06.28.05

“Requirements Specification” is an Oxymoron

Posted in Software at 10:39 pm by wfrantz

I’ve never liked the term Requirements Specification or Software Requirements Specification even though these are widely used in the industry. There are requirements and there are specifications. The two are always different in my mind. Indeed, Webster’s defines them differently.

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06.19.05

Yahoo Music Service

Posted in Technology at 11:15 am by wfrantz

I signed up for Yahoo’s Music Unlimited service last week. I’ve found it to be quite nice. I don’t often go looking for the deep tracks, so Yahoo’s catalog seems pretty big to me. You can’t beat the price. $60 for a year of Yahoo is cheaper than 5 CDs! Looking at my collection of 300 disks, I could have bought 60 years of Yahoo music for less!

I don’t have an iPod, but I do have an iPAQ with a 1 Gig flash card. I also have an old portable CD player and a CD deck in my car. None of this stuff works with Yahoo’s service which relies on the recently created Windows DRM 10 (aka Janus) to protect its music. I don’t want to shell out $250 for a new portable music player and I don’t want to pay an extra $0.79/song for a burnable copy, so I set off to find a cheaper solution.

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06.10.05

Chevrolet is Phishing?

Posted in Technology at 1:25 pm by wfrantz

MarkMonitor

Today I received e-mail from Chevrolet that began like this:

Recently some of our unsubscribe data was deleted. Please help us update our records to ensure that we have captured your preferences correctly. If you have previously unsubscribed from Chevy email communications, please unsubscribe again http://www.imail.imrsvcs.com/UM/U.asp?…

I would never respond to such a message because it looks like phishing. There’s no valid return address. The website they ask you to respond to is the mysterious imrsvcs.com rather than chevrolet.com. The entire premise of the message seems dubious and there’s no way to verify the story.

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