AVG and AVAST

Both of these are free anti-virus software products. Both claim to be in use by hundreds of millions of users. They are based on the model where you give customers a foretaste of good products and then try to up-sell into more sophisticated products. Both are obviously good products and have been around for some time now. I personally think that's a good model too. After people get used to the anti virus protection, they can then take a decision about additional protection. Using these known good sources is a vastly superior strategy compared to getting into the clutches of the fake anti-virus products that some people are making a lot of money from. According to some estimates these rogues made more than 150 million dollars from selling such products last year alone.

One small silver lining for such scary stats is that a lot of people do want to install anti-virus products. But what really matters is that you get it from a known good source, unless you have been deceived into buying such stuff and contributing to their kitty. Here are two good choices for your protection.

Patent Championships 2009

Last year IBM won the most number of patents. That is a championship the big Blue has won for the 17th time in a row! IBM has this image of being a very conservative company. That has changed a lot in the recent past. It has gone through couple of transformations. While it was previously synonymous with big iron, it earns a large part of its revenues through software services now! So, looks can be really misleading. Somehow the innovations must run pretty well if they have to manage this for 17 years consecutively! I am sure IBM is still not as casual as a Google or one of the start ups. Yet, this is running the innovation machine so well. There are a couple of really interesting things about the roll of honors. The second in line, Samsung managed to get significantly less number of patents. IBM received 4914 patents while Samsung received 3611 patents.

The other interesting aspect of the list is that out of the top 10 spots, IBM, Microsoft, Intel and HP are the only American companies. The others are from outside the US: the likes of Samsung, Canon, Panasonic Toshiba, Sony and Seiko Epson. A couple of trends become obvious. Things are going global without a doubt! And companies think that patents are an important tool in the global playing field.

Recently active malware

Sunbelt Software found the following malware pieces to be the most active last month. It is good to be aware of the threats that are current. Maybe you can ensure that your malware protection does have detection and correction capability of these threats:
1.Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT
2.Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen
3.Trojan.Win32.Generic!SB.0
4.Exploit.PDF-JS.Gen (v)            
5.Trojan.ASF.Wimad (v)             
6.Fast Browser Search              
7.Trojan.Win32.Malware              
8.INF.Autorun (v)                  
9.BehavesLike.Win32.Malware (v)     
10.Trojan.Malware               

Medical Technology

This morning my wife went through a knee surgery. This is a corrective procedure so that the knee joint replacement (as suggested by most doctors we consulted) was not necessary for some more time. But this post is not about that, though the knee joint prosthesis certainly rates as one of the wonders! There were couple of pictures about surgery in olden days hanging at the entrance to the OT complex.

One was of a woman who was totally conscious and yet a surgeon had started the removal procedure of one of her breasts. There was one assistant holding her hands and patients had to endure such a process. The other was that of a man hanging from some contraption, one person hanging on to one shoulder and the other was straining at the other shoulder trying to correct a dislocated shoulder! I was struck by how far we have come! I am sure many must have died simply from the shock/trauma of the surgery itself!

But today knee replacement is possible and works well for at least twenty years! I am not even looking at heart/liver/kidney transplant like really sophisticated procedures. The surgery itself is not that much of a trauma anymore. There are a whole host of things to manage the post surgical pain and recovery. After you have recovered, it feels so good! Most often at least! With this corrective procedure my wife should be able to start walking reasonably comfortably again and that should last 5 to 10 years! I remember with my own surgery, the ankle fracture was completely healed. Three years later when the hardware were removed, there was not one spot on the pieces of metal that remained inside my body for three years!

But all this happened step by step, one baby step at a time! These advances on so many areas have brought us this overall advancement! I kept wondering how many experiments, how many researchers toiling away at it and technological advances made all these advances possible!

You cannot help wondering how small improvements at the boundary areas of any discipline keeps moving the boundary in small increments! Yet over a time you have a larger area representing the body of knowledge!