THE POWHERTZ AWARDS

2002


Powhertz Awards 2002
Best operating system
Best Web browser
Best Internet utility
Best e-mail client
Best archiver
Best search engine
Best PC game
Coup de Coeur
X category


We've got to admit it, 2002 was not a year of great revolutions in computer software. No matter what you consider as the thing to remember of 2002 in the computer industry among the following possibilities, that would not be a software release:

In short, the public did not have that much words for software in 2002, except the Mozilla browser, version 2 of KaZaA and Morpheus and maybe, at most, StarOffice 6.0 and Visual Studio.Net, for the few programmers of us. However, there is still well enough good stuff for Powhertz awards, that I present you right away! I repeat it like last year: the winner in a category is not the most downloaded, not the best-seller and not the most voted of its category. It is the software that, according to Powhertz, has had the most merit in its category among the software released in the last 12 months. So here are the winners and closest nominees.

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Best operating system
Powhertz Award stamp 2002
Mandrake logo

Linux Mandrake 9.0
Runner-up #1: Mac OS X 10.2
Runner-up #2: Red Hat Linux 7.3

We're not low on choices this year, so it is almost impossible not to go a little bit into subjectivity to be able to rank this year's operating systems like this, since a good operating system could, for example, be a wonderful server but a bad desktop. Considering an operating system to be used as a workstation, it's the latest Linux Mandrake that leads the pack this year. Traditionnally, Mandrake has always been seen as the beginners' Red Hat, but this perception has pretty much disappeared in this end of 2002. I saw several ex-Red Hat users try Mandrake 9 and be so greatly surprised that they now prefer Mandrake to Red Hat, including even a network professional (for a bgi company that I won't mention here) that I know personnally. I feel really bad not to have been able to find the necessary disk space to put Mandrake 9 to the test on my PC before writing the current file, but it will be done for sure in the beginning of 2003! I have the 3 installation CDs waiting on my desk since over a month!... What do you want, these are the negatives of working at 3 operating systems on an hard disk of only 30 GB! So I'm unfortunately not the best reference to talk of Mandrake, but the numerous opinions I got lead to the same conclusion: Mandrake has became an excellent choice for the desktop, not to say the best choice. Its philosophy is on effortless configuration and the power of choice to the user, the version 9 even proposing simplistic but blazing-fast graphical environments that were abandoned by most of the other distributions: IceWM, Enlightenment and even Blackbox. I even heard from a user on the Internet that Mandrake would now be able to support some more offset hardware that Red Hat does not support... Let's also mention its score of 9/10 on the site ExtremeTech (http://www.nyq.extremetech.com), the highest note given to a distribution of Linux on this site. Moreover, Mandrake 9 became one of the first distributions of Linux to be LSB (Linux Standards Base) 1.2 certified.

Apple's poor Mac OS X is once again left to an unfortunate 2nd place! The new version 10.2, also known as Jaguar, has been much boasted and has indeed a lot to offer... well maybe a bit too much. The strong points include an integrated kind of Webshots Desktop, UNIX-Samba-powered Windows file-sharing agreeably integrated to the simple preferences panel of Mac OS X as well as integrated firewall and Internet connection-sharing utilities. In the superfluous but still additional functionalities are the iDisk "public folder", the included programs iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iChat (IM) and an excellent address book program. Compared to 10.1, if also offers performance increases and keeps this magic semi-transparence a little bit everywhere in the Aqua interface. The good words flow for Mac OS X 10.2, but just like last year, it is tough to grant it a title of great winner for many reasons: its expensive price, made to run on Mac systems only (its Darwin kernel runs on Intel processors but not Mac OS X as a whole, which limitates its scope to fewer than 5% of all micro-computers), incomplete exploit of the infinite possibilities of a BSD kernel, compared to any Linux: lack of virtual desktops and lesser customization capabilities, and always this same growing irritating Microsoft Windows-like mania of integrating as much Apple-signed software as possible to the operating system. Mac OS X 10.2 is still a good second.

We complete with Red Hat Linux 7.3, the distributor's first version to come on 3 CDs. It is indeed one of the most complete and enjoyable distributions of Linux to date. No major change compared to Red Hat 7.2, but several details and stability fixes brought back Red Hat to its best days. Only one problem that really irritated me during my few months of use: the bundled Web development program Quanta that was crashing at almost every startup attempt when launched from GNOME (from KDE it was long but was always getting through). Probably a little incompatibility with the used Qt libraries.

