Well, of course, we had to try our luck with this one first. Can you blame us?
But think about it: We don't run any banner advertising, and we're not funded by anyone. This site is, as mentioned above, truly a labor of love. Still, we try and provide information on the evils of Microsoft, and the alternatives out there. This isn't terribly easy work, you know -- especially when there's no boss to crack the whip and offer us a paycheck as an incentive.
We'll leave it to you to decide how much to contribute; any amount is appreciated. We generally prefer to receive contributions by PayPal, which allows you to charge the contribution to your credit card or ATM card with no service charges or fees.
You can also make your donation through the Amazon.com Honor System, which also allows you to charge your credit card or ATM card, without incurring a fee or surcharge. The only difference is that we get charged a fee -- Amazon.com has chosen to take a taste of any payments they process, so we'd prefer you go with PayPal if you can . . . at least until Amazon.com decides to stop being so greedy.
Want to pay by check or money order?
No problem. That's what good old snail mail is for. Just make your check or money order out to The Public Internet and send it to:
The Public Internet
P. O. Box 602
Parlin, NJ 08859-0602
USA
In theory, you could send non-monetary contributions, such as gift certificates, free movie passes, and the like. Surprise us! (In a legal way, that is.)
We're a little picky on this one, but if you're a reasonably skilled writer, we'd love to hear from you. Now, we'll tell you this up front: We can't pay you. But hey, it's a byline. And we may give you a freebie from our online store -- but this is not a guarantee; it's at the discretion of the webmaster.
We're pretty cool about it -- by submitting an article to us, you'll still maintain ownership of it, and you can still submit it elsewhere (but we ask that, as a courtesy, you allow us to run it exclusively for a short while -- we'll work out the details on a case by case basis).
Please note that, by submitting any material to us, you are not receiving any guarantee that we will publish your submission(s). If we do, you agree that we may edit your article -- though we generally limit this to mechanics, punctuation, grammar, and basic style.
Again, we're not utter morons -- your webmaster holds a Journalism degree from a very well regarded Journalism school -- so we'd like it if your writing reflected some degree of intelligence.
That said, feel free to send your submissions in, and we'll take it from there.
The other guys got the glory for the infamous "Halloween" memo that was leaked out of Microsoft a few years ago, and others got the pleasure of revealing internal e-mails from Microsoft all over the Internet. So why can't we have some of this fun? There's plenty of traffic coming to this site from Microsoft (we have the server logs to prove it), so surely someone out there has something interesting they'd like to reveal.
We'd also love to join the motley gang that is the Mac rumor community. If you've got some interesting insider information, juicy screenshots, or hazy photographs of mysterious new products to be released from everyone's favorite fruit company, by all means, send them in.
We invite you to set up an anonymous e-mail account if you have to, and then send us whatever you think might be of interest to visitors to this site. If it's earth-shattering enough, then rest assured that once it appears here, the big boys will pick up on it soon after.
Aspiring Deep Throats are always welcome to e-mail us.
We've got a wish list at Amazon.com that's chock-full of goodies we wouldn't mind receiving in the mail. If you feel like bestowing a gift upon us, we certainly won't complain. Some items are as cheap as $3.00 US (for a used copy of one of the books we've got our eyes on), while others go for . . . oh, a little bit more than that. Find whatever suits your budget, attach a little note (Amazon.com will give you the chance to write a comment with your gift), and click away.
Would you like to express yourself on Microsuck in some way other than the written word? We're open to other kinds of submissions that may be of interest to our visitors. Perhaps you're a Photoshop expert and can assemble a truly amazing photo illustration or desktop background for us to offer on the site. Or you're an aspiring musician with a not-to-be-missed parody song about Microsoft to share. Whatever it might be, hey -- it can't hurt to run it by us.
The same terms apply to these submissions as does to writing submissions: By submitting content to us, you'll still maintain ownership of it, and you can still submit it elsewhere. But again, we're not giving you a guarantee that your submission will be published.
We put out a call for donations in the past, but we generally received offers for some pretty useless stuff. Yes, we realize that beggars can't be choosers, but that doesn't mean we're asking to be insulted, folks!
Unless you're a hardware geek who insists on being on the cutting edge, chances are that companies or other large organizations are probably the best shot we have for getting reasonably cool donations. Here's the current list of stuff we'd love to get right now:
Intel/AMD Hardware: Systems (more or less complete) comparable in speed to a Pentium III/800 or higher.
Macintosh Hardware: Apple (or clone) hardware comparable in speed to a G3/300 or higher, or a G4 Cube (any speed), or a Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (hey, we can dream, can't we?).
Other Hardware: Anything from NeXT (including accessories). A BeBox. Anything from Sun that was made in the 1995 or later.
Miscellaneous Hardware: 512 MB PC100/PC133 DIMM (non-ECC) memory. An Ultra-ATA controller card that works in the Power Macintosh 9500. A USB scanner. A TV tuner card that'll work in a Dell Dimension tower. A USB or FireWire webcam. A five- (or higher) port Ethernet switch (not hub). A 3Com 100BaseT PCI Ethernet card. SCSI hard drives of 9 GB or higher in size. An Apple Cinema Display HD or iPod (hey, like I said -- we can dream, can't we?).
If you think you've got something, drop us a line and we'll chat. We'll probably pay shipping if it's cool stuff, or we may even come pick it up if it's in or near the New Jersey, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, or Triangle/Triad/Charlotte (North Carolina) areas.
This is the easiest one. Just link to www.microsuck.com. Pretty basic, isn't it? But every link to our site from somewhere else means a few more potential visitors.
We don't have a links section of our own, so we can't exchange links with you -- unless, of course, you're developing an alternative operating system, browser, or office suite, in which case we'll gladly add your link to our left navigation bar. Just let us know.
Watch this space; in the near future, we'll have banners you can use to link to our site in a more . . . attractive manner.
Free Alternatives
