RAndY's RumOR RaG August 1994 NEWS IN YER FACE WordPerfect's flashy slide show at PC Expo was produced using a Macromedia product, not their own Presentations. Hmmm . . . --------------- Beta testers report that a PIM is being included as an applet with Chicago which has the look of a pen-based interface. This leads some to speculate that Chicago will include features for the handheld crowd. Also included is a remote access architecture which includes infrared communications for wireless messaging. Wordpad is another new applet which combined Write and Notepad. --------------- This fall, Adobe will release Photoshop 3.0 for Macintosh, PC, and PowerPC. Distributed on CD-ROM, this new version will feature multiple layers, new color correction tools, and an improved user interface. They suggest that Windows users have a Pentium, Windows NT, and 32 megs of memory. --------------- Microsoft recently granted NexGen (producer of 586 generation microprocessors) the right to use the Windows Compatible logo with the Nx586 processor. As I recall, this processor is fully code compatible with the Pentium but does not have a math co-processor. --------------- Philippe Kahn said to then-Novell CEO Ray Noorda after he shrugged off Kahn's suggested merger of the two companies: "Why don't you like me? You're like my father!" --------------- Aldus is looking to sell their Freehand Graphics software in order to ward off antitrust and other legal problems which could block their merger with Adobe. The original developers of Freehand Graphics (Altsys) has a non-competition agreement with Aldus which would be violated with their Adobe merger, since Adobe has Illustrator. Altsys also collects Freehand royalties which accounted for half of their 1993 revenue of $7.5 million. Freehand accounts for only about 15% of Aldus' revenues. If Altsys regains rights to Freehand, they could license the software to an Adobe/Aldus rival or sell the package under their own name. But, says James Von Ehr, president of Altsys, "They want me to pay a whole lot of money for Freehand that I'm not willing to pay." --------------- Look for Quarterdeck to apply their memory management expertise to limited memory devices such as portable computers and PDAs, helping them tap the Internet and other information sources via an easy-to-use GUI. --------------- "We have plenty of guys with ponytails and earrings" - Steve Solazzo, IBM marketing director, multimedia applications. --------------- OS/2 UPDATES AHEAD An IBM banner at the recent PC Expo in New York exclaimed "Flight 4.0 to Chicago has been delayed." Looks like IBM is going to use Microsoft's troubles getting Chicago to market as an opportunity to sell OS/2. Look for several new versions of OS/2 to surface this year. Available this summer will be OS/2 for Symmetrical Multiprocessing which I mentioned last month. This product is aimed at Windows NT, which Microsoft is still promising to upgrade before this fall. Look for a list price in the $395-$795 range (depending upon the number of processors supported). IBM claims it will support up to 16 processors! A new version of OS/2 for Windows (with a new name) will be here by October. It will be smaller and faster and require less memory. Enterprise OS/2 will also run in 4 megs of memory and will be similar to the full-blown version of OS/2 available now. Finally, by year's end you'll also see OS/2 for PowerPC (but it might be early 1995). Microsoft is not visibly shaken about possible competition as predicted Brad Chase, general manager of the Personal Systems group at Microsoft, "Chicago will break every sales record in the book." --------------- OS/2 CD OK, I've become an OS/2 convert so it is now incumbent upon me to talk about OS/2 software. Check out the Hobbes OS/2 CD-ROM. I don't know what it costs (a friend loaned it to me) but you've got about 3,000 files covering every category from development tools, utilities, drivers, games, comm programs, and much more. Most of the programs are shareware and many are crippled (until you send payment to the author). Some of the programs are quite good. My favorite is a character-based communications program called Livewire. It reminds me of the DOS Procomm. There are drivers for everything from video to sound card CD interfaces and tons more. You'll find tips on optimizing OS/2 and other interesting and helpful documentation. There's even an IBM Corrective Service update which corrects some minor problems and upgrades you to OS/2 2.11. This particular CD is available on a subscription basis and is distributed quarterly. Decent OS/2 software can be hard to find and this disc is a good place to start. --------------- MORE PC IN PCS I get tremendous flack every time I make a statement concerning homosexuality (either in the RaG or on the local BBSs). What does this have to do with computers? I don't want to read this stuff in a computer publication. If this bothers you, you might as well skip to the next section right now. Back in 1991, Lotus was the first major company to grant health insurance to homosexual couples. Microsoft and Apple have similar policies. This year, Microsoft publicly opposed Initiative 608 in the state of Washington which stated that homosexuals have no rights above any other citizen and that homosexuality