In short, the rejected ones:
Very divided opinions on this new graphical environment Bluecurve, which is in fact a GNOME, slightly merged with some KDE and some custom touch. Some people think that this is a step towards a massive acceptation of the "Linux as a desktop" formula, but a majority of long-time "Red Hatiens" (including myself) did not appreciate very much the idea of centralizing the interfaces. But beyond Bluecurve, I ran into a lot of little problems with 8.0 that did not exist with the more polished 7.3:
It remains a good product and a product with ambition, but not a dream product as we would expect from a giant who holds half of the Linux distribution market. Still, 2 people that I contributed to their conversion from Windows 98/ME to Red Hat 8.0 are completely pleased of their migration.
Last year's winner is holding on without having made the news much this year. ExtremeTech gives it a global score of 7/10, which is 10% less than Red Hat 8.0 and 20% less than Linux Mandrake 9.0, while CNet accords it (in a very close contest, I've got to say) the "editor's pick" title as the best Linux distribution... The opinions seem slightly divided, but for sure, there is nothing to really put it ahead of the other Linuxes in 2002. Still, it was battling for the title.
Good alternative to Windows for beginners and the level just after "beginner", but there is no free version and, according to many people, no much fun there for advanced users. However, good ability to run Windows applications in this user-friendly Linux.
Once again, no free version, and also no disk-partitionning wizard in the installation.
A Linux without the GNOME environment and a firewall utility... And without a free version neither... Except for that, it's fine.
Good idea and it's a good distribution as is, but as the companies behind it are all integrating it to their own distribution, then automatically the SuSEs and Turbolinuxes will worth at least a UnitedLinux, but in more complete.
Linux distributions that are wonderfully hailed (note by the way Gentoo's user appreciation rate of 100% on Download.com!), but that are aimed at a restrained public. Gentoo declares itself as a "distribution for developers and network professionals"...
Slackware is dead, purely and simply. This might be real good, but only its very long-time fans are still finding a particular interest into this great veteran that is slowly collapsing under the weight of the too big number of Linux distributions.
Still the greatest UNIX of this world, but limited to the SPARC platform (the support for Intel-based systems has been temporarily taken off for this release).
Excellent, extremely secure choice for a server... but what kind of freak would swith to an OpenBSD for an all-purpose system?!

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Best Web browser
Powhertz Award stamp 2002
Mozilla
Mozilla 1.0 / 1.1 / 1.2.1
Runner-up #1: Netscape 7.0
Runner-up #2: Opera 6.05 Windows / 6.11 Linux


  A year a little less exciting than 2001 as far as Web browsers are concerned except for one name to remember: Mozilla! In development and tests for months and even years, Mozilla has finally became public this Spring and rewarded everyone for their patience. Available on an incredible range of operating systems (Microsoft Windows 32 bits -which means 95 and up-, MacOS 9.x, Mac OS X, Linux x86, SPARC Solaris, AIX, HPUX, OS/2 and OpenVMS for version 1.2.1, add to this list BeOS, FreeBSD, BSDi and NetBSD for version 1.1), it became the new reference in Web browsing, period. A responsible Web developer should, in this second half of 2002, test his stuff in the latest version of Mozilla first, and then only look at the results on Internet Explorer 6.0, 5.5 and 5.0x, obviously used by much more people but limited to only 2 plateforms (Windows 32-bit and MacOS, and I even believe that IE6 is still not yet available for the Mac...), less respectful of the established standards, conceived for the interests of one corporation as opposed to Mozilla which is programmed by a community of volunteers who only wants to build standard quality product, etc... The functionalities are all there, as much for standards support as for the interface, which was its biggest thing to improve at the beginning of the year. Mozilla has even reached this year a point where it serves a good lesson to Internet Explorer on a technical point of view, as shown by the Web page of the 101 things that Mozilla does and that Internet Explorer don't, written by a Mozilla enthousiast following the release of Mozilla 1.1 (we now have 1.2.1, which has even more to offer). Personnally, the functionality that conquered me the most is the "tabbed browsing", functionality that resemble a bit the MDI interface that Opera has been using for over 2 years. It is also the first time since Netscape's near-extinction that Linux developers benefit from a Web browser that can be considered as a reference, feels good!! First time also that these people can enjoy a browser that *never* crashes. Maybe more Web developers on Linux for the coming year... Let's also mention the extremely dynamic developer community, which has the bad habit to deliver its versions 2 weeks late but works professionally and is really here to stay (a detailed roadmap already exists for the upcoming 1.3 and 1.4 versions, both of which expected for 2003). Maybe also mention the fantastic characteristic that makes of each version of Mozilla a better version than the previous one, which is also the case with Opera but not always with Internet Explorer or Netscape). It's simple, no matter the OS you're running, no matter any factor you want, you could and should always have the latest version of Mozilla on your system. Only 1% of the global market for now, but it is likely to continue expanding in 2003.

