Best ‘Free’ Antivirus for Windows

The word “Free” may not always be same as “Cheap”; not at least in software world. There are some truely great antivirus software out there which are available for free use at home, and really does a more than enough job for protecting your PC against viruses. Two popular names in this field are AVG, and Avast. Although both are great applications, none of them really comes close to Avira AntiVir.

Avira AntiVir is simply a superb anti virus software that really puts many paid products to shame. You won’t believe just how good it gets unless you try it out yourself. From my years of experience, I have found this A/V product to be more than enough for basic defense against viruses for an average user. It has a great detection rate (although with some false positive alerts) that works for most people. If you are looking for a solution against this common computer problems, you really can’t go wrong with Avira. This one supports Windows XP, Vista in both 32 and 64 bit environments.

You can download the FREE fully functional version from here.

Five pillars of marketing?

During my boring weekends, as an effort to realize marketing in general, I was looking around the internet to know what exactly distinguishes this faculty. Leaving all theories and scientific analysis to what marketing is, I was in a quest to find a simple way to see what it deals with, I wanted something that is short, yet detailed, and understandable to non-business majors like me. Well we all know it’s a way of selling your product to someone else. But to make a little more sense, I came across this entertaining video that explains the five pillars of marketing from a broad viewpoint as:

1. Solve customer’s problems.
2. Treat customers with respect.
3. Connect with the customers.
4. Make customers feel they are being played fairly.
5. Save customers time (take them to the express train of happiness, no confusions).

Of course this isn’t any Harvard B-School material, but do check out this great video to have details on these pillars. You’d love it!

Shadow of the day, will embrace the world in grey.

Shadow of the Day, by Linkin Park is one of those favorites that will always be on my mind. The song talks about varied contrast of people in this world, saying goodbye for what’s right, never giving up in the worst of times, and remembering that what’s “right” will win at the end. It reminds me to stay strong knowing that life is never easy, and even then, that’s the only way to live with it.

“I close both locks below the window.
I close both blinds and turn away.”

In our world there is both black and white, and rarely some shades of gray. But to me, life’s not about being in the shades of gray, it’s about choosing a side and living with that choice.

“Pink cards and flowers on your window,
Your friends all plead for you to stay.”

First, it comes to decide on change, everyone around us expects us to stay the same person. It’s about knowing how much you believe in yourself, to take this step alone, and it’s almost certainly about courage. So even if this isn’t the easiest thing to do, saying goodbye, and turning on the right side of this world is the real way.

“Sometimes solutions aren’t so simple.
Sometimes goodbye’s the only way.”

Of course, there comes a time in our life, earlier or later, when we have to make this choice. This can be about anything, the truth versus lie, the right vs wrong, the dream vs making others happy, or making a choice of leaving the people closest to us to support what is right.

“And the shadow of the day,
Will embrace the world in grey.”

Even when we do realize it’s about time to make that choice, and we know what’s right for us to do, it’s not a one way ticket to the other side. As the important part is knowing black and white, both will always co-exist in this world, and we should try to stay on the white side, even when it’s not easy. We can’t just move there, and have no black around us; as part of life is about dealing with the dark sides of this world, even when you are on the right end. There will be times when the sun is around, but you will still see shadows – even if you are doing the right thing, you will be surrounded by wrong, and living in this world is getting used to deal with that, and being strong. Even when you are in search of light, you will find shadows with it.

“And the sun will set for you.”

This is the most important part. When we move on, it will still be hard to live a life, leaving so much we used be to behind, but even with all the suffering going on, everything will become right, only if we work hard enough, stay strong to our belief. Because then there is time, when the sun will set, and there will be no shadows. It’s about taking responsibility of our tasks in this world, and staying strong, knowing good will happen.

This song is written by CHESTER BENNINGTON, ROBERT BOURDON, BRAD DELSON, JOSEPH HAHN, MIKE SHINODA, DAVE FARRELL. It has an exceptionally great vibe to it, and feels like the song’s tempo and beat have some similarities to U2’s “With or Without You”. The song is also thought to have meaning with supporting the idea of “suicide and giving up” by some listeners.