could not be taught in the schools as a health behavior. Oracle recently aroused the wrath of some of their employees when they sponsored a gay pride display at a company facility. Diversity Manager (what is that?) Vicki Yee sent a memo stating, "Gay and lesbian employees who are uncomfortable in the work environment. . . are not as productive as other employees." I have about had it with politically correct companies and municipalities putting a stamp of endorsement on a behavior which has been proven harmful to those who engage in it. Just a few years ago, this was a behavior that one was ashamed of. It's a sad world. (Send your hate mail to me, not to whoever carries the RaG.) --------------- INNOVATIVE & USEFUL MULTIMEDIA I have no problem with multimedia software but too often it's a gee-whiz thing. It's cool to look at and play with but serves little or no useful purpose. From Australia comes PICS (Parts Interpretive Catalog System), a windows-based multimedia catalog for companies needing parts cataloging. PICS digitally stores and retrieves complex parts, equipment, and inventories for businesses ranging from auto dealerships to coal mines. The system uses a run-time version of SQLBase from Gupta and works on a 486 with Windows. Users can point and click to retrieve exploded images of equipment along with CAD drawings, color images, video and audio demonstrations. The system enables companies to publish catalogs of up to 200,000 pages on a CD-ROM using industry-standard interfaces allowing integration with legacy systems such as inventory, order entry, and manufacturing. It sells for $1,100 per PC with maintenance available for 15% of the purchase price per year. --------------- MORE NEWS IN YER FACE "We're using Microsoft Mail. We eat our own dog food, so to speak." - Bill Gates explaining that's he's also a client of Microsoft, not just their CEO. --------------- Microsoft is thinking about dropping the price of Windows NT to make it a stronger competitor with Novell's NetWare. Insiders say that the 10-20 user network price may drop to the $900-$1000 range (current price is $1,495). --------------- Novell is considering a 64-bit version of NetWare for an undetermined future date - which could require a complete re- write of the network operating system to take advantage of 64-bit processors. Such a product would require third parties to rewrite NetWare Loadable Modules and other applications to take advantage of 64-bit processors. --------------- Lotus may soon have a challenge to the OS/2 spreadsheet world with the August introduction of Mesa 2 for OS/2. This will be a native 32-bit, object oriented spreadsheet from a company that has become quite popular in the NeXT world. Athena Marketing Director Tracy Kugelman says that this is a full- featured OS/2 application and "It's not a port." Mesa will feature a workbook-like GUI in the form of a layered spreadsheet with tabs, taking advantage of multithreading capabilities. --------------- Pro OS/2 IBMers have been wearing T-shorts bearing the motto: "Chicago - Been there, done that." --------------- Intel and WordPerfect are negotiating to include Intel's conferencing software on a new CD-ROM suite called PerfectOffice. --------------- Corel will slip in a maintenance release of CorelDraw when they ship Ventura in August. --------------- Egghead and Microsoft will be distributing 300,000 copies of a CD-ROM interactive catalog beginning in October. An additional 200,000 will be distributed through sources other than Egghead. The catalog will be available to customers for $14.95 for a single issue and $29.95 for a one-year subscription. Multimedia Know-It-All will look at product areas such as sporting goods, musical instruments, and travel. It will also contain information about thousands of computer products including descriptions, photographs, reviews, prices, and technical specifications. --------------- Intel is getting ready to position the Pentium as the low- end of the business and consumer markets in preparation for the release of the P-6. The 60mhz and 66mhz lines will be transformed into manufacturing 75mhz Pentiums. Speaking of the P-6, Intel has started the quest for a name for this new processor. Remember, the last time they had an internal contest among employees and Andy Grove didn't like any of the names and used an outside firm to come up with the Pentium moniker. --------------- I hear that Novell and Lotus are still looking at each other with the possibility of a merger. --------------- Here's a new acronym for IBM: I Built Microsoft. --------------- Did you know that IBM recently approached Microsoft about the possibility of porting Chicago to the PowerPC. Apparently IBM's own OS/2 for the PowerPC will be delayed later than expected. Microsoft officials insist that Chicago is an x86- specific product. To do this port, IBM would need access to Chicago's source code. I wonder how they could benefit from that? --------------- CHICAGO UPDATE Beta testers are reporting that while the code is quite stable for a product at this stage of development, there are some major problems in the current beta release. Testers have already submitted 60 pages of known problems with the operating system. One major problem is the inability to use long