Welcome to page 2 advanced people
Next up for selections are the chat clients, communication applications, & a note about cracks and keygens.
CHAT CLIENTS
There are many chat clients out here, some I catagorize as major and some as minor. The ones I consider major are the messenger types, Yahoo! is fast becoming the chat service of choice, although IRC still has it's followers. MSN is only surviving because either the people there are long term or they simply haven't discovered Yahoo! yet. MSN tries to get subscribers to it's ISP to use their chat as they want to sell ads and make oodles of cash (Micro$quash is soooooooo greedy, it ain't enough they control every application for the 98% of all computers, they want ALL the ad revenue too. Yahoo! outsmarted them by letting the bots spam up the joint. This in turn generates a lot of revenue from the ads they place in their profiles and send into the rooms. Since sex is the fundamental driving economic force without which there would not be an internet as we now know it, I say Let 'em bot-spam away, Yahoo! will never admit it but, they actually WANT the bots there. Heck, they use 'em themselves to keep the regular listed rooms open & monitored. The other major client are (in order of popularity) IRC, the most notable of which is mIRC, is a major client but is very open and suseptible to invasions unless you are an experiencced (and I mean EXPERIENCED) firewall user. YahElite by MasterDeep, Ychat, Y!mlite by cjdelphi, and YahZak by zakfromanotherplanet which is improving rapidly, although it is not yet widely used. 3rd party clients have the distinct advantage of being as close to unbootable as you can get, unlike the Messenger provided by Yahoo! itself which the script kiddies and a few dedicated hacker/cracker types seem to live to create new boots for. If Yahoo! would spend a little time with the creator of YahElite or Y!mlite, they could EASILY configure their own client to be much more boot-proof (Booting, for all the newbies reading this, means knocking your client offline with a series of codes inserted or "posted" either into the room or directly to your computer through the chat server in a peer-to-peer communication. Webcams and PMs/IMs are peer-to-peer and as such leave you vulnerable to an unscrupulous person getting your IP address and/or access to your machine, difficult but possible.) The minor client are Cheetachat (which used to be a major client but has fallen off except for the cheetahchat regs which stick by it still), Eyeball, which is comprised of a lot of horny teenagers and Gen-Xers, Gyach, ICUII (horny adults LOL,), and a middle to major client which is sort of a chat manager called ICQ. I'm sure there are many more out there but most are rather limited in their application and are mostly IRC-types. Cobracam is a fine example of what they can be like. The ones that have the ability to see and send webcam images are IRC, YAhElite, Eyeball, and Yahoo! messenger, the rest do no,t so far as I know. As of now the only voice chat client I know of is Yahoo! messenger. But there may be some IRC chat that does utilize voice somewhere, never ran across it but, ICUII is supposed to have it. The other branch of chat client are instant messengers likw AOL (AIM), MSN, and Odigo, they are strickly real time text chat clients and do not have chat rooms per se. They are for direct communication to another user without the intermediary chat service. They work fine for keeping in touch though just not community chat like the larger clients.
COMM APPS
What I catagorize as comm apps are programs which help your computer stay online better or perform better while there. stay alive ,(a crashguard) callwave,(an answering machine), 0-disconnect, stay connected, and iOpus's Always connected (which seems to work the easiest and best for me) are just a few, apparently they are fairly simple and easy to write as many peole have done so. They work on the principle that they "PING" or send a signal which looks like you are using a browser and moving from page to page which fools the ISP into believing you are actively on-line, not just idling. If your ISP thinks you are idle, they may disconnect you. I used to drop offline (even after setting the built-in pinger in IE to never disconnect) about every 15-20 minutes before I installed iOpus AC-plug. Now I can stay up, if I am active, for up to 4 hours (which is my ISP's cutoff length, after which I simply redial).
CRACKS & KEYGENS
This is the dirty little secret that NO software creator wants you to know. It's not so secret,but if everyone knew about it, they would all go broke.
There is a group of people out here dedicated to cracking the security protocols creators put into their programs so they can control the availability of them. Either you must buy the program on a disc or download it from them after they get paid. Some of the larger programs have trial versions, either fully functional but time limited or not fully functional until you pay. They need a serial number to keep them working. The creators have to place some form of serial recognition into the program to do this and so a determined person can decompile the program, read the recognition pattern or actual serial number which is encoded in the program .dll files somewhere and do as they please with it. There are generally 3 ways these "crackers" solve the security issue:
1.) Make a serial number available (downside, the creator finds out and patches/blocks it out)
2.) Make a program which fools the program into believing a serial has been applied
3.) Make a small program which generates a NEW serial number which will work and not be easily recognised as a forgery.
Here is MY comment on the whole thing, I am relatively poor, have an uneasy feeling about theft and in general believe that creative people need to earn a living. That being said, no person in the world is probably going to find out if I use a crack or serial or keygen to STEAL software, so the only thing stopping me is my own moral values. I deliberate about using illegally gained programs and unless they are ABSOLUTELY essential, I will NOT use a crack or keygen except to explore the program. Generally this is not necessary, but occasionally some programs do not offer a fully functional trial version to test drive and applying a crack or keygen is the only way to truely evaluate it. If I like it enough to keep it and use it, then it's time to pay the piper. You wouldn't accept it if someone refused to pay you for your work, so why would you think it acceptable to steal another person's labor???????????
OK, I'm off the soap box, let's get on wiff dah show. See you on the next page.
