What You Need to Know about All Things PC
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The Naked PC - http://www.TheNakedPC.com What You Need to Know about All Things PC Publisher: Lee Hudspeth and T.J. Lee Editor in Chief: Dan Butler Contributing Editor: Al Gordon This issue is for Thursday, April 5, 2001 - Vol. 4 No. 7 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Table of Contents ** 01. Letter from the Publisher ** 02. High-speed Internet Connection: What To Do When Yours Goes Down - Part 2 (by Lee Hudspeth) ** 03. TNPC Primer - Email Basics Part 1 (by T.J. Lee) ** 04. Internet Disaster Planning (by T.J. Lee) ** 05. Featured FAQ - "10 Big Myths about Copyright Explained" by Brad Templeton ** 06. Featured Book - "Microsoft Office 2000 Visual Basic for Applications Fundamentals" by David Boctor (reviewed by Lee Hudspeth) ** 07. Featured Product - FrontXtension: USB and Serial Ports ** 08. Featured Web Site - Twists, Slugs and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang ** 09. Newsworthy - a potpourri of current events and interesting stuff ** 10. We Get Mail ** 01. Letter from the Publisher Happy Spring to those of you reading this in the northern hemisphere. The days grow longer and Jim's just starting to recover from losing an hour due to the switch to Daylight Savings Time. By chance it seems that this issue focuses on email and trying to stay connected to the Internet. Lee has some useful advice about what to do when a high-speed connection fails you, including tips that serve both when email tanks or you're simply on the road again. Jim spouts off about some email basics and asks the musical question, "What will you do when the Internet goes down?" Al and Dan are taking a well-deserved break so that pretty much lets them off the hook. As you might have guessed if you've ordered our ebook, "The Book That Should Have Come with Your Computer", we've experienced some small difficulty keeping up with the high demand. We've just ordered another 2,000 copies for inventory, so orders placed now should not be delayed for more than a few days. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/a/tr.cgi?tugpc2 Oh and if you're ordered something from us please make a note that credit card charges for merchandise from The Naked PC Store or PocketFlashLights.com will show the company name "PlanB Group." That is Dan's company name and he's handling the merchant banking for our e-store's credit card orders. As always, reader support is what keeps TNPC free, so PLEASE help us and pass a copy of TNPC on to co-workers and friends (no spam please!) and remember to always say "I saw it in TNPC!" http://www.TheNakedPC.com/refer/ So now you know. +++------------------------- sponsor -------------------------+++ "The Book That Should Have Come with Your Computer" Get this electronic book today and get the upper hand on your computer. Written by T.J. Lee, Lee Hudspeth, and Dan Butler, this is the electronic version of "The Unofficial Guide to PCs" delivered to your door on a CD-ROM disc in fully searchable PDF format. If you use computers you need this book! "This is undoubtedly the most informative and readable book on PCs I've read." "Great book, full of good sound advice and gives a clear explanation of PC's in an easy readable format." These are just a few of the comments we've received on this book. Check it out! http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/a/tr.cgi?tugpc2 +++------------------------- sponsor -------------------------+++ ** 02. High-speed Internet Connection: What To Do When Yours Goes Down - Part 2 (by Lee Hudspeth) My first article in this series generated several emails from folks incredulous that I would suggest using AOL under any circumstances. I appreciate these readers' cries of alarm, and here's my reply. I consciously chose not to get into a discussion of AOL in my initial article. In retrospect, that was a mistake. Too many readers may have inferred that if Lee says AOL is okay for a backup plan, it must be okay for general use. In my opinion, it's not okay for general use, but under certain very specific circumstances it can provide a safety net (more on this in a moment). I never had any direct empirical evidence that AOL was causing system instabilities, only that it had what I considered a poor user interface and bad technical support. The "bad UI" judgment was easy to make; AOL connection software is proprietary, frenetic, and laden with "eyeball traps" that simply shouldn't be part of a paid-for online connection experience. I made the bad technical support judgment based on the experiences of numerous clients and friends, all of whom reported extensive problems with the service, but I had never used it myself. (As you'll read in a moment I now have my own bad AOL experiences to lament.) I recommend that people NOT use AOL, but I didn't clarify that in my initial article. What I should have said was this. All the Internet connectivity tools at my disposal at the time were broken (DSL was down, my ISP doesn't offer dial-up for DSL subscribers, and NetZero was belly up). With several time- critical consulting projects on deadline, I chose to take a risk and sacrifice a clunker PC to AOL. When AOL worked, I was able to connect, browse the Web, and