Adobe Acrobat 7 and his "spyware" features.

[Fast]

Maybe xpdf is an alternative. It's very basic though. There's a precompiled win32 version on the downloads page.
I use it in SuSE to read and convert pdf-files to text and it's lightning fast.

Bye,  Fast 

http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

[polonus]

Dear forum members,

These incidents with software are not incidents anymore, but what I fear is becoming more and more of an evolving trend. Recently  the beta Google Web Accelerator too was put back into its  sandbox, that is to say  after three days it went definitely on hold, because surfing habits of users could be traced almost immediately by Google. It is a strange cardgame folks, where everybody is allowed to look in over one's shoulder, but you are not free to hide your cards anymore.

For what would not be tolerated outside the virtual world, is almost commonplace  in the virtual world of the net. Now with laws coming in that non-free software also becomes irreversible- e.g. not to be reversed (rulings for digital TV cards in US as a forerunner of this legislation) makes that consumer protection becomes certainly unbalanced. Stallman & friends with their view on free software (to be shared and adjusted or improved) are in for a hard fight.

Keep up your visors folks,

polonus

[DavidR]

I got the typewriter function in Foxit PDF Reader working now, which is quite a handy tool to make some annotations in a pdf file and print it off with the annotated text on the document.

[polonus]

Howdy DavidR,

Good thing. You see that more people are steering away from the main stream overbloated software, especially when their privacy is concerned. Here you can find how you can run windows with only free software aboard: http://www.searchlores.org/bangla.htm#dabig
It is a big list.
Awaiting your comment,

regards,

polonus

[DavidR]

Yes it is a big list and it is theoretically possible to run windows with only free software. it is worthy of further investigation by those looking for freeware software

I have seen some very good freeware, avast for personal non-business use is just one; some excellent freeware software written by the enthusiast or someone looking for a solution to their own problem. I have also seen terrible freeware software that is buggy.

However, for me it has to revolve around functionality, does it do what I want it to do. I have bought many programs when there were freeware options because they had better functionality.

I shall not take this thread any further off-topic other that to say, free doesn't always mean best or worst, or you get what you pay!

[polonus]

Hello everybody,

Adobe Acrobat came with a patch for the privacy vulnerability only for  the last edition (7.02), the others do not have it. So you have to upgrade first and then patch. Only for windows, the Mac version is still unpatched for the moment. This I wanted to tell,

kind regards from,

polonus