Saturday, February 6, 1999
Your newsletter is just great!
Bruce Matheson
We were, indeed, very pleased to see our article on stereoscopic dinosaurs listed in the current issue of NSD. A friend passed it along, and it was a pleasant surprise.
Indeed, we agonized about the file size for the stereoscopic visions, and finally left them as they were in order to provide the highest quality image for this sort of viewing. We've taken lately to putting the file size as part of the text information for each image. However, these are the largest files we've ever made available.
Thank you again for your kind mention of our work.
E. Summer - Dinosaur Interplanetary Gazette
With all the newsletters I get on a regular basis, I only have one folder to keep some of them, even separating them into divisions, Netsurfer: Science, Digest and now Books. They are, each and every issue, terrific.
Case in point. I purchased James Carville's riotous book you suggested in your introductory edition of Books, and have been forced to beat off friends and family from it until I can get it read this holiday busy-time.
So thank you again for all the information you send to everyone in such a timely and well-planned manner.
Jean L. Hohnstein
I was happy to hear that you were in the Yahoo list of best sites. I am able to astonish and amaze my friends with the range of interesting sites I can point them to, and all because I get NSD. Thanks.
Barbara K. Iverson
Thank you for featuring my Web site, Heart Disease Guide on the Mining Company, in NSD 4.35. Thank you to all the writers, websurfers and the editors who bring out this useful e-mail publication that has directed me to so many useful resources on the Web, and now thinks my own site merits inclusion in this exclusive list.
S. Sivasubramanian
I just got the first NSD of the new year in my box. It is amazing! By far, this is the best issue that I have seen in a long time. Not that your other issues are cooked spinach; this one is just chock full of fun. No intelligent commentary here, just awe, memories of my Sim City-plagued youth, and a desire to go out and buy grapes.
Alnoor Allidina
I appreciate very much indeed your including a review of my Web site in the 5.01 edition of your excellent e-zine! This means a lot to me and makes my efforts so much more worthwhile! Thank you!
Patrick Wullaert
I have to tell you how much your piece on EarthMail meant to us. The thrill of being in NSD was just part of it. I feel like your reviewer nailed our product exactly. I honestly cannot think of a better description of what we do. When Disney can amass 36% of netsurfers simply by spending money, getting something unique started is a daunting task. I want you to know how much we appreciate your mention of our product - and especially the incredible prose you use to nail it's mission to the wall. EarthMail is and always will be a different brand of news - news driven by a need to not be CBS or NBC. Thank you so much and congrats on a cool product of your own!
Todd Herman - South Salt Lake City, Utah
Thanks for the review of ALR Advocate in NSD 5.01. But I really need to tell you - we're not dead yet.
Chocker
After reading NSD 5.02, I can say NSD is one of the most valued items appearing regularly on my screen. The selection of interesting sites reflects intelligent minds at work, and the descriptive commentaries are literate, unlike much Net puffery elsewhere. Thanks a lot, and please keep it up!
Charles Gaulkin
Now I know why e-mail was invented. How did I surf without NSD? Thanks for the great sites!
Dave
You guys probably get a lot of these, but if not I just wanted to let you know that you're doing a great job. I always enjoy looking through the sites that you guys pick. Thanks for the service and keep up the great work.
Yun
I would like to thank you for mentioning Danny Hillis's millennium clock and his site in NSD 5.03. I had read an article in Newsweek concerning the clock and wanted more information about it, but no Web address was listed. A Web search only came up with Hillis's original letter to Wired and no current information. Your mention of the site was very timely. As always, I appreciate the work you put into creating the digest, and frequently find its contents of use.
Matt Monroe
I have been reading NSD for some time now. I have found it entertaining and useful. But recently your newsletters have become so overburdened with commercials that it is taking longer and longer to receive them. And I am on an ISDN line here. Perhaps you could try to restrict the burden a little?
Terry Moston
For the past six months we've had six or seven
banners in each issue. We do not plan on adding any more, but on the other
hand we do not plan on having any fewer for economic reasons.
What you may be seeing is the fact that it takes longer to load the banners
because the ad servers are overburdened by the holiday online crowds.
Slower banner loading makes it seem as if our publication takes longer to
load.
