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One of the reasons I loved the Toshiba, starting with the PDR-M4, is because Toshiba developed a high speed DSP (digital signal processor) that let me take photos almost as fast as I could press the button. I have a shot of a baseball about to connect with the bat. Many digital cameras can't handle this.
So when looking for a digital camera, think about the kind of photos you expect to shoot and what length of delay would be acceptable. When comparing cameras, in addition to such features as resolution, size, capacity and price, consider the processing speed as well.
If you don't have one of these camera models, we can still help. We have the AC and car battery/charger pack for Nikon ($48), 4 rechargeable AA NIMH batteries with charger for just about any camera ($10) and a rechargeable external power pack that hangs from your belt like a beeper, lasts 3 times longer than the best batteries and works with almost any camera or walkman ($20).
If you have more than one PC or shuttle between your home and office, or your office and your clients, the ability to transfer large volumes of data between different machines may be important. Digital camera users have another problem. If you're going on vacation and plan to take a lot of photos but will not have access to a computer, what do you do? Do you buy eight compactflash or smartmedia cards at $50 each and spend $400 to get a gigabyte of storage on 8 different cards which are easily lost? I'm not a good photographer (though now that I have a digital camera and can shoot as many photos as I want, I'm getting better). So I like to take a lot of photos, figuring that one in ten will be a keeper. If your photography skills are anything like mine, how many media cards will you need to be sure you don't miss that great shot? A simpler, cheaper and more versatile solution is a device like the DigitalBin. It hold 20 gigabytes (larger models are also available), the equivalent of 160 128mb cards (which would cost about $8,000 at $50 each). It works off a rechargeable lithium battery, can read the media card directly and download it to a PC via the USB port once you're home from vacation. In addition, it doubles as a second hard drive for extra storage and backup. When you think about all it offers, $300 is not a high price.
Time: It takes two hours to copy a two-hour video. Making copies for all three dozen relatives is just too time consuming. Content: The videos are unedited. You thought it was cute to record Junior's first grade play in its entirety, but your relatives don't want to sit through an hour of performances by strangers. You can copy just the relevant portions to another tape and then copy that edited one, but each generation (each copy that is one step removed from the original source) is worse than the previous. The final result will be barely watchable. You will also need two VCRs. Format: You have an 8MM machine, but some of your relatives have VHS, some VHS-C and grandma has Beta. Longevity: The sad news is that video tape is just not a suitable format for long-term storage. My wedding video has long since deteriorated to the point where it can barely be seen.
Copying your home videos to CDs solves all these problems. Time: CDs can be copied in minutes on a high speed CD burner. Content: Once the tape has been copied to your PC, you are editing digital images. Done properly, there should be no degradation, no matter how many copies you make. Format: Almost everybody these days has a PC with a CD ROM or a DVD player, except maybe Grandma, who's still waiting for Driving Miss Daisy to come out on Beta. Longevity: Unlike tape, CDs don't record by laying magnetic tracks that are easily distorted on to tape which is easily damaged. Digital bits are actually burned on to the surace of the disk. A CD that is gently treated should last for years.
Dazzle Multimedia has a number of devices to accomplish this, priced at around $60 for device, cable and award-winning software. The one you need depends on the system you have. You can email me for specifics.
Editing software: This usually comes with the capture device and allows you to grab video segments and create clips, create special effects, add titles, etc.
CD Burner: You can't create video on CDs if you don't have a burner. If buying an internal device, get the highest speed your PC can handle. If buying an external device, there are two factors involved. If all you have is USB 1.1, the highest speed you can get is no more than 6X. Drives advertised at higher speeds are either firewire or USB 2.0. A USB 2.0 device will work, but you still won't get more than 6X maximum. So you can save your money and buy a slower drive cheap. Then again, you might want to buy a faster drive in anticipation of the day when you will buy a machine with USB 2.0.
Lots of blank CDs: Hardly a week goes by that I don't get an offer for 50-200 blank CDs for $2.95 after rebate. With CDs costing pennies, you might as well back up your hard drive regularly, store all your digital photos and copy all your videotapes.
Email for more information.
Microsoft originally designed their Media Center PC with a copy-protection scheme that allowed only the PC which recorded a program to play it back. There was an outcry from people who record programs in order to watch them on their portable DVD players or laptop PCs at a later time. Now Microsoft has changed the scheme. It will be up to the copyright owner to decide if the program should be restricted to the original PC or not. Special programming in the device will allow the copyright owner to encode into the original recording an instruction which will prohibit playback from any machine but the original PC. At the moment, it appears that no recording contains this instruction but that could change. If a recording will not play on another machine, Microsoft can then blame it on the copyright owner.
Advantages: It is free to buyers and mostly free to sellers. Even at 50 cents a transaction, it is very cost effective. Payments are guaranteed to sellers with no chance of buyer fraud or charge back.
Taking all of this into account, I think the CheckFree system is as safe as it can be. Since they have the name, address, bank account, driver's license and social security number of the seller, I would think this would minimize buyer risk and prevent scamming sellers from using the service. They also state quite clearly that they are not responsible for any disputes between buyer and seller. If the account is hacked and the customer reports it promptly, the account holder will not be responsible for more than $50. If it can be shown that the customer was negligent in reporting it and that without this negligence the loss could have been prevented, the account holder may be responsible for up to $500. There are no other grandiose promises of "buyer protection."
