This is the CCS Internet newsletter. If you are not already on our list and did not get an email from us, please join by sending an email and you will receive notification when the newsletter is posted, once a month. The notification email contains just the URL to the newsletter and the table of contents - not even the text of the newsletter and definitely no ads.
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Inside this issue:
Five Million Credit Cards HackedAs I have said many times, the fact that a site has a "secure" page does not mean that it is secure. Hackers rarely, if ever, get information by hijacking the signals between a site and its users. There has not been one reported case of a credit card being "stolen" via a hijacked email. Hackers steal credit card information by hacking into a site AFTER the information has been recorded. The bigger the site, the more credit cards are available and the more tempting the target. Because our site is small and does not get a deluge of orders, we can do what the bigger sites can't do. We can store all customer information offline. If someone was to hack into our site, there would be no customer information available to steal. Unfortunately, the big sites are too busy to do this and must rely on security systems. Despite their best efforts, hackers still seem to be able to get past them.
Just to set the record straight, this is not an Internet tax. This is a sales tax on items sold mail order. The Internet did not cause this problem, it only made it more apparent. The moratorium on Internet taxes is only a moratorium on taxes on the Internet itself, such as any attempt to tax the ISP services. It is not a moratorium on sales tax, which is an entirely different matter.
For many years (long before the Internet became a platform for merchandising), mail order companies had an unfair advantage over brick and mortar stores. While stores were required to collect sales tax, mail order companies only had to collect it if the customer was in the same state. A lot of shoppers took this into consideration when placing their orders. If the tax was higher than the shipping, the customer would pay less via mail order, even if the price of the item was the same. For years, retailers have been complaining about this loophole. Now that Internet sales has reached billions, the cash-strapped states are realizing just how much money they are losing.
Reality Check: Mail order purchases are not tax-exempt. Because of the hardship involved, vendors are not required to collect taxes from states in which they do not have a presence. The customer is legally bound to send in the tax to the state in which that item will be used. That is why it is called Sales-and-Use Tax. A number of years ago, a large mail order retailer was visited by tax agents from another state. They went through the books and sent out notices along with penalties to customers from that state who had not paid sales tax. Because of the fines and interest penalties, customers ended up paying as much as triple the tax they had failed to pay originally. Some chose to contest it in court. They lost.
The reason states are losing so much in sales tax is due to their greed. If the states had all gotten together and agreed on a fair sales tax, this problem would have been resolved decades ago. But some states want to charge a fair amount of 5% or less, while others use the sales tax to plug their own deficits and have raised the amount to over 8%. Some states have so many internal municipalities, each charging a different amount. The end result is that the merchant can not possibly track how much should go to which state. And so the loophole was made that a merchant only collects the tax for the states in which it has a presence. As bad as this scenario may be, it pales in comparison to Canada, with its double taxation resulting in a sales tax in excess of 15%.
I recently spoke to a Washington Post reporter who is doing a story on how this affects Internet sellers. He told me that there are several proposals being considered. One proposal is having one central agency that will collect and distribute sales tax to all 50 states. Vendors will no longer have the excuse that collecting the tax is onerous. The scariest proposal yet, and the one that will probably pass, given our government propensity for always choosing the most confusing and expensive method of doing business, involves setting up special audit programs to which vendors must subscribe. The vendors will report all their sales to one of these auditors who will then calculate the tax, send the vendor a bill and send the funds collected to the states where they belong. The problem is that there would be a fee to the vendor, which could amount to $30,000 a year and the vendor would have to transmit the data from every sale to this auditing agent. If this passes, expect to see ebay become a ghost town. Another rumor exists that this requirement would only apply to vendors with 5 million dollars of annual business.
But you can bet that sales tax on Internet purchases is coming and to many merchants, this could be a good thing. It could finally level the playing field.
It was the Saturday before New Year's and Lauren, a college student, was driving to visit a friend. An UNMARKED police car pulled up behind her and put his lights on. Lauren's parents have always told their children never to pull over for an unmarked car on the side of the road, but rather wait until they get to public place. So Lauren promptly called #77 on her cell phone to tell the police dispatcher that she would not pull over right away. She proceeded to tell the dispatcher that there was an unmarked police car with a flashing red light on his rooftop behind her. The dispatcher checked to see if there was a police car where she was and there wasn't, so he told her to keep driving, remain calm and that he had back-up already on the way.
