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Inside this issue:
No Rush For DVD Recorder
One of the battles concerns competing formats for rewritable discs and another different formats for blue-laser technology, which promises to provide greater storage than current red lasers can.
What all of this means is that if you can wait a little longer to buy a DVD recorder, it makes sense to do so. As for DVD players, they are getting cheaper by the day. You can now buy one for under $30 and you don't have to be trampled at Walmart to accomplish this. But the newer ones are coming out with the DIVX standard, so again, if you can wait a little longer, it makes sense to do so.
There are at least two nasty tricks that paypal is pulling here. 1) Paypal's terms state that to qualify for seller protection, you must be able to prove SHIPPING to the confirmed address - not DELIVERY to the confirmed address. They give USPS Delivery Confirmation as an example of proof. The sellers complied with the stated terms. (In a case that happened to someone I know personally, Paypal denied her seller protection because they said that USPS DC only shows the destination zip code, not the actual address. So Paypal places terms on their site that they are prepared to violate from the outset.)
2) Paypal is taking money from C to recoup losses they suffered when A cheated B. No one is complaining about these sellers. No one is claiming that the merchandise wasn't delivered. But Paypal suffered a loss when seller A cheated buyer B, so now they are looking for other people to steal from, robbing Peter to pay Paul. Imagine if you deposit cash in your bank account and your bank tells you, "We know you got the cash from Jack. Since Jack cheated someone else, we're going to take away YOUR cash." I believe this would be considered theft in any courtroom. But of course, there are banking laws to protect customers. With Paypal, you enter in the lawless Wild West where Paypal is judge, jury and executioner. There is no appeal.
What reports like these prove is that paypal isn't safe, not for buyers and not for sellers, not when using credit cards and not when accepting paypal balance payments.
Discover and Amex have tried an interesting ploy to bypass the consumer protection mandated by law. They claim that when a buyer uses Paypal, the buyer is paying for the service of transferring the money to the seller. This service has taken place regardless of whether the merchandise is actually received and can not be charged back. Amex has already lost this argument and was forced to reimburse scammed buyers. I guess Discover hasn't gotten the message that companies can not enter into agreements which violate federal consumer protection law.
In my opinion, this bidder begged for it. She emailed the seller stating that these were probably fake. The seller not only made no effort to argue - he told the bidder not to bid and then blocked her from bidding. She circumvented the system (for which she received a suspension) in order to bid. Why did she bid? She says that she took a chance because one of the animals was worth over $1,000 if it was genuine. So she gambled and she lost. That is the risk she took.
How did this rumor originate? Possibly because in some hotels, key cards can be used to order items at the bar or shops. Somebody must have assumed that the cards contained credit card information. No, all they recorded was the room number to which the items are to be charged. There was also a story in which credit card thieves were able to lift the information recorded on a credit card and then record it on to the magnetic strip of a key card. But in this situation, the key card was being used only as a sort of floppy disk. It was the thieves who recorded the information, not the hotel which issued it. The rumor might as well say "Warning: floppy disk may contain your personal information." If someone deliberately puts it there, it will.
There is a fine line between caution and paranoia.
Note that with encryption the data itself is written to the drive in a scrambled fashion so that it can not be read without the matching decryption. This is different than password protection, where the data is stored normally but a password is required to access it. Hackers can bypass password protection rather easily. Encryption is far more difficult to defeat.
Over the past few months, we have heard similar stories from other web masters and have been victims of this ourselves. Hardly a day goes by in which we don't receive dozens of "undeliverable" messages for spam that was sent out using our domain name. We also get the occasional nastygram from someone who is upset at receiving this spam. We are also upset. We are upset at the spam and we are upset that someone is spoofing our domain to sent it.
There is only one way to know who the spam is coming from and you have to be careful when using this method. If it is typical spam offering growth pills, mortgages or drugs, the link will take you to a website. You can then fill out an order (or many orders) using fictitious information. If you know of a valid credit card number for a card that no longer works, you might want to use it. Each time you press the submit button (no reason you can't hit the back button and submit numerous times), the site is charged an order processing fee. Why not make them pay for spamming you? Why not show them that if you put junk into millions of mailboxes, maybe some of those people will return the favor?
However, you have to be careful. Some spam contains attachments which are either viruses that will damage your computer or trojan horses which will spy on you and report back to their creator. For maximum security, never open an attachment and read your email only in text mode. If you have not yet installed anti-virus software and a firewall, shame on you.
Cost-Reduction Expectations
My experience in large corporations has always been that managers ignore the costs and overstate the benefits of any move they make. Why is this? Because the corporate structure is almost always geared to rewarding immediate "benefits" without looking at the long-term costs.
