How many people... I do. I work full time for a company that produces software for document storage warehouses. On the side, I own Liquid Mirror Enterprises - software, ebooks, sites (such as Shareware Junction, the BX/Free Banner eXchange, SWJ/BX Banner eXchange, Crush Alarm, etc), and more. I'm also a part-time therapist. Why do you do it? 1) I need the extra income to keep my kids in private school. 2) I love it! Whould you rather work exclusively for your business... It's a life-long dream, and will happen one day. ;-) How do you guys manage both things? Basically, no social life. LOL ;P -Mike Stevenson Owner, Liquid Mirror Enterprises www.liquidmirror.com www.sharewarejunction.com www.learnhypnosisnow.com www.bxfree.com SWMirror.com File Hosting DigitalShockwave.com Windows 2000 Web Hosting

In my experience, every one of those little 'magazines' that Pinnacle has ever published has been junk. Way overpriced junk, at that. I have felt ripped off on more than one occasion after signing up for a subscription. I finally learned my lesson and won't ever buy a subscription from them again. :( Just my two cents worth, -Mike Stevenson Owner, Liquid Mirror Software and eBooks, Shareware Junction Downloads and Crush Alarm http://www.liquidmirror.com/ - http://www.sharewarejunction.com/ - http://www.CrushAlarm.com/ Sign up for the Shareware Junction Banner eXchange! http://www.sharewarejunction.com/swjbx/

A quick search of the KB shows that there's a Office Addin produced by Symantec/Norton called Officeav.dll. It appears to be a COM object, so you could probably play around with its interfaces and get it to work if you're persistent enough. I'm not sure if it does a real virus scan or only scans Word docs internally, but you should be able to find out with a bit of testing. I assume that you'll have to have MS Office and Norton Anti-Virus on the machine in question in order to get it to work. -Mike Stevenson Owner, Liquid Mirror Software and eBooks, Shareware Junction Downloads and Crush Alarm http://www.liquidmirror.com/ - http://www.sharewarejunction.com/ - http://www.CrushAlarm.com/ Sign up for the Shareware Junction Banner eXchange! http://www.sharewarejunction.com/swjbx/

When you open a .doc file in MS Word, a little message that says 'Requesting Virus Scan' appears in the status bar. My guess is that there's some sort of interface, defined by Win32, that a system's registered virus checker adheres to. I've never read of such a thing, but you might want to look at winword.exe in Depends and see what it's importing. I'd look at the MS Knowledge Base too and see if you can find anything relating to that message. Good luck! :-D -Mike Stevenson Owner, Liquid Mirror Software and eBooks, Shareware Junction Downloads and Crush Alarm http://www.liquidmirror.com/ - http://www.sharewarejunction.com/ - http://www.CrushAlarm.com/ Sign up for the Shareware Junction Banner eXchange! http://www.sharewarejunction.com/swjbx/

http://www.mail2web.com/ They also have some other sites... I think news2web and pda2web. Hope this helps :-) -Mike Stevenson God Bless America, God Bless the World News - Forum - Games - Comedy - Chat Click: http://www.USAvsAfghanistan.com

Oh Yeah?!? Try this one, it's interactive ;-) http://www.USAvsAfghanistan.com/SBL.asp -Mike Stevenson God Bless America, God Bless the World News - Forum - Games - Comedy - Chat Click: http://www.USAvsAfghanistan.com

Luke, it looks to me like you've already made your decision. You list 1 positive and 4 negatives for your current job, and a whole paragraph full of positives for the job you seem to want to go back to. I think it's pretty clear which one you really want. ;-) -Mike Stevenson God Bless America, God Bless the World News - Forum - Games - Comedy - Chat Click: http://www.USAvsAfghanistan.com

