The Champaign-Urbana Computer Users Group

The Status Register - May, 2002


This newsletter will never appear on CUCUG.ORG before the monthly CUCUG meeting it is intended to announce. This is in deference to actual CUCUG members. They get each edition hot off the presses. If you'd like to join our group, you can get the pertinent facts by looking in the "Information About CUCUG" page. If you'd care to look at prior editions of the newsletter, they may be found via the Status Register Newsletter page.
News     Common     PC     Linux     Mac     Amiga     CUCUG

May 2002


To move quickly to an article of your choice, use the search feature of your reader or the hypertext directory above. Enjoy.

May News:

The May Meeting

The next CUCUG meeting will be held on our regular third Thursday of the month: Thursday, May 16th, at 7:00 pm, at the Illinois Technology Center. Directions to the ITC are at the end of this newsletter.

The May 16 gathering will be one of our joint SIG meetings. Richard Rollins will be orchestrating a literal joining of all the elements of CUCUG. He will be networking a PC, a Mac and a Linux box together. If you've ever contemplated a home network, this meeting is for you.

ToC

Welcome New and Renewing Members

We'd like to welcome the newest members of our group, joining us in the last month: Cathy Faulstich (Mac 680xx) and David Darner (Classic Amiga, Windows PC Desktop, Windows PC Laptop, CD-ROM Burner, Digital Video Camera).

We'd also like to welcome back renewing member Lucy Seaman. Lucy took a few years hiatus, but we're very glad to see she's returned once more. Our door is always open.

We welcome any kind of input or feedback from members. Run across an interesting item or tidbit on the net? Just send the link to the editor. 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.

ToC

CUCUG Merchandise Now Available

You may now purchase CUCUG-brand merchandise at this URL:

http://www.cafepress.com/cucug

CUCUG T-shirts, caps, mugs and a tote bag are available.

Here's your chance to support the club (we make 2-3 bucks off each item) and show the world your true geekiness. Sales are made through CafePress which is a widely known custom logo promotional materials company and their site features secure shopping.

Buy your CUCUG merchandise now so you can show it off at May's meeting on the 16th!

ToC

Mac OS X 10.1.4 Released

TidBITS#627/22-Apr-02

Apple has released Mac OS X 10.1.4, a 2.2 MB update available via Mac OS X's Software Update. The new software adds support for Fast 10 SCSI drives and disc recorders from SmartDisk, EZQuest, and LaCie. On the networking front, a potential delay has been removed when using dial-up PPP connections, performance of Sherlock file searching on local and remote volumes has been improved, and networks with 3Com routers can browse Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) services. Finally, network security has improved: BSD-based TCP/IP connections check and block broadcast or multicast IP destination addresses, thus avoiding a potentially serious security hole. An AppleCare Knowledge Base document published shortly after the update's release goes into a little more detail than the description of the update in Software Update. [JLC]

http://www.apple.com/macosx/
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=35022
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106859

Photoshop 7 Arrives at Last

TidBITS#627/22-Apr-02

Adobe announced that Photoshop 7 is now shipping for both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. Like a top- billed band arriving late to their gig, Photoshop 7 is perhaps the most anticipated Mac OS X software upgrade. Fortunately, it offers more than just Mac OS X compatibility: a new Healing Brush tool makes repairing damaged photographs vastly easier than previous versions; a File Browser provides a method of tracking and navigating images; new painting tools provide better brush and pen strokes; and there's even a spelling checker to help locate the typos that invariably show up during projects (like spelling the band's name wrong on the tour t-shirts). Photoshop 7 costs $600, or $150 if you're upgrading from a previous version. The program requires Mac OS 9.1, 9.2.1, or Mac OS X 10.1, 128 MB of RAM, and at least 120 MB of hard disk space; of course, with Photoshop you're advised to max out all of the preceding minimum requirements to the best of your budget and ability. [JLC]

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/

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Apple Posts $40 Million Q2 Profit

TidBITS#627/22-Apr-02

No doubt about it: iMacs rake in the dough. Apple announced a $40 million profit for its second fiscal quarter of 2002, coming in slightly higher than analysts's expectations following component shortages which impeded the roll-out of the new flat-screen iMac. Apple had $1.5 billion in revenue on gross margins of 27 percent; international sales accounted for 45 percent of the company's revenue.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2002/apr/17earnings.html
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06682

Apple shipped 220,000 iMacs during its second quarter, contributing to a total of 813,000 Macs shipped, up 8 percent from the same quarter a year ago. Apple didn't call out sales of portable systems or the iPod, but did note it has $4.3 billion in cash on hand and plans to open an additional 20 Apple retail stores by the end of the calendar year. [GD]

ToC

Critical Microsoft Security Patches Released

by Mark H. Anbinder (mha@tidbits.com)
TidBITS#627/22-Apr-02

Microsoft has released security patches to address two security vulnerabilities affecting Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, and Office applications for both the "Classic" Mac OS (Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9) and Mac OS X. Microsoft is urging all users of these programs to download and apply the patches at once.

http://www.microsoft.com/security/security_bulletins/ms02019_mac.asp

Vulnerable software includes:

The first security vulnerability could make it possible for malicious HTML code in a Web page, HTML email message, or Office document to exploit a buffer overflow; theoretically, an attacker could exploit this buffer overflow to perform such tasks on your computer as deleting or changing files, or installing and running software without your permission. (Under Mac OS X, the attacker would have the same privileges as the current user, which could limit the vulnerability.) In the case of Office documents (Word files, Excel spreadsheets, or PowerPoint presentations), the user would have to open the malicious document to be exposed; both Microsoft and common sense both say you should never open files from unknown sources.

The second vulnerability affects only Internet Explorer 5.1 under Mac OS 8 or Mac OS 9. It could make it possible for an attacker to run an existing AppleScript script on your computer, but only if the script's name and complete path were known. (The attacker cannot install a script; it must already be available.) The most common "well-known" scripts are those in the Speakable Items folder; they perform tasks like quitting applications, restarting the computer, emptying the Trash, and more.

The patches for Microsoft Office 2001 (263 K), Office X (1.8 MB), and Outlook Express (new version 5.0.4; 8.6 MB), and patches for Mac OS 8 and OS 9 users of Internet Explorer (new version 5.1.4; 5.4 MB), are available for download from Microsoft's Macintosh download site. Mac OS X users should apply the patch to Internet Explorer for Mac OS X via the Software Update feature of Mac OS X, available via System Preferences. Mac OS X users must still manually download and apply the patches for Office or other applications.

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/DOWNLOAD/OFFICE2001/URLSecurity.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/DOWNLOAD/OFFICEX/CombUpd1003.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/DOWNLOAD/OE/oe504.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/DOWNLOAD/IE/ie51.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/download/

Microsoft says versions of Internet Explorer prior to 5.1, of Outlook Express prior to 5.0.1, and of Office prior to Office 98 are no longer supported, have _not_ been tested, and may or may not be subject to these vulnerabilities.

The current security patches, when applied, also patch all previously noted vulnerabilities in these versions of the Microsoft applications.

Microsoft is offering free user support by phone to U.S. and Canadian callers at 866/727-2338. International users should contact their local subsidiary for information about obtaining free support for downloading and installing these patches.

http://www.microsoft.com/worldwide/

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Apple Rolls Out Education eMac and Faster PowerBooks

by Geoff Duncan (geoff@tidbits.com)
TidBITS#628/29-Apr-02

A scant four months after announcing the death of the CRT in favor of flat-panel LCD displays, Apple today introduced the eMac, an all-in-one G4-based Macintosh strictly for the education market - and to keep costs down, the eMac is built around a 17-inch CRT display supporting resolutions up to 1,280 by 960 pixels.

http://www.apple.com/education/emac/

On the outside, the all-white eMac looks much like the original iMac, and its roughly similar footprint means it will fit on existing furniture, despite having a larger screen. Under the hood, the eMac offers a 700 MHz PowerPC G4 processor, 128 MB of RAM, a 40 GB hard disk, an Nvidia GeForce2 MX graphics processor with 32 MB of video memory, 10/100Base-T Ethernet, three USB ports (plus two more on the keyboard), two FireWire ports, a headphone jack and a built-in microphone along with an audio input jack, optional AirPort support, and a mini-VGA port for video mirroring. Two configurations are available: the $1,000 eMac offers a 32x CD-ROM drive (for schools preferring non-recordable Macs in labs and classrooms), and a $1,200 edition includes a DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo drive and a 56 Kbps modem. Apple also offers a nifty tilt and swivel stand for the eMac.

The eMac will be available in May to the U.S. and Canadian education market, which wanted a display larger than 1,024 by 768 pixels and has been underwhelmed by the price tag of Apple's new flat-screen iMac. The eMac fits that bill, and its introduction is well-timed: right now, schools are planning budgets and purchases for the next academic year. In the past, Apple has often missed the boat with product announcements or price drops in July or August. The eMac seems like a good idea: it may not greatly bolster Apple's bottom line, but it could help increase Apple's share of the education market.

TiBooks to 800 MHz

Apple has also revised the high-end Titanium PowerBook G4 line. The most visible change is the screen: it still measures 15.2 inches but now offers a resolution of 1,280 by 854 pixels, up from the 1,152 by 768 pixels of its predecessors - a 25 percent pixel increase. An ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 processor with 32 MB video memory drives the display.

