The compensation con is a form of confidence trick. The swindle takes the form of a criminal carrying a package, perhaps gift wrapped, containing worthless broken glass or crockery. The con artist waits around the vicinity of a shop selling expensive vases or similar, for a suitable victim, and then pretends to be bumped into by the victim. At this point the con artist drops the package with the resulting clearly audible sound of breakages occurring, and proceeds to claim that the package had contained an expensive item, and its breakage was the fault of the victim. The victim is then pressed to pay compensation towards the cost of the supposedly broken item. The con is particularly effective if the con artist is an attractive or elderly woman and targets wealthy looking, middle-aged men. Research Compensation Con
The courier con is a confidence trick which has been successfully played out many times in the United Kingdom. The con takes the form of the con artist establishing a premium-rate telephone line which costs a lot to telephone, with most of the proceeds going to the con artist. The con artist then dons suitable motorcycle or other courier clothing, including a dummy personal-mobile-radio, and calls at an office building purporting to be there to collect a package. Since a courier has not been called for the supposed package to go to the declared destination, the receptionist will inform the 'courier' of the apparent mistake. The 'courier' then asks if they can telephone their office to get instructions, or report the error, or similar. The con artist may even make a pretence of trying to use the dummy radio, claiming the battery is flat or it doesn't work in buildings. Most often the receptionist will allow the 'courier' to make a telephone call, which is of course made not to an office but to the premium-rate telephone line, at the expense of the unsuspecting company occupying the office. The longer the con artist can remain on the telephone, carrying on an imaginary conversation, the more revenue can be generated, before they politely leave with suitable apologies. Research Courier Con
3S Accounting is a versatile accounting computerpackage for the PC designed for the small office/ home office (SOHO) market. 3S Accounting is full featured, easy to use and completely free. It includes a general ledger, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and an invoicing and order-entry system. Reports can be exported directly to MSOffice and Corel WordPerfect. Research 3S Accounting
Aldus Persuasion is a full-featured desktop-presentation product for the Mac that lets you create graphics presentations using slides, transparencies, speaker notes, audience handouts, and on-screen slide shows. It includes an outliner, freehand-drawing tools, and business-charting capabilities. presentations can be created from scratch, or can include charts created in a spreadsheet or any graphics imported from another package.
Aldus Persuasion includes an outliner to begin creating presentations. Once the outliner and slide masters are set, the program automatically creates your slides. The outline text and slide text are hot linked, so changes made to one are automatically reflected in the other. Speakers notes can be created from the outline. Aldus Persuasion lets you create multiple masters for slides, notes, and handouts. You define page orientation, background colour and pattern, and the graphics to be placed on the master. You can add a title, body text, charts, tables, or organisation charts to the master. More than one master can be used in a presentation. This means that a company can intersperse master text slides, master chart slides and master table slides in a single presentation. New masters can be created based on existing ones. The drawing tools are very advanced and allow editing of all characteristics of an object. Although Aldus Persuasion does not do calculations, it includes powerful chart editing capabilities and provides full control over axes, tick marks, legend placement, formatting of axes, switching of axes, and numerical formats. Persuasion lets you import worksheets from spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel and generate charts using the data.
Aldus Persuasion outputs to a number of slide services as well as printers and film recorders compatible with the Apple System. The slide-show generator lets you set the delay between slides and layers on slides. You can set the show for full screen, partial screen, or continuous cycle, where the show automatically repeats, or set it to stop after it has gone through the show once. You can also set the show to either automatic advance where you can set the timing, or manual where you click the mouse to move from slide to slide. Research Aldus Persuasion
The replacement for Draw Applause, Applause II by Ashton Tate is a business graphics, charting, drawing, and presentation package all in one. It can be used to create slides, do on screen presentations, or create annotated charts. The picture Window includes drawing tools such as text, lines, circles, arcs, boxes, and polygons which can be used to annotate charts or create freehand illustrations. Images can be copied, moved deleted, rotated, sized, and stretched. Objects can be customised with fill colours, patterns, and line widths.