This was a big problem this past holiday season - many of the ad servers
from various services had a hard time keeping up with all the online
shoppers. This year is truly the breakout year for electronic commerce, and
the volume of online business is causing problems for many commerce related
sites - both the online merchants and the advertisers. I've been seeing the
volume problems mount since late November. - AB
Thank you for taking the trouble to reply. I thought you would like to have some feedback from an end user and learn that the banners can be very irksome. You write that you are observing the problem too; while recognition is the first step to a solution, you did not in your reply indicate any solution to the problem.
That may be because possible solutions are not
entirely within my control - something rather irksome to a control freak
like me, I can assure you. :)
I can control the number of banners, but have good reasons not to lower
that number. If we cut down on the banners, our income goes down, I can't
pay the writers I need, and the quality of our e-zine goes to pot, which
drives away readers and lowers our income even more: a vicious circle I
don't want to get into unless lots of people complain - something we
haven't really seen.
On the other hand, the ad server people do recognize the problem and are
beefing up their servers - in fact our service was forced to do this in
mid-December. Lousy timing, but at least they did it and were pretty cool
about keeping us informed.
As with most real-life situations, solutions are not straightforward and
require many components to be in place - faster ad servers, better
bandwidth capacity, smarter caching technology, etc. - which are not under
the control of any one entity. Reality is inherently very messy.
Thanks for the feedback - we do listen even if we don't always have an
answer. - AB
Tried your new search engine. I entered "mims" and got http://mims.com/maib/. It was the only item in the reply. So I searched for "mims mall" and the parent domain and drew a blank reply. Alta Vista and InfoSeek always reply with my domain. Perhaps http://mims.com/maib showed up because NSD was kind enough to mention that site in one of the newsletters.
I enjoy receiving NSD and always read the whole thing each time - I click on all the links at least once.
Donald Duquet
I used the NSD search engine to search and found nothing....
Roger Wise
The NSD search engine only searches NSD back issues, not the whole Web. - LN
I have been using Blue Mountain cards for a long time, and after reading the article in NSD 4.37, I sent one to myself. It went though with no problems.
I checked out the WebTV cards the first time I saw them - they suck. What these WebTV people need is some competition.
Kirk Ellsworth
I was under the impression you were a weekly publication, but I have not seen anything since Dec. 19. Just wondering if it is me or you that isn't working?
Butch Grafton
We take a break for the holidays. There should be a new one in a few days. We're not really weekly, though - we get out about 40 issues a year. - LN
I truly appreciate the space you gave Impression - the publication that I edit - in your Dec. 19 issue, but I must respond to the condescending tone of the clueless reviewer who painted Impression as a magazine for raw, aspiring hack writers who are looking to make it. One of the pieces that was mentioned in the review was written by Tim Goodman, the TV critic for the San Francisco Examiner, who won this year's first-place award for arts and entertainment criticism in the prestigious annual Excellence in Feature Writing competition. If this isn't "making it" in your line of work, I'm not sure what is.
Consider also that our AIDS columnist, Celia Farber, covered the disease for a decade for Spin and is now a staff writer for Gear. Oh, and she also found time to write one of this year's most provocative stories: Esquire's OJ Simpson cover piece. Jim DeRogatis, who, like Farber, is a monthly contributor, is the award-winning rock critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and a former Rolling Stone senior editor who writes regularly for Request and the LA New Times. Neal Pollack, who I assume is Mark Leyner lite, is an accomplished staff writer for the Chicago Reader who also contributes to numerous glossies. I could go on, but I won't. That would involve spending more time writing this than your reviewer spent reading Impression. I'm at all of three minutes now.
Your reviewer's lack of knowledge about our writers make him or her seem like somebody who doesn't read anything that isn't on the Internet and who is ignorant enough to believe that... well, that most e-zines have a rant section. The fact that he or she notes that 40 percent of our coverage is rock criticism shows that your reviewer obviously couldn't get past fifth-grade math, because this statement is simply false. Have a closer look at impressionmag.com again. Mock the content if you want, but not the credentials of our writers. Criticism is always appreciated, but please stop the shoddy, lazy journalism.
Andy Wang - Editor-in-chief, Impression
I really didn't understand the point of your piece in NSD 5.01 about Maoist Towelettes. Are you running a communist newsletter?
Christopher Locke (a.k.a. RageBoy)
Yes. Note the red vertical stripe in our publication.
It's a secret sign signifying our allegiance to the International Communist
Conspiracy.
By the way, Laurie, toss http://www.angelfire.com/la/comi
nternet/ into the mix
and burn this e-mail. Burn RageBoy while you're at it also. - AB
Thank you for your timely response and for the link to the Listing of World Communist and Workers Parties. I have forwarded your mail to Lieutenant General Kenneth A. Minihan, Director of the National Security Agency.