The new machines sport processors up to 800 MHz with 1 MB of L3 processor cache, Gigabit Ethernet, and a DVI video connector for connecting to digital displays. (A DVI to VGA adapter is included; Apple also introduced a $150 DVI to ADC adapter to connect Apple's own digital displays.) The new PowerBooks are available immediately starting at $2,500, with processor speeds of 667 MHz and 800 MHz, 256 to 512 MB RAM, a slot-loading DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, 30 to 60 GB hard disks, and optional AirPort support. Pricing is higher than the previous low-end of the Titanium line, but cheaper than the previous 667 MHz model.

http://www.apple.com/powerbook/

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Intel to unveil speedy new P4s, chipset

Mon May 6, 7:43 PM ET
By John G. Spooner, ZDNet News

The chipmaker will announce three new Pentium 4 chips for desktop PCs, along with a new version of its 850 chipset. The new chipset offers a faster 533MHz bus and supports a speedier version of Rambus memory, 1066MHz RDRAM, sources said.

Intel's new flagship Pentium 4 will be a 2.53GHz chip. The other new Pentium 4's will run at 2.26GHz and 2.4GHz. All work with the faster bus.

The added clock speed, faster bus and new RDRAM could translate into an overall performance boost of roughly 10 percent to 15 percent over current high-end desktop PCs, some sources have said. The bus provides a data pathway between the processor and memory. Maintaining a proper ratio between the bus speed and the clock speed of the processor is an important element for preserving performance as processors get quicker.

Boosting the bus will make room for faster Pentium 4's. But it also helps Intel up the ante in its desktop performance race with rival Advanced Micro Devices. AMD and Intel have been trading blows on the desktop since the introduction of the Athlon in late 1999. The latest move may give Intel the upper hand for a while.

However, AMD has several tricks up its sleeve, including Thoroughbred, a new processor that will bring higher clock speeds later in the year. In early 2003, PC makers will also begin shipping systems based on ClawHammer, a new chip that AMD says will begin at 2GHz speeds.

Currently, AMD's fastest desktop chip is the 1.73GHz Athlon XP 2100+. Despite the difference in clock speed, the Athlon chip offers competitive performance to the 2.4GHz Pentium 4, reviewers have said.

While Intel may pull away with the 2.53GHz and its associated performance enhancements, AMD won't be far behind with its forthcoming 1.8GHz Athlon XP, the model number of which has yet to be announced.

Intel introduced the 2.4GHz Pentium 4 in April, but the transition to a faster bus is somewhat forward-looking. Intel has said, for example, that the Pentium 4 will reach 3GHz in the fourth quarter.

Meanwhile, raising the bus speed helps Intel make room for new Celeron chips based on Netburst, the processor architecture debuted with the Pentium 4. Forthcoming Celerons can jump from their current 133MHz bus to the 400MHz bus used by the current Pentium 4 platform, sources have said, and sport much higher clock speeds than current Celerons.

With the 2.53GHz Pentium 4 announcement Monday, a cadre of PC makers will also announce new high-end desktops.

Compaq (news - web sites) Computer, Dell Computer, Gateway and others are expected to offer the new Pentium 4's in their performance PC lines.

New high-end machines, fitted with the 2.53GHz chip, the 533MHz bus, large allotments of 1066MHz RDRAM and 80GB or so hard drives are expected to start around $2,200 to $2,300. The machines will be available for order Monday.

Intel declined to comment on unannounced products.

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Common Ground:

Was Bill Gates Lying?

by Matt Deatherage (mattd@macjournals.com)
TidBITS#628/29-Apr-02

[A quick refresher in the Microsoft antitrust case. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson found that Microsoft was indeed a monopoly and ordered the company broken up. Microsoft appealed, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the breakup order, and, after the Bush administration took over, the Justice Department dropped its efforts to break up Microsoft. Of the states involved in the case, nine plus the District of Columbia broke ranks with the Justice Department in the remedy phase and are seeking harsher terms than those proposed by the Justice Department and the nine remaining states. -Adam]

http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbser=1152
http://news.com.com/2104-1001-891286.html

Bill Gates took the stand last week in the Microsoft antitrust remedy hearings, and from most accounts, acquitted himself well, far better than in his previous videotaped depositions. Joe Wilcox of CNet News said Gates "redeemed himself as a witness." The Washington Post described Gates's depositions in the earlier trial as "embarrassing" but said this time, "a well-prepared Gates provided a human face and a modicum of deference," and that he was a "controlled, polite, and more mature chairman" who "displayed encyclopaedic knowledge" of the proposed remedy. Other reports described Gates as calm, thorough, and professional. (If you haven't yet seen full reports of Gates's testimony, read the links below.)

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-888889.html
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-892447.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31247-2002Apr22.html

Despite these positive reports, the technical community immediately insisted he was lying when he said that Microsoft could not remove components of Windows such as Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. In the Eastside Journal of the Seattle area where Microsoft is based, writer Cydney Gillis reported on people skeptical of Gates's claim, including Dave Winer. At UserLand, Winer ran a survey on the topic, and out of 413 votes expressing an opinion, only 1 percent say Gates was telling the whole truth. 64 percent say he's lying and 30 percent say he's misleading by saying code couldn't be removed from the _current_ Windows without breaking it.

http://www.eastsidejournal.com/sited/story/html/89976
http://www.userland.com/surveys/results/dave@userland.com/isGatesLying

The reporters present in the courtroom say Gates did well, and hundreds of people who weren't there think he's lying. Some of that's gratuitous Microsoft bashing, no doubt, but most complaints are technical. People do not understand how something that was a separate program now can't be separate again. Since the court will decide the question, it's worth exploring.

Background Concepts

Let's try to take the issue in Mac OS 9 terms for clarity. Many key components of Mac OS 9 are implemented as extensions - AppleScript, QuickTime, Disc Burner, and even USB and FireWire support. Reboot without these extensions, and you get a version of Mac OS 9 without their capabilities. Any program that requires one of these components, however, will not run without them - QuickTime Player won't run without QuickTime, DragThing won't run without AppleScript, and no Carbon application runs unless CarbonLib is present.

Yet these programs do not crash, they simply don't function as you expect. That's because Apple has, for about fifty years, warned developers to make sure a component is available _before_ calling it. Programs that call components that aren't installed crash hard. Checking before calling a component is roughly equivalent to making sure your car has come to a complete stop before getting out.

Back to Windows. The states that don't want to settle with Microsoft say that since programs like Internet Explorer, MovieMaker, Windows Media Player, and MSN Messenger were previously stand-alone programs, they can stand alone again. Any integration into the operating system should be like an extension, so programmers can use them only if present, and so other companies can replace them with their own versions. Microsoft says that's technically impossible.

Obviously it is possible, since Windows programs have had to work with or without those components in the past. Now however, many programs, including some in Windows, do not work properly in the absence of those components because their presence is assumed. If a necessary component were to be removed today, those programs would break, just like Gates says. That's not what the states have in mind, but that's the way he's spinning it.

http://www.politechbot.com/docs/gates.testimony.042202.pdf

Gates's testimony says that to meet the states' requirement that Microsoft remove components from Windows while maintaining the capabilities of Windows APIs, the company would have to leave the binary code for all those components in Windows after all. If you take out Internet Explorer and its HTML rendering engine, Windows stops displaying all HTML, including help text. Windows doesn't duplicate Internet Explorer's HTML rendering in other code - take out Internet Explorer, and HTML goes with it.

Microsoft chose a similar approach during the trial in 1998, breaking Windows by ripping out every piece of code Internet Explorer used rather than repackaging it as a replaceable module. Microsoft feared, then as now, that proving it can modularize software would mean a court would eventually require modularized versions of Windows, in turn forcing Microsoft to give up the control over which programs stay installed in Windows. The states say Microsoft shouldn't be able to do that anyway, and Microsoft is pulling out all the stops to make sure it can.

http://davenet.userland.com/2001/08/13/excerptFromBreakingWindows

Weasel Words

So how can Microsoft say modularity is impossible under the states' proposed remedy? The weaseling is in the word "middleware," used in the remedy to identify the components that would have be modular. Microsoft and Gates say the word is so poorly defined it could refer to _any_ API - that is, any routine at all in Windows. It's as if Apple not only had to make QuickTime a separate extension, but also make every routine _within_ QuickTime a separate extension that could be removed or replaced at will.

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-891286.html

That approach would never work - programmers can test for components before using them, but not for every single API. It would lead to chaos and mass confusion, exactly the effects Gates describes. By hammering on the details and dogmatically sticking to the worst possible interpretation of the proposal, Microsoft is trying to make sure only Microsoft decides what is and is not part of Windows, the company's position since 1995. And it's truthful, too: Gates says the proposed remedy can be read this way, and if it can, Microsoft may have to implement it this way.

Actually, he's signalling the court that Microsoft will read it this way, ripping out sections of "middleware" under court order even though other parts of Windows might need the APIs they provide. Such versions would never wind up on store shelves, but if a PC maker purchases more than 10,000 Windows licenses and demands that Internet Explorer be removed, Microsoft would rip it out, breaking any program that needs HTML rendering. Such a modified Windows might not even boot.

The new remedy would also require that any "modular" versions run "without performance degradation" over the full version. Microsoft says it absolutely cannot do that. Adding checks to see if HTML rendering is present adds more instructions to a program and therefore degrades its performance. Hence Gates's assertion of impossibility: if you remove something, the resulting operating system either doesn't function right or is slower than the full version. It's an extreme reading, but it's within the language of the remedy.

