Copyright © 1995, 1996 Last Update: 20 Dec 1996

Download Original Plain Text Issues of "Ask Dr. Internet"

Submit your question to the Dr. Internet!

Please Read Our Disclaimer!

20th Issue	19th Issue	18th Issue	17th Issue	16th Issue
15th Issue	14th Issue	13th Issue	12th Issue	11th Issue
10th Issue	9th Issue	8th Issue	7th Issue	6th Issue
5th Issue	4th Issue	3rd Issue	2nd Issue	1st Issue

You are visitor number #COUNT since Jun 27, 1995

Would you like to be notified by Email whenever a new issue of "Ask Dr. Internet" goes online? Send us your email address: ...Please, check carefully your Email address BEFORE sending... You'll be added to our list and will receive our Newsletter about each New Issue. That list will be NOT used for purposes other than this. Our Adviser Robot sends out to you a copy of your subscription as confirmation and, if you do not receive it after a short time (no more than 24 hours), most likely the address you sent wasn't correct. Please, remember to come back here and resend it... Thank you!

1.  Send Us More Browser Hints!

2.  Sending URLs from Netscape.

3.  More On Search Engines.

4.  The "V Chip" Is Coming To A Browser Near You
    Limited Browser Access Is A Growing Phenomenon
    I've Got The End Of The Semester V-Chip Blues.

5.  What About Support Lines Requesting Credit Card Numbers
    Before They Will Give You The Support You Already Have
    Paid For?

6.  Shopping In Silicon Valley.

7.  More on the book "Hackers".

8.  Would You Do Something on the Cyberpunk Fakebook?

9.  What Have You Heard About This New Treaty That Will Make It
    Illegal To Compile And Publish Statistics, And Apparently
    Many Other Facts.
    (WIPO = World Intellectual Property Organization)

10. Book Review and Interview:
    "Holy Fire" by Bruce Sterling

0.  The Browser Wars!

1.  Benchmarks. Various benchmarks on chips and the Internet.
    Lots of them. If you aren't interested in it just skip this section.

2.  Predictions.
    We welcome Kevin Gilmore to the "Ask Dr. Internet" staff.

3.  Secret Guide To Computers, by Russ Walter.
    We welcome Len to our staff, from Russ Walter's Secret Guide
    to Computers.

4.  Search Engines.

5.  More On the Email Virus.

6.  Suppression of Internet Access In More Locations Than You
    Might Think?

7.  RAM Upgrades.

8.  Include Your Entire Email Address In Your Notes.

9.  Setting Clocks For The Year 2000.

10.  Book Reviews.

1.  More about wasting bandwidth with chat programs, etc.

2.  We are also still getting questions about how to get Web Pages,
    ftp files, etc., via email.

3.  Lots of people are still reporting that they are having troubles with
    getting images to come up properly in various programs that are
    are supposed to display and/or edit Web Pages.

4.  Why do some urls start with http://www then the ip address while
    others (e.g. yours) start http:// then the ip address
    [this untrue, our URL is:http://promo.net/drnet/]

5.  How do I find the email addresses of people on the Net?

6.  What is a URL?

7.  If you are searching the internet to get ideas for a webpage/
    homepage, what is legal or illegal about taking something you see
    that you like and copying it?  For example if you see a
    background or icon that you would like to use and you copy for your
    own use... What are the laws governing this?

8.  More about the email virus scare, see previous issues, too.

9.  How do you download files?

0.  Please keep us informed about the growth of the Internet.

1.  What has been happening in the cases in which providers refused to
    allow the word "breast" on the Internet?

2.  More About The Wastefulness of Talk/Chat/Phone programs.

3.  Please Keep Us Posted On Current Events.

• RAM prices are falling drastically.
• CPU Chips
• A new US bill to remove materials from the Public Domain.
• Copyright issues between the United States and China

4. Quick Answers.

• How do you become an Internet Service Provider?
• What Equipment would you suggest to get or need?
• How do you connect directly to Internet?
• What is a cablemodem?
• How do you make a homepage?
• How do you contact a WEBSITE? I've tried to get http://www.wttw.com. I've tried a number of search engines, but nothing turns up! I've tried it both with and without the http://. What am I doing wrong? Is there any easy way to contact any website?

0.  Internet Addresses

00. New copyright legislation removing two million more books from the
    Public Domain, meaning they cannot be posted on the Internet.

1.  "Chat" programs.

1A. Internet telephone and "voice email" programs.

2.  Maintaining Internet addresses.

3.  The impact of the Internet in unemployment?

4.  Online fee-based information services.

5.  Is the Net still _the_ "New Frontier" it promised to be, or the "big
    brothers" will rapidly transform it in the most advanced money-making
    and unemployment machine never built?

6.  Who pays for the cost of using phone lines to transmit an email?

7.  Is there a way to get text only when getting web pages?

8.  We had several questions on how to look up various things on the Net.
    How do you save the results of your searches.