Helped by its Mozilla community, Netscape 7.0 was also, by obligation, an excellent browser. Clearly superior to Netscape 6.0, which had deceived a lot of people. It supports the "tabbed browsing" too and has highly improved its startup time in Windows thanks to a quick startup icon in the system tray that allows it to be more fairly compared to Internet Explorer, of which some components were automatically stored in memory on Windows startup to make Internet Explorer's startup look faster afterwards. Not much to reproach it, except maybe of not offering much more than its parent Mozilla. Netscape-faithfuls or those who feel more secure using the browser of a big company instead of the browser of a group of volunteers are making an excellent choice in Netscape 7. I believe that Netscape 7 is all that was missing to be able to finally officially declare Netscape 4.x completely obsolete.

On its hand, Opera continues to be dominating, although is didn't have its major upgrade in 2002. Their most important release of the year was the 6.11 for Linux, version before which Opera was having very serious stability problems under Linux (Opera has always been very stable on Windows). Opera 7.0, which is currently in beta, starts the new year as a favorite for the title of Browser of the Year for 2003.

Another fast browser would be FastBrowser, but it is not even considered because it requires MS Internet Explorer, which makes it not a pure browser (a little bit like NeoPlanet which already had its small part of popularity).

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Best Internet utility
Powhertz Award stamp 2002
Shareaza logo

Shareaza 1.7 Pre-release
Runner-up #1: gtk-gnutella 0.91.1
Runner-up #2: AOL Instant Messenger 4.8

It is not in my habits to give a title to a software that is only in beta mode, but this little file-sharing utility, that I just discovered during the last week of 2002, is given a golden occasion to be honored with the series of reknown but uninteresting software releases of 2002 in this category (Morpheus 2.0, KaZaA Media Desktop 2.0, Copernic Agent 6.0, ICQ 2003a, MSN Messenger 5.0, etc...) as well as the near-inertia of several others (Everybuddy, Trillian, ZoneAlarm, etc...). Shareaza, however, still merits its title! Here is a list of its strong and weak points found during Powhertz' series of tests:
+its new protocol that it calls "Gnutella2" (it is, for now, the only file-sharing client to implement it)
+continuous search (like gtk-gnutella, principle that I was explaining in last year's Powhertz awards)
+pretty good interface, inspired by KaZaA and/or Morpheus, but better
+simultaneous multiple searches (when will KaZaA and Morpheus finally understand that this is a major important feature in a file-sharing client?!?)
+automatically comes with support for 5 languages (is there any other file-sharing utility supporting more than 2 languages? well, is there another program of this kind that support multiple languages without having to download a separated version or localization files?!!)
+search by file type (audio, video, application, eBook, image), THE thing that is still missing to my little favorite gtk-gnutella and that I appreciate a lot from KaZaA and Morpheus
+efficient transfer multiplexing
+automatically lists the search results with the icons from Windows' file associations
+excellent, detailed and practical tooltip texts when we hover the mouse over a listed file
+comes with 4 different skins that we can select to our taste
+no spyware  ---BIG advantage over KaZaA
+unlike most programs of this kind on Windows, does not use Microsoft Internet Explorer to make annoying popup windows or advertisements popup at any time
+for the more technical users, a packet monitor that really allows to see in details all the activity generated by the program
+uses the Gnutella network which, unlike the FastTrack network used by KaZaA and Grokster, could never be ordered to close by Justice
-eats up lot of processing power
-tougher to find a rare file with Shareaza than KaZaA
-the way to treat the simultaneous multiple searches is maybe a bit less interesting than in gtk-gnutella
-only available for Windows 95/98/2000/ME/XP, without public source code

Good (very good) second comes gtk-gnutella 0.91.1, the little inoffensive-looking rebel that none of the 2 market leaders Morpheus 2 and KaZaA 2 has managed to catch up! Due to changes in the Gnutella network, the little gtk-gnutella has run into several difficulties in early 2002. That's why they released version 0.85, but even there, it was not so reassuring for the future of the small Linux utility. But, there was a bounce with version 0.90, and then the reconsecration with version 0.91.1 . A very satisfying utility.

