The Fruits of my Labour

Password prompt for PHP CLI

Mango — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 22:08:38 +0000

Do you use PHP from the command line and need a password prompt? This is how you do.

Windows:

$scriptpw = new Com('ScriptPW.Password');
$password = $scriptpw->getPassword();

The Windows version requires the file scriptpw.dll. This comes with some versions of Windows, such as XP, but not others, such as 2000, Vista, or 7. If you don't have the file, simply copy scriptpw.dll from the system32 folder of another machine to the system32 folder of your machine. Then, from a Command Prompt window (running as Administrator for Vista and 7) enter the command regsvr32 scriptpw.dll

Linux:

system('stty -echo');
$password = trim(fgets(STDIN));
system('stty echo');
echo "\n";

Free Tools for Windows

Mango — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 01:13:08 +0000

Everyone seems to have their list of free Windows applications they can't do without, and here's ours. All of these are free for the download and their authors deserve a serious hat tip for all of their excellent work. We list them in alphabetical order:

AutoHotkey
AutoHotkey is the quintessential keystroke and mouse automator that you really must try to see just how powerful it is. You can automate almost any program by sending it keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can remap keys on your keyboard or mouse. One of our favourite features is that you may compile your finished script into a single EXE that may be run on any Windows computer.

Hidden Start
Hidden Start is great tool that allows you to run any Windows program, without a window or taskbar icon appearing.

ID3-TagIT 3
ID3-TagIT 3 is excellent software for bulk editing of ID3 tags in MP3 files.

Media Player Classic Home Cinema
This is our favourite media player. It plays a wide variety of media formats, is simple to use, and best of all, it uses just a few megabytes of RAM.

Notepad++
Notepad++ is our favourite text editor. It's fast, colour-codes many languages, supports collapsing of code, and has plenty of other very useful features. Be sure to get the NppAutoIndent plugin.

PuTTY
PuTTY is an excellent Telnet/SSH client. If you currently use the Windows Telnet program, you will no doubt consider PuTTY a breath of fresh air.

SmartRipper
SmartRipper is an excellent tool for ripping MPEG video from DVDs. We found it difficult to find a free program that would rip the original MPEG video into a single file without transcoding. SmartRipper does. Unfortunately, its author no longer offers it for download but it is easy to find with Google.

TreeSize Free
TreeSize Free is excellent software to show you which folders on your hard drive are using the most disk space.

UltraVNC
UltraVNC is our favourite flavour of VNC and is excellent and highly configurable remote desktop software. If we need to be able to use a computer that is in a different location as if sitting in front of it, or if we need to use a computer that has no keyboard, mouse, or monitor, UltraVNC is our tool of choice. For technical support purposes, we like UltraVNC SC, a tool that allows us to build a single EXE file that we may send to a client.

Windows Grep
Ever need to search through a large number of files for some specific text? Windows has a built-in tool to do this...but it doesn't always work. Enter Windows Grep, the Windows version of the popular Grep tool. It even supports regular expressions.

WinSCP
WinSCP is a great companion to PuTTY and is the best FTP/SFTP client we've ever found.

XYNTService Project
With the XYNTService Project, you may start any program (including PHP or AutoHotkey scripts) as a Windows Service. It has more features and is easier to use than srvany.exe!

Zoiper
The free version of this excellent VoIP softphone supports up to three SIP accounts. It also supports IAX!

Video Editing Software for Windows: Sony vs. Adobe

Mango — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 21:37:44 +0000

These opinions were formed based on recent use of Sony Vegas Pro 10 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 on a computer running Windows 7 with a quad core Intel Core i7-2600K CPU @ 3.4 Ghz and 8GB of RAM.

Spoiler alert: Sony Vegas Pro wins!

Vegas memory consumption is better. At this moment we have both Vegas and Premiere running, both with a similar project loaded, and both sitting idle. Vegas is consuming less than 200MB of RAM; Premiere over 850MB.

Vegas doesn't have to render previews as Premiere sometimes does. It's frustrating to make the smallest of edits and then have to re-render a preview to view your work. This machine has a 2600K; it can handle rendering on-the-fly.

Vegas renders our finished product significantly faster. Premiere took 9.5 hours to render 1.5 hours of 720p video; Vegas took 11 minutes to render a similarly complex project of the same length using the same source footage and same output file format.

