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August 1997 Newsbyte | |
EDITOR'S
CORNER
Well, summer is in full swing here at computer ranch. Don't know whether to call it Computer Ranch, or better The Graveyard. Depends on how I am feeling at the time.
Have you noticed the club name has changed? Also, did you know the meeting place is permanently at the ATI-OSU campus? Now you know!
Anyone that wants their address listed next month, simply e-mail me your address or give me a call, and I will put it in.
| President | Earl McGaha | 264-7950 |
| Vice Presidents | Jim Pfaff | 262-6805 |
| Tom Zimmerman | 264-5521 | |
| Secretary-Treasurer | Pat Johnston | 264-8726 |
| Librarians | Joe Luster | 682-7815 |
| Phillip Crosby | 264-1444 | |
| Editor | Harry Geiser | 682-7486 |
FilePile
(http://filepile.com/nc/start) This site claims to have the
largest archive of shareware anywhere. Last we looked, it had more
than a million, so who's going to argue?
Freeware Favorites (http://www.execpc.com/~jeffo/webdes/frefavmn.html)
If you haven't yet upgraded to Windows 95, you'll find reviews of
Windows 3.1 software with links to libraries where you can download
the programs. (The site's creators have just begun to review Windows
95 software.)
Jumbo! (http://www.jumbo.com/) This
site, which bills itself as the
most mind-boggling collection of freeware and shareware on the Web,
stocks more than 60,000 such programs, complete with full descriptions
to help you decide which ones to download and test.m
Shareware.com
(http://www.shareware.com/) Whether you're looking
for business software or educational games for the kids, this is the
place to find loads of inexpensive and free software-including editors'
picks from tens of thousands of programs.
Windows95.com 32-bit Shareware
Collection (http://www.windows95.com/apps/)
Almost daily, another dozen or so Windows 95 shareware programs are
added to this extensive collection.
An electronic book project being developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The basic technology is just now confirmed as workable, so this much anticipated product now moves from theory into something approaching reality. The basic concept is as follows: The display device is actually individual pieces of paper coated with what amounts to electronic ink. A book is downloaded through electronics in the spine which in turn relays the data to the appropriate page. The ink is basically tiny dots that have the ability to blink white or black on command. Thousands of these dots form a single letter. Once you've finished reading the book, another title can be downloaded (from the Web, for instance), erasing the previous material. Another aspect of the electronic book is the ability to show animation: A book on bicycling could show the moving parts of a bike, for instance. Estimates are that a real product is five years away at a retail cost of under $500 for a high-end model and around $200 for a basic model. Theoretically, this could be the only book you need to own, particularly if some removable storage device is incorporated allowing you to store your favorite novels on a chip. By Frank Vizard
Seven satellites providing 500 television channels-that's the vision that emerged from the announced merger of two satellite TV operations. The deal would combine the satellite TV services of Echostar and the SkyTV system operated by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Murdoch intends to invest $1 billion in the operation. The vast channel capacity available would allow for the transmission of local broadcasting stations not now available. Local stations should be available to about 75 percent of the nation's viewers by the end of next year.
AltaVista (http://www.altavista.digital.com/) It's both the fastest and the most thorough search engine on the Web; it also combs through Usenet newsgroups.
The Bare Bones Guide to HTML (http://werbach.com/barebones/barebone_html.html)
Computer and Network Security Reference Index (http://www.telstra.com.au/info/security.html)
Cryptography, PGP, and Your Privacy (http://world.std.com/~franl/crypto.html) Learn the basics of cryptography and how to scramble your electronic communications so they can't be read by snoopers or spies.
CyberCash (http://www.cybercash.com/)
The Electric Library (http://elibrary.com) This easy-to-search resource-with hundreds of magazines, newspapers, books, photos, maps and broadcast transcripts-is well worth the $9.95 a month it costs for unlimited use.
GeoCities (http://www.geocities.com) Join the tens of thousands of people who have a free home (page, that is) in one of the 24 themed communities-from Athens to Hollywood-in this virtual on-line world.
Homepage Creation Center (http://the-inter.net/www/future21/html.html) Just fill in the blanks in the easy-to-use Homepage Creator and-voila!-your home page is ready to upload to your Internet service provider's Web server.
