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The April 19 gathering will be one of our joint meetings. We be taking another shot at exploring everyone's favorite web site. So, bring a list of your favorite destinations on the web and we'll see if we can get the hardware to co-operate this time.
We'd also like to welcome back returning members Chris Johns and Susan Kraybill.
We welcome any kind of input or feedback from members. Have an article or review you'd like to submit? Send it in. Have a comment? Email any officer you like. Involvement is the driving force of any user group. Welcome to the group.
Although Sue worked with computers in her daily job, her degree was in music. She worked on many of the theater productions at Parkland College. She also work on many CUTC productions. I had the privilege of working with Sue on the recent CUTC production of "Kiss Me Kate" for which she was the musical director. She was magnificent in the role and looked forward to the many opportunities coming up. As with almost any death, one is struck the senselessness of the loss of so much talent and experience contained in each single human being. Sue was just 46 years old. Derek was 19.
In March, Sharp announced its plans to market the Zaurus PDA in the United States and Europe as one of the world's first Linux-based handheld device. The Linux operating system is gaining wider acceptance in the computer server market because its underlying code is freely distributed on the Internet. Easily adaptable for different hardware devices, the Sharp handheld will be able to run software written in Sun Microsystems' versatile Java software language that supports different operating systems.
In this partnership, Amiga announced that its developer community would either develop new content or adapt existing content for PDA applications, using their reputation for innovation and leadership in gaming, 2D, 3D, animation, video, and music applications. Amiga-developed content can be downloaded directly through wireless networks, using desktop computers, or ported directly into the new device.
"By working with Amiga as one of our content partners we are able to expand the applications and content available for our new devices," said Dr. Hiroshi Uno, Ph.D. Division General Manager - Mobile Systems Division, Communications Systems Group, Sharp Corporation Japan.
Amiga has an outstanding reputation for software development. We anticipate that the alliance with Amiga will create a lot of momentum for the Zaurus PDA."
"Amiga is excited to be part of the Zaurus PDA project, and we look forward to bringing the excitement, brilliant content and magic of the Amiga community to Sharp," said Bill McEwen, President/CEO of Amiga Incorporated. "Amiga is adding new dimensions of content for the next generations of computing devices, and we see the new PDA platform as an important area of strategic business growth and applications for the Amiga community. We intend to develop some really great applications as consumers more fully understand the great potential and skill set of the Amiga community."
About Sharp Corporation
Sharp Corporation, a worldwide developer of the core digital technologies that are playing an integral role in shaping the next generation of mobile computing products for consumer and business needs. Since creating the Wizard(R) electronic organizer in 1989, Sharp has led the market in introducing innovative handheld computing products. Sharp is also the global leader in LCD technology, which is incorporated into leading-edge LCD monitors and projectors. From the small office/home office (SOHO) to large corporate environments, Sharp provides a variety of innovative, computer-related solutions designed to help increase productivity while providing functionality to meet customer demand. Dedicated to improving people's lives through the use of advanced technology and a commitment to innovation, quality, value and design, Sharp Corporation employs approximately 60,200 people worldwide in 30 countries. More information is available at http://sharp-world.com/index.html.
About Amiga
Amiga Inc. provides technology to developers for writing and porting applications to a new multi-media operating systems which is hardware agnostic. AmigaDE is a joint development effort between the Tao Group of Reading England, and Amiga Incorporated. AmigaDE based applications can run unchanged on x86, PowerPC, M Core, ARM, StrongARM, MIPS R3000, R4000, R5000, SH 3, SH4, and NEC V850 processors. The Amiga OS can run hosted on Linux, Embedded Linux, Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT, CE and QNX4. Amiga is based in Snoqualmie, WA, 28 miles east of Seattle and has offices worldwide. Amiga can be reached at (425) 396-5660 or visit Amiga on the web at http://www.amiga.com.
Intel will dramatically cut prices on the Pentium 4 this month to stimulate demand for its new chip, as the processor market gets even uglier.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker will slash Pentium 4 prices by as much as 50 percent this month in two cuts coming Sunday and April 29, industry sources said. As reported earlier, the company also will introduce a 1.7GHz Pentium 4 on April 23.
The cuts will potentially fill a number of strategic goals. The company has already said it wants the Pentium 4 to displace the Pentium III on desktops by the end of the year. Demand is also slow, and rival Advanced Micro Devices continues to gain ground.
The depth of the cuts, however, poses huge problems, according to some analysts. The Pentium 4 is a fairly large chip and expensive to make. Intel also continues to give PC makers rebates for each computer that includes Rambus memory and, for now, Pentium 4 systems work only with Rambus memory.
All of these factors combined with discounts will have a major effect on the company's bottom line.
"It is going to have a catastrophic impact on gross margins," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray. "You're not going to see any seasonal pickup in demand," he added.
Intel is scheduled to report first-quarter earnings Tuesday, and analysts expect glum news of slowing sales and canceled orders.
Cuts come with the territory
The discounts to some degree are inevitable. Large distributors and computer manufacturers have been dumping chips onto the gray, or secondary, market, according to several analysts and dealers. As a result, Intel has to reduce wholesale prices to stimulate demand.
An Intel spokesman would not comment on either price move, citing the company's earnings quiet period. However, he did say it behooves Intel to establish Pentium 4 in the mainstream market.
"We're continuing on our plan to bring Pentium 4 system prices into mainstream price points," said spokesman Seth Walker. "One way to bring computer buyers into stores...is to lower the bill of materials cost," therefore lowering overall Pentium 4 PC prices.
Currently, Pentium 4 systems are priced as low as about $1,200. However, the company has said it wants to see those prices fall to $999, including a monitor, by the fourth quarter.
Meanwhile, Pentium III will continue its run in notebooks and low-end servers for some time. But Intel plans to phase it out of the desktop market by the end of the year, Anand Chandrasekher, vice president of microprocessor marketing at Intel, said in a recent interview.
The proliferation of the Pentium 4 through price cuts could put extra pressure on AMD because of the magic of megahertz marketing, said Kevin Krewell, an analyst with MicroDesign Resources.
By the numbers
Although megahertz is only one measure of processor performance, the number, which indicates the speed of a chip's internal clock, is one of the most important figures for determining price.
AMD's Athlon tops out at 1.3GHz, with a 1.4GHz version expected later this quarter. By contrast, Intel has a 1.5GHz version of the Pentium 4 and will have a 1.7GHz chip this month.
At an equal clock speed, the Athlon outperforms the Pentium 4 on many functions, according to many analysts. In fact, many tests show a 1.2GHz Athlon outperforming the 1.5GHz Pentium 4. But this doesn't help AMD, which must price its chips by megahertz, forcing the ostensibly superior Athlon to sell at the lower price, Krewell said.
"AMD is forced into a frequency match up with Intel, which is beneficial to Intel," he said. Krewell said the looming price cuts are "very similar to what Intel did with the Pentium and (AMD's) K-5."
AMD took a stealth price cut last week and will cut prices again Sunday.
AMD price cuts are typically deeper than the official announcements suggest because of extra discounts the company grants to large computer manufacturers when they buy in large quantities.
Going gray
This can sometimes backfire, allowing many chips to end up in the gray market when the large PC makers or distributors unload excess chip inventories at the end of a given quarter.
Gray market activity has picked up in recent months, according to several analysts and dealers, thanks to an oversupply of processors.
"The infiltration of the gray market has gotten worse and worse," said Roland Baker, president of Fremont, Calif., computer seller Net Express.
This isn't a problem for AMD alone. It's a rare occurrence, but many of Intel's Pentium 4 chips are selling at retail for less than Intel's advertised wholesale prices.
"When you see steeply discounted products, someone other than Intel is taking a hit," said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. "The gray market grows in times of short supply or oversupply. In times of oversupply, you have the (computer makers) dumping their inventory. In the shortage situation, the same thing happens because they can make more by selling the chip."
Apple Computer has stopped selling the 667MHz Power Mac G4, possibly making room for new dual-processor computers later this month.
In late March, several dealers, who asked not to be identified, said that distributors had informed them Apple would stop selling the 667MHz Power Mac in April. On Friday, the company pulled the model from its online store.
Typically, Apple clears out older models before releasing new ones. More recently, Apple dealers slashed prices on the oldest dual-processor Macs--450MHz and 500MHz models--in yet another sign new models could be coming, analysts say.
"You have to get rid of the old to make room for the new," NPD Intelect analyst Stephen Baker said. "Apple isn't any different in that respect than anybody else."
But Apple also could just be pruning its product line. Sources close to Motorola, which supplies PowerPC processors to Apple, said manufacturing yields of the 733MHz processor are not only higher than expected but way ahead of schedule. With more 733MHz processors available, Apple could simply be getting rid of a less-desirable clock speed.
"It harks back to a (press) release we made awhile ago, when we announced a new (model) of the 733MHz configuration due to the fact Motorola had made improvements to their processes and dramatically improved supply of the 733MHz chip," said Apple spokeswoman Nathalie Welch.
In fact, Apple added a second 733MHz model in early March, replacing the DVD recording drive with a CD-rewritable drive. At $2,999, that model sold for just a few hundred dollars more than the 667MHz Power Mac.
Welch would not comment on future products, but emphasized that because of "strong demand for the 733MHz chip, Apple discontinued orders on the 667 configuration."
Older model fire sales
Still, Apple has recently stepped up efforts to clear out older dual-processor models sitting on dealer shelves. Online and catalog retailer MacConnection on March 30 cut prices on dual-processor 450MHz and 500MHz Power Macs, company spokesman Matt Cookson said. MacConnection is out of stock on dual-processor 500MHz models but has plenty of dual-processor 450MHz Power Macs available. MacConnection and other Mac dealers are advertising the dual-processor 450MHz for $1,799 and the dual-processor 500MHz for $2,199.
Baker noted that Apple has consistently dropped prices on these dual-processor Macs since December, when the 500MHz model sold for an average of $3,299 and the 450MHz one for $2,421. By February, the average dual 500MHz machine sold for $2,396 and the dual 450MHz for $1,942.
Overall, Apple has more older dual-processor Power Macs on dealers' shelves than any other model, according to NPD Intelect. Apple ended February with just under a month of inventory of dual-processor 450MHz systems and 15 days worth of dual-processor 500MHz Power Macs. By contrast, stores stocked less than two weeks of the top-selling 466MHz Power Mac, which packs a single processor. For all desktop models, Apple started March with about three weeks of inventory on dealers' shelves, according to NPD Intelect.
This contrasts sharply with the fourth quarter's inventory crisis, when Apple had more than 11 weeks worth of stock in stores, according to market researcher ARS.
Baker noted that the more normal inventory levels had to due with "Apple not replenishing new models more than strong sales."
Dual-processor power
For Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple, getting faster dual-processor systems out the door could be crucial to driving sales of Mac OS X. The new operating system--the first complete overhaul of Mac OS in 17 years--is designed to take advantage of multiple processors. Mac OS 9.1, by contrast, recognizes but does not use a second processor, although some software applications can.
"Mac OS X can take advantage of two processors in a way Mac OS 9 can't," Technology Business Research analyst Tim Deal said. "Right now, Apple needs all the margins it can get from Mac OS X."
Apple Vice President Phil Schiller told CNET News.com in March that "multiprocessing is really important, particularly to the Power Mac lines."
Apple reintroduced dual-processor Power Macs last summer, touting the value of getting a second chip for free as the company kept prices level with older models. But Apple's postponement of Mac OS X's release limited the new systems' usefulness for the majority of Mac users, Deal said.
