In this era of computers and Internet, software becomes an integral part of our life. However, there is good software and bad software. Bad software could be malicious programs written by malignant people with a dark purpose, "darker than dark and hotter than hot." Man...maybe I should stop watching Aladdin which, by the way, has come out on DVD. It is funny how those old motion pictures made it today and even packaged into DVDs for sale. Why are they able to be sold? Oh....it's because there are people who watch them. Wow, isn't that yet another peculiar nature of ours? Sometimes we "adopt the novel and discard the dated," and yet sometimes we dwell on the past. Things have value because we give it to them. If nobody gave a damn about diamond, diamond would be absolutely worthless. Hope I didn't offend our female fellas..
If you'd like me to post any software here simply let me know by email (wentaihao at yahoo dot com)!
On the left is a screen shot of the Firefox browser.
I don't know about you, but I don't like the size of text in Internet Explorer browser, and there is no way to set it to say, 200% bigger. I often read online articles and I don't want to strain my eyes, do I? A solution came to me when I discovered a browser with such a fantastic feature - Mozilla Firefox. You can set text size to any percentage you want and most of the time the webpage is still laid out nicely after text size changes. Good for eyes. In addition Firefox has a bonanza of features such as Firebug plugin which is an incredible tool for web developers. I just love Firefox!
Many people are familiar with MSN and Yahoo! Messenger, and they are great for exchanging messages on the Internet. They also offer voice communication feature that allows people to talk to each other through microphones and speakers (also video communication). However their qualities sometimes are not good in part due to heavy Internet traffic. I highly recommend Skype because its quality is almost comparable to phone quality. You download it, install it, create your own account, and you are ready to rock'n roll. It takes just a couple of minutes!
Remember the link I told you about in
My Favorite Links? Yes, download.com. Go there and do a search with "free Anti-virus" and you will see many great virus cleaners, including AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition and Avast Free Antivirus, both of which I tried and work great. Personally I don't use any antivirus software and my computer has NEVER been infected with virus. Why? Because I use software firewall called Sygate. It's free and incredibly powerful to help you sort through traffic you want.
There are several types of intrusion detection tools out there, a popular one of which being firewall. A firewall can be either software-based or hardware-based, and pc users usually choose software and large companies go with hardware. For a detailed definition check out Google. Several months ago my pc was acting strangely with ads popping up like crazy. A virus cleaner simply didn't cut it. Somehow I found this firewall software on download.com and decided to try it out. It is so easy to use and since then my pc stopped giving me problems. I am sure there are other great firewall programs but Sygate is definitely one of them. To download it, go to download.com and perform a search with keyword "Sygate".
Winrar definitely tops the list. A couple of years ago I used to use Winzip, but I got annoyed whenever I needed to click on "Use Evaluation Version". Later I was introduced to Winrar and it is really good. When I unrar a file I only need to right-click on it and choose unrar here or something. Then it does everything automatically. Function-wise it can handle both .zip files and .rar files, and many other files, including .cab, .arj, .lzh, ,tar, .gz, etc. Its compression ratio is usually better than Winzip. From then on I go with Winrar to compress or merge files into one convenient .rar file.
Obviously there are A LOT more software applications out there that are useful and valuable. Again if you'd like me to post any new software let me know by email (wentaihao at yahoo dot com)!