HTML Editors (http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HyperNews/get/www/html/editors.html)
HTML Goodies (http://www.htmlgoodies.com) There's no excuse for having a home page that's as dull as a dishrag when you can visit this site and download any of the 400-plus icons, arrows, lines, buttons and such-for free. (Also HTML tutorials, JavaScript tutorials, and JavaScripts.) Webmaster is a professor in Bowling Green State University's Computer Sciences Department.
Teacher: Lynn Evans, media specialist Grades: 1 to 6 School: Clear Creek Elementary School, Silverdale, Wash.
Lessons: Math, communication, responsibility
E-mail address: lynne@cc.cksd.wednet.edu
There are few school projects teachers can bank on to raise test scores and increase students' sense of responsibility. But for four years now, the microsociety at Clear Creek Elementary School has paid off. All students get a salary for performing various jobs anything from tutoring to selling homemade jewelry to working at the school's Orca Buck Bank. Last year, a bank-teller friend of teacher Lynn Evans trained 22 students in grades 3 through 6 who signed up to be bank tellers, data entry clerks, customer service representatives and supply department personnel. Lynn acted as the young staff's supervisor.
Students designed the bank's currency dubbed orcas, after the killer whale. The kids could deposit their orcas in bank accounts, and withdraw them to pay for, say, tickets to a school show. Whenever they lacked enough orcas to buy what they wanted, they could apply to the bank for a loan.
The bankers used Access database software, customized by a computer specialist in the school district's technical center, to track and disburse funds. Access helped them record deposits and withdrawals, check balances and print monthly statements. Student IDs, downloaded from the school's computers, served as account numbers. Last year, the bank handled about 4,500 transactions.
Banking hours were from 1:10 to 1:45 p.m. four days a week, in a classroom with desks that were arranged to resemble a bank. There was only one computer in the classroom, but bankers could use the database from any of the school's 26 computers.
The bankers used the Publisher desktop publishing program to create most of their forms, including bank books, deposit and withdrawal slips, loan applications and promissory notes. The orcas were printed by high-school students in the design and graphic arts departments.
Lynn credits the microsociety project for a dramatic change in the kids including standardized test results that have risen 20 percent in the past four years. "Suddenly the students can see the relevance of what they're learning to the real world," she says. "They become much more responsible when they have a voice and a choice in what they do."
Access: $339 (Windows 95, Windows 3.1) from Microsoft, (800) 426-9400, (206) 882-8080, http://www.microsoft.com
Publisher: $79 (Windows 95, Windows 95 CD-ROM, Windows 3.1) from Microsoft
Hands On This is not your father's science textbook. But then, if you've caught Bill Nye's manic version of science education on TV in "Bill Nye the Science Guy," you already knew that. What you may not know is that his purposeful play has now come to CD-ROM. The zany scientist and his peculiar laboratories translate fairly well in Bill Nye the Science Guy: Stop the Rock! ($40 for PCs or Macs), thanks to realistic 3-D graphics and frequent video clips of Bill and pals on the "Nyecom 3000" monitor. Designed for young scientists ages nine and up, the program leaves you to wander through the three floors of Nye Labs, encountering odd devices that help explain concepts in earth sciences. In the process, you gather clues that can help prevent a gigantic meteoroid from hitting Earth (hence the title). Adults over 30 and other linear thinkers won't much care for the haphazard, often vexing process of finding and figuring out the devices and clues, but that approach may be just fine for the Myst generation. The program's only serious flaw is its depth, or lack thereof. Many of its devices- like the Weatherator, in which you specify warmer or cooler variables to see weather conditions such as fog develop-are too simplistic, and don't invite many replays. But Stop the Rock! is the first of a planned series, so we may yet see more science within the adventure. --Chris O'Malley
Recently started up a new computer for a friend, and could not find the CD-ROM drive so the Windows CD-ROM could be used to install Windows 95. Well, guess what, the CD-ROM software could not find the drive either. I tried about everything, and finally in desperation called the service technician at MEI in Columbus. We went through a series of tests that I had already been through, then he suggested that I hook the drive up to the IDE controller card on the same cable as the Hard Drive, instead of the jacks on the sound card. Seems pretty dumb now, but that was the problem. Without the sound card driver that can only be installed under windows, the CD-ROM drivers could not find the drive. Sort of a Catch 22, don't you think?