conduct my email business for three days while waiting for my ISP to fix the problem. So, yes, AOL worked for me under those circumstances. But thanks to TNPCer Michael Zipf, we can all study important empirical evidence of AOL's insistence on destabilizing systems. If I had known then what I do now, I would have further qualified my comments. Michael shared a link to an online article penned by the venerable Fred Langa, Publisher of LangaList (http://www.langa.com) and freelance computer/Web author, about his AOL experiments. You can find "AOL 5.0: The Upgrade of Death?" at: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/407/tr.cgi?lee1 In fine empiricist form, Fred took a perfectly clean, stable Windows 98 SE system; cloned an exact "disk image" copy so he could always return to the same "clean PC" state; and installed AOL 5.0 on it. AOL wreaked havoc on the PC's networking protocol stacks, created several online security vulnerabilities (this was reported in a more recent version of the article that's not currently available online), unnecessarily installed Virtual Private Networking (this was reported in a more recent version of the article that's not currently available online), changed power management Registry settings, and added or replaced numerous system files, all for no apparent reason. To add insult to injury, AOL's uninstaller did not return the system to its original state. Fred concluded that AOL 5.0 was a high risk because it made so many changes to a system for no logical reason (AOL technical support engineers were never able to intelligently answer any of his questions). He repeated the experiment with AOL 6.0 and found it made only slightly fewer changes. Oh, but it gets worse and closer to home. I read TNPCer Richard H.'s email and filed it away for future reference when he wrote, "[Regarding canceling AOL before your initial free 30-day trial,] been there did that, make sure you ask for reference number, and be willing to put up with timeshare-like jerk on the AOL cancellation desk." I cancelled well before the 30 days had ticked by, but not without almost getting duped out of at least one month's charges. When I called to cancel I took careful notes, but I had forgotten Richard's advice about the cancellation confirmation number. The rep (I'll call him Eric) responded to my cancellation request by saying, in his best huckster patter, "I'll waive the bill date until May 12th blah blah blah..." and kept on with some goofy spiel, so I stopped him and said, "No, I want to cancel forever, right now, not extend or waive anything. I want you to unequivocally guarantee me that it is cancelled and that there will be no charge for AOL ever on my credit card. Do you guarantee that?" Eric answered yes. Twenty minutes later while working on this article, I remembered Richard's warning and that I had forgotten to get a cancellation confirmation number, called back, and got a different rep. She looked up my account and it was alive, un-cancelled, and "extended" to May 12th at which point the billing would have kicked in. I quoted her my notes, explained that I wanted to escalate to a supervisor and file a formal complaint about Eric. She apologized, quickly filed an electronic complaint about Eric (so she said), asked if I would be willing to be contacted by phone by a manager in regards to the regrettable incident (I said okay), and then gave me my cancellation confirmation number. Just bad karma? Whatever it was, it was bad. Take heed folks, and take Richard's advice: always get the cancellation confirmation number when canceling your AOL account. Here are several Internet connectivity options to consider if your primary high-speed connection goes down. (Some of these options work well when you're traveling, too.) 1. Get a high-speed connectivity provider that offers free dial- up access. Our colleague Al Gordon reports that as an AT&T RoadRunner cable subscriber he can use a free dial-up connectivity service called "Mobile Access Beta Test." Al reports that this may be the world's longest-running beta test: three years! However, Al relates that RoadRunner does *not* offer its own proprietary Web- based email, and yet AT&T WorldNet does. Go figure. Others I have corresponded with cite arrangements like this: Telocity DSL subscribers get free dial-up access through an 800 number (limited to 60 minutes per month); PacBell DSL provides free dial-up with a local number; and so on. Your DSL provider may not proactively advertise its free dial-up access. Listen to TNPCer Gary V.'s tale, "I have ADSL through Bellsouth for $40 a month. They do not advertise this fact when you sign up for ADSL, but included along with the ADSL is a regular dial-up account. I found this out from a Bellsouth tech rep when I had to call about an ADSL service outage." 2. Use a free dial-up service like NetZero. If you're going to have this as part of your safety net, be sure to have an updated copy of the connection software handy or you'll be stuck, unable to connect to get the software. 