Microsoft’s 300 million dollar campaign on Windows

It’s a difficult argument, trying to figure out how much marketing a specific technology needs. Although, marketing is absolutely necessary, but how much can business team at Redmond pull up, when the technology being marketed has flaws. IT is an industry where comments and impressions have a huge impact than what the vendor is saying about themselves. Windows Vista received too much negative comments, and the idea of Vista being the worst mistake from Microsoft is spread everywhere. I believe, it’s also part of a fashion statement (at least for geeks) to hate companies like Microsoft. Even after hundreds of patches, and updates, when you approach someone with Vista, they will not bet their money on it – and they have reasons for that, no doubt.

Guys at Microsoft came up with a 300 million dollar budget to fix that. Now, by the word “that” I do not mean the actual software itself, rather the promotion campaign of Vista (or whatever they are promoting). So how do you do that? Now that they have the budget, all they needed was an imagination. When you add too much sophistication to a dream, you succeed in making it a nightmare. I’m talking about the Windows Vista ad featuring Jerry Seinfeld. Sorry to make you feel like you entered a time capsule and sent yourself 15 years back, but it’s equally difficult for me to figure out why they didn’t put someone from this century in there. Couldn’t they find Matthew Perry, Adam Sandler, Robin Williams, or Eddie Murphy?

As the saying goes, Windows Vista hasn’t been able to convince enterprises to switch all their systems to Vista. Corporations are still not confident on switching over to Windows Vista, not to mention the added cost brings back very little value for money. It’s unclear why a company will spend millions in switching over to Vista based system, and what sort of benefit would it actually bring in the long run. I guess one way to convince the CEOs, CTOs, and other senior members of different organization was to bring back a celebrity from their era? C’mon guys! After all, if 60 year old Harrison Ford can be back on Indiana Jones 4 and Stallone starts doing Rambo again, I have no idea where exactly the audience is expected be.

And by the way, did I mention how absolutely pointless the advertise feels? Seinfeld figures out what shoe size Gates wears, advises him to shower with his shoes on, tells him they should come out with something that makes computer soft and chewy like cake, and Gates gives Seinfeld a signal that something like that is on the way. Was it about Windows Vista or Windows 7? If it is episode 1 of the advertisement, I think it’s a promotion that tries to hide what’s being promoted, or something like that. I jsut couldn’t connect anything at all from this.

Windows Vista is a great OS, that has been greatly misunderstood. But it was partly because Microsoft didn’t want to see how much an average user  has to spend to throw away a working system, just to get the new OS. I have a lot of respect for Microsoft, but I have been hoping for the “Wow” factor for too long now. It could be that Microsoft becomes like AOL, the people using their products would be the ones who really don’t know that alternates exists. It’s a trend to go and use something (Mac, Linux, Open Source applications) that is not made by Microsoft, this has started to give esteem and a sense of being knowledgeable. Did you ever see the impression when someone walks in with a Mac, or shows off work on his Linux system? Microsoft needs to bring back the feeling that tech elites can still carry Windows based PCs.

Brainstorming for Linux

Ubuntu came up with this great way for many of Linux users to share their ideas, opinions, and vision online. It seems like a good place to see how users can play a great role in development easily.

You can register and start brainstorming right away. These include many topics across various categories. This can be as broad as reinventing the whole Linux philosophy to something like system-wide spell checking, or being consistent with button names.

The nicest part is the ability to promote or demote any idea. Also, new ideas will pop in the list anyway, so people don’t miss out checking out ideas that might have been underestimated by others. Every user also has a personal ranking, which is determined by subtracting total number of demotes from total number of promotes of all his ideas.

When typing in a new topic, the site will automatically search matching words on the heading, and show a list of already existing ideas – reducing the chances of duplicate entries. Ubuntu also has a bug tracking website, and topics can be linked in between these sites for references.

The entire site is very simple yet intuitive, which is probably the best reason why it’s so easy to share ideas.

Google Chrome: Another approach to taking over the world?

It’s actually more like saving our world by being taken over by someone else. Millions of blog posts, reviews, and coverage have already made it to the World Wide Web regarding this striking new browser, Google Chrome; but all comments apart, what could be a broader view to this new innovation?