AOL Instant Messenger 4.8, that I personnally don't prefer to ICQ for it, is probably the instant messaging client that shown the best progression in 2002. Its idea of the stock alerts and sport scores alerts (a little bit like the alerts for an incoming message) was genious and would have probably been enough for it to gain this position of finalist to the title of Internet utility of the year. But that's not all! This version has also brought the possibility to send your contact list to another user as well as sending greetings... Congrats! It's a sign that there is still some room for more original improvements than new "emoticons" or new secured transfer protocols in instant messaging!

The next ones on the list would have been, in order, ICQ Lite (people were complaining that ICQ was becoming more and more overbloated, and AOL was able to go over its arrogance and answer with a much lighter and agreeable version for the majority of ICQ users, NICE!), Virtual Network Computing 3.3.4 (with the shutdown of the British laboratory of AT&T, we thought that our dear VNC was dead, but VNC 3.3.4 is the version that relieved us!) and 3D-FTP 5.0 (several improvements compared to the 4.x versions; as for 6.0, there is no much new).

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Best e-mail client
Powhertz Award stamp 2002
Pegasus logo

Pegasus 4.02
Runner-up #1: Evolution 1.2
Runner-up #2: Eudora 5.1/5.2

Version 4.02 was not so superior to version 4.0, but it's a little bit at the same time to be forgiven never to have talked about Pegasus in the past! This e-mail client is 100% free, small, fast and highly functional. Also, is it the not well-known enough ancester of all e-mail clients, a true pioneer! There is a Pegasus for any Microsoft Windows (even Windows 3.x) and even a DOS version! Version 4.02 is available in 2 languages for now: English and German, but French is coming. Great this little David Harris! Click here for a good review of Pegasus.

For its part, Evolution continues to impress with its version 1.2, faster and more efficient than the 1.x series. Extremely complete, I know have 2 important people in my office (including the president) who are now using Evolution 1.2 in the everyday life and who still don't see any inconvenient compared to the Microsoft Outlook they were using before. A great success for Ximian!

Finally, Eudora, which is still considered by many as the best-email client around. Version 5.1 was adding the ability to import e-mails or contacts from Netscape 6 while version 5.2 was mainly adding SSL encryption.

Mozilla 1.x's and Netscape Mail 7's e-mail clients has also been good, but will have to content themselves of a 4th rank. As for IncrediMail, I would have liked to encourage it, but it didn't have much new features to offer in 2002! Also notice the absence of Microsoft Outlook Express, of which no new version was released since the version 6 last Fall.

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Best archiver
Powhertz Award stamp 2002


WinRAR 3.00 / 3.10
Runner-up #1: PKZip 5.0
Runner-up #2: WinACE 2.2

Very active these Rarsoft! They deserve to be rewarded for this good work, because the archiver market in general was sleeping this year! WinRAR has made the changes where is was important, and that's the way they distinguished this year. An excellent 2nd choice is this new major version of the pioneer PKZip by PKWare, which is even faster than before but mostly puts the emphasis on the security aspect, with mainly 168-bit encryption of ZIP archives. To help you figure out, a normal encryption of a secured site on the Internet is only encrypted on 128 bits... Also to mention, a very tight integration with Microsoft Outlook. Finally, to complete the list, let's go with WinACE 2.2, new minor version of what remains one of the best archivers available for Windows, clearly superior to WinZip that is still 10 times more popular.

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Best search engine
Powhertz Award stamp 2002
Google logo

Google
Runner-up #1: AltaVista
Runner-up #2: Teoma

We won't lose too much time on Google. It is not a secret for anybody now, Google is the best search engine and now even the most popular ahead of the one that always been #1 since the early days of the Internet, Yahoo!. It does not require any special presentation, and its nomination as best search engine for a 3rd consecutive year was just obvious.

The first finalist is one that was really slipping away at an alarming rate but which achieved to put themselves back on the track and rebecome excellent. To do that, it didn't use too much originality; it followed Google's success model, and honestly it's better like this! AltaVista is finally back in the race thanks to a greatly simplified and faster home page, a new very efficient spider system that won't let much broken links anymore, the indexation of PDF (Acrobat) files, and more. It is followed close by Teoma, a little newbie that impresses at many levels, including simplicity, speed, the number of search results and relevancy of them. For example, for the word "Nirvana", it is the 3rd search engine to come up with the most search results behind only Google and FAST. Teoma returns in fact 753 500 results for this search, and well-ranked. It's always a pleasure to encourage the new ones when they worth the helping hand.

