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January 1998 Newsbyte | |
EDITOR'S
CORNER
For those of you that doubted that it would happen, 1998 arrived
safely and quietly here at the computer graveyard..... The dreaded
millenium is another year closer and the pundits are speculating on
the effect it will have on computers from PC's to mainframes.... I've
read and heard everything from the speculation that everything will
fall apart to the new century having no effect at all on computers.
For me, I'll take the "wait and see" attitude and laugh when everything
falls apart, or when nothing happens. Seriously, I think it'll be
somewhere in between. Some systems will have problems, probably where
least expected, and where it was supposed to fizzle out, maybe nothing....
stay tuned fans.....
The election is over!! See the right hand column this page. Can't
thank Earl and Jim enough for their help in getting the club through
another year. Also to all the other officers for hanging in there
for another year of torture. The Constitution is about ready for
a final reading on the floor of the January meeting, and with any
luck it'll be approved and put into effect. Thanks to Brian Powell,
and Stan Kinney for their laborious work on this document. I only
hope everyone in the club reads it and appreciates their many hours
of work to perfect it.
| President | Willis Troyer | 669-3925 |
| Vice Presidents | Brian Powell | 828-8365 |
| Tom Zimmerman | 264-5521 | |
| Secretary-Treasurer | Pat Johnston | 264-8726 |
| Librarians | Joe Luster | 682-7815 |
| Phillip Crosby | 264-1444 | |
| Editor | Harry Geiser | 682-7486 |
Tired of making compromises when you buy a laptop computer? You might
not have to anymore.
Intel's new Mobile Pentium MMX processors bring the latest laptops
up to desktop speeds, and their new drives and expanding screens make
them true no-apologies machines.
IBM's ThinkPad 770, for instance, marries a 233- MHz Pentium chip
with a 5.1GB hard drive, a DVD-ROM drive, and a luminous 14-inch active-matrix
color screen. Toshiba's new Tecra 750CDT has some serious road muscle,
too, with the same 233MHz chip, 32MB of memory, a 13.3-inch screen,
and an included digital camera for videoconferencing. A DVD drive
is optional. Gateway and NEC offer similar specs in their Solo 9100XL
and Versa 6230, respectively.
Digital also uses a 14-inch display in its HiNote Ultra 2000 ($5,999),
but managed to squeeze it into a package that is a mere 1.4 inches
thick and about 6.7 pounds. Versions with the new, faster Pentium
chips are due out soon. Still, the bigger screens mean the end of
the notebook form factor. They do not, however, mean the end of high
prices, quite the opposite. Most of the 233 - MHz laptops cost between
$5,700 and $7,000.
But beyond their faster speeds, the new chips do yield another important
benefit. They draw significantly less power than previous chips, which
may add an hour or more of battery life to many models. Think of it:
a laptop that runs when and where you want it to. --Jon Pepper
For more than 15 years, Intel's microprocessors have been the preferred
and often the only engines for MS-DOS and then Windows PCs. But new
chips from rivals AMD and Cyrix are challenging Intel's monopoly and
providing computer buyers with something to which they're unaccustomed:
choice.
AMD's recently revved-up K6 chips are now available at peak speeds
of 233- and 266MHz, the same as Intel's Pentium II processors. Benchmark
tests show them to be as fast as Pentium II chips in real-world Windows
applications, too. AMD says a 300MHz chip will be available by year
end or early in 1998, matching the top speed of Pentium II chips (though
Intel's 300MHz chip is not widely available).
Cyrix, meanwhile, has begun shipping the latest versions of its 6x86MX
chip, which carry performance ratings of 233- and 266MHz. (They run
at slower clock speeds but use extra memory and buffers to make up
the difference.) Cyrix, which was recently acquired by National Semiconductor,
says it also intends to offer a 300MHz chip soon. Both the K6 and
6x86MX chips have MMX graphics-speeding technology.
Why buy a PC with a non-Intel chip inside? Mainly, to keep a little
more money inside your wallet. At this writing, the 233MHz chips from
AMD and Cyrix cost computer makers about $290 apiece, for example,
while a comparable Pentium II chip from Intel costs about $540. The
newfound competition is expected to drive prices even lower. -- C.O.
When Microsoft released Windows 95, the company took pains to assure
computer owners that the model year naming did not mean a new operating
system upgrade would be an annual occurrence. Apparently, every three
years is more like it.