Ten minutes later, 4 cop cars surrounded her and the unmarked car behind her. One policeman went to her side and the others surrounded the car behind her. They pulled the guy from the car and tackled him to the ground. The man was a convicted rapist and wanted for other crimes.
Apparently police have to respect your right to keep going to a safe place. You obviously need to make some signals that you acknowledge them (i.e., put on your hazard lights) or call #77 like Lauren did. Too bad the cell phone companies don't give you this little bit of wonderful information. So now it's your turn to let your friends know about #77.
According to this story, most spammers aren't even selling anything. They send out millions of emails in order to build a list of emails which they then sell to other spammers. As people change their email IDs and acquire new ones, the list grows and grows and is therefore worth more money to the next customer. If you respond to a spam with a request for more information, you often won't get a response. All they want to do is verify that your email address is valid. A valid address is worth more. Any response, even one to be removed from the list, generates even more spam as the ID is resold. At the bottom of this pyramid are the clueless newbies, the people who really believe that you can make $10,000 a week from hom sending out spam. They buy these lists and then stupidly send out spam, sometimes from their actual email, with what they believe to be genuine offers (the 1,000 ginsu steak knives they bought for 9.95 that they hope to sell for 19.95 and the like). The only spam offers that actually delivered what they promised were the porn sites. Isn't it reassuring to know that of all the offers you will receive via email, the honest ones will be the pornographers?
The good news is that a number of tech industry leaders have gathered to form an anti-spam consortium. If the folks behind Outlook, Eudora, Hotmail, Yahoo and the like all get together and come up with a protocol that will let them recognize where email originates from, they might be able to stop most spam right at the source before it even gets to their servers. Here is the ZD Net story.
Rant: Spammed by Spam Arrest! By Janet Roberts
How valuable to you are the readers who have started filtering their email with programs like Spam Arrest and Matador that require you to verify your address before they'll accept your email? You might want to think twice the next time you get an autoresponse asking you to prove you're human and not an email autobot, especially if the message comes from a reader who just signed up with Spam Arrest.
If you've done that -- if you've gone to the Spam Arrest site and typed in that one little word that theoretically unblocks your email -- you probably got the same email I did this week from Spam Arrest. Bearing the exquisitely ironic subject line "ADV: Enjoy a spam-free inbox," a copy went to the support email address of every email newsletter whose deliveries I have had to verify.
Let's add up the offenses:
1. I didn't ask Spam Arrest to send me email. I've never sent any email to Spam Arrest. However, I send email newsletters to Spam Arrest clients, and the email addresses those newsletters go out from are now listed as verified addresses in the company database.
2. It asks me to buy something; so, it's commercial.
3. I have to opt out in order to get taken off Spam Arrest's list.
It's unsolicited. It's commercial. It's opt-out. It's spam!
I complained, but I haven't heard anything back yet from the Spam Arrest high command. Others were luckier. They got replies from a Spam Arrest representative who claimed the company met "industry-accepted rules for sending email" by including the ADV prefix, a valid return email address and a working opt-out link.
Maybe those rules were true a few years ago, but today, the conventional wisdom among responsible practitioners is that you don't email anyone you haven't had a customer relationship with or who hasn't requested your mailings. Apparently, sending email to a Spam Arrest customer now creates a customer relationship with Spam Arrest.
The Spam Arrest rep also said the messages complied with the company's own privacy policy, a policy which it doesn't post either in the verification-request message or on the verification page at the site. At the site itself, the policy refers to information collected "voluntarily." I don't recall ever volunteering information to Spam Arrest.
This dust-up has prompted Spamhaus, which operates the Spamhaus Block List, to block Spam Arrest's IP addresses, and ignited a global anti-spam storm. Given all that, I will continue to verify addresses. I value any subscriber to a List-Universe.com email newsletter, even the Spam Arrest customers, and my junk-email filter will dispose of any future Spam Arrest messages for me. Plus, it was an irresistible Friday column for Ezine-Tips. Thanks, Spam Arrest!
The company's motto is "Take control of your inbox!" I'd just like to take it back from Spam Arrest.
I have been a satisfied user of Turbo Tax for a number of years. This year I was somewhat puzzled by the fact that Intuit had not bombarded me with emails and snail mails reminding me to purchase this year's version. Now I am glad I waited. In an effort to combat piracy, Turbo Tax is now protected by something called Safecast/C-Dilla. This accomplishes two things. First, it prevents copying the CD. Second, it prevents installing the full program on more than one machine.
