8/1/1982 the threatening approachIn the May Open Discussion, you said most companies require six to eight weeks for delivery. They don't. They can't. It's against the law. Specifically, it's a violation of federal regulations under Section 205 of the Federal Trade Commission Improvement Act for a mail-order business to fail to deliver within thirty days (if no other time period was specified), unless the business notifies the customer that it cannot deliver and offers to refund the money. A friend and I each ordered a disk drive by mail. When it hadn't arrived after well over a month, I sent a letter asking what had happened and they ignored it. Then I sent a letter following the format recommended by the book and that got their attention; they sent the drive the day they got my letter. Seeing my success, my friend sent them a similar letter, and got his drive equally promptly. Soon after, I started seeing notes in newsletters about slow delivery from that company. Then they stopped advertising. I assume they went out of business.
On the subject of copy protection, I have a TRS-80 at home and an Apple at work. (It should probably be the other way around.) Copy protection is more difficult to do on the TRS-80 than on the Apple. Perhaps that's why few programs for the TRS-80 are protected, and most of those that are can be easily broken. I have rarely seen a serious program that I didn't want to (or have to) modify. We have DB Master at work (yes, it's a legitimate, purchased original). Several people have told me it's a very good program. I wouldn't know; we don't use it. The application I had in mind for it requires that many people be able to use it to look up information, most of them unfamiliar with computers. I can't risk leaving an original of DB Master out for them to use. And without modification, the information retrieval would be too slow. To top it all off, examination of the Basic portions of the code turned up a routine, poked in each time the menu program is run, that checks if you are running a copy. If it decides you are, it zaps your memory and your data disk too. I would never entrust valuable data to such a program; what if it thought the original was a fake? So DB Master sits unused, while we use a public domain database program I got from the local Apple club and modified to fit our application. Breaking DB Master's copy protection presents the sort of challenge that I'd probably enjoy at home, but really don't have time for at work. Everett B. Ogden, Delmar, NY - V2N12 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The company in question in May, Omega Microware, supplied to us copies of all documentation showing that their company had shipped the ordered merchandise in excellent time in the instance in question. The disk drive problem merely emphasizes the value of shopping at a local retailer when possible. Softalk Response - V2N12 Comments are closed.
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