Christmas Dr. Internet
Michael S. Hart
something in the mailbox for all those who might appreciate receiving
something today, whether it be people who are snowed in, alone, or on
the Christmas Day work shift. Those who receive this through relays,
many of which are shut down over the holidays, will, of course, get a
much later delivery. . .we hope you all are having, or have had, what
would amount to best of all possible holidays. Happy Channukah, too!
***
First, for those interested in a little Christmas review:
We received an awesome game called "NASCAR." This is perfect for an
already growing population of video gamers who would like to transfer
from Nintendo, Sega, Playstation, 3DO, etc., to real computers.
This game is perhaps the best we have seen, not only with variations,
and very realistic ones, but with the ability to save movies of races
complete with a wide variety of camera angles. If you get this for a
kid, be prepared to watch a few race replays every day for a while.
The game can be played from the CDROM or loaded onto the hard drive.
Great graphics and sound, and very realistic.
The cars and drivers are taken from the real NASCAR circuit, and they
look like the real thing, even the personalities of the drivers are a
bit different: Sterling Marlin is a polite driver, but watch out for
Rick Mast, Geof Bodine and Rusty Wallace.
We have explored the game pretty much as it sets up the first time, a
field of 38 cars running at 95% efficiency. We would suggest you may
start with a field of 10 cars at 80% efficiency for the first races--
then add 1% each time you have won a handful of times.
If you can win, with no modifications to your car, racing 10 others--
in a race of 6 laps, then you are better at it than we are.
We suggest you leave all options on automatic, except skid marks, the
skid marks should be left ON. . .you will see why when you try to get
going at about 94%.
This game is from Papyrus and we liked it a lot! Merry Christmas!
Comment: we think it might be more the case that when you raise cars
% level of strength that it does not so much improve the performances
of the other cars as is reduces the performance of yours. You should
be prepared to have to drive better just to stay in the groove.
***
Several people again wrote in about using word processors for email--
and how to get other documents into email, including the message your
email is in reply to.
We will get into that in more detail if you will tell us exactly what
mailers you are using, and if we can find those mailers to study.
In general:
1. How do I go about including the message I am replying to.
Most mailers have a "reply with text" option, which starts up with an
email note already containing the one being replied to, often indents
or > characters are used to indicate the original lines and responses
can be inserted where appropriate.
In some mailers this is called "reply text" or "r" or "R". . .UNIX is
case sensitive. . .remember that.
In other mailers the easiest way is just to save the message, and get
it again, as a separate file, as below.
2. How do I include a file in a message:
Be careful here, the "r" commands mentioned above sometimes RETRIEVE,
sometimes REPLY. . .depends on your mailer.
Most mailers have some option to "get" or "retrieve" or "append" file
materials from an directory. Some require it in the mail directory.
Usually you place the cursor or highlight on the line you which to be
the beginning of the inserted file. Thus, if you can't "reply text,"
an alternative would be to save the mail you are replying to, then it
can be inserted as the first thing, and you build your reply around a
previously sent message.
Warning: "appending" files seems to be more difficult for many users
and apparently it is not always obvious whether the files actually do
append or not. . .
3. Using word processors for you email requires two steps. . .first,
you have to get the file out of your word processor in "Plain Vanilla
ASCII". . .meaning. . .no oddball characters. . .if you have received
email in which every line or every paragraph ends in "=20" or another
type of symbol, or if you find a lot of very long lines followed with
very short trailing lines, you should advise the sender to practice a
bit with getting their messages out of the word processor in a format
that is easy for mailers to use.
Setting the margins for 65 to 75 should eliminate most long and short
lines, if you remember to save with "hard returns" turned on. . .or a
person could simply write from the terminal input in lines that are a
standard length. . .we don't know anyone who does that. . .do we?
Getting your email into Plain Vanilla ASCII and knowing margin length
is not as easy with a sophisticated computer as it is with a simplest
computer setup that doesn't do fonts, proportional spacing, etc.
If you are seeing things in various fonts, you might have to insure a
recipient is using the same font, and sometimes in the same program--
or the input at their end may not look like the output from your end.
The easiest way to test this is to experiment with reading your email
on a DOS machine using the DOS "type" command. . . . If you can read
the message clearly and easily there, it will make a good email. The
"type command" can be run through the "more" command so it would stop
and go so you can look at each part of the message.
TABS do not work well, as the recipient may not have the same setting
for tabs that you do. . .the "type" command will simply move a tab to
the next space of an 8 multiple. . .8-16-24-32, etc. . .if you see an
extra set of spaces, you might want to replace your tabs with spaces,
we would recommend never using tabs at all in standard files.
***
We have received an inordinate number of questions on these topics:
if you will send in more information about the mailers in question we
will try to do more detailed research on your questions.
***
If you would like to see Dr. Internet [dis]continued in 1996, send an
email our way.
Happy Holidays!!
The Dr. Internet Staff