Because of chip supply issues, Apple in January largely backed away from offering dual-processor systems. As first reported by CNET News.com, the company unveiled 466MHz, 533MHz, 667MHz and 733MHz machines during Macworld in San Francisco. At the time, Apple offered one dual-processor 533MHz model, but did not promote it alongside the other new Power Macs. That system now gets equal billing with other Power Macs sold through the Apple Store.
Sources close to the company said Apple may be preparing to unveil a dual-processor 667MHz or 733MHz Power Mac G4, possibly during the National Association of Broadcasters show April 23 to 26. But other sources suggested Apple CEO Steve Jobs could announce new models during the company's first-quarter earnings conference call Wednesday.
If Apple does bring out new models now, it would be a step in the right direction, NPD Intelect's Baker said. Typically, Apple introduces new models at the various Macworld trade shows.
"People anticipate them coming out with new products at specific times of the year, and that freezes up the market and makes it difficult to sell old products," Baker said. "They may be trying to break away from that and bring out models with shorter life cycles."
Netscape has released Communicator 4.77, a maintenance update that provides a few minor fixes to the company's older Web browser for the Mac (most of Netscape's development efforts are focused on Netscape 6 - see "Netscape 6 Arrives on Wobbly Legs" in TidBITS-556). The new version corrects a problem with bookmarks added to the Personal Toolbar, plus two JavaScript related issues: Command-clicking some JavaScript URLs wasn't always properly handled, and Communicator now always handles JavaScript URLs internally. The new version is a 14.7 MB download. [JLC]
http://home.netscape.com/download/
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06206
When Apple announced the CD and DVD burning capabilities of its new Macs, we wondered what it mean for Roxio's Toast, the current standard in media burning. Now, Roxio has released Toast 5 Titanium, a new version that can burn Video CDs which can be played on most DVD Video players. The new version also improves its MP3 Disc, Data CD, Audio CD, and CD Copy formats, includes background burning and a new interface, and adds support for Apple's iMovie and iTunes. Toast 5 Titanium is now shipping for $90. [JLC]
http://www.roxio.com/en/products/toast/
Microsoft has released the Office 2001 for Mac Service Release 1, which updates the suite of applications for Mac OS 9.1 and Mac OS X compatibility, international language support, and other improvements. Word 2001 now correctly saves documents in Word 4.0 format and fixes a rare problem caused when documents with numbers were saved in Rich Text Format (RTF) and then opened in Word for Windows. Excel 2001 offers enhancements to the List Manager, printing, and when importing FileMaker data. PowerPoint 2001 better handles linked files and presentations created with PowerPoint for Windows, and improves the Save as Web Page feature. Entourage 2001 fixes a host of problems ranging from application crashes to rebuilding Entourage databases, along with better support for working with various SMTP and IMAP servers. The Service Release 1 is a free update, and is a 6.9 MB download. [JLC]
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/download/office2001/sr1.asp
Aladdin Systems has released StuffIt Deluxe 6.0.1, a small update to their venerable file compression and archiving software. Along with a number of bug fixes, new features in StuffIt Deluxe 6.0.1 include support for the GnuTar format and symbolic links used in Mac OS X, plus support for Microsoft Entourage in StuffIt Deluxe's "Stuff and Mail" and ReturnReceipt features. Plus, you can now specify an anti-virus application to scan archives after expanding. The free updater for StuffIt Deluxe 6.0.1 is a 3.1 MB download; make sure to read the installation notes.
http://www.aladdinsys.com/deluxe/updates.html
Aladdin has also released free 6.0.1 updates to the shareware DropStuff and DropZip and freeware StuffIt Expander, though the only notable improvement is the capability to Shift-click multiple items when selecting files via the Compress or Expand menu items (this is actually a feature of Apple's Navigation Services that DropStuff and StuffIt Expander make accessible). StuffIt Expander 6.0.1 is a 2.2 MB download, DropStuff 6.0.1 is a 3.9 MB download, and DropZip is a 3.8 MB download. If you download the full StuffIt Deluxe update, you don't need these individual updates as well. [ACE]
http://www.aladdinsys.com/dropstuff/updates.html
http://www.aladdinsys.com/dropzip/updates.html
http://www.aladdinsys.com/expander/updates.html
Palm, Inc. has unveiled the Palm m505, which offers the long-awaited combination of a color screen in a thin case the size of Palm's popular Palm V series. In addition to a 16-bit color screen, the new handheld features a USB HotSync cradle and vibrating alarms. New to the Palm platform is an Expansion Card slot that accommodates postage stamp-sized MultiMediaCard and Secure Digital memory cards initially offering up to 16 MB of additional storage, as well as content-specific cards such as a dictionary/thesaurus, travel guides, and games. The future will bring Expansion Card devices such as digital cameras and music players. The m505 also runs Palm OS 4.0, which boosts the operating system's security features, adds software for wireless Internet access, and enhances how alarms are handled (in addition to lots of under-the-hood changes for color support). Palm also announced the Palm m500, offering the same features as the m505 but with a grayscale screen. The Palm m500 will be available at the end of April for $400; the m505 is expected to arrive in May for $450. [JLC]
http://www.palm.com/products/palmm505/
http://www.palm.com/products/palmm500/
Motorola fell short of analysts' reduced estimates in its first quarter Tuesday and posted its first operating loss in more than 15 years.
In the quarter, it posted a loss of $206 million, or 9 cents a share, on sales of $7.8 billion.
The maker of semiconductors and wireless telephone handsets twice lowered sales and earnings estimates in the quarter, but still was unable to hit the revised targets.
First Call consensus pegged the semiconductor and wireless telephone handset maker for a loss of only 7 cents a share on sales of $7.96 billion.
Motorola shares closed up $1.50 to $13 ahead of the earnings report before falling to $12.04 in after-hours trading.
The $7.8 billion in sales represents an 11 percent decline from the year-ago quarter when it earned $481 million, or 21 cents a share, on sales of $8.8 billion.
Analysts originally pegged the Schaumburg, Ill.-based company for a profit of 12 cents a share.
"Although cash flow from businesses, including net proceeds from investments, was positive in the first quarter, this quarter was a difficult one," said Chief Operating Officer Robert Growney in a prepared release. "Order growth weakened across all of the company's business segments. We believe this change in customer requirements is part of a major global pattern affecting many technology companies."
Motorola executives will provide more details on their first-quarter results and outlook during a conference call Wednesday morning.
On Friday, Motorola shares plunged 23 percent on concerns about the company's ability to raise cash due to its heavy short-term debt load and credit-rating reviews under way by both Moody's and Standard & Poor's.
Motorola executives were quick to refute the rumors, calling any inference of a liquidity problem "erroneous."
Motorola countered in its earnings release and added that it has "expanded financing relationships" and "undertaken aggressive cost-cutting measures" to offset any balance-sheet worries. Indeed, Motorola ended the quarter with a little more than $4 billion in cash, up from $3.3 billion on Dec. 31.
Merrill Lynch analyst Michael Ching noted the company improved its cash position, but it wasn't through operations. Indeed, Motorola said "cash flow from businesses, including net proceeds from investments, was positive in the first quarter."
So far this year, Motorola has announced plans to lay off roughly 14,000 employees across all of its business units in an effort to cut costs and streamline its operating efficiency.
Before the earnings report, UBS Warburg analyst Jeffrey Schlesinger predicted Motorola would lose only 8 cents a share on sales of $7.95 billion. He added that further layoffs and asset sales would likely be announced in future quarters.
"Frankly, we expect to see more corporate downsizing in the near future, which we would view as a positive in light of industry and company fundamentals," he wrote in a research report.
Paul Sagawa, an analyst at Bernstein, pegged Motorola for a loss of 8 cents a share on sales of $7.8 billion.
"We see little chance of upside surprise as the company continues to struggle amidst an environment of sagging consumer spending and a dramatic reduction in carrier spending," he said ahead of the earnings report. "We foresee no near-term danger of insolvency, however we have little faith that management is making sufficient progress in dealing with key issues across the business segments."
Performance numbers
Viewed as something of a bellwether for the technology industry because of its early reporting date, Motorola's performance in the first quarter shows just how dramatic the decline in information technology spending was during the first three months of 2001.
Among major markets, orders were down "very significantly" in wireless, standard embedded solutions and networking/computing, down "significantly" in imaging/entertainment and slightly lower for transportation.
Through Friday, Motorola said it had more than $4.5 billion in cash and cash equivalents. Outstanding commercial paper had been reduced to $3.1 billion helped by the sale of assets and a term loan.
Future and past
Looking ahead, Chief Executive Officer Christopher Galvin could offer only a vague outlook in the prepared release.
"We see a continuing downturn in the U.S. economy beginning to spill over to the rest of the world," he said in the release. "The high-tech sector, which has been hard hit, is already in a recession. These issues, plus interest rate policy or energy prices, cannot be controlled by Motorola."
Company executives are expected to provide more detailed information during Wednesday's conference call.
First Call consensus expects Motorola to earn 14 cents a share in the fiscal year on sales of $36.4 billion.
Last quarter, Motorola met analysts' reduced estimates when it posted a profit of $355 million, or 15 cents a share, on sales of $10.1 billion.
Its shares rallied up to a 52-week high of $52.65 last April before falling to a low of $10.50 last week.
Fifteen of the 25 analysts tracking the stock rate it either a "hold" or a "sell."
From PCForrest
A solution is often difficult to pinpoint. When it happens to me, I usually live with it until it's time to reinstall Windows over itself, which sorts it out more often than not. It can be more tedious to follow this than to reinstall Windows, but here goes...
The Microsoft Technical Support Troubleshooting Wizards may help. Just select your version of Windows then select the appropriate troubleshooter. There is also a How to Troubleshoot Windows 95 Shutdown Problems document, which contains a link to the troubleshooter.
When Windows shuts down it doesn't just close a few files and go to sleep. Data waiting to be written to disk is saved, protected mode drivers go back to real mode, and any applications still running are told to close down. If there is a problem with any of these operations (a driver crashes, for example) the shutdown process stops dead. To locate the culprit try using these steps:
1. A damaged exit sound file can cause the shut down to freeze. In Control Panel, double-click Sounds. In the Events box, click Exit Windows. In the Name box, take a note of the sound file currently in use before changing it to None. Click OK and shut down Windows. If it does not lock up, install a fresh copy of the sound file.
2. Find out if a program loading from the Startup folder is refusing to shut down properly. Restart the computer and hold down the Shift key until Windows has loaded. This prevents programs in the Startup folder from being executed. Shut down Windows. If it no longer hangs, you know that one of the programs you avoided loading is the cause of the problem. To find out which, move all the program shortcuts except one from the StartUp folder to a temporary home. Repeatedly shutdown and restart Windows, putting one program shortcut back each time, until the bad one is revealed. You should then ask the author for a solution. Access the StartUp folder as follows: right-click the Start button, choose Explore and navigate to Programs\StartUp.
3. The StartUp folder isn't the only place where programs can be run automatically when Windows starts. Lines in WIN.INI can run them too. Go to Start > Run then type SYSEDIT and click OK. Switch to the WIN.INl window and locate all 'Load=' and 'Run=' lines. Put a semi-colon (;) at the start of each line, thus disabling them. Save WIN.INI, close Sysedit and restart the PC. The Load and Run lines are now ignored. Shut down. If it still hangs, the problem does not lie in WIN.INI and you should remove the semi-colons. If shut-down now works, re-enable the lines one by one, restarting and shutting down each time to find out which is at fault.
