Timothy
Parker Consulting Incorporated
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Questions and Answers Part 6 Q: I ended up receiving e-mails
from a mailing list created by a company called Cyclades. I have never heard of the company and I can’t unsubscribe.
What’s going on? A: Cyclades is a manufacturer of
serial and network devices, intended mostly for the UNIX and Linux market.
The company claims it used an internal list of e-mail addresses from
people who wanted to receive literature from Cyclades, but many people have
complained they never visited the site. Cyclades
probably bought the mailing list addresses from some source, or trolled Usenet
groups or other membership organizations for the information.
I also ended up on this list, as did many more people around the world.
If you visit their site to unsubscribe, you found you couldn’t because
a password for your non-existent account with Cyclades was unknown!
The company issued instructions shortly after the complaints reached a
fever pitch about unsubscribing, but they simply should have cancelled the
entire mailing list. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can really do about
this sort of practice. Your e-mail
address is readily available to anyone who wants it, and there is no real teeth
to rules about stopping this type of e-mail plague.
Best advice is usually to simply delete the offending mail, or find a way
to complain to the sender’s company until they stop. Q: What is WebSphere?
I’ve heard of it but don’t know what it is. A: WebSphere is IBM’s Web
commerce server. It’s available
for several platforms and is a remarkably good product. I recently compared it
to Microsoft’s Commerce Server and a couple of lesser known commerce packages,
and found it to be excellent in practically every way (except documentation). Q: I went to register a domain
name and Network Solutions charged $40US a year.
However, I now get e-mail from companies offering registration and
renewals for as little as $15. I
thought Network Solutions was the only game in town. A: They were. However, the Internet authorities have essentially
deregulated domain name registration and there are many companies that can now
register domain names with Internic. The
companies can charge as little (or as much) as they want for the service.
You’ll often find low prices (such as $15 a year) and discounts for
multiple years at relatively unknown sites.
For example, linuxcheapdomains.com offers $15 single year and multiple
year registrations. Use a search engine to find other offers. All these
registrations are valid with Internic. Q: Can I register .ca domains or
is it a pain? A: It used to be a real pain. You
had to prove you were a Canadian company, and you couldn’t have .ca unless you
proved you were in more than one province (otherwise you got province domains
like on.ca). That’s all changed
and you can register .ca domains as easily as any other domain extension. Q: I’ve been told that fonts
used on a Web page display differently on a Windows system and a Macintosh
system, even though the name of the font is the same.
Is this true? A: Yup. Windows fonts are, on average, larger than Macintosh fonts. Using the same font name is no guarantee that the font will appear the way you intended. The only way to ensure font consistency is to use either dynamic fonts (which are downloaded when the Web page downloads) or use bitmaps for the letters. Both solutions are poor as they delay page loading times. The best approach is just to be careful when designing the pages so you don’t have any text wrap problems. Q: Do all Web browsers support
DHTML? A: Dynamic HTML is supported by recent generations of both Internet Explorer and Navigator, but earlier versions lacked support. Some other browsers in use on systems like Linux and UNIX do not support DHTML, either. |
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tparker@tpci.com with
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