How does it work? Of course, the details are secret. But experts have come up with this general explanation. Since a CD is read-only, it is not possible to alter the CD when the program is installed. Therefore any "alterations" must be recorded on the user's hard drive. When the program is installed, a series of files (hidden files? encrypted files?) are written to various locations on the hard drive. Periodically, the program will access the Internet and attach to the Turbo Tax site, recording this information into their database. If that same CD is used to install the program on another CD, the program will work until the user tries an operation that requires access to the Internet (filing, printing). At that point, the program will read the various files it wrote to the drive and compare it against a database on the site. If this is not the original installation, that function will fail. This allows the owner to use the software on multiple computers, say a desktop at home and a laptop out in the field, but the final filing can only be done from the original machine on which it was installed. So according to Intuit, the legitimate user will not be impacted but others will be unable to copy it.
So what's the problem? First of all, there have been reports of the copy protection program failing to install properly. Some claim it has even slowed down their PCs and had other harmful effects. Second, this approach means that the legitimate owner will have difficulty if they choose to upgrade their hard drive. Third, imagine what would happen if the program or computer failed in April? All the data would have been entered and with only days to go until the deadline, the legitimate owner would have no way of printing a return.
More troubling is exactly how this software operates. The CD can not be duplicated because it contains "hidden instructions." What hidden instructions? Is something being loaded at the lowest level which will interfere with CDRW drives? Will it affect other operations? Intuit also says that if you reformat the drive, the program will re-install properly. Does that mean that it has written something to the boot sector that will not be erased on a format? I don't think I want to chance outside programs adding their own code to my hard drive and CDRW. So I find myself joining the other formerly satisfied Turbo Tax users who will switch to Tax Cut.
The most unusual aspect to this whole fiasco is that the software seems to do exactly the opposite of what is intended. The uninstaller won't completely uninstall but the copy protection feature doesn't even seem to work. Testers were able to install the same CD on multiple machines.
Turbo Tax responded to complaints by increasing their support staff to handle calls. Someone please explain this to me. They are selling a product that costs between $20 and $30 (and with the rebates, also includes about $100 worth of additional free software) and can only be used for a few short months. How many thousands of dollars did they spend on this copy protection and how many tens of thousands more are they spending on support staff to handle the problems caused by the copy protection? How many customers did they lose because of the copy protection? I suspect that when they check their earnings for this year against last year, the copy protection scheme will have cost them more money than the retail price of all the illegal copies made.
An AOL security bug allowed web users to view anyone's email (except for that of AOL employees) simply by entering the user's ID. AOL has since fixed this bug. The troubling aspect of it is the ease with which it was done and the fact that this is not the first time AOL security was compromised. In the past, I have included articles about other problems - for example, someone who chose a brand new AOL ID and immediately began receiving spam, before this ID had ever been used. I still don't understand why people choose to pay double the rate of just about any other ISP for a program which is buggy, a resource-hog, bombards them with ads and may expose their IDs to spammers. You can get better service from a free ISP like Netzero. If you want to eliminate ads completely, there are plenty of ISPs offering accounts for half the price of AOL. One we recommend is Alsonetworks.com which has unlimited Internet access for $12.50 a month and a family-filtered version for $16.50 a month (both plans have discounts for annual subscriptions). The family-filtered version is particularly intriguing. There are blocking programs available that you can install on your PC but these all have problems. They take up resources. They may interfere with other programs you run. Your children may figure out a way around them. But a filtered account means that the blocking takes place at the ISP. No software is installed on your machine and there is no program which can be disabled at your end. For more info, contact andrew@alsonetworks.com.
Clearplay has created software which can filter violence or nudity from DVD movies. Now your children can watch some of those movies that have an appropriate plot, ruined by inappropriate scenes. A DVD player with the Clearplay software built-in might go on sale for under $100. Unless the courts rule in favor of Hollywood. The folks who produce this sleaze are arguing that their customers don't have the right to decide if their kids should see it. If your kids get hold of an inappropriate movie, you don't have the right to prevent them from watching every gory or graphic scene. I hope that Hollywood loses. I hope they learn that not everyone wants their children exposed to this. I hope they understand that if there is a market for this kind of software, then maybe there is a market for movies that don't require the filters at all.