4. Commands executed from CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT should now be tested. When booting up, press F5 and choose Step-by-Step Confirmation from the start-up menu. Press Y at the following prompts and N for all others:
Load Doublespace driver
Process the system registry
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C: \WINDOWS\IFSHLP.SYS
Load the Windows graphical user interface
Load all Windows drivers
If Windows now shuts down cleanly, repeat the process, enabling one more command to execute each time, until you find the fault.
5. There may be a memory conflict even when EMM386.EXE is not loaded from CONFIG.SYS. To find out, run Sysedit and click the CONFIG.SYS window. Ensure the following lines exist in this order:
device=c:\windows\himem.sys
device=c:\windows\emm386.exe noems x=a000-f7ff
dos=umb,high
Save the file and quit. Restart the computer and shut down Windows. If it now closes properly, you need to do some detailed troubleshooting, which there isn't room to explain. There is another Knowledge Base article, Locating and Excluding RAM/ROM Addresses in the UMA, which explains what to do.
6. The PC Speaker driver, SPEAKER.DRV, can cause shut-down problems. Disable the wave=speaker.drv line in the SYSTEM.INI file. Restart the computer and shut down Windows.
7. Next, check whether a virtual device driver loaded from SYSTEM.INI is at fault. Run Sysedit again and click the SYSTEM.INI window. Locate the [386Enh] section. Place a semi-colon at the start of each line that begins with 'Device=' and ends with '.386'. Save SYSTEM.INI and restart Windows. Shut down. If Windows does not freeze, the problem may be caused by one of the drivers you have just disabled. Identify it by repeatedly removing one of the semi-colons, restarting and shutting down. When Windows freezes, you'll know the most recently enabled driver is the one. Don't forget to enable all problem-free lines before moving on.
8. If your PC has Advanced Power Management (APM), it may be at fault.
9. Check the Windows file system settings. Right-click My Computer and choose Properties. Click the Performance tab and then File System and Troubleshooting. Select all the checkboxes. Click OK, Close and then Yes. Restart Windows and shut down. If it works now, the problem is related to the File System settings and you need tech support from the PC's vendor.
10. Investigate Windows device drivers. It's important to have a backup of the registry before proceeding, as you can make a mistake that might otherwise necessitate reinstalling Windows. The instructions in How to Troubleshoot Windows 95 Shutdown Problems on this point didn't always tie up with what I saw on the screen, so what follows is my adaptation.
1. Click the Hardware Profiles tab in System Properties.2. Click the hardware profile you are currently using (there's probably only one) and then click Copy.
3. Type Test Configuration in the To box and then click OK.
4. Restart the computer and, when Windows says that it cannot determine what configuration your computer is in, choose Test Configuration from the options.
5. Go back to the Device Manager tab in System Properties.
6. With the exception of System Devices, expand each branch in turn and disable the devices you find there.
7. Double-click a device and then click Disable In This Hardware Configuration.
NOTE: Sometimes the checkbox does not exist. If so click Remove and then the Remove From Specific Configuration radio button.
8. Choose Test Configuration. Do not disable any system devices.
9. Sometimes you will be prompted to restart Windows. Click No. Only when all devices have been disabled should you restart it.
10. Once again Windows will say it cannot determine what configuration your computer is in. Choose Test Configuration.
11. Next you will see a complaint about the display adapter being disabled or not configured.
12. Click Cancel.
13. Click Cancel again when the Display Properties dialog box opens.
14. Now see if Windows will shut down properly. If so, the problem may be caused by a Windows device driver or an installed device that is configured incorrectly or is malfunctioning.
15. Restart the PC and choose Original Configuration.
16. In System Properties, delete Test Configuration and make a new copy of Original Configuration as Test Configuration.
17. Restart in Test Configuration.
18. Now disable or remove one device and shut down.
19. If it still crashes, restart in Test Configuration and disable one more device.
20. Repeat until Windows closes-down properly. The problem is associated with the last device you disabled.
NOTE: Watch out for Plug and Play devices. Windows will detect them when restarting and try to reinstall the drivers. Don't let it.
21. When you've finished, restart in Original Configuration and delete Test Configuration.
11. Remove the possibility of damaged files by reinstalling Windows to a different folder.
12. Rule out a defective Plug and Play BIOS (if one is fitted) by reinstalling Windows using
SETUP /P I
13. Start Windows with boot logging enabled (it's an option on the boot menu). Shut down and restart in MS-DOS(r) mode. View the BOOTLOG.TXT file. Look for 'Terminate=' entries at the end. Each should have a matching 'EndTerminate=' line. If the last line in BOOTLOG.TXT is 'EndTerminate=KERNEL' then Windows shut down successfully. How to Troubleshoot Windows 95 Shutdown Problems contains a list of some other last lines and the problems they might indicate.
14. If Windows still won't shut down, there may be faulty hardware and you should seek the assistance of the manufacturer or a competent repairer. 15. Reset the CMOS settings back to the factory defaults - the motherboard documentation or manufacturer should tell you how to. Always write down the existing CMOS settings before changing them. Messing around with the CMOS can result in a non-functioning computer. If you aren't an expert, leave it to someone who is to test this one.
[Source: The Commo-Hawk Computer User Group newsletter, "The File" April, 2001. CHCUG's address is P.O. Box 2724, Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52406-2724.]
Applies to:
* Internet Explorer 4
* Internet Explorer 5
UPDATE: Internet Explorer 5 adds a Sort by Name option to the context menu you see when you right-click any menu or Favorites folder. Pity they didn't think to add an auto-arrange option, too.
If you installed Internet Explorer 4 (included with Windows 98) you may have noticed your menus appear slightly differently. Instead of the multi-column display (as with Windows(r) 95 without Internet Explorer(r) 4) you now only see a single column with small scroll arrows at the top and bottom. Since the arrows can be a bit fiddly to operate the ability to drag and drop menu items was also introduced - you could drag all your common menu options near the top of the menu, for example. The best way to get around this problem is to sub-divide large menu structures into smaller logical groups.
However, most people prefer an alpha-numeric sort order, but with IE4 installed, new items are added to the bottom of menus and have to be manually sorted. If you would like to have Windows automatically sort your menu alphanumerically, you need to remove a registry key.
The Favorites folder also has a sort order which can be removed in the same manner.
Note: This document describes the manual method required to regain the alpha-numeric sorting order of start menus and favorites. For an automated solution, refer to the Q-Sort Windows Utility.
Removing the customized sort order:
1. Backup the registry.
2. Select Start > Run > "RegEdit" (no quotes).
3. For the Start Menu sort order, remove this key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion \Explorer \MenuOrder \Start Menu
4. For the Favorites folder sort order, remove this key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion \Explorer \MenuOrder \Favorites
5. Close RegEdit
6. Reboot.
Your menu's will then be sorted correctly - sub-folder menus at the top, program/document shortcuts at the bottom (each sorted alpha-numerically). New items will be inserted in their proper place in the menu/folder.
Note: If you drag an item to a new position you may lose the alpha-numerical sort order again. In this case the registry key(s), above, need to be removed once more.
Advanced Tip:
By removing just the following key, both the Start Menu and the Favorites folder will regain the alpha-numeric sort order:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion \Explorer \MenuOrder
[Source: The Commo-Hawk Computer User Group newsletter, "The File" April, 2001. CHCUG's address is P.O. Box 2724, Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52406-2724.]
You've heard plenty online about Mac OS X from those who installed the Public Beta and those who took the jump before this. But now you've received your shiny white box with the big X, and after reading last week's article about Mac OS X, you're ready to install Apple's new operating system. My goal here is to help you install and set up Mac OS X in as painless a manner as possible. The process is a bit like Mac OS X itself - simple on the surface, but complex under the hood, as you can tell if you read through the TidBITS Talk threads related to installation.
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06372
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=1327+1332
System Recommendations
Officially, Apple says you need an original PowerPC G3 or G4-based Macintosh (other than the original PowerBook G3) with at least 128 MB RAM and 1.5 GB of hard disk space. As usual with new operating systems, the more processing power and memory you have, the better it operates. That's how Apple sells new hardware, right? Personally, I'm running Mac OS X on a 400 MHz iMac DV SE with 256 MB of RAM. I've also installed it with no problems on my 366 MHz Indigo iBook with 198 MB of RAM.
I wouldn't recommend running Mac OS X on non-Apple computers, but several Unix-experienced friends have reported success using Power Computing clones with PowerPC G3 upgrade cards, and others have managed to hack Mac OS X into running on Macs whose CPUs predate the PowerPC G3 as well.
http://homepage.mac.com/RyanRempel/OldWorld/Instructions.html
As far as RAM goes, 128 MB of RAM is a realistic minimum. You might theoretically get away with less if you're not using Classic applications, since Mac OS X manages its virtual memory efficiently. But how many people won't be using Mac OS X's Classic mode at least some of the time? Since Classic puts the entire Mac OS 9.1 operating system in RAM when loading, Mac OS X needs at least 64 MB just for Classic. Initial reports indicate that memory beyond 128 MB improves performance.
Mac OS X itself requires about 1.1 GB of hard disk space for a default installation (you can opt out of installing extra printer drivers and the BSD subsystem, each of which take about 80 MB), which it spreads across many thousands of files and folders. I assume Mac OS X requires the rest of the disk space for virtual memory swap space. Welcome to the wonderful world of Unix, and as you can tell, hard disk speed and possibly fragmentation level will play a part in overall performance, since Mac OS X will be hitting the disk constantly.
Advice for Testers
Before I delve into the basics of a safe installation process, let me make a few points for those who have tried one of the earlier releases. I have now installed every version of Mac OS X from Developer's Preview 1 to the official release, and I've come up with the following pieces of advice.
If you installed any version of Mac OS X prior to the Public Beta on a hard disk partition, you probably have a corrupted partition and should run the latest version of Norton Disk Doctor or Micromat's TechTool Pro and try to repair it. If these programs can't fix the damage, you must back up and reinitialize your hard disk, then restore from your backup. Frankly, that might be safest anyway.
http://www.micromat.com/
http://www.symantec.com/nu/nu_mac/
Although Mac OS X will install over the Public Beta, the process is much slower than installing from scratch because the installer has to work hard to figure out which of the many thousands of files have changed. Also, there have been reports of performance problems and other weird behaviors from such an approach. Although installing over the Public Beta retains all your settings (not a big deal unless you used it heavily), you won't get some new stuff. For instance, on an iBook, if you install over the Public Beta, you won't get the battery monitor in the Dock by default, as you do after doing a clean install.
Preparing for Mac OS X
Now, for everyone else... Unless you are installing on a Mac containing no useful data, the first thing you should do is back up _everything_ (not just important data) to a location from which you can restore easily. Despite the similarities in the way you use it, Mac OS X is a vastly different environment from any previous version of the Mac OS, and although you should not lose data, it is possible. Be smart and back up.
The next step is to decide whether you want to install Mac OS X on the same partition as your existing copy of the Mac OS, or if you'd prefer to separate the two by partitioning your hard disk and installing Mac OS X on a different partition. I've seen no difference in the safety of data, but it's easier to customize or even get rid of a Mac OS X installation entirely if you've dedicated a partition to it. Of course, if you have working data on your hard disk, you'll need that backup to restore your data after reformatting and partitioning with Apple's Drive Setup utility.
If you're not running Mac OS 9.1 currently, you'll need to install it before installing Mac OS X, and it's generally easiest to find, download, and install any necessary updates to the programs you use while you're in a familiar environment. I recommend starting with the newest versions of your programs when upgrading versions of the operating system because it saves you grief in the long run. Otherwise, you might have crashes from, for instance, an old extension that isn't compatible with the new operating system, and you don't want to see crashes as soon as you've finished installation. One additional suggestion - if you see a Mac OS X version of a program while downloading an update, snag the Mac OS X version at the same time. You'll want it eventually, and again, it's easier to work in your familiar environment right now.
