You might at least be considering it after reading the latest announcement that Microsoft made this week.  After all, most virus scanners at the moment cost money, and if you combined them with a firewall they become even more expensive.

I have probably used nearly all of the major virus scanners in my time.  My first experience was with a scanner from McAfee that ran under DOS.  It must have been around 1990 and I remember removing the Jerusalem virus with it - from a 60MB (yes, MB!) hard drive.

Later I moved on to Norton (later Symantec) Antivirus, and even the Internet Security versions.  A number of my employers used their corporate versions as well.

But one year I had trouble installing the annual update, and so then I discovered F-Secure.   I stayed with them for about a year, until I finally ended up with Avira’s Antivir.  Here I have used the free version (privately), the premium version (which scans e-mails and websites) and the professional version (for my business computers).  I still find it the best virus scanner out there at the moment.

Other employers have used Trend Micro and McAfee (for Windows), whilst I have customers that use Kaspersky and G-Data solutions.  So you can see that there are a number of solutions out there, and I have experience with most of them.

Let’s turn now to Microsoft.  For the last couple of years there has been a programme out there called OneCare - Microsoft’s security package.  I have yet to see this running on any PC that I have come into contact with, not even at any of the trade shows that I go to.

So what will happen when they release their free anti-virus solution?  Of course, various computer publications will test it and then we will know fairly quickly how good it is.  But even if it doesn’t recognise absolutely everything, will users still be prepared to pay for a better scanner if they can have it for nothing?

It will be interesting to see if it comes pre-installed new computers.  If it does, then I am sure that Microsoft will have the same problems in Europe as they did with the pre-installed Windows Media Player.  Maybe they will have to pay another fine to the EU and produce a version without the pre-installation, but that doesn’t mean that user won’t still see it as a cheap alternative and use it anyway.

Although I can have Microsoft’s Windows operating system without the Media Player (so-called “Windows N”), I have seen very few computers that do not have it installed.  But the number of installations of other products such as QuickTime, RealPlayer, WinAmp, MusicMatch etc. are - in my opinion - declining.

Are the current anti-virus products doomed to suffer the same fate?

As a viewer of geekbrief.tv, I was interested to hear Germany get a mention this week.  The reason was the Photokina trade fair taking place in Cologne.

For some reason, their presenter Cali doesn’t feel that there is anything new on the news feeds from the fair - I beg to differ and took a look at the news coming out of Cologne.  I also went to the Photokina part of another show taking place in Gießen at the same time to see some things for myself.

New versions of Adobe Products

Adobe showed CS4 versions of their products Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere Pro. They use OpenGL2.0 to speed up zooming, turning the desktop, moving images, anti-aliasing and some 3D effects. They require a PC with at minimum of 128MB graphics memory. The Premiere Pro utilises NVIDIA Quatro graphics cards to make video effects quicker to calculate. It also allows more than one HD-stream to edited at a time.

GPS camera add-on

There are some high-end cameras on the market that have the ability to ‘tag’ pictures with the GPS co-ordinates of the location that the photo was taken.  These tend to be expensive and GPS is normally not a reason to buy a new camera.

A company called Jobo have invented a GPS receiver that sits on top of your camera and records the co-ordinates separately.  The data is later converged with the photos back on the PC rather than in the camera intself.

37.5 Megapixels

A single-lens-reflex-camera from Leica offering 37.5 megapixels was being shown.  It is expected to be released in Summer 2009. It has a 3 inch display and is waterproof and dustproof - two vital elements for taking it hiking with me.  But do I really need 37.5 megapixels?

The digital camera testcard

Visitors to Photokina received a free digital camera testcard (in A0 format: 841×1189mm) with which they can check out features of their camera. See it at http://6mpixel.org/?p=351 - non visitors can order it within Germany for 20EUR+VAT.

Make your own TV show

As much as I like the idea of a GPS tagger and the testcard, this one has to be my favourite of the week: make.tv. The site offer flash-based video editing, which at the moment is free.  What I particularly like is the fact that cameras can be at different locations but the output is mixed from a single computer.  The finished video podcast can then be streamed from the make.tv server.

It’s something that I’d like to try out in a future project!

It’s always a shame when a great piece of software is discontinued, and this week whilst installation a new WordPress site I was shocked by a message on the Spam Karma screen - the “major announcement” was that development of the plug-in was being discontinued and the software would pass over to a GPL project.

I first discovered Spam Karma through a post on the Notes from Spain forum around the time I first started using WordPress. It’s a plug-in that really belongs in the software by default, as a popular blog gets spammed on a daily basis. Unfortunately, it’s not.

Spam Karma uses a clever set of rules to decide if a comment or trackback is spam, and I don’t think that any spam has ever got through on the installations that I support. There have have been some false positives - about 1 or 2 per year!

But I can understand the problem - the software is non-profit, so however passionately you develop it the time eventually comes where you decide to call time and move on to other projects.

The author’s blog gives one of the reasons as the current development of WordPress. I think WordPress is a great piece of software as well, but I do agree that the frequency at which the upgrades appear has recently become a little bit overwhelming. There have been times where I seem to be in a cycle of upgrading installations, and before I have finished the next version is released.

Let’s hope that this is not the end of the story for Spam Karma, and that some good programmers take over the project and keep the blogosphere free of spam.