Her last hit record may have appeared in 1975 but Janis Ian is still a recognized name. Her hit "At Seventeen" was the voice of any teenage girl who wasn't cheerleader material. Here in a clear, no-holds barred letter, she comes out in full support of music downloading and lambasts the music industry for their failure to adapt with the times.
None of the technology described nor its uses are new. The only thing that has changed is that the technology is being overapplied or misused. I once had a business partner who had been the manager of Information Systems for a large department store chain. One of his famous projects was a method of tracking all the employees to detect those who were chronically absent, late or hiding in the restroom. His solution was to provide all employees with coded ID tags. As they moved through the store, scanners recorded it. Management now knew who was late and who hung out in the coffee room. Of course, the employees resented being spied on and found ways around it. Employees began removing their badges when leaving and using other tricks to fool the scanners.
In another example of technology being overapplied, I once worked for a major utility on a safety program. Whenever major maintenance was done on generators, the program would print a list of all the steps that had to be done before the work could begin. This would prevent someone from working on an item that still had power going to it or from turning on something that another person was in the process of adjusting. Then some workers decided that they had memorized the list and didn't need to refer to it. They paid for this shortcut with their lives. Management at the utility decided that simply printing a list was not enough. They wanted some assurance that the steps were actually followed. We came up with a method that involved downloading the step to a handheld device, along with bar codes that also appeared on the switches and fuses. The employee would be shown the first step, which might be to shut off a particular switch. He would then have to scan the bar code on that switch before the next step would be shown.
Management now had a system that accomplished what it was designed to do - it saved lives. But they didn't stop there. They wanted the system to record the start and stop times of every task. Then they analyzed these reports to determine the duration of each task. Then they began questioning employees as to why they took longer on certain steps than other employees. The system designed to prevent life-threatening accidents was now being used to spy on employees. Instead of appreciating a program that was doing safeguarding their health, employees resented a program that was spying on them.
The EZ Pass system used on many tollways can be a blessing. I love being able to breeze through the toolbooths without searching for exact change or getting in line. Similar systems have been adopted by other states and other countries. I recently heard a story where the technology was misused in an incredible way. In Canada when someone is on unemployment, they must remain "available for work." An unemployed person travelled to New York during a holiday weekend to visit family. His EZ Pass showed the trip. He was denied his entire unemployement benefits because his EZ Pass record showed that he was not "available for work" during that weekend. His argument that it was a weekend and a holiday weekend at that and no company was going to be calling him had no effect. The use of his EZ Pass ended up costing him thousands of dollars. I wish the authorities were that dilligent in capturing criminals.
Incidentally, when someone's car was stolen with an EZ Pass in it, the EZ Pass did help. As the thief passed through a tollbooth, clerks were notified. Police stopped him and confiscated the EZ Pass. They let him continue on his way with the stolen car after he paid the toll in cash. They did not ask to see a driver's license.
The problem with this technology is the way it is being applied. Laws are being passed to make it easier for law enforcement to apprehend criminals and particularly terrorists. Instead it is being used to harrass citizens over minor infractions and even invented violations. In the words of Maxwell Smart, "If only they had used the technology for good instead of evil."
Here is an excellent letter about the dangers of using dehumanizing technology to control people:
Choose to be an insect or choose to be human.
Some tried. There was the 2.88 megabyte floppy which died a quick death. The 120 megabyte superfloppy never really hit it off. Iomega's Zip and Jazz drives had some success until folks learned about the infamous "click of death." Syquest had some products that I felt were better than Iomega's but due to poor marketing, these never really went anywhere.
So here we sit ten years later. Windows XP can now take a gigabyte just to install. Hard drives have gone to the multi-gigabyte level. 256 and 512 megabytes of RAM has become standard. And for many folks, the only removable storage on their system is still the 1.4 megabyte floppy. Maybe this is why I am still running into customers who have never backed up their work even once.
A number of computer manufacturers have decided to stop including floppy drives altogether. To some extent, this is a good move. First, if this practice becomes widespread, it will encourage some manufacturer to come up with a real solution for removable storage. Second, without a floppy drive as a method of exchanging data between computers, customers will have to make a conscious decision about the method they will use.
Writable CDs are too slow. Removable hard drives are still too bulky and expensive to replace floppies. Most people have still been trained to believe that the best computer to buy is the cheapest and the extra $100 the second hard drive would cost is not worth the expense. Of course they sing a different tune when their system crashes and it costs them more than this to restore it or their data is gone forever.