VersionTracker is the first place to look for and download updates. If you don't mind spending some money, you could purchase either Insider Software's $70 UpgradeAgent 8 (it also runs under Mac OS X as Upgrade Agent X) or Casady and Greene's $40 Chaos Master (which uses VersionTracker to compare versions). These programs scour your hard disk and return a list of applications that have updates available. Then it is just a matter of spending hours downloading patches and running their installers.
http://www.versiontracker.com/
http://www.insidersoftware.com/
http://www.casadyg.com/products/chaosmaster/
Still assuming that you're not already running Mac OS 9.1, you'll need to install it next. Apple has made it easy by including a Mac OS 9.1 CD-ROM in the box with Mac OS X. (Note, however, that PowerBook G4, Power Mac G4 (Digital Audio) and iMac (Early 2001) machines that come pre-installed with Mac OS 9.1 cannot boot from the Mac OS 9.1 CD included with Mac OS X.) There are a few interesting changes in Mac OS 9.1, but the two that affect you the most with Mac OS X are the way it rearranges your folder structure (the Applications folder becomes "Applications (Mac OS 9)" and the Internet, Utilities, and Apple Extras folders move inside it) and the new Startup Disk control panel that enables you to switch between Mac OS 9.1 and Mac OS X. It's a good idea to move all your custom Mac OS 9 folders inside Apple's default folder hierarchy to avoid file permissions problems. The top level of your hard disk should thus contain only Applications (Mac OS 9), Documents, and System Folder. Also, be sure to run the Software Update control panel to check for any recent updates, such as the essential Startup Disk 9.2.1 control panel Apple released last week.
http://asu.info.apple.com/swupdates.nsf/artnum/n12078
Also noteworthy, on the Mac OS 9.1 CD-ROM in the CD Extras folder, there are a number of firmware updaters for the blue & white Power Mac G3, the iMac, the iBook, the Power Mac G4, and the PowerBook (FireWire). Apple recommends using these firmware updates, but if you have third party RAM in your Mac, the potential of having that RAM disabled outweighs the benefits, so hold off on those until Apple addresses the problems.
At this point, you should have Mac OS 9.1 running, with all of your extensions and control panels. They're some of the most likely things to break under Mac OS X's Classic mode, so shut them all off by using Extensions Manager to switch to a Mac OS 9.1 All set of extensions. Those should work under Mac OS X, and once you're in Mac OS X's Classic mode, you can create a set which contains just the Mac OS 9.1 extensions and control panels you need, and to which you can slowly add your third-party extensions. (Casady & Greene's Conflict Catcher 8.0.8 knows about Mac OS 9.1 and can even switch between extension sets depending on whether you're in Mac OS 9.1 or in Classic under Mac OS X, but a bug means you have to enter your registration information in Classic each time if you're using a single-partition approach.)
http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n106149
One last thing. Although you should do so before installing any software, be sure to read the READ BEFORE YOU INSTALL.pdf file located on the Mac OS X CD-ROM for information about things you might want to do before installation (especially with beige Power Mac G3 and the PowerBook G3 Series machines with large partitioned hard disks). If you launch right into the installer and read this info at the start of the installation process, you won't be able to back out without restarting the Mac.
Phew! You are now ready to install Mac OS X itself. Luckily, that's much easier than all the preparation.
Setup and Installation
The actual process of installation is almost trivially easy, although it can take some time (half an hour or more). You can start the installation while booted into Mac OS 9.1, though the installer immediately reboots from the Mac OS X CD-ROM; or, you can just boot from the Mac OS X CD-ROM directly by holding down the C key during startup. Apple recommends the latter as a troubleshooting approach should the initial attempt fail for some reason.
At the initial startup, Mac OS X provides you with a new version of the Setup Assistant that Apple has used for years. Each screen of the Setup Assistant asks for different information, such as your time zone, your localization requirements (language and keyboard), and so forth.
The Setup Assistant also walks you through creating your user account - remember, Mac OS X is inherently a multiple user system - and in the User Account pane, you must enter a long name (for File Sharing purposes) as well as a short name (but not "root" or, possibly "wheel", both of which are special accounts in Unix) and password. Write these down on paper and store them in a secure location! The short name and password are very important because they give you authority to change important preferences and set up how other users can access your Mac. Luckily, Mac OS X makes this account an administrator-level account (so you can set up and manage preferences and access) and defaults to an automatic login, so you don't have to enter a password on every restart.
In previous versions of the Mac OS, a separate Internet Setup Assistant helped you configure your Mac for use on the Internet. In Mac OS X, the main Setup Assistant does this as well, so make sure you know your email address, mail server addresses, DNS addresses, modem access numbers, passwords, and so on. One departure from the previous Internet Setup Assistant is that Mac OS X's Setup Assistant asks you for your iTools account (and lets you sign up for one if you haven't already). This is worthwhile - access to your iDisk is built into the Mac OS X Finder in the Go menu, and Apple is already making software like iTunes and iMovie available via iDisk.
Switching Back and Forth
The details of using Mac OS X are beyond the scope of this article (and of course, if you've bought into Apple's rhetoric, Mac OS X is utterly intuitive, right?), but there is one important task you need to know how to perform - how to switch back to Mac OS 9.1. If you're like almost everyone else, you'll need to do that on occasion when you run into software that doesn't work in Mac OS X's Classic mode. And, if you've installed the new operating system on your primary Mac, you may find that working in Mac OS 9.1 is necessary to get your work done efficiently.
To switch from Mac OS X back to Mac OS 9.1, choose System Preferences from the Apple menu (or click its icon in the Dock). Click the Startup Disk icon in either the toolbar (Apple set it as one of the favorites that appears there no matter what other control panel you're using) or in the collection of control panels below. You'll see a list of System Folders that can boot your Mac (at least one for Mac OS X and one for Mac OS 9.1, and possibly more, depending on your setup). Select one with Mac OS 9, and then choose Restart from the Apple menu to restart the Mac.
When the Mac reboots, you'll notice that some new files and folders have appeared at the top level of your hard disk (assuming you installed on a single partition). Along with the Mac OS 9.1 System Folder, Documents, and Applications (Mac OS 9) folders, you'll see a new Applications folder that holds Mac OS X applications, a System folder that contains much of the guts of Mac OS X, a Users folder that holds folders and sub-folders for each user, and a Library folder that contains folders for shared files like fonts. Also at the top level are two files - mach and mach.sym - that are part of Mac OS X and are invisible when you're in Mac OS X.
Feel free to explore the new Mac OS X folders while in Mac OS 9.1 - you'll probably find navigating in the familiar Mac OS 9.1 Finder to be much faster and more fluid. However, do _not_ move or delete anything! In previous versions of the Mac OS, there were a few files that were dangerous to move, such as the System and Finder and any enablers or Mac OS ROM files, but short of those, you couldn't do much serious damage. That's totally not true of Mac OS X - move or delete the wrong file while in Mac OS 9.1 and the whole thing may cease to work. Worse, there aren't yet many people out there who will be able to help).
Plus, Mac OS X uses many more invisible files and folders, which means that if you end up with a bad installation for some reason and want to erase it, just deleting visible Mac OS X files and folders while in Mac OS 9.1 won't completely uninstall Mac OS X. First, make sure to switch to Mac OS 9.1 in the Startup Disk control panel (this is important), reboot, and then start deleting things, including all those invisible files and folders (utilities like DiskTop and Greg's Browser can display and manipulate invisible files and folders). This is the point at which having Mac OS X on its own partition would save some time and uncertainty, since you could just choose Erase Disk from the Finder's Special menu.
http://www.prgrsoft.com/pages/disktop.html
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05843
http://www.kaleidoscope.net/greg/browser.html
When you're finished in Mac OS 9.1 and ready to return to Mac OS X, just open the Startup Disk control panel in Mac OS 9.1, click the disclosure triangle to reveal the different valid operating systems, choose the Mac OS X System folder, and click the Restart button. A few minutes later, you'll be back in the watery wonderland of Mac OS X.
Go West, Young Mac
Where to go from here? I'd encourage you to explore Mac OS X on your own first - there's nothing like personal experience to help you make up your own mind what you think about Apple's efforts at redesigning the Macintosh interface. For additional tips, opinions, and a moderated forum for asking questions, subscribe to TidBITS Talk (send an email message to tidbits-talk-on@tidbits.com), where the Mac OS X discussions have been going strong. And of course, I'm sure additional articles about Mac OS X will be forthcoming in TidBITS over the next few months.
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=active
[Rita Lewis is the author of over 20 Macintosh books, including the best-selling Mac OS in a Nutshell from O'Reilly.]
Last week, we wrote about firmware updates for recent Macs which Apple issued shortly after the release of Mac OS X, and which were causing updated Macs to stop seeing some third-party memory modules. (See "Avoid Current Firmware Updates" in TidBITS-574_.) Apple has now provided a statement to MacInTouch in which they say that the 4.1.7 and 4.1.8 firmware updates incorporate a new check that validates whether installed RAM is compatible to address random crashes and overall stability issues. The firmware update causes the Mac to ignore DIMMs that either don't meet Apple's specifications or that the update can't identify as compatible. Of course, this raises the question of why Apple initially didn't provide some warning about the possible consequences (which they've now done in the descriptions of these files on the Apple Software Downloads site), or why the firmware update itself doesn't test the DIMMs before installation.
http://www.macintouch.com/firmwareramprob2.html
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06380
Glenn Anderson, author of Qualcomm's Eudora Internet Mail Server, has stepped up to the challenge with DIMM First Aid (previously called DIMMCheck), a free utility you can run in Mac OS 9 to see if your DIMMs are likely to fail Apple's newly enforced specifications. If the test fails, DIMM First Aid can reprogram the offending DIMMs' Serial Presence Detect EEPROMs so they won't later be disabled by the firmware updater. DIMM First Aid is a 6K download.
http://www.eudora.com/eims/
http://mactcp.org.nz/dimmfirstaid.sit
So, before running the 4.1.7 or 4.1.8 firmware updates (which Apple says "dramatically improve system stability and performance"), be sure to check your Mac's memory with DIMM First Aid. If your DIMMs fail, use DIMM First Aid to fix them. If your DIMMs pass, it's almost certainly safe to update your firmware. You can download the firmware updates from Apple's Software Downloads Web site (search for "firmware update") or get them via the Software Update control panel, but note that the firmware updates on the Mac OS 9.1 CD-ROM that comes with Mac OS X are much older versions. We said in "Out of the Box: Installing Mac OS X" in TidBITS-574_ that you shouldn't run these firmware updates; that's a mistake, and we'd encourage anyone installing Mac OS X to run at least the older firmware updates on the Mac OS 9.1 CD-ROM beforehand.
http://asu.info.apple.com/
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06384
If you're in the nerve-wracking position of having the firmware updates already disable one or more DIMMs, first run DIMM First Aid, which should be able to fix the problem even after the DIMMs have been disabled. If, for some reason, that doesn't work, contact the vendor from whom you purchased the RAM. Most of them, according to a Ramseeker survey, are accepting returned DIMMs. They either replace the DIMMs or reprogram the EEPROMs for you.