RageBoy
I find your magazine invaluable and look forward to its arrival blah blah blah (but it's true). As a freelance writer, I'm always looking for an idea and they arrive in bundles with your mag. So thanks. Also, love your clever and amusing write-ups for each site. But tell me, is there a movement to change the spelling of millennium? I'd say the second "n" is missing a good 50% of the time. In your one paragraph on the Millennial Clock, it appears both ways.
Just curious. I'd hate not to catch the next wave!
Nancy Hall
Ummm, language is an ever changing, dynamic medium? Yeah, that's the ticket.... - LN
Love your Digest, but what gives with http://www.emergency.com?!?! It rebooted my computer 3 times!
James King
I have no idea. It doesn't happen to me, with Netscape 4.5 (Windows 95). - LN
Every time I receive an NSD, I get irritated by the name of the file. A name like "nsd.05.03.html" might be perfectly logical to you, but for me it means I have to tell Windows explicitly which software (Netscape, of course) to run it with, from out of my mail program (Happy Mail for Banyan Vines).
I presume it is because of the three periods in the name. Couldn't you change the periods in the filenames to hyphens, or leave them out altogether ?
Frans Rip
I suspect you already know about matching extensions
(in this case .html) with programs in Windows. There's a way to do this
somewhere, I think under Windows Explorer in the Options menu, so that
Windows will open the right program when it sees the .html extension. You
may want to check that this is set up correctly to launch Netscape with
..html files . If it is, and your mail program does not launch Netscape it
could indeed be the extra dots.
To be perfectly frank, at this point it would be difficult to change this
on our side, since the naming convention is threaded through many
production and administration programs on our end. Once or twice per year
we hear somebody complain about this, mostly users of older systems (Win
3.1 and DOS) but that's been trailing off as people are migrating to the
newer mail clients which have no problems with this issue, or which handle
HTML files directly (e.g. the built in mail handlers in Netscape and
Explorer/Outlook). What all this amounts to is that there is no compelling
justification for us to rewrite our whole production system just to
accomodate the shrinking number of users for whom this may be a problem.
I know that's not what you want to hear, but that's the commercial reality
of it. I would encourage you to migrate to a newer HTML capable e-mail
client if possible. They do provide many advantages and easily handle the
growing amount of HTML mail winding its way around the Net. - AB
Claire Dinsmore of Studio Cleo here - I think you should keep in mind that it is possible to use the tag "et in Arcadia ego" ironically, my dears - I should hope you would have enough intelligence to gather the tinge of humor, however subtle. The romance lingers and, indeed, infuses the site, but the references are cited sardonically and, yes, sadly - as with Cornell: the site, and most genuine art, would not exist without it. By the way, the textured rock walls, the Dead Can Dance clip, and the URL are gone.
Claire Dinsmore
I haven't written in a long time so I'm overdue in expressing my appreciation of NSD. Is that a good enough kiss up?
I was under the impression y'all used some type of Mac to produce NSD. Right? I have been a PC user since 1984 and before that I used a Commodore 64. I am very seriously considering buying a 266 MHz iMac but I am scared to death of wasting my hard earned cash. What do you think, could an iMac do whatever it is y'all do on a daily basis? What I do is 90% Internet/e-mail and the rest is programs like Quicken, Turbo Tax, letter writing, minimal games, CDs and .WAV files. Maybe I'd get into a little photo manipulation but nothing serious. The PowerPC G3 400 seems like overkill and way too expensive and the iMac seems like a Pentium II 300 type of machine. I need some advice... help! I would give it to my daughter in a year when she goes to college. What do you think, in 100 words or less?
Dan Johnson
(Long long long time subscriber) Just trying to kiss up a little more. :)
Barring any blank checks, I guess your text kiss
up'll have to do.
As far as NSD goes, I use a Mac clone (a Motorola Starmax) to surf and
choose Web sites, as well as to edit the stuff that comes in from the
writers. After I put an issue together, I send it to Arthur, who processes
it through a Unix box, which e-mails it to all you rabble. Some writers use
Macs, others PCs.
Personally, I've used Macs since 1984, and I've owned a succession of them
since 1992. I've also used PC boxes, and in fact have one ten feet away -
but I'm using the Mac.
