E. Run Microsoft Word, open the binary (MS Word!) file and print.
There may be one slight glitch. Macintosh files have two parts, a "resource" part and a "data" part. The resource part contains such information as the name of the application to run when you click on the file and how to draw the cute little icon pictures. Some of the simpler programs do not encode the resource part so you may get a generic doc.u.ment that you can"t open by clicking on it (the infamous "application busy or missing" message). That"s OK. Open it from *within* Word and then save it as a Word doc.u.ment. It should recover the missing parts. And get smarter software.
Certainly this procedure is complicated--and you might want to do a dry run before you try beating a 5 o"clock deadline--but the capability of transfering a computer file cross-country in seconds can be crucial to a business. The fact that it can be done with free software and a casual $10/month E-mail connection is astounding. Play around and learn to do this. In the future, printers may commonly accept submissions by E-mail or by direct transfer over telephone lines. Imagine not having to figure out how to keep your camera-ready copy dry on a rainy day or having to rush across town minutes before your deadline!
STEP 4. Image enhancing and/or color separation
One of the great advantages of having a graphic in a computer file is that you can use free software (or shareware) to play around with the image. Cropping, rotating, streching, zooming, and so on are all common. In addition, you can convert color to black and white or greyscale, enhance the image, make halftones or color separations, and even play with the spatial frequency spectrum if you want. (Color separations are the four images needed by printers--separate ones for Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, and Black ink).
STEP 5. Importing or embedding in a word processing or desktop publishing program
Once you are happy with the picture you import it as a graphic into your DTP or word processing program. If your program reads the format the picture is in, this is easy. If not, you will need to get free software that converts from the format you have to the one you need. This process is very experimental. I"ve found that I have better results converting from an obscure format to a standard and common format like GIF or TIFF before converting to a proprietary target format. This is even true if the software says it reads the obscure format directly.
STEP 6. Printing on a laser printer or other equipment
If a graphic is not solely intended for display on a (color) monitor, like a slide presentation, it must be printed out. And there it is.
Your picture in print.
What to Do When You Only Have E-mail The very first thing to do is to get information on getting a better Internet connection! But barring that, there are many reasons that you might need to know workarounds that only require E-mail: you might be stuck somewhere (like work) where there is no Internet access, or you could be borrowing access from a friend. Since Internetworking is about communicating with others, in many ways this is the most important chapter in this course.
First we consider methods for
FTP by Mail Servers Archie by Mail Mailservers and Fileservers Mailing lists and how to find them E-mail to FAX Fax is not a useful as E-mail, except in regard to one thing.
The Top Ten Fun Things to Get by E-mail List Now that you know the techniques, try getting some of the things on the "Top 10" list, in Appendix E.
Employee Development: How to Get Your Employees Internetworking This short Chapter contains a little advice on how to learn about the Internet. It should be clear from the preceding Chapters that learning how to use the Internet is a survival skill for many businesses.
Effective use of the electronic medium
o Saves employee time--time lost in phone tag, lost messages, and they three day time delay of surface mail.
o Avoids circuitous means of transfering data like printing a doc.u.ment, faxing it, and then rekeyboarding the data at the receiving end
o Allows businesses and individuals to self-publish, and distribute their work efficiently, whether or not the text or the graphical appearance is primary.
o Provides access to information, allows communication and distribution of doc.u.ments in a single, uniform fashion.
It should also be clear that Internetworking is not yet a smooth, easily learned process. It requires knowledge and skills that are not presently taught anywhere except on the Internet itself.
The next section discusses specific needs of different segments of people. The final section contains a fairly systematic exposition of the methods and skills needed to Internetwork effectively. But far from representing these sections as the last word on the subject, I would like to stress that the only way to learn Internetworking is through undirected exploration of the Internet.
This means you have to let your employees play, at least on their own time: play with programs, play with Anonymous FTP, and play with Usenet news. None of these activities are directly productive, but the playing pays off when you need a new program and someone in your office can
o pick the right Usenet newsgroup and retrieve its FAQ
o read the FAQ and learn about free software that will solve your problem and where to find the latest version
o connect to the software archive and (correctly) transfer the program--even though the intervening machine is of the "wrong" make.
o properly decompress and install the software.
When all this is done competently, in less than half an hour, you will have attained the goal of employee development.
A final caveat: *don"t neglect Usenet news.* Usenet news is the most difficult of the "Internet basic services" to get because it is not really an Internet service. It is commonly found on Internet computers and commonly transmitted over the Internet, but it does not fit into the E-mail-FTP-telnet scheme of things. If your Internet provider does not provide the news, you may have to ferret it out by (1) getting an account on a public access UNIX system and (2) learning to use UNIX.
Command-line UNIX is no easier than command-line MS-DOS, but it is worth learning how to get on a UNIX system for the "rn" (readnews) command alone. All you need to know to get that far (and more) is contained in Appendix D.
Any guide like this will soon be dated in terms of information sources, techniques, and software. But Usenet is up to the minute. There, hidden among the many diversions of alt., talk., and soc. hierarchies, is the latest information on the computing environment of modern Internetworking. In the opinion of this author, learning to use a newsreader and reading the network news regularly is the *single most important Internetworking skill*. The Usenet newsgroups are Dewey Decimal System of the the true world library. Information can be found in plenty elsewhere, but guides to information are rare and priceless-- and the Usenet news is the guide to the Internet.
Special Concerns
This Part lists briefly some of the ways in which various groups of people can use internetworking skills.
Special for Businesses I wish I had better news for business use of the Internet. I wish I could describe hundreds of free services of interest to *business* and tell you how to use the Internet for profit. But it"s not there yet.
However, before you turn away with a sad but knowing smile on your face shaking your head over another unlikely technological dream--you"ve seen it before--consider this: the main potential of the Internet is as a communication medium. Is radio and television important to businesses?
What about newspapers and magazines? Or direct mail? Very few businesses make money by selling newspapers or operating radio stations, but many, many businesses use these media for advertising. You and your employees need to become adept at using this medium for the same reasons you"ve mastered layout of newpaper ads and writing form letters.
It is very important to understand that the Internet is not a broadcast medium but more like the telephone or mail system. It specializes in contacting individuals one at a time. In other words, you are not going to get a list of all 25 million E-mail addresses and bombard them every 10 minutes with a 30 second sound byte. Nor are you going to send 100 people a letter asking them to contact 100 persons each. On the other hand you might use the medium to contact a mailing list of your customers or self-publish a promotional brochure.