Microsoft now says its next major operating system release will be
called Windows 98. The company has not set an exact release date yet, but PC
makers
say they expect to see Windows 98 sometime in the first half of 1998,
perhaps in the first quarter. What you won't see is
much of a change in the way Windows looks and acts at least not at
first.
Windows 98 sports essentially the same default interface as Windows
95. But with Windows 98, which is now in beta testing, you'll have
the option of making your files, folders, and drives appear as Web
pages being displayed on Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, rather
than within windows on the usual desktop-style interface.
Most of the other new features in Windows 98 are aimed at keeping
up with hardware advances. The new Windows edition will directly support
DVD drives, high-speed Universal Serial Bus (USB) and IEEE 1394 (Firewire)
ports, and Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) video cards, for example.
-- C.O.
If the notion of buying one scanner for documents and another for
photos strikes you as redundant and expensive, you're not alone. And,
having reached that conclusion as well, scanner makers are responding
with a host of new, versatile color scanners that are just as adept
at digitizing family photos as they are at turning documents into
computer text.
Storm Technology's EasyPhoto SmartPage Pro ($199) is the latest in
a field that includes Kodak's PhotoDoc ($249), Logitech's Page-Scan
Color Pro ($299), and Visioneer's PaperPort Strobe ($299). All four
are sheet-fed models that can digitize color originals ranging from
35mm prints to 8-by-10 portraits at 300 dots per inch or better in
24-bit color. The Storm and Logitech scanners also have detachable
heads for scanning images in books and magazines. Each of these devices
includes photo editing and optical character recognition (OCR) software,
so you can turn documents into editable text as well.
The desire for the ability to scan and print color photos has inspired
several new scanning and printing devices that have multiple functions,
too. Xerox's new HomeCentre ($499) combines a detachable color scanner
with a color inkjet printer and copier. Canon's new MultiPass C5000
($699) adds fax to a similar mix of color features. Both include image-editing
and OCR software. -- C.O.
When you're attempting to chronicle more than a century's worth of National Geographic magazine's words and pictures on CD-ROM, how do you decide what to leave out? That's a tough call, and ultimately one that National Geographic Interactive and Eastman Kodak decided was too difficult to make they simply included everything. The Complete National Geographic is just that, a CD-ROM archive of all of the magazine's 108 years of articles, photos, maps, and graphics, plus a little classic advertising for good measure. From the Incas to the icebergs, it spans no fewer than 30 discs. (Unfortunately, no DVD-ROM version, which might reduce it to two or three discs, is available yet.) The $199 package is an astonishing collection, taking you on a worldwide journey to nearly every part of the planet, drawn from the 185,000 pages of 1,200 issues of the magazine. You can page through at your leisure, or you can use its search engine to hunt for information by subject, date, explorer, writer, photographer, or map location. When you select an article, the program lists related topics and contributors so you can dig even deeper. You can bookmark and print pages, too, and there's a link to an exclusive area of the National Geographic Web site for the latest news and features. The Complete National Geographic collection, which runs on Windows PCs or Macs, is being sold by Mindscape (800-234-3088 or www.mindscape.com). A built-in search tool lets you track down nearly any animal. -- C.O.
The next big thing in computer displays may actually be smaller and
a little easier on the eyes as well as on the furniture legs.
Several monitor makers are offering 19-inch CRT displays as a step
up from the 17-inch monitors that come with most PCs today, but a
less overwhelming and less costly step than the 21-inch displays that
had been the next size larger. Hitachi, MAG Innovision, Optiquest,
Philips, Princeton Graphics, and Sampo are among the companies selling
19-inch monitors. Most are priced in the $800 to $1,000 range, which
is $200 or more than what most 17-inch monitors cost but at least
$500 less than most 21-inch displays. Most can show resolutions up
to 1,600 by 1,200 pixels.
More important, perhaps, 19-inch monitors may prove a better fit
for many desktops and eyeballs than the significantly larger and heavier
21-inch models. These new 19-inch models have an actual viewing area
of about 18 inches diagonally, which is roughly 30 percent larger
than 17-inch monitors, but they take up little or no more desktop
space. And if you are sitting within 2 feet of the monitor, it may
be all of the display area your eyes can soak in without darting around
the screen so much that you get a visual migraine. Princeton Graphics
adds a touch of wind-swept style to its new line of 19-inch displays.
