President's Message

Hello everyone, and welcome to my first column as DACS president. I’ve never been president of an organization like DACS, so not only am I new, but I’m inexperienced as well. Inexperience not withstanding, I’ll be proud to serve as your president for the coming year.

First off, I’d like to thank the DACS board (of which I’m a member, of course) for their vote of confidence in naming me DACS president at our meeting on April 8th. Just to refresh everyone, DACS has a sort-of semi-parliamentary form of government. The members elect a board of directors and then the board names the officers who may, or may not, be board members. Hopefully, the fact that we had just finished dinner and most everyone had a beer or two was not the overriding factor in the vote. The other officers are: Charles Bovaird, Treasurer and Larry Buoy, Secretary. We also have three Vice Presidents: Marlène Gaberel, Jeff Setaro and Gene Minasi.

Next, a big tip of the hat goes to Richard Chernock for his excellent presentation at the April general meeting. Rich gave the clearest explanation I’ve ever heard of digital TV—what it is and how it works. In addition he talked about interactive TV and its workings. He even touched on some of the political issues surrounding the adoption of digital TV. It was an all around great job.

Now, not to take away anything I just said about Rich, but there are many more DACS members who can easily do the same type of presentation that Richard did. Member presentations tend to be on topics closer to the interests of DACS members as a whole. Certainly, we need to keep up on the latest from Microsoft, and I’d really like to see and hear from Red Hat or one of the other GNU/Linux distributors, but there are many practical topics that no one vendor can really cover. A good example was November 2000, when Bruce and Scott Preston (father and son) demonstrated—live and in person--how to set up a home network. Jeff Setaro’s presentation on Anti-Virus software is another example. We have a "Best of Shareware" meeting planned for this summer when several members will each present a program they find particularly useful. I use many free and shareware programs every day. I’ll talk about WinStock Pro, the program I use to get stock quotes. Let me know if you would like to join the fun--my email will always appear at the end of this column. If you have a topic but need some help preparing a presentation, fear not! DACS can help turn your idea into a presentation. In fact learning to use PowerPoint and how to do public speaking would make a good SIG. Hmmm . . ..

May is the time for one of my favorite events of the entire year--the Trenton Computer Festival. The year the festival will be May 4th and 5th, at the Raritan Convention Center in Edison, NJ. This is almost an hour closer than the old locations that were actually near Trenton. The best part of this event is the outdoor flea market where the bargains can be unbelievable. For the best selection, go on Saturday and get there early. For the best bargains, go on Sunday when many vendors will give stuff away rather than pack it up and take it home. There is a also an indoor sales floor much like the "computer show" held from time to time at the O’Neal Center on the WestConn campus but with many times the vendors and better prices. There is also a schedule of seminars on topics ranging from word processing to Linux configuration to amateur (ham) radio. Go! You’ll have fun. The festival web site is www.tcf-nj.org.

A few months back, the DACS board authorized a DSL connection for the DACS Resource Center. The DACS.ORG domain lived on the Danbury Library server from when we first opened a web site. Back then having a web site was pretty leading edge for an organization like ours, so we didn’t even think about an email system. Well that changed when we moved the domain and web site to Mags Net, LLC, in Danbury. Our DSL line is also managed by Mags Net, and a side benefit of all this is that we can now run our own email. All officers and board members now have email addresses @DACS.ORG. Check the DACS web site for the exact addresses. As we gain experience, we’ll be able to move on to hosting discussion boards and other services.

In future columns I’ll talk more about some of the issues facing DACS and how I hope we can provide more benefits to our members. Since many of our members are small business owners, I’d like to see more DACS involvement with small businesses. There are many possibilities here, and the new Small Business SIG is a step in the right direction. Please catch me at the general meetings or send email as I want to hear everyone’s ideas.

There are many more things I’d like to write about, and probably will, over the coming months. The aftermath of September 11th is having some disastrous affects on our civil liberties and personal privacy rights. This has added to the onslaught, already under way, by the movie, music and software industries to limit how you can use the intellectual property products you buy. All this directly affects you and your computer. Some legislation could even make open source software, like Linux, illegal! (See The Open Source column in the April 8th, 2002, issue of InfoWorld entitled "New name, same smell" by Russell Pavlicek.) If you find this hard to believe, an open source program called DeCSS that allowed viewing DVD movies on a Linux system has already been declared illegal in the courts. Essentially the courts have ruled the mere possession of the program or the source code to be a crime.

And there are things I would like to write about but they aren’t really related to DACS or computing, like the horrendous situation in the Middle East. Fortunately or unfortunately, I will let that one go for now and see you here next month for Issue 0.1.

Jim Scheef

jscheef@dacs.org or jscheef@telemarksys.com