Premiere crashes randomly and has odd quirks that occasionally require Googling for workarounds. Vegas lets us get to work editing with a minimum amount of fuss. This is our opinion based on use of Premiere Pro since version 1.5 on multiple operating system/hardware combinations.

Sony DVD Architect Pro's user interface feels rudimentary compared to Adobe Encore. However, DVD Architect Pro works properly and is not ulcer-inducing as Encore is.

We like Premiere's user interface slightly better though that could be simply because we're used to it and haven't yet had as much experience with Vegas. One notable difference is that Vegas does not permit you to create multiple timelines in a single project. However, you can place Vegas files inside other Vegas files. That said, we find Vegas more efficient for creating dissolves between clips.

Conclusion: if Premiere Pro was built to the same high calibre as Adobe's industry-standard Photoshop, we'd use it. As it is, we use Vegas in order to maintain our sanity. We understand that Vegas Pro 11 was released about three months ago and look forward to trying it.

Offset printing: Good, Fast, and Cheap. Pick any 3.

Mango — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 05:50:55 +0000

When something is this good, we feel it is our duty to let everyone know about it...and for us, "everyone" is the readers of this blog.

We're referring to Juke Box Print Shop, which in our opinion qualifies as the coveted trifecta in any industry: good, fast, AND cheap! How they do this, we're not sure, but we like it. Here's our Juke Box Print Shop Review:

The finished product looks amazing. Seriously. They output 420 line screen which is an amazing improvement over the ~200 line screen we're used to. The end result looks so good, it's barely distinguishable from photographic printing.

Their trimming is exceptionally accurate. In our opinion, great printing is wasted if trimming is sloppy. Fortunately, Juke Box aims to please. Mango inspected every single postcard in a recent order and was delighted to find each card looked as pretty as you please. (Yes, Mango has OCD. Why do you ask?)

All of our orders have arrived in a timely fashion. Some were completed a few days before the estimate; some up to three days after. They stress that their time estimate is in fact an estimate but in our experience it is an accurate average of the product's completion date. From file submission to receiving the box from FedEx is about two weeks. We could pick the product up, but shipping is inexpensive enough that it's cheaper to have it delivered.

We've saved perhaps the most important point for last. Juke Box's website rocks. It allows you to control absolutely every aspect of your project by yourself. You can tinker with paper stock, coating, quantities, and anything else you may require, to your heart's content. The quote even updates in real time - there's no more waiting a day or two for a reply from a sales rep. File submission and proofing is also all done online.

If you're Canadian and you do any full-colour offset printing, we highly recommend you consider Juke Box Print Shop for your next project. We rate them five out of five stars.

As per usual, we do not participate in Juke Box's referral program and endorse them even without commissions.

Dymo Label Printer on a Tomato Print Server

Mango — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 03:40:11 +0000

In case anyone's wondering, and since we couldn't find any references to this anywhere, a Dymo LabelWriter 400 will work perfectly well with a Tomato Print Server. We used an ASUS WL-520gU router with the Teddy-Bear build of Tomato firmware. Setting up the printer on the router was just a matter of plugging it in, and installing the printer within Windows simply required a TCP/IP printer port to be created, using the IP address of the router, and the settings for Generic Network Card.

Fax-to-Email for Canada

Mango — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 20:26:15 +0000

Let us start out by saying that finding a fax-to-email solution that met our requirements was a chore. Most people we asked for advice told us, "Faxing is archaic. Forget that and use email instead!". We agree, but as long as people insist on sending us important things by fax, we will need a way to receive them.

Allow us to introduce you to a telecom company called AcroVoice. AcroVoice is based in Victoria BC and provides business and residential VoIP service, and also wholesales Canadian VoIP 9-1-1 and American E911, 411 Directory Assistance, Caller ID Name / CNAM Lookup, and of course, it also provides fax-to-email. Keep reading to find the criteria with which we evaluated their fax-to-email service, and how AcroVoice performed.

Number porting

Few fax-to-email providers will allow porting of numbers in and out, but AcroVoice allows both. Our port was fast, involved no downtime, and was generally uneventful.