A small clip-art library of images is also available. The images are object-oriented so you can edit the individual elements. The program includes some interesting and artistic special effects. For example, you can create colour blends by picking two colours and the starting points for each in an enclosed area. The product automatically fills the colours so they blend into the centre of the object you are filling. This creates the illusion of three-dimensional objects. You can create slide shows with Applause II although there is no runtime slide show utility. Links can be established between Applause II and any data file, including Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, any Master product, or Framework. This means that presentations can be created more easily and efficiently than if you needed to key data in from scratch. Research Applause II
Autoroute was a computerised map information system built using data from the Ordnance Survey. It allowed quick planning of the most suitable route between points in Great Britain. To use Autoroute, the user first needed to tell the package the travelling speed of the vehicle. Then, enter the start point and the desired destination, along with other places to visit - or places to avoid. Autoroute would then calculate the quickest and the shortest routes, which could be displayed as a colour map and then printed. A set of written directions could also be printed, including such detail as 'At GilletteComer, turn left onto A310 to Richmond.' The estimated journey time and total mileage were also calculated. Since Autoroute appeared in the 1980's, it has been superseded by numerous similar software packages, many of them available online through the Internet. Research Autoroute
Byline by Ashton-Tate offers a style of desktop publishing for people who don't like or don't have a mouse. Not quite a WYSIWYGpackage nor a fully-fledged batch program, Byline uses a page layout system with keyboard-only interaction and instant preview. Byline uses familiar commands and keyboard sequences to lay out a page, complete with multiple columns and graphics. It can be used to integrate text and graphics from many sources including standard word processing and paint programs, dBase users can read data directly from their database and format it with Byline. Grids are used to set up pages and help create an organised document. One side of the screen displays the document while the other side contains a form which allows definition of document characteristics such as titles, borders and font style and sizes. Nearly all formatting is maintained when files are imported. Byline can edit the text with its built-in word processor which includes cut-and-paste and search-and-replace functions. Changes made to word processing documents in
Byline are reflected in the original file. Four fonts are provided. Times, Helvetica, Courier and dBase. Other fonts and typeface sizes which are available in a given printer are inaccessible. Byline's graphic editing capabilities include cropping and scaling of images. All other editing must be done in the graphics package. Especially useful is the screen capture utility which allows any screen image to be saved if it is in a graphic file format Byline can read. A demonstration disk is available. This software is designed for minor publishing requirements giving simple, effective desktop publishing facilities and which are easy to learn but flexible enough to produce good handouts, memos and the occasional newsletters. Byline will produce documents which are more readable and impressive than ordinary typed documents but not to PageMaker or Ventura Publisher standard. Research Byline
CA-Cricket Presents by Computer Associates is a desktop presentation package for the Mac that lets you conceptualise, create, and produce complete presentations including slides, transparencies, speaker's notes, and audience handouts. It includes a copy of Acta Outliner, which can be used during the conceptualisation stage of a presentation. A hotlink can be created between the Acta Outliner and the presentation so edits made to the outline are reflected in the presentation. You can produce charts, overhead slides, flipcharts, illustrations, and tables complete with legends and captions. The product includes freehand painting and drawing capabilities and a graded background feature for creating the background for your shows.
CA-Cricket Presents' basic business chart capabilities include a data-entry screen or importing files from spreadsheets and generating charts from the data. The tabling tool lets you create matrices to easily handle numbers and word charts. Research CA-Cricket Presents
Canvas is a precision drawingpackage for the Mac that lets you create presentation materials, desktop publishing images, or architectural renderings. Its large selection of powerful, easy-to-use tools makes it one of the more popular drawing programs. Icons and menu options provide continuous multipoint Bezier curves, instant autotrace conversion of bitmap images to unlimited drawing layers, 1/65,000th of an inch precision, and text and graphics in 16.7 million colours plus PostScript grey scales in 1% increments.
For touching up clipped or scanned art, Canvas provides a number of painting tools which can be used on the same layers as the drawing tools. Canvas supports 24-bit colour on the Macintosh II, hairlines to 1/1000th of an inch, auto-dimensioning of lines and arcs, and a zoom capacity ranging from 3% to 3,200%. The program adds area and perimeter calculations, a peel-away ruler, PixelPaintcompatible colour palettes, smooth multipoint polygons, and special effects such as object rotation in one degree increments, distortion, and one or two point perspective.
Canvas also features object libraries (macros) that function as extensions to the drawing toolbox. Up to 32 objects can be added to any macro library, and macro libraries can be saved as individual files. A desk accessory version of Canvas can be invoked while working with other programs and provides approximately 80%, of the program's capabilities. The program also has a bitmap conversion option for transforming scanned colour or grey scale images into one of 15 predefined halftone or dithered images (for the Macintosh II only). Research Canvas
CC:Mail is a network communications system which functions transparently across different networks, operating systems and hardware platforms. As such it has the ability to connect groups of users across a LAN or collection of LANs. CC:Mail enables a central database to be maintained which is called the CC:Mail post office. This structure contains single copies of messages together with pointers to individual mailboxes. This cuts down on network traffic and also disk storage space. As the package is of a modular nature, CC:Mail may be expanded as requirements grow with ease. Anything that can be created or viewed on a workstation may be transmitted across the LAN to the central post office. When the message is received by the post office the recipient is notified. Items within the message can be multiple so that one message may contain many items. These items can be text, graphics, files and screen output. Items may be edited when they are viewed and returned the sender, forwarded, printed, archived or deleted. If the item is of
special interest it may be saved in a private folder for personal use or made public by placing it on a bulletin board. If an old message is required a search can be made by name, keyword phrase, and date. Management of the system is carried out by the CC:Mail Administrator who creates the maildirectory. Research CC:Mail
The Probert Encyclopaedia was designed, edited and programed by
Matt and Leela Probert
Abbreviations
Research Compensation Con