Honorable mention to FAST (what a DB!), Wisenut (a little bit slower since it is at LookSmart, but not enough to make it a problem, and it is still very good) and Excite (mostly for the themes!). I also had to cut off Vivisimo and Kartoo which are really interesting but not real search engines as is, but more meta-engines like AOL or Metacrawler (but in better-presented).

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Best PC game
Battlefield 1942 logo

Battlefield 1942
Runner-up #1: No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way
Runner-up #2: Mafia

Just like last year, Powhertz' author and administrator did not play much PC games during the last 12 months, except for 2 NHL 2002 seasons, a few games of the demo of NHL 2003 and a few games of the latest Wolfenstein, released in 2002. We have to take off the Powhertz 2002 seal and refer to what we saw on TV (mostly at M. Net with the Grand Talbot, on the airs of Musique Plus), heard here and there, and read on the Internet's gaming sites. By the way, here are the main references used:
http://gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/bestof2002/pc31.html
http://www.gamespy.com/goty2002/pc/
http://www.pcgamereview.com
http://www.webwombat.com.au/games/topgames_pc.htm

Let's face it: these 4 Web sites are choosing a different game as the #1 PC game of 2002! Gamespot chose Warcraft III, GameSpy selected No One Lives Forever 2, PC Game Review chose Medieval: Total War and Web Wombat goes for Hitman 2: Silent Assassin! Well, Powhertz will just add up some confusion because it will opt for a 5th game: Battlefield 1942! Without having had the chance to play the game personnally, what I saw really impressed me and made me feel that the bar was too hight for a #2 to catch it up. Without going too much into details, It's really a very well-made game that gives a lot of power to the user. No One Lives Forever, another one that made unanimity, is chosen for a 2nd place, while Mafia, so much anticipated, has finally delivered and finds itself among GameSpot's 5 finalists for the title of Game of the Year. The following ones on the list would have been (in order) Medieval: Total War, Warcraft III: Reign of ChaosNeverwinter Nights,Grand Theft Auto 3, Unreal Tournament 2003, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin,Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, Madden NFL 2003 and Microsoft Age of Mythology. Little deceptions, just to name a few, to EA Sports NHL 2003 and Salt Lake 2002.

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Coup de coeur

(software that particularly impressed Powhertz during the last year and couldn't fit in any other category)
Powhertz Award stamp 2002
OpenOffice logo

OpenOffice 1.0
Runner-up #1: gtKam 0.1.4 / 0.1.5 / 0.1.6
Runner-up #2: xine 0.9.10

Powhertz' MVP this year is certainly the office suite OpenOffice 1.0 (and then 1.0.1, which was a very minor update), the kind of software that you seriously wonder why not 90% people do not have it installed no their PC. For those who didn't follow the story, this is an open source office suite directly derived from Sun Microsystems' StarOffice, which is unfortunately not free anymore since its version 6.0 . We now have to pay for StarOffice, but we don't and for sure never will for OpenOffice! It is programmed by volunteers who gave a helping hand to Sun for the upgrade from version 5.2 to version 6.0, but who kept (legally of course) the source code of 5.2 provided by Sun and the code that they programmed themselves to form a new, separated office suite. That said, OpenOffice 1.0 is like a StarOffice 6.0, but in 100% free and lacking only a few little functionalities, very insignificant for the large majority of us, added to StarOffice by Sun before they launch StarOffice 6.0 .

OpenOffice 1.0 is sublime. Except for a few stupid ideas of Microsoft like Visual Basic macros inside a so-called text document, OpenOffice's word processor is as good (better, if you ask me) than Word for at least 95% users (if not 98-99%), the spreadsheet is almost as good as Excel (but does perfectly  the job for at least 90% users), the presentations software is relatively comparable to PowerPoint, without to forget all of the other components that I never used... Except that Microsoft Office XP Standard (grouping together Word, Excel and PowerPoint) costs US$429,99 on Amazon.com (less expensive for an upgrade edition but even more expensive for the professional edition) and is only available for Windows 32-bit (95/98/ME/2000/XP) and Mac OS X while OpenOffice is entirely free and is available on 3 more platforms: Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris! Also, it produces data files of a very respectable size. I converted a spreadsheet file from the StarOffice 5.2 format to the OpenOffice 1.0 format... I shrank it almost by half! It is sincerely to wonder why so many people are losing their time and honor at illegally copying/cracking Microsoft Office or worse, lose their money to buy it. I repeat it proudly: OpenOffice has become, in 2002, an absolute necessary on any PC. And don't bother for your Word/Excel/PowerPoint files; OpenOffice handles them very well! It is also 100% compatible to StarOffice and the programming team is even working on an import/export for Corel WordPerfect files!

