Rupert Goodwins

Mixed Signals

Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise

Saturday 27 July 1996, 10:07 AM

Rupert Goodwins' Saturday Diary

Email addresses: seven. E-mail messages: 168. Not good. Muse miserably about being "Technical Editor (Online)"; everyone sends you free accounts for their Internet services, which is good. Almost none support E-mail forwarding, which is bad. If I ever have to move away from my main private E-mail address, I doubt I'll be able to leave a forwarding address. I'll vanish from the online world as cleanly as if I'd been abducted by aliens.

Anyway. Of that 168 messages, 121 are the weekend's outpouring of the US Robotics' Pilot mailing list. This little handheld PDA has rather won my heart, but it's not without fault. Fully half of the messages concern various physical defects, with most of the others covering obscure bugs and the usual gossip about new software packages. This is the sort of user feedback that companies pay thousands of pounds to research, and here it all is for USR to pick up for free. Hope they are. I sure don't want it. Resign mailing list.

Rest of mail is dominated by AOL. Here, the get-rich-quick merchants are having a field day: if you appear in a chat area or message forum for a microsecond, some scanning robot quickly scoops up your ID and adds it to a list. Result