The Cost of Free Software

Instead of Microsoft's Office suite, you could use Open Office. Instead of Photoshop, you could use GIMP. Instead of Windows, you could use Ubuntu Linux. The difference is that you would pay for Office, Photoshop, and Windows. Open Office, GIMP, and Ubuntu Linux are free. That doesn't mean they're the best choice for your needs, even in a tight economy. But they might be. Depending on what you need to do, the free applications might succeed beyond your expectations, perform adequately, or fail miserably. Think of software the way you might think of a car: Whether you buy the 2-seater sports model or the 9-seat van depends on your needs; or maybe the best decision is just to keep your 15-year-old sedan.

If you decide to investigate the free options, here are some applications that are well worth your time. (By the way, that's "free" as in "speech", not as in "beer", which means that it would be a good idea to support the applications you use with a donation.)

Audacity (Windows, Mac, and Linux): The user interface is decidedly un-cool and not at all easy to learn, but it's a decent audio editor that can handle just about any audio file you feed it.

GIMP (Windows, Mac, and Linux): Version 3 will be released soon and some people are able to make GIMP do just about everything Photoshop can do. I have to admit that I'm not one of those people.

OpenOffice (Windows, Mac, and Linux): I recently did a full review of this suite. It's not Office, but if all you need is the basics, Open Office will do the job for you.

Ubuntu: If you're thinking about pitching Windows or you want to add Linux to your Windows machine, you won't find a faster or easier way to do it than with Ubuntu Linux.

HijackThis (Windows only): When you run into a problem with malware or some browser "helper" object that won't go away, use HijackThis to create a log file that you can then use to obtain help.

Comodo Firewall Pro (Windows only): Windows XP has only half a firewall. Vista's built-in firewall is better. But Comodo is better still, and it's free. Better still Comodo is already aware of hundreds of thousands of applications and knows what access they should have. Beware, though, that version 3 of Comodo Firewall Pro is needlessly complex and difficult to use.

Hotspot Shield (Windows only): When you use your PC on any public Wi-Fi hotspot, you acknowledge that communications are not encrypted. Hotspot Shield can set up virtual private network (VPN) that creates a secure tunnel between your laptop and the Wi-Fi hot spot. Anyone who travels or uses hotspots for Internet access should install this.

Google Docs and Zoho (Web based): Two on-line office suites that allow users to share documents and work collaboratively. Zoho has more applets, but development has been uneven and the interface can be puzzling (to be overly polite).

Kompozer (Windows, Mac, and Linux): This is probably the best free Web authoring tool available, but editing a site developed with Dreamweaver can mangle the embedded control codes so that Dreamweaver will no longer be able to edit it.

Notepad++ (Windows only): Notepad++ isn't UltraEdit, but it offers some of UltraEdit's basic features such as tabs for multiple documents and color-coding reserved words, functions, and the like in programming languages.

Scribus (Windows, Mac, and Linux): This is a severely limited page layout application, more akin to Pagemaker than to more advanced programs such as InDesign.

Google Calendar (Web based): Create your own calendar and share it with others. You can also synchronize your calendar (and only your calendar) with Outlook, so the Google Calendar is a handy way to synchronize Outlook in multiple locations.

LogMeIn (Windows, Mac): When you need to connect to your home computer from the office to your office computer from home, you need LogMeIn. The paid version gives you a way to transfer files within the application, but the free version is all that most people need. LogMeIn also provides powerful support tools that are definitely not free, but are worth every cent you pay for them.

Allway Sync (Windows only): Sync files between your PC and an external drive, FTP site, or network drive. You can filter files by folder, file name, or file type. But this is a nagware application. When it decides you've used it too much to be using it without paying, it starts nagging you to pay.

SyncToy (Windows only, of course): Similar to Allway Sync, the Microsoft Sync Toy makes backup copies of your files to other folders or drives. It's not as adaptable as Allway Sync, but it doesn't nag.

NetStumbler (Windows) or InSSIDer (Windows) or Kismet (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Mac OS X): Because NetStumbler doesn't work with Vista or Windows 7 and has not been modified since 2007, the application has largely been supplanted by other tools that allow you to see and identify Wi-Fi network that's available in the area as well as whether it's an open connection (as in a library) or one that's closed.

Your Browser on Acid 3

We've had Web browsers for 15 years now. In the early days, they all displayed pages about the same. But then the various browser companies (particularly Netscape and, later, Microsoft) implemented non-standard functions. A website that looked great in one browser would fail miserably in others. Designers were forced to develop multiple versions of sites, one for each major browser, if they wanted to take advantage of the advanced functions. Things are better now. More browsers comply with the standards. Acid 3 is one test that shows how well (or poorly) browsers comply with the set of standards that Acid tests.

