Just last week, it popped up to 1.24/litre here on the east coast of Canada.

I have been a long time fan of Irfanview and am totally unfamiliar with Xnview, mostly because I have never had a reason to look beyond what I got with Irfanview.

I can certainly sympathize with his feelings that someone has stolen his work - it's happened to me many times, in different fields of endeavour.

I can say that calling people thugs or thiefs, or calling another product fat and bloated, is not very professional and certainly doesn't help win anyone over to your cause.

Having said that, I will continue to use Irfanview because I find that it does what I want it to, when I want it to and in the way I want it to.  But I don't think I'll be inviting the author to my next birthday party.

I agree that that offline computing, in general, will be around for some time to come.  However, there are some types of software that have all but abandoned that approach.

I recently moved to a rural area where I can't get a high speed connection - the best I can do is dial up.  Because dialup is also so slow, I don't get online that often from home anymore. I have to try to do any downloads etc. while I'm here at work.  As you might guess, my virus checker has become out of date, I'm way behind on Windows Updates, and last week I lost two computers worth of work to a virus.

So I started searching for a virus checker that would allow me to manually download an update that I could then transport home and install.  So far, it's been a complete strike out!  Every package now insists on doing a live over the internet update to the exclusion of any other method!  Some even require authentication.

Welcome to the New World Order.

Now I don't imagine for a second that I have covered every virus checker out there and if someone knows of one that allows manual updating via "download and sneaker-net", I'd sure appreciate the pointer.