Given the choice between stripping features out of Windows to the point where it might not even boot (thus undoubtedly provoking complaints and legal challenges from affected PC makers), or being accused of degrading performance by adding checks for missing components, Gates indirectly cautioned the court that Microsoft would pick the former. With the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals's past track record of supporting Microsoft in designing its products, the likelihood of a punitive injunction against the company for not obeying any remedy is small. Also, as the Washington Post reports, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly is sustaining almost every Microsoft objection, and allowing Microsoft to make presentations to the court when the states were barred from similar presentations despite numerous pleas. Don't count on the courts spanking Microsoft for hyper-literalism.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35100-2002Apr23.html

Back to the original question. Was Gates lying? No. He testified that a decree will cause some behavior in the future and that it's "impossible" to make it work the way the states want. It's legal posturing, certainly, but as Microsoft Chairman, he can make sure his testimony comes true.

The states can either admit that Microsoft will sabotage their proposal or come back to the court with one so tightly worded that Microsoft cannot read it in any way other than the way it's intended, a difficult if not impossible task. Last Tuesday's testimony confirmed this, as the states's attorney portrayed Gates as deliberately adopting the most extreme interpretations, unsuccessfully attempting to get Gates to provide more acceptable language on the stand.

In short, Gates's testimony was consistent with everything he has said and done for his company since this mess started - promising the world that any restriction on Windows that Microsoft didn't like would result in a version of Windows the world wouldn't like. It's not an empty threat.

[Matt Deatherage is the publisher of MacJournals.com, where he oversees MDJ and MWJ - daily and weekly subscription-based, ad- free journals for serious Macintosh users. For a free trial, visit MacJournals.com.]

http://www.macjournals.com/

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Why Do New iMacs Surf So Slowly?

By Paul Boutin (paul@paulboutin.com)
URL: http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,51926,00.html

2:00 a.m. April 19, 2002 PDT

They're here, they're slow, get used to it. At least for now.

One of Apple's top goals for its new flat-panel iMacs is to get home consumers to switch from Windows PCs.

But some who rushed to order the attractive new computer sight unseen say they have been disappointed: For Web browsing -- still the biggest time use of home computers after e-mail -- the new iMacs are notably slower than a PC. Yep, even an older, cheaper one.

Tests conducted by Wired News confirmed reader complaints that a new 800 MHz iMac takes an average of twice as long to render Web pages as a comparable or cheaper PC running Windows XP. Even on broadband networks, the iMac's default Internet Explorer browser took an average of 10 seconds per page to render several popular sites, including CNN.com and the Apple Store homepage.

Slashdot discussion pages and some weblog sites took even longer, despite their lack of fat graphics. The diagnosis: The problem is not a bandwidth issue caused by fat HTML, but an annoying delay in actually drawing the page onscreen after its components have been downloaded.

"I spent $1,800 on a computer that's slower than the $400 eMachine it replaced," one iMac user wrote in an e-mail

Several correspondents asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation by Mac zealots, who have been known to e-mail 1,000 or more harangues to the work addresses of those who criticize the huggable device.

But, still: "I'm sick of looking at that little wheel spin," another griped, referring to the circular hourglass cursor that appears while the Mac processes a Web page.

Tests on other Apple platforms showed a similar performance gap between a $1,500 Dell notebook and a freshly unboxed, $3,000 PowerBook G4.

Switching browsers -- even to the latest version of Opera, the self-styled "world's fastest browser" -- indicated that Mac versions of most browsers are conspicuously slower than their Windows counterparts.

The culprit, it turns out, isn't the new iMac's hardware, but its operating system, which Apple focused on getting to market first and bringing up to speed later. In order to let OS X support as many existing software applications as possible, "Apple supported a number of legacy technologies designed to ease their transition to the new operating system," said Nathalie Welch, the company's public relations manager for hardware.

As a result, Welch said, "We are merely at the beginning of the performance opportunities in Mac OS X."

Jason Hazlett, a Mac developer for Opera, said performance problems are something application developers have to live with at this stage. "To get any application running on OS X is one thing, but getting it to run well is another," he said. "The most important thing to do is to use the OS X native event model. I cannot speak for Internet Explorer, but the Opera beta you are running does not (run the event model). This goes a long way in explaining what you are observing."

Hazlett said that early test versions of Opera's future 6.0 release, which uses OS X native events, are already faster than their predecessors on MacOS 9.2, the previous generation Macintosh operating system still booted by skeptics and late adopters.

Jimmy Grewal, Microsoft's program manager for the Mac version of Internet Explorer, agreed that the problem lies with OS X, not the browser. In particular, he said hardware graphics acceleration was largely missing from OS X at this stage in its development. "The effort of drawing something to the screen (on Windows) can be offloaded to a graphics card, but in OS X the CPU is heavily involved," he said.

Grewal defended Apple's strategy of releasing a slow version of OS X now rather than a faster one later. "That was a conscious decision Apple made," he said. "They optimized for user experience rather than raw performance."

The goal, he said, was to update the Mac's look and feel to the new Aqua interface, while avoiding onscreen glitches and user interface inconsistencies that a hasty excursion into hardware acceleration might have brought. "We think our users wouldn't trade that performance difference for the experience," he said.

And, at least in Wired News tests, OS X didn't mimic 9.2's habit of locking up completely, requiring the Mac's power cord and/or battery to be removed in order to reboot it -Ð hardly a satisfying user experience.

Apple declined to specify a date or time period when faster browsers or OS X performance enhancements would be available, but Grewal speculated it could take more than a few months. "I think this time next year or in 18 months, Apple will have time to focus on not just porting (i.e., translating software from OS 9 to OS X), but on how they can make the performance better," he said.

In the meantime, at least some owners of the new iMac agree the experience is worth the wait.

J.D. Falk, a 10-year Unix administrator, replaced his home PC with one of the first flat-panel iMacs to leave the warehouse. Falk shrugged off performance problems even after a demo. "I've wanted a Mac for a long time."

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Bell Labs breaks through on Moore's Law

By Reuters
April 26, 2002, 6:00 AM PT
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-892894.html

Scientists at Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies, have found a way to peer deep inside a semiconductor and create an image of a single impurity atom in silicon, a development that will help scientists understand how impurities affect the properties of microchips.

This understanding of semiconductors at the atomic level is critical in devising manufacturing technologies needed to shrink the size of future generations of high-speed electronics, such as microprocessors, in a bid to keep Moore's Law on track.

Moore's Law, observed by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, posits that the number of transistors on a semiconductor doubles roughly every 18 months with a 50 percent reduction in area.

This is the first time that an individual impurity has been pictured in its undisturbed state within a crystal and was achieved using a special electron microscope, Bell Labs said, adding that such a feat is as difficult as seeing a footprint on the surface of the moon.

The research is described in an article published Thursday in the journal Nature.

The results "are important in understanding the distribution of impurities in silicon at an atomic level," wrote Paul Peercy, a professor and dean of engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "They will also be important in increasing our understanding of a wide range of complex materials."

As chips get ever smaller, it's now important both to image and understand the chemical and physical environment within devices, because those properties will ultimately determine to what lengths engineers will be able to shrink the sizes of transistors and interconnections among them in semiconductors, said Elsa Reichmanis, director of the materials research department at Bell Labs.

Impurities--or "dopants" as they are known--are purposefully introduced into silicon to provide charge carriers that control a chip's electrical properties. But as chip components continue to shrink in accordance with Moore's Law, the industry is reaching a point where just a few atoms of impurities could determine the function of a particular device, Bell Labs said.

The Bell Labs technique, which uses scanning transmission electron microscopy, enables scientists to view the individual dopants and clusters as they exist within actual devices, and will provide scientists with an understanding of how these impurity atoms function within real devices, Bell Labs said.

Previous techniques had not been able to look inside crystal.

"Now we can look at things hidden inside a solid, in their natural environment," said David Muller, a Bell Labs physicist. "It's as qualitatively different as seeing how an animal behaves in a zoo and how it behaves in its natural habitat."

The Bell Labs technique is extremely sensitive and can be applied to almost any material, not just semiconductors, Bell Labs said.

Other members of the research team were Paul Voyles, John Grazul and Paul Citrin of Bell Labs, and Hans Gossmann of Agere Systems.

ToC

The PC Section:

Recover Deleted Files

by Kevin Hisel (khisel @ kevinhisel.com)

Norton's Disk Doctor once included an app that allowed you to recover deleted files provided the file system had not rewrote over the data already. At some point, they must have dropped that capability and opted for another method that requires you to be running some sort of background process as the file is being deleted that puts it in their 'protected recycle bin'.

This works okay, but what if you come across a machine that isn't using this application?

Brian Kato's 'Restoration' to the rescue. Restoration has a nice GUI and will search for deleted files on your local drive(s) and in many cases allow you to restore them provided the file system has not already overwritten the information.

Restoration is a freeware tool and works with all modern flavors of Windows. Download it here: http://hccweb1.bai.ne.jp/~hcj58401/

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Powertoys for XP Rereleased

from Kevin Hisel (khisel @ kevinhisel.com)

Powertoys for Windows XP have been rereleased. Go here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/powertoys.asp

The 'toys' are all now separate files, so you can just download the ones you want. It appears they all come with installers so installation should be easy going. You must uninstall your old Powertoys first, though.

If you don't know what Powertoys are, go check them out. This is a collection of applications for Windows XP that provide helpful features and extends the capabilities of the OS. One Powertoy in particular you should consider is TweakUI which provides dozens of helpful tweaks and control over the settings of Windows XP.

