As a member of this list, you are also entitled to free email tech support. Have a computer-related question or Internet-commerce question? Looking for the best place to buy something, particularly digital cameras? Just email.
This is not a spam list. We send out this newsletter once a month. We don't sell, trade or in any way make your information available to anyone else. We don't accept paid advertising. The web sites we tell you about (other than ours) are sites we have personally tried. No one paid us to disseminate this information. There are thousands of sites offering incentives for referring people. We only present sites (whether or not they pay us) that we have tried ourselves and feel you would benefit from visiting. We present information that will help you make the most of your Internet experience.
- email for a product or service in which the recipient has expressed no interest and/or from a company the user has never contacted. I never inquired about any products related to losing weight, physical enhancement or adult entertainment. Anyone sending me such information is spamming. However, I have made purchases at Internet sites for electronics or computer-related equipment. If that site sends me a notice of a special sale, is that spam? In my opinion, unless I tell them otherwise, that is customer service. Obviously, they have to make it easy for me to opt-out, but as long as they do so, they are sending me information about products in which I have expressed interest.
- too much email. Even if I am interested in a product, I don't need to hear about it over and over. Some companies are good about it, sending me a reminder once a month or when there is a special sale. Others bombard me with ads. As a result, I unsubscribe and then never hear from them again. Some don't even honor my unsubscribe requests.
There are notices posted on our site about our privacy policy. We never sell, trade or give your email to anyone else. When you email us, you are put on our list to receive one email from us each month. That one email will be the cover page of our newsletter with a link to where it can be found. We don't even strain your email by sending you the whole newsletter. The email does not contain advertising. Our newsletter does not contain paid advertising. We may mention a product we carry or a product or service that we like or a product or service of one of our readers. At least 95% of the newsletter is content, Internet news, technology news, scam or virus warnings or links to free software. If you don't want to know about it, a one-word reply is all that it takes to be removed. So why do people send us diatribes, often obscene or report us to various "agencies" as spammers? Often these people requested our newsletter or took advantage of our free tech support to ask us about their problems. Should we have reported their email to us as spam?
You may ask, why don't we make our newsletter completely opt-in, where no one is added to our list unless they specifically request it? The answer is that this would require more effort from subscribers. In the past, when someone emailed us or made a purchase, we responded with an email inviting them to join our subscribers. They would respond asking what they were subscribing to. We would send them a sample of the newsletter. They would then respond. That takes two emails from us and two from them. Now we send the table of contents of our newsletter. To continue receiving it, they do nothing. To unsubscribe, they send a one-word email. Isn't this easier?
Yes, spam is a problem. Just because new tools are making it easy to report spam, doesn't mean that you have to brand every email you receive as spam. If our once-a-month letter bothers you, you can get rid of it permanently with a one-word reply. But if you email us again with another request for free tech support, don't be surprised if you find yourself receiving the newsletter again.
The purpose of spam is to get the recipient to take some action, either placing an order on a website or joining some "get rich quick" plan. For this reason, a spammer can not remain completely annonymous. Somewhere in that email there must be a real email ID or website link. One particular spammer sent me dozens of emails concerning an incredibly stupid program. For only 49.95, he would spam my resume to thousands of companies and this would guarantee me a job. After the first few, I went to the link in the email, found the webmaster and let him know what I thought of his program. I also warned him to take my name off his list. When I continued to receive these emails, I wrote a little script that sent him dozens of applications under fictitious names. After executing these scripts a few times, the emails stopped coming.
I use a program called Eprompter to check my emails IDs and show me just the message headers. I can quickly mark off the spam and delete it unread. When a spammer becomes particularly obnoxious, I find the real email ID or website link and then trace it to the webmaster or the registrar of the site. I then report the problem directly. Unfortunately, for every spammer that gets shut down, ten more take their place, but it takes a while before they get my email ID.
The Internal Revenue Service is teaming with private companies to offer electronic filing for free. As many as 78 million Americans, or 60 percent of taxpayers, could benefit, according to a proposed agreement announced yesterday by the Department of the Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget. The IRS is under pressure from a congressional mandate to have 80 percent of federal tax returns filed electronicallyIby 2007. About 46 million taxpayers, or about 36 percent, filed online this year.
My comment: It's about time. I don't understand why ANY agency finds an excuse to charge for something that is easier and cheaper for them in the first place. Touch tone phone systems are easier and cheaper for the phone company to manage than the old rotary dial, yet for years they charged extra for this. Electronic filing is cheaper and easier for the IRS to handle. They should be encouraging its use, not charging extra for it.
It took a little more than a week for the statement to find its way to the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) committee, which denounced any attempts to derive fees from the standard.
Forgent's patent No. 4,698,672--or "672" as it is being called--appears to stand up to initial technical scrutiny, said Rich Belgard, an independent patent consultant. It has both a solid technical pedigree--created by a research scientist well known in the image compression community--and apparently applies to the JPEG technology.
"It's in the ballpark of reality," Belgard said.
Moreover, the firm has been able to persuade two Japanese companies to ante up cash. In April, it signed a deal to license the patent for $15 million with a large, though unnamed, Japanese digital camera player, according to company filings and to an industry expert. In May, Forgent signed a "multimillion-dollar patent license" with Sony for the compression technology, the company said in a press release and in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Jeffrey Dabbs, a research analyst with San Antonio-based financial research firm Kercheville & Co., estimates the actual fee to be between $17 million and $18 million.