In the end, Glenn Anderson deserves the highest accolades for his work in creating DIMM First Aid, in contrast with Apple, whose release of an update that could disable hardware without warning was negligent in the extreme.
http://xlr8yourmac.com/OSX/FirmwareUpdate_missingRAM.html#apple
http://www.ramseeker.com/firmware.shtml
Computer books can be big, because computers - as well as the applications and operating systems they use - are far more complex than their makers would often like to admit. Although size isn't always important, it is true that a huge tome often contains information left out of other books.
The Mac OS 9 Bible, by Lon Poole and Todd Stauffer (Hungry Minds, $40) is one such book. It does not offer an introduction to the Mac OS 9 or a tutorial approach to using it, but tries to present the whole shebang - and at over 900 pages, there is little missing. You might ask why it would be worth buying a Mac OS 9 book at the dawn of Apple's release of Mac OS X, but, aside from the fact that not all Macs are able to run Mac OS X, I strongly suspect that many Macintosh users are taking a wait-and-see attitude toward Mac OS X. And if you're planning to stick with Mac OS 9 for another year, or, if you're planning to run older applications in the Classic environment (which uses Mac OS 9.1), there's no reason not to make the most of it in that time.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0764534149/tidbitselectro00A/
You get a sense of the depth of this book in the first few pages - the table of contents alone is 22 pages long. Poole and Stauffer have compiled seemingly as much information as possible on the Mac OS, and they present it in a clear and easy-to-understand manner.
However, the Mac OS 9 Bible is not a book for Macintosh beginners, as the authors specify in the introduction. It won't tell you how to point and click or how to select menu items. Instead, it's for those who want to know how everything works, or who want a reference book at their side when a question arises.
The first 100 pages or so deal with the basics of using the desktop and the Finder, as well as what's new and cool in Mac OS 9. (Note that it does not cover the recent Mac OS 9.1 update; I doubt there will be a new edition taking new features such as the Finder's new Window menu into account, but Mac OS 9.1's visible changes are mostly minimal.) This material is geared toward inexperienced users, but the sheer quantity of information presented will probably turn off such users. In short, don't give the Mac OS 9 Bible to someone to get them up and running with a new iMac (TidBITS will publish a comparative review of some iMac- oriented books in the near future).
The Mac OS 9 Bible was not written to be read cover-to-cover, but it includes everything, in well thought-out chapters, and contains excellent explanations of some of the key aspects of the Mac OS. Just a few examples: the section on fonts gives an overview of the different types of fonts and how they work; the two comprehensive chapters on printing tell more than you will ever need to know about the subject; and the chapter titled "Adjust Controls and Preferences" tells you how to tweak every tweakable part of your system.
The Mac OS 9 Bible also includes a good chapter on Apple's system- level scripting technology, AppleScript - something that many Mac OS books mention merely in passing. Power users have long appreciated the automation possibilities presented by AppleScript, such as mounting network volumes, changing file attributes, integrating applications, or applying folder actions (scripts that watch over folders and act when files are added or removed). It can be hard to get started with AppleScript, but with a good introduction like this, even novices can start writing scripts that work wonders.
For those interested in setting up a network (home or home-office networks are becoming increasingly common), three chapters tell all about networking and file sharing. I did notice one significant omission, though: Apple's AirPort wireless networking technology warrants only a brief mention that covers less than one page. AirPort deserves significantly more attention, since being able to set up a network without running cables through your home is quite empowering. (See "Going to the AirPort" in TidBITS-567_ for more on setting up and using AirPort networks.)
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06300
I was pleased to see a chapter on shareware - there are many excellent applications available for the Mac that are not sold through traditional channels, and, in more than 20 pages, the Mac OS 9 Bible presents dozens of the best shareware programs, along with the URLs to find their latest versions. Many people are unaware of these gems, and some of the best enhancements to the Mac OS come from shareware sources.
Another hefty chapter on tips and secrets goes beyond the basics, but I was a bit disappointed by the troubleshooting chapter. The Mac OS may be powerful and generally easier to use than Windows, but Mac users have their share of problems as well. Though the pages on preventive measures are excellent, I would have preferred to see a more thorough explanation of some of the most common problems and their solutions. If you're looking for Macintosh troubleshooting information, pick up a copy of the 4th edition of Ted Landau's long-standing Sad Macs, Bombs, and Other Disasters (Peachpit Press, $35).
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/020169963X/tidbitselectro00A/
Compared to David Pogue's Mac OS 9: The Missing Manual, which I reviewed recently, the Mac OS 9 Bible offers roughly twice the number of pages, and presents information differently. Where Pogue takes a didactic approach aimed at teaching you how to use Mac OS 9, Poole and Stauffer are more exhaustive, digging into every nook and cranny of the Mac OS. The former is a great book for general users who want to get a handle on their Macs, but the Mac OS 9 Bible fills in all the missing details that are inevitably lost when trying to present a coherent lesson.
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06089
All in all, the Mac OS 9 Bible is excellent, even though I found it lacking in a few areas. I consider myself a power user, yet I've referred to it many times and, in most cases, found the answers to my questions (an first-class index and glossary of key terms also help find the answers inside). It's a bit pricey at $40, but when you think of the time the Mac OS 9 Bible can save you, it is definitely worth the cost. Well-written, clear, and with an excellent layout, this is one of the best and most complete books on Mac OS 9.
[Kirk McElhearn is a freelance translator and technical writer living in a village in the French Alps.]
The Gateway Amiga 2001 show in St. Louis has become inarguably the most successful Amiga show in the Western hemisphere, and this year was no exception.
The show officially began Friday afternoon, and the day was filled with classes, show registration, and the obligatory gathering of Amiga geeks. Unfortunately the Amiga.org team began arriving later in the day around 2pm, so there isn't much that we can accurately report about Friday morning. After our respective travels of anywhere between 4 and 11 hours, we weren't in much condition to do much more than greet fellow "family members" and enjoy a refreshing drink or two (or in some cases, eight).
The Keynote
The show kicked off very early Saturday morning with a keynote speech led by Bob Scharp, the show's ever-present organizer. Bob talked about the history of the show, from start to present, including a few stories about the initial resistance to the idea of holding a show at all. We're glad he was able to convince them that it was a good idea.
Next, Ryan Czerwinski of Merlancia Industries came out and discussed their plans for the future, most notably including:
- Tsunami:
A full PPC-based, Amiga-compliant desktop machine. ("Amiga-compliant" means that Tsunami will run any Amiga applications circa 1993 or later, which were written strictly to Commodore's programming specs [read this as, "applications that don't directly hit the Amiga hardware"]). Ryan had a few of the brushed-aluminum cases throughout his display, which did look fairly substantial as well as pretty.
- Hurricane:
An "ultralight" PPC-based laptop with lots of RAM and lots of expandability.
- eClipS:
A fully compliant Amiga handheld device. Not many details of this were available, and no pictures were around.
After Ryan's announcements, Nova Design's Bob Fisher took the stand. His speech, while reportedly unrehearsed, was actually rather inspiring. He detailed the history of Nova Design's involvement with the Amiga and his company's current works, and reacknowledged Nova design's commitment to the future. (There was more, but our site manager Wayne Hunt will be using the lessons learned as the basis for an editorial which should be coming very shortly.)
The show floor
On Saturday in particular the show floor was packed with Amiga fans waiting to hear the promised "big" announcements from Amiga Incorporated. In fact, considering the crowd and the lack of elbow-room, we would venture to say that the attendance was sharply up from even last year. Enthusiasm was running eerily high, as the hype for the show's announcements had been building since Amiga promised them in early February. Many attendees (and Amiga fans all over the world) we talked to considered Amiga's forthcoming announcements a make or break turning point for the company.
Fueling excitement even further were the plethora of former Commodore and Gateway Amiga employees that were present at the show, including Joe Torre (who was showing around a new optical Amiga mouse), Petro Tyschtschenko, Leo Schwab (who currently writes device drivers for BeOS), and Dave Haynie who sported a business card from Met@box as his show badge.
Said veterans were -- by all accounts -- treated like royalty, especially Dave Haynie, who hadn't been to an Amiga show in at least five years. (Haynie toured the show with an ever-present but ever-changing entourage; attendee Lee Stanford noted that Dave looked like he was "holding court").
Sadly, the weekend also marked the final official appearance of Petro Tyschtschenko as a member of the Amiga, Inc. staff. Petro responded by providing a lunch-time pizza party for all attendees, replete with beer (provided graciously -- if not coincidentally -- by Merlancia Industries). (More on Petro's retirement in a moment.)
Sunday morning, Dave Haynie played a slightly remastered version (mostly the sound had improved) of his Deathbed Vigil video. The two-hour video chronicles Commodore's last days after several bouts of layoffs and the company's bankruptcy liquidation from the perspectives of Amiga engineers who, by the end in 1994, pretty much universally loathed the highly paid and seemingly incompetent executive team at Commodore led by the company's last CEO Medhi Ali.
The banquet
The banquet hall this year was physically smaller than last year, but the food was excellent and the night's entertainment alone was well worth the money. After eating, a few members of the Amiga community got up and roasted Petro Tyschtschenko to celebrate his hand in keeping the Amiga alive since the demise of Commodore, and to wish him well in his retirement from Amiga Inc. (For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of a "roast", it's a peculiar Hollywood tradition where the person being honored is placed in the center of the stage while others give tribute by way of fond -- and sometimes embarrassing anecdotes.)
The "roasters" - that is, those giving tribute -- included Joe Torre (former Gateway Amiga engineer), Charles Meier (Amiga St. Louis), Randhir Jesrani (CompuQuick), Kermit Woodall (Nova Design), Juergen Haage (Haage & Partner) and Bohus Blahut (Legacy Maker, Inc.). Their topics included stories beyond imagination, ranging from Petro's penchant for driving at light-speed down the Autobahn to his never-empty pockets full of Amiga paraphernalia.
Two films were shown during the roast, including a wonderful retrospective and a hilarious animated short film done by Kermit Woodall of Nova Design. All we can say here is that if you weren't there, buy the videos which should be available shortly. We don't normally insert a plug for products into a show report, but this film was that memorable.
Upon each roaster's departure, gifts were presented, and Petro even reciprocated with a special gift to the person he considered to have been the best roaster of the evening, Bohus Blahut, who had the entire banquet hall rolling in laughter for almost half an hour.
Eyetech's first AmigaOne boards
After saying farewell to Petro as managing director of Amiga Inc., the speeches began with Bill McEwen introducing Alan Redhouse of Eyetech. Mr. Redhouse talked about the future of Eyetech's product line, the seriousness of their commitment to the Amiga community, and outlined the actual dates for product delivery. (Redhouse said that the boards would be released for beta testing this summer, with a final release to follow [also this summer].)
To back up his claim, he showed one of three already-fabricated AmigaOne PPC motherboards and actually let people take a look at it for themselves when the speeches were over. (Interestingly, Leo Schwab was actually first in line to take a look at it. Leo Schwab also noted that he was skeptical that EyeTech would be able to ship the AmigaOne this summer, estimating they wouldn't get it out before October or possibly even December. "Hardware is always delayed," said Schwab. "It never turns out right the first time; you send it off to be built and something's always wrong with it when you get it back.")
Amiga Inc. breaks the silence
Once the Eyetech announcements were done, Bill McEwen returned to the spotlight and went through what was possibly his most point-blank, straight-forward speech yet, outlining Amiga Inc.'s strategy, the company's goals, their focus, and how they intend to get us there. Among the highlights of Bill's initial presentation was his showing of the Amiga MMC "prototype", which Bill called something like "a damned fine wood carving," referring to the fact that the prototype was literally just that - an empty promise.