Thanks to CUCUG President Lewis for the heads-up on this.

ToC

Nifty little bandwidth calculator

From Jim Lewis (kjlewis@prairieinet.net)

For those who like an analog bandwidth gauge...

http://promos.mcafee.com/speedometer/test_0150.asp

ToC

ePrompter Review

by: Jim Lewis (lewisj@pdnt.com)
© CUCUG May 2002

Have you ever wanted to check your mail on those AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Juno, etc. accounts without having to fire up the web browser (or Outlook Express) and endure all that html SPAM, security holes and just plain sluggish message retrieval ?!?!?

Well here ya go, Bucky!! ePrompter to the rescue!!

http://www.eprompter.com/

This program came to my attention from The Screen Savers program on TechTV (via my DirecTV satellite service). It's a small *freeware* app that can handle up to 16 of those free spam email accounts for you (and/or POP3, if you like) and deliver the messages to your desktop in plain, pure ASCII. You can set the interval for checking the mail, read, reply, forward etc. from within ePrompter.

I've attached some screenshots as visual aids :^)

Normally, the program lives in the System Tray (see ePrompter_2.jpg) quietly retrieving your email. The colored dots rotate among the accounts with mail waiting at an adjustable interval (see ePrompter_4.jpg for update display). ePrompter_3.jpg is the program's display in the tray if you have nothing new to read yet. ePrompter_5.jpg shows you have some mail waiting to be read.

In ePrompter.jpg you see the main interface. Each icon represents an email account, color-coded with the number of new messages in the dot. Just double-click on one of the boxes to read you mail. Right-click to bring up the other choices (like get new mail, compose, etc.).

The program also has a screensaver that shows larger versions of all the account boxes for you. A little gimmicky, but all in fun. On minus side is the lack of support for file attachments. The authors state that this will be addressed in a future version. Also ePrompter's best feature could be considered a negative; namely the lack of HTML support. But then it wouldn't be near as fast and fun to use, would it? :^)

To sum up, this is a great little solution for reading your average free email account(s) in a fast and convenient manner. This is particularly appealing for Yahoo users, as POP3 forwarding service on their free accounts was *discontinued* in April, 2002.

Jim Lewis
President,
Corporate Agent,
WinSig Chairman
CUCUG, Inc.
Email: lewisj@pdnt.com
www.cucug.org

ToC

The Linux Section:

Linux Bits

from Kris Klindworth (kris.klindworth@carle.com)

Red Hat Linux 7.3 is here!

Red Hat means business with its latest release of Linux, version 7.3. It offers several new features aimed specifically at small businesses and educators, including the Apache 1.3 Web server, GNOME videoconferencing software, MrProjects project management software, and PostgreSQL database management. It also offers Web and telephone access to Linux experts as well as to Red Hat's automated service for managing Linux systems. Version 7.3 will be available May 15, though the company started taking orders on Monday. The small-business version sells for $199.95, while a consumer version costs $59.95.

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-899607.html

OpenOffice.org Team Releases Version 1.0
Posted by timothy on Wednesday May 01, @08:32AM
from the hey-641-still-works-great dept.

DenialS writes: "Congratulations to the OpenOffice.org team! Version 1.0 of the open office suite has been released. I'm downloading it now; I've had good luck with the previous stable builds. Release notes haven't been posted yet, so I can't say what the major differences are between 1.0 and the previous stable build, 641d, but I'm looking forward to finding out!"

http://slashdot.org/articles/02/05/01/1232239.shtml?tid=162

Codeweavers runs Office without Windows
Posted March 29, 2002 10:23 Pacific Time

Hoping to break down one the biggest barriers to acceptance of Linux on the desktop, Codeweavers unveiled software that allows corporate users to run Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes without a Windows operating system.

The product, called CrossOver Office, eliminates the need for a Windows operating systems license as well as a Windows emulator which, traditionally, have tended to weigh down the speed and performance of desktop applications.

For the full story:
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/03/29/020329hncodeweavers.xml?0401mnam

Big Blue thinks small -- and medium
(Source: InfoWorld)
By Ed Scannell
May 9, 2002 5:47 am PT

HAVING CATERED TO developers and business partners focused on corporate accounts with several product announcements Wednesday at its developerWorks Live conference, IBM on Thursday turned its attention to the other end of the market with a new program and product bundles aimed at small and medium-size business (SMB) accounts.

IBM announced that its eServer Integrated Platform for e-Business, to be delivered and supported through the company's business partners, is intended to help smaller companies quickly build and implement Linux-based solutions around SuSE's version of the open-source operating system.

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/05/09/020509hnibmsmb.xml?0509thap

Caldera announces support for other Linux versions
(Source: Computerworld)

Linux users will now have more choices for service and support as Caldera announces broad support for other brands of Linux, including distributions from Red Hat, SuSE and MandrakeSoft.

http://www.idg.net/go.cgi?id=677180

HP wins contract for Linux supercomputers
By David Becker
Special to ZDNet News
April 17, 2002, 4:45 AM PT

Hewlett-Packard announced a high-profile contract Tuesday to build a Linux-powered supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Energy.

The $24.5 million supercomputer will be capable of processing 8.3 trillion calculations per second (8.3 teraflops), according to HP. That would place the system among the current top 10 of the world's fastest supercomputers, if it were operating today.

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-884584.html

ToC

The Macintosh Section:

Jaguar: Mac OS X Prepares to Pounce

by TidBITS Staff (editors@tidbits.com)
TidBITS#629/06-May-02

At the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs previewed the next major release of Mac OS X, codenamed "Jaguar," due for release in "late summer," which we would interpret to mean the end of August. Along with a number of Mac-only features that we'll cover below, Jaguar will build in the latest versions of the Unix operating system and tools that lie under Mac OS X. Some of those tools, such as the GCC 3 compiler, could help developers provide improved performance, and others, like the next generation Internet protocols IPv6 and IPSec, will help Mac OS X be a first-class Internet citizen. Those changes, though welcome, are unlikely to affect users as much as the higher profile improvements Jobs outlined. One caveat - we're not developers and Apple didn't provide a webcast of the keynote, so we've had to piece details together from a variety of sources. More details will undoubtedly become known as WWDC continues.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/newversion/
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2002/may/06jaguar.html
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0205/06.wwdckeynote.php

iChat

Adding to Apple's iApp stable, Jobs announced that instant messaging software called iChat would be built into Jaguar. iChat will be compatible with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), marking the first time AOL has allowed any company to work with AIM. That hasn't stopped a variety of companies from reverse- engineering AIM support, and with Mac OS X users added to AIM's 150 million user party, AIM compatibility will become even more attractive. You won't need an AOL or AIM account to use iChat - it will work with your iTools username and will reportedly also let you create buddy lists of local network users as well. Apple plans to integrate iChat with the enhanced Mail and Address Book so you can see the online status of people in your buddy list and turn email exchanges into real time chats. iChat's interface is simple - it uses "dialogue bubbles" to present instant messages in a "graphically conversational manner." And you thought balloon help was dead.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2002/may/06ichat.html

As much as we're not fans of instant messaging, iChat will probably be a hit by virtue of being bundled with Mac OS X. Chat applications haven't evolved much from their inception years ago, so we're hoping that iChat does more than offer a pretty Aqua interface. Our wish list? An auto-correct option that ensures words are spelled correctly coupled with an auto- expansion function that turns the common abbreviations like "cul8r" into the actual words of "See you later." So what if we're old-fashioned?

Mail

Apple's bundled Mail client has thus far failed to measure up to any well-known email clients. Judging from the WWDC keynote, though, the next version of Mail will provide more competition via filters with multiple criteria, automatic saving of message drafts when you quit, better handling of multiple accounts, searching across mailboxes, color highlighting, security features, support for virtual private networks, and support for QuickTime.

Most interesting, though, is the promise of a spam filter that works on the semantic content of spam. Apple must be extremely careful in how Mail identifies spam, since false positives could prove highly damaging to the business reputations of companies whose legitimate mail was incorrectly identified. We had significant problems with Outlook Express's Junk Mail Filter marking TidBITS as spam when it first shipped - despite the fact that TidBITS has always been an opt-in mailing list, a number of readers reported us as spammers based solely on Outlook Express's say-so. If that judgement were to come from Apple's default email client, especially given that it will be used heavily by novices, it could be utterly disastrous to companies like us that rely on email communications.

http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05647

Address Book

Backing up iChat and Mail is a new Address Book. The main change to Address Book is that any application can now access its system-wide database of contact information. It supports vCards and reportedly will also offer LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) searching. Plus, it's tied into Apple's forthcoming Bluetooth support, so you can exchange vCards with PDAs and cell phones. It's unclear if other applications will be able to use Address Book to work with databases containing other sorts of information; also unclear is if the database engine underlying Address Book offers sufficient performance and robustness to be used in such a way. We've been agitating for a system-level database since 1996 (see "The Database Returns" in TidBITS-341_); it would be nice to see Apple finally provide such a service.

http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=00906

Finder Improvements

Fans of Mac OS 9's spring-loaded folders will be happy to see the feature return to Mac OS X, enabling you to click and hold on a folder to view its contents and drill down into other nested folders. Also new in Finder windows is instant searching via a Toolbar Search field into which you can enter file names or text in a document; the results are displayed in the Finder window. It promises to be much better than today's glacial searches via Sherlock.

