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Hi guys.I have a fustrating problem.Eveytime when i start Pinnacle Ultimate Studio version 17,on my desktop some random white icons apear that seems the app creates them. Look in this image : And thats only when the app starts,further into editing more and more of them apear and when i close the app,some of my other sistem icons disapear. FTW is going on ? Realy need some help on this because i realy wanna give this editor a try.And the options from Settings menu,are quite poor.Getting bored of PowerDirector (not realy xD )

Hello everyone. I commented that I have a problem when activate my kaspersky Pure 3.0 on windows 8.1 64 bit with kaspersky world. As the instructions say, removes the license, disable the self-defense and close kaspersky from the taskbar, but when I open the kaspersky world (with administrator privileges) I get an error saying that self-defense is still active even when in I have actually already closed everything having to do with kaspersky, and I disabled the corresponding option. Can anyone help me? Thank you very much.

Would it be possible to stop using special characters like ® (®)? Every time there's Intel product update the rss feed is broken for a quite some time.. There are some other minor validation problems with the RSS feed but those special characters will usually brake the feed completely for a lot of feed readers.. Thanx

Claps and cheers: Apple stores' carefully managed drama Those ‘geniuses’ in the bright, sleek Apple store are underpaid, overhyped and characters in a well-ma Steve Jobs wanted customers to understand the Apple store “with one sweep of the eye,” as if gods standing on Mount Olympus. Indeed, the outlets seem to speak for themselves. Bright, uncluttered, and clad in glass, they couldn’t contrast more sharply with the big-box labyrinths they were designed to replace. Neither could their profit margins. Since launching in 2001, the instantly recognizable stores have raked in more money – in total and per square foot – than any other retailer on the planet, transforming Apple into the world’s richest company in the process. Yet the very transparency of the Apple store conceals how those profits are made. When we think of “tech”, we rarely think of retail stores, and when we think of “tech workers” we rarely think of the low-waged “geniuses” who staff them. Most media coverage of tech companies encourages us to forget that the vast majority of their employees are not, in fact, coders in Silicon Valley: they’re the suicidal assemblers of your phone, the call-center support staff, the delivery drivers and the smiling shop floor staff who make up the majority of Apple’s workforce. The Apple store was explicitly designed as a brand embassy rather than a dedicated source of technical knowledge. As Ron Johnson, the former Target executive who came up with the concept, told the Harvard Business Review, “People come to the Apple store for the experience – and they’re willing to pay a premium for that … Apple is in the relationship business as much as the computer business.” Johnson and Jobs wanted ambassadors whose ostensible role was not to sell products – uniquely, Apple store employees receive no commission – but to create positive customer sentiment and repair trust in the brand when it broke. That was hard to do if your stuff was lumped in with everyone else’s in a big electronics store, overseen by third-party staff lacking any special expertise or interest in what you wanted to sell. The goal was to take full control of the brand image while humanizing it. The problem, however, was that humans can be rather unruly. Fortunately for Apple, someone had been hard at work fixing that bug. In 1984, a group of professors at Harvard Business School published a book, Managing Human Assets, aimed at updating workplace organization for a new era. The book was based on the first new compulsory course at the Harvard Business School in a generation, launched in 1981. Ron Johnson started his MBA at Harvard the next year, graduating as the book itself was released. Previously, the book argued, labor discipline could be achieved in a relatively straightforward top-down manner, but now it required something else. “The limitations of hierarchy have forced a search for other mechanisms of social control,” the authors said. The mechanisms they proposed consisted, at root, of treating employees as nominal stakeholders in business success, but within narrow limits that would increase rather than challenge shareholder profitability. Johnson put many of these ideas into practice. He found the first cohort of Apple store employees by personally interviewing every manager and offering jobs to upbeat staff working for competitors. He sent the first five managers through the Ritz-Carlton training program to learn concierge skills. Then he developed a training program for the in-house production of “geniuses”. (Jobs reportedly hated the term at first, finding it ridiculous. True to form, he asked his lawyers to apply for a trademark the following day.) How do you create an engaged, happy, knowledgable workforce that can pass, however implausibly, as an entire battalion of geniuses in towns across the country? More importantly, how do you do all of that without the stick of the authoritarian boss or the carrot of a juicy commission? Apple’s solution was to foster a sense of commitment to a higher calling while flattering employees that they were the chosen few to represent it. By counterintuitively raising the bar of admission, crafting a long series of interviews to weed out the mercenary or misanthropic, Johnson soon attracted more applicants than there were posts. Those keen enough to go through the onerous hiring process were almost by definition a better “fit” for