#I'm back
23 messages in this thread
Adrian,
I don't see any movement in the U. S. to raise speed limits. America is
concerned with saving lives but not necessarily with saving nerves.
Paul
Paul,
Higher speed limits don't equate with more accidents. In fact the reverse is
probably true as the traffic finds its own level rather than being forced
together.
Even the official figures still show motorways are the safest roads to drive
on.
Speeding tickets raise too much revenue; that's why the actual limits won't be
made more realistic<g>
Adrian
I'm a little confused here. Is this a CD-ROM forum or an international politics
forum?
Well, it's pretty much anything the regulars want to make it, isn't it? If
you have a CD ROM question, I'm sure folks here would be happy to answer it
(most of us are veterans of betas and multimedia stuff and all that) and if you
have a question for Nautilus they'll happily answer it here.
The rest of the discussion is, you're right, not germane, but that's true
in a lot of forums. What we try and do is keep the thread titles clearly
unrelated to CDs and multimedia so that folks can skip the threads if they're
not interested in joining the discussion. You should be using something like
TAPCIS or OZCIS anyway (just for the sake of your bank account) which allow you
to download just the thread titles and mark which ones you really want to read
offline.
Digressions on various topics are the price paid for having experts around
when you need them. When they're not needed, they tend to talk anything but
shop.
Thanks you so much for the advice. I am very new to telecommunications and
still trying to decide whether to get my own account. I am currentl using Bob
Starrett's (my business partner) account, and the bill for this month will help
me to decide. I tell you this so that you know that he is not the author of
these comments. It's also nice to know where I can find the experts to answer
my humble CD-ROM questions.
Dana Parker co-author of "Technology Edge: Guide to CD-ROM", former Meridian
Data Senior Technical Support Engineer, and CD-ROM Professional magazine
columnist <g> <g> <g>
Fine; join the club, then, and answer everybody else's questions.
The key isn't just the bill; the key is to use BBS management software that
limits that bill and also allows you to manage your own time. TAPCIS is my own
choice; it logs on, downloads my EMail and all the forum messages I'm
interested in at 9600 baud, then logs off. Then, when I have the time in my
schedule, I call it up, go through them all, read the ones that interest me,
answer the ones I want, etc. Then I hit a key and it's all uploaded to the
right places. It means I can monitor a half-dozen forums and a few more
sections of same and generally do all that there's a charge for in about 3
minutes a day maybe every other day. If I need to go to a forum for specific
info that I'm not usually in, I just download the thread titles and go through
and mark the ones I'm interested in. The next time I log on, only those threads
are downloaded.
You can spend a fortune on this thing (particularly CI$, which is by far
the most expensive of the services) but you can also do more than you have time
for on the cheap.
Gentlemen, thank you for your replies. I may have been hasty in my responses,
but I appreciate your insight into Photo CD and it's place in the CD-ROM
industry. I am in the position of teaching CD-ROM to potential publishers of
CD-ROM, and it is very annoying to be interrupted in mid-spiel with the
question: "What about Photo CD?" even though what the potential client has in
mind (full text, fielded data, and graphics, with perhaps a few images) is more
suited to regular old CD-ROM. Kodak has, in their advertising, confused the
issue to the point where potential CD-ROM publishers think that the only way to
display images from compact disc is to use Photo CD. You and i both know that
this is incorrect. Often, the case is that the ONLY CD-ROM technology the
customer has heard about is Photo CD. I think this is unfortunate, after all
the years we in the CD-ROM industry have spent being evangelists for our
technology, its capacity, versatility, and cross-platform capability. Once
again, please be aware that this is not Bob, but Dana speaking. Bob is allowing
me to use his account (and I'm gonna pay, Lord, how I'm pay) until and IF I get
my own. And yes, I see many questions here that I could answer, but having
spent so much time in tech support, I'm glad that I am no longer required to do
so.
Dana Parker
Where can I get TAPCIS?
Regards,
Dana
Bob,
Navigation programs are available as follows:
AUTOSIG (free) GO IBMCOM
OzCIS (free) GO IBMCOM
TapCIS (shareware ca $79 registration) GO TAPCIS
There are others, but I think the above are the most commonly used.
I use Autosig myself, and the other two I've got just in case I ever need
them<g>
Adrian
Bob,
Another reason to get TAPCIS: a couple of days ago, my mail came down in
a garbled transmission, so I posted a note to the TAPCIS sysops. They directed
me to the _undocumented_ CIS "Retain" feature, that will keep your retrieved
mail for 48 hours. (TAPCIS 5.4 "Alt-P" will select this feature
automatically.) With "Retain" active, you can recover a "lost" transmission by
using Interactive to Go Mail, and then typing "Undelete" at the !prompt. You
can then scan the retained messages. Without TAPCIS, I'd never have learned
about this "safety net." TAPCIS is the best bargain available on CompuServe.
