Tech World in 2009
2009’s Best
"Open source poses a threat to proprietary software"
Open source
Open source software has been rapidly evolving for the past few years, and has now finally reached the point where it actually poses a threat to established proprietary software. Not too many years ago open source was, in a way, known as a rebel movement in which only the elites took part. Nowadays, open source plays a large role in any computer community. Many mainstream applications today are open source, for example Firefox, Chrome, Audacity and VLC. The best of it is that most open source software is cross-platform, meaning that they will run equally well on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. Linux, the open source family of operating systems, has also established itself as a viable desktop OS for end-users which is fast, stable, eye-catching, and most of all, free. The large selection of Linux distributions now mean that there is a suitable choice for all users ranging from the beginner to the programmer or multimedia professional. And, for the skeptical gamer, there is also a wide range of open source 3D games of all genres running on the powerful OpenGL rendering engine.
2009’s worst
"the Conficker worm hit 8.9mil computers in 2 weeks"
Security
With all the advances in computer technology, it is most unfortunate that security is still the worst aspect in computing. At about 30 years into the personal computer era, computer viruses and worms are still as rampant as ever, with their resilience being compared to that of the common cold. The widespread popularity of email and instant messaging has given rise to new breeds of cyber criminals with frauds, scams, and electronic spying. The worst outbreak in 2009 was that of the Conficker worm, also known as Downadup. 8.9 million computers were infected in the first two weeks of 2009 alone, and the worm is still constantly evolving. Clearly security has not been improving as much as the rest of the industry, and much has to be done to make the digital world secure, if possible.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.