Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock
Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock

The non-event that was the Conficker virus sparked a ton of media attention on April 1.  In one afternoon two TV crews visited the new Schrock Innovations Computer Repair Service Center in Lincoln, NE to talk about the virus.

I was also interviewed by the 1240 AM KFOR newsroom on March 31st.

In both interviews I predicted that the virus would be a non-event, but that the bot network left behind could be leveraged at a later date for just about anything.

Channel 10/11 ran a lengthened report on their website, and this is the video of that report used with permission.  I did have to edit this video a bit to keep one of our local competitors happy.

While computer hardware prices have plummeted over the past few years, the cost of many popular software programs has soared to all-time highs. But you may not need to open your wallet to get the benefits offered by many high-end software suites.

In fact, a savvy consumer could save as much as $2,000 by selecting comparable open-source programs instead of buying the name-brand titles.

Open-source is a term that refers to software applications that are created by individuals or teams of individuals and distributed freely on the Internet. While open source software is similar to freeware, it differs in that the license allows others to freely add or modify the program to make it better.

I have found that there are hundreds of open-source programs available on the Internet, so for comparison purposes I selected four that appeared to compete directly with fee-based software titles. In this post I will examine open-source counterparts to Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop CS3, Adobe Audition, and Microsoft Publisher to find out if they really measure up.

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