CHEBUCTO CONNECTIONS Q & A

Printing problems and searching strangeness

I'm given the option to print, but when I choose it, nothing prints. My word processor, and other programs print just fine. What's going on?
When you print, by pressing the P key (or the Y key in Pine, the e-mail program), the computer that runs Chebucto Community Network sends a command to your computer, telling it to print the information instead of just displaying it on the screen.
The problem is than many pieces of communications software, that is, the software you use to connect to Chebucto Community Network, are not able to correctly interpret this command. What usually happens is that the pages you want to print scroll down you screen, but you printer just sits there.
There isn't really anything you can do about this problem, other than try a different communication program, since this is a defect in your software, not in CCN. The help desk keeps a list of what communication programs will print properly from CCN. Windows 3 users may want to try the Windows Terminal program, located in your Accessories program group. It is known to print properly.
Sometimes I do a search on the Internet, using a search engine such as Lycos or Webcrawler. Why do some of the links produced by the search lead to empty documents, or give me error messages?
If you are using a web search engine such as Lycos, then here is the most likely answer: All the search engines work by automatically connecting to thousands of pages on the WWW per day, and then index what they find in a database. When you search the web, you are really just searching this database. If the data was gathered, say, a month ago, and two weeks after that the page was removed from the World Wide Web, the link provided by the search engine will not work.
All the search engine knows is the state of the web when the information was gathered, not the state of the web at the current time. The better search engines re-visit sites frequently, attempting to keep the database up-to-date, but much old data remains. If you do a search on "Chebucto" you will find links to cfn·cs·dal·ca, the system's old name, even though the name was changed long ago. (The links will still work, in this case, since the old name is still accepted.)

Of course, the usual internet annoyances -- load problems, system failures and other glitches could also cause be the cause problems.

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Chebucto Connections QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
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Last Month: December 1995 Next Month: February 1996