5. No decent IDE. That's not necessarilly true. I use Visual J++ for all my Java 1.1 development and Forte for Java (free from Sun) for all my Java 2 development. Forte is a great IDE if you have a decently fast machine -- PIII 800 or better. It will run on less, just a little slow. It's got most of the features of dev studio including intellisense popup and tooltip method info. And it's free. It will not make exes though. You need Visual J++ or Visual Cafe for that. I think JBuilder might make exes too. -Mike Stevenson God Bless America, God Bless the World News - Forum - Games - Comedy - Chat Click: http://www.USAvsAfghanistan.com

Yeah, but there has to be something to say about people who still use Cobol ;-) -Mike Stevenson God Bless America, God Bless the World News - Forum - Games - Comedy - Chat Click: http://www.USAvsAfghanistan.com

Rich, The market stinks everywhere. Here in Irvine, which is another hotbed of IT jobs (at one point, it was called The New Silicon Valley), there are very few jobs out there right now regardless of what language you use. I think that .NET will be pretty well received. I know of a few shops who are going to 100% .NET (Dundas is a good example of a commercial vendor who is moving to .NET). I wouldn't write it off. And if you're a java developer, C# will be a breeze for you to pick up. -Mike Stevenson God Bless America, God Bless the World News - Forum - Games - Comedy - Chat Click: http://www.USAvsAfghanistan.com

I run some pretty big websites and 1GB is tough to to hit in one month even for a website serving concurrent users 24x7. The 1GB cap is their way of making sure that you aren't running any "business class" servers off your machine, like a webserver or ftp. They want to charge you hundreds more $$ for the same bandwidth if you plan to do that ;-) I think that you'll do fine with 1GB as long as you're not an MP3 or video fiend. Normal browsing for a few hours a day will not come close to the cap. -Mike Stevenson God Bless America, God Bless the World News - Forum - Games - Comedy - Chat Click: http://www.USAvsAfghanistan.com

I've been using Install Shield 5.1 for a few years now. I never used them because they were good, but because they were the best (IOW, I never liked any of them, but IS was the most widely used, so I went with it). Anyway, I just upgraded to IS Developer 7 and I've go to say that it is incredible. What a change from the crappy interface in IS5. Almost everything is thought of and organized in an intuitive manner. I don't know if IS6 looked anything like this, but IS7 is worth the upgrade if you ask me. As I look back over this, I realize that it may sound like an advertisement, but it's just a little testimony from someone who has always hated building installs ;-) -Mike Stevenson God Bless America, God Bless the World News - Forum - Games - Comedy - Chat Click: http://www.USAvsAfghanistan.com

I used XP Beta 2 on one of my home PCs. I was getting along pretty well when I decided to install PC Anywhere 9 on it (Terminal Services are just too slow). So anyway, the little warning came up and said that "This software is not compatible with WindowsXP, please contact the vendor for an updated version..." blah, blah, blah. I thought "Ah, screw it... they're just being overly cautious." and proceeded with the installation. That installation of XP never booted again (that machine now runs RH Linux 7.1. ;-) It may be useless, but it's kind of fun). The moral of the story: When XP says that software isn't compatible... believe it. -Mike God Bless America, God Bless the World News - Forum - Games - Comedy - Chat Click: http://www.USAvsAfghanistan.com

Builder.com has many links to resource sites. That would be a good place to start looking. -Mike Stevenson God Bless America, God Bless the World News - Forum - Games - Comedy - Chat http://www.USAvsAfghanistan.com

Thank you, kind Sir. Ditto ;-) Anyone remember Logan's Run? That one tops the charts too. I usually don't mention it around "normal" people, but we're all geeks here. ;-) -Mike Stevenson CoderX@liquidmirror.com Owner, Liquid Mirror Software (http://www.liquidmirror.com) Owner, USA vs Afghanistan (http://www.usavsafghanistan.com) Owner, Shareware Junction (http://www.sharewarejunction.com) Owner, Internet Shopping Spree (http://www.internetshoppingspree.com/)

