Minutes of the Meeting held 7 August 2001 Rod B was "elected" chair and I was deemed to be note collator. 32 people were in attendance and a later arrival (Alan) was there for the first time. Herewith the list: 1. Canon 2000 cartridge holders - TonyS I am having problems with the ink cartridge holder in a couple of printers, in that if they are not used for a week or so, the ink congeals in the print head and stops printing. A new holder with two cartringes(Mandatory) costs $97 almost as much as a new printer. Tried to soak with various fluids no go, does any one know where I can get new holders without the cartridges. Machines are about 18 months old and have not been run in yet. Tony 2.a VB Course - R Gregory 2.b Booklet --- JohnA 3. Geocities - Jeff 4. Voice recognition "Astray Aliens" - Kevin He spoke about a recent Canberra Times article. I quote from a follow up article called Addendum published on Sat 4th August: Addendum by Jack Waterford August 4 2001 I fully expect that our blooper this week with the astray aliens will go around the globe. It's up there with the celebrated Age correction which appeared under the headline, "We heard wrong", which confessed that a reporter had misheard Lady Cilento's warning that consuming too much Vitamin C could cause "loose motions", and instead wrote "hallucinations". Our mistake showed a new trap for young players: voice-recognition technology, which allows a person to dictate rather than to type. Voice-recognition technology has improved enormously over the years, and current models can even learn the spellings of commonly used proper names or some particular idiosyncrasies of the authors. A problem is that it will usually have a stab rather than produce gobbledegook when it does not understand. In our case the writer, or dictator, was quoting the Prime Minister, who had observed that most supporters of Pauline Hanson were average Australians. It came out in the copy as average astray aliens, which is what some might think of them. Indeed, given that the sentence still scanned and that worse things have been said about Hansonites, I could understand how even a diligent sub-editor might have missed it. <...more> 5. 20 years on - MikeD 6. Word/DOS file on 5 1/4in floppy that will not open from Windows - NigelW 7. Internet disconnection reminder - PaulH 8. Web access privacy - CharlieK Charlie reported that as part of his search for a new home he had registered with AllHomes.com and that involved providing name, address and phone number. From then on he received periodic e-mails from AllHomes whenever a Real Estate agent added a home which met his criteria. Those e-mails contained web addresses of real estate agents and pointed to the specific matching property. He perused a few of these and was then surprised to get a phone call from an Agent who said he had knew Charlie had accessed a particular property and could he provide any further assistance. While there was no real issue with privacy Charlie found it surprising that a web owner could identify that a specific individual had accessed his site. AllanM advised that this was usually achieved by providing a web address (URL) within the e-mail which was unique to the individual to which it had been mailed. That address contained sufficient information to allow AllHomes to identify when that person accessed the site. This is probably the same technique used by e-card sites such as Blue Mountain to advise you when someone has viewed the card you sent to them. It's not a big issue, but one to remember whenever you provide personal details to any site - you erode a little bit more of your privacy. =============== These were received by 5 pm Friday. Thanks, Trevor ****************************************************** Coffee & Chat Page, inluding archives of past meetings http://www.pcug.org.au/pcug/candc/ ******************************************************
Return to the Index or the Coffee and Chat Page