Subj: Explorer Note I Found
Date: 97-12-25 23:00:49 EST
From: NSohar
To: GEISERHJ
Special to ABCNEWS.com
Watching the U.S. Department of Justice do its Elmer Fudd act in
its ongoing dispute with Microsoft is enough to drive Bugs Bunny-haters
to despair. If mighty competitors can't stop Microsoft, and if the
federal government can't even slow it down, what is to keep Bill Gates
from outright world domination?
The answer, of course, is Microsoft itself. Largely unnoticed because
of the distraction furnished by Justice's hilarious legal maneuverings
against the company was the release of a flawed Internet Explorer
4.0 and the company's uncharacteristic defense of it. Most illuminating
was Microsoft Executive Vice President Steve Ballmer's defiant admission
last month that Internet Explorer 4.0 was buggy. "I'm not trying to
say there's some excuse for bugs," Ballmer said, as he began excusing
IE's bugs, "but the reality is, you're always making a set of tradeoffs
about the probability of problems; unknown problems versus when you
ship."
Microsoft has always prided itself on the rigor of its testing and
debugging procedures. Indeed, the legendary brutality and relentlessness
of its product testers has consistently set the company apart from
its competitors, and the resentment with which Microsoft's testers
are regarded by product teams at Microsoft has always been telling.
So Ballmer's statement is a shocking signal that the company has dramatically
shifted ethical course.
In order to get testers to sign off on a new release, a Microsoft
product team once had to make its software work seamlessly on a wide
array of machines and combinations of parts. If a color map on Encarta,
for example, showed up in black-and-white on a computer with a certain
brand of video card installed in it, or a certain brand of monitor,
the team had to make that one map print properly on that one component,
no matter how rare it was, before Encarta could be released.
Product teams used to scream constantly about the unreasonable attitude
of testers, about their insistence on "backwards compatibility" reliable
performance on obsolete machinery and about test routines so outlandish
they surely would never occur in the real world of real users. But
company management always turned a deaf ear to the complaints.
A Sign of Change at Microsoft
Given this proud (and expensive) company tradition, the release of
IE 4.0, along with Ballmer's defense of it, serves as a sobering indication
of profound change at Microsoft. The browser was riddled with bugs some
obscure and rare, true, but others shockingly widespread, involving
large numbers of machines. Most scandalous was the effect of installing
the browser on the Compaq Presario, the flagship line of home computers
from the nation's No. 1 seller of home PCs. Users who installed IE
4.0 on their Presarios, then rebooted, found that their desktops had
gone blank.
In times past, release of software that doesn't run properly on the
world's most ubiquitous piece of hardware would have been anathema
at Microsoft. If this was an "unknown bug" that is, if Microsoft did
not bother to test IE on one of the most popular and widely used PCs
in history something is drastically wrong at the company. Release
of a browser that screws up a Presario is tantamount to the release
by Ford of a car that can't run on freeways.
There were other bugs as well. Among the more widespread were noticeable
slowing of graphics rendering, particularly when screens were redrawn
as windows were dragged around and resized; font problems; scroll
bars that stopped working; and a host of operating-system and other
application problems that cropped up when users tried to uninstall
IE 4.0. All of those, combined with the Presario fiasco, make you
wonder if Microsoft bothered to test its product at all before sending
it into our homes and offices.
Should be Obsessed With User's Needs
Microsoft built its vast fortune and power by means of focusing obsessively
on the needs of the user, and by including in the definition of "user"
someone new to computers. Gates and his fellow managers have always
believed that only by making computers reliable and easy to use could
they grow their market properly. By those standards, users of all
manner of computers and computer components should have been able
to download IE 4.0 and begin using it effortlessly and without problems,
no matter how unsophisticated either they or their machines were.
There is an odd, ironic touch to this sad affair. Microsoft's ethical
lapse and Ballmer's defense of it is the classic behavior of a monopolist.
No longer subject to competitive pressure, the monopolist grows lazy
and careless, making poorer products and disdaining the needs of customers.
But this collapse was caused by the opposite: intense pressure from
an able competitor. Determined to beat market leader Netscape to market both
companies were feverishly working on 4.0 releases of their browsers Microsoft
forced its way out the door first, knowing full well that it was unleashing
a disaster for countless users. You have to wonder how a company renowned
for logical thinking and analysis fell for this bit of logic: In the
battle for market share, customers be damned.
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