There's no question an iMac can do what I do. My Starmax has a 200 MHz PPC
604e chip in it, and MHz for MHz, the PPC 750 chips (the ones in the G3s
and iMacs) blow it away. Heck, a 266 MHz PPC750 chip blows away a 300 MHz
Pentium II, but they're practically equal.
The iMac has some issues, though - I'll get to those below. I use Photoshop
on this machine, which is probably the most taxing application I use (next
to a game called WarBirds). I only have 64 MB RAM, and Photoshop eats RAM
like I eat Kit Kats. If I were serious about it, I'd get more RAM or use
virtual memory, but I don't use virtual memory since it inhibits WarBirds's
frame rate and I hate rebooting.
There are several issues - not necessarily drawbacks, mind you - that you
need to keep in mind.
1) No floppy drive - Much ado about nothing. I don't think I've ever used
the floppy on my Starmax in a year of use. One of the nice things about a
Mac is that it can boot from a CD-ROM, so that even if it does crash (and
I've never had to replace a system) you can just start up with a CD-ROM.
For file transfer, I either use e-mail, FTP, or a Zip disk. The Mac can
read PC floppies, PC Zip disks, and PC everything else. It can even format
PC media.
2) Monitor - The monitor built into an iMac is probably the most crisp 15"
monitor you'll ever see. There are two problems, however: it's built-in and
it's 15". If you ever want to go to a larger monitor, you're stuck. If your
iMac monitor goes on the fritz, you'll be without the whole machine while
it's repaired.
3) limited expandability - You can stick as much RAM in an iMac as you'll
ever need, but your old RAM will have to be sold off, since there's only
one RAM slot. Also, if you enjoy playing with computer guts and swapping
cards in and out, the machine won't accommodate you. However, it, like all
Macs, comes with so much built in (Ethernet, sound card, video card, etc.)
that you'll probably never have to go inside it.
4) USB - Until the iMac, all Macs used ADB cables for the keyboard, mouse,
and other input devices, and serial ports for printers/modems. The iMac has
USB only. While there are USB converter devices on the market, they'll run
you an extra $50 or so. There are plenty of USB devices on the market now,
though, so this issue only affects those who already have peripherals they
want to move over to the iMac.
5) keyboard/mouse - some people hate the round mouse and the reduced
keyboard. Try them out at a store before you buy. On the other hand, they
can be readily replaced with any USB devices.
I wouldn't buy an iMac for myself, for two reasons, neither of which may
relate to you. First, I have an Apple 15" monitor now and I hope to upgrade
to a larger one at some point. The iMac would cut off that upgrade path.
I also don't trust monitors. While I've never had one go bad, I need my
computer every day - it's my livelihood. I can't afford down-time for a bad
monitor, and monitors are the least reliable piece of hardware (some would
argue hard drives here...).
I do plan to get a G3 Mac in the next six months. For me, it's the best
solution. For you, it might be different.
As far as the Mac/PC debate goes, I've found the Mac OS to be reliable,
easy to learn and use, and elegant compared to Windows. Plug-and-play
really is and the system doesn't need coddling. The PC is not without its
advantages, however - two of them. First, Windows uses true multitasking -
the Mac sort of emulates this, but the PPC processor only switches very
quickly between tasks whereas the Pentium really does multitask. Still, I
do have my browser open, my e-mail open, FTP open, a text processor open
all at once, working simultaneously on my Mac and it works fine.
Next, the game market is very much owned by Wintel. The Mac gaming market
lags behind the PC market and many games never get ported to the Mac OS.
Still, I can play most of the games I want to and the occasional gamer
won't suffer too much. On the other hand, if you have a gang you play
Starcraft with, say goodbye.... There are programs for the Mac which let
you run Windows on it (SoftWindows, Virtual PC, etc.) but while they work
fine for static programs, they can't keep up with the processor demand of
the latest games.
One of the nice things about the Mac is that even in a mostly Wintel world,
they can adapt. And for what you want to do with it, an iMac will more than
fulfill your needs. The best thing you could do would be to go to a store
and play with an iMac on display for an hour. You might be a little
confused by the Mac interface if you're used to Windows, but don't let that
get in your way. Check out the hardware, and see if it fits.
Hope this helps, and sorry if I went over 100 words. :) - LN
No rat's asses were harmed in the making of this document.
Publisher: Arthur Bebak
Editor: Lawrence Nyveen
Address your letters to
editor@netsurf.com.
Letters and
signatures edited for clarity and brevity.