Trick Windows Into Shutting Down Without Installing Updates

We’ve all been there: You go to shut down your machine, but you see that dreaded Windows Update icon that means your computer might stay powered on, installing updates for the next 20 minutes. If you want to shut it down immediately, you can trick it by going to the lock screen first.

To avoid installing updates when you shut down, all you need to do is lock your computer (which you can do by pressing Win+L). Then, from that screen, head down to the shut down button, where you’ll see an option to “Install Updates and Shut Down” or just “Shut Down”—an option you don’t get from the regular ol’ Start menu. Choose “Shut Down” and you can wait to install those updates when you aren’t in a rush. For a more permanent solution, of course, you can hack the registry, but this will do in a pinch.

Trick To Shutdown Windows By Skipping Windows Update Installation | Into Windows

YouTube Surpasses 4 Billion Video Views Per Day January 24th, 2012

Reuters, reported that YouTube is getting approximately 4 billion video hits per day, as the figure has changed with an increase of 25% since May, 2011. Google relates the increase of Youtube video viewership to the increase of smart mobile devices.
Furthermore, YouTube owner Google also announced some other figures, that about 60 hours of video is now uploaded to YouTube each minute, whereas this figure was 48 hours of video upload every minute in May, 2011.

Via

A Deeper Look At Microsoft’s New ReFS Format

Windows ReFS

As early back as 2003, Microsoft has been promising a new file system to replace NTFS, originally known as WinFS. Now, in 2012 a new file system finally is coming. So what is ReFS all about and does it have anything to do with the original WinFS announcement?

First off, WinFS was a technology designed as a relational file system for the storage of structured and unstructured data. After several years of hype, it was essentially quietly killed in 2006.

The main factors for its death laid around the fact that it didn’t offer a significantly better experience than what we already had with NTFS.

So fast forwarding to today, with NTFS as the dominate file system (though many legacy devices still use FAT-32), what makes ReFS worth the change?

First off, Windows 8 is all about change with its touch-centric design, its use of the hibernate kernel for speeding up start-ups and shut-downs, and the introduction of ARM processor support. So now seems like the perfect time to make yet a big change on the file system front as well.

Microsoft is working hard to overcome past perceptions that its Oses are easily corrupted and overly unstable when compared to options like Linux and Mac OS. Despite that fact this has been somewhat true, the folks at Redmond still find it important to lay these security and stability concerns to rest.

So ReFS standards for “resilient” file system, and resilient it is. The main purpose that designers kept in mind with this format is that it is capable of keeping data safe and, hopefully, free of potential corruptibility.

There are several ways it attempts to accomplish this goal, such as keeping metadata integrity with checksums,  verifying and auto-correcting data to limit data corruption, isolating data corruption, keeping user data integrity with integrity streams, and keeping an entire volume intact, online, and accessible.

In general, ReFS’s big data protection features are really meant to be used with Storage Spaces, which provides native RAID and provisioning capabilities within Windows Server 8.

According to the “Building Windows 8 Blog”:

We have tested ReFS using a sophisticated and vast set of tens of thousands of tests that have been developed over two decades for NTFS. These tests simulate and exceed the requirements of the deployments we expect in terms of stress on the system, failures such as power loss, scalability, and performance. Therefore, ReFS is ready to be deployment-tested in a managed environment. Being the first version of a major file system, we do suggest just a bit of caution. We do not characterize ReFS in Windows 8 as a “beta” feature. It will be a production-ready release when Windows 8 comes out of beta, with the caveat that nothing is more important than the reliability of data. So, unlike any other aspect of a system, this is one where a conservative approach to initial deployment and testing is mandatory.

With this in mind, we will implement ReFS in a staged evolution of the feature: first as a storage system for Windows Server, then as storage for clients, and then ultimately as a boot volume. This is the same approach we have used with new file systems in the past.

Initially, our primary test focus will be running ReFS as a file server. We expect customers to benefit from using it as a file server, especially on a mirrored Storage Space. We also plan to work with our storage partners to integrate it with their storage solutions.

So what does this all mean? It means that Windows Server 8 is the only version getting ReFS for now. Additionally, it is not a bootable format at this time and instead is used for extra drives and partitions as a way of keeping crucial data safe and uncorrupted.

Will ReFS truly prove to be an uncorruptable format and a worthy successor of NTFS? It is certainly shaping up that way, but I have a feeling we won’t truly see ReFS shine its brightest until Windows 9.

Google announces record-breaking Q4 results, Google Plus has reached 90 million users

Google reported its fiscal results for the last 2011 quarter and for the year 2011 as a whole. The Q4 results were a record for the search giant, with revenue topping the $10 billion milestone for the first time.

CEO Larry Page was also proud with their social network, Google Plus. It reached 90 million users, more than double the 40 million users reported in October. This also puts them on track to reach the predicted 100 million by the end of February (a prediction that sees Google Plus reaching 400 million users by the end of 2012).

Let’s start with the financial results. Google’s revenue for the full year 2011 went up by 29%. For just Q4, revenue reached the record $10.58 billion (a 25% increase year over year). Operating income for Q4 was 33% of revenues ($3.51 billion, up from $2.98 billion in Q4 2010) and net income was $2.71 billion.

During the last quarter of 2011, almost half of Google’s revenues came from the international market (47%). The UK alone accounted for 10% of revenues.

The number of clicks on Google served ads went up by 34% compared to last year’s fourth quarter, while the cost per click fell by 8%.

Here are a few other numbers – at the end of 2011, Google was sitting on a $44.6 billion pile of cash, their effective tax rate for Q4 of 2011 was 21% and their hired about 900 new people in that same quarter.

For the full year, Google’s revenues reached $37.905 billion with total advertising revenues reaching $36.531 billion. Net income for the year was $9.737 billion. You can check out the full table of informationover here.

All these results weren’t enough to impress Wall Street, which expected the search giant to do better. Shares dropped 9% in after-hours trading as a result.

Anyway, back to Google Plus. According to comScore, Google’s social network had 67 million unique visitors in November, 15.9 million of which came from the US. In December, the number of US visitors was 20.6 million.

Larry Page also claims 60% of Google Plus users use a Google service each day (it’s not clear if he meant any Google service or just G+) and 80% use a service at least once a week.

There was no Android-related info in the press release.

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