Security

The most common reason we hear for using a fax machine is security. Many people feel more secure knowing that there is a phone line between them and their destination, rather than the public internet. AcroVoice provides an excellent alternative that we haven't seen anywhere else: if you wish, they'll encrypt the email based on a public key that you supply. In order to decrypt the email, you may install your private key in an email client such as Thunderbird, and the encrypted fax will arrive just like a regular email. Additionally, their mail servers use encryption when communicating with other SMTP servers that support it.

Reliability

Fortunately for us, reliability is something that AcroVoice has not overlooked. AcroVoice not only has equipment in Victoria BC, but also Montreal QC. If a network or hardware issue should arise with equipment in one facility, the other will still be able to receive faxes.

Efficacy

The most important criteria is: does it work? We're delighted to say that AcroVoice outperforms every other fax-to-email service we tested, to the point that in the six months we've been using them, we haven't ever had a problem. In case you missed that, let us say it again: every single fax that we've ever been sent in the past six months has arrived exactly as our customer intended. We're delighted with AcroVoice's high standards - and, frankly, astonished!

You may ask how we are able to claim we've never not received a fax. One useful feature that AcroVoice offers is notification of calls to your fax number that fail for any reason. Though we haven't yet encountered any faxes that do not arrive, (except when we simulated such a case to test this feature) we have discovered that a LARGE number of our customers accidentally dial our fax number first before calling our main line.

It may be worthwhile to describe the tests we performed before selecting AcroVoice as our fax provider. We assembled a collection of fax machines made by five of the most popular manufacturers. (In no particular order: HP, Canon, Brother, Toshiba, and Ricoh.) Then we sent test faxes using multiple combinations of these machines and phone lines from five different carriers - a mixture of traditional POTS and cable phone, both local and long distance. We also sent several faxes to our AcroVoice number using five other popular internet fax services.

Then we received an email from AcroVoice inquiring about the "bazillion test calls to Mango's line".

Pricing

AcroVoice fax-to-email service costs $15/month, or $10/month in a bundle. Number porting is available in many Canadian rate centres.

Conclusion

As with all of the posts on this blog, we don't participate in referral programs or otherwise receive compensation of any sort from any of the companies mentioned here, including free service - we pay for what we test. We make a point of knowing what works for our own purposes, and feel that this information should be shared. Our verdict: AcroVoice provides the only Canadian fax-to-email service that we can confidently recommend. Thanks for reading!

Easily disable ClearType in Windows 7

Mango — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 17:01:38 +0000

Because we're sure some of you who adore ClearType will ask, yes, we tried it for well over a month and just couldn't get used to staring at what looked like (to us) blurry text all day. Fortunately, we found this:

Disable ClearType in Windows 7

It is interesting to note that we had to use the "Auto Adjust" feature on our monitors after doing this.

Which codec should I use for HD YouTube Videos?

Mango — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 17:11:01 +0000

We wanted to upload some of our video projects to YouTube. But which format would produce the highest quality, after YouTube's processing? We decided to test four of the most popular formats: MPEG-2, AVC, Windows Media, (16Mbit/sec each) and uncompressed (over 800 gigabytes per hour!). Which do you like best?

In terms of artifacts in the image, we did not notice any differences between the formats, with the naked eye. We did notice colour shifts, but none were dramatic enough for us to be able to decide that one format was clearly better than another.

Here is the amount of time it took our hardware to encode each version:

MainConcept MPEG-2 16Mbps - 10:01
Uncompressed - 13:19
AVC 16Mbps - 36:24
Windows Media 16Mbps - 24:14

For future projects, we anticipate using MPEG-2. Since it encoded in the shortest amount of time, it is an excellent choice for our purposes. It's true that AVC can theoretically produce a better quality image at the same bitrate, however since YouTube videos are re-encoded at a compartively low bitrate, we do not find the improvement worthwhile.

The above samples, in order: MPEG-2, Uncompressed, AVC, Windows Media.

Mango, do you believe in the supernatural?

Mango — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 05:51:52 +0000

I was working my company's booth at a trade show last weekend. I know - mistake. But it did provide some excellent entertainment. I had the most interesting customer strut up to me and ask if I believed in the supernatural.

I thought about this. I'm pretty open-minded. I certainly don't disbelieve that there are things unexplainable by natural laws. But quite frankly, I'm a programmer. I'm pretty analytical. So far, I haven't personally experienced anything that I don't have a good explanation for. So I said, "You know what, I don't really think too much about it. But what's on your mind?"

