All About SROP Free Samples and Where to Find Them
PJ's recent survey of local unicorns has revealed that they are in favor of free samples, so... Here we go... You can't argue with unicorns.
This posting is sort of a jolly rant, so you'll really want to skip it if you have no interest in the history of free samples at Smashed-Rat-on-Press.
The world is full of wonderful things. It is also full of detritus-loving bottom feeders. While SROP loves to give away free books, we only want to give them away to people who actually want to sample them for real. Usually, that means if someone asks us for a book, we give it to them. We do not, however, post loads of files in unprotected directories free for the taking. That's the digital equivalent of leaving a bowl full of candy on your front porch with a sign that says "only take what you'll eat yourself." Lots of book and music publishers do that. But what happens is that herds of roving robots (and sometimes a few people) come by and empty out the bowl. Well, all right, a web page full of links is a digital bowl that is magically always full, so that's not a very good analogy. What we mean is... Well, let me take you back a few years...
In the past, one of the rodents posted a small bowl full of original music files, free for anyone to download and listen to. (Note: the actual audience for this audio was tiny; it was not pop music by big-name stars, rather it was the musical equivalent of limburger cheese.) The result of just setting out the bowl of MP3 files was that hundreds of bottom-feeding Ringtone sites and loathsome MP3 scavengers of the world soon descended upon the site and kept sucking down our MP3 files repeatedly. They did this tens of thousands of times each month, chewing up excessive gigabytes of bandwidth that we had to pay for. So they ruined the notion of free-samples for everyone else, like the three people who might come by each month and only take a file that they planned to taste themselves before spitting it out. And because the stuff was accessible, the problem kept escalating. This is the dark side of search engine accessibility in a world where merely hosting a file of the right type (MP3) is cause enough for pirates to grab it like piranhas, even if it contains nothing but the sound of limburger cheese.
So. We don't leave out bowls of free candy (or limburger cheese) anymore because we can't stand around monitoring 24/7 with an electronic shotgun to protect the goods from bandwidth bandits. And we don't invite in all of the world's myriad search engines to just take our stuff and then index it for the convenience of loathsome scavengers who just add it to their stockpiles of stolen crap, or worse yet, add the samples to their libraries of stolen goods they're trying to sell, and then hit the site repeatedly in case they didn't hog enough bandwidth the first time around.
If you want a free sample of something that SROP publishes, just ask for the book and we'll send the whole thing so you won't even have to come back for the remainder if, by some chance, the opening pages are appealing.
Or, if you want to be more circumspect and don't want to interact with any rodents, friendly or otherwise, because you're shy or private, you may now go directly to our FREE SAMPLES page and use the ID "srop" with the password "srop" to pop open the gate and see what's in the back yard. (That's like having a simple lock and whispering to you where the key is.) You can then snoop around our very small but growing page of free PDF samples.
We'll try this out. But if the page gets hit too often by scavengers, or if crap starts showing up in search results, we'll just have to delete it all and get back to hunkering, which is what we do best.
This posting is sort of a jolly rant, so you'll really want to skip it if you have no interest in the history of free samples at Smashed-Rat-on-Press.
The world is full of wonderful things. It is also full of detritus-loving bottom feeders. While SROP loves to give away free books, we only want to give them away to people who actually want to sample them for real. Usually, that means if someone asks us for a book, we give it to them. We do not, however, post loads of files in unprotected directories free for the taking. That's the digital equivalent of leaving a bowl full of candy on your front porch with a sign that says "only take what you'll eat yourself." Lots of book and music publishers do that. But what happens is that herds of roving robots (and sometimes a few people) come by and empty out the bowl. Well, all right, a web page full of links is a digital bowl that is magically always full, so that's not a very good analogy. What we mean is... Well, let me take you back a few years...
In the past, one of the rodents posted a small bowl full of original music files, free for anyone to download and listen to. (Note: the actual audience for this audio was tiny; it was not pop music by big-name stars, rather it was the musical equivalent of limburger cheese.) The result of just setting out the bowl of MP3 files was that hundreds of bottom-feeding Ringtone sites and loathsome MP3 scavengers of the world soon descended upon the site and kept sucking down our MP3 files repeatedly. They did this tens of thousands of times each month, chewing up excessive gigabytes of bandwidth that we had to pay for. So they ruined the notion of free-samples for everyone else, like the three people who might come by each month and only take a file that they planned to taste themselves before spitting it out. And because the stuff was accessible, the problem kept escalating. This is the dark side of search engine accessibility in a world where merely hosting a file of the right type (MP3) is cause enough for pirates to grab it like piranhas, even if it contains nothing but the sound of limburger cheese.
So. We don't leave out bowls of free candy (or limburger cheese) anymore because we can't stand around monitoring 24/7 with an electronic shotgun to protect the goods from bandwidth bandits. And we don't invite in all of the world's myriad search engines to just take our stuff and then index it for the convenience of loathsome scavengers who just add it to their stockpiles of stolen crap, or worse yet, add the samples to their libraries of stolen goods they're trying to sell, and then hit the site repeatedly in case they didn't hog enough bandwidth the first time around.
If you want a free sample of something that SROP publishes, just ask for the book and we'll send the whole thing so you won't even have to come back for the remainder if, by some chance, the opening pages are appealing.
Or, if you want to be more circumspect and don't want to interact with any rodents, friendly or otherwise, because you're shy or private, you may now go directly to our FREE SAMPLES page and use the ID "srop" with the password "srop" to pop open the gate and see what's in the back yard. (That's like having a simple lock and whispering to you where the key is.) You can then snoop around our very small but growing page of free PDF samples.
We'll try this out. But if the page gets hit too often by scavengers, or if crap starts showing up in search results, we'll just have to delete it all and get back to hunkering, which is what we do best.
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Smashed-Rat-On-Press
The main purpose of this blog is to announce occasional additions and changes to the SROP catalog or the site. And it doubles as a soap-box from which to gesticulate and babble...
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