BENTSEN GROVE COMPUTER CLUB
BULLETIN
Week of
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MEETINGS MONDAY ROOM 3 & 3R BEGINNERS PRESENTATION GENERAL MEETING 10:30 AM |
SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS: If you would like to meet in a small group to
discuss one of the following subjects, contact the following people.
If you would like to lead a SIG, discuss it with
Val. Our bulletin is also available on line by visiting http://www.bgrcc.com/ and clicking on bulletin. You may also select bulletins by its subject |
NEED
SOME HELP
Click on HELP EMERGENCY
RESPONSE
TEAM
Val Barron…..….519-2319 Harold Buechly..581-3180 Claude Westfall 580-4042 |
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UPCOMING EVENTS: Monday March 29th
2004, 9:30 AM New user LESSON 13, Downloading Internet Files By Corinne Higbee Click here to get the lesson, print it and bring to class.Monday March 29th
2004, 10:30 AM General meeting. |
Barron’s BytesBy Val Barron valbarron@att.net Thank You, Thank YouAs our season winds down I
would like to take a moment to thank all who have helped support our club this
year. Harold Buechly has done yeoman’s work as our Bulletin editor,
Webmaster, treasurer, membership chairman and many other ways too numerous to
mention. Corinne Higbee worked diligently as our beginner instructor with a
prepared lesson every week. Thanks also to our “keyboard artist”, Pat Ingram,
for running the computer during meetings. Claude Westfall has done a great
job of setting the hall up for meetings then later packing things away after
the meetings. I am sure that there are others who should be singled out that
I am unaware of because of my long absence. In addition I know that many of
you have been more than willing to help a friend or neighbor in need of help
with their computer. I want to thank those who participated as program
presenters in my absence. John Abbott, thank you for presenting the program
on Next Generation Browsers that I was unable to present. You did it much
more knowledgably than I could have. THANK YOU ONE AND ALL. I am very grateful for the
card of appreciation I received from our membership. I sincerely hope I can
serve you better by being present much more often next year. Internet Accelerator Services (IAS)
On Tuesday I downloaded
and installed the accelerator, which AT&T is providing FREE to its
customers. Wow what a difference. Web pages and e-mail now download from 3 to
4.5 times faster than before. I am definitely planning to demonstrate and
discuss IASs next Monday. Firefox and MozillaAfter this past Monday’s
discussion of Firefox and Mozilla some of you expressed a desire to try a
tabbed browser but didn’t want to get involved with Firefox which is still in
Beta testing. John gave a good demonstration of Mozilla which is also an
excellent browser so I thought I’d reprint an article from the December 2003 Smart
Computing. ________________________________________________________________ Go, Go, MozillaMozilla 1.6 Free Mozilla.org Scumware purveyors use
ActiveX and other technologies to try to install their evil code on your PC
when you visit particular Web pages and later have the nerve to claim that
your browser’s security settings equal explicit permission to do so.
Microsoft has a business interest in ActiveX’s success, so even if its
Internet Explorer 6.0 browser does let you disable ActiveX, IE will pester
you with nag messages afterward. Combine such bullying with
a lack of pop-up blocking and continual discoveries of security
vulnerabilities, and IE will make you wonder why it’s still the most-used
browser in the world. Fortunately, there are faster, more secure
alternatives, such as Mozilla 1.4 for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X (free;
http://mozilla.org). Mozilla only supports ActiveX with a plug-in (a download
that adds support for a content format, such as Flash), and it doesn’t let
ActiveX controls install anything on your system by default. Mozilla is a hefty 13MB
download for Windows, partly because of its optional email, newsgroup, and
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) features. However, Mozilla.org, the browser’s group
of open-source developers, also offers a browser-only beta edition called
Firebird. Recent Netscape browsers
use Mozilla’s core browsing engine, called Gecko, and Netscape-compatible
plug-ins work with Mozilla. Mozilla 1.4 displays most common image Web file
formats, such as JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) and GIF (Graphics
Interchange Format), but not TIFF (Tagged Image File Format). Mozilla also
supports XML (Extensible Markup Language), XHTML (Extensible HTML), and XUL
(XML-based User Interface Language), which are becoming more important in Web
design, along with SSL2 (Secure Sockets Layer 2), SSL3, and TLS (Transport
Layer Security) protocols. Mozilla can block most pop-ups,
although it warns that some sites use other means to display discrete ads or
windows. If a Web site has to display pop-up menus to operate correctly, such
as an online banking site, you can easily accept that site’s pop-ups (or
cookies or images) through options in the Tools menu. Mozilla also offers
fine control over Java content. For example, you can block Java scripts that
resize or move windows, create or change cookies, or change images on a page.
