Friday, June 11, 2004
Issue Contents:
| 13:33 | Check Your System Free tools for computer protection. |
| 23:16 | The Reagan Legacy From The Economist. |
Unexpected days-off are good for performing clean up around the office and on our various computers.
Noted on the net, a useful text on protecting your computer from spyware and other security exploits and issues. Take the time to read and follow its instructions, regardless of which web browser you use for day to day work. Keeping your Microsoft operating system up to date should be considered a critically important task.
A Simple Plan
Virus-proof your PC in 20 minutes, for free.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2102230/
Mentioned in the article are two free tools, Ad-Aware and Spybot Search and Destroy. I've tried them both and found them to operate as designed. Recommended.
As has been mentioned many times in TrendVue Trader Talk, I prefer using any of the Mozilla web browsers over Internet Explorer.
Mozilla is the open source project that arose from the original Netscape Communicator web browser and communications client. Netscape source code was released to the open source community and they have advanced the product many times over since the last official Netscape browser.
If you are looking for a full featured browser with integrated Mail and News clients, try the full Mozilla client. If all you need is the browser, I highly recommend the Firefox browser client. All Mozilla products are always free, and supported on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and most Unix flavours.
Before installing any new software, I highly recommend that you search and remove any ad-ware or spyware using the tools mentioned in this article.
Both Mozilla and Firefox offer tabbed browsing and I bet you a nickle once you've used that feature you'll wonder how you did without it before. As a bonus, pop-up blocking is an integral feature of these web browsers, so you'll be able to disable or uninstall other third party products you may have added to your system for that purpose.
The big payback for switching browsers is that Mozilla-based browsers are far less often targeted by malicious hackers than Microsoft's Internet Explorer. I'm not making a political statement by choosing to use a browser other than IE, I'm making a security-driven decision. Big pay-back, low effort (download and install over a broadband connection takes less than 2 minutes), and best of all, its all free.
Excerpt from an interesting article in The Economist.
The list of Mr Reagan's conservative triumphs is long. He began his presidency by pulverising organised labour, sacking more than 10,000 members of the air-traffic-controllers' union for striking (even though the union had been one of the few to support his presidential bid). In 1981 he embarked on one of the biggest tax cuts in American history; before long the top marginal rate of income tax had fallen from 70% to 28%, weakening the progressive principle that Democrats cherished. He gave a push to the deregulation movement which had already started under Mr Carter. All this was driven by a clear ideological agenda: get the government off people's backs (partly by starving the beast) and unleash entrepreneurial forces.
He also helped engineer a huge surge in American patriotism. The Carter years were a period of American self-doubt: about the economy and about American power (with the memory of Vietnam still tormenting most policymakers). Mr Reagan set about wiping this away. He increased military spending by a quarter between 1981 and 1985. He talked to the American people not about “malaise” (as Mr Carter had done) but about “morning in America”. By the end of his second presidency, much of the talk about American decline had gone out of fashion: the country regarded itself once again not only as the world's greatest superpower, but also as the world's most dynamic economy.