The Finder will also receive performance boosts from multi- threading and from Quartz Extreme, an enhanced version of the Quartz rendering engine that's responsible for drawing graphics. Quartz Extreme offloads graphics processing to a supported video card, freeing up the Mac's main processor(s) for application- specific tasks. Graphics-intensive programs like 3D games and video utilities will see performance improvements, as will the drawing of Finder interface elements such as drop shadows and transparent windows. However, the key phrase here is "supported video card," which includes the Nvidia GeForce2 MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 Ti, GeForce4, or GeForce4 MX, as well as any ATI AGP Radeon card - and preferably cards with at least 32 MB of VRAM. So, essentially, only the newest Macs (other than the iBook) will be able to take advantage of Quartz Extreme, no doubt an effort by Apple to stimulate hardware sales when Jaguar is released.

Sherlock 3

Although we primarily use Sherlock to find files, Apple has always pushed it as a way to find Internet information such as news headlines or phone numbers. Those features have never impressed us, in part because Sherlock has always been a jumping-off point, displaying results that load into a Web browser when clicked. Sherlock 3, however, will be able to display properly formatted results in its own window, turning Apple's online sleuth into what looks like a clone of Karelia's excellent Watson, although Watson offers more tools than appear in Apple's screenshot of Sherlock 3.

http://www.karelia.com/watson/?src=_tb

Handwriting Recognition

One of the more intriguing announcements was support for handwriting recognition, referred to as Ink on Apple's Web site. Reports from the conference claimed that handwriting is recognized by any application that accepts text, including Unix programs such as Terminal. However, Apple's Jaguar page notes that Ink works in Mail and TextEdit, with an additional program called InkPad used to copy and paste written text into programs that don't support Ink. An input tablet is reportedly necessary, though we suppose a finger on a PowerBook or iBook trackpad might work as well.

Ink will no doubt ignite a new round of speculation about a Mac OS-based handheld device, which we'll believe when we see it. In the meantime, adding this type of low-level support provides developers with an alternative to keyboard-based input. We can imagine graphics programs supporting Ink for adding text to illustrations, or educational programs relying on it to help children learn to write. However, it's important to remember that handwriting recognition has never caught on with most computer users, not to mention the fact that tablets remain uncommon input devices.

QuickTime 6

Apple's Jaguar preview also included QuickTime 6 and QuickTime Broadcaster. QuickTime remains one of Apple's key technologies, with QuickTime 5 for Mac and Windows being downloaded a few million times each week. QuickTime 6 will sport (yet another) new user interface and better performance of streaming media over limited-bandwidth connections. It will also enable users to view MPEG-4 video. The MPEG-4 standard is a way to encode audio and video for use on digital devices or for transmission over the Internet; it was defined nearly four years ago and is itself partially based on QuickTime. Like QuickTime, MPEG-4 can scale to a variety of devices and deliver content in limited bandwidth situations (like typical Internet streaming applications today). MPEG-4 also targets high-end digital television and video markets, has features for creating interactive applications, and offers digital rights management features. MPEG-4 also supports Advanced Audio Coding (also known as AAC - a perceptual audio encoding method from Dolby Labs which offers better fidelity than MP3 audio in less bandwidth). With QuickTime Broadcaster (combined with QuickTime Streaming Server), QuickTime 6 will probably make Jaguar the first platform that can create, stream, and view MPEG-4 video.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2002/may/06quicktime.html
http://www.aac-audio.com/

A complete MPEG-4 solution is nice in theory, but it's currently mired in licensing issues. The multimedia and video industry has cringed at a licensing proposal which includes a per-minute use fee (roughly $.02 per hour), along with fees for shipping MPEG-4 encoders and decoders. Although Apple has essentially completed development of QuickTime 6, it won't ship until licensing issues are worked out. Including QuickTime 6 in Jaguar may indicate that Apple has confidence that MPEG-4 licensing issues can be finalized soon.

http://www.mpegla.com/
http://www.m4if.org/

Rendezvous

Jaguar will also include Rendezvous, a new technology from Apple intended to ease administration and configuration of IP-based network services. Long-time Mac users fondly remember how easy it was to set up and configure AppleTalk networks: you plugged in the devices, turned them on, and they magically all knew about each other. Rendezvous promises to bring the same functionality to IP-based networks, letting devices both discover services available on the network and advertise services they offer - and it's all supposed to work over Ethernet, AirPort, Bluetooth, FireWire, and other networking technologies. An iBook with an AirPort card could automatically find a printer connected to the iMac upstairs; a user could set up iTunes to serve as a music jukebox for an entire local network. Rendezvous is based on a draft IETF standard called Zero Configuration Networking and should be most useful in small networks where network administration is low-key or absent; let's hope Rendezvous doesn't expose any security bugaboos.

http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/zeroconf-charter.html

Windows Compatibility

On the cross-platform front, Jaguar improves Mac OS X's connections to Windows-centric networks. No longer will you have to type URLs for accessing a shared Windows folder via SMB - Jaguar includes SMB browsing. Plus, in news that probably isn't popular with the folks at Thursby Systems who work on DAVE, Jaguar will also let Mac OS X share files with Windows machines (although Apple's press release didn't mention printer sharing). Finally, Jaguar will offer built-in PPTP (Point-to- Point Tunnelling Protocol) security for virtual private network (VPN) uses.

http://www.thursby.com/products/dave.html

Universal Access

Mac users with disabilities have been pretty much locked out of Mac OS X so far, with only Niemeijer Consult's KeyStrokes and Black Cat Software's Mouseki offering onscreen keyboards under Mac OS X. The release of Jaguar should improve the situation significantly, since Jaguar will offer APIs that let developers provide screen magnification via Quartz, out-loud reading of text under the cursor, access to everything via the keyboard, and visual notification of alerts. It's possible Apple will provide simple user-level utilities with Jaguar, but it's even more important to provide these system-level capabilities to the developers working on tools for Mac users with disabilities.

http://www.assistiveware.com/keystrokes.html
http://www.blackcat-software.com/mouseki.htm
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06773
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbser=1189

Bated Breath

Jaguar promises a great deal, but with developers receiving a copy at WWDC, there's hope that we'll see not just the technology in a few months, but also a wide variety of applications that take advantage of these new capabilities to offer features never seen before. Apple will undoubtedly preview Jaguar again at Macworld Expo in New York in July, although there the demonstration should be aimed more at users than developers. Until then...

ToC

Top Mac OS X Utilities: Alternative Controls

by Adam C. Engst (ace@tidbits.com)
TTidBITS#628/29-Apr-02

In the previous installment of this series on Mac OS X utilities, I looked at Mac OS X programs that restored common capabilities provided by third party utilities in Mac OS 9. I said then that I was ignoring a large subset of that category, utilities that offer alternative control mechanisms.

http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06779

Even though utilities like DragThing, QuicKeys X, and TypeIt4Me X may not seem similar, a close look reveals that all offer alternative approaches to completing common tasks, ranging from opening files to entering text automatically. Each utility's raison d'etre is that its alternative method is either faster than the standard approach or fits better with the way your brain is wired. Because of the significant overlap among these utilities, I'll start with launchers and work through to those that just insert text.

DragThing

One of the best known of the alternative launchers is James Thomson's DragThing, which has provided Dock- like functions for years. You can create multiple docks, add files or folders to those docks, assign hot keys to any item, and far more (including, oddly enough, the option to put the Trash back on the Desktop). DragThing offers significant customizability - colors, textures, hot spots, sounds to play, delays before various actions happen, alias handling, and numerous other settings. The multitude of options and settings probably defines DragThing's audience - if you love tweaking your virtual environment, DragThing probably fits your tastes. DragThing costs $25 shareware (floating dock windows and hot key support aren't enabled until you register); competitive upgrades from Semicolon Software's The Tilery launcher - which won't be moving to Mac OS X - Aladdin's DragStrip, and Power On Software's Action GoMac cost $19. DragThing 4.3 is a 1.3 MB download.

http://www.dragthing.com/

MaxMenus

Although DragThing uses screen real estate efficiently, for a less cluttered look, check out Proteron's MaxMenus. Taking its cue from Power On Software's Action Menus, the MaxMenus preference pane lets you create numerous custom menus activated by clicking in the corners of the screen (MaxMenus supports two monitors), by clicking in unused space in the menu bar, or by pressing a hot key. These menus can contain any file or folder, plus special items like text labels, separators, mounted volumes, open programs, recent applications, recent documents, and System Preferences. The corner-based and hot-key-activated hierarchical menus can be spring-loaded, so dragging items into those menus copies or moves them; you can also grab items out of a menu. If that's not enough, you can assign a hot key to any individual item while you're viewing it in a menu. After thinking about how I wanted to set up MaxMenus, I found it extremely useful - definitely a winner. My only negative so far is that it won't open files or folders on shared volumes that aren't mounted. MaxMenus 1.1 costs $30; a 30-day trial version is a 1.1 MB download. Through 05-May-02, owners of Power On Software's Action Utilities can save $10 on MaxMenus with the coupon code ACTN2MAX and their Action Utilities serial number.

