Events

December 7, 2002

Welcome to the latest issue of the Argentum Newsletter, which will bring you up to date on what we have done over the recent weeks to further upgrade our software and services. A more detailed list of events is available at http://www.argentuma.com/news.html. Your feedback is welcome at .

Sincerely,

Argentum Corporation,
http://www.argentuma.com/
(206) 337-1724

Our thanks.
On the edge of technology.
Activation, Zip64 and MP3. What's next?
Share your satisfaction.
Christmas give-away.

Our thanks.

2002 was a great year. We would like to thank all of you for the support your provided throughout the year. Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! We hope we get to meet more of you in 2003. Enjoy your holidays and rest up for the year to come.

On the edge of XML technology.

Okay, it's finally done. In short, our web-site is now XML-based. The whole back-end infrastructure has been upgraded and is now powered by XML family of technologies. The original site's content and structure is maintained in plain XML. An XSLT transformation is used to transform the original XML source into XHTML level one formatted content. Cascading style sheets (CSS) with a few JavaScript insets are in use to style and decorate the resulting XHTML content.

As a result of upgrade the content became more manageable, the look and feel of the site is more unified now. The site became W3C standards-compliant in every respect in order to get better accessibility in alternative browsers, like Opera and all Gecko-based browsers including but not limited to Mozilla, Netscape Navigator, CompuServe, AOL for Macintosh and a few others.

We have also put some content to the site to help search engine visitors easier find us through highly relevant keywords. The content is essentially the documentation topics that come with our products. So the essential information is now online in full detail and you are welcome to check it out using the following links:

Other notable improvement relates to the structure of our site in whole. In short the CSS formatting used on our site is now in full conformity to CSS level one specification. This also leads to a better rendering in today's CSS-compliant browsers, like Opera, Mozilla and others. If you find any bugs however, please let us know.

What's next?

We have the following major incentives for the next year:

Product activation server.

We are going to set up an activation server to validate and authenticate purchased licenses on the Internet. Each user installing the Argentum product on their computer will be required to go through a very simple activation process on the server. It will be as easy as entering your license key, supplying the computer key and receiving the activation key to finally activate the software on that particular computer. We're hopping this would prevent possible fraud issues and cases of license misuse and overuse. Do you mind it?

Zip64 multi-gigabyte archives on modern top-notch computers.

You may already know that the largest Zip archive Argentum Backup can create is nearly 2 GB (2,048 MB). That's the limitation of original Zip compression specification. We are planning to address this issue in the near future by supporting the newest Zip64 specification that is able to hold large quantities of data up to 4,294,967,295 GB. Do you need such a feature and consider it should be a top-priority plan for us?

MP3 audio cleaning and tuning with minimal processing.

We are looking for a chance to create a new product aimed to clean and tune up MP3 music files without actually reprocessing them with such harmful operations as decoding and coding. The basic features might be: cleaning the MP3 file by removing broken and unused chunks (some MP3's are full of them), cutting the silence at the beginning and at the end, normalizing the volume, maybe including the frequency scope analyzer and corrector. Would you be interested in such kind of product? What other features would you like to see if it eventually be released in the future?

The bottom line.

Your feedback on the above three topics is highly welcome and we'll actually be making a decision on what to start first with according to your feedback. You can also send your own suggestions even if they are totally off topics outlined above. You can either e-mail back to us or use an easy-to-fill form at http://www.argentuma.com/support.html where you can stay anonymous.

Thanks in advance.

Share your satisfaction.

What makes us keeping our software so reasonably priced is actually the fact that we do not use expensive advertising. People often find our tools through the world of mouth, in private and public e-mails, from news groups, e-communities and message boards. If you feel you're satisfied with us please don't hesitate to constantly share your opinion either offline or online. This way you help us to survive in today's extremely competitive and aggressive Internet marketplace.

Thank you!

Christmas give-away.

In case you're interested in purchasing, here is a discount coupon code for you:

NICE-MPLB

It is active for all of our products for a limited time. A link to purchase is the same as before:

http://www.argentuma.com/ordering.html

If you ever want to unsubscribe just answer this e-mail provided that your e-mail address is included in the body of the message. If you have any comments, please feel free to contact us at .

Best regards,