[SunWorld: IDG's magazine for the Sun community]

SunWorld's FAQ

You guys work for Sun, right?
Wrong. SunWorld is published monthly by IDG Communications, the world's largest publisher of computer-related information. IDG publishes the "For Dummies" series of books, and our sister titles include InfoWorld, PC World, and Computerworld, as well as 275 others.

Please send me information about a Sun product. Pretty please?
SunWorld's editors don't work for Sun Microsystems. Go to http://www.sun.com/ to learn more about Sun's products.

SunWorld's fonts are too small. Could you please make them bigger?
No, we cannot. But you can. The neat thing about HTML publishing is that you the reader control the details of the presentation. Most of our readers use Netscape. In Netscape, go to the Options menu, and select Preferences. Then choose the font size you want. Users of Mosaic and other browsers can also control the size of the typeface and the typeface family displayed.

How do I save an article from SunWorld on my local machine?
Netscape, Mosaic, and Lynx allow users to save pages to their local disks. In Netscape, go to the File menu and select Save as... Name the file, tell Netscape if you want to save the file as PostScript, text, or HTML, and press the OK button.

To print a story, go to the File menu and select Print...

All browsers offer many other useful commands. You should read the documentation for more information.

Our stories stay available with their unique file names, so you may want to concoct your own personal mini-Yahoo of valuable URLs.

How do I subscribe to the paper version of SunWorld?
You can't. SunWorld has no printed alter ego. The editors responsible for SunWorld online brought you the paper-based SunWorld and Advanced Systems magazines, so we we certainly know how to use that technology. But rising paper and postage prices, coupled with a downturn in advertising make profitably publishing a Unix-specific paper-based magazine difficult. The economics of Web publishing are completely different.

Why don't you use the Adobe Acrobat file format?
Formatting text into pdf requires additional steps and splits our "source tree" so we've been reluctant to take the plunge. Doing so would result in hiring more staff, and we'd rather invest in content than presentation at this time.

Why don't you make SunWorld available via ftp or e-mail?
Two key issues for us: Being able to track reader use (for advertising promotion purposes) and being able to deliver ads to all readers regardless of delivery method (so we can pay for things).

The dog Sun uses in its advertisements, what breed is it?
Greater Swiss Mountain.

Why do you accept advertising in SunWorld?
Editors may be easy, but we ain't cheap. Someone needs to pay the bills, whether it's readers with monthly service charges or vendors with ads. Oddly enough, some readers like ads in trade magazines because of the information the ads contain.

I'd like more choices in the questionnaire at the end of each story.
The brief story questionnaire we offer at the end of each story is meant to be an unscientific measure of our readers' satisfaction. We purposely kept the selections few to make completing the form as painless as possible.

I own stock in Sun, and its price just dropped. Please have someone call and tell me why.
  1. See the first item in this FAQ.
  2. If we could explain meanderings of a stock's price we would, perhaps, be able to predict its rise and fall. And if that was the case we wouldn't be here to answer your question, but instead would be pondering fruit-flavored drinks on a Bahaman beach.

Which tools do you use to create your Web pages and manage your magazine?
The editors use their favorite text tools (vi, textedit, etc), and we gin-up the HTML pages using templates for each section (i.e., news, features, columns). We've tried a few HTML word processors, and found them too slow, buggy, and rigid. For what it's worth, the editors employ SPARCstations of various vintages.

I need help locating Adrian Cockcroft's performance measurement tool, which I believe is called either "SE," "virtual_adrian," or "ruletool." Can you help me find this?
Point your Web browser to http://www.sun.com/950901/columns/adrian/column1.html and you'll find an article describing the SE Performance Toolkit and ruletool, including a hyperlink to the toolkit: http://www.sun.com/960301/columns/adrian/se2.5.html

[(c) Copyright 1995-98 Web Publishing Inc.]

If you have technical problems with this magazine, contact webmaster@sunworld.com
URL: http://www.sunworld.com/common/swol-faq.html
Last updated: 1 August 1999