the devotional ethos of the brand, far more receptive to the fiction that they weren’t selling things but, in an oft-repeated phrase, “enriching people’s lives”, as if they’d landed a job at a charity. “When people are hired,” Johnson explained, “they feel honored to be on the team, and the team respects them from day one because they’ve made it through the gauntlet. That’s very different from trying to find somebody at the lowest cost who’s available on Saturdays from 8 to 12.” While not the lowest, the cost of these eager staff was still low – relative to industry averages, to the amount they made for the company, and to the $400m that Johnson earned in his seven years at Apple. Lower wages also had another, less obvious effect. As Apple store managers explained to the New York Times, the lack of commissions meant that the job didn’t pay well enough to support those with dependents: older workers were functionally excluded from representing the brand without the need for a formal policy – or the attendant specter of discrimination lawsuits that it would raise. Deploying psychology, not the maximizing calculus of economic rationality (money), allowed Apple to turn hiring and wages into managerial props. The sense of higher calling and flattery doesn’t stop with the hiring process, of course. Make it through the gauntlet and you are “clapped in” by existing workers: given a standing ovation as if receiving a prize. The clapping, according to employees, continues until new hires, perhaps after a confused delay, begin clapping too, graduating from outside spectator to part of the performance – part of the team. Leave the company and you’re “clapped out”. Products are clapped, customers waiting overnight to buy them are clapped, their purchases are clapped, claps are clapped. Clap, clap, clap. “My hands would sting from all the clapping,” said one manager. Claps, cheers, performances of rapturous engagement provided, by design, a ready-mixed social glue to bind teams together, reaffirming both the character of the brand and employees’ cultish devotion to it. It might be expected that Apple store employees are, as their name implies, tech gurus with incredible intellects. But their true role has always been to use emotional guile to sell products. The Genius Training Student Workbook is the vaguely comical title of the manual from which Apple store employees learn their art. Prospective geniuses are taught to use empathetic communication to control customer experience and defuse tension, aiming to make them happy and relax their purse strings. One of the techniques the book teaches is the “three Fs”: feel, felt, found. Here’s an example from the book, meant to be role-played by trainees: Customer: This Mac is just too expensive. Genius: I can see how you’d feel this way. I felt the price was a little high, but I found it’s a real value because of all the built-in software and capabilities. When customers run into trouble with their products, geniuses are encouraged to sympathize, but only by apologizing that customers feel bad, lest they implicate Apple’s products as the source of the trouble. In this gas-lit performance of a “problem free” brand philosophy, many words are actually verboten for staff. Do not use words like crash, hang, bug, or problem, employees are told. Instead say does not respond, stops responding, condition, issue, or situation. Avoid saying incompatible; instead use does not work with. Staff have reported the absurdist dialogues that can result, like when they are not allowed to tell customers that they cannot help even in the most hopeless cases, leading customers into circular conversations with employees able neither to help nor to refuse to do so. Apple’s “geniuses” perform on a stage that’s as carefully managed as they are. Jobs and Johnson wanted to control every aspect of the Apple stores, down to the specific color of the bathroom signs. Almost every detail is trademarked, from stairs to display tables to storage racks. Even the supposedly “intuitive” layout, so obvious that it can be understood by all, is considered unique enough to warrant a suite of intellectual property protections. In part to counter the falling sales volume of a saturated market, Apple has spent the past two years overhauling its stores to work even harder. Potted trees have been added to give a green splash to the signature grey and, in a move so ridiculous it’s almost certain to be a hit, the Genius Bar has been rebranded the “Genius Grove”. Windows are opened to blur the distinction between inside and outside, and the stores are promoted as quasi-public spaces. “We actually don’t call them stores any more,” the new head of retail at Apple, former Burberry executive Angela Ahrendts (2017 salary: $24,216,072), recently told the press. “We call them town squares.” The town square. It’s an almost-quaint symbol of participatory civic life – a world away from the big-box sprawl that characterized the retail imaginary of the late 20th century, or even the digital isolation of the 21st. Apple’s goal has been to create spaces for people to just hang out in, extending the original insight that focusing on everything other than cold hard cash will paradoxically be the best way to rake it in. In Ahrendts’s vision, “the store becomes one with the community”. But the real hope seems to be closer to the opposite, that the community will become one with the store. After Apple recently won the race to surpass a $1tn valuation, CEO Tim Cook emailed staff to explain, “Financial returns are simply the result of Apple’s innovation, putting our products and customers first, and always staying true to our values.” While seductive, this story is, like the Apple store itself, a managed fiction. Apple’s system of operation is less the result of genius than