tulare - Slashdot User

Submission + - Dumping .info TLD for good?

Submitted by

tulare

on Monday February 26, 2007 @12:15AM

tulare writes: "To the chagrin of postmasters and webmasters everywhere, the newish .info and .biz domains have become the realm of all that is seedy on the Internet, from popup-laden porn sites to every imaginable R)oleX and Herbal V14GrA advertising domain. From this writer's point of view, there is simply nothing on .info or .biz that is not at some level related to spam.

My question is this: at what point, and what sorts of efforts can be taken to simply drop the entire mess that has become .info and .biz? I'm sure ICANN would need to get involved, but perhaps a petition drive to convince DNS server admins to blackhole those TLDs would be a starting point to show public support for denying spammers the cheap safe haven they now have. Thoughts?"

Submission + - Open-source reader for Publisher files?

Submitted by

tulare

on Monday September 18, 2006 @09:04PM

tulare writes: "Over the past year or so, I've noticed an increase of people sending one another documents in .pub format, both to myself, as well as to the users who I support at work. I've seen everything from thank-you letters to disclaimers, to the sort of newsletters I imagine Publisher was intended to be used for. Problem is, nobody here has it, nor do we need particularly need to spend the money for it, but I can't seem to find a file reader anywhere.

To be frank, I don't blame the senders for this — they have Publisher, everyone in their office has Publisher, why wouldn't anyone else? Add to this the File | Send to Mail Recipient feature, and the assumption is easy to make if you don't know any better. Yes, we can and do email the sender saying "Hi, can you either send that file to us in some other format, or forward along $149.99 so we can go down to {Fry's,Staples,BestBuy,etc} and pick up a copy?" but it's becoming a common enough problem that I've had to draft an email template politely requesting that the sender use other document formats. Please keep in mind the fact that I don't work in a desktop publishing-heavy business here. From the chair I infrequently get to sit in (due to constant user-support brushfires), Publisher is sadly going down the road of becoming Yet Another De-Facto Standard. Beyond deploying the velvet-covered LART every week or so and dealing with frustrated users, or paying Microsoft more money just to read someone's document, what options do we have? Does anyone know of a reader or plugin in the works? Where can I help?"

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