Feel the Buzz -- Joel Smith writes about an electrifying subject: using power transmission lines for data access. For background, according to the November 1997 issue of The Seybold Report on Internet Publishing, European and Southeast Asian power grids have an advantage over the U.S

More on Cable Modems -- Johann Beda writes in regard to his cable modem connection: I just got hooked up here in southwestern Ontario with The Wave through the local cable TV provider

Cable Whiplash -- Kate Binder complains that her cable modem connection isn't nearly what it's cracked up to be. Although we have no specific suggestions to pass along to Kate, if anyone out there has some ideas, please send them to Kate directly. I noticed that you'll be covering cable modem issues next week

Why Make Netscape Source Available for Free? Jim Peters offers a suggestion for why Netscape is making the source code for Communicator 5.0 available for free on the Internet, as we mentioned in NetBITS-016: Perhaps you don't understand the motivation behind the free software community

PDF without a Font Net -- Chris Ruebeck adds to the discussion surrounding PDF on the Web, started by Mike Lee's article in NetBITS-014: I would like to add to the comments of Ray Davis on the subject of PDF's incongruities with the Web

Acrobatic Dead Horses -- Michael J. Tardiff writes with one final comment about Acrobat: Ray Davis's comments in NetBITS-016 brought to mind my past experiences in dealing with the "structure vs

Special Acrobatics -- Francois Pottier passes along news of a free method of creating Acrobat PDF files (see NetBITS-014): For people who don't want to buy the full Acrobat package, it's also possible to create PDF files using free tools, like a recent version of GhostScript, which can convert PostScript files to PDF files

Fall from the High Wire -- Ray Davis offers an excellent rebuttal to Mike Lee's view of Adobe Acrobat in NetBITS-014: I was disappointed to see the unqualified rave for Adobe's PDF electronic document format

JavaScript Yourself Anonymous -- In response to letters on hiding your email address on a Web page to avoid spammers sucking it down, Joseph McLean wrote us with a nifty JavaScript-based solution, which he offers for free: Brandon Munday mentioned how he removed all "clickable" mailto links from his Web site to thwart the evil address-collecting spiders

Acrobatics -- Davide Guarisco offered some addenda to Mike Lee's article on Acrobat in NetBITS-014: First, with the newest Macintosh LaserWriter software from Apple (8.5.1) it's even easier to create PDF documents

Cleaning Windows -- Last issue in NetBITS Updates, we expressed confusion that no one writing about Microsoft's attempts to offer versions of its Windows 95 operating system without Internet Explorer mentioned that the original Windows 95 system was still in use on tens of millions of machines

X-Rated Placeholders -- A random and amusing anecdote arrived from Russell Aminzade : I had a job recently developing a Web site for an intranet for a division of a Fortune 100 computer company

Filename Extension -- Steve Peterson pointed out that Windows 95 is more clever than we gave it credit for when mapping its long filenames to short ones. On floppy disks it's a little more complicated

Long and Short of It -- James Weissman notes that many systems that can't support long filenames are able to use mapping - a table of the short names and the longer ones they correspond to - to provide nicer looking URLs. EnterpriseWeb/VM is a Web server that runs under the IBM VM/CMS mainframe operating system where file identifiers can have an 8 character name and 8 character type

FTP Snatching -- In response to our FAQtoid that mentioned how spammers might capture your email address when you visit a Web page, Peter N Lewis noted a sneaky technique involving FTP: Another way I've heard to snatch an email address when visiting a Web page is by coding an inline image with an FTP URL

Imaging an Address -- Brandon Munday offers a suggestion for displaying your email address on a Web page in a manner that prevents automated spiders from sucking it down: I used an image editing program to create a graphic image of my email address, in a font and size similar to that used by most browsers

Move Me -- Martyn Wilkinson writes in regards to the graphic file formats article in NetBITS-007: There's one point Glenn forgot to mention: GIF files support multiple "frames," which means they can be used for simple animation

Myths of the Net -- Ken Lager points us to a good resource for debunking stories like the AOL 4.0 rumor we lambasted last issue: I have found that the best way to deal with mail warning me of a deadly computer virus is to fire up my Web browser and head on over to the Computer Virus Myths page at Rob Rosenberger's non-profit Web site

50 Pence for the Next 10 Minutes, Please -- Mark Townshend wrote in response to Paul Durrant's letter last week in NetBITS-006 about how some UK ISPs don't maintain points of presence (POPs) all over the country, but rather forward calls to a central, vast modem pool

Paths to POPs -- John Baxter , a colleague of ours out on the Olympic Peninsula, notes that POPs aren't the only way for providers to build networks. Similar to the UK solution we mention above, U.S