Now don’t raise eyebrows on my usage of the word “innovation” – quite frankly speaking, it actually is a new genre of browser, unlike anything that’s out there – the typical Google way, huh? Google kept one concept in mind, to redesign the perception of browsers. As stated by Google, browsers were originally designed to browse web pages, but in this era of consumer driven Internet, the life changing Web 2.0 is definitely a lot more than mere browsing experience. Web sites act more and more like applications themselves, and that’s exactly how Chrome works. Chrome is capable of taking advantage of our system in an amazingly efficient way, making each tab (site) act like an individual process. They have their own memory space, and acts like a totally separate application. If you actually switch on Task Manager, you’d see all those tabs acting as a separate process. This adds stability too, as when you lose something on one tab; it doesn’t kill the whole browser, along with other pros like increased responsiveness and speed. The browsing really felt to be significantly faster than any other browsers, to me. The benefits are enormous, and you probably have come across a billion sites stating them, my favorite however is the documentation by Google themselves. (Go through this, if you ain’t a tech junkie, and want a one stop article that covers almost everything.)

Bugs and expected security holes apart, the beta version of Chrome brings together the best of both worlds, Internet Explorer and Firefox, that is. For example, the minimal menu bar works very closely like the ones we can get using the “Hide Menu bar” add-on.  The sleek, sophisticated look and feel are closely designed from Firefox/Safari, tricked out with a futuristic slide on the tab corners, added with those smooth animations, works great! Wait until you try this on Vista, the top window border sort of mixes seamlessly with the tabs and gives that IE-7 transparent frosted glass look. Oh, and like IE, tabs would generally open right beside the one you are browsing (instead of at the end like Firefox) – sweet. The tabs preview is also like those add-ons in Firefox, it’s like a package of our must have plugins, all in one place. There’s also stealth mode, to browse sites without your footprint, making sure to protect your privacy, a feature much advertised in Microsoft’s next browser, the Internet Explorer 8. The ability to search within address bar might not be entirely new, but it also instantly searches for possible URLs, another enhancement making my life easier. The minimalistic design barely leaves you wondering, and everything works so naturally right, I wonder how they always do great work on HCI. I do miss my download manager, smooth scrolling, phishing filter, online bookmark management, and a few other plugins, but I’m keeping my figures crossed this time.

Moving on, since Google sort of leading the Internet race here, a browser from them indeed makes sense. But it sort of comes out at a time when Microsoft couldn’t possibly take any more hits. Before even the IE-8 made an apparent exposure to the public, Chrome sort of stole the show. If pressure from Mozilla, Apple, and open source community wasn’t enough, this certainly is making people in Redmond sit in round tables and scratch heads. IE-7 has been undoubtedly better than IE-6, but let’s face it, Microsoft can do better (or that’s how it used to be). When it comes to bringing in competitive products, Microsoft hasn’t been able to bring products recently that not only live up to the challenges thrown by others, but to take it to the next level. Not to mention, the next browser from Microsoft shares one common pattern seen in all of their new software, be more resource hungry. I haven’t been able to find anything from Microsoft’s IE that feels yet as much as an innovation as it does when coming from Firefox, and now, from Chrome. Between IE and Firefox, I guess it’s the former that will be more affected.

Looking at Google’s beta browser’s release strategy, it makes things more obvious. First of all, Chrome is made open-source; anyone can look and see what’s been going on inside their innovation, making pressure on Microsoft more intense. Google wants to share their ideas on Chrome, make more people learn and move the web forward. Their strategy can actually help all browsers better, and therefore give a even better end user experience. This browser can benefit from almost all the advantages that Firefox had. Not to mention, this browser will benefit from almost all the advantages that Firefox had.I wonder if IE developers are going to reverse engineer Internet Explorer 9 from Chrome – only time will tell.

What’s more of a concern to me, an open-source project this big, not officially released for trying out in open-source operating systems, hmmm… strange? Apparently this version has been primarily released for Windows XP and Vista platform. Although I’ve gone through the developer documentation to build Chrome, it’s clearly not yet ready for Linux. Google mentioned themselves that, “There is no working Chromium-based browser on Linux. Although many Chromium submodules build under Linux and a few unit tests pass, all that runs is a command-line “all tests pass” executable.” And here I thought, Google loved open-source – may be not as much as they hate Microsoft?

Mountain View or Redmond, as long as guys there are on a cold war, it only means one thing for consumers like me, better products for value. Although I can’t wait to see answers from Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera Software, and Apple to this, I doubt how much they can put up with it; trust me, I’d love to be proved wrong.