GTS Blog

2009 is almost over. On New Years eve champagne glasses will be guzzled, kisses will be traded and a new decade will dawn. 

An extra reason to rejoice tonight is the official burial of 2009, which was a terrible year for business in general and for the translation industry in particular. Many companies in the USA and in Europe scaled back their budgets, delayed their translation/localization projects or cancelled them altogether. Translation companies, translators and other language professionals felt the crunch while under-employment prevailed.

But the signs of recovery began in Q4 of 2009. The color returned to the cheeks of many in the translation industry as orders started to pile up. Land at last! It seems that translation/localization services are essential to companies that are looking to grow their business. As the global economy looks for recovery, more and more corporations will invest in translation projects as the way to gain their competitive edge. Many of us in the translation industry will prosper as a result.

2010 will be a great year for people in the translation business. HAPPY NEW YEAR to everyone!

Having been affected with annoying advertisements that were popping up on my Windows system (a Windows XP machine installed under VMware on my MAC OS/X) , I downloaded and installed the Internet Security trial product from Kaspersky Labs. And while the product solved my ad popup problem, it did so many other bad things to my system that I removed it after about one day of use. What did it do bad, you ask? Well for one thing, it was a total drain on the CPU as well as on the Internet connection bandwidth. It seems that the application spent a lot of time looking for updates, scanning the computer and reminding you to pay for the license (“29 days left . . . “). So much so that the other applications had no room to breathe and were working very sluggishly or not working at all. I guess that after saying that, the other things are insignificant in comparison.

Before I decided to remove the Kaspersky application, I tried to disable it (without uninstalling). That way, I thought I would able to use it once in a while when I needed it. Using the Windows System Configuration Utility, I tried to disable the Kaspersky startup items so they would not be executed at reboot. That proved to be impossible–Kaspersky has some strong hooks in there. I then tried to remove the application entirely, but that also proved to be difficult. The first attempt failed and crashed the Windows entirely. After another attempt, I finally succeeded in removing Kaspersky and my Windows came back to life.