One device that is beginning to catch on are those USB keys that can hold 16 to 64 megabytes. But at an average of $1 per megabyte, they are too expensive to replace floppies. The floppy was the perfect item to use when you wanted to hand your friend a copy of that funny article or photo you had or that spreadsheet you were working on. But are people really going to be passing around devices that cost $30 and up? At a maximum capacity of about 128 megabytes, the USB keys can not really be used to backup a multi-gigabyte drive.
My interim solution: Instead of buying one of those USB keys, you can buy a 6-in-1 card reader that reads 6 different formats of media cards. The media cards are tiny and currently hold as much as a gigabyte. You can write to them as if they were a hard drive and they are almost as fast, certainly many times faster than a floppy. Because they are solid state (unlike floppies where the drive heads actually touch the media) you should not have the problems typical of floppy drives such as being unable to read media written by a different drive or having bad sectors damage the data. Again, the cost is higher than a floppy, so you won't exactly be handing these out to your friends. But they do hold more than 200 times the data. If you have a digital camera, you can use the card for that as well. Special offer for our readers: Card reader and 256mb CF card $100.
"Why choose Microsoft Office?" I asked, "when the company standard is currently WordPerfect and our in-house tests have shown the users prefer WordPerfect and it just works better?"
"Because" came the answer, "it's a Microsoft product."
In other words, companies were choosing products because the manufacturer was known for 1) shoddy second-hand work, 2) poor customer service, 3) greed in their licensing structure, 4) being less than ethical in their methods and 5) a desire to monopolize the industry and force everyone to pay ever-increasing fees. But as the famous saying in the hardware industry goes, "No one was ever fired for choosing IBM." In software it's "No one was ever fired for choosing Microsoft." It was a no-brainer. If you were a manager too clueless or lazy to make an informed decision, you could safely choose IBM and Microsoft products without expending any effort on research or evaluation. If you chose another company, you would have to put in some effort to justify your decision. Microsoft products were the first choice even though by most objective comparisons, competing products were superior, cheaper and had better tech support. Microsoft would find a useful program produced by someone else and then either force that company to license the technology to Microsoft for a pittance or put out a competing product and drive that company out of business. This worked even when the Microsoft product was inferior. But it seems that day may be coming to an end.
A number of major corporations are switching from Windows to Unix (and Linux)-based products. They are finding that this offers them much lower costs, better support since the code is open-source, and fewer security problems. There were recently reports that the City of Houston has decided to abandon Microsoft products and switch to shareware versions of Office-compatible products because it would save them millions in licensing fees. It looks like the days of the Microsoft monopoly may be coming to an end.
In my opinion, this was too long in coming. Microsoft has arrogantly ignored the needs of the community that built them. WordPerfect recognized that the word processor that was taught in schools would be the ones teachers and students would be more comfortable with and continue to use. Therefore they offered extremely low-cost academic versions. Some companies understood that employees sometimes take work home with them. Just because your company uses Microsoft Office does not mean that you are prepared to shell out hundreds of dollars for a copy so that you can sometimes work at home. While other companies offered discounted products, shareware products or licenses that allowed employees to use it at home, Microsoft insisted that every copy be purchased at high prices. Recently someone reported that they had 3 machines running Windows 98, two desktops and a laptop, which they wanted to upgrade to Windows XP. It would cost them $200 per machine for the software alone. After a lot of searching, the only discount they found was $20 off each additional installation, bringing their total cost to $560. It would then become their tasks to spend the hours necessary to get it done and deal with the problems that were sure to come up, with no guarantees that the end result would work any better than what they already had. They chose to stay with 98 and hope that either XP would drop in price or a user-friend version of Linux would become available. How many more folks out there feel the same way? I know I do, which is why I am staying with Windows 98. Like the boy who stuck his hand in the filbert jar and then couldn't get it out because he held too many, Microsoft has tried for too much and in the end they may wind up with less than they could have had.
