Comment on the following questions as you feel necessary. Your participation is greatly appreciated.

Q1) Which is more secure: OSS or Proprietary software?

Advantages of OSS

i) Various kind of distributions. Therefore, even a malicious code attacks a particular distribution, the other distributions are unlikely to be affected by it.

ii)Source codes for OSS are widely available to the public. When a vulnerability is found, it can be fixed in a short time as more people are available to solve it. Unlike a proprietry software, only selected employees wthin the organization are available to troubleshoot the problem.

Disadvantages of Proprietary Software

i) Virus writers tend to write the malwares that attack more popular softwares like Windows and other Microsoft products.

Q2) Do you use google as your main and sole search engine?

http://www.google-watch.org/

Alternate view of google and all the goody they provided.

The Google story Vise, David A. TK5105.885.G66V829 ISBN: 055380457X

The search Battelle, John, TK5105.885.B335 ISBN: 1857883616

Google power Sherman, Chris. TK5105.885.G66S553 ISBN: 1857883616

http://labs.google.com/papers/index.html

Publications related to Google technology

Q3) Do you find online dictionary too slow?

http://wordweb.info/free/

wordweb is a freeware offline dictionary.

Google toolbar provides a free translator, but the tooltip fonts are not adjustable, making it hard to read Chinese on monitors like 19" @ 1280x1024

http://jazzy.sourceforge.net/

jazzy : The Java Open Source Spell Checker

Q4) Want to contribute to society?

http://www.globalknowledge.org/ict4d/

Free ebook : ICT4D - Connecting people for a better world

(lessons, innovations and perspectives of information and communication technologies in development)

Are information and communication technologies (ICT) such as computers, mobile phones, radio, TV, video and the Internet effective instruments to empower people, reduce poverty and improve lives? Or are ICT just deepening already existing inequalities and divisions in the world?

Q5) Draw 3D?

http://www.povray.org/

The Persistence of Vision Raytracer is a high-quality, totally free tool for creating stunning three-dimensional graphics. It is available in official versions for Windows, Mac OS/Mac OS X and i86 Linux. The source code is available for those wanting to do their own ports.