Wow... that was an eye-catching subject line! :eek: My favorites are History of the World Part I, Young Frankenstein and Holy Grail. -Mike Stevenson CoderX@liquidmirror.com Owner, Liquid Mirror Software (http://www.liquidmirror.com) Owner, USA vs Afghanistan (http://www.usavsafghanistan.com) Owner, Shareware Junction (http://www.sharewarejunction.com) Owner, Internet Shopping Spree (http://www.internetshoppingspree.com/)

I've used everything from BASIC on a TRS-80 to VB-DOS, all versions of VB, all versions of Java, borland turbo c++, and GNU C++. Nothing is quite as nice as Visual C++ 4+. VC balances power and usefulness and gets better with every version. Free libraries such as PJ Naughter's make up for any missing controls in the forms editor. My guess is that Victim of VC++ is a Borland/Linux Zealot (He's also a victim of a defective spell checker). -Mike Stevenson CoderX@liquidmirror.com Owner, Liquid Mirror Software (http://www.liquidmirror.com) Owner, USA vs Afghanistan (http://www.usavsafghanistan.com) Owner, Shareware Junction (http://www.sharewarejunction.com) Owner, Internet Shopping Spree (http://www.internetshoppingspree.com/)

Yes, I've got my own shareware company, Liquid Mirror Software, plus SharewareJunction.com. I find that when it comes up in interviews, potential employers are actually impressed because I've gained so much notoriety because of my program AnyWhere 5. I've actually been featured in quite a few magazines, won many awards and sold software in nearly every modern country on the globe (I actually have more customers than my current employer!). I always get asked if it would interfere with my position and the answer is always "no". I never hide it... my license plate even says "LQDMIRR" with a little advertisement on the license plate frame ;-) I also think that is shows quite a bit of maturity, initiative and commitment that many of the "kids" in the software market lack these days. -Mike Stevenson CoderX@liquidmirror.com Owner, Liquid Mirror Software (http://www.liquidmirror.com) Owner, Shareware Junction (http://www.sharewarejunction.com) Owner, Internet Shopping Spree (http://www.internetshoppingspree.com/)

I used to program my shareware utility "AnyWhere" (then, AnyWhere 95) in VB. For about two years people were forced to download a 2mb install just to use this little tiny app because I had to distribute the vb runtime dlls with the install (You almost can't get away with not shipping the dlls. End users don't understand dll-hell and would rather throw your app away than hunt down runtime dlls). Most people just passed it up. I had been toying with the idea of using C++ for quite a while, but VC didn't have a built in "directory tree" like VB. Eventually, I broke down and coded it. Statically linked, the entire thing came out to around 180k. I saw 120% increase in downloads and a big boost in sales. While many people are using high-speed dsl or cable now, the majority are still on dialup and won't tolerate a large download. In my opinion, VC is the only way to go for shareware. -Mike Stevenson CoderX@liquidmirror.com Owner, Liquid Mirror Software (http://www.liquidmirror.com) Owner, Shareware Junction (http://www.sharewarejunction.com) Owner, Internet Shopping Spree (http://www.internetshoppingspree.com/)

The most recent that I've heard of is Freedows. It was supposed to be a free version of Windows, but with the added feature of hot-swappable kernels that would let you run Win, Linux and Mac programs natively, side by side. The project started in 1997. At last glance, to date, they had an os loader and part of a functional kernel. Pretty sad. It seemed like a good idea. I've just checked out freedows.org and it's not responding. Looks like they might have gone belly-up after all. There was another project that was writing an NT clone. From what I heard in 1999, they had an os loader, and a working subsystem (minus GDI) and were successfully running programs against a stubbed out gdi32.dll. The rumor at that time was that MS was going to squash them. I haven't heard about it since then (and I'm sure it would have been big news had they been successful) ;-) -Mike -Mike Stevenson CoderX@liquidmirror.com Owner, Liquid Mirror Software (http://www.liquidmirror.com) Owner, Shareware Junction (http://www.sharewarejunction.com) Owner, Internet Shopping Spree (http://www.internetshoppingspree.com/)