http://www.proteron.com/maxmenus/

piPop

Where MaxMenus can overwhelm you with possibilities, piDog Software's piPop (previously called piDock) offers a more focused approach. Move your cursor to the edge of the screen, and piPop's hierarchical menu appears. Navigate through the menu, and click to open a selected item. You can also drag an item from piPop's menu to move it, copy it, or open it in another application, and you can even tear off menus and leave them floating on screen for repeated access. Although piPop doesn't attempt to be as customizable as MaxMenus, Control-clicking the piPop menu lets you set various options, such as which edge of the screen activates piPop, whether a modifier key should be required, and which folders are at piPop's top level. piPop is at version 2.0b2 as I write this, and although updates have been arriving regularly, it still has stability problems: it doesn't avoid the Dock if both occupy the same edge of the screen, and I was unable to make a feature that mimics Mac OS 9's spring-loaded folders in Mac OS X work reliably. Nonetheless, piPop is worth watching, even if you haven't moved to Mac OS X, since it works under Mac OS 9 as well. The suggested registration fee for piPop is $20 to eliminate startup nags; it's a 1 MB download.

http://www.pidock.com/

Snard

Gideon Softworks' Snard creates a custom system-wide menu (a separate Dock version provides almost the same capabilities and is available even when you're in Classic applications) into which you can put files and folders; applications can display recently accessed documents in a hierarchical menu as well. The menu can also serve up special items including a Find command, a Recent Servers menu, a System Preference menu, and an Open as Administrator command. You can create and name text separators, and you can create your own hierarchical menus with groups. A different sort of group - worksets - lets you open a number of applications and documents with a single click. Selecting an item is the only way to open it - Snard has no hot key support. I found Snard's configuration window flaky, and the only features that distinguish it are its worksets and server list. Snard 1.0 costs $10 and is a 1.6 MB download (1.1 MB for the Dock version).

http://www.gideonsoftworks.com/snard.html

LaunchBar

For ad hoc keyboard control of your Mac, look to Objective Development's LaunchBar. At its heart, LaunchBar is deceptively simple - press Command-Spacebar to display LaunchBar's small pop-up window, type a few letters of the filename you want to open, and press Return. The real power of LaunchBar lies in its sophisticated matching algorithms. When I entered EA, for example, LaunchBar matched it with EIMS Admin. Typing LP didn't initially select LetterRip Pro Administrator, but I was able to find it in the list of possible matches. Since LaunchBar's algorithm is adaptive, every time I entered LP from then on, LetterRip Pro Administrator was the default match. For abbreviations unrelated to the file's name (matching MAIL to Eudora, for instance), you can create manual aliases. Along with files, folders, and disks, LaunchBar can also open URLs (from your bookmarks), create mail with email addresses (from your address book), and jump directly to preference panes inside System Preferences. Plus, you can drag files onto LaunchBar's pop-up window for launching with specific applications or performing various file operations like moving, copying, or making a link (including aliases, absolute and relative symbolic links, and hard links). LaunchBar is simply brilliant, although there's still room for improvement. I'd like it to send text selections to specific applications (such as a word to Omni Dictionary, or a URL to a Web browser); mount shared volumes automatically when needed; and learn to parse Eudora's nickname files properly for better display of email addresses. LaunchBar costs $20 for non-commercial use or $40 for businesses; a trial version that works for seven launches is available as a 208K download.

http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/

Script Menu

Apple's Script Menu provides an alternative method of launching AppleScript, Perl, and shell scripts from a system-wide menu. Interestingly, to install Script Menu, all you do is drag the ScriptMenu.menu file to the menu bar; to remove it, Command-drag it off the menu bar. Script Menu automatically provides access to a number of scripts pre-installed with Mac OS X (some are useful, others are merely examples), and you can add your own in the Scripts folder inside your user's Library folder. Like Snard, Script Menu is unavailable when you're in a Classic application, and it has no provision for hot keys. Nevertheless, Script Menu is free, and if you know AppleScript, you can probably make it mimic many of the capabilities of the other utilities discussed here. Script Menu is a 284K download.

http://www.apple.com/applescript/macosx/script_menu/

Drop Drawers X

Fans of tabbed pop-up windows in Mac OS 9 should check out Sig Software's Drop Drawers X, which lets you create custom "drawers" around the edges of your screen (all sides, and yes, Drop Drawers supports multiple monitors). Drop Drawers X features two types of drawers: process drawers, which show active applications, and the more-common clip drawers, which can store file and folder aliases, URLs, text snippets (with styles), pictures, movies, sounds, and more. Options for the location and appearance of drawers are myriad, and you can open drawers by mousing over them, clicking them, or pressing a user- defined hot key. Once a drawer is open, you can drag items in (even onto application or folder icons), double-click items (for opening files), or drag items out to another application (as you might a piece of boilerplate text). Any item can have a hot key attached to it, making it simple to open a file or insert text (which happens via pasting). Drop Drawers X is more manual than launchers like MaxMenus and piPop in that you must set up every drawer in advance rather than have it built automatically. Simultaneously, the ease of adding content to a drawer means that Drop Drawers X is notably more fluid than programs like QuicKeys X that require a fair amount of effort to create a piece of boilerplate text. In short, if you find yourself reusing bits of content frequently or like the process of arranging your virtual environment, you'll like Drop Drawers X. Like piPop, it works equally well on Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. Drop Drawers X 1.5.9 is a 393K download and costs $20 shareware.

http://www.sigsoftware.com/dropdrawers/

QuicKeys X

It might seem odd to include CE Software's long-standing macro utility QuicKeys X here, but most people probably use QuicKeys primarily to open files and type bits of text via hot keys, though activating macros via toolbar buttons has also been possible for several years. QuicKeys X will remain feature-poor compared to its Mac OS 9 ancestor until Apple exposes more of the innards of Mac OS X, but the utility can type into applications, move and click the mouse, open files and folders, run AppleScript scripts, switch among applications, open URLs, change Finder views, and more. Some of those features are unique among Mac OS X utilities, but QuicKeys X really stands out when you need a macro that combines multiple steps. For example, I have a simple macro that types the beginning of a URL in angle brackets, then moves the insertion point back inside the closing bracket for me to enter the rest of the URL manually - there's no way to do that without multiple steps. Like DragThing and Drop Drawers, QuicKeys X requires manual setup for use as a launcher, but if you need its more powerful features, it's utterly invaluable. QuicKeys X 1.5.1, which fixes a bug in 1.5 with inserting text into some Carbon applications, lists for $80 and is available for $60. There's a 30-day demo that's a 7.6 MB download.

http://www.cesoft.com/products/qkx.html
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06603
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06786

Keyboard Maestro

For those interested in primarily using the keyboard, Michael Kamprath's Keyboard Maestro offers a number of pre-built Hot Key Actions, displays a pop-up toolbar that lets you launch and switch between applications, and provides multiple clipboards like CopyPaste-X and PTHPasteboard. Keyboard Maestro's Hot Key Actions can switch between applications, quit and hide applications, open files, launch URLs, open System Preferences panes, run AppleScript and Unix scripts, insert text and remap keystrokes. Keyboard Maestro proved flaky in my testing, crashing a number of times and at one point requiring reinstallation. You can use Keyboard Maestro 1.0.4 for free, although paying $20 removes a number of limitations and reminders. It's a 526K download.

http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/

Key Xing

John Scalo's Key Xing offers features roughly similar to Keyboard Maestro's Hot Key Actions - it can open files or folders, switch to applications if they aren't already running, hide open applications, perform a few system actions (Sleep, Restart, Shut Down), run AppleScript scripts, and send URLs to your Web browser, all activated via hot keys. It can also, oddly enough, copy full file paths in the Finder and control iTunes. Unfortunately, it can't insert text into a document, though I suppose that could be done via AppleScript. For $7 shareware though, Key Xing's capabilities might be all you need, and it was stable in my testing. Key Xing 2.1 is implemented as a preference pane and is a 316K download.

http://homepage.mac.com/scalo/keyxing.html

TypeIt4Me X

Since 1989, Riccardo Ettore's TypeIt4Me has made it possible to insert bits of text when you choose a menu item or type an abbreviation. (This latter feature is currently unique among Mac OS X utilities.) In Mac OS X, Riccardo made TypeIt4Me X an input method component, which means it lives in /Library/Components (the other utilities are stand-alone applications or preference panes) and is activated by enabling it in the Keyboard Menu pane of the International preference pane, then choosing TypeIt4Me from the keyboard menu. In my limited testing, TypeIt4Me X 0.99 worked well despite being in beta, though installation and activation hadn't yet been cleaned up for the final release. TypeIt4Me X will cost $27 ($14 for students) with $9 upgrades. It's currently a 1.7 MB download.

http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~r-ettore/TypeIt4MeIndex.html

Typist

With this last utility, Selznick Scientific Software's Typist, we've moved all the way from utilities that just launch files to those that just type text. In Typist you set up chunks of text to type and then insert them in other applications by choosing them from Typist's Dock menu (click and hold or Control-click) or by pressing a user-defined hot key and then selecting an item from the list. Although Typist can handle large chunks of text, it simulates the keyboard, so it's slow to enter large amounts of text; there's also no way to link different hot keys to specific pieces of text. Like TypeIt4Me and QuicKeys X, Typist can substitute a number of time-related variables in the typed text, along with the current contents of the clipboard. Typist 1.2 costs $15 shareware, and it's a 411K download.

http://www.selznick.com/products/typist/

Choose and Move On

I hope my descriptions above help you determine which of these utilities will best match the way you work; when it comes to alternative control utilities, personal preference rules. I'm still not sure which of these utilities will earn a permanent place on my hard disk. It is worth noting, however, that performing the kind of testing necessary for these articles in previous versions of the Mac OS would have been a nightmare - Mac OS X has been solid throughout, and I haven't seen any specific conflicts between utilities with overlapping features.

In the next installment of this series, I hope to look at utilities that extend the basic capabilities of Mac OS X to make it faster, more flexible, more powerful, and sometimes just plain more fun.