Lynne
Lynne,
Thanks for sharing that information. As it's a CI$ command, it's useful for
non-TAPCIS users to know as well.
Adrian
Adrian,
Now that I've used "Retain" once, it looks like I should add the rest of
the instructions: to recover a lost message, you Go Mail, type "undelete" at
the ! prompt, then "scan all." If you want to recapture the message(s), you
can log off and use TAPCIS to "Go Mail" again. You can delete messages that
you don't want to retrieve by typing "delete msg. #" before logging off.
Something is going haywire with my TAPCIS/CIS connections from time to
time–now I think it is a CIS node, but I'm still figuring it all out. At
least I won't lose any more mail!
Lynne P.S. to Dana: Sorry about addressing my prior note to "Bob," after
you'd made a point of telling us who's speaking …
Thanks again. I have occasional problems with Frankfurt node, but I haven't
actually lost anything yet<KOW>
Adrian
Speaking of which, the "I'm back" title for this thread may well be one of the
longest running I have seen in years on CIS!
But I digress.
Well, why not? After all, nobody's going to mistake a thread with a name
like that for anything about Nautilus or CD ROMs, are they?
And all the time I thought the "back" part had something to do with a
Chiropractor who started it…
I, of course, disagree. But then, that is my nature, to disagree. "I'm back" is
misleading. Could be somebody who is looking for exactly what my company
offers, and has found no solution yet.
Whydon't you rename this thread "Digressions"?
Dana
Because somebody could read "digressions" and think we were just digressing
on Nautilus subjects, which we often do….
Jack,
Well, I'm back, so the thread title is appropriate. Two items possibly of
interest to you: (1) my husband will probably install Windows NT this weekend
(March release), and has been instructed to look for the TIGA driver; and (2) I
cancelled Prodigy because it is going to start charging by the hour for
connecting to the bulletin boards.
You're no lover of Prodigy, I know, but I thought you might be interested.
Delphi should pick up some share of the Prodigy refugees. BTW, Prodigy claims
that only about 10% of Prodigy subscribers actually use the bulletin boards.
Lynne
Yeah, well, Prodigy keeps getting more and more expensive and you still get
the ads!
I have several services I find useful for different things: DELPHI is
friendly and is great for online "live" stuff, has great email, and very cheap
($2.50 a month) access to the Internet. BiX I use mainly for its Windows forums
and to bug Pournelle. I was on the verge of canceling the very Prodigy-like
(but no ads!) America On Line when it suddenly began to explode with a lot of
libraries and PC downloads and the like and is becoming interesting. GEnie is
also extremely popular and extremely cheap.
Jack,
You're so right about Prodigy getting expensive. With the ads and
graphics, it is so slow that you can easily stay connected for 30-60 hours a
month, or more (at 9600 bps). At even $0.50 an hour, our household would have
spent $14.95 plus $30, minimum, per month. Not a good deal!
In fact, the Prodigy bulletin board surcharges will be much higher:
something that reduces to $3.60/hour for 6 or more hours of monthly usage, I
think. They're talking about making a bulletin board downloader available, but
they have _no_ plans to drop the ads from the timed-usage areas. (!)
Actually, the Prodigy execs did me a favor: I knew I was wasting time
online with Prodigy, but hadn't realized that so _much_ time was getting away.
And I wasn't even having fun. I was answering beginners' questions, to pay
back some of the help I've received online, but Prodigy members' constant
complaining gets to you after a while.
Yesterday I went looking for "refugees" and found some in the Helpforum,
still complaining. (Ed Giroux is an understanding sysop.) Anyway, they'll
assimilate fairly fast.
Many Prodigy bb users have spoken well of AOL. Many will go there, and
lots will go to GEnie, which I've tried. However, GEnie is overloaded in
Northern California. The system halts all the time, and you may wait 2-3
minutes for a prompt, before you can even log off. It's really hard to learn
navigation, too, with the system stopped all the time. I figured it wasn't
worth the trouble, and cancelled out.
Lynne
David,
Nahh, we don't get any "longest-running" honors. There's a thread on the
MECA Forum called "Two Old Men" that's been running since before MECA opened
a forum on CIS. It got transferred from IBMAPPS . . .
The thread does seem to have outlasted Kevin, who started it, though.
Hope he returns before long.
Lynne
Bob,
AFAIK it's a CDROM forum<g>. Threads drift here like they do everywhere else on
Compuserve though, so if you didn't come in at the beginning of the thread, you
won't have seen how the subject varied over time. This thread will now probably
go on to the general theme of thread drift<g> and in another couple of days
we'll be talking about something completely different, even though the subject
title is still the same.
Adrian