The customer got all excited. "Have you...have you...have you ever seen an orb?!"

Heck, the show is slow, and I'm curious. So I said, "Dude, why don't you tell me all about that?"

He could barely get the words out, he was so excited. "It's...it's...it's a phenomenon," he explained, bolding and italicizing the word "phenomenon" as he spoke, for emphasis.

"Ok," I said, so far unimpressed, but still curious.

"They're everywhere," he said excitedly. "But we don't know where! The only time you can see them is if you're in a place with the right kind of energy...and if you take a picture of them with a digital camera!"

"Ok," I said, still unimpressed, but even more curious.

"Here, I've even been lucky enough to take some myself! I'll show you," he said. He whipped out an HP Photosmart camera which honour prevents me from laughing at, because it is the same as the first digital camera I ever owned. "I've got 1400 pictures on this thing...I'll be a little while," he explains.

When I got back from my coffee, he had found his picture of the orb.

Now, I admit, I am incredibly curious at this point. If working a trade show was going to be the difference between old-Mango and new-Mango that experiences the supernatural, (with his digital camera) I would have to start volunteering to do more trade shows to see what else would happen.

As I looked at his picture, my hopes were quite quickly dashed.

"Dude, that's lens flare. It's when you have a bright light source and the light bounces around between the lens elements in your camera. Sorry."

He looks at me disbelievingly. "It's even on Google," I add, for credibility. This is apparently quite effective.

I feel a little bit bad, because the look on his face changed to one that was as if I had taken away his pudding pop.

"But...my friend told me they were a phenomenon," he said sadly.

I probably shouldn't have helpfully added, "You can just edit those right out in Photoshop!"

The story doesn't end there. So far, I have told this story to three people. The fact is, twice I've gotten part way through, and the person has said, "Oh yeah, and they show you a picture and it's lens flare or dust on the sensor, right? I've got a friend who totally believes that. Crazy nutjobs."

The Cult of Those Who Believe Lens Flare is Supernatural is ostensibly trying to take over the world. I would be afraid if they weren't so entertaining.

Business Equipment Leasing Tips

Mango — Sun, 16 May 2010 16:10:57 +0000

Mango runs the IT department at his day job, which involves evaluating business equipment for purchase or lease. Here are a few tips that we would really like everyone to know. Or if you don't care about leasing but like making fun of sales people, you can just skip to the bottom.

Find out the Purchase Price
Every salesperson we have spoken with has required massive amounts of convincing to reveal the purchase price of a piece of equipment. We're not sure if it's because they don't want us to get sticker shock, or if they're on commission from the leasing company. But here's an example of why the purchase price is something very important to know: maybe it's far cheaper to purchase than to lease it! We currently have a printer on lease that cost an astonishing FORTY-FOUR PERCENT more to lease than it would to purchase. (Mango hastens to add here that he was NOT the one who made that deal.) At this rate, it would have been cheaper to even put the equipment on a credit card, or better still a line of credit.

ALWAYS negotiate a buyout.
Here's another advantage to purchasing equipment: when a typical lease ends, you get...nothing. If you've negotiated a buyout, you can purchase the equipment for often 10% of its original value. Then you have the option to actually own something after paying for it for five years.

Myth: If I purchase equipment, the company's service contract won't cover me.
Not always. Sometimes, the service contract is separate from the lease, and completely optional. You can purchase the service contract separately, not at all, or on an a la carte basis.

Girl, you've got nothing but time.
Maybe that's lyrics from a Sara Evans song, and maybe you're not a girl, but you still have nothing but time. Don't be taken in by promotional pricing that they can "only guarantee until the end of the quarter". These people want your business. Every time we've said, "well, we can't do a deal until after the quarter, but we like that price," they've said "...well...ok."

Could you outsource?
If you're doing a lot of production in-house, consider outsourcing it. We considered replacing a very old and decrepit folding machine and were dismayed by the prices we were quoted. Then we investigated outsourcing all our large volume mailing. As it turned out, after we factored in staff time, we discoved that we could pay to the outsourcing company exactly what we currently paid to do the work ourselves. It was a bonus not to have to do the work, and as an additional bonus, we didn't have to replace expensive equipment.

