Dear Fellow YACKonian,
Here's the latest offering of neat stuff from YACKland.
Lotus goofed! And, you win. Imagine having names and addresses of over 80 million households. Imagine being able to produce a mailing targeted to inner-city singles in the Sunbelt, cautious young couples in suburban Minneapolis, or mobile home families who own dogs but not cats. Or, unmarried wealthy women over the age of 65 in your neighborhood. Lotus Marketplace: Households contains name, address, age range, gender, marital status, dwelling type, neighborhood income range, and neighborhood lifestyle data on over 120 million American consumers. In January of this year, Lotus yanked the product off the market amid claims that it was a threat to privacy. But, through a special arrangement with a former Lotus employee, we are able to offer you the product that spooked the ACLU at an inflation-blasting price of just $79.90 ($6 P&H).
It's unfair. You may be barred from cloning a computer or program because you know too much. It's true. Lawsuits over copyright infringement in clone cases are often decided on the issue of whether the developers had inside information about the copyrighted product. Yet clones made this industry what it is today. IBM didn't sue Compaq for cloning the PC. And Apple hasn't sued Nutek, the first company to successfully clone the Mac. What's their secret? Strategic ignorance. Nutek made sure that its developers had access only to publicly-available information in cloning the Mac operating system, user interface, and hardware logic. It's called "clean-room development," and now you can have it, no matter how much you already know. Just use YACK's Clean Coders. These programmers work exclusively in Cobol on IBM System 360s, so you know they're ignorant. $79.90 per hour.
Massive object blowout! Forget late-night coding. Forget missed ship deadlines. Imagine grabbing the object class you need in a blazing ten seconds mean access time. If you're like me, you never have the object class you need when you need it. Now, you can have an amazing 8000 object classes in the YACK object libraries on CD-ROM. Choose from Set #1: Chrysler Parts; Set #2: Forms of the Syllogism; or Set #3: Animals of the Galapagos. And there are more to come! Each disk is just $79.90 ($6 P&H).
It's a problem. Kids love reading about space travel, but there aren't enough good books written at their level. And, if you're like me, you don't have the time to keep up with all the awesome developments in this exciting field. But now there is Space 2000, a mind-blowing excursion into outer space in easy-to-read loose-leaf format, written at the second-grade level. Your kids will thrill to these dazzling scenarios for the exploitation of space. Originally prepared by science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle for Vice President Dan Quayle, Space 2000 is now available to kids everywhere for just $79.90 ($6 P&H).
Forget clumsy character-recognition software. Forget puzzling over the inconsistencies of English spelling. The MacHandwriter, available for the first time in this country, will read your handwriting in any of an amazing three Japanese character sets. The secret? Japanese characters are more uniform and easier for computers to read than English. And, if you order before July 31, 1991, you get absolutely free the book Beginning Japanese. The MacHandwriter and book are just $79.90 while supply lasts ($6 P&H).
It's awesome. It's neat. It's super. I've slashed the price on the ever-popular video A Tribute to Bill Gates from my December mailing. All Bill's industry friends express their admiration and affection for the great man in this three-minute video, now just $6 (P&H included).
I have a confession. I can't really get any of these items for you, even though all but one of them are more or less real. The style parodied here is that of Drew Alan Kaplan, publisher and breathless author of the imitable DAK catalog of neat stuff. I've wanted to do Drew for years. Forget dry technical writing.
Copyright © 1991, Dr. Dobb's Journal