Following are highlights, by topic, from Bill McEwen's banquet announcements:
- Sharp:
Amiga Inc. is partnering with Sharp to bring AmigaDE applications to Sharp PDAs. Already released in Japan is the new Zaurus PDA, the first Linux-based PDA ever to be released, as well as the first to host the AmigaDE. The Zaurus device will be released in the U.S. soon, and more AmigaDE-enabled Sharp devices will follow.
- Psion:
AmigaDE software will run on a soon-to-be-released Psion notebook device (Psion dominates world PDA markets other than the U.S. market (the one market where Palm OS dominates).
- PocketPC:
AmigaDE also runs hosted on PocketPC devices. With a simple-to-use, separately available upgrade card, PocketPC users will be able to run AmigaDE applications. Further, although WindowsCE does not natively support Java, running AmigaDE enables Java on WindowsCE-based devices.
- AmigaDE:
Amiga will use the AmigaDE (which is based on Tao's Elate OS and intent Java platform) as a distribution platform for Amiga content. Even with the announcement of Amiga OS 4.0, developers will likely still be compelled to write applications for the AmigaDE because, while DE apps can be run on Amiga, Windows, and Linux machines (and more), programs written for the Amiga OS 4.0 will run only on Amiga OS (or an Amiga OS emulator).
- Amiga OS 4.0:
Amiga Inc. has reversed its previous position on the future of the Amiga OS. The plan had been to create a desktop implementation of the Amiga DE for the AmigaOne computer, but CTO of Amiga Inc. Fleecy Moss says that the AmigaDE is not ready as a desktop system yet. Amiga OS 4.0 will be the first version of Amiga OS to be native to the PowerPC processor, the first to implement memory protection, and will have an all-new TCP/IP stack which is due for release by the end of the year. OS 4.0 will be used for desktop systems such as the AmigaOne computer.
- The AmigaOne computer:
The AmigaOne will first surface as a PowerPC upgrade for Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000 systems , supposedly this summer. and the AmigaDE will likely be used on everything else. Eventually the AmigaOne boards will be released in ATX form factor for use in PC towers and cases. The AmigaOne will use Amiga OS 4.0.
Commodore veterans were even impressed (or at least, not depressed) with Amiga's announcements. Dave Haynie said that he found the news "fairly compelling," and that he was considering the possibility of running the AmigaDE as a secondary OS on Met@box's set-top device. (Met@box natively runs an OS developed by Met@box called CAOS, an OS Dave says was designed in the spirit of, but not to copy, the features of the Amiga OS.)
Fellow Commodore engineer Leo Schwab said that he found the announcements "very interesting," noting that he would "definitely be paying more attention" to Amiga and their doings in the future.
Related links
Greetings to one and all:
What a wonderful time it was for us in St. Louis. I must thank our hosts Bob and Diana Scharp and all of the members of the Gateway Amiga Club. They once again outperformed and kept things rolling.
I want to make very clear what the announcements were and what it means for Amiga and the rest of the Amiga Family.
Summary:
I thank you all for your support and look forward to a very exciting year before us!
Sincerely,
Bill McEwen, and the rest of the team at Amiga, Inc.
The AmigaDE and the AmigaOS are the two products offered by Amiga to allow for the realisation of the dream of Digital Living. Both can happily exist independently of each other, but together they provide an unbeatable combination of power, performance and elegance.
AmigaDE & AmigaOS
The AmigaDE is a universal content environment that can sit native on low-to-medium resource devices or sit hosted, in software, on medium to high end devices. Its purpose is to provide a consistent, interactive environment for users across many different devices and to provide a consistent development model for developers across those same devices.
The AmigaDE uses the Tao-Group's intent¨ product set to provide a clean service abstraction that allows it to sit on both hardware and software hosts. In this context, one should consider the full device itself as a set of layers with hardware at one end and, a user experience at the other. Separating them is a set of layers which take the capabilities of the hardware, abstracts and packages them and then makes them available to system and third party applications, which in turn are experienced and manipulated by the user via a content environment.
From the user's point of view, such static terms as 'desktop' and 'workstation' no longer need to define the digital experience. The AmigaDE is a digital environment in which any content can be executed subject to both its requirements and the capabilities of the host on which it is sitting. If the AmigaDE is hosted on a physical device which has a Geforce 2 graphics card, a 1 gigahertz Athlon and 256 megabytes of SDRAM, then it will be able to offer those services to any content that runs on it. If it is running on a PDA with a 100 megahertz processor, 8 megabytes of SDRAM and no hardware accelerated features, then it will only run content that is able to execute within those resource constraints.
From the developer's point of view, such dynamic brokerage requires that they either create content for a specific level, in the knowledge that it will run on anything above that level, or they can take special advantage of the tailoring system, allowing the AmigaDE to dynamically modify the performance and presentation of content to the device profile. They can thus choose to target smaller markets as a subset or go for the broader market for increased sales.
If one considers the device as a whole, then the AmigaDE starts at the user end and grows down towards the hardware end. Since every device has its own particular physical nuances, the AmigaDE uses its clean service abstraction wherever possible to take advantage of other operating systems that have already done all the hard work of abstracting the hardware. This allows the AmigaDE to spread rapidly to the maximum number of devices with the minimum amount of effort whilst offering the device builder (and through them the user) the choice of how they want to present and experience the AmigaDE.
Some users can chose to run it co-operatively on top of an existing and well understood Operating System, such as Windows or Linux, whilst others can use it on its own, choosing a software host that best suits their needs to sit underneath it, perhaps a small realtime operating system. In this master mode, the software host remains hidden beneath it, and the user chooses only to interact with and work within the AmigaDE environment. The emphasis in this approach is on the word 'choice', something that no other operating system provides in such a complete way as the AmigaDE.
Amiga is hard at work on the next version of the Software Development Kit (SDK) which allows developers a glimpse of more capabilities of the AmigaDE and introduces the multimedia services for the first time. This will ensure an abundance of content when the AmigaDE makes its first appearances in the consumer market.
The AmigaOS, Amiga's other new product is intended to become the server core for Digital Living. This will be built up from the existing base provided by AmigaOS 3.9, the latest version of the venerable but neglected AmigaOS that started its life in 1984.
The current AmigaOS, version 3.9 runs on the old AA hardware which, while advanced for its time, is now showing its age. After much discussion with the existing Amiga community, Amiga released the zico specification. Zico is an open description of hardware that Amiga encourages IHVs to use, and which provides a requirement for the first version of AmigaOS4, OS4.0 to run on. This provides such features as a PPC processor, PCI, AGP, USB, Firewire and other features standard in other computers but are new to the AmigaOS.
PPC was chosen both because it continues the relationship of Amiga with the Motorola processor family, and because with the Book E specifications, the PPC family now offers a very easy migration path from 32 bit to 64 bit processors.
All of these hardware facilities are required to provide a first step towards the physical requirements that the new AmigaOS will have in its role of a next generation digital server. A clean implementation, with no performance losses due to being tied to the older AA systems, means full access to what the user pays for and a far better performance all around.
Amiga is also aware that during the past five years, third party companies contributed to the extension of the Amiga AA platform by providing PPC accelerator cards in ingenious implementations to increase processor power past the discontinued 68k series. In considering the design of OS4, much thought was given as to whether it should also run on those cards. While Amiga had a great willingness to reward the owners of those cards for the loyalty they have shown to the Amiga, it was also painfully aware that many of the implementations were done in such a way that, while adding performance to the AA Amigas, the details of the implementations would be antagonistic to the performance of a new version of the OS, slowing it down and, in some cases, crippling it.
Given that AmigaOS4 is the first step on the road to a product in which performance will be of paramount importance, it was decided that there would have to be a clean break. This was done with the zico specification and, because of the clean nature of that specification, the first zico compliant device, the Eyetech AmigaOne - the first, new Amiga certified hardware in over five years - has been designed in record time and will soon be available for shipping.
However, Amiga is still mindful of the thousands of loyal users and developers who have invested significantly in the PPC accelerators. Amiga is looking to offer an opportunity for third parties to create a software compatibility layer that can map the clean OS4 to these PPC accelerators.
AmigaOS4 itself will move the existing 68K-based OS3.9 to a PPC implementation. By order of impact upon user experience, each library and module is being examined and re-implemented in such a way as to take maximum advantage of the new zico standard motherboards and their sub system cards. This is a gradual process and will be spread out over a few releases of the operating system. Consequently, the first release (OS4.0) will contain a mixture of native PPC and 68K code which will run through a high speed PPC 68K emulator. As further releases come out, the proportion of PPC code to 68K code will increase until the OS no longer needs to run any emulated code within itself.
In addition AmigaOS4 will also open up the capabilities of the zico standard, providing USB, Firewire and full access to the PCI and AGP world of plug in system cards. Amiga users will be able to take full advantage of the very latest in graphics,audio and networking technologies.
Most importantly, AmigaOS4 will see the first introduction of the AmigaDE for existing Amigans, with it running co-operatively on top of the Operating System, and then slowly being integrated until, with the release of AmigaOS5, both will effectively merge to become one.
AmigaOS4 will not only be able to run existing AmigaOS applications (this requires an Eyetech AmigaOne with a AA system attached to it to provide the AA chipset), but also new AmigaOS4 applications. In addition, the presence of the AmigaDE means that AmigaOS users will also have access to the growing volume of AmigaDE applications, able to take full advantage of its host (one of the advantages of Amiga owning its own host) and as a side benefit, they also have access to the large volume of Java applications, since the AmigaDE also provides a high efficiency Java solution.
In one go, Amigans, both users and developers will go from a small, isolated platform to one that reaches across the AmigaOS, AmigaDE and Java worlds, providing an abundance of content and a huge increase in market potential for developers. They can either develop for the AmigaDE, in which case they have a large market opportunity that spreads far beyond the number of AmigaOS users or they can concentrate on the AmigaOS and take maximum advantage of the advanced features of both the new hardware and the new OS. Again, the emphasis is on choice.
The ultimate purpose of the AmigaOS product is to reach AmigaOS5, where all the services required by the digital core product set will be finally implemented. This includes brand new and, in some cases, revolutionary new services that will put the AmigaOS firmly out in front once again. These are being developed internally by Amiga in parallel with the AmigaOS4 product set and will be available later in 2002. More details will be released as the work progresses.
For those requiring a small taster, there follows a preliminary feature list and version schedule. All things are subject to change. The first release of AmigaOS4 is targeted for Summer (in the Northern Hemisphere), with further releases every six months.
AmigaOS 4
AmigaOS4 represents Amiga taking control of
the AmigaOS and reinvigorating it as it
drives it forwards as an integral part of the
Amiga Digital Environment.
The purpose of the AmigaOS4 family of
releases is to;
1. move the 68K OS3.9 to a native PPC OS,
enhancing and where necessary
reimplementing the OS to take advantage
of the PPC CPU
2. add new functionality to improve the
functionality and performance of AmigaOS
3. allow for full backwards compatability
via the Eyetech AmigaOne (with a classic
Amiga attached) or retargetable
application compatibility via any
AmigaOne
4. move the community to new, state of the
art hardware
5. provide an attractive computing
environment to non Amigans so as to
encourage growth of the Amiga community
6. integrate the AmigaDE into the AmigaOS
7. provide a foundation for the development
of AmigaOS5
This project will be accomplished via a
staged set of releases which allow Amiga Inc
to build from the bottom up. This gives
developers the maximum increase in
performance across the releases and ensures
that the users can look forwards to regular
and better products rather than having to
wait over a long and frustrating period of
time until something is in their hands.
AmigaOS 4.0
AmigaOS4.0 is the first release of AmigaOS4.
