On Thu, 25 Feb 2016, Ali wrote: "they will not be"??!? Of course I intend to reopen. Calling it temporary was honest at one time, but then seemed necessary to discourage "abandonware" vultures. "projects" was a euphemism for PROBLEMS. I ran the company at a loss for a long time. Then, I lost my lease, and had a crisis of storage space. Still do. I wonder how much stuff I can take to VCFWest, . . . The college discontinued all advanced programming classes that I taught (everything that had a pre-requisite). Then they found out that one of my degrees is an MLIS, and they did an "involuntary reassignment" making me a librarian. Then my mother's health collapsed and I took care of her full-time. My best friend died in 2014 My mother died last year. I now have two houses, with enough crap to fill three. I always intended to re-open my programming business (and Lee Felsenstein says that he still wants to go back and fix problems with the Osborn design). Now that I could again, should I? There are still more disk formats to add. There are plenty of bugs to fix. I now know ways to make it faster. I never mastered "Installable File System" to be able to mount an alien disk for active use, besides file transfer. I want to add capability of working with disk images, besides physical floppies. I want to add flux transition board support, besides normal FDC. But, disks needing to be converted are now finally fading away rapidly. "Free download"/shareware software relies on minimal support requirement, and a larger volume than is realistic to expect for this kind of software, unless somebody else is supporting you. (Realistically, what does it take to pay the bills?) The most successful model for this kind of software is to do it as a hobby with an indulgent employer, or charge [PLENTY] to also do it as a data recovery service operation. Retail sles of it won't pay for an office and/or wage for support staff. This kind of software has an astronomical level of support requirement, since most new customers need to be educated starting at "what is a disk format, and why are they not all the same", and/or "Which of the MFM disk formats on the list do I select to read Apple2 disks? I KNOW that they can be done, because both turn at 300RPM." "What do you mean 'file system structure'? This machine just writes straight to the disk, and then you ask for your document by name", "XenoCopy doesn't work. When I try to open the Wordstar files that it supposedly transferred from my Kaypro disk, Word2015 says 'unrecognized document format'" "Our college (UC Berkeley) is buying ONE retail copy, which we make available for all students and staff to copy." I did not refuse to provide support to those who couldn't/wouldn't tell me the serial number. After providing support help to administraors of a midwestern university who refused to pay their purchase order, "because it never arrived", I stopped accepting purchase orders. "But we are government-agency/largest-distributor-in-Europe, etc."- "Then buy it out of YOUR personal pocket and submit paperwork for petty cash reimbursement of 'prepaid purchase order'" "Yes, if you intend to purchase thousands of copies, you still have to pay for the first one (at quantity one dealer price), and then we will deduct what you paid from your later full-size orders." "Free copies for 'REVIEW' are not yet available to publications that have not put out their first issue yet." Plenty of "please add this disk format. Name of the computer? On the front, it says 'ADM3A'" (BTW, "Pentabs" is Vector) Even, "I will buy ONE COPY, for half the list price, if you make a special version with this format, and don't sell any other copies that have it, because I don't want anybody else to be able to do this one.", "How do I put a 5 inch drive on my Chromebook?" I used to have capability to input your own parameters. But, instead of an average of less than an hour to me to add a new format, it typically called for far more than an hour of telephone hand-holding support for each one, and IF it was successful, then I would NEVER receive a sample disk, or even a call back with the parameters that worked, so I couldn't add that format into the release version of the program! That capability stayed in the program, but I stopped documenting the keystrokes to activate it. I may be too old, too tired, and too burned out to try. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On 2/25/2016 12:12 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: Ok, thanks... That rings bells now... -- --- Dave Woyciesjes --- CompTIA A+ Certified IT Tech - http://certification.comptia.org/ --- HDI Certified Support Center Analyst - http://www.ThinkHDI.com/ Registered Linux user number 464583 "Computers have lots of memory but no imagination." "The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back." - from some guy on the internet.

Hm? You're implying your ISP was handling your mail, but then you imply you were handling your own mail. I'm a little confused. The main reason I'm writing, though, is a bit different. That there's a company I know that was in a somewhat similar position - they were getting so much spam bounce blowback that they were shutting off all incoming SMTP during the day to keep the machine up. I wrote a very lightweight SMTP server for them; it accepts connections and talks SMTP until it gets a valid recipient, and then - and only then - connects through to the real SMTP server and passes protocol both ways. It was very good at turning away mail to unknown addresses. There was one time when some host in south-east Asia opened about 100 parallel connections and started a dumb-as-rocks dictionary attack. It turned away many tens of thousands of unknown recipients in something like thirty seconds, and, even knowing exactly when it happened, I couldn't find the blip on our load graphs - it was drowned out by the noise. If I hadn't been reading the logs for other reasons and stumbled across it I never would have known it happened at all. Obviously, it's of no direct use to you now that you don't hold ao.com any longer. But in case you - or anyone else - is interested, I got their approval to open the code up; it's available to anyone who cares to fetch a copy. ftp.rodents-montreal.org:/pub/mouse/misc/mail/shim/ is the place to look for those interested. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Hello Mouse, Was just looking over your shim application briefly. Just curious, as I see the README.linux note, what OS was your shim application built for and ran on? Thank you, Jerry On 02/25/16 05:41 PM, Mouse wrote: