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Page 8 Diablo Blue January, 2002 |
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members attending their meetings. Of course, a PC user can stop anyone on the street and have a reasonably intelligent conversation with them about PCs. MAC owners, however, have to look for like-minded companionship in MAC organizations. The odds of walking up to a stranger who is a MAC user are just slightly better than the odds of being hit by lightning while in the act of cashing in a winning lottery ticket. One of the other newsletters had photos of the “new” Board members. And you think your Board members are old! |
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and decide you are unhappy with the product for any reason, you could be in for a “sorry all sales are final attitude” from your retailer. There are two sides of the coin on this rather sticky situation. The retailer takes an inflexible stance for several reasons, but the prevailing justification is the illegal copying of media thanks in part to CDRW drives costing around $100. Not everyone agrees with this methodology. Bad Software is a book by Cem Kaner and David L. Pels about getting your money's worth when you buy computer software. The book is written to assist you with getting a refund, support, or compensation for significant losses caused by defective software. Like I said—it’s a grey area. If the software does not perform as claimed or is bug-ridden should you have to bear the loss? You can demand, and sometimes get, a refund from where you bought the software, but you better visit the web site badsoftware.com or buy the book prior to doing battle. Another path is to review the software box and see if the software maker directly warrants a MBG for 30, 60, or 90 days. Remember soft |
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Occasionally I pen a short item for Diablo Blue, but today it’s just an observation, not some thing new or strange in the computer world. There seems to be a active underground (for lack of a better expression) among computer user groups, and others, to monitor the user groups on the web, and if it appeals to them to use it or adopt it, or just mull it over. Example 1: Early this year I received a request to reprint an article I wrote, Cool, in the March 2001 issue of Diablo Blue. This request was from a editor for the Monitor a Rochester N.Y. computer user group’s newsletter. As a result of my consent, they have sent me copies of their monthly newsletter. Example 2: I got a request from someone in Sarasota, FL for the source of a copy of the program ZAP (ZAP, in the July 2001 issue of Diablo Blue). Seems they had the same problem described in the article, and this person was not even a member of a computer user group. So I sent them a floppy with this old DOS program, and information that Sarasota had a very large computer user group. What does all this have to do with DVPC? Well, it shows that a user group member’s actions can have a surprising positive, or even negative, effect elsewhere. So — support your user group, and maybe you will get back a communiqué from Timbuktu — or somewhere slightly less exotic. |