Powhertz would also not forget to mention the small Linux program gtKam, included with Red Hat Linux 7.3 and 8.0, among others. How not being impressed by this little wonder of computing? Written by only 2 lead programmers (with several contributions, I've got to admit) of good faith who do not make any money from their activities, gtKam 0.1.4 supports over 200 models of digital cameras and groups them into an interface that is often more simple and functional than the software of the camera makers themselves and that, without any help from a Kodak or HP to write their Linux drivers (drivers are generally written for Windows and MacOS only)!! gtKam is not perfect, but I'm confident that will become so. It is still a little fragile, but practical! But even without being perfect, it really impressed Powhertz and easily grabs its title of #1 finalist to the Coup de Coeur award 2002.

In all honesty, there was no real, very deserving #3, but let's go with xine 0.9.10, an audio/video player for the Linux OS. Another software in development that is not perfect yet, but that is already of a precious help to Linux users. This version of xine plays DVDs, MPEG videos and even  AVI videos (a Windows format)! Are the .ASFs next?!?

I can't hide my low enthousiasm for the Windows applications market in 2002. I already use almost no Windows anymore (the author and administrator of Powhertz passed at least 85% of his time on Linux in 2002, the large majority of the other 10-15% Windows only to play NHL some NHL games!), I didn't see anything very major on Windows this, except the OpenOffice mentionned above. First, Winamp 3.0 has been a clear deception. The biggest new feature from the 2.x version is the ability to play MPEG videos... but it does it bad! At least, clearly not as well as  (yes, I can admit it when it's true) Microsoft Windows Media Player. Also, some menus changed without any apparent reason other than the like to change, the oscilloscopes work pretty bad generally and there is a new bug, inexistent the 2.x versions, that prevents Winamp 3 to open MP3 audio files which name contain an accent... Then, QuickTime 6? Well, it's for the MPEG4 support, but I still didn't see any (and I really mean none!) MPEG4 file to date!... Photoshop 7? Maybe I just don't know it enough, but is it really worth the upgrade from version 6?... I also tried SuperX 7.0, an X server software for Windows that didn't manage to excite me. Would be left the utility One-click Audio Converter that I liked pretty much and Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net and Windows Media Player 9, that I didn't try at all.

Note: Last year I forgot the CD-ROM-burning application Nero 5.5, which really should have been in the good runner-ups for this category.

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The category that changes every year
This year: The category that is not one
Powhertz Award stamp 2002
Logitech MX700

The Logitech MX700 mouse

I thought of many possibilities for the category that changes every year, but none was catchy. Powhertz' author and administrator works at the same place than last year and has nothing special to say about travel Web sites in 2002 anyway. The only interesting thing linked to computer science that comes to his mind: his newLogitech MX700 mouse!!! Optical, cordless, fantastic ergonomy, incomparable precision, damn nice look, relatively quick battery charging (more or less an hour and a half for a full charge), useful special buttons, etc... It's the dream computer mouse! Also, for those like me who would have some fears, I can tell you that it works very well in Linux when configured as a Logitech MouseMan+! The only problem: 3 of its 6 special buttons won't work properly in X-Window... So what! So even if it's written on the box that Windows or MacOS is required, don't worry; it is conceived standard enough so that its main functions can work in most operating systems.

Thanks to EarthV.com for the picture of the MX700



And the grand winner is...
Mozilla MOZILLA ! The only award winner that was almost sure of its win for several months, the only one which domination was so clear. This suite, composed of an e-mail client, a Web page editor, an address book, an IRC chat client and, most of all, a Web browser, made the news more than once this year and it's a very well-deserved success! Now that it managed to hurt such a big name as Netscape, let's see how much time it will take to become, as Linux compared to Windows NT/2000/XP, a well-known Microsoft enemy.



Powhertz
2003/01/02
rev: 2003/01/25