ToC

OK, chalk one up for the Mac...

From Jim Lewis (lewisj@pdnt.net)

Here's a funny one for all the Mac Addicts...

Bill Machrone (Editor Emeritus of PC Magazine, currently Editor of ExtremeTech, a PC Mag feature) on video editing using the PC (a school project for his son):

----

Thank heaven for my 16-year-old son, Drew. If it weren't for his ill-starred attempts to make videos for school projects, I'd be happily out of touch with the state of the art in nonlinear editing on the PC platform. But he persists in making the things, and I wind up getting involved, usually because the technology fails him at one point or another and I have to bail him out.

<
< lot's of whining and moaning and installation details
< covering several ill-fated hardware installs DELETED...
<

We uninstalled the DV500 drivers. Premiere worked with the Pyro board. I give high marks to Win XP for recognizing the DV camera and working very smoothly with it. Once my son figured out how to use Premiere, we were in good shape, except that Premiere can't do a simple voice-over. It invokes Windows Sound Recorder or the audio editor of your choice, but you then get into foreground/background fights over the record and playback controls. We wound up using Win XP's Movie Maker for the voice-overs, then bringing the WAV files back into Premiere.

Why didn't we just use Win XP Movie Maker for the production? Because it's incredibly lame in most other respects. I don't know about the universe Microsoft lives in, but in mine, VHS tape is the gold standard of video exchange and display. Movie Maker can only output files; it can't write back to tape. With Premiere, we played the edited, rendered video back out to the DV camcorder, then did an analog dub from the camcorder to a VHS deck÷at 9:30 P.M. on Sunday.

I've come to the conclusion that last week's video software is about as useful as last week's newspaper. My wife, bless her heart, asked, "How do normal people do this?" Drew and I answered in unison, "They buy a Mac."

----

Sounds to me like this Mac-niche is safe for the time-being.

:^) 

Jim

ToC

The Amiga Section:

Amithlon Statement - by Developer

from Bernie Meyer
Melbourne, April 3rd, 2002

Quo vadis, Amithlon?

There has been a considerable amount of discussion and speculation about the future of Amithlon on Amiga news sites as well as on the Amithlon mailing list recently. I suspect it has not gone unnoticed that I have been uncharacteristically quiet on the subject, avoiding to get drawn into discussions which I obviously have passionate opinions about.

The reason, regrettably, is a legal one. All is not well where Amithlon is concerned. In fact, all is far from well.

In the early hours of March 9th, Melbourne time, I received an email from Amiga Inc, In which Amiga Inc informed me that they considered the distribution of AmigaOS XL to be in violation of their intellectual property rights and thus illegal. The details of their third party intellectual property claim were such that they related, among other parts of AmigaOS XL, to the Amiga IP embedded in the file "isolinux/bigird.gz" on the AmigaOS XL CD.

According to the distribution contract for Amithlon, I am fully and exclusively responsible for defending and/or settling any third party intellectual property disputes that arise from any part of the software I have provided under the contract. The file "isolinux/bigird.gz" was provided by me to Haage & Partner, and was included on the AmigaOS XL CD unchanged.

I would like to state that, when the Amithlon distribution contract was agreed upon, I was led to believe that Haage & Partner had secured the required licenses to Amiga Inc's IP. In fact, being able to provide such licenses was the main, if not the only reason H&P was chosen as the distribution partner. Until I was informed by Amiga Inc of their different view of the situation, I had no doubt that Amithlon, as distributed as part of AmigaOS XL, was a fully licensed product.

I need to stress that I have no way of verifying whether Amiga Inc's claims are justified. I also have no way of determining whether Haage & Partner have negotiated for, or hold through some other means, the licenses to Amiga Inc's IP which would be necessary for the distribution of AmigaOS XL.

However, the claim was made. Legal action was mentioned. And I am contractually required not only to defend any claim at my own cost and in my own name, but also to assume full and unlimited liability should the claim be found to be justified.

In order to minimize the resulting personal legal risk, I immediately sent an email to Haage & Partner, invoking a contract clause that allows me to prohibit any further use and/or distribution of Amithlon, taking effect immediately, in such a situation.

In a response email dated 5:05pm on March 8th (German time), Mr. Haage confirmed that "no agreement [had] been reached" with Amiga Inc.

As Mr. Haage's email did not acknowledge that the contract clause prohibiting further use and distribution had been invoked, I sent another email at 3:29am, March 9th (Melbourne time), clarifying that the claim did indeed touch upon parts of AmigaOS XL provided by me, and stressed again that I had invoked that clause. I also suggested that Mr. Haage, who assured me that I neither would nor could be held legally responsible for anything, sign an addendum to the Amithlon distribution contract, stating explicitly that any intellectual property claims by Amiga Inc are fully and exclusively the responsibility of H&P, and that in no case would I be required to defend, settle or be liable for any such claims.

No reply was ever received, despite logfiles confirming that the mail was indeed delivered to Haage & Partner's mail server.

Distribution of AmigaOS XL by Haage & Partner is continuing. In fact, a new preinstalled "Monster System" was introduced on March 15th. This exposes me personally to a substantial legal risk.

I consider any copies of Amithlon shipped by Haage & Partner after March 8th, 5:05pm German time, to have been distributed in direct violation of the Amithlon distribution contract. I explicitly refuse any responsibility or liability resulting from such distribution. I also need to point out that as far as I am concerned, the purchase of any such copies does not provide the purchaser with licenses for the use of any parts I contributed to Amithlon, which includes the main emulator executable.

As a freelance software designer, I depend for my livelihood on proper handling of intellectual property issues. I would like to stress that under no circumstances would I knowingly approve of or condone the distribution of a product for which unresolved yet credible third party intellectual property claims have been made.

I very much regret being the messenger of such unfortunate news. Amithlon is a product I have poured my heart and soul into, and one I am rather proud of. Having had to stop its distribution like this pained me greatly; Having to deal with the implications of the ongoing distribution is taking a toll on my psychological and physical well-being, and stops me from doing what I do best, which is to write useful software (if I may say so myself...).

Over the last few weeks, I have been working with Amiga Inc, trying to resolve these issues and to find a common way; Unfortunately, it is my understanding that due to the ongoing nature of their dispute with Haage & Partner, they are unable at the current time to comment; At the same time, the stresses this whole affair put on me started to seriously interfere with my life, my health and my continuing support for the users of Amithlon. That could not continue.

ToC

The CUCUG Section:

April General Meeting

reported by Edwin Hadley (e-hadley@life.uiuc.edu)

The April 18th general meeting of CUCUG started with the usual introductions.

The first thing on the list of topics was that IBM seems to be getting out of the archive business. It was mentioned that they are having troubles with their hard drives crashing. It seems that their high capacity drives are failing. Kevin Hisel asked "Are those initial failure rates? Please say 'Yes.'" "No" said Mike Latinovich. 'They are two months down the line.' "Oh" replied Kevin. "I've had mine for three years." The problem varies from drive to drive, but it seems to be predominantly in larger capacity drives, 30 gig and above.

But that is the speculation as to why IBM are getting out of the business. This, it was agreed, is the BIG NEWS in the PC world. It also seems a shame because they were one of the biggest names in hard drives and the inventors of the hard drive. Mike described the first hard drive: 50 discs, each one 2.5 ft in diameter. It spun at 1,200 rpm and had the capacity of 5mb. They applied the magnetic substrate, which was paint with iron filings in it, with pantyhose and dixie cups. Truly a hand made computer. Everyone was impressed with how crude everything was and how far we've come.

AMD has introduced a smaller and faster Athelon XPs for portable computers. This is the 'die-shrink' that everyone has been waiting for. Jim Lewis asks if this applies to the Duron chip as well? Harold said he's heard AMD is dropping the Duron. Mike said he doesn't think so. John Ross replied he'd read that AMD is dropping the chip, too. That it was the end of life for the Duron. Someone piped up with "They heard it on the Internet so it HAS to be true!" Everyone laughed., but they agreed that it makes sense because the Durons are very similar to the P3s and the P3s are being phased out.

Microsoft is going to drop "My Services," formerly "Hailstorm," because all of the corporate partners dropped out. They said they didn't want all of their customers' info publicly out on the Internet. But, analysts think that they really don't want their information on Microsoft servers. Microsoft made a press release saying that they haven't given up and are 'regrouping.' Harold retorted 'They'll make it an integral part of Windows!' There were general grumbles and laughing.

There is a new port of Gimp for Windows available. It is supposed to run natively and be GUI. No dropping to the command line to draw a circle.

Linux news was requested. John Ross reported for us what was listed in the newsletter. The items included Mozilla, KDE 3.0, Yellow Dog Linux 2.2, Sharp Zaurus PDA and Apache 2.0. He remarked as to how well some of these applications run on Windows.

There was discussion as to where to get the Mozilla. It can be downloaded from their website (www.mozilla.org) and you don't have to go looking for the hidden button on some 'advertising ghetto' page. John likes it because of the various skins it has. He has been using one that shrinks up the 'large buttons' and gives him "maximum reality."

KDE is available. John plans to wait for a CD release, but if one is daring, one could download it at their site.

Yellow Dog 2.2 is out and a new version of Mandrake as well.

Sharp has a new color PDA out, the Zaurus, It has an embedded keyboard and dual card slots. John doesn't have one, but wants one. (Send donations to... ) It even has the Amiga based TAO Elate engine on it. It costs $4-500 bucks. Some figure that any color PDA (w/keyboard) would probably run about that much. John has a $40 PDA that works and won't break for the high priced spread.