It provides the first stage on the road to a
PPC AmigaOS designed to take full advantage
of the potential of the zico based computers
being developed.
It is designed to take the key elements of
the current AmigaOS and reimplement them as
PPC native systems, providing for the biggest
increase in performance. The remaining
elements will be left as 68k code for this
release and be executed via a PPC 68k
emulator, which will also be used for the
execution of 68k based application code. In
addition, it will add new features that have
never before been available in the AmigaOS.
The feature set for OS4.0 will include;
* ExecPPC allowing for the following
execution of PPC, 68k and mixed
(PPC+68k) executables. This will be PPC
native.
* A PPC 68k emulator - ExecPPC will be
capable of executing 68k code, but it
will be done via the native PPC 68K
emulator. At no time will a real 68k
processor be used
* Virtual Memory System - OS4.0 will for
the first time allow developers to
create new applications that can take
proper advantage of the MMU capabilities
of the PPC and make use of Virtual
Memory, particularly important with the
new games and applications being
created. This will be PPC native
* Graphics system - all PPC native
o AmiRTG - high performance
retargetable graphics system that
provides full access to hardware
acceleration features of modern
graphics cards
o Drivers - Voodoo3 and Matrox G450
o Ami2D - low level access for high
performance 2D functionality
o Ami3D - low level access for high
performance 3D functionality
o Full Mesa 3.4 implementation for 3D
development
* Audio system
o AHI integration for samples and
streaming
o CAMD integration for MIDI
* File system - PPC native
o AmiFFS2 - brand new
reimplementation of the AmiFFS
offering much higher performance
and reliability
* Connectivity - PPC native
o AmiNetStack - brand new high
performance TCP/IP stack optimized
for PPC, multiplayer gaming and
content serving
All other AmigaOS libraries will remain as
68k executables and be executed by ExecPPC
via the 68K emulator
AmigaOS 4.2
AmigaOS4.2 will build upon the foundation of
AmigaOS4. It is designed to ;
* Integrate the Amiga Digital Environment
(AmigaDE) into the AmigaOS
* make OS4 fully device retargetable,
allowing all applications to be able to
operate without the need for physically
attached older Amiga hardware
* Open up access to the new hardware
features offered by the zico hardware
specification
* Convert, reimplement and enhance more of
the AmigaOS4.0 68k code to PPC
The feature set for AmigaOS4.2 includes;
* AmigaDE integration
o AmigaDE hosted directly in the
AmigaOS
o Full access to all content
experience and development
o Personal Java
o SHEEP scripting language
* Audio System - PPC native
o Retargetable Audio system (RTA)
o AHI/CAMD drivers for EMU10K1 PCI
cards
o Multiple Audio Contexts
o Advanced MIDI support
* USB - PPC native
o USB2.0 OHCP stack
o System device drivers - mouse,
keyboard, hub
* Amiga Device retargeting - PPC native
o Amiga.devices reimplemented as
retargetable, removing the
requirement for old Amiga hardware
to be present
* Further conversion of 68k code to native
PPC - this will be done by order of
contribution to execution performance,
to give developers and users the most
improvement.
AmigaOS 4.5
AmigaOS4.5 represents the final stage in the
creation of a native PPC OS. Its tasks
include;
* All remaining 68k OS code to be
converted to PPC native
* All hardware features of the zico
specification to be made accessible to
developers
* New user environment
AmigaOS 5
AmigaOS5 represents a revolution in the
development of 'other' operating systems and
the evolution of the AmigaOS as it seeks to
provide the best way forwards for users and
developers. Its feature set includes;
* Brand new services model providing
o Virtual Memory
o Memory Protection
o Symmetric and Asymmetric modes
o Contract QoS
o 64 bit
o Fully distributed
* AmigaOS4 sandbox
* PDP sensory processing system - PDP
stands for Physical to Digital to
Physical and provides a scalable system
that provides for capture, conversion,
representation, manipulation and
presentation of sense delimited
observation and interaction
* Orthogonal Persistence - all content is
persistent, instead of having to be
saved to and loaded from storage.
* Safe and Unsafe environments - separate
memory spaces in which developers can
continue to use unsafe languages or
develop using the new SafeC language and
environment.
* Semantic Context - an environment in
which the user can layer any number of
associations, relationships and meaning
to their environment and content, and
use that semantic information to
organize and query.
3 April, 2001
As has been discussed here several times, AmigaDE has no memory protection. This and a couple of other issues are the reasons for the announcement.
Basically, here is what we are doing and why:
1. Developers are starving to death and will leave unless we find a way to help them make money fast. Dealers have the same problems. We need more oomph to take advantage of higher fps games, etc. This IS a multimedia platform community after all. My mail box tells us developers and dealers need something quickly. We can get AmigaOne and OS4.0 out by summer without losing any time developing the DE. This is with our thanks to Haage & Partner and Eyetech who have agreed to meet PRD's we set before them. We could not implement this plan so quickly without their valued help. Also we should include Hyperion who is assisting our team with a level of GL and video capability that will enhance game developers potential.
2. Users want new hardware. Amigas are starting to fail and frankly it is just too expensive to start R&D for new (modified) chips in the amounts we would probably be able to sell and just as expensive for fabbing the older chips as well. So, off the shelf, open designed, new machines based on PPC is the most inexpensive way to get the Amiga user onto a newer platform.
3. Amiga users have always been partial to PPC. Dean Brown, Dave Haynie, Mick Tinker, and Joe Torre (four of THE best and brightest Amiga minded hardware gurus I know) are all for a PPC based platform advance. Dave had the PiosOne design that he allowed us to release openly to help people see what can be done with an open hardware design based around PPC. We did not release Dave's specs the week before the announcements by accident. It was to open people's minds to what can be done by thinking outside the box. Dave Haynie doesn't know what a box is. Remember, we already run on a bog standard PC. :)
4. Our Zico base specs are an open spec based around PPC. Alan Redhouse at Eyetech has a full plan, knows when to freeze the design and ship, and has met our Product Requirements Document. Dean Brown has approved his design. Dave Haynie saw it in St Louis and thought it was cool. Joe was there also and while I didn't ask Joe specifically for his ideas, he is open enough to have said if he thought the design was bad. Haage & Partner have met our PRD's on the software side. Both have excellent reputations for actually meeting deadlines and shipping product when they say they will. While they are contracting to us, these projects are being managed by us now.
5. AmigaDE provides us with binary compatibility, distributed processing capabilities and many other things we can get no where else. This line of development will continue as previously planned. Note: There are NO changes to what you have been told we plan to do with AmigaDE.
6. We intend, as we have stated all along, to cover everything from PDA's and cell phones, set top boxes, and servers. This plan allows us to do that with ease.
7. AmigaOS will continue to be developed and will be merged into or under AmigaDE so that we eventually have our own familiar base to play on and it will be a full AMIGA base that is server capable and cell phone capable as well. But we will not drop Windows and Linux compatibility either. Think of this as adding yet another playground for AmigaDE. It is no different from deciding to also play on top of Be or any other OS out there. We will continue to find playgrounds that provide us, our developers, and dealers even more opportunities.
8. As far as splitting the community and the developers: We have over 2,000 developers currently involved with us. Another 30 added themselves today after the news from St Louis. My mailbox is so full I spent all day JUST answering new mails from developers and companies wanting to come to Amiga and play and I didn't get them all answered yet. Half of the developers are firmly in the PDA, cell phone, and set top box camp. The other half are either desktop oriented or want to do both. This gives everyone a place to utilize their talents and make money.
9. Most notable request from developers I have is "please also give us a desktop". As Bill noted in his banquet speech, he made certain promises to me based on what Team AMIGA members (6000 plus) and others in the community have said they want from whomever has the Amiga name. I took this job based on those promises. Bill keeps his promises.
10. This is a business and this is fun. We do what we do because we want to and we can. If someone tells us we can't, we do it just to show them we can. This is also a family. This was very evident over the weekend. I hugged more people in St Louis than I do at a family reunion. Bill had tears in his eyes as he talked about us losing Bob Cosby. We care. We have to make sure our friends and family can finally make money but we have to do it in ways that keep us afloat as well from a business standpoint.
11. Tao Group is a great partner and is providing Amiga with opportunities we have never been able to land before. Good business means taking advantage of this opportunity they provide and we intend to do that with their help and assistance.
12. Listen to the facts and ask questions here and in other Amiga forums where we are there to answer your questions truthfully. Don't listen to the naysayers, the hype, the conjecture, and the innuendo of people who have no clue. We will tell you the truth. Bad or good, you get the truth.
13. We have taken flak from certain people because they say we provide no value. Our value is in uniting as many people as we can into a formidable force. We can not do what we plan alone. It takes unity, solidarity, team work. All of us must work together and together we will slowly conquer the world ... just because we want to.
Sincerely,
Gary Peake Amiga Inc.
March 15 2001 - Ed begins this narrative...
Before the meeting started there was a burnt smell emanating from the club's PC. After further investigation, and a jiggle or two, it was deemed viable for the show. And as the crew filtered in George Krumins was fiddling with a projector so that the web show could be seen by everyone - big and bright. And Harold Ravlin was fiddling with his new Titanium Powerbook. It seems that it was being real difficult starting up. Rich Rollins was helping him find the - Internet connect software - the Titanium was spending precious time checking for a web connection when there was none.
Everything kicked in and the picture was BIG and BRIGHT! Almost IMAX if you used your imagination - a lot!
Then came the rub, the access to the web had been cut off because a vital piece of equipment needed to be rebooted and the door was locked.
President Jim Lewis gave the traditional intros of the officers and guests from the past versions of the club.
Kevin Hisel kicked of the Question and Answer Session by lobbing a grenade about the new Microsoft Windows XP registration procedure - install on it on your PC and use it for 30 days. Within that 30 days you have to call or via the web and you get a registration for you installation. The rub is that it is for that machine only. It recognizes a match number for your machine, a coded description of your machine. If your change your processor or your motherboard... your screwed.
Several views were expressed but the main one was that this really puts a crap on the hot rod computer builders. The free-booters, hobbyists and customizers are the victims. The "fascist" nature of the architects of this new twist was vented. The serial numbers on processors are key to this system.
Kevin brought up the fact that Microsoft looses Billions to piracy and that they do have a beef. Any software author wants to be paid for his work. But aggravating the average user. A long discussion passed around on the pros's and con's of the situation. Several thought that not too much would change. Some even thought that this was pretty much a non-issue. Kevin Hopkins thinks that Gates is a fanatic fascist anal retentive.
Kevin is here and taking notes so I will shut down now.
[At this point, Kevin Hopkins takes up the storyline .... Ed you really didn't think I'd take out that Gates stuff did you :-) OK, I actually came in during the intros. There were 19 people attending. Here's my take...]
Kevin Hisel talked about Windows XP and its oppressive registration policies. It was discussed and the members pretty much concluded that such methods dictate cracking as a response. Granted such Draconian merchandising is aimed at the Mom and Pop user. Those in the know will "defeat" it in a heartbeat.
The next topic of discussion was that Advancenet (a local ISP and home to CUCUG's web site) has been bought by eGIX. Nothing is changing. The old management has been retained for day to day operations.
Harold Ravlin brought in his brand new G4 Titanium Powerbook. Everyone was very impressed.
Someone said something about Apple purchasing a child software company.
Sears and Apple are parting ways again. Apple is opening stores similar to Gateway's Country Stores. Wonder why Sears would be upset.
Mike Latinovich said he is looking for a cheap SCSI card that works with Windows 98 or 2000.
