On (16 Mar 95) Brenton Vettoretti wrote to Keith Richardson...



 BV> Hi keith,



 KR> i've been freezing my arse off in a little place about 30 miles out of

 KR> boston mass (and i do mean litteraly freezing, the temp went positive 4

 KR> times in 28 days!).



 BV> Geezzz, it's a rough life but sombody's gotta do it, right :)



yearh well.... it was my first time in the states, and frankly, i can

take it or leave it, it know that i only saw one small part, and not at

it's best then, but i think i'd rather go to asia - its more

interesting. i was living out in the country, but basically there was

bugger all around, unless you went into boston, and that town is

probably worth a couple of days visit only. i liked hardvard, but the

rest was rather ordinary. i visited mit, i can see why unix is the way

that it is, a reflection of a rather dour and bland looking place. i

spent some time in the computer supermarkets ((:) but the savings are

very spotty, some things aren't much cheaper there than here, but then

others were far cheaper - i bought my daughter a copy of generic cad at

$100 against $600 or so here. otoh the street price of hard disks is

about us39c per meg plus tax which is not so different to here. modems

are, of course cheap, an internal 14.4 + fax sportshoe is about us$100,

and that is typical. if it weren't for my deep and abiding respect for

the austel regs, i'd have bought a 14.4 + fax zoom at $69 (: . desktop

systems are cheaper, but not enormously so, otoh laptops seemed much

cheaper. i found it hard to get used to the fact that nothing in the

country cost what it is advertised for, theres always some tax or tip to

be added.



 BV> That's the important part. I just bought BC++ 4.5 with Database

 BV> Tools and the Visual Solutions Pack. At $359 it was a _steal_.

 BV> The bummer is that v5.0 is being release next week. The good news is

 BV> that my package has two free upgrades with it. What a bargain. If

 BV> you don't already have a student card, then get one. Even if you

 BV> have to beg, borrow or steal one (like I did ) and rush to your

 BV> nearest Hardly Normal store and have them order it for you. The

 BV> dealer price for that package is over $800 and they are selling it

 BV> to dickheads who wouldn't know how to use it for only $359. That

 BV> package also has 10 tons of printed documentation with it too.



i think that i got ripped, i paid i think $280 for v4.5 with docs and an

extra copy of 4.0 thrown in. all i need is someone who wants an unused

copy of 4.0. all told, at the moment, i have 2 floppy copies of 4.0, a

4.0, a 4.0s, and a 4.5 cd rom, the dos power pack, and vis solutions.



 BV> Same here. Frank went. Bob lost interest when he found out that it

 BV> required 128Mb of disk space and a CD-ROM to load it . Of course

 BV> this was after I ordered and paid for his copy at the special price

 BV> of $250. If you're interested I have _one_ only copy at that price.



shit, thats even more disk space than c++ 4.5 at 100 meg. at the moment

sadly i have not the time, the money, or the disk space (100 megs left

out of 920) what i desperately need is more ram, photoshop uses it like

a drunken sailor - 32megs would be ok but 48megs would be about optimum

):



 KR> anyway, it will be a while before i get back to programming - i got a

 KR> new toy, a flat bed scanner, and photoshop 3, so i'm busy feeding all

 KR> my old photos through it, guess i'd better try and "lose"
one of the

 KR> scsi 9 gig drives at work (-:



 BV> Wanna loose two ? :)



sorry buster, the line starts on the right, and goes right through the

door (: . acually, its a good example of what i said above, these drives

have a street price in the us of $US3750 plus tax thats about $A5270,

and you can buy them in sydney for about $5500.



                        Keith



... All I want is a warm bed, a kind word, and a 500Mhz CPU.



--- PPoint 1.88