9.  Will major corporations answer their email?  [Short answer. . . no]

10. How does anti-virus software work?

1.  New CPU Chips

2.  "Refreshing" Backups

3.  What Can I Log Onto From Where

4.  Who Authorizes Internet Domain Addresses

5.  Netiquette: The Wannabe Lords of the Internet

1.  New Italian Copyright Laws for Life of the Author +70 Years
    New Proposed Internet Copyright Law

2.  The Internet Indecency Law

3.  WWW Home Pages and HTML Programming

4.  Combining Email With Web Browsers

5.  Why Can't I Connect When Someone Else Can,Or I Could Just Yesterday?

6.  Email, and we are talking massive amounts of email

7.  Commercial Internet Connections, ISDN cables, etc.

8.  Online Privacy

9.  Tax The Internet!

1.  What's New For 1996?
         - ...the latest figures for the Internet...
         - ...the hardware front...
         - INTERNET OVERLOAD

2.  Will Cable Modems replace ISDN as the best
    (fastest/cheapest) way to connect from home?

1.  How do I go about including the message I am replying to?

2.  How do I include a file in a message?

3.  Using word processors for your email.

0.  What about PC prices?

1.  Is there any more information on the 1996 Grolier's?

2.  Why do my CDROM's load so slowly? And why do they seem so out of date?

3.  What about backups?

4.  Can you list books and movies that take place in cyberspace,
    can you add some comments about them?

00. Britain appears to be verging on removing
    20 years of the public's access to information...

0.  Grolier 96, a word of warning...

1.  What do you see in the media about the Internet?
    This month's National Geographic.

2.  Why can't I get Email to some people.

3.  Short answers.

1. Is There Still Room for "us" on the Internet, Or Will the Big
   Boys such as Disney, Playboy, ABC, CCI, GE-NBC, Westinghouse,
   Time-Warner, CBS, TBS, etc. create another vast TV wasteland,
   along with MCI, Paramount, Viacom, QVC, AT&T, America Online,
   CompuServe, Prodigy, etc?

2. More about last month's question:
  "How Do We Make Our Presence Known on the Internet?

3. What About the New Copyright Laws?

4. A note from Jean Armour Polly, author of Surfing the Internet

1. How Do We Make Our Presence Known on the Internet?

2. Is the Internet Still Getting Bigger?

3. Disney Bought ABC, On Tuesday Westinghouse Bought CBS.
   Do You Think This Have an Effect on the Internet?

4. When was the term "Surfing the Internet" first used?

1. Who Decides Who Gets Web Pages.

2. What Kinds Of Servers Do You Need For Web Pages.

3. More about bandwidth.

1. The "Dr. Internet Philosophy".

2. Tell us the general tricks you have learned over the years.

3. More about bandwidth.

1. More about "Bandwidth."

2. Cost of computers and hard drives.

3. What is "Bloatware?"

4. Our Disclaimer.

1. Can You Explain the Concept of "Bandwidth" and How It Affects Us?

2. What Is The Difference Between Listservers,
   Fileservers, Web Page Sites, FTP Sites, Gopher Sites, etc?


3. What is a "Name Field" and Why Do We Need One?

4. More About Viruses and Trojan Horses and Plain Vanilla ASCII

1. How Can We Subscribe/Contribute to "Ask Dr. Internet?"

2. More About Viruses and Trojan Horses and Such.

3. More About Creating Plain Vanilla ASCII files.

4. How Do I Insure No One Else Is Reading My Email?

5. The Future of Dr. Internet on Various Servers.

1. How Do I Get Documents Into Emailable Format?


2. What Is Happening With The PC Market?

3. Do You Know Anything About "Johnny Mnemonic?

4. What About That "Email/Etext" Virus We Heard About?

 Replies from previous questions to "Ask Dr. Internet"

  1. Permanent Email Addresses

  2. What Do Email Addresses Mean?

  3. How do I unsubscribe from a mailing list?

  4. Netiquette

 1. How big is the Internet? When did it start? How did it grow?

 2. Who owns the Internet?

 3. What do the Internet addresses mean?

 4. Tell me how to get on and off various lists and discussion groups.

 5. What is "Netiquette?"

 6. What is "Flaming?"

 7. What is "Bandwidth?"

 8. Why can't I FTP to some places?

 9. What is the World Wide Web, Gopherspace, etc?

10. Why can't I get some WWW stuff via FTP?

Dr. Internet is a consortium of Internet veterans who volunteer effort and
time to help others understand and use the Internet better, and is
sponsored by PromoNet, Sol-Tec, New Media Publishing
and Project Gutenberg.

If you have suggestions or questions, or differing opinions, we should be
happy to try to fit them into future issues of "Ask Dr. Internet."

This is not an "Advice" column, we merely try to answer the questions of
general interest people send us, period.

We reply directly to all messages we receive directly.
If we do not reply directly, then please presume the note you sent did not
reach us, and send it to us again.

Not all questions can be answered in the column, of course. Sorry.
We do not believe in being authorities or authoritative, so we throw in
something once in a while that is not true; we want you to do you your own
research, if interested, not just take our word for anything.

0. We make no claim to know everything or to present all of the available
knowledge to our readers, just general matters of general interest,
presented in a general way.

General to us means that it should be of interest to as many people as
possible, though we know we cannot interest 100%.

Therefore, we welcome additional information that interested parties would
find applicable to their usage of the Net, but this is not meant to be a
game of Trivial Pursuit in which a team of people tries to show off 
esoteric knowledge.

1. While some of us are about the longest time Internetters you are ever
likely to come across, we do NOT believe that a person should be listened
to simply because they have been a long time in their field.

In fact, we are considering the founding of a New Boy Network [Women MORE
Than Welcome], for an alternative to the Old Boy Network, if you are
interested please reply.


2. Not only should you not believe what we say as gospel, a person should
rarely, if ever, believe what anyone says in a Gospel manner.
We believe in multiple frames of reference as a check on reality, and
strongly suggest you check for an alternative point of view, which we
hope you will share.

3. We will sometimes include incredibly silly and obviously untrue [to us]
items, so please DO check out the worthiness, validity, and reliability of
Dr. Internet.
We do not take anything as "from the horses mouth" and suggest the same.

4. However, will be glad to put you in contact with experts and
professionals in the various fields we touch on.

If you want more detailed information than the general overview the Dr.
Internet column was designed to provide, just send us an Email message we
can forward to our team of experts.

Please work out whatever professional arrangements directly, do not send
money to "Dr. Internet."

This is a free service, which is why it is necessarily of general interest.