Is it really worth it?
Maybe not. Why not divide the monthly cost of the equipment by the number of times per month you expect to use it?

Could you live with home office-grade machines?
We find it very economical and convenient to do our own colour laser printing. We were offered some very large and very very expensive colour laser printers by various office equipment companies. We ended up purchasing a Xerox colour laser printer online for an astonishing $30 + toner! Off-brand toner is approximately half the price of OEM toner, and in this case the image quality looks exactly the same. This brought the cost of an average page with 50% coverage (we think figures based on 5% coverage are worthless) to an appealing $0.09 - exactly half the price of the cheapest local print shop. True, it's a much smaller machine than what we were offered by the office equipment companies - in fact, it sits on a desk - but it did come with a year of free on-site service, and is more than up to the task of printing several hundred pages in a day. We used eBay saved searches to find excellent deals on extra paper trays, a duplexer, and spare parts that we will one day need to replace.

NEVER do pre-authorized payments.
Why? Because every leasing company we've ever dealt with never stops them on time. It's true that writing a cheque every month is time consuming, but convincing them to give back two or three payments AFTER your lease expires is MUCH MORE time consuming. Dealing with them suddenly starting payments again THREE YEARS after you no longer have the equipment is even more time consuming. If you do have a pre-authorized payment, and you request that your bank block future payments, spend the extra $5 to have them block payments of any amount, not just the typical amount. Sometimes, if the bank declines a payment, the first thing the leasing company will do is subtract $0.01 and try again.

Put the expiry dates of leases on your calendar, in advance if you need to.
We do this, and we also have a sticker on each piece of leased equipment that states when it expires. The reason is: sometimes, the contract states that the lease auto-renews itself for a year (or five!) if you continue to pay for it. Sometimes it states that the lease must be cancelled at least three months before the end of the term. To get around this, we simply submit a letter at the time we sign a lease stating we wish to cancel the lease at the end of the term. (It qualifies as "at least three months"!)

Read the contract. Read every single word.
We needed to replace a mailing machine. Fortunately, there are only three companies in Canada licensed by Canada Post to manufacture postage meters, so research was relatively simple. We were intrigued by a machine offered to us by Pitney-Bowes...but dismayed to find the contract was four pages long and written in positively microscopic-sized font. Buried on page two, in the middle of the section about obtaining service to the machine, was: "PBC may change the services, the terms pursuant to which the services are provided to you, or terminate such services, upon written notice to you." Wait, what?! They can decide that they don't want to provide service to us, on a whim? Oh, but it gets better! On page four: "After the first year of the initial term, PBC may increase the subscription and/or rental fees upon 30 days prior written notice."

Yes, you read that right. They can actually increase the rental fees of the equipment and there's nothing you can do about it!! We mentioned this to our salesperson, and her response was a shocking, "Well, it probably wouldn't go up by much, if at all." We asked how much it had gone up in the past, but were not surprised to be told that she was "not able to provide that information". We suggested that since it wouldn't go up by much, she wouldn't mind giving us a different contract without that provision. She told us she couldn't do that. We asked for permission to terminate the lease early without penalty if the rate went up. That too was shot down.

Needless to say, we didn't sign THAT one.

Find out what consumables cost.
Find out exactly what consumables cost, including shipping and handling, and whether or not you can get them from off-brand suppliers. (You'll have to figure out this last one on your own.) Find out how long a consumable will last in the real world. Toner cartridges for printers are often quoted by how many pages they'll print at 5% coverage. 5% coverage is about equivalent to a small logo in one corner of the page. If you plan to print more than that, and you almost certainly will, the cartridges will last for a significantly less number of pages.

On the other hand, maybe it's okay to have expensive consumables. If your machine is inexpensive enough that it offsets the cost of the consumables, perhaps it will even out. We had someone once tell us that their printer was the best because their cartridge lasted for 30,000 pages and cost "next to nothing". Perhaps it was true, for given values of "next to nothing", but their printer itself was nearly double the price of everyone else's. For our use, there was no possible way that total cost of ownership would have been cheaper.