I don't know how CheckFree plans to make money on this service. Maybe they expect to partner with large vendors. Only time will tell if this one will survive without increasing fees.
A basic fact of a business transaction over the Internet is that there is no way to protect both parties. The method will either favor the buyer or the seller. Credit cards favor the buyer and many sellers have been taken by scamming buyers. Money orders favor the seller and there have been buyers scammed by dishonest sellers. I believe that it is the sellers who need protection more than the buyers for these reasons:
1) There are far more buyers than sellers. If there is a tool that can be used by buyers to scam, it opens a much bigger door for fraud than a tool that can be used by sellers.
2) Buyers can choose their sellers. Sellers don't have the luxury of choosing their buyers. Buyers can check out a seller's ratings before making a bid. There is a reason why the famous saying is "Buyer Beware." Only the buyer has the means by which to be aware.
3) Sellers have to maintain a reputation, buyers don't. So it is far easier for a buyer to keep changing their ID and scamming more sellers than for a seller to do the same. Most buyers who have been scammed on auctions bought something from a seller with low ratings. In a sense, they asked for it. Now I don't believe it is correct to take advantage of someone under any circumstances, but if someone fails to exercise their due diligence, they have no right to complain that someone else (an auction site, a payment service, a government agency) should have protected them from their own ill-conceived actions. There are laws to protect people from muggers and burglars. But should we make a law that if someone leaves their wallet in a restaraunt and it disappears, they can sue the restaraunt? Some people want to hold the payment services or auction sites responsible for their own negligence. Paypal tried to come up with a plan to protect everyone. The result became so convoluted that only the scammers managed to stay protected.
A federal judge says PayPal has a mandatory arbitration policy that is unfair to customers who complain that their accounts are being mishandled. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose allows customers to take their grievances to a jury rather than an arbitration panel. Fogel also refused to dismiss a lawsuit that seeks class-action status on behalf of thousands of PayPal customers nationwide.
Plaintiffs in the proposed class-action suit say PayPal has a backlog of more than 100,000 unanswered complaints. A common allegation is that the company brushes off or stalls customer grievances for months and meanwhile freezes the customer's account and pockets the interest.
Fogel's ruling, issued Aug. 30, struck down PayPal's requirement that customers submit disputes to private, binding arbitration in Santa Clara County, rather than suing in court. Fogel said PayPal reserved to itself the right to freeze a customer's account during a dispute; prohibited customers from combining their claims into a single arbitration case; and required customers to pay a share of arbitration fees, which would commonly exceed the amount of their claims.
"By allowing for prohibitive arbitration fees and precluding joinder of claims (which would make each individual customer's participation in arbitration more economical), PayPal appears to be attempting to insulate itself contractually from any meaningful challenge to its alleged practices," the judge wrote.
He said it was equally unfair to require customers from around the nation, whose average PayPal transaction was $55, to travel to Santa Clara County for arbitration. PayPal's lawyer said the company is considering an appeal.
It is the latest of several business arbitration policies to be overturned since the state Supreme Court set standards in 2000 for determining when a company's rules were unfairly one-sided.
This news is exciting for a number of reasons. Right now there is a "battle" between USB and Firewire to decide which one will become the dominant technology for transferring data between devices. Philips USB-On-the-Go could put USB in the lead. This is good news for all those folks who have USB ports on their PCs.
But the really important news is what this breakthrough signifies. Many people today have digital cameras, printers, scanners and PDAs that all contain USB ports. But all these devices can only talk to a computer. Want to print a digital photo? First you have to download it to a computer. Want to transfer a file from your PDA to a friend's PDA? Find a computer. Philip's new chip will allow USB devices to talk to each other directly. Plug your digital camera directly into your printer. Plug your PDA into your friend's PDA. Best of all, this would only add about $5 to the cost of any device.
The Incredimail agreement itself is extremely long... but the attached excerpt from the agreement almost knocked me out of my chair:
"10. UNSOLICITED MATERIALS
Any confidential, secret or proprietary information or other material submitted or sent to IncrediMail, including without limitation via any Message sent by You through the Service, Site, or IncrediMail's physical mail and e-mail addresses, or in any other way, will be deemed to be not confidential or secret. By submitting or sending information or other material to IncrediMail or by posting information on any portion of the Service you (a) Warrant that you have all rights of any kind to the material and that to the best of your knowledge no other party has any rights to the material; and (b) Grant IncrediMail an unrestricted, perpetual, irrevocable license to use, reproduce, display, perform, modify, transmit and distribute the material, and you further agree that IncrediMail is free to use any ideas, know-how, concepts or techniques you send us or post on the Service for any purpose, without any compensation to you or any other person."
Some of that language is similar to that used by other mail services and ISPs to get around copyright issues that can innocently arise when proprietary information is sent through a third party--- for example, it's not uncommon for an ISP to want to ensure they're not violating a copyright if they merely store a copy of your mail on their servers while it's being processed.
