By JULES ALLEN
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 21, 2000
Like BlackIce but free
Well, it's free for some, such as non-profit groups or individuals. ZoneAlarm 2 is a program that's much like Network Ice's $40 BlackIce, a program that protects your Windows computer from attacks via a network. Either program is useful for computers hooked to cable modems or DSL. While dial-up modem users will benefit, always connected machines are more likely to be attacked just because they're, well, always connected. If you're smart and proactive enough to have a virus scanner installed on your PC, fear alone should drive you to get protection like either of these programs, especially since one is now free.
www.sentient.com/ ~pcm2/action_item.gif
Faster than a speeding bulldog, he leaps tall tales in a single bound. Nihil's Action Item cartoon gave me a chuckle and really gave a co-worker a much needed lift after being dragged, kicking and screaming, into yet another rambling, buzzword infected meeting. Of course, my peers and superiors are on to me and I don't get invited to meetings anymore. For reasons that are best left untouched in a family newspaper, you understand. A tip of the topper to Scott Morris for passing this one on.
There are a few good ways to look up three-letter acronyms (or TLA) on the Web, but few offer cross-referencing like this one. A check for DSL brought back references to G.Lite and all the variations of DSL. Nice. The interface is mildly annoying. It goes over the top with HTML frames -- one of those good ideas at the time but horrible for you, the user, in practice. Just right-click in the area with the content and open it in a new browser window unless you like reading long documents in the viewable area of a Palm organizer screen. Now my wife and I can finally communicate about the subtle intricacies of TCP/IP, WAP, XML-RPC and why haven't you done those dishes yet?
Those free Internet storage places are starting to hit their stride and offer services that go beyond just offering a place to stuff 20 or so megabytes of your personal stuff. I-drive appears to be one of the leaders, offering something called Filo, a software add-on to save Web pages you like or, say, Web-generated confirmations and receipts with a click of the Windows mouse. It's good when you're on the road without a printer. The service will also synch up to 50 megabytes of your files from your PC, which is a great way to back up your data files while you sleep. While the synch is Windows-only, there's a tip of the fedora toward the Mac: Filo is cross-platform. Of course there's browser access for the Unix crew and other weirdos who won't conform but none of the sexy stuff -- yet.
Its contents are not doctoral material but that adds to this site's charm. Knuckle draggers like me enjoy plain English. Learn.com contains a multitude of mini-courses to help you understand such diverse topics as parenting, search engines and how to be a better boss. I particularly like the Notes feature that allows you to store your own annotations on documents. Readers get great content for free and authors can earn a percentage of the advertising revenue. I rambled through quite a bit of this site and found the content to be a bit dry in places but, on the whole, very accurate. Good job.