Tips for specific types of equipment:

Copiers and printers
If you have to pay for toner, find out how the machine calculates how much toner is remaining. Some cartridges have a counter that counts up each time you print a page. A friend of ours has a Samsung printer that does this. But here's the problem: the counter increments whether or not you've used that colour! So if you print a few thousand pages of plain black text, your colour cartridges will be worthless, even though you haven't used them! Our favourite printers have bottles of toner instead of cartridges. These bottles have no counter; the printer simply uses them until they're empty. They're also very very easy to refill.

If you purchase a home office-grade printer, try and find one that can be connected to a network so that you can share it amongst a few computers easily. Also, consider a model that supports PostScript. PostScript is useful for many reasons. For example, if the printer manufacturer does not provide drivers for Linux, but the printer supports PostScript, it's often trivial to make it work.

Postage equipment
In Canada, Canada Post prohibits you from owning a postage meter. However, you can own a postage machine. One is completely useless without the other. Sometimes, the contracts for the meter and the machine are separate, so if you decide to cancel a contract, be sure to cancel both. Better still, choose a company that only asks that you sign a single contract. We investigated purchasing a postage machine and renting a meter. However, the meter rental was only a few dollars less expensive than renting the machine and the meter together.

We mentioned Pitney Bowes before. We've also used equipment from Neopost. It had a device to automatically seal envelopes, but we were never able to make it work particularly well. We had their technician come in a few times to service it, but with very little success. One day, we received two letters in the mail: one from Neopost, and one from the local Neopost dealer. The letter from Neopost was not sealed. The letter from the dealer was taped shut. After this stunning display of confidence in the company's own product, we gave up trying.

We currently use a machine from Francotyp-Postalia. It is a quarter of the price of the machine we used to have from Neopost with the only difference being that the scale is a few kg smaller.

Do you like the salesperson?
Finally, follow your instincts. If your instincts say the salesperson is honest, (and you have good instincts,) they probably are. Here's something to watch out for: if all the salesperson will do is tell you everything they can think of that's negative about their competitor's product, that's a bad sign. If they'll actually talk about their own product and tell you about everything positive about it, you're probably ready to do a deal. And finally, if you start hearing quotes like these...well...you have our permission to laugh at them and then write about it on the internet.

Him: "...and the competitor's model doesn't have an automatic feeder!"
Us: "Actually...according to their salesperson, yes it does."
Him: "Nope. I can assure you that 100%. It doesn't have an automatic feeder."
Us: "Ok, well, we won't argue with you about a product that's not yours, so--"
Him: "IT DOESN'T!!"
[We took the competitor's product. It had an automatic feeder.]

Him: "This is a GREAT deal! It's the best deal you're gonna get!"
Us: "You told us that with the deal you offered us yesterday, and the deal you offered us two days ago. But each time you've said that you've later offered us a better deal."
Him: "But this IS the best deal you're gonna get. You're just gonna have to trust me."
[Three days later, he offered us yet a better deal. We selected a competitor.]

Him: "You could go with [model A], or you could go with [model B] for just $30 more per month."
Us: "What's [model B] do?"
Him: "It's..." [shrugs] "...better. Better built."
Us: "So your [model A] isn't well-built?"
Him: "Oh, [model A] is well-built too."
Us: "What features does it not have that [model B] does?"
Him: "Not...really any. But it's better. In your case I'd recommend it."

[he wanted us to take a refurb]
Him: "You can tell it's been well-taken care of. You can just tell by lookin' at it."
Us: "It's...got scratches and dents all over it."
Him: "Yeah, but it it works well. Inside. You can just tell by lookin' at it."
Us: "Ok. How can you tell that?"
[We expected some sort of explanation for his claim. Apparently our question was not specific enough.]
Him: "By lookin' at it!"

Him: "Oh, a binding machine! When you want to replace that, talk to me! I know all about those!"
Us: "That's a paper cutter."

Him: "So, when you're thinking about replacing your machine, just give me a call!"
Us: "We doubt we'll be doing that. The current one breaks down all the time and it's terribly frustrating to use. It's also too expensive for the amount we use it."
Him: "Well, I'm sure you'll like our newest model. I could let it go at [price that's much more than what we're paying]."
Us: "That's even FURTHER from being cost-effective."
Him: "Well, we're not going to know that for sure, are we? Not until we come in and do a complete collective cost-comparison analysis!"
[We are NOT going to purchase anything from a salesman who can't even think of a buzzword for "analysis" that starts with a C.]