The PalmPower mailbag has simply been overflowing of late. In this month's edition of Letters to the Editor, you'll find a question about PowerBoard registration, comments on last month's editorial and Palm m100 review, calendar trouble, and a letter from a reader who put what some might consider too much thought into the relative buoyancy of handheld organizers and lunch meat.

No appetite for spam
I want to find out if my email address will be visible in messages I post to the PowerBoards or be accessible in any other way to the other users of the service. If so, I would not use the service because my work email address has not yet fallen into the hands of spammers, and I would like to keep it that way as long as possible. I noticed with my home email address that soon after I posted to Internet newsgroups, I started receiving large amounts of spam.

Is the email address used for any sort of notification or just for registration?

Thanks,
Don G. Anderson

Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz responds
Not directly. You have to drill down a bunch of levels to find an email address. However, a diligent Web scraping program might find an email address that way. If you don't want to have your email address shown, you don't need to include it when you register. We don't do email validation and believe your privacy is yours to protect. However, we do ask you register with your real name, rather than a pseudonym or "handle."

Have fun. Enjoy the PowerBoards.

This link's for you
The Madison Palm Users Group Web site has a link to you. See http://facstaff.wcer.wisc.edu/pbaker/PUG.htm.

Paul Baker

Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz responds
Thanks! Of course, so do thousands of other sites. In fact, PalmPower is in the top 2% of all sites linked to on the Internet. But without lots of individual sites like yours linking to us, we wouldn't be at that exalted place.

Palm V: the seaman's choice
This letter was sent in response to an editorial in the August 2000 issue of PalmPower at http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue200008/ppeditorial0800001.html. In it, Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz criticizes the US Navy for implementing the use of Palm V devices onboard the USS McFaul when they could have used the functionally identical Palm IIIe devices and saved taxpayers money.

Though I generally agree about going for the lower-cost solutions where [the two choices] are identical, in this case, the Palm V's rechargeable batteries make all kinds of sense aboard a ship... Where do you go to buy AAA batteries when you're at sea and the ship's store runs out? If they're going to use a Palm device in any meaningful way, the Palm V is the better choice.

Thought I'd get in my two cents worth!

Jim Parker

Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz responds
Damn, you know I never thought of that (and I shoulda)! Good point.