Favorite Softwares of China Business Watch

The following are softwares China Business Watch endorse. Criteria: used almost daily by China Business Watch, and few/no substitutes accepted. This is quality software,
Mozilla Firefox web browser - Previously, one of those "best kept secrets" but rapidly gaining popularity these days. Firefox is now breaking through, and my own web site stats support this. Firefox runs on many platforms, is fast, glitch-free and likely more secure than Internet Explorer. Very stable in all my testing, and has lots of nice features.
Too much spam? SpamProbe spam filter - A very fast, Bayesian spam filter for UNIX created by Brian Burton which classifies spam so accurately that I no longer care how much spam I receive; I never see any of it. "Best kept secret" of the anti-spam world. (by the way,to stop telephone spam, use this National Do Not Call Service. )
PuTTY telnet/SSH client - Stable, light, powerful, and extremely functional. If I'm running Windows this is the SSH client I reach for immediately. Simon Tatham has done a very nice job with PuTTY, which is tool #1 for remote access.
Xnews news reader - Luu Tran's USENET client for Windows. Has all the features you need in a USENET client even for advanced use (kill files, scoring, etc.) Has a nimble interface, and works flawlessly.
TightVNCOpen source (GNU GPL) : UNIX, Windows, JavaChecked: version 1.3.9
TightVNC is remote control software derived from VNC, allowing interaction with a remote desktop including keyboard and mouse use. Features protocol compliance with other VNC software, efficient compression, web browser access, and automatic SSH tunneling under UNIX.
pidgin (formerly Gaim)Open source : UNIX, WindowsChecked: version 2.3.1
Pidgin (formerly Gaim) is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client that supports AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Yahoo protocols.
Media players and viewers
foobar2000Freeware : WindowsChecked: version 0.9.4
Foobar2000 is an audio player with native support for several popular audio formats, low memory footprint, high quality audio output, and extensive playlist functionality (including Unicode support).
PDFCreatorOpen source : WindowsChecked: version 0.9.3
PDFCreator allows one to create PDF documents from any application via the PDFCreator Printer driver. When a document (web page, etc.) is printed, PDFCreator converts the text internally using Ghostscript and produces a highly compatible and portable PDF file you can save.
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