Activity for June 28

Comment - Opera 11.50 released -- get it now!
(Jun 28, 2011 - 2:48 PM)

This is also my main problem with Opera. I use it as my main browser both at home and work, and especially at work it's a significant burden on the PC's resources and may slow down other applications.

Opera seems to remember everything you did on any page, even after you close it. Try opening Google Maps and browsing for an hour or so—you might reach 1.5 GB of RAM! This should be fixed ASAP.
Comment - 36 apps for the successful home office
(Jun 11, 2011 - 3:24 PM)

If you're using TeamViewer for commercial purposes, it costs something in the area of $1700. There are better applications out there.

Regarding some of the other suggestions, I tried every available office and e-mail application, but nothing really beats Microsoft Office at this point.

Otherwise, an interesting article.
Comment - Sound the ZoneAlarm -- Extreme Security is back in spiffy 2012 edition
(Jun 8, 2011 - 3:55 PM)

ZoneAlarm is general anti-power-user. Every time I tried it, it interfered with one of my existing Internet-based applications in strange ways that have nothing to do with port blocking, Internet access blocking, or any of the basic stuff that ZoneAlarm does.

For example, in one case it created a problem where every couple hours, my computer would stop recognizing any and all DNS servers, so effectively I could not browse the Internet (moreover, applications that made DNS lookups, such as the browser, tended to freeze at this point). In another case it ruined the graphs for cFosSpeed (a solution can be found on the cFosSpeed forum, but why should it interfere in the first place?). And this is after I set the application to fairly low security, and disabled many of its features.

In short, I'm opting for a less invasive application that can essentially do the same things.
Comment - As Adobe gets sued for killing FreeHand, Corel gently offers its alternatives
(May 22, 2011 - 6:41 PM)

As far as I can tell, they're not blaming Adobe for stopping development in 2011, they're blaming them for stopping development as soon as they could, i.e. right when they acquired the product. As I said additionally, I don't actually expect Adobe to continue developing FreeHand now. However, they can be forced to do something positive with it, like release its source to the public (see MEG's post below).

The bottom line is, a healthy economy has to be free-market, but with government intervention when there is a market failure. The software industry is one big market failure—and besides the unhealthy obsession with Microsoft, the powers that be are not performing the job of the regulator as they should, and have not touched this industry.

The government should therefore both entice companies to develop and support their products, and at the same time work to prevent the creation of monopolies, or duopolies such as Adobe/Corel in the vector graphics industry. Most of this can actually be done without unnecessary lawsuits and drama—what needs to be adopted is a basic carrots and sticks policy toward the major software companies.
Comment - As Adobe gets sued for killing FreeHand, Corel gently offers its alternatives
(May 19, 2011 - 8:09 PM)

CorelDRAW is great but version X5 is essentially the same as version 12 released years ago. Corel is not known to innovate much unfortunately.

In regards to the fairness of the lawsuit, I think both sides have a point. On the one hand, a commercial company has a complete right to stop developing/manufacturing a certain product.

On the other hand, the software industry is deregulated and this causes many problems. Hardware products (inside and outside the computer industry) have warranties, so if it breaks down you can get it fixed. This is not so with software, so buying software does not guarantee that it will work with the newest operating systems in 1 year or in 3 years (typical warranty periods for physical products), you don't get a guarantee that known bugs will ever be fixed, etc. These and other related problems cause real financial damage to real businesses, who often have to buy completely new software and retrain their employees for it after development of the original software stagnates. Therefore, I believe there should be some kind of framework obligating companies to support their products and fix bugs for a certain minimum period, and announce in advance (as much as possible) when development slows or stops.