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freshmeat CDROM Subscription Service
by jeff covey, in freshmeat - Tue, Apr 1st 2003 12:00 UTC

During the boom years, broadband Internet access was a fact of many freshmeat users' lives. In the new millennium, many have found that their return to the basement of the parental home has coincided with a reintroduction to an old friend, the 56k modem. Others in developing countries like Nigeria and Idaho wish they had access to even that much bandwidth. Today, we're happy to announce that we will soon be providing a service which many of you have requested.

freshmeat is a large and complex site, and, every day, people need our help. Our user support inbox is filled with interesting and often urgent questions and comments like these^[1]:

hello I am doing an art project for school what I have selected is to build a grandfatherclock; I have the tools and I can get the wood but i need plans to build one do you have any?

where do u get your hanson songs from because as far as i know stick boy is by suddan death. and other songs are from other varios artists alot of them are by hanson ansd alot of them arn't so please put some real hanson songs on their. thankyou victoria hanson's #1 fan.

Hi, my name is Bertha. I am a 40 year old Austrian who likes romantic evenings and sitting at a warm fire as you shave off my back and chest and cover me in chocolate and whipped cream. I have not seen a man in twenty years, so I have a lot of love to give. If you'd like to meet, please contact me. I'll be waiting....

The corect location to go too. An find a living condition in a functional location (squat) in Amsterndam is my current delima. Can you send me the imformation on who too talk to, or see, too get into a place and out of the hotels and motels?

Would you mind adding me to your hosts file please please please.

I am owed a lot of money from the government and I will soon have a lot of money to burn on PR. I'll pay you $1.4 million to post the site when i have publicity from you when I have more funding from the government. People and freshmeat should not be part of a cover-up.

Is this the Evan Martin who graduated from Sycamore High School?

i have a little library on msn and bill gates will sell for proper amount of money only if someone feels they could use it. he has spies all over the place and is ruthless.sometimes they even tamper with my email. so it would be better to phone me

My name is Miljan, I'm from Banja Luka-Bosnia and Herzegovina. I'm Christian, I'm Serbian. I'm very nice. I want married.

SEEKING EMPLOYMENT AT PLANT IN ST.LOUIS ON MARTINLUTHERKING NOT ABLE TO GET IN CONTACT WITH BY WAY OF EMPLOYMENT OFFICE.PLEASE HELP.THANK YOU

I have some pictueres of a UFO taken in Puerto Rico in 1978 .

Please help! I just left my husband and he shut down my business account, changed my password and I started a new account. But I cant retieve my mail from previous account! I am a model and all my leads come through that name. Please,please help, please?if i could just get that account- i dont want his or anything... please....

One question which comes up from time to time is: Why don't we sell freshmeat CDROMs? People suggest that we could fill them with the most popular projects or let users create custom CDs of their favorites. We've parried this request with a number of creative excuses. The most impressive-sounding is that operating system distributions already package the most commonly-used software, and those items which people need and can't find on their distribution CDs are sufficiently small in number and unique to the individual that it's easier for them to just download them. The most honest is that we're simply lazy.^[2]

Still, people keep asking. They say that they're in a part of the world in which they pay for Internet access by the hour, or that it's frustrating to find the software they want, then discover that the site hosting it is down.

Well, we've heard your cries, and we're enthusiastically delighted to say that we've just hired Bob, our latest employee, and that he's going to be devoting his full time and energies to making this dream come true.

It will not, at least for the first year, be as configurable as some of you had hoped. You will not be able to select the projects which you wish to have included in your mailing. However, we're sure you'll come to see this as a benefit, as every project listed on freshmeat will be on the disks. It will all be right there, at your fingertips. We will unfortunately not be able to include a directory listing what's on which disc, but by popping disks in and out, you will eventually find anything you need.

In our test pressings, Bob has demonstrated tremendous commitment and diligence in the pursuit of completeness, and we feel confident in promising that these mailings will include all branches of all projects from all sections, including themes, OS X software, etc. The most current release in each branch will be available in both source code and any binaries available from the originating site. For example, the Debian project will be included in Stable, Unstable, Testing, and Frozen varieties for Alpha, ARM, HP PA-RISC, Intel x86, Intel IA-64, Motorola 680x0, MIPS, MIPS (DEC), PowerPC, IBM S/390, and SPARC.

This may, at first, seem slightly excessive when extended to all 27,761 projects, but the first time you experience the joy of discovering that disk 137 has just what you want, we know you'll recognize the inestimable value of this policy.

Since so much of the software listed here is updated so frequently, this will be a weekly service. You will be billed four times a year for the 13 mailings in the coming quarter. Mailings should arrive by Saturday so they will be ready for your use in the coming week. If you would prefer to receive your mailings on floppy disks, please let us know when you subscribe.

If you're as excited about this bold next step as we are, just include your full name, address, telephone numbers, next of kin, and credit card information in a comment beneath this article, and we'll add you to the list of people to be notified when this service goes live a few weeks from now. Happy CD Surfing!

Footnotes

All genuine. I swear I am not making this up.
Especially Daniel. I can get away with saying this because he won't bother to read the footnotes.^[3]
Oh, damn; he did. Ok, I didn't really mean it.^[4]
Actually, I did. I know he won't read all the footnotes.

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Comments

[»] Nattor the Little CD Vendor
by Lord D. Nattor - Sep 19th 2003 22:12:26

Hi,

I just started a website this week:
http://www.waglo.com/nattor/

It's the place to get a lot of gnu/linux distributions, other, seperate open source / free software, and other miscellaneous stuff: human genome, earth height maps, etexts, etc.

For now, Nattor only ships to Canada, since it's based in Montreal, Quebec.