Apple had to buy back thousands of Cubes from CompUSA because they couldn't get rid of them.
Mike Latinovich then told a RAM story concerning a copyright war. I didn't really catch it, so I asked Mike later to fill me in. He said ...
"The lawsuit is Infineon (formerly Siemens) suing Rambus over some allegedly proprietary IP that they (Rambus) claim to have developed, etc. Problem is, there's a consortium that all these RAM makers have, and meet at, to discuss RAM and RAM standards and new issues and such. Infineon (along with a couple other companies) are claiming that Rambus hadn't mentioned that they were pursuing a patent upon the types of memory that had been discussed and agreed upon at one of this consortium meetings, which turns out to be (ta da) SDRAM and DDR-SDRAM, of which now, Rambus claims to own the patents to, and is attempted to extort (my view) the rest of the industry into compliance with their patent ownership.
Basically, it boils down to: all these other companies had put together and agreed upon SDRAM & DDR-SDRAM as being the 'next standards' many years ago. Rambus was at the meeting for this agreement, and had not mentioned that they were filing for patents upon that specific type of memory, and in failing to do so, they weren't being entirely truthful or fair to the rest of the industry by not disclosing such.
I'm sure I don't really have the complete story, or anything close to it... However, there has been some excellent coverage from the following sites (which, if you pursue more & accurate information, you'll have to do some quick searches on them - keywords: rambus, infineon, jedec):"
http://www.zdnews.com/
http://www.news.com/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/
[Thanks, Mike.]
Kevin Hisel told everyone about the new Netgear RT314 router he purchased for his home LAN. He said it was a piece of cake to configure. Using a web browser interface, it took about ten minutes to set up. It works with @Home. His computer is noticeably faster, since it's no longer running proxy software. It uses one IP address. It uses NAT. Kevin said he got it for $107 from Amazon.com after the $30 rebate. They are available at Best Buy, too. Having investigated the subject, Kevin said stay away from the LinkSYS. He's heard they're trouble.
Richard Rollins said he is running Zone Alarm on his PC. He said it is freeware, and very capable.
Greg Kline said he had a reader ask advice about where to recycle her old computer, as she didn't want to see it just go into the landfill. Aussie Computers on north Lincoln, right across from UPS, was recommended. Laughingly, several people said Quentin Barnes would be right their to turn it into one of his server/routers. Others said you could just save time and give it to Quentin straight away.
Mike Latinovich asked about Slot A Athlon motherboards. He said he thought the original K7 boards were of this type. [This one went passed me like a shot, too, so once again, I asked Mike to clarify the topic.]
"A friend of mine happened to (accidentally) buy a Slot-A Athlon motherboard some time ago, and since 'Slot Anything' boards are pretty much obsolete, we were trying to figure out what route we really needed to take with it - whether it would be possible to even *find* a CPU for the beast, and if so, would it be the original Athlon Slot-A, or a Slot-A variant of the Athlon Thunderbird CPU (read: newer (socket) Athlon in slot packaging).
Unfortunately, no-one really had a clue. :)
Fortunately, we (the friend and I) were able to dig out some info, and we were able to piece together quite a spiffy machine in the end. :) The board now houses an Athlon 950, Soundblaster Live (audio), GeForce2 (video), 256MB RAM (cheap!), 46G/7200rpm ATA100 hard drive (also pretty cheap), an Ethernet card, and the rest of whatever goodies needed to make it work. Sweet machine. Now for sale. cheap. :) "
Jim Lewis also gave his slant on the topic:
"Mike was talking about a mainboard that is no longer in production. The Slot-A boards were the equivalent of the Slot-1 mainboards for the P-II (& some P-III) class processors, since obsoleted by a socketed design.
The processor-on-a-card (thereby requiring a slot, rather than a socket) was necessary because the manufacturing process hadn't shrunk enough to squeeze the L2 cache onto the chip die yet. With the advent of .18 micron and smaller resolutions, the L2 could go on-die, thus eliminating the need for the circuit board. This also has resulted in lower prices, since a component has been eliminated from the mix."
[Thanks, Mike and Jim, for the information.]
Harold Ravlin asked if anyone knew where to get a dual processor Linux box. Jim Lewis's ears perked up and said that through his business he could provide such a unit.
Dave Witt let everyone know that he'd just purchased eight 50 disk blank CD-R spindles at Walmart for $10 each. He was informed that several area Walmarts were carrying the same deal. He purchased his disks in Charleston, but later, when Kevin Hopkins explored the Champaign Walmart for the 198 spindles they were supposed to have, no one there knew anything about it.
Before we went to break, Kevin Hopkins wanted to publicly thank Jim Huls for recommending the Lazers Edge to fix his Hewlett Packard inkjet printer. The printer had just stopped working. It wouldn't even perform it's own self test. Steve Schwall, at the Lazers Edge, has a very reasonable $15 bench charge to look at a printer, which applies to the repair if he does the work. It turned out that the problem was simply a defective color ink cartridge. So, for $32, Kevin got his printer back which had been on the short track to the city dump, a much more satisfactory outcome. Thanks, Jim.
With the failure of our Internet connection, the fate of the meeting was pretty much sealed at this point.
March 20, 2001 - The March meeting of the CUCUG executive board took place on Tuesday, March 20, 2001, at 7PM, at Kevin Hisel's house. (For anyone wishing to attend - which is encouraged, by the way - the address and phone number are both in the book). Present at the meeting were: Jim Lewis, Emill Cobb, Charles Melby-Thomas, Jack Melby, Jim Huls, Kevin Hopkins, Kevin Hisel, and Dave Witt.
Jim Lewis: Jim commented on the meeting. He said the Internet connection failed because ITC's Linux box needed to be rebooted. But, since it was locked up, we were at a loss to correct the situation. He said he was sorry the meeting fizzled. He also noted the funny smell that had come from the club's PC, but he said it appeared to still be functioning.
Dave Witt: Dave relayed a suggestion from Mike Latinovich that we should check into getting a key to the computer closet.
Emil Cobb: Emil reported that 19 members attended the March meeting.
Emil then noted the controversy over Windows XP. He believes the market will rebel. He said, "Hackers will take care of it."
Jim Huls: Jim said the meeting was a disappointment; it turned into a Social.
He commented that the Windows XP rebellion would help drive further acceptance of Linux. It might even help the Macintosh. Other Board members disagreed, but it is certain to stir things up.
Jack Melby: OS X will be released on Saturday. It will come as a three disk release: OS X disk, OS 9.1 disk, and the Developer Tools disk. The announced cost is $129, but it'll probably be readily available for $99.
There was a discussion about what a fair price would be for an old Bondi blue iMac someone was thinking about buying.
Kevin Hopkins: Kevin delivered the updated version of the club membership database.
Kevin said the first half of last meeting was very good: the Question and Answer Session was very animated. The second half of the meeting tanked. The loss of the Internet connection completely scuttled the planned program for the evening.
Kevin exchanged information with Treasurer Rich Hall on some of our newly joined members.
Kevin passed the Technical Information manual on the club's Macintosh to Kevin Hisel in preparation of advertising it for sale.
Kevin Hisel: Kevin reported that we had a flood of membership applications on the web site from Anonymizer. We were just one stop on the prankster's hit list. Those seeming to make application were employees of Software Metrix in Canada. They were the intended target. Kevin related his efforts in assisting the company in tracking down the perpetrator.
On a personal note, Kevin said he is going to get a new PC. He's looking at a 1 GHz Pentium III with 256 MB of RAM. Kevin has a rule that he doesn't get a new computer until the replacement is at least twice as fast as the machine he has. He also shies away from the bleeding edge of technology to avoid having to deal with the bugs and hiccups associated with brand new anything. He's now in his comfort zone to make the next jump, so he should have a new toy soon.
Jack Melby: Jack spoke about the trouble he has (and many others have) been having with @Home's email system lately. He said he'd just received a month's worth of email all in one batch.
Jack then told us about at little Applescript he'd written that can be found on the MacFixIt web site (http://www.macfixit.com/) and his own web site (http://www.johnmelby.com/). Here's how he explained it:
"Most Mac users running Mac OS 9.0.4 or 9.1 are very enthusiastic about Apple's new iTunes and Disc Burner applications. However, since Disc Burner cannot as yet burn bootable CDs and iTunes cannot burn CDs in DAO (disk-at-once) mode, it is still necessary to keep Roxio's Toast CD-burning software for these purposes--and in most cases it is impossible to keep all of the files necessary to run all of these applications active at the same time. It is very annoying to switch back and forth between sets of extensions using Extensions Manager or Conflict Catcher and then rebooting just to change CD-burning applications.
I have written an AppleScript application for this purpose that makes rebooting unnecessary, though it is still required that the CD burner be turned off and then back on. It's called USB CD Burner Toggle 1.0, and it can be downloaded at...
http://www.johnmelby.com/USB_CDBurner_Toggle-10.sit.hqx
Jim Lewis: As for programs for up coming meetings, Jim suggested we try "Your favorite web sites" again in April and we all agreed. George Krumins will be doing a demo on Playstations in May and Jim Huls will do a presentation on Windows 2000 in June. Jim will be comparing and contrasting the differences between Windows 2000 and Win 9x. For the Macintosh, Jack Melby said that now that OS X will be out officially, he could do an updated presentation on where the Mac's operating system now stands.
Jack Melby: Jack sparked a discussion on drives when he made a comment about Iomega password protecting a blank disk for his 2 GB Jaz drive. He said that the Imation and Sony LS 120 drive used to be great storage alternatives, as they could also read and write high density floppies.
Meetings are held the third Thursday of each month at 7:00 p.m. at the Illinois Technology Center. The Center is located at 7101 Tomaras Ave in Savoy. To get to the Illinois Technology Center from Champaign or Urbana, take Neil Street (Rt 45) south. Setting the trip meter in your car to zero at the McDonalds on the corner of Kirby/Florida and Neil in Champaign, you only go 2.4 miles south. Windsor will be at the one mile mark. Curtis will be at the two mile mark. Go past the Paradise Inn/Best Western motel to the next street, Tomaras Ave. on the west (right) side. Tomaras is at the 2.4 mile mark. Turn west (right) on Tomaras Ave. The parking lot entrance is immediately on the south (left) side of Tomaras Ave. Enter the building by the front door under the three flags facing Rt 45. A map can be found on the CUCUG website at http://www.cucug.org/meeting.html . The Illinois Technology Center is also on the web at www.IL-Tech-Ctr.com .
Membership dues for individuals are $20 annually; prorated to $10 at mid year.
Our monthly newsletter, the Status Register, is delivered by email. All recent editions are available on our WWW site. To initiate a user group exchange, just send us your newsletter or contact our editor via email. As a matter of CUCUG policy, an exchange partner will be dropped after three months of no contact.
For further information, please attend the next meeting as our guest, or contact one of our officers (all at area code 217):
President/WinSIG: Jim Lewis 359-1342 jlewis@computers4life.com Vice-President: Emil Cobb 398-0149 e-cobb@uiuc.edu Secretary/Editor: Kevin Hopkins 356-5026 kh2@uiuc.edu Treasurer: Richard Hall 344-8687 rjhall1@uiuc.edu Corporate Agent: Jim Lewis 359-1342 jlewis@computers4life.com Board Advisor: Richard Rollins 469-2616 Webmaster: Kevin Hisel 406-948-1999 khisel @ kevinhisel.com Mac SIG Co-Chair: John Melby 352-3638 jbmelby@home.com Mac SIG Co-Chair: Charles Melby-Thompson 352-3638 charlesmt@home.com
Surf our web site at http://www.cucug.org/