Foxit, a free PDF reader, may offer better and safer functionality than Adobe’s PDF Reader (aka Acrobat Reader). More on Slashdot and Computerworld.

Foxit by default runs in “safe mode”, disabling most potentially exploitable functions (that are usually unused and just an annoyance).

We may want to consider switching to Foxit as the default PDF reader, EULA permitting.

Update: Lifehacker.com reports that Nitro PDF also has some cool features, such as annotation, in addition to providing a convert-to-PDF feature. http://lifehacker.com/5548047/nitro-pdf-reader-provides-advanced-pdf-tools-for-free

It appears that MATLAB cannot manipulate 64-bit integers. Mind you it can do 64-bit floating point arithmetic. There is some discussion whether manipulation of 64bit integers is common [1].

Rival product Mathematica, does support this feature [2]. This may be useful if we ever discuss advantages and disadvantages of computational software. Currently we have instances of Mathematica, MATLAB, Mathcad, Maple and a few others.