COMPUTER CURRENTS
Despite misgivings from the ICT Ministry, there are a lot of worthwhile open source applications available
JAMES HEIN
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| Scribus from www.scribus.net is a page layout program for desktop publishing. |
Despite comments to the contrary from the ICT Minister, open source and freeware software can be as good or better than some of the commercial applications. Consider the general area of anti-virus.
Clam Win at http://www.clamwin.com is a free anti-virus program from the SourceForge.Net open source group. While this product does not yet include on-access real time scanning it does provide a way for you to check files, CDs, DVDs and attachments for viruses.
You can schedule scans, updates are an automatic download if you prefer and it is integrated into the right click functionality of Windows. It also includes an add-in for Outlook to remove infected attachments automatically.
GAIM is an instant message integrator allowing you integrate Hotmail, Yahoo, IRC, ICQ messaging and others and even includes a secure chat add-in. You can find it at gaim.sourceforge.net. Version 2.0 is close to release and if you want secure chatting install the Off-the-Record Messaging plugin.
Gnumeric from the Gnome group is available from http://www.gnome.org. This application is a replacement for Excel and will read and write Excel files. The application contains over 500 functions with over a hundred of these special to Gnumeric, including a lot of financial stuff. Graphing is supported.
Gimp from http://www.gimp.org is a Photoshop replacement that will allow you to produce some great graphics, edit photos and is cross platform capable. The product is almost at version 2.4 and is very powerful.
Scribus from http://www.scribus.net is a fully functional page layout tool for desktop publishing. CMYK colour separations, ICC colour management and PDF creation is all supported. Frames, kerning, embedded fonts, styles, Unicode support including right to left languages all for free.
Snort from http://www.snort.org is a network intrusion prevention system, capable of performing real-time traffic analysis and packet logging on IP networks. It can perform protocol analysis, content searching/matching and can be used to detect a variety of attacks and probes, such as buffer overflows, stealth port scans, CGI attacks, SMB probes, OS fingerprinting attempts, and much more.
Finally, but not an exhaustive list by any means, there is Squid from http://www.squid-cache.org. This is a web proxy cache that helps to protect you when you are connected to the Internet.
I have just scratched the surface of the available open source applications and the above are a cross section of some that may interest you right now. There are also larger and more business-like products, such as the MySQL database and others including fully functional CRM products out there.
So why would you want to develop your own versions of any of these products from scratch when you have access to the source code already? I have no idea but some local leaders have suggested that this is a better approach than taking advantage of existing open source applications.
Open source products get input from hundreds and thousands of developers all over the planet and typically release updates at a much higher rate than the commercial competitors can or do. Ignoring open source apps could cost you personally and your organisation real money for no real additional gain. For example, I suspect that there are lot of people out there who could use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office without any real loss of productivity or functionality.
Industry news
You may be surprised to hear that Microsoft is already planning for SP1. Remember that Vista as you see it now is a cut down "short horn" version of the original Longhorn operating system. I do not expect SP1 to be a big one but rather some security fixes and other smaller stuff and will probably be out before the end of the year. We can expect SP2 to carry the bigger upgrades.
In the continuing game of leap frog played between Intel and AMD, Intel beat AMD out with the quad-core Clovertown processors late last year. AMD are telling us to wait until mid-2007 for their Barcelona quad-core range that they say will be 40 percent faster than the Clovertown series.
While this sounds a lot like Intel's promise of a 40 percent speed increase over AMD's offerings last year, it is all just part of the continual improvement process that healthy competition gives the PC and server buyer.
In related news, Sun announced that it will sell Intel-based servers thanks to the new quad-core range. AMD continues to undercut Intel processor pricing and they are hoping that lower Opteron costs will keep their customers happy until the Barcelona range is released.
Intel's quad-core is actually a dual-core, dual-chip, so it is cheating just a little bit compared to the proposed single chip quad core Barcelona architecture. Of course, the customer doesn't really care what the internals of the chips are as long as they are getting the performance benefits.
Remember that Sun's move to Intel is performance based. They have used Intel chips in the past and phased them out in favour of moving to AMD, and they will move back to AMD if the performance dictates.
As predicted, Blu-ray DRM has been cracked by the same hacker who broke the DRM technology of rival HD DVD disks last month. Using a media file provided by another hacker, muslix64 hacked a copy of the movie Lord of War without even needing access to a Blu-ray player.
HD DVD and Blu-ray share HDCP DCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) for playback display authentication and similar implementations of AACS (Advanced Access Content System) to encrypt the disk content. The hack bypasses the protection and muslix64 has posted a 18KB tool that allows you to try extracting the keys of other Blu-ray Disc movies.
While Blu-ray is supposed to have a second layer of protection, BD+, it has yet to be applied to most disks. Both formats allow for decryption keys to be updated. This will mean a series of updates and cracks causing compatibility problems in the future as the entertainment industry giants insist on bringing out more and more basically flawed DRM that will ultimately cause their basic customers problems and keep the crackers amused.
So what about your notebooks and Vista? Most new models will be powerful enough to install Vista and run the graphics. If you are looking for a new Vista notebook take a look at the Asus W5Fe or the 8Ajr with ATI X2300 graphics.
The first of these comes with an extra screen on the lid called Slideshow. This 2.8in 320 x 240 screen is based on a secondary OS and will allow you to check email, find a phone number and check your schedule without the need to start Vista.
The unit is attached to 1GB of NAND Flash storage and can even be used to display a map. In other words, Asus has combined a notebook and a PDA in a single device.
Beware, there is a new malware download that contains a Trojan designed to steal a user's Windows Live Messenger password. The IMB download displays a fake Windows Live Messenger Login Screen and prompts for login details. The username and password are captured and stored in C:\pas.txt.
Email: jamesh@inet.co.th
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