Software products that you think are really good

[C-Dog]

Here is a list of stuff I really like:

Newsleecher (http://www.newsleecher.com)
The Best Binary news reader on the market, it has an integrated binary search, and it just added the ability to parity check and extract from archives within the program automatically. It's just sick.

Ultramon
Dual monitor program, best one I could find.

Movie Collector
For cataloging the DVD collection

The Portable Apps Suite (http://www.portableapps.com)
It is a bunch of free apps that run off your USB Drive and leave no trace on the PC.

RSS Owl
I like it for reading Newsfeeds at this point, though it would not surprise me to find something else I liked as much.

C-Dog

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anyone know a user friendly stats program? By user friendly, I mean not R.

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stata.

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I should have specified that it must be free.

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How big of a dataset? I think you mentioned excel - if you are doing anything on your own I trust it isn't much data and can just use excel.

Pretty much everything like STATA is going to cost and arm and a leg because they're commercial products. We use SAS here at work and I think it's a LOT better than STATA, more "project friendly" but it also costs a lot.

For any gifted developers an open source stat analysis package seems like a cool idea. If anyone is interested my statistics knowledge is vast, though I can hardly say the same for my programming skills.

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SAS is about the most user-unfriendly programming language I've ever seen, though the GUI may be good/useful (I've only ever used it through a unix shell, so I have no idea). It is, however, very useful for merging data sets.

R is open source, and almost as weird/un-useful as SAS, though its about the most powerful thing out there. S-Plus is a commercial version that's slightly more intuitive to use, though the big problem with either one is the design of the language itself.

[goofyballer]

Microsoft Visual Studio is pretty much my favorite piece of software ever. It gets better with every release and allows me to program much more efficiently; just about any place I want to use a type/variable/whatever I can just type a couple characters and hit enter and it will fill in the rest; it does a ton of automated stuff as well, like fill in 'case' statements in a switch block, rename a variable/type/whatever in every spot in a project where it's referenced, it's just so [censored] cool and fast. One of my friends once described it by saying "You're like 'void main' and it's like 'Boom! Here's 50 lines of code' and you're like 'YES, that's the exact program I wanted to write!'" Plus, Express editions of VS for each .NET language are free.

Also, Skype is a voice chatting program which I've been using recently and works really well. It works similarly to an IM program, except that instead of sending messages you're usually 'calling' people on your buddy list. The quality is like 10x better than AIM voice chat; it does a really good job of stripping away background noise, for example. I've only started using it recently to sweat people playing poker but it works really well and I like it a lot.

Lastly, UltraMon is an awesome program for multi-monitor users. It lets you use multiple desktops on different monitors, or span one desktop across all of them; its most useful feature (imo) is the addition of a button on every window which allows you to quickly move a program between different monitors. I use that function at least 20x per day.

[mrkilla]

Some of these will be ubber geek but alas that is what I am...

Any case

Dameware - remote access tool - I am an IT dorq for a living and this makes my job super easy. From my PC I can remote into any machine on my network with a few clicks and a service install. It's also fairly light weight and has file transfer abilities. It also doesn't screw up video drivers like RDP and PC Anywhere does.

Spysweeper - Anti Spy ware - One the few that seems to get every piece of new spy ware and stays pretty up to date - sucky part is you need to pay but I fell its worth it.

Roboform - password keeper auto form filler - This is a siq program plugs into Firefox and IE saves your passwords and will auto fill forms with nae/CC info address etc. Highly recommended for those who login to lots of websites

utorrent - I care NOT to elaborate on this one [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

lastly

VMware - Virtual PC's - this is really cool. I use this at work on servers mainly but what it does is allows you ro run multiple systems at once on one PC. Thus and under utilized File server I can install a Virtual machine on and use it for a front end application server with out disturbing the existing environment simultaneously. Also you can use it for say running Vista and XP at the same time and switching back and forth with out having to reboot into it.

[mmbt0ne]

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Open Office is really really good, at least for a casual user.

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Very much so. The only reason I got away from it is because it didn't have (at least I could never find) the Excel Solver function.

[econophile]

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I'm a budding ecologist. There's loads of stuff Excel doesn't do, e.g. GLMs.

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You're just going to have to get Stata or SAS. I don't know as much about SAS, but Stata has a lot of built in biostatistics capabilities. Check to see if you can get student pricing through your school. It still won't be cheap, but it should be affordable.

[David Steele]

For online chess I like 2+2 TimM's
Xboard or Winboard interface.

I am sure there must be something else that has come along
in the 15 or so years I have used a version of it, but it seems perfect.

[Nortonesque]

Private label Gmail -- basically Gmail but with your own domain. It's free right now because it's still in beta (click on "Business Solutions" on Google's main page to find it).

[suzzer99]

The imageshack toolbar is absolutely awesome for these boards.

Agent Ransack - for searching through files. XP search sucks, and ignores certain kinds of files. This thing does so much more, including display the line that the text is found on, so you don't have to always open the document. Essential for coders, great for searching through HHs too.

Ultra Edit - sweet text editor for coding and pretty easy to customize to rapidly scan through HHs. I can go though one in about 30 sec. now on average. Also if you email support they get back to you in 5 min.

Synergy - allows you to mouse and keyboard across X # of computers as if they were one. Also saves text in the clipboard across computers. Awesome program.

HT Track - website scraper. Comes in handy sometimes. I've made a few grand archiving websites for people.

Pivot Pro - to rotate your monitors.

[iSTRONG]

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www.beamyourscreen.com

basically allows you to let someone see your screen in real time, or vice versa. it's free.

it's OMGawesome for anyone who is a poker coach/getting coached or just if you have friends you talk strategy with. df_newb and i have been sweating each other for the past couple of days with this.

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UltraVNC?