One thing that is very common is to replace graphics image with something else, something which boldly says "stop doing this". I've known some people who use pornographic images or include swear words. I would not recommend these actions, as they are unprofessional. A simple "This person is a thief" or "this website is stealing bandwidth" or something to that effect is fine.

Don't worry about how big you make graphic - it will show up just fine on offender's web page. If they did not include high and width tags, graphic will show as is, otherwise it will be distorted - but who cares?

Remember to fully optimize graphic image. A GIF with eight colors is perfect, and a JPEG image compress by 50% to even 80% is great. This reduces effect of bandwidth stealing by lowering size of image that's being stolen.

Let's say you have an image that's 50k in size and it's being stolen. The web site that's using image is displaying it 100 times a day. That's 5 megabytes of stolen bandwidth per day! If you can create a new graphic and optimize image to, say, 5k, you reduce effect to 500k of bandwidth instead of 5mb. In addition, of course, since person stealing bandwidth will hopefully stop doing it, then you may eliminate problem all together.

You can even reduce graphic to a simple 2 color 1X1 pixel image if you want (although that will not display rude message). This may be your only option if webmaster still does not remove link to your images.

Oh yes, there is another important piece to remember. You have to change name of graphic that your own pages are using. Otherwise, of course, your pages will show that you are a thief, and that's not what you want.

Let's say you are using a graphic called "mine.jpg" and it is 127k in size. Several sites link to that graphic. You go to each of those sites, get webmaster email address from each, and send a polite letter asking them to remove link. You are ignored (which is often case). A harsher email is not only ignored but one of webmasters responds with a nasty email.

Most companies make it very simply for me and my staff. If I want to license Norton Antivirus, all I need to do is count number of machines on which product is to be installed, write up a purchase order and call salesperson to order product. It works same with Conversion Plus, Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, WinZIP and any of other hundreds of products that we require to keep our company in business.

You would think that Microsoft would want to make it easy for people like me to give them money. I know that if I were in their shoes that's what I would do.

I should stop for a minute and explain that I love many Microsoft products. Windows 2000 (server and professional) are very solid, well-thought-out operating systems, and Office 2000 suite is easily best in industry. Internet Explorer is far superior to Netscape and has been for several years now, and Visio 2000 is one of most versatile flowcharting tools available anywhere.

Unfortunately, purchasing and licensing Microsoft products is nowhere near as pleasurable as using their office suite. My god, they make it so difficult to purchase licenses that I've often considered (especially recently) switching entire company to Unix and WordPerfect just to simplify my life.

Okay, let's take Office suite of products. In a sane world, you would do this one of three ways:

- You could just buy everything (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and so on)

- You could purchase "base" kit, then purchase additional licenses for pieces that you needed. For example, spend $75 on base, then add $40 for Word, and perhaps $10 for PowerPoint, and then don't purchase Access. This could all be done with a licensing key.

- Just purchase each piece separately.

Naturally, Microsoft didn't choose any of these methods. What you have instead is a number of "suites", each a different mix of products. For example, if you just need Word and Excel, you could purchase Office Standard. If, on other hand, you also need Access, then you need to purchase Office Premium. To make matters even worse, depending upon how many of each product you want to purchase you can use different discount scales.

It's enough to make one pull his hair out in frustration. But wait, it gets even worse with operating systems. You want Windows 2000 server, then you need to purchase a license for server, a license for each workstation (Windows 2000 Professional) and a Client Access License (CAL) for each workstation that needs to access a server. And, of course, depending upon how many of each you buy you get a different discount scale.