But I can't think of any innocent reason for the phrasing that states "... IncrediMail is free to use any ideas, know-how, concepts or techniques you... post on the Service for any purpose, without any compensation to you or any other person." Maybe there is a perfectly inoffensive reason for including that, but it eludes me.
There's another reason not to like IncrediMail, it's HTML-based, which not only opens the door to all manner of web-borne security threats that are absent from text-based email, but also adds tons of baggage to outbound IncrediMail email. This extra baggage can clog the inboxes of recipients of these mails, even if the recipients aren't IncrediMail users.
In comparing the headers of two messages, one sent with Incredimail and the other with Outlook, IncrediMail adds an extra 600 characters or so. Yes, IncrediMail provides amusing, all-singing, all dancing, animated, colored, formatted, flashing, bleeping, blurping emails--- but with the certainty of tons of excess baggage riding along with the email; with the possibility of opening the door to malicious HTML-borne worms, viruses, and such; and with serious questions about who owns the content of the messages you send using their system.
"What's the paper about?" I asked him.
"What I did on my summer vacation," he answered.
"You won't find that on the Internet," I laughed.
Undeterred, he went to Google.com and entered Danny+Goodman+Summer+Vacation. Up popped a site that described his vacation in excruciating detail. With a little cutting and pasting, he had his paper done in about 3 minutes.
After he left, I read the site carefully. I'm going to have a talk with him about his smoking in the woods.
The above page is from Fred Langa whose newsletter I highly recommend. Langa Newsletter. Everything you need to know to connect USB under different operating systems and conditions. Some USB devices may not work properly under Windows 98SE when using an AMD CPU of greater than 350 mghz and a VIA controller. Microsoft Support Page.
Aurelitec - get rid of those unwanted programs even if Control Panel add/remove programs and the uninstall don't work. This program claims to be able to uninstall them anyway and it's Freeware.
Naviscope This program seems to be a very nifty all-in-one web utility. It blocks pop up ads and animation, speeds up your Internet experience in several ways, sets your clock from an atomic clock. You can't beat the price, unless they paid you to take it. It's free.
www.definitivesolutions.com This site has several nifty utilities for displaying different types of graphic files including AVIs, creating film clips and slide shows. BHODemon is a free program which checks your system for Browser Helper Objects. These are subprograms which work with your browser. Some of them can be helpful but others are Spyware, which watch what you do and report back or feed you ads. BHODemon will show you a list of the BHOs on your system so you can decide if you want to remove them.
Bootdisk.com This site is crammed with utilities for every operating system - even the old DOS. It has programs which create boot disks for many operating systems, recovery tools, anti-virus, etc.
Get over 400 megs of photo editing software, utilities and games on CD. We have been posting links to free utilities for well over a year. If you go to our back issues, you will find that some of these links no longer work. Some of these files are large and downloading them over a modem can be time-consuming. Some readers have asked if there is a way to get these on CD. The answer is Yes. We have downloaded and used the utilities mentioned here as well as many others. We have compiled a CD with over 400 megabytes of utilities and games, including several full-featured photo editing suites. Since we did not create this software, we do not sell it. We do however provide the CD for free with any purchase.
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.
eBlaster 3.0 records and automatically forwards email!
eBlaster lets you know EXACTLY what your employees or family members are doing on the Internet, even if you are thousands of miles away. eBlaster records their emails, chats, instant messages, web sites visited and keystrokes typed -- and then automatically sends this recorded information to your own email address. No other product on the market records and instantly forwards emails.
In addition, every 60 minutes, you receive an Activity Report of their latest chats, instant messages, keystrokes and web sites visited, plus a summary of all emails. (If you want to receive reports less frequently than once every 60 minutes, it's easy to change to once every few hours or just once a day.)
Regularly priced at $149.95, eBlaster is on sale for $99.95 and is available for immediate download. eBlaster is fully compatible with all versions of Windows since Windows 95, including Windows XP. eBlaster is 100 percent compatible with AOL 5.0, AOL 6.0 and AOL 7.0.
Spector - available in both Windows and Mac versions.
Awarded PC Magazine Editors' Choice for best Surveillance Software (July 2002).
Now with Web Mail capture! Spector Professional Edition is the newest version of the world's best selling Internet Monitoring and Surveillance software. Spector Pro automatically takes hundreds of snapshots every hour, very much like a surveillance camera. Spector Pro also includes TRUE email capture (SMTP and web-based email), TRUE chat and instant messenger capture, and now includes the world's best Key Logger. In addition, Spector Pro provides IMMEDIATE NOTIFICATION when your loved ones encounter dangerous or inappropriate web sites, emails or chats.
Spector Pro is the only program available that will capture web-based email such as Yahoo mail, Hotmail, Excite mail and AOL web based email. With Spector Pro, you will be able to SEE in exact detail what your spouse, kids and employees have been doing online and offline.
Regularly priced at $149.95, Spector Pro is on sale for $99.95 and is available for immediate download. Spector Pro is fully compatible with all versions of Windows since Windows 95, including Windows XP and all versions of AOL and Instant Messenger.
Want to comment? Email izzy@ccs-digital.com