Category: Technology

You can always count on the fact that somebody will want to ruin the party. Take email, for instance. Several years back, when your email client told you "you've got mail," that meant that someone had sent you a personal note that you definitely wouldn't want to miss. These days, "you've got mail" means that some con artist wants to help you arrange a loan, get a credit card, obtain refilled printer cartridges, or increase the size of certain body parts. Oh yes, the mail could be from the Queen of the Third World who needs you to help her get $642 million out of her country.

Linux Canada, Inc. has announced that they plan to take Quasar, their popular cross-platform accounting program, open source, beginning with the release of their next version, 1.3. This should come as welcome news to the open source crowd, since a business accounting application of Quasar's scope is something that's been missing in the list of open source applications.

Editors Note: When this article was written, we were still trapped in the world of Microsoft and Windows. We have since migrated to Mandrake GNU/Linux 9.0 and now use open source or open source based applications almost exclusively. For example, this article was preparred for publication using StarOffice 6.0 , the Bluefish HTML editor, and the gFTP program. Although we still have to use Windows to run our inventory control program for The Unicorn Shoppe, that too shall pass. We are currently attempting to replace Small Business Inventory Control, mentioned in this article, with a GNU/Linux alternative.

Almost anyone who's ordered software over the internet will tell you that customer relations are practically nonexistent in cyberspace. If you have a problem with installation or figuring out how to use your newly purchased program, you're usually directed by an automated server to the dreaded "knowledgeable database," a Byzantine maze that requires the knowledge of a programer to navigate. An email to technical support will usually be answered several weeks later with a document from the aforementioned database that's indecipherable by the lay person. Advise from an actual human being is usually not available, and when it is available there's a hefty fee involved. In other words, after you fork over your credit card number and download that program you really need or want, you're pretty much on your own.

Do you consider yourself to be an “alternative” person? Do you resent the hold that mainstream “traditional” medicine holds over the health care system, at the expense of alternative treatments like homeopathy, herbalism, and acupuncture? Do you gripe about the fact that big chains like Wal-Mart and Borders have all but driven local community based merchants out of business? Do you think there's something drastically wrong when a company like Enron can amass and lose billions of dollars buying and selling oil without producing a single drop? Are you appalled because your supermarket's shelves are filled with produce from another hemisphere when locally grown crops rot in the field for lack of a market?

Editor's Note: Although Open Source software is usually associated with GNU/Linux, many applications are cross platform and will work on Windows, Linux and other operating systems.

For more than two years, this column has been written using Open Source software. This started when I downloaded a copy of StarOffice 5.2, an office productivity suite similar to Microsoft's Office, to evaluate it for an article. To my surprise, I discovered that I liked the suite's word processor so much that it quickly became my writing tool of choice. The fact that it does an excellent job of opening and saving documents in Office formats means that I can read and send attachments to those who are still beholden to Microsoft – a definite plus.

If you spend any time online, or ever share a file with another computer via a floppy or CD, then your computer is at risk. There is the risk of potentially destructive viruses infecting your system from email attachments, or of other malicious codes being placed on your machine from a seemingly innocent web page. There are also hackers who scan your ports, hoping to gain access to your computer. Once access is gained, the hacker can do anything from destroying your data, recording your keystrokes to gain access to your user names and passwords, to turning your machine into a "bot" (short for robot) to be used in distributed denial of services attacks on key Internet services.

There’s been a big brouhaha recently regarding internet censorship and your local librarian. Remember now, the computers at your neighborhood public library are many people’s only way to connect with the web, including many school children who must rely on the web for research to be competitive in the classroom.

As recently as 1999, about 80% of newspaper and magazine articles on the Internet dealt with its ability to disseminate knowledge, and nearly every news story referred to the World Wide Web as the “information superhighway.” In those not-so-long-ago days, the politicos and media mavens inferred that this technology was going to make us smarter and more knowledgeable than we’d ever before been. The entire wealth of human knowledge would be only a few keystrokes away, making this the best thing to come along since the library at Alexandria.