Activity for January 16

Review - SUMo
3.5.0.193 (Jan 16, 2013)

I used to like it - it detected more softwares than other solutions I tried at the time. But it's now way, WAY too aggressive on the adware, with misleading download links added to search results on top of that. I understand that free softwares might need revenue sources, but there's a balance between "revenues" and "driving customers away".
Review - VSuite RAMDisk Free
1.18.1531.1240 (Jul 7, 2011)

The Free edition is only available for 32-bit...
Review - Trillian
5.0.0.26 Beta (Sep 21, 2010)

As a former Trillian 3 user, I had skipped version 4 due to performance. Version 5 however brings back the goodness.

A reason to use this over Pidgin? It supports even more networks, and it has server-side account settings, so if you have multiple computers, you don`t need to reconfigure/maintain your accounts on each computer separately.
Review - MediaCoder
0.7.3.4620 (Apr 13, 2010)

Has the potential of being a very good GUI for advanced media transcoding... if it was less unstable. Every time I try a new version, I seem to run into new ways to make it crash, generate error messages, and so on. Could use more testing by the developer.
Review - Mozilla Thunderbird for Windows
3.0.1 (Jan 20, 2010)

Homepage is obsolete BTW - the current one is http://www.mozillamessaging.com/

After being pretty much on life support for a long time, TB is slowly starting to turn into a very feature-complete product. Still a few quirks in it however, but 3.0 was a major improvement over 2.0.
Comment - iPad kills HP TouchPad, is BlackBerry PlayBook next?
3.0.1 (Aug 18, 2011 - 5:00 PM)

They are killing the whole mobile division and getting rid of PSG, which means no more tablet whatsoever, WebOS or Windows.
Comment - We want your Windows XP memories
3.0.1 (Aug 18, 2011 - 11:24 AM)

One of my customers wanted to become an early adopter, and asked me to upgrade his desktop Win98 to WinXP only a few weeks after it became available. I told him it would be a waste of money (the upgrade must have been around 150$ for the software, plus labor), and that he'd have trouble with some of his hardware, but he insisted.

In the end, he had a non-working HP Multifunction for which HP only released drivers a few months later. He was really annoyed at HP for taking so long, and admitted he made a bad decision by wanting to become an early adopter. Doesn't that sound oddly familiar with complains people had with another Windows release that happened only a few years ago? :) When it comes to OS, it never pays to be an early adopter if the OS is a major step forward (like XP or Vista both were).
Comment - Network admins stunned and reeling from repeated Firefox upgrades
3.0.1 (Aug 15, 2011 - 1:14 PM)

Mozilla should consider doing what Ubuntu does: establish regular LTE "Long Term Support" releases that sysadmins could install and see supported for 18+ months, while short-term releases could be skipped by them, but used by home users.
Comment - German courts will hear Samsung appeal on Galaxy Tab ban
3.0.1 (Aug 12, 2011 - 2:03 PM)

"stealing" is a bold word considering there is little in common between both devices, beside some very specific elements that are highly debatable.

Beside... Do you think you'd be using a 3+ GHz computer today if companies hadn't been allowed to clone the original IBM PC (which is celebrating its 30th anniversary these days)? Competition is what drives innovation, not exclusive patents on ridiculous elements such as "the color contrast used between a back plate and a front bezel to give a device an appealing look" (or whatever vague patents are being used here to stiffle competition).
Comment - I want my Windows Update Rollup!
3.0.1 (Aug 11, 2011 - 6:02 PM)

Do you need to apply each months separately? If so, it's not very helpful when doing a fresh SP3 install.

I would favor MS releasing quarterly ISOs that contains everything since the latest Service Pack (and include said Service Pack while at it). So that way, the worst case would be downloading 3 months worth of updates, instead of 12-24.