3. Use a free public email retrieval site that allows you to connect to any POP3 provider via a Web interface (thanks to Jonathan A. to be the first to make this suggestion). Here are some of the most popular sites. Mail2Web: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/407/tr.cgi?mail2web POP2Web: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/407/tr.cgi?pop2web ThatWeb: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/407/tr.cgi?thatweb 4. Use your provider's proprietary Web-based email interface (as mentioned in my initial article). In my unscientific tests, Verizon/GTE's interface seemed slower that the public email retrieval sites listed above. 5. Pay for a limited-usage dial-up account as a backup. Thanks to subscriber Lee H. for this tip. Check with your ISP as mileage may vary. 6. Completely segregate your email service from your ISP. Thanks to subscriber Craig R. for this tip. To reduce the risk of being dependent on the same company for both email service and connectivity, never use your ISP's email infrastructure. Instead get your own domain name and get a reliable host that provides an SMTP server and allows you to manage your own POP3 mailboxes. 7. Dan Butler's suggestions. TNPC Editor-in-Chief Dan Butler believes that receiving email is more important than sending, because with an unreliable email provider you won't ever know if incoming email has come in or not (Email Metaphysics 101!). In a pinch you can almost always use phone/fax to replace the temporary loss of the outbound email medium. Dan's suggestions include: (1) buy a domain name (say, example.com) then have mydomain.com redirect--it's a free service--any email sent to example.com to the location of your choosing; http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/407/tr.cgi?mydomain (2) find an ultra-reliable email provider so you don't have any email problems; and (3) alternately, run your own email server. For great tips on choosing an ISP, see our ebook "The Book That Should Have Come with Your Computer" chapter 17 "Making Internet Connections." Dan's ideas will be addressed in more detail in a future issue. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/a/tr.cgi?tugpc2 Credit is due to TNPCer Mark L. for his timeless advice, "I knew the e-mail would still be waiting for me when I got back, the Web sites wouldn't disappear and try as it might, the world would not come to an end just because I didn't see it over the wire at 300Kbps." TNPC subscriber Stephen G. kindly but tersely :-) offered a clever plan for me, "Get cable." Fair enough, and cable is available in my area. For now I'm sticking with my existing DSL infrastructure, but that got me thinking about what your experiences with cable and DSL have been like, so here's a short survey I'd like you to fill out if you're in the mood. I'll publish the results in an upcoming issue. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/407/tr.cgi?survey I'll close with some high-speed facts to consider: in North America, DSL users grew 185% in 2000 to 2.9 million (Cahners In- Stat), and cable modem users grew 144% to 3.4 million (Gartner Group). That's 6.3 million individual cable and DSL connections combined. You can reach Lee Hudspeth at: mailto:leehudspeth@TheNakedPC.com ** 03. TNPC Primer - Email Basics Part 1 (by T.J. Lee) I get a lot of email. Sure, much of it is spam and most of that never sees the light of my inbox since I use a filter that shunts the most obvious into the bit bucket. But aside from the spam I still get a lot of email. As publisher of this newsletter, in my role as a consultant and project manager for PRIME Consulting Group, Inc., as Cubmaster of Pack 11, I even have the dubious honor of being included on the group list that my wife and her sisters have. Whilst digging through my inbox this morning I decided that it might be timely to do a primer on the basics of email because so many people (I'm not saying my sisters-in-law are in this group, but I'm not saying they're not either, if you get my drift) seem to be using email without a solid understanding of how it should be used. Now before any of you get riled I'm not saying that my recommendations about email usage are gospel. I'm just making some suggestions that I think might help people who are new to the email game. First let's contemplate the email message itself. Email is the electronic equivalent of writing a letter and sending it to someone in the post. The electronic part makes it much faster than the USPS and you don't have to pop for 34 cents (here in the USA) so it's free. This is good as far as it goes. Unfortunately the speed and ease with which email lets us reach out and touch someone, seems to have helped make it a lot more impersonal than the letter we all learned how to craft in school. Things get lost in our hurry to hit the send button. Like a greeting, punctuation, whole sentences, paragraphs. Basic stuff that makes your communications easier for the recipient to figure out. If you write to someone it's always nice to include a greeting be it something as simple as: Jim, It's also a good idea to close with your name especially if the person you're emailing does not know you outside the context of the email. It's awkward when you reply to a message and the best you can do for a salutation is fish something from the header like: "Dear 123iggy@example.com" Replying seems to give people troube. Generally, in a business context you shouldn't reply to something unless the message