of capture and control. Semiconductors, microprocessors, hard drives, touch screens, the internet and its protocols, GPS: all of these ingredients of Apple’s immense profitability were funded through public dollars channeled into research through the Keynesian institution called the US military. They are the basis of Apple’s products, as the economist Mariana Mazzucato has shown. The company’s extraordinary wealth is not simply a reward for innovation, or the legacy of “innovators” like Steve Jobs. Rather, it flows from the privatization of publicly funded research, mixed with the ability to command the low-wage labor of our Chinese peers, sold by empathetic retailers forbidden from saying “crash”. The profits have been stashed offshore, tax free, repatriated only to enrich those with enough spare cash to invest. But, as the public well from which it has drawn past innovations runs dry, the company’s ability to repeat the success of the iPhone is evaporating. Federal funding for scientific research is in deep decline, and Apple isn’t likely to make up the gap. To keep profitability high, Apple is moving to ever-more-luxury price tags for ever-more-marginal improvements (like the iPhone XS Max) and expanding its ability to extract rent by controlling the creativity of others (through Apple Music or the App Store, both impossible to sign out of without landing in pop-up purgatory). All the while its brand embassies sell a different story with a smile. Source

Leprosy is often considered an ancient malady no longer relevant in the modern day and age. In 2000, this chronic and infectious skin disease was even declared eliminated as a global public health problem. But while it's true that leprosy is now entirely preventable and curable, this stubborn disease just refuses to accept its defeat. Today, over four million people live with leprosy-related disabilities, and it remains one of the leading causes of long-term nerve damage worldwide. And even though the World Health Organisation (WHO) now offers highly effective leprosy treatments free of charge, the organisation reports there have been between 200,000 to 300,000 new cases detected globally every year since 2005. So while we might have eliminated leprosy practically, the findings suggest there are still pockets of the disease that have persisted. Of all the new diagnoses made in 2016, two-thirds were from India, and 18,472 involved children. "It is a harsh reality that nine out of every 100 new cases diagnosed today are children," said Erwin Cooreman, the Leader of WHO's Global Leprosy Programme in 2018. "The world has the tools, the right medicines and the political will – yet we are falling short of detecting the disease in time, particularly among children." Leprosy is tropical disease caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium leprae, which multiplies very slowly. If left untreated, this infection can creep up on its patients, causing muscle weakness, skin sores, and blindness. It can even damage a person's nerve endings, destroying their ability to feel pain and injury. Over the past 20 years, more than 16 million patients have been treated for leprosy, but even though we have all the tools at hand to wipe this disease off the face of our planet, some people are still falling through the cracks. At least part of the problem may have to do with leprosy's long history of oppression and discrimination. Nowadays, we know that the disease is harder to contract than we once thought, possibly requiring repeated contact with nose and mouth fluids. It's not even close to the contagion that once prompted us to develop leprosy colonies, like the notorious ones in Hawaii. Still, these stereotypes are hard to shake, and negative attitudes towards the illness have continued to persist, stopping many people from coming forward and getting treated. In fact, it's thought that only half of all leprosy cases are being detected and treated, leaving millions with a disease that could potentially cause long-term disability. Between 2006 and 2015, WHO says the number of people with leprosy that have visible deformities increased by 13 percent, which means the disease is not only continuing to spread, it is also going untreated. In countries like India, Indonesia and Brazil, where leprosy is more common, the social stigma is especially great. Here, some believe that leprosy is a form of punishment for sinful acts or immoral behaviour, and this can often lead to social exclusion and family rejection. India itself still has 700 leper colonies in order to keep these people out of the way. Plus, the nation also has discriminatory laws specifically aimed at those with leprosy. This means that people with leprosy are often denied access to markets and educational institutions. These laws might even limit a person's ability to access treatment for the disease itself. "Leprosy is not highly contagious or easily spread, and most people have immunity against the disease," assures Spencer Bezalel, a dermatologist who recently conducted research on leprosy in the US for the Mayo Clinic. His findings uncovered nine patients in the US who were evaluated and treated for leprosy between 1994 and 2017 - some of whom had emigrated from tropical regions and others who were born in the US itself. Bezalel says that while these cases should not be taken lightly, most people are safe from leprosy, and that it is those with poor or developing immune systems that we should be the most worried about. This is probably why the WHO aims to achieve zero child leprosy infections by 2020, calling for greater early detection efforts. "Leprosy in children clearly shows that transmission of the infection is occurring in many communities and that detection efforts are inadequate," added Cooreman. "We again re-emphasize the importance of periodic follow-up, contact tracing and monitoring of everyone in a household where a case is detected." It's about time we put this disease and all the stigma it carries to rest. source