The claim to JPEG technology ownership arose from a data compression patent that Forgent acquired from videoconferencing hardware maker Compression Labs in 1997, said Ken Kalinoski, chief technology officer for Forgent. Forgent didn't do any of the original work of the patent that they now own; that was done by Compression Labs' Wen-Hsiung Chen and Daniel Klenke. Chen, who joined Cisco after selling Compression Labs to Forgent and a second firm to the networking giant, published several papers in the 1970s and 1980s on image compression and transformation. Some experts credit him with the creation of a specific kind of image manipulation--the discrete cosine transform--used in the JPEG format.
Yet he or others may have published all the components of the 672 patent more than a year before the application date for the patent. Known as prior art, such publications can undermine a patent. While Chen and Klenke applied for 672 in October 1986, the same year that the Joint Photographic Experts Group was formed, the push for the standard had begun more than four years earlier. Clark of the JPEG group said Chen may have sat on one of the committees.
Chen could not be reached for comment, but Kalinoski of Forgent denied the claim and stressed that he believed that Chen never took part in any committees. Even if he had, it's unlikely his participation would be considered improper, said patent expert Belgard.
That leaves the question of prior art as the issue that will determine whether the patent is valid.
While the debate rages, Forgent refuses to slow its royalties effort. Kalinoski said the company is looking for more royalties from other digital camera makers and the company is looking at companies in other industries as well. One certainty: Forgent has a wide swath of the Internet in its sights, as it will consider any company that doesn't pay to use JPEG a pirate.
What do you do in the case of a corrupt Laptop drive, where the drive spins, but the OS won't boot. You don't want to risk losing critical data by reinstalling the OS. You can't just pop the drive into another PC as a slave... Unless you have a micro-IDE adapter. It has mini-IDE and power connections for the Laptop drive, standard connectors for the desktop PC, and adjustable rails to hold the drive in a standard 3 1/2" slot. And they're only $10. Here is a good source www.nanosys1.com. On the left, click Hard Drives, then Cables and Adapters, then look at the bottom of the list.
They work on most laptops (but not the IBM ThinkPad 240.) It can be pretty tough trying to figure out the Master / Slave jumpers on a Laptop drive, so we just connect it to the IDE cable for the CD-ROM drive on the desktop, and don't worry about jumpers. Slide the laptop drive into a desktop, and extract the critical files, reimage the laptop and copy the files back.
But now a company called Hop-On has a solution. For a one-time fee of about $40, I can carry around a disposable cellphone with about an hour of calling time. No deposits, no contracts, no monthly rentals. When that hour is used up, I can either throw the phone away or pay for some more time. ZD Net story.
www.mdwoptions.com. Want to learn about the stock market? How to use options to leverage profits while minimizing investment? Visit this site for an education.
Sick days - Though we frown on sick days and urge employees to use them sparingly and only when needed, we grant employees a sick day for every two months of service to this company. Take all precautions to avoid infecting other employees.
Violence - Though we deplore violence in the workplace and urge employees to work out their problems amicably, we grant employees the right to punch another employee once for every two months of service to this company. A manager may be punched once for every month of service.
Most of the software is fully-functioning freeware. Some of it is shareware, which means it will either run for a limited amount of time or some of the features will be missing or it will nag you to register by sending the author a few dollars. Shareware is a great way to get good software out to the public without spending a fortune on packaging and marketing. Before shareware came along, there were a limited number of word processors and they all cost a few hundred dollars. Now there are products available on the Net free for private use and at low cost for business use that rival those sold by Microsoft and others for hundreds of dollars. Shareware lets you try a product before purchasing it. Support the shareware concept. If you download a product that you find useful, send the author the fee he or she deserves.
Delete on new boot Ever want to delete a file and Windows just won't let you, insisting that the file is in use? This free utility lets you mark files for deletion or moving the next time you boot your machine. Since it will activate early in the Windows session, it should be able to grab the file before Windows decides it is in use.
The 15-day limit was due to a confusing message by the author. He also sells another program which is a language translator. When you run WinDriver, an ad for the translator shows up on the toolbar and flashes something to the effect of "download your 15-day trial." It is easy to see how someone could draw the conclusion that the WinDriver program is a 15-day demo.
If you have been using any version of Windows for any length of time you know that sooner or later something will happen to affect your PC in a negative way. The system will slow down. Certain programs won't load. Mysterious errors will pop up. You know that this is caused by a software program - either a bad DLL or a conflict between two applications. You also know that it may be impossible to completely eradicate the errant program without completely removing and re-installing Windows. Recently, one of my friends had a problem where his Windows 98 computer ran like molasses. After clicking an icon, it took a minute or two for a program to load. His printer crawled along, pausing about 15 seconds between each line. I removed many applications from his system, his startup and his registry. I ran scandisk and defrag. I re-installed Windows 98 on top of his existing application. I did not want to erase and re-install 98 because then I would have to re-install all his drivers and he wasn't sure that he had all the disks. In the end, nothing worked and we had no choice but to re-install Windows 98 from scratch. Fortunately, he did have all the disks and his system is now operational. But thanks to the Langa Letter (you can subscribe at Langa.com. There is a free version and an even better $10 per-year version), I found a program which makes complete re-installs easy. It backs up all the drivers to a new directory (and I suggest you copy that to a CDRW drive). When you re-install Windows and it asks for drivers, just point it to that directory and it will find everything which was installed before. It was tested with 98 and XP. Here is the link: http://ln.skycn.net/down/DtempWinDrvExpert.zip
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