From megalith!overlord@uunet.UU.NET Thu Jan 6 11:40:00 1994 Received: from relay2.UU.NET by toadflax.cs.ucdavis.edu (4.1/UCD.CS.2.4) id AA07367; Thu, 6 Jan 94 11:39:56 PST Received: from spool.uu.net (via LOCALHOST) by relay2.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA28847; Thu, 6 Jan 94 14:38:04 -0500 Received: from megalith.UUCP by uucp5.uu.net with UUCP/RMAIL (queueing-rmail) id 033426.865; Thu, 6 Jan 1994 03:34:26 EST Received: by megalith.miami.fl.us (V1.16.20/w5, Dec 29 1993, 21:22:55) id <048i@megalith.miami.fl.us>; Thu, 6 Jan 94 03:19:01 EST -0500 Date: Thu, 6 Jan 94 03:19:01 EST -0500 Message-Id: <9401060318.048h@megalith.miami.fl.us> Sender: errors@megalith.miami.fl.us Errors-To: errors@megalith.miami.fl.us Warnings-To: warnings@megalith.miami.fl.us Return-Path: errors@megalith.miami.fl.us Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Reply-To: fnf@fishpond.cygnus.com (Fred Fish) Message-Number: 653 Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.announce Message-Id: From: fnf@fishpond.cygnus.com (Fred Fish) (CSAA) To: announce@megalith.miami.fl.us Subject: The Fishing Report - Jan 94 Status: RO T H E F I S H I N G R E P O R T Jan 5, 1994 This is the first in what will hopefully be an ongoing series of news- letters to inform people of what is happening with my CD-ROM distributions. As I write this, the December Freshfish CD-ROM is entering production and I have started preliminary work on the next Freshfish CD-ROM, as well as the 1000 disk archive CD-ROM. ------------------- CONTACT INFORMATION ------------------- I still continue to receive a lot of mail that is forwarded from my old Belmont address, taking an extra 5-10 days to reach me. Please make a note of the following current contact information: Amiga Library Services 610 N. Alma School Road, Suite 18 Chandler, AZ 85224-3687 USA FAX or voice: (602) 917-0917 email: fnf@cygnus.com or fnf@fishpond.cygnus.com --------------------------- PREORDER PRICING ELIMINATED --------------------------- The initial concept for pricing the CD-ROM's was to provide two standard prices, one for orders that were received prior to production of the CD-ROM, and one for orders that were received after production had commenced. The rationale for this was to encourage people to preorder CD-ROM's so that I could closely match supply with demand. The goal was to avoid having either too many discs and not enough orders, or too many orders and not enough discs. Now that I've gone through the production cycle for two Freshfish CD-ROM's, I have a much better grasp of the costs involved, both for initial production runs and for what is called a "remount", where another small production run is done to meet an unanticipated demand. So I have decided to eliminate this price differential, and use the preorder price (currently $19.95 plus shipping and handling) for all CD-ROM's. I think I can probably do pretty well at matching supply and demand, without driving the costs up past a tolerable level with either overproduction or too many remounts. I still encourage preordering however, if for no other reason than to ensure that a disk is available for you. If you wait until after production, and I have guessed wrong on matching supply with demand, you may find that a disk you are interested in is sold out and no more production runs are planned. ---------- BACKISSUES ---------- I still have a limited quantity (75) of the Oct-93 Freshfish CD-ROM's available, plus a very limited quantity (18) of the Hypermedia Version 1.7 CD-ROM's (floppy disks 1-900). These disks are available on a first-come-first-served basis for $19.95 plus shipping and handling. ------------------ Freshfish CD-ROM's ------------------ My original concept for what is now the Freshfish series called for production on a monthly basis, and in fact the disks were refered to as "monthly CD-ROMs". As most of you know, that short of a production schedule turned out to be a little too optimistic, at least for the first few CD-ROMs. I still think the concept of a CD-ROM series that is updated on approximately a monthly basis is good, and long term I will work towards reducing the production cycle to hit the goal of releases every four to six weeks. For the next couple of CD-ROM's I will be satisfied with a six to eight week release cycle. Naturally, people that have preordered a certain number of months of the "monthly CD-ROM" will still get exactly that many Freshfish CD-ROM's, it will just take a little bit longer to get all of them. Currently I'm planning for the third Freshfish CD-ROM to be called the "February Freshfish CD-ROM", and to go into production