Speaking of cookies, there’s a new option in Mozilla 1.4 to block cookies
based on more specific privacy settings than in previous versions. One of the most popular
features in recent non-IE browsers is tabbed browsing. Tabbed browsing lets
you view new Web pages while keeping previous ones quickly accessible with a
single mouse click. At this writing, the closest things to tabbed browsing in
IE6 are a) clicking Back several times or hunting through the History for
previous URLs (uniform resource locators); b) opening new instances of IE for
each page; or c) setting Favorites. We set Mozilla to open a new tabbed
window whenever we pressed CTRL and clicked a hyperlink. You can enable the
Netscape Plug-In Finder Service to automatically download plug-ins when you
encounter Web pages that need particular ones. Furthermore, Mozilla offers
password management and automatic form completion. You won’t have to leave
your Favorites behind because Mozilla can import bookmark files exported from
IE or other browsers. Mozilla 1.4 seemed faster
than IE 6 in our tests, especially after we enabled the experimental (and not
universally supported) Pipelining feature, which attempts to download page
elements in a single transaction. Mozilla isn’t perfect, however. Some Web
sites are only designed to look right on IE, so they may look jumbled on
alternative browsers. Also, some sites’ elements, such as weather forecast
charts, may not appear at all under Mozilla if you block certain content or
don’t have the right plug-in. Finally, you’ll still want to run a free spyware/adware
blocker such as Spybot Search & Destroy (http://www.safer-networking.org)
or Ad-aware (http://www.lavasoftusa.com) and update it occasionally. If you make the switch to
Mozilla or another browser, there’s still no getting rid of IE. Microsoft still
forces you to use IE to access Windows Update, and you’ll still have to patch
IE security holes because the browser is integrated with Windows. Still, for
most day-to-day Web surfing, Mozilla is a better choice. by Marty Sems "Reprinted with permission from PC Today,
publishers of Smart Computing. Visit http://www.smartcomputing.com to learn
what Smart Computing can do for you and your user group!" ________________________________________________________________ Happy computing, Val Barron |
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FREE FROM MICROSOFT?? To help make your MS Windows more secure. Did Bill goof and give something away free or is there a catch. You not only get a CD, updates for Windows and shipping, but he is including a free 30 day trial offer to 2 software packages (an antivirus and a firewall) that will cost you after the 30 days. Certainly, the updates will help you if you haven’t downloaded updates for a wile. But if you haven’t downloaded updates, probably your computer no longer works anyway. You can order a CD for Windows 98 through XP. If you use this CD to do the updates it includes updates through February 17, 2004. You must continue doing updates thereafter. If you have been doing your updates on a regular basis, you probably do not need this CD. It could be that CD’s sent in April includes updates through March?? We keep hearing rumors that a major update is coming soon and that it will be very large and take a long time to download on our slow connections. When and if it is available on CD it may be a goon thing for us as well. You may get your own copy by clicking on the following link and filling out the form. You may keep this link in your Favorites for future reference when new updates become available on CD. http://www.microsoft.com/security/protect/default.asp Harold Don’t forget to update your membership if you will be moving else ware for the summer and will have a different e-mail address. I expect there will be a monthly bulletin starting the first week of May. Use the link at the bottom of this page. |
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