According to Silicon Valley legend, this is how Microsoft achieved its dominance:
Microsoft was known for a Basic compiler for personal computers. When IBM was releasing the IBM PC under tight security and secrecy, they approached Gary Kilidal of Digital Research to discuss licensing his operating system. Killdal asked IBM to wait while he went off to another appointment (possibly a flying lesson). IBM was upset that he didn't seem to be taking them seriously and went to their next appointment to meet with Bill Gates. They were under the impression that Gates had an operating system. Gates pretended that he did. He saw the potential for personal computers far better than IBM did. IBM expected to sell perhaps 50,000 PCs. Instead of selling them an operating system outright, Gates suggested that IBM pay him $50 per copy and sell it for $100. IBM agreed. Gates then went to a company called Lifeboat and paid them $50,000 to write him an operating system, which he bought outright. The rest is history. Millions of IBM PCs were sold and Gates made $50 off each copy of IBM DOS sold. Lifeboat tried to sue for a share of this but the case was dismissed.
But Gates' fortune didn't stop there. For some strange reason, IBM's contract with Microsoft did not prevent Gates from licensing the software to other companies. A slightly different version called MS DOS was licensed to Compaq and other IBM competitors. IBM was now competing with other companies using the same operating system IBM had paid to develop. And IBM was still paying millions to the company that made this all possible. One wonders why IBM didn't just write their own operating system. Perhaps this is what they had in mind. Later IBM and Microsoft would collaborate on a new operating system called OS/2, which IBM eventually took over when Microsoft began concentrating on Windows. Despite the fact that OS/2 seemed far superior to Windows, it never caught on over its competitor and once again a shoddy Microsoft product defeated a superior competing product. The wonder of it is that they achieved this even when the competitor was IBM. Score another point for the triumph of marketing over substance.
Have you ever seen the old ads "2 out of 3 people prefer Microsoft Office to WordPerfect?" I was the third person. (Funny thing is that three out of four people I ask all claim to be the third person.) I was one of the people contacted by Microsoft to take the Wordperfect vs Word challenge. I chose WordPerfect for a number of reasons. I found it easier to use. I found it more powerful. When you want to insert a graphic and you browse your PC looking for a file, the next time you take that same action during your session, it will open in the directory you last used. To me this is basic common sense. Microsoft's products have an incredibly annoying habit (that still persists today, about TEN years later! Wake up and fix this, Microsoft!) that starts you at some arbitrary directory every time. Try this. Open Internet Explorer and choose File-Open. You start off at the Desktop. Now click browse and go to one of your directories and open a file. Now choose File-Open again. Are you at the last directory you just used? Of course not! You're back at the Desktop. Does this make sense to you? WordPerfect also has a feature that has saved me and my clients hours of aggravation called reveal codes. As you choose fonts, sizes, bold, etc, the word processor inserts hidden codes into your document. What happens when you look at your document and notice that the font is wrong or something is bolded that shouldn't be? With Wordperfect you can choose reveal codes and all these hidden codes now appear. You can easily delete the unwanted code. I have gone berserk trying to get a Word document to appear the way I wanted it. At one corporation, they had a document done in Word 6 that could not be formatted properly by any version of Microsoft Office they tried. I was able to bring it into WordPerfect, remove the offending codes and reformat it. WordPerfect did a better job on a Word document than Word! It's amazing that Microsoft understood that WordPerfect was a competitor and didn't bother to implement a key feature that made WordPerfect stand out. Isn't it a key rule that when you compete with someone, you try to go one better? But I proved to the corporation I was working for that WordPerfect was superior. I took one of their brochures and duplicated it in WordPerfect. A whole team of "experts" was unable to get it to work in Word. Because I was participating in this test, I had a hotline to Microsoft's tech support. They were unable to duplicate the document either.
Over the years Microsoft has bullied other companies into licensing their utilities for a song and when a company refused, Microsoft released a cheap imitation, knowing that most users would jump on the Microsoft bandwagon. When Stacker wouldn't license their on-the-fly disk compression technology to Microsoft for pennies, MS produced their own version called DoubleSpace. Stacker claimed that some of their patented code was used. They took it to court, where Microsoft ended up paying them something like 120 million dollars. But many smaller companies were not up to challenging the 800 pound gorilla and simply went out of business.
I do admit however, that Excel is probably the best spreadsheet software available today and Internet Explorer (I'll leave security issues aside for now) is probably the best browser. IE has the distinct advantage of being forgiving of minor HTML errors. I can't understand why Netscape will crash if a /table command is missing. How hard is it to fix the browser so it understands the problem and compensates?
