OCEANIA ORACLE

ISSUE #15- 12/17/94
No Nonsense New Nation News - © 1994

INDEX

• BUSINESS PLAN
• TITUS BROWN DAY
• ALT.CULTURE.VIRTUAL.OCEANIA
• THE FLOWCHART
• BUSINESS VENTURE UPDATE #1 - COMMUNICATIONS PRODUCT
• BUSINESS VENTURE UPDATE #2 - MATCHMAKER SERVICE
• WEB SITE
• EQUIPMENT
• OCEANIA PIONEER JOURNAL
• PASSPORT UPDATE
• THERMOMETER
• WHITE PAPERS
• NEW MUTUAL LINKS
• OCEANIA SECRET .SIG SOCIETY
• LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
• HOW YOU CAN HELP
• END OF THE YEAR
• EQUIPMENT - FOOTNOTES

BUSINESS PLAN

TITUS BROWN DAY

ALT.CULTURE.VIRTUAL.OCEANIA

Summary of steps that it took to launch this group:

1. I posted an RFD (refer for discussion) to news.announce.newgroups. It was accepted by the moderator there and was posted.
2. When I made later inquiries, I was told that my name had been rejected by an elite group. (Note that I was not informed that there was a problem and a message had been posted to the public saying that everything was going fine with the group.)
3. Negotiations began with the elite group.
4. The elite group approved the name soc.culture.virtual.oceania and a new RFD was posted for this.
5. When I made later inquiries, I was told that my name had been rejected by the same elite group. (Note that again, I was not informed that there was a problem. This time they posted messages to the public for a month saying that everything was going fine with the group.)
6. I tried to negotiate with the elite group with no success and finally figured out that the vote for the group was being blocked. I.e., I was experiencing election fraud yet again.
7. I found someone to create an alt.* group.
8. I posted an announcement to alt.config that I was going to create the group alt.culture.oceania.
9. There were no complaints over a week period, but once again a member of a different elite group later informed me that he was not going to accept my newsgroup name. I was starting to worry that the entire Usenet universe was full of election fraud as is the problem with the election process in the country that I currently reside in.
10. Negotiations began with this individual.
11. This individual approved the name alt.culture.virtual.oceania. I won't name this individual, but let's just say there is an active alt.bonehead group for him.
12. Meanwhile I learned that having an unmoderated group was a real bad idea as there is a rising level of rudeness on Usenet. So it had to be moderated...
13. I found two moderators to run the group (I would have settled for one).
14. I found someone to run a script that would accept all messages posted to the group and then distribute them to the moderators.
15. The group was launched.

I would like to thank Kent Landfield for his excellent information on how to establish a moderated newsgroup. And, of course, I would like to thank Tramm Hudson for running the script file that will make it possible to handle multiple moderators.

Finally, for the record here is what Paul Campbell had to do to create the newsgroup:

"I have the control article all queued up to fire off into 3
different servers, two in Florida and one in Japan, which should help
propagation problems. I would also suggest advertising by cross
posting to your group, which will cause additional automatic links to
be created at some servers and virtually guarantee the group's
existence.

I will send out newgroup commands 3 times (one a week) which should
also guarantee its existence."

THE FLOWCHART

This large amount of people has meant that it has become increasingly easy for me to accomplish tasks. For example, I was happy to begin our newsgroup with two moderators instead of the one that was the minimum requirement. Now that the workload has been reduced for them, I believe it is much more likely that further people will volunteer to be moderators in the future as they won't be volunteering for as large of a workload.

The only major task that we do not have enough people for is to overturn the election fraud that has been perpetrated against us. Based on previous experience with government entitites, I believe we will need 10,000 subscribers to this newsletter before we will have sufficient firepower to defeat those people who have committed treason under the Oceania Constitution. I will continue to take steps to build up our resources so this victory will one day be ours.

BUSINESS VENTURE UPDATE #1 - COMMUNICATIONS PRODUCT

BUSINESS VENTURE UPDATE #2 - MATCHMAKER SERVICE

Marcus Tye has also made significant progress on improving the matchmaker questionnaire and I am still looking for more people to help improve this questionnaire. I would also like to thank Brian McInturff for his recent input into the questionnaire.