Hands On -- Remember when CD-ROM drives were novel add-ons that came in an assortment of upgrade kits? Well, as Yogi would say, it's like deja vu all over again-this time with the DVD-ROM drives that are based on digital videodisc technology. Creative Technology, Diamond Multimedia, Panasonic, and STB are each set to begin selling DVD-ROM upgrade kits this spring. The first kits are expected to cost between $500 and $1,000, and will include the DVD-ROM drive and an MPEG-2 video card with Dolby AC-3 surround-sound support. While only a handful of DVD-ROM titles likely will be available before summer (mostly phone directories and encyclopedias), DVD-ROM drives can also play existing CD-ROM discs, music CDs, and new DVD movies. DVD discs can hold at least seven times as much data as CD-ROM discs. Eventually, as more titles appear and the cost of the hardware drops, DVD-ROM drives are expected to become standard equipment in desktop PCs, just as CD-ROM drives have. Already, a number of PC makers-including Gateway and Hewlett- Packard-say they plan to include DVD-ROM drives in some systems by summer. Gateway says it will add a DVD-ROM drive to one or more of its Destination PC-TV models, for example. At least one PC maker has already delivered DVD in a home PC. Toshiba's new Infinia 7220, which runs on a 200MHz Pentium MMX processor, comes with a built-in DVD-ROM drive in place of a standard CD-ROM drive. The drive is designed to play CD-ROM titles at 8X speeds, and 9X for DVD- ROM discs. It comes with two DVD titles: Leopard Sun/Animal Planet and Forrest Gump. No price has been set. --Chris O'Malley
Small-time Viewer Imagine reading a fax or gazing at a Web page from
the Internet on the pager or cellular phone you're using. That's what
Kopin Corp. of Taunton, Massachusetts, hopes you'll be doing in about
two years with its new Cyber Display, a 1/4 -inch, active-matrix LCD
screen.
The tiny screen, coupled with a magnifier, can be added to mobile
communications devices for the viewing of words, pictures, and even
video. When you look through the viewer, it seems as if you're watching
a 20-inch display from about five feet away. The Kopin screen is similar
to LCD screens used in laptop computers, but is many times smaller.
Kopin expects to sell product developers a 320- by 240-pixel monochrome
display first, and later a color display. Given product development
cycles, Kopin expects devices using its display to be available in
18 months to two years. Other products that could use this display
include watches and cameras.
A T & T is developing a technology that may allow you to use the same
phone at home and on the road. At the core of Project Angel is a transceiver,
about the size of a pizza box, that is attached to the side of your
house. The transceiver is linked wirelessly (using the 10MHz band)
to larger neighborhood antennas that can service as many as 2,000
customers each. This antenna is connected to a digital switching center
that routes your call.
The technology is expected to be available in two years; each customer
will initially have two phones lines and the capability for Internet
access at a very fast 128,000 bits per second. Existing touch-tone
phones can still be used with this service. Mobile phones can be used
as in-house extensions, giving them extra versatility. Or you can
dispense with the wired phone and simply use wireless for both home
and travel. This "fixed wireless" system was actually being developed
by McCaw Cellular Communications prior to A T & T 's takeover. It wasn't
until after the acquisition that A T & T knew of its existence. This
technology is expected to give A T & T a competitive edge in the battle
for providing local service. A T & T says it is now working on techniques
that will greatly increase the capacity of the 10MHz spectrum and
make it as fast as fiber-optic delivery. During the past two years,
A T & T has quietly acquired through FCC auctions the licenses in the
10MHz spectrum it needs to provide service to 93 percent of the country.