That last part of the previous sentence is important. A test tests what it tests. Acid 3 includes tests for several elements from the cascading style sheet 2 recommendations that were removed from CSS2.1. These features are in the working draft for the Worldwide Web Consortium's proposed CSS3, but that is a work in progress, far from complete.

The Acid 3 Test shows a deceptively simple looking page, but it's a page that tests a lot of functions. According to Wikipedia, "When successful, the Acid3 test displays a gradually increasing percentage counter with colored rectangles in the background. The percentage displayed is based on the number of sub-tests passed. It does not represent an actual percentage of conformance as the test does not keep track of how many of the sub-tests were actually started (100 is assumed). In addition to these the browser also has to render the page exactly like the reference page is rendered in the same browser. Like the text of the Acid2 test, the text of the Acid3 reference rendering is not a bitmap, in order to allow for certain differences in font rendering."

Developer Ian Hickson started working on Acid3 in 2007 and released it in March 2008. The test primarily examines a browser's support for cascading style sheets, ECMAScript (the generic standards-compliant version of Javascript), and level 2 of the document object model. Addition tests confirm compliance with scalable vector graphics, extensible mark-up language, and uniform resource identifiers.

Who wins?

Click for a larger view.Here's what the Acid3 test is supposed to look like. The developer calls this the "reference display".

Windows users can easily find compliant browsers

Click for a larger view.Except for the one that most people use, that is. The worst performer of the group was Internet Explorer 8 with a score of 20 and a failed link test.

Click for a larger view.Opera 9.64 was second from the bottom, but quite a bit closer to the top than Internet Explorer was.

Click for a larger view.Chrome scored 100, but the link test failed.

Click for a larger view.Opera 10, on the other hand, was perfect and with no link failure.

Click for a larger view.Firefox had a lower score and got one of the box colors wrong, but didn't fail the link test.

I didn't test Safari on Windows because it's primarily a Mac application and I'm of the opinion that Apple should write software for Macs, not Windows machines. In total, nearly 30 browsers exist for Windows machines, but Internet Explorer and Firefox are the primary browsers with Opera in a distant third place.

On the Linux side, the battle is between Firefox and Firefox

Click for a larger view.The only browser I have on the Linux machines is Firefox, but the installed version was still 3.0.11. Opera 9 and the pre-release version 10 are available.

The results were pretty grim, so I decided to install version 3.5. That required a bit of a detour.

 

Click for a larger view.The result with Firefox 3.5 was much better, a score of 93. This is identical (as expected) to Firefox's score on a Windows machine.

Other browsers exist for Linux systems, but I didn't test them. Amaya is both a browser and development tool. Opera is available for Linux. There's Gallion, which is based on Gecko, the Mozilla rendering engine.

The detour to install Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu Linux

The final version isn't yet ready for Linux and the only "official" option would be an early beta version. If you look in the right place, you can obtain the final 3.5 pre-release version, but it's a manual install. Do it the wrong way and it won't be updated when Ubuntu updates the rest of the system.

I found a good description of the process required to install version 3.5 so that future updates will be automatic, but the directions contained a couple of typos. Fortunately, one involved a command I familiar with and the other pitched an error that effectively told me what was wrong.

On the Mac, 3 good choices

Mac users can choose from a wide variety of browsers. Internet Explorer isn't available, but that's actually a plus. Opera is. Firefox is. Safari is (Safari is also available for Windows machines, but I'm of the opinion that Apple should write software for Macs, not Windows machines.)

Click for a larger view.As expected, Opera scores 100.

Click for a larger view.Safari comes in second with a score of 94.

Click for a larger view.And Firefox earns a 93 as it did under Windows and Linux. That's good enough for third place on the Mac.

I didn't test Camino or Flock, two browsers that are based on the Mozilla rendering engine, Gecko, and would be expected to produce the same kind of results. I didn't test Internet Explorer because the Mac version is 6 years out of date.

I didn't test Lynx (text only) on any platform. I didn't test Netscape because development stopped in 2008 and the application will no longer be updated.

What does it mean?

Actually, not much. Yes, it's nice if your browser complies with current and planned standards. You might have a better browsing experience with a more compliant browser, but you probably won't notice much of a difference because no intelligent Web designer would design a site that takes advantage of the leading-edge features, even the ones that can be reasonably assumed to be in the next version of the various specifications.

Still, the more compliant a browser is right now, the better. Early compliance with future standards means that the developers are paying attention and that they have users' interests in mind. Any browser that scores 90 or more is probably a good choice.