at the end of February, with shipping during the last week of February or first week of March. The fourth Freshfish CD-ROM will be the "April Freshfish CD-ROM", with production planned about the middle of April. I'm not yet ready to project release dates for Freshfish CD-ROM's beyond that point. ----------------- QUARTERLY CD-ROMs ----------------- The original concept called for a CD-ROM to be produced after every third monthly, containing all the new material from each of the previous monthly CD-ROMs, up to the limit of available previous monthly CD-ROM's or reaching the maximum capacity of a CD-ROM, whichever came first. These CD-ROM's were refered to as "quarterly CD-ROMs". I need to come up with a more descriptive name for this CD-ROM series, hopefully one that is as cute and appropriate as the "Freshfish" name for the CD-ROM's which bring you the "freshest available Fish". I've already ruled out "RipeFish", "CannedFish", etc, so please don't suggest those. The first disk in this series should be available shortly after the release of the February Freshfish CD-ROM, which would put its release date in early March. It will contain all the new material from the Oct-93, Dec-93, and Feb-94 Freshfish CD-ROM's. I'm not sure what I will use to fill the remaining space (assuming there is some). It will depend on exactly how much space does remain, and upon what sorts of suggestions I get from the user community between now and then. My current inclination is to include archives of the floppy distribution, starting with the most recently released disk and working backwards, until the CD-ROM is full. -------------------------- 1000 FLOPPY ARCHIVE CD-ROM -------------------------- Last summer when I was laying out plans completing the floppy distribution to disk 1000, and switching over to CD-ROM distribution, I projected reaching floppy disk 1000 by Jan 1994. This was based on releasing 25 floppy disks concurrent with monthly CD-ROM's in Oct, Nov, Dec, and Jan. Obviously I am going to miss that projection. I am currently at disk 950 in the floppy distribution. Between now and the release of the February Freshfish CD-ROM, I am going to attempt to organize another 25 floppy disks to be released concurrent with the February Freshfish CD-ROM, and then do the final 25 disks to be released concurrent with the April Freshfish CD-ROM, about the middle of April. Between now and April I will be doing as much work as possible on the 1000 disk archive CD-ROM, using the currently available floppies and new floppies as they become available. It is possible that the release of this CD-ROM will be concurrent with the release of the final 25 floppies and the April Freshfish CD-ROM, but realistically, I am expecting the release to happen a couple of weeks later. Pushing two or more CD-ROM's out at exactly the same time may be just too much work. So expect the 1000 disk archive CD-ROM between the middle and end of April. Many people have asked for details about how the 1000 disk archive CD-ROM will be organized. My current thinking on this is to do two different versions, one that consists of a single CD-ROM with everything in archived form, and the other that consists of a two CD-ROM set with everything in unarchived form. Each of them will be the same price ($19.95), and people that have preordered the CD-ROM will be asked to select which version they want. The single CD-ROM (BBS-ready) version will contain archives on a per-floppy-directory basis. That is, each of the main directories on a floppy will be put in a separate archive, and the "overhead files" such as the contents of the :c directory and the usual "readme" files, will be put in yet another archive. To reconstruct a disk all that will be necessary is to format the floppy, and then unarchive each of the archives in the root directory of that floppy. A CRC list will be provided for each disk, for validation that the reconstruction was successful. A tool will be provided that handles all the details of this process, and makes reconstruction of floppies as simple and painless as possible. --------------- Hope you all had a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year's. -Fred ><> -- Read all administrative posts before putting your post up. Mailing list: announce-request@cs.ucdavis.edu. Comments to CSAA@megalith.miami.fl.us. MAIL ALL COMP.SYS.AMIGA.ANNOUNCE ANNOUNCEMENTS TO announce@cs.ucdavis.edu. ==================================================================== This is part of a mailing list gateway maintained by Carlos Amezaga. Bugs, Comments, Subscribes and UnSubcribes should be sent to announce-request@cs.ucdavis.edu.