Puntz,

I am a programmer and have developed my own program to collect and analyse racing stats. So far I estimate I have invested about $15000 worth of my programming time in the development of the program and probably double that amount in the research and testing time that went into developing the method and parameters that the program uses - hopefully it will pay for itself soon otherwise I am going to have a very angry wife!!!

With regards to your comments the easiest way to protect the method if you were having a program developed would be to use your first suggestion and have a series of parameters that the program uses. Not only does this protect your "secret" formula but it also makes it much easier to tune the program later - you don't want to keep paying the programmer each time you want to make a minor adjustment in your algorithm.

I did some programming about 10 years ago useing Q-basic....i know this does not compear to todays language...but i found it easy to devolope.
You are basicly useing a calculation formula to make things add up....if i understood todays language i am sure it would not be that difficult to program.

Puntz - My standard rate is about $500/day if I am working from our offices - can get up to $1000/day if I am working on-site in Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane (with travel costs/accomodation, etc). I generally work in Visual Basic which as Shaun indicated is quite easy to develop in so simple programs can be done for reasonable cost. Most of the time I have spent on my program has been in writing the code to extract information from different websites and save it to my database - the actual part of the program that gets the info back out of the database is quite simple!

If you want anything done let me know - although hopefully I will be retiring in a few months and living of my "investment" income :grin:

Practical Punting Magazine has a programmer working for them who advertised the fact he was interested in programming people`s systems at reasonable rates.
He also wrote a few articles for them.

They might be worth contacting.

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Cheers.

thanks bc,


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[ This Message was edited by: puntz on 2002-06-09 23:18 ]

[ This Message was edited by: puntz on 2002-06-10 00:00 ]