Short Circuits

Two E-mail Addresses

In the old days, some ISPs gave you one e-mail account. If you wanted more, you had to pay extra. But for the past decade or more every ISP I can think of provides at least 3 e-mail accounts. Many offer 5 and some will give you as many as you want. So I find myself wondering why people maintain a single e-mail account for both spouses or even for the whole family. I simply can't imagine doing things this way. And it goes deeper than that.

Do you have a single account on your computer for everyone in the house? If so, why? This is something that simply makes no sense to me. I don't care if my wife sees my e-mail and she probably doesn't care much if I see hers. In fact, she sometimes tells me to open her e-mail account to read a message. But I get enough e-mail of my own. I don't want to have to look through somebody else's messages just to find mine.

Keeping things separate is easy. All it requires is the use of individual user accounts for each user. This is true whether you're using Windows, Apple's OS X, or Linux. Create an account for each person.

When you do that, everyone can establish their own preferences from typefaces, colors, and desktop backgrounds to default applications, directories, menu structures. You might like the Windows "classic" menu structure, but your spouse may prefer the latest XP, Vista, or Windows 7 defaults. You may want clicking the mouse wheel to mean universal scroll while your spouse wants it to signify a double click.

If you each have an account, you can establish separate but equal Word defaults. Applications will find your documents instead of your spouse's. Even if you both use the same default browser, your bookmarks and your spouse's will be maintained separately.

Whether you use passwords to protect your individual accounts is up to you, but you and your spouse should at least have individual log-on names.

Will Windows 7 Pull Microsoft Back from the Brink?

Back in the days when I thought about investing in stock, Microsoft seemed like a good deal. Microsoft owned the desktop. Microsoft would always be there. Microsoft would always be profitable. Yeah, like the New York Central Railroad, Penn Central, and National Cash Register. Microsoft's stock is down and the prospects are none too bright. They bet the company on Vista, which was not exactly the best received operating system Microsoft has ever released. (Millennium Edition and Microsoft Bob were worse, but Vista is often mentioned in series with Bob and Me.) Will Windows 7 restore the luster?

Microsoft has handed Windows 7 and the companion server version of the OS over to computer manufacturers and it has released the code to the companies that will make the installation DVDs. This is called "release to manufacturing" (RTM) and it means that Microsoft is serious about making Windows 7 available in October.

Some observers think that Microsoft is trying to recapture the excitement that surrounded the release of Windows 95. People stood in line to get copies of Windows 95 on the day it was released. At midnight. Windows 95 was truly revolutionary, though. It moved Windows from 16-bit platforms to 32-bit platforms. Companies such as Corel released new versions on the same day.

Today Microsoft and Corel have little in common. Corel purchased Word competitor Wordperfect and made an (ill-advised and) abortive attempt at Linux several years too soon. Windows 7 is seen by many as nothing more than Vista done right. For all of its positive look-and-feel components, Vista was a flop because it was slow, bloated, and sold in a way that allowed manufacturers to claim "Vista compatibility" for machines that had no business running Vista.

So, in some ways, the manufacturers and Microsoft got what they deserved for the Vista belly-flop. Windows 7 is different, though. I've been running the release candidate version for the past couple of months and it seems to couple the beauty of Vista with the speed of XP.

According to Microsoft, Windows 7 boots 20% faster than Vista (and I think this is an extreme understatement) and that it's 40% faster than Vista (this agrees with my assessment). Today, according to Forrester Research, Windows XP, remains on 86 percent of corporate PCs. It's unlikely that corporate buyers will rush to Windows 7, but there's a good chance that they will at least accept it.

Intel's "Human Rights" Violated?

US law allows a corporation to be a "person". Yes, I know that's nonsense, but that's the law. And now Intel says that the European Commission has violated its "human rights". Excuse me? It was Intel that engaged in crooked activities that caught the attention of the EU's Commission. Even so, Intel has filed a 300-page appeal that claims it was the victim.

Poor little Intel says that the fine ($1.45 billion and the largest ever levied by the EU) is excessive. The Wall Street Journal claims that the EU's competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, is essentially investigator, prosecutor and judge. Kroes says that Intel has harmed millions of European consumers by acting to keep competitors out of the market for computer CPUs and at least one company on this side of the Atlantic agrees. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has often complained that Intel uses illegal means to shut AMD out of markets.

It's not just AMD, though. Japanese and South Korean officials say Intel is using anti-competitive practices. So does the New York attorney general and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. If you hold stock in Intel, now might be a good time to sell short.