Xref: utzoo comp.misc:11424 comp.org.eff.talk:1445 alt.censorship:1229 Path: utzoo!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!lavaca.uh.edu!menudo.uh.edu!nuchat!sugar!karl From: karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer) Newsgroups: comp.misc,comp.org.eff.talk,alt.censorship Subject: Re: Prodigy Special Offer hits my mailbox... Message-ID: <1991Feb12.030202.9781@sugar.hackercorp.com> Date: 12 Feb 91 03:02:02 GMT References: <1991Feb11.061828.20234@looking.on.ca> Organization: Sugar Land Unix -- Houston, TX Lines: 39 >In article <1991Feb11.061828.20234@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes: > Face it folks, 25 cents per e-mail message with 30 included in the > price is actually a good deal when compared to past e-mail pricing > trends. Some new trends, including GEnie's unlimited e-mail (but no > mailing lists) for $4.95/month, are better deals, and many here are used > to the unusual deal of usenet/internet mail, but I am a bit surprised at > the bad press Prodigy's gotten on this price change. But it begs the question a bit. They didn't want anyone posting anything but the blandest stuff in the public forums. Use mailing lists, they said. Then the new pricing policy effectively prohibits mailing lists. My biggest impression of Prodigy from my free month was how little of the text of the messages/articles/etc were shown on the screen once the room for the ever-changing-ad-at-the-bottom was taken, plus other areas, plus the big, clunky font they used to display it as. It was around 16X40, as I recall. Oh yeah, in an earlier posting Brad mentioned stuff Prodigy could do that Usenet can't. You can order groceries, for example. I was sold by that one. For only seven dollars they'd pull my order off the shelves, bag it and drive it out to me. But it turned out that you were paying full list price for everything, like Diet Cokes were $2.69 a six pack, instead of the $1.50 typically at Kroger's. And I sure all of my fellow Diet Coke-swilling programmers out there can see that there's just no way you can justify that extra $40-50 a month just to get your Cokes delivered... Oh yeah, one more thing. Another Prodigy special, "Free Film." Scrolling by in the advertising area of your screen, something like "Get two rolls of film for free! Press [QUERY] now!" "Hey great," you say, "free film." You drive through a bunch of steps, then at the end it displays a little invoice: Film $0.00 Shipping and Handling $4.00 Press [NEXT] to complete your order! -- -- uunet!sugar!karl --