At a major corporation where I once worked, managers were given bonuses of 15% of any costs they saved. One manager figured out that the company spent $160,000 a year on water coolers. He cancelled the contract and received his bonus. I asked him if he took into account the fact that in the large office building there were no water fountains or refrigerators. Now employees had to go to the store in the lobby every time they wanted a drink. If they did this three times a day and each trip took twenty minutes (figure in the elevator ride down and back, waiting in line at the store, chatting with other acquaintances), the company was now losing an hour a day of work per employee. Mutiply that by the ten thousand employees in the building and the loss was much greater than the $160,000 a year that was saved. The manager told me he was well aware of this, but the company did not grant bonuses for good ideas, only for ideas which appeared to be saving money.
Outsourcing is no different. Many managers argue that if an Indian programmer works for $20 an hour while an American programmer wants $50, there is a $30 an hour savings. Not taken into account are the costs involved in the knowledge transfer; making certain that the offshore programmer fully understands what is needed and codes the program in a way that is understood by the people who will later maintain it. As the article states, the actual saving usually end up in the 15% range. One small cost overrun and this small savings can vanish. Small savings like these are often not worth the risk.
Data Security/Protection
There are enough horror stories about hackers and stolen data without worrying that sensitive information is being routinely sent around the globe so that some company can save some money. A recent California law requires that sensitive information such as social security numbers must be protected. As a result, we can no longer send genuine sample payroll data to the offshore consultants. We now have to strip out this information and the offshore consultants have to fill it back in (with made-up numbers). When the cost analysis and time estimates were done, they did not account for the time spent doing this. It also means that the offshore programmers can not test with real data.
Knowledge Transfer
It is one thing to explain a complex system to an employee who is in the office and expected to remain there for a long period of time. It is extremely difficult to transfer knowledge to someone in another country, whose first language is not English, who does not see the process in operation and can at best understand only the concept.
Loss of Business Knowledge
There are employees in our organization who have been here for years and know all the rules and issues involved in our custom applications. They can glance at a printout and spot immediately if there is a problem. But now the programming is being done by offshore consultants who are far from experts in the rules. Then we have to test their work to make sure they got it accurately. A lot of time is wasted having to explain and re-explain our rules. When an error is found by an end-user and we have to go back to the offshore programmer to get it corrected, more time is lost. This problem is exacerbated by the next one:
Scope Creep
Most projects change by 10%-15% during the development cycle.
Anyone who has participated in the development of a complex system knows that new requests are constantly being made. In our payroll system, contract changes occur regularly or someone decides that the way a rule was implemented is not correct. When the developers were the employees in the office, fixes could be quickly made and costs to the company were fixed (salaries were already being paid). Now each request for a change must go back to the offshore firm, who often argues that this is outside the scope of the project and requires another payment.
Vendor Failure to Deliver
After paying a consulting firm well in the five figures for a custom payroll system, they delivered something that was totally useless. Two years later, we have changed every screen, every program and almost every table. We would have been better off writing it from scratch, but the management did not want to admit that they paid a fortune for nothing, so they are pretending that we only "enhanced" the original system. As I tell my manager, I have the original axe that George Washington used to cut down the cherry tree. I replaced the handle and the blade, but it's the original axe.
Turnover of Key Personnel
The reason the particular firm we used was chosen was because they delivered a working system for a previous project. We were told that we would be working with the same people, but once the project was under way, we learned that those people were no longer employed by that firm. We had to waste a lot of time training the new people in the knowledge that we had already imparted to the previous group. Even though the new project was building on top of the previous system, it was written in a completely different style and used different tools and data access methods. The result was a hodge-podge which performs poorly.
Years ago when I read that a particular company had $50 million in losses yet paid their president $38 million in bonuses, I was tempted to write to them that I could save them at least $37 million. For a million dollars I could be equally incompetent. I might even do a better job and make them some money. At least I could sell some digital cameras on the side.
According to ORAMITY, "Every living human has derived benefit from Linux in one way or another, and since American movies and music are available everywhere in one form or another, all residents of all countries have either viewed or heard them or have illegally used copyrighted phrases taken from movie dialog or song lyrics."
Two of the most popular copyrighted phrases used in everyday speech, according to McBralenti, are "I'll be back" and "Don't worry, be happy."
"The royalties owed on these two statements alone are higher than the entire Gross National Product of Jamaica," noted McBralenti.
The amount sought by ORAMITY is $63 billion, which is approximately $10 from every living person.
XXcopy.com
A copy program with many parameters you can control.
Leopard Programming
A neat little windows programming language that lets even novices create simple windows programs.
saypad
A program that will read aloud to you.
xp resources
More Windows XP resources
Here is a site for XP/Nt/2000: Wayne's Resource Sites
There is a membership fee of $8 a year which allows you to send personal greeting cards to family members.
Thanks to Leonard, one of our readers, for sending this in.