Now that companies are learning that it is a bad idea to let one company dominate and Microsoft is learning that companies can find alternatives to its products, perhaps Microsoft will improve and the market will shape up so that everyone gets an equal shot and the best product wins.
Printer companies have changed their business model to emulate drug pushers. They sell printers at or below cost and once their customers are hooked, gouge them on the price of cartridges. When other companies began cloning the cartridges, printer manufacturers added a computer chip to each cartridge. The only purpose this chip serves is to prevent other companies from cloning the cartridge or refilling it. The European Union has banned these chips because they are causing more cartridges to end up in landfills instead of being recycled.
The ink cartridge companies haven't sat by idly. They have come up with compatible cartridges that include compatible chips. Now Lexmark is suing one such company for copyright violations. If Lexmark wins, it will set a dangerous precedent. Any company can then put chips in their products whose sole purpose is to force customers to buy only their products at inflated prices. Imagine if your Sony camcorder could only use Sony tapes? Your Ford car could only run on Ford tires? There would be no competition and prices for these consumables would skyrocket. I hope the courts are smart enough to realize that companies should be run by businessmen, not drug traffickers.
They all create videos in AVI format. The problem with AVI is that it takes about 200 megabytes per minute of video. MPEG is a format which is more compressed, though with some loss of quality. It works similarly on videos as JPEG works on photos. However, this requires a separate conversion step which can take a long time, longer even than the original clip. It can take 10 minutes to convert a 3 minute AVI to MPEG. They can all create MPEG-1 video which compresses the AVI at a rate of about 20 to 1. A 600 megabyte AVI became a 30 megabyte MPG file. However, there was a noticeable loss of quality. They can all create MPEG-2 files, which are better quality and a bit larger. The same 600 megabyte file became a 60 megabyte MPEG-2 under Moviestudio and a 90 megabyte file under VideoStudio. The quality of the 60 megabyte file from Moviestar 5 was unacceptable. Whenever there was motion in the video, whether from the camera being moved or from the action, there were streaks across the image. Imagine moving your still camera as you take a picture and you can understand what these streaks look like. The 90 meg file produced by VideoStudio 4 was better, though still far from perfect.
DVD Complete seems to be a far superior program. It splits up the sounds and the video into two files which appear to yield far better results. However, after going through all the steps to create a slick-looking video, the final step requires that you have a DVD recorder. I only wanted to save the output as an Mpeg-2 file and this option was not available in the supplied version.
I downloaded a program called TMPGENC which converts AVI files to MPEG-2. There is a free version and a pro version. The pro version seems to have more options, but I am not sure what they do, so I left it at the default settings. I used the Pro version during the 14-day trial to covert some AVIs. It did a great job with no streaks. When the trial ran out, I used the free version. The resulting 60 megabyte file was the best quality of all the programs I used but it still had those streaks (though far fewer of them). I don't know whether this is because of something in the intial AVI or whether only the Pro version is designed to remove those streaks. I found another freeware package called Avi2MPG2 which does the same thing and created a streak-free MPG file. However, when I used it with video captured from an old VHS camcorder, the sound quality contained an annoying click. The best solution I found was using VideoStudio 4 to capture the video and create MPEG1 from low quality tapes or use Avi2Mpeg to create Mpeg2 from high quality video.
In conclusion: the Dazzle package works, adequately but disappointingly. Tech support is available if you pay for it (or mention that you are are writing a review). Dazzle's business method resembles the Nigerian scam letters - they promise you the sky and then keep coming up with requests for more money. Want the program promised on the box? Pay extra. Want tech support? Pay extra. Want to produce a viewable Mpeg-2, as promised? Pay extra. Of course with the Nigerian scam you end up getting nothing. With the Dazzle, if you spend enough, you may eventually be able to do what the package promises. But rather than go through that, you might want to try similar products from Pinnacle. Based on reviews I read recently, the Pinnacle products do what they are supposed to right out of the box.
I sent this review to Dazzle and received replies from two different reps. They both said that 1) Dazzle was unaware of the difficulties with tech support until now but they would take steps to fix it and 2) they are aware of the streaking problem with Moviestar 5 and a new version would correct it. They could not give me an estimate of when it would be ready nor would they promise that it would be a free upgrade.
The best free spyware blocker is Spyware Search and Destroy. The author requests a voluntary $5 donation. Spyware Search and Destroy .
Backup your windows drivers with this new freeware program. Windows Driver Backup.
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 500 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 500 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.