filenames. Older Microsoft or compatible clients "may have problems connecting to and using a shared directory with a long file name as the directory" says one report. Creating a long filename will give an error message if an OS/2 namespace is not loaded on the server, some multimedia applications will not be able to save files with long filenames. Using DoubleSpace in MS-DOS 6.x will destroy long filenames in Chicago. Also, several aspects of OLE 2.0 such as the common dialog for Insert Object, Paste Special, Convert, Links, and Object Properties have not yet been implemented. Drag-and-drop has not yet been fully supported in the Chicago version of InfoCenter, not is the ability to embed objects or links. Applications are also having trouble, such as Adobe's Acrobat 1.0 not functioning correctly; and Word 6.0a will crash when you add a new data record to a form letter document. Symantec's C++ version 6.1 and Norton Utilities version 8.0 "refuse to run under any version of Windows except for 3.1." Of course by now you've likely heard that Chicago will be delayed until after the first of the year. Some are even saying that it will be in the April-June period before it gets to the shelf. Microsoft says they won't ship until they have a month's worth or product manufactured. Even Steven Ballmer said, "I'd say there is not a chance we'll have [Chicago] in the stores before January." --------------- ANTI-VIRUS ROM McAffee Associates has come up with a single chip solution to the problem of virus detection at boot-up. ROMShield plugs into the vacant boot-ROM socket on Ethernet adapters and prevents virus infections by installing itself as an extended BIOS before the system accesses the boot and master boot records. If a virus is detected, ROMShield suspends the boot process to allow the user to remove the virus. The chip has special OEM-definable algorithms for preventing false alarms but company officials say that it "doesn't substitute or eliminate the need for postboot virus protection." The device sells for $69.99. --------------- PROCOMM PLUS FOR WINDOWS 2 It's been quite some time since Datastorm introduced their Windows-based telecommunications package. How could they possibly improve on this excellent product? Of course the ability to fax from either applications or from within Procomm has been added. Also added is a configurable implementation of the IND$FILE protocol for communicating with IBM mainframes. The Action Bar is now customizable, but the icons are too large for my taste (and thereby waste valuable screen real estate). The first thing you'll notice is that the program runs considerably faster than its predecessor. There are numerous options for customizing the program to the way you want it. Unfortunately there seems to be no way to get rid of the scroll bars at the right and bottom of the screen. For those with internal modems, the bottom right of the screen can display modem lights which emulate those on an external modem. Fortunately you can turn this whole line of useless information off. You can attach a WAV file to various events such as file download finish, carrier detect, etc. Host mode now carries an option for implementing a fax-back service. In fact, the whole process of rendering a document to be faxed seems much faster than other fax programs. The ASPECT language has been changed. I hope you kept your WAS files because the installation process will convert them for use in the new program. If you're like me and dumped your source files after you compiled them, you'll have to start all over again. Some scripts will require rewriting. Speaking of the dialing directory, it has been greatly enhanced to allow data, fax, and voice numbers as well as other information about people you call. The default terminal font is the most ugly, unreadable thing I've ever seen. You'll want to switch to something like Terminal - just about anything is better than the default. One thing missing is support for RIP graphics which are so popular with BBSs these days. Overall, they've done a great job of upgrading an already great product. It chews up a little more hard drive space, but the increased speed and functionality are worth it. --------------- NEXT MONTH Sorry this won't get here in time, but in the September issue I'll be looking at Woodstock, the CD. I should also have Mad Dog McCree II - The Lost Gold to review. Beyond that, we'll just have to wait and see what happens. ================================= DISCLAIMER RAndY's RumOR RaG is published on a monthly basis by AINSWORTH COMPUTER SERVICES and is available on various local BBS's, GEnie, and in Modem News. In case anyone cares, RAndY's RumOR RaG is produced on a 486- 50 with 8 megs of memory, 420 MB Connor IDE hard drive, 105MB Toshiba IDE hard drive, TEAC 1.2 MB and 1.44 MB floppies, Pro Audio Spectrum 16 running a Hitachi 3750 CD ROM drive, Trident VLB video card, Sceptre SVGA display, Microsoft mouse, Word for Windows and transmitted through a US Robotics HST Dual Standard modem. Opinions expressed are those of the author. Comments should be addressed to Ainsworth Computer Services on GEnie, via phone, analog mail, or whatever method makes you feel good. AINSWORTH COMPUTER SERVICES 605 W. Wishkah Aberdeen, WA 98520-6031 (206) 533-6647 GEnie Address: RAG