WEB SITE

In addition, Sean Kane has converted the Constitution and Laws to hypertext, Greg Griffin of Online Media Consulting has converted the archived Oceania Oracles to hypertext and has begun work on the Mall site, and Vern Hart is working on improving the Sea Structures Inc. page.

EQUIPMENT

The best camera scanner that we found is a 24 bit color digital camera from Apple, available for $689.95 from PC Connection. At this time, we do not plan on buying one.

Looking into the best teleconferencing system was an interesting experience. It turns out that the best system available for around $2500, the Intel Proshare Video System 200, has one big problem. The company behind it is falling apart. Intel's phone lines are jammed due to the Pentium mess. They aren't responsive via e-mail either. Anyway, I was finally able to contact them, and received the necessary information.

It has been determined that the fact that their device only works with ISDN lines instead of ordinary phone lines makes it unusable for our purposes. (I am talking about the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine's purposes.) We need to be able to send a teleconferencing system to someone for a short time period and then UPS it to someone else. I am currently looking into Creative Lab's ShareVision PC3000 system which works off ordinary phone lines. I shudder when I think about their level of customer support, though...

Oh, I should point out that it is currently illegal to use the Intel Proshare Video System 200 in Nevada. While the phone company has developed the necessary technology to create ISDN connections, their new technology is still going through the price approval process with the Nevada government. They hope that their product will be legal by the first quarter of 1995. Anybody want to move yet?

OCEANIA PIONEER JOURNAL

1. A day in the life of an Oceanian.
2. Questions and Answers about Oceania.
3. Exclusive interview with Richard Morris, founder of Sea Structures Inc.
4. I need one more topic.

PASSPORT UPDATE

The format of the passport is nearly identical to the World Service Authority Passport. The unique thing about this passport is that it has a lot of stuff in other languages. I quote:

"The first few days, I presented my US passport in English and 
French.  The policeman would detain me for up to an hour and record 
every detail in the identification pages.  On the thought that they 
were having as much trouble with the Latin alphabet as I was having 
with the Cyrillic, I got out my WSA passport in 6 languages as a 
courtesy to my hosts.  Almost every time I gave this document in 
Russian for my personal identification, the policeman glanced over it 
quickly and sent me on my way with a smile.  The same thing happened 
in Egypt."

Note that if someone has a fax and a xerox machine we could put them in charge of doing a little fax tree where they could send faxes of the passport in development to people on the passports list.

The sample passport kept saying that it was vaild for travel to Oceania, of course it should imitate what the WSA passport said which is that it is valid to travel for all countries.

The part where it said "Signature and stamp of Oceania Officer" should be changed. Under the Oceania constitution any company may get into the passport business. So what should we change this to?

The only other thing of interest was the front page which steals some good stuff from the WSA passport:

OCEANIA

This is to certify that _________ is a holder of Oceania passport No. 
_______ issued _________, 19__ from Oceania Office ________.  The 
Oceania passport is sanctioned by Article 13, Section 2, Universal 
Declaration of Human Rights, approved by the General Assembly of the 
United Nations, 10 December, 1948.

This article states: "Everyone has the right to leave any country, 
including his own, and to return to his country".

The Oceania passport is the personal property of the person to whom 
it was issued.  The right to personal property is sanctioned by 
Article 17, Sections 1 & 2, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 
viz:

"Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in 
association with others."

"No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property."

Thank You for visiting Oceania, please come again.

_________________
Oceania President

At this point there is very little else of interest in the mockup passport. The rest of the text is very ordinary and is taken from the WSA passport. We are very interested in hearing suggestions on how the passport can be made unique.

I would like to thank Bob Crawford for providing the information on the WSA passport.

THERMOMETER

Here is the current suggested format of this "Thermometer", I am open to suggestions. Note that Sean Kane will be the official Oceania Thermometer Reader.

        Oceania Development Meter
        -------------------------
        This week, the following progress was made in our goal to build a
        new country:

        + Dollars raised through merchandising: $xxx
        + Dollars raised through bookselling  : $xxx
        + Dollars raised through donations    : $xxx
        + Dollars raised through investments  : $xxx
        + Dollars raised through other means  : $xxx
        = Total dollars raised                : $xxx

        . Number of Oceania WWW accesses              : nnn
        . Number of requests for information          : nnn
        . Number of subscribers to the Oceania Journal: nnn

"I'm running out of things to meter; I'm sure others have ideas.
Another item that I'm sure people would be interested in is media
coverage;  also, perhaps number of people who want to move in first
thing.  How about setting goals, as well, and reporting percentage
complete?  We could determine the amount we'd need to raise to build
a 10-unit SeaCell platform, and start selling the units...  Watch out
for securities violations, though...