specifically calls for a response or a response is necessary given the context of the message. Unfortunately, given the often unreliable nature of email an acknowledgement that the message was received is sometimes necessary. It's ironic the number of times I've emailed someone then had to phone them to see if they got the email. Sure you can use the confirmation request option that a number of email client software packages have but you may not get an automatic confirmation depending on the type of client software your recipient is using and the email servers your message passes through to get to them. You also want to be aware of the difference between a "Reply" and a "Reply to All". A message that you've received may have been sent to more addresses than just yours. For example, if your address was in the To: line of the original message along with 10 other addresses and you hit "Reply to All" your response goes to all 10 names. Likewise if you "Forward" a message all the addresses in the To: line are visible and accessible to whomever you forwarded the original message to. So some discussion of the To: line is definitely in order. The To: line is where you put the address of the person you are sending your message to. This is usually only the person you want to take action regarding the contents of your message. If you want other people to know about the message but not necessarily reply or take direct action you should include their addresses on the Cc: or Bcc: lines. The Cc: stands for carbon copy, or courtesy copy if you prefer. If you're old enough to remember trying to stack paper and carbons and roll the whole shooting match into a typewriter you'll understand the reference. Bcc: stands for "blind" carbon copy. General rule of thumb is you copy people who need to know but don't need to respond. The "blind" carbon address line Bcc: differs from the Cc: line in that the recipient sees the address of the person(s) to whom the original message was sent but they cannot see the other addresses of those who were also included on the Bcc: line, hence the term "blind" carbon copy. If send a message with an address like this: To: Lee Cc: Dan, Matt Bcc: Al Everyone knows I sent the message to Lee. Lee knows I sent a copy of the email to Dan and Matt. Dan knows Matt got a copy, Matt knows Dan got a copy, but neither Lee, Matt, nor Dan know that Al got a copy. Say I wanted to send a message to Lee, Dan, Matt, and Al but did not want any of them to know who else I sent the message to. I would address the message to myself and include everyone else on the Bcc: line. To: Jim Cc: Bcc: Dan, Matt, Al, Lee This is the way you send a message to a bunch of people but you don't want to share each person's email address with everyone you're sending the message to. It's bad email etiquette to share email addresses with groups of people unless the people who own the email addresses being shared have given their permission. More on this topic in another issue. You can reach T.J. Lee at: mailto:tj_lee@TheNakedPC.com +++------------------------- sponsor -------------------------+++ PHOTON MICRO-LIGHTS the Super POCKETFLASHLIGHT! Micro-Lights are the BRIGHTEST flashlights for their size in the WORLD. Reliable, incredibly bright light for any situation. Comments from Micro-Light owners pour in: "We received our lights, and are they COOL!" "I am using a RED light every night when I walk my dogs." "...last night we were having a romantic dinner in a very dark restaurant where I couldn't read the menu without one. Micro-light to the RESCUE!" These LED marvels produce light in your choice of Red, Orange, or Yellow; superbrights: Green, Turquoise, Blue, or White. Shipping is FREE in the USA! http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/a/tr.cgi?pocketflashlight +++------------------------- sponsor -------------------------+++ ** 04. Internet Disaster Planning (by T.J. Lee) As Lee discusses in his article in this issue, it's sometimes a real pain just trying to keep your email flowing. And companies are become very dependent on email in particular and the Internet in general. Most companies have disaster plans for what to do in the event o of bomb threats to their buildings or storms that may snow in the city preventing workers from getting to the office, but not many have addressed the issue of what they'll do if the Internet goes down for any significant amount of time. A number of companies got a taste of this possibility when NorthPoint, a DSL provider that has fallen on hard times, suddenly announced that the cash deal they worked out with AT&T (who is buying NorthPoint's assets through a bankruptcy sale) was deemed to be insufficient to keep the DSL service going for the 30 days. NorthPoint said they could not give current clients notice that they needed to replace their DSL service and just started pulling plugs. Lee and I head a consulting firm, PRIME Consulting Group, Inc., and this NorthPoint closure affected several of our clients who started wondering about how an Internet failure would affect their day-to-day operations. Most companies are a lot more dependent on the Internet than they realize. Not only email, but file transfers, order systems (e- commerce), internal applications, and information distribution