manis@ubc-cs.UUCP (03/28/87)
In article <1729@trwrb.UUCP> gibson@trwrb.UUCP (Gregory S. Gibson) writes: >BTW, I believe a buyer can negoiate a better price if he pays COD with a >Cashier's Check. That is because seller's must pay a credit card surcharge >that is past on to the buyer. I'm not entirely sure I buy this argument. It was the case a few years ago that mail order firms would tack on a 3% charge for VISA/MASTERCARD, but that seems to have vanished nowadays (a merchant depositing credit card payments loses from 2%-4% as a discount, depending on the volume and the financial institution, but most mail order houses seem to have absorbed that as a general cost of doing business). On the other hand, money orders and certified/cashier's cheques are somewhat risky to send via mail, as a third party could intercept them and deposit them. Further, you then have a considerable delay between the time you actually purchase the money order and the time it is actually received by the vendor. On to some good news: I ordered a copy of Mark Williams C from MicroTyme, of Kettering, Ohio, on March 7. MWC lists for US$179, but their price was US$119. When it hadn't arrived two weeks later, I called them, and they said that they had just shipped it. It arrived earlier this week (via Canada Post, in only 4 days!). Once I unpacked it, I discovered a set of release notes dated March 4 of this year. I don't believe I've ever received a piece of production software this soon after its completion. MWC really does look like an astonishing buy. The new version is really inexpensive; it includes a shell which is compatible with neither the C-shell nor the Bourne Shell, but is certainly quite powerful, a crummy implementation of Micro-Emacs (I'm using 3.7i with it now, and am about to compile 3.8b), all the utilities one could ever ask for, and a Version 7 style debugger named db. The compiler is reasonably fast (though not blazing). Documentation is relentlessly complete, covering not only the software provided, but also GEM and TOS. Unfortunately, it is ordered in a dictionary-style manner which groups the dayspermonth subroutine, the db command, and the Dcreate system call adjacently. You have to know what you're looking for before you start, but you will find it there. There's also an incredibly nice ramdisk (which has now displaced Eternal2 which has displaced Eternal which has displaced RMD650, and so it goes), which lets you load files into your ramdisk, and then save the disk as an executable file in your auto folder. Voila! You do a cold boot and the disk is automatically loaded quite quickly; if on the other hand you've made the ramdisk bootable, you can press the reset button and, moments later, you're back with all your files intact. They claim you can use it on a 520ST with one single-sided drive. Maybe so, but I wouldn't recommend it. I've configured the compiler, editor, and shell, along with a very few utilities and a \TMP directory, in the 500K ramdisk, and most (but not quite all) of the other commands filling up a DS disk which I leave in B:. That leaves me a source/object disk. A hard disk would of course be nicer. All in all, highly recommended. Disclaimer: I have no connection with Mark Williams Company, MicroTyme, or Atari, not to mention the Catholic Church, Amway, or the Prawn Fanciers of British Columbia. ----- Vincent Manis {seismo,uw-beaver}!ubc-vision!ubc-cs!manis Dept. of Computer Science manis@cs.ubc.cdn Univ. of British Columbia manis%ubc.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1W5 manis@ubc.csnet (604) 228-6770 or 228-3061 "BASIC is the Computer Science equivalent of 'Scientific Creationism'."