For a variety of things, though, I believe percentages are the way to
go.  People enjoy charting the progress of things, and this approach
may generate more support -- similar to the hospital or school
"thermometers" I'm sure you all have seen.  (It would be interesting
to research the ROI of various presentation techniques; anyone up for
it?)"

WHITE PAPERS

NEW MUTUAL LINKS

• Craig Dickson has established a link to us in his links to Other Places page, under "People and Communities".
• The Island One Society favors space development and the establishment of an off-planet society that in some ways sounds rather like ours. They have established a mutual link to us is their "Space Index" page, in the "Miscellaneous" category.
• The Liberty Conference on the WELL has a "Libertarian Organizations" document which lists the Atlantis Project, with a favorable description that includes a link to our site.
• Amdahl's Hot Topics lists us; for over a week as the #1 item!
• As part of CERN's Overview of the Web, we're listed under the name "New Country".
• We're in the Etext Archives, in the alphabetical listing of all zines.
• The Oceania Oracle is listed in John Labovitz's e-zine list.
• The Ocean Engineering department at Texas A&M University has a link to us in their "Off-campus Web Links" page.
• QuoteCom has a link to us, in their page "Other Links for Investors".
• Russ "Sovereign" has a link to us in his home page (near the bottom, under SOLUTIONS).
• Tomservo@iastate.edu has a link to us in his "Gateway" page.
• Vic Varma has a link to us in his "Virtual Town", under Other Towns.

OCEANIA SECRET .SIG SOCIETY

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Oceania: A New Country In Development ->  oceania@terminus.intermind.net |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

I just got an ad for Popular Science magazine, and one of the
"upcoming articles" was about an ocean city called The Marine Uranus
Project.  The project is from the Nishimatsu Construction Co. of
Japan.  Their city is shaped like an inverted cone with a diameter of
1650 feet and a depth of 660 feet.  It would have a breakwater to
stop waves, and undersea tunnels to connect it with other marine
cities.  There was an artist's rendition making it look like a domed
roulete wheel with a bridge-like ring around it.

Just thought you might be interested.  Keep up the good work!

          -- Mike "any chance of the Oceania Channel yet?" Bartman --

HOW YOU CAN HELP

1. More people are needed to help maintain the Oceania web site. We still need at least one more person working on it before it will start to thrive.
2. I need a place to locate the American Academy of Anti-Aging web site. Note that for the first few months it will have very low traffic so I am looking for a temporary place to base it.
3. Volunteers are needed who are interested in anti-aging reserach to help me build the Anti-Aging web site.
4. If you have an interest in the game of Diplomacy, I need volunteers for some projects.
5. I need a person to write and conduct the interview in the Oceania Pioneer Journal of Richard Morris, the founder of Sea Structures Inc.
6. I need people to both a) find other web sites that have mentioned us that we do not know about plus b) convince more web sites to mention us.
7. Since I will soon be doing scanning of large pictures, I am interested in any good deals on memory for my Gateway 2000 486/66Mhz system. I currently have 8 megs.
8. Another topic for an article in the Oceania Pioneer Journal needs to be developed.
9. Input is needed on the passport design.
10. More moderators are needed for our newsgroup.
11. I need people to write new ads for the promotions that I put on Usenet for this mailing list.
12. A second source for mailing lists is needed. If you can create mailing lists, please send me e-mail.
13. More people are needed to write white papers on Oceania. White papers are detailed papers on a topic. We currently have someone writing white papers on the money system of Oceania.
14. I need a site that I can telnet to and use Pnews on.
15. I need someone to be able to accept faxes from the art department that is working on them, scan them in, and post them in .GIF or .JPG format to our passport mailing list.

END OF THE YEAR

EQUIPMENT - FOOTNOTES

"The quote they gave me (12% over wholesale) is $739.99 -- a full 4
cents more than your quote from PC Connection.  Either PC Connection
operates at lower overhead, or higher volumes, or CompUSA isn't being
forthright with their costs.  Or perhaps there's another middleman on
the way to CompUSA.  Whatever it is, I'd buy from PC Connection."