all run over the Internet and the Web. When companies can't get online, work has a tendency to just stop. And we're not talking about an outage measured in hours. What will you do when you can't get online for days or weeks? We've started laying out a disaster program for one of our clients and we see this as a service that will grow as there are more glitches with the Internet that take longer to get resolved. If your company has a disaster plan for Internet failure in place I'd sure like to hear from you. I'd like to gauge the interest on this topic so I can plan future articles and get a feel for how large a perceived threat this possibility is. You can reach T.J. Lee at: mailto:planning@PRIMEConsulting.com +++------------------------- sponsor -------------------------+++ STOP TELEMARKETERS COLD! As seen in the pages of The Naked PC newsletter, now you can get the Ultimate Anti-Telemarketer Device! Don't let your dinner get cold while you try to stop some telemarketer's sales pitch long enough to say NO! Just press the button on the Easy Hang Up by Phonex Corporation and let this marvelous device tell the telemarketer that your phone number does not accept sales calls and put them on notice to remove your phone number from their call list. This small device plugs into your phone and when you get a sales call just press the button and hang up! It's that simple. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/a/tr.cgi?ehu +++------------------------- sponsor -------------------------+++ ** 05. Featured FAQ - "10 Big Myths about Copyright Explained" by Brad Templeton Copyright is a hot topic these days, especially as it relates to privacy on the Internet. Is your email protected by copyright? 'What does "Fair Use" mean? What about stuff you put up on your Web site? If you find it on UseNet is it public domain? Brad Templeton is Chairman of the Board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which he describes as "the leading foundation protecting liberties and privacy in cyberspace." Brad's FAQ on copyright deals with most of the myths and errors that people make when they come up against the popular misconceptions about copyrights. Brad also has links to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which directly affects copyrights on the Internet as well as discussions on "deep linking" and the possible violations inherent in simply linking to another person's or company's Web site. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/407/tr.cgi?ffaq ** 06. Featured Book - "Microsoft Office 2000 Visual Basic for Applications Fundamentals" by David Boctor (reviewed by Lee Hudspeth) Lots of folks contact our company for recommendations on how to quickly get up to speed with Microsoft Office's programming language Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and how to become facile with Office's rich but often arcane object models. Our standard answer is: (1) read the help documentation for whatever application you'll be coding in the most (that's free); (2) buy a copy of David Boctor's book; and (3) code, code, and code some more. Boctor covers all the relevant material, and does it in an easy- to-follow style. He includes plenty of practice files that are nicely coordinated in the text. His practice and sample source code isn't "cast off" code, it's the good stuff; focused on the task at hand, well written, and well documented. The book is divided into six key sections: Learning VBA, Managing Documents and Files and Manipulating Document Content, Working Across Applications, Working with Active Window Content, Customizing the User Interface, and Developing COM Add-Ins for Office. This 527- page tome is a must-have for the bookshelf of any Office developer at any level. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/407/tr.cgi?fbook ** 07. Featured Product - FrontXtension: USB and Serial Ports Back in TNPC #3.23 we reviewed a very nifty product called FrontX that fits into a 5.25" drive bay on the front of your computer and effectively transfers your speakers, microphone, and joystick connections from the back of your system to the front making them infinitely more accessible. To see what we're talking about see the pictures here: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/407/tr.cgi?frontxpics Jim has a FrontX on each of his systems and couldn't be happier with them. Until now. The FrontX folks have now added cables for relocating USB and Serial ports to the FrontX panel. You can get a USB cable that can reroute the port from the back of the system or one that will attach directly to the motherboard port. Ditto for the 9 pin D-shell cable for the serial port. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/407/tr.cgi?fproduct ** 08. Featured Web Site - Twists, Slugs and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang "So I said don't be a bunny, the butter and egg man was due anytime and I wanted to bump gums with him before we dusted." Howzat again? Want to put some colorful slang from yesteryear into your everyday speech? This Twists, Slugs and Roscoes site is indeed a compendium of hardboiled slang. Here you can sharpen your vocabulary along the lines of patter spoken by the likes of Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, and Mike Hammer. When Cagney, Bogart, or Edward G. wanted to mince words this is how they talked. Get hip so if someone tells you your flivver is bent you can drop a dime to the coppers so they can make a pinch and return your boiler. That'd make everything silk. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/407/tr.cgi?fsite +++-----------------------------------------------------------+++ WANT TO GET YOUR WORD OUT? Classified ads in The Naked PC can be yours for ridiculously low prices. Get your message out to over 65,000 TNPC subscribers. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/tnpcadvertising.html?v4i7 +++-----------------------------------------------------------+++ ** 09. Newsworthy - a potpourri of current events and interesting stuff *-* The United States Postal Service (USPS) has stood up to rain, sleet, and dark of night, but it looks like it has met its match in electronic mail. Crying foul the USPS says that email has eroded it's client base to the point where the service is going broke. The USPS is floating the idea of dropping Saturday mail service here in the USA as a way to cut costs. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/407/tr.cgi?news1 *-* In case you haven't heard, some hacker convinced VeriSign to give them two Microsoft digital certificates. MS has come up with a patch to Windows (every version since Windows 95 running any version of IE no earlier than 4.01 Service Pack 2) that will warn you if you try to accept these one of these bogus certificates. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/407/tr.cgi?news2 *-* Is Microsoft trying to guide PC hardware makers towards a more Microsoft-centric design of the PC itself? Better check out what Peter Coffee is saying on this topic. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/407/tr.cgi?news3 *-* If you're using Internet Explorer 5 and your network is running Microsoft's Exchange 2000 server there's a newly discovered bug you should know about. Georgi Guninski, bug hunter extraordinaire, has discovered a way malicious Web page creators could lay a trap for unsuspecting surfers that could give them access to email folders on the Exchange 2000 server. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/407/tr.cgi?news4 *-* Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 6 Public Preview beta. You can download this new version of IE, which will run on Windows 2000 Professional, Windows NT Workstation 4.0 Service Pack 6a (SP6a), Windows Me, and Windows 98. New features include new toolbars, integrated ICQ-like instant messaging, image resizing, and some enhanced privacy features. Unless you must live on the bleeding edge we suggest you wait for the final release and forgo the betas. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/407/tr.cgi?news5 *-* If you're thinking about getting the IE6 beta you can read a review of the latest release over at eWeek. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/407/tr.cgi?news6 Get more Newsworthy bits on the TNPC Web site: http://www.thenakedpc.com/newsworthy/ Have you come across something newsworthy? Drop us a line: mailto:hottips@TheNakedPC.com ** 10. We Get Mail *-* TNPCer Stephen D. read last issue's comments about the Belkin OmniCube and reports that he's had trouble getting them to work with Logitech optical mice. *-* TNPCer Babette B. wants to know more about all the buzz around Juno's move to make their "free" email service turn a profit. This story broke back in February when Juno changed the terms of their service agreement. We'll revisit this issue again as we cover the Internet's transition from "free" to "fee" in future issues. For now there's a story about this buzz right here: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/407/tr.cgi?mail1 Be sure to stop by the Letters to the Editor page for more: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/letters/index.html **PLEASE SUPPORT TNPC BY VISITING OUR ADVERTISERS** +++----------------------- classifieds -----------------------+++ **NEED INK? SAVE 40-70% OVER RETAIL!** High Quality Inkjet Printer Cartridges, JetPaks, Refill Kits. Super Prices! Your Satisfaction IS Guaranteed. NEW! 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Get over 60 issues on disc, fully searchable, all the articles, pub letters, each and every issue, complete and uncut! http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/a/tr.cgi?backissue +++-----------------------------------------------------------+++ DISCLAIMER Personal computers are individual machines with performance that can vary with components, software, and operator ability. The Naked PC is not responsible for the manner in which the information presented is used or interpreted. Also, although we work hard to provide you with accurate Internet links in The Naked PC, we are not responsible for Internet links herein that represent sites owned and operated by third parties. We are not responsible for the content, accuracy, performance, or availability of any such third-party sites. Or global warming. Or the ozone thingy. Honest. REDISTRIBUTION POLICY We encourage you to forward this newsletter to your friends, associates, and colleagues for their review and enjoyment. 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