What did the Parthenon really look like when it was brand new, some 2,300 years ago? Or the Forum Romanum after Julius Caesar redid it? Most of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, as well as the remains of other great civilizations, lies in ruins. Often, only shards are left to stimulate the viewer's imagination. Now a collaboration among information technologists, computer experts, and students of ancient structures has spawned a discipline whose aim is to make archeological information visually real. The results are dramatically displayed in a new book called Virtual Archeology: Recreating Ancient Worlds, published by Abrams. The 660 full-color illustrations include computer-aided 3-D reconstructions paired with aerial photography of ancient sites, from the palace of King Minos on Crete to the dwellings of the mysterious Anasazi in the American Southwest, from an Emperor's tomb in Japan to the Aztec capitol of Tenochtitlan. Before and after pictures -- the "before" being contemporary photography and the "after" being the computer reconstruction -- reveal how significant features have been lost with time. The triumph of this technique is to translate the information in archeological data banks into realistic and scientifically accurate images. -- A.F.
The next generation of the Internet is taking shape. Dubbed Internet II, it is being planned by U.S. universities as a new, superfast, national computer network that will avoid the traffic jams that frequently clog the Internet today. Representatives from about 60 of the country's leading research universities are designing Internet II for a new class of applications that will far outstrip the present network's capabilities. Internet II will have speeds as much as 10 times as fast as today's Net. It's being developed primarily to give U.S. universities the kind of desktop-to-desktop broadband connections that can easily accommodate distance-learning presentations, videoconferencing, and online collaborative research, according to J. Gary Auguston, executive director of computer systems at Penn State and chairman of the national Internet II steering committee. The first prototype of Internet II is a high-speed, high-bandwidth link on the campus of Penn State that runs between computer and engineering buildings. At 600 million bits per second -- compare that to 28,800bps for a PC modem -- it can dispatch an entire encyclopedia in 10 seconds. Nearly 3,000 undergraduate and graduate students in 15 different science and engineering courses are using two classrooms connected to the high-speed link to solve problems in fields such as fluid dynamics and chemistry. Beyond such disciplines, Internet II could be used in the arts. Theater classes, for example, could use it to design "virtual sets" for TV programs, with actors actually emoting in an empty room, adding scenery later.
Buying your kids a computer to open their minds to the wonders of science and logic? Maybe you better buy a piano instead. A team of psychologists exploring the link between music and intelligence has found that piano instruction is far superior to computer instruction in enhancing the kind of abstract reasoning skills a child will need for excelling in math and science later on. In a two-year experiment, one group of preschoolers was given private piano and singing lessons and another got private computer lessons. The musically trained kids scored 34 percent higher than the others on tests measuring the higher brain functions critical in science, math, and engineering.
Much of life's daily communication comes in short bursts -- rescheduled
meetings, location changes, fact verification, affirmatives, and negatives.
So a small device that can handle most of these communiques while
keeping you mobile is a handy tool. That's why a new pager from SkyTel
is so useful. The SkyWriter, as it is called, is alphanumeric, so
messages are in plain English (and by necessity short, since you spell
out the message letter by letter). But what makes the pager especially
useful is that it sends messages through the Internet. This means
you can send e-mail to anyone, even while you're on the move. The
SkyTel Web site can also be used to send e-mail messages to you.
Another clever feature is pager-to-pager communication. Recently,
a colleague and I used our SkyWriter pagers to continuously coordinate
our movements during an outdoor photo shoot even though we were 20
city blocks apart -- it was like using a radio without the static.
The lack of a backlit screen can make reading messages in dim light
tough. But the price is right. The monthly fee is $25 for nationwide
service (though rural coverage is spotty). Tack on another $15 per
month if you lease the pager; it costs $399 to buy it. Compared with
the cost of cell phones and other alphanumeric paging services, these
prices are very competitive -- and you even get news updates.
Tired of waiting while your CD-ROM drive spins its discs? Western Digital thinks your hard disk can help do more to speed the process along. The company says its new Storage Data Acceleration, or SDX, technology can improve CD-ROM performance by up to 100 percent by connecting the CD-ROM drive directly to the hard disk drive, rather than to an interface card or the PC's motherboard. This direct link enables the CD-ROM drive to temporarily store, or "cache," program instructions and data on the hard drive, which can transfer them to the processor and memory areas much more quickly. The catch? You'll need new CD-ROM and hard disk drives to make this work. Western Digital plans to begin selling SDX hard drives this spring, which is about the same time Sanyo says it'll sell the first such CD-ROM drive. In all, more than a dozen companies say they'll support SDX. Western Digital says SDX can be adapted for DVD-ROM drives as well.