Now that you have the basics in place, a GOOD Antivirus program & a GOOD Firewall (and if you don't you need to stop right now and go back to the 1st list page & re-read it), we will move on to the reasons you got a computer in the first place.
In my opinion there are 3 legitamite reasons for having a computer:
1) For work and production of documents, graphics, web pages, diagrams, etc.
2) For communication purposes, keeping in touch with friends, colleagues, family, banking, on-line shopping and researching various things you might want to know more about.
3) F.U.N.
Heh heh, this is the catagory y'all will probably end up in most often, after all there is only so much work and shopping to do, & all work and no play make not just Jack but, anybody, REAL dull. So lets cover 1 & 2 real quick and get to the good stuff. By the time we get to the next page, I will devote much more time to the F.U.N. stuff
WORK
Okie Dokie, we all have to make a living. On the computer you can do almost anything with a decent program designed for the kind of job you do as long as it is virtual and not real "PHYSICAL" labor although the box can be an asset to that as well in that planning always makes one more productive. Whether you do graphic work or just produce documents, someone has designed a program just for you. Use the browsers and search for them, eventually you will find so many you will have to choose just which one you really want to use. The ONLY way you will know which one is right is to acquire several (usually, they are available in a test version good for 30 days) and run each one until you find the one that suits you. Some of the leading software comes from Major houses like Microbeast, but the best part about the web is that so many people are trying to make a name for themselves that they often will give out their earliest (and usually some of their BEST work) for free. There are a lot of search engines to use but most people will acknowledge that GOOGLE.com is the best. This is partly because more people use it and their server has a larger search initialization base than other search engines. If you want to save a lot of effort, just buy MS Office or Works Suite. They come with pretty much everything you need to do competent, if not better, work. Try to acquire the Professional or Premium version as you get a few extras.
HINT: Look for a student or university near you and purchase a copy through their computer center, MUCH cheaper!
I acquired Office 2000 Premium for $31.00 instead of $399.00 by going through a student and Windows 2000 Professional only cost me $25.00 instead of $299.00. You won't get the manual with these academic versions but for the money saved, I think one could EASILY acquire a good instruction book for a few bucks, and they are LICENSED versions, meaning you OWN them legitimately. The Works Suite has a mapping program (so you can find anyone's address in the USA and also most cities & towns anywhere else in the world). StarOffice is a similar type of office suite but who knows? some like it though, I've never used it for more than a cursory inspection and went back to MS. I've tried many (30 or more) photo/picture processing applications and still find Photodraw to be the one I prefer. Unfortunately, it is also the one I have the most trouble with too, but that is my own problem, not likely to happen to you as I monkey around with the guts of ALL the programs I use (much to the detriment of many of them, [hehehehe]) I STRONGLY suggest you go get the latest JAVA JAVA or JAVA (3 places to look) from SunJava as almost everything in cyberland works off of it or certainly much better with it anyway. There is more to Java, but we'll get into that later.
If you are going to use a program a lot and it is a legitimate work expense, PLEASE purchase it as the starving artists who create this stuff need to put food on the table too and they won't make these life-enhancing programs for you if they have to go out and bust-a-hump for a living. For all of you who can't afford it or are just plain cheap, there are alternative ways to acquire programs, including just reloading the trial version every time the 30 days expire, but if you can expense it do so. (Heck, if it's a legitamate work expense, maybe the bossman will buy it and you can just take a copy home, I think that's why they make CD burners anyway. LMAO)
COMMUNICATION
We all like to, as they say, "Reach out and touch someone". Never has it been easier to communicate than over the web. In todays hectic world, most of us don't make time to write anymore, telephone calls are hard to schedule (ever notice just how often you get an answering machine these days?), and, with increasing mobility, many if not all of us have lost touch with people from the past. Now you have email, instant messages, fax machines, and teleconference calls with netmeeting. There is no reason to NOT go find all those loved ones (or lost loves for that matter) and hook up again. No need to get all possessive about it though, just drop them a line and explain that you're doing so because "YOU" need to, not because you "EXPECT" a response. Remind them that you get pleasure picturing the smile on their face as they see that you were thinking about them. I re-connected to my cousins in New York, New Jersey, and Russia a couple years ago at a wedding after 30 years of not seeing them. Now we just drop a line occasionally and are becoming much closer just by virture of the fact that we have frequent reminders that we think about each other. Too bad my relatives that live close by don't have the internet. I use the internet to complain about bad service, file reports about fraudulent sales practices with the Consumer Protection division of my state government, communicate with my wife at her job, find the best prices on stuff and compare them to stores near me, I even try to buy stuff on eBay (never had a successful bid, but I try anyway. LOL), I look for information on a variety of things I would have to use the public library for and save a lot of time doing so, and here's the best part of all.... I find information about things I didn't even know I was interested in!!!!!! My world has expanded exponentially and I was ALWAYS a heavy reader. One feature of the internet that surpasses any other for keeping in touch is if you can learn to use the voice application in Yahoo! messenger, all you need is a microphone and a headset or speakers and you can talk to ANYONE (even your relatives) for FREE!!!! No time limits, no charges, you can even make a private room and invite ONLY the person or people you want to chat or talk to. Fergit about 10-10-220, Terry Bradshaw makes funny commercials but this is free, folks, I mean how much better does it get?????
Next we get to the IMPORTANT part ....
F.U.N.
To learn about the fun stuff ya gotta turn the page, see you there.