"Check out the MacWorld review of OCR and scanners. It came down to
OmniPage Pro 5.0 and the Canon scanner. The HP was only mediochre for
OCR. My experience w/ OCR, is if you don't have the fastest computer,
best scanner and software, you should just hire a typest. Even w/ the
best setup, you still need to proof read the doc.  A spell checker
will not fix "on" being scanned as "or", "if" being scanned as "it".
example like these abound. I'll find the exact date of the reviews;
their content is PC valid."

"I bought a HP 11cx a few weeks ago. I had an ad to make for Micro
Computer Journal. But I returned it before I opened the box. It was
$800. It was a 24-bit, 400 dpi unit. It said it could do
transparencies on the box, but I couldn't confire whether it was
slides or not. Hummm... In the end I used a service bureau to do the
scan and separations. So, I took the scanner back and did some
further checking. My conclusion was, the 400 dpi resolution is
outdated. With simple inkjets now capable of 720 dpi, HP was
unloading its IIcx's. But they were already too late. Many other
scanners with 600x300 dpi were selling for about half the cost (high
$400's). An at $1000 there were 30-bit scanners with 1200x300
resolution.

I'm thinking, when I do try to buy again, I'll try to get a bit ahead
of the "technology" game. It'll be a UMAX Powerlook at about $3000.
It has a 30-bit 600x1200 optical resolution and operates in one pass.
Interpolation software can take this to a simulated 2400x2400 dpi. Of
course, it all depends on what you're looking to do with the output.
I am making artwork for ads with 133-150 lpi screens, so I need good
resolution. Remember, as the resolution goes up, so does the need for
RAM in your system, if you are going to manipulate the image, or even
view it.

I've been wanting a video input for years now, but frankly, if the
picture you want to capture and print is to be printed larger than
2"x3", you're going to be disappointed. The video process limits the
information available from a video camera to 640x480, so regular
(not super) VGA is all the detail you can get.  That makes a fair
picture at 133 lpi up to 4", but that's stretching the very limits.
Beyond that you'll see teh "boxes" of color along diagonal lines and
on circles. To quote Video to Print by Doug Swank in Flash Magazine
Volume 6 Issue 6, "...frame grabber might give us the rough
equivalent of a 640x4870 computer image. This is quite useful for
many purposes but, of course, not nearly as good as an image scanned
on even a lowly desktop scanner. In simple terms, the National
Geographic Magazine will never use video for its 480-lpi photos."

There's my two cents worth of input. I'm curious to hear how the
search goes, since I am still sitting on the sidelines waiting for
the technology to caught up with the promise. Pls consider keeping me
informed."

"Regarding Scanners and OCR software.  I've always despised them
as inefficent.  Having to go back and error check a document often
took the same time it took to type in properly by hand...

however,

My sister-in-law uses a scanner for the newsletter she edits.  A
great mass of text obtained largely from newsprint.  Her method is to
copy the print text on a bright white paper with the brightness set
either to lighter or darker (depending on the original) and then to
scan the copy.  Says she gets 95 percent OCR recognition.

fin"

re: scanners.  According to the PC mags, the HP ScanJet IIcx is one
of the best scanners for the money. I have one and it is works great.
It does color very well and it is fast. The most popular OCR software
is Omnipage Pro. There is better stuff from a place called
Arkenstone, which makes OCR software for visually impaired people.
However, it is about twice the cost of Omnipage.

re: Arkenstone.  The software is called "An Open Book Unbound" and
costs $995.  Call Arkenstone at 800-444-4443 for all the details.
They also sell packages that include the scanner and software for
example the software + HP IIp is $1594. But it might be cheaper to
get the scanner from a place like Computer Discount Warehouse, and
the IIcx is better than the IIp.

--- Gay

CONTACT INFO

     FTP:        oceania.org/pub/oceania
     LISTSERVER: oceandom@oceania.org
     E-MAIL:     welcome@oceania.org
     WWW:        http://oceania.org/
     NEWSGROUP:  alt.culture.virtual.oceania
     BOOK:       The Atlantis Papers from After Dark Publications/
                 73370.3046@compuserve.com
     SNAILMAIL:  The Atlantis Project
                 2038 N. Clark St., Suite 348
                 Chicago, IL 60614

Maintained by trilogy@rahul.net (Ann Marie Harmony)