In the predigital days, advertising agencies were ruled by swaggering creative directors who gorged on lavish client contracts and sometimes created campaigns that set the cultural agenda and captivated the public. Nearly every piece of that equation has changed. Agencies are better informed than ever before about consumers, having amassed huge stores of their data. But many of those consumers, especially the affluent young people prized by advertisers, hate ads so much that they are paying to avoid them. At the same time, companies that hire ad agencies are demanding more from marketing campaigns — while paying less for them. As a result, the advertising industry faces an “existential need for change,” according to a blunt report published on Monday by the research firm Forrester. Now the agencies must “disassemble what remains of their outmoded model” or risk “falling further into irrelevance,” the report concludes. “It’s harder to reach audiences, the cost of marketing is going up, the number of channels has exponentially proliferated and the cost to cover all of those channels has proliferated,” Jay Pattisall, the lead author of the report, said in an interview. “It’s a continual pressure for marketers — we’re no longer just creating advertising campaigns three or four times a year and running them across a few networks and print.” As advertisers bombard consumers across platforms like Twitch, Facebook, television, billboards and more, consumers are trying to get away, signing up for ad blockers and subscription services. “People hate advertising,” said Joanna Coles, the former chief content officer of Hearst Magazines, during a session at the Advertising Week conference last month in New York. “And it’s all advertisers’ fault.” Seated next to her, nodding in agreement, was Marc Pritchard, the chief brand officer at Procter & Gamble, one of the largest advertisers in the world. Ads, he said, are often irrelevant and sometimes “just silly, ridiculous or stupid.” “We tried to change the advertising ecosystem by doing more ads, and all that did was create more noise,” he said. The industry, over all, is also struggling to adapt as Google and Facebook reshape ad delivery and Netflix stokes appetites for ad-free entertainment, according to a separate report also released on Monday by GroupM, the media buying arm of the ad giant WPP. The result is “dangerous days for advertisers,” according to the report. “With shifts in viewing habits, commercial impressions in the most viewable, highest-attention media are in free fall across the world,” researchers wrote. “The problem is universal, and if the viewing behaviour of younger audiences is a harbinger, things are not going to get better.” Some start-ups have begun rewarding or compensating consumers to look at ads. But to effectively reach viewers, advertisers must also “incorporate data-driven, tech-fuelled approaches and platforms into the creative process and tool kit,” according to the Forrester report. That includes automation and machine learning technologies, which Forrester expects will transform 80 percent of agency jobs by 2030. In July, JPMorgan Chase announced a deal with the ad tech company Persado that would use artificial intelligence to write marketing copy. Advertising has become a “very complex, sprawling marketplace,” with agencies grouped under large holding companies like Interpublic Group, Publicis Groupe and WPP, Mr. Pattisall said. To stay nimble, the holding companies must centralise their operations, even if it means “the disappearance of some pretty storied, iconic advertising brands,” Mr. Pattisall said. Last year, WPP merged Young & Rubicam, a creative agency cited in “Mad Men,” with its digital ad business VML. Soon after, WPP combined J. Walter Thompson, which was founded in the 1800s, with the digital agency Wunderman. The consolidation will bolster agencies as clients scale back their budgets, according to the Forrester report. Steven Moy, the chief executive of the Barbarian agency, said that multiyear contracts had shortened, with budgets tightening and performance metrics becoming more stringent. “I haven’t seen a lot of multimillion-dollar, blue-sky, five-year projects happening — it’s more like, ‘can you deliver something in six months?’” he said. Global spending is expected to grow at slower rates this year and next year compared with 2018, weighed down by signs of a weakening economy and rising geopolitical tensions, according to data released Thursday from the WARC research group. For the first time ever next year, Facebook, Google, YouTube and other online platforms are expected to soak up the majority of advertising dollars, according to WARC. Advertising giants are facing competition for clients from consulting companies such as Deloitte and Accenture, while independent agencies such as Wieden & Kennedy New York have beaten out legacy advertising companies for major accounts such as McDonald’s. Some advertisers, like Unilever and Bayer, are pulling business away from agencies and handling some of the work internally. Last year, 78 percent of members of the Association of National Advertisers had an in-house agency, up from 58 percent in 2013 and 42 percent in 2008. Smaller agencies, such as Cutwater in San Francisco, are feeling the pressure. But Chuck McBride, Cutwater’s founder, said that changes in the industry would allow companies to express their creativity as they experiment with increasingly personalized advertising. “The gloom and doom is greatly exaggerated,” he said. “Things are really messed up, but there’s opportunity in this.” Source