Apache 2.0 is out.

Then John Ross complimented the Register and whoever puts it together. Kevin Hopkins' name was mentioned with HIGH PRAISE! I brought up the fact that the unix stuff was submitted by a club member, Kevin Hisel, John Ross, and I, among others have submitted items in the past. I wanted to reinforce the fact that this newsletter survives by having plenty of material. So if you, the reader, see something interesting or useful, send it in. Kevin is usually more than happy to put it in. He can always use another helpful tip. Especially in some of the areas he is not very familiar with. It's not like the "old days" of snail mail distribution, when the size of the Register was limited by postage. John said that he really had to sit down and read it over several sessions to get everything. (Compiling these notes can be a real chore. So my hat is off to Master Kevin. Hear! Hear! - ELH)

George Krumins brought up that he had learned that the Linux drive available for Play Station 2 will have a different format than standard Linux drives. And, the modem is going to be a broadband adapter. Mike Latinovich said the system ships in May and will have an adapter and no modem. The drive will be one way or the other. You either do Unix or play games. You can't do both. A discussion continued about the difficulty of developing games on the final consumer version of the PS2 Unix system. Evidently all the info is there, but it is only has sketchy documentation. To do it "right," you'd still do better to invest in the 'industrial strength' developer's kit. About $15K.

A new version of Wine is out, WineX. It is supposed to run all Windows software on Unix systems. You don't need anything from Microsoft. It has a DirectX compatible API. Kevin Hisel said "I'll bet that was easy to put together! Not!" It is supposed to be compatible enough to run the newest games. You do have to port the applications for it. It doesn't run as fast but "Look Ma! No Microsoft!" Jim Huls said that Quicktime breaks on it. Several people piped up that Quicktime breaks on everything! And even though the latest version of Quicktime is better, it has issues.

Mac news was called for. John Melby mentioned the latest OS X update 10.1.4 that was released a few days before the meeting. It has increased support for CD burning. And, there is a major update coming out soon, - 10.2. It is supposed to have a major speed bump, and many new printer and scanner drivers not available previously. John suggested that one NOT get the update disc. This is because if you clobber your hard disc, you will have to start at the beginning and reconstruct the system from scratch. Besides, you also get a full set of developer's tools if you buy the $100(+) OS 10.2 full package.

Harold Ravlin quibbled about developer tools, Fortran 2 and ageism. Harold scored his dig early tonight. I voted to smack him with a dead fish. John went on to talk about how easy it is to install Fortran 2 using Fink. Fink can install most applications (or try at least). At this point the conversation degenerated into bad jokes about finking this and that with a dead fish and a compiler...

John Melby soldiered on with a story about Apple either porting or NOT porting a version of OS X for the Intel platform. It appeared right around April first and so has been labeled a hoax. But, it keeps showing up on sites, some fairly respected, on days other than April 1. Harold brought up how it might behoove Apple to keep this possibility as a last resort. John said that that seemed to be the most common rationalization.

Jim Lewis asked about Apple's general business health because they had not done as well over X-mas holiday as they had expected. Earnings were down 6% or so. It was asked what was the typical gross margin for the main PC manufacturers. The answer was about 20%, but at the retail level, it was 6 points. or so. Apple's was down to 27% because of costs going up. But their average is higher than the industry standard. The new iMacs are selling real well, but it was released post X-mas. Apple had to raise the price of the iMacs by $100 because of lack of supply of the flat panel displays. Their sales are up from last year. In the three months prior they had shipped 280 thousand units. So sales are up but profits are down a bit. RAM memory has fluctuated in price quite a bit and so it has cost everybody a bit of profit. All in all, things are going well for Apple.

George Krumins asked about the dual processors in Apples and how aware the OS was. Harold Ravlin and John Melby both assured him that it is very aware, partly because it is Unix based. Photoshop has been dual processor aware for several version (from version 4 on). A discussion ensued about whether it is more important that the OS be aware than the application. But some of it depends on how threaded the application is. Apple has always looked for an edge and dual processors have been in their line-up for several generations of machines. John Melby mentioned his processor monitor that he uses to watch his dual processor work. He says that quite often applications that weren't design to be aware are still operating the "dual processor way." Right now Apple has a 1 gig dual processor machine and they are rumored to be working up a 1.6 gig machine later this year. And maybe a 2.4 gig version sometime next year.

Sales of G4s and Powerbooks are down, but iPods, iMacs and iBooks are doing well. Jim Lewis commented that these items are usually lower profit items than the high end G4 desktop machines. Rich thought that the iBooks are G3s and so might have a better profit than the Powerbook. (There sure was a lot of "profit" talk going on that night! - ELH) John mentioned that a lot of folks who would have bought G4 towers are getting the new iMacs because they use G4s. "And are real pretty!" said Kevin Hisel. Jim Lewis stated 'You gotta give'm an A+ in design." I mentioned that I had talked to several people who have decided to go for the 14" iBooks because of a better price and a big screen. John mentioned that at the next developers' conference Apple will release a 17" monitor iMac. (I can't wait for the 22" version! - ELH)

John Ross mentioned that he had tried to build a dual processor Pentium. He was hoping for speed improvements, but ran into all sorts of problems with the applications. He was running NT 3.1 and it worked but the applications had to be dual processor aware, and they weren't. Mike Latinovich asked what happened to this machine? John got ticked off at it and junked it.

The subject of iPods came up and their possible uses. (Like bootlegging software.) They work as a portable Firewire drive. Rich Rollins mentioned someone has made them into a virtual Palm with a HUGE hard drive. There are also applications that allows them to connect to PCs. Harold Ravlin mentioned an acquaintance that had one that lost it's Firewire four days after it's warranty expired. John said there is a fix for the problem which includes removing a panel and pushing a reset switch. This most likely voids the warranty, but... And it might save the guy about $250.

Kevin Hisel decided to add some balance to the whole mix. During the last quarter Apple's profits were $40 million, and while that is nice, Microsoft's profits were $2.74 billion. That was up only 12% but their stock was down $3. Apple's profits were down 6.7%. Apple sells hardware and hardware production costs are going up. Microsoft sells air wrapped in cellophane, said Kevin.

A couple of guys out east are designing a fully object oriented codebase from the "binary up" called "Ruby." It is a scripting language for games and graphical applications. It is supposed to be faster and better. And fully object oriented instead of mimicking it as other languages do. It is supposed to be cross-platform. John Ross said he runs a version of it on his Intel, Mac and Alpha IAX(?). He figures it is a new upgrade.

Mike Latinovich had some news for us! Some one made an Internet card for a Commodore 64. There is already a TCP stack for the C-64 available. All the design stuff is available, so you can build your own. Many moans and groans about who would really want one. Mike continued with the news that they are also running a web server on one as well! They have been doing this for awhile. But the new news is that they are also running a streaming audio server off of this machine, too! Harold wants to know if there is proof! Mike said all the documentation is available! I commented that this may instill new life into the old C-64-SIG! Not too many people were convinced about this. Evidently, you sample off of the datasette port digitally. Kevin claimed it really does work but sounds bad. Mike said "It sounds like ...., it's at one bit!" But it works pretty well! Their server is flooded off line quite often. And that is the Commodore 64 news!

George Krumins mentioned a mini laptop with docking station and a 1 ghz Pentium, color LCD. It's the OAQ (?). Mike Latinovich didn't think it would see the light of day. (At this point, the tape is a mass of confusion as everybody started spouting spec. about this device. I am not even sure I have the name correct. - ELH) The discussion was about several of the newer 'mini-laptops'. A few have been around for a year or more and they cost a bundle. (My question is, just how small do you go before it becomes too small to see or you lose it when you sneeze? - ELH) Everything starts at about $1,900.

Rich Rollins mentioned the Klez virus that was warned about a couple of days prior, but it had just hit Rich's machine that morning. It is supposed to be really nasty. Someone mentioned Sans.org and downloaded their newsbrowser for PCs that has nice anti-virus and security features. Rich mentioned ABG. Jim Lewis tossed in his two cent about ABG which is a free anti-virus program that has an scheduler and an auto-updater. You have to register to get a serial number, but the number is the same for everybody. He has been running ABG for almost 2 yrs. and hasn't had one viral problem. He has become dissatisfied with Norton because it costs and it installs SO MUCH STUFF! It is also too sensitive sometimes.

Mike Latinovich brought up the 5 year anniversary of the Microsoft/Apple software development deal. They are not planning to officially renew the agreement, but operate as if it were still in effect. It is in both of their best interests to keep it alive. Discussion turned to the browser situation again. Netscape seems to be the preferred browser on Apple machines. But ads for Apples have Internet Explorer running on the machine. (My work machine had IE on the dock. I had to add Netscape - ELH)

AOL has drop the requirement that CNN had to use AOL's e-mail application. This after they had screwed their business up.

John brought up Microsoft's Unix bashing website. Seems it was being run on Unix servers. They farmed out the work. But, after all the flak they took, Microsoft took over the site and set it up on their own servers. It promptly crashed. (hmm....... )

We then took our break before we split into our SIGs.

ToC

The Macintosh SIG: Edwin Hadley does Desktops

reported by Edwin Hadley (e-hadley@life.uiuc.edu)

At the meeting, first thing I did was fight the learning curve on the projector that put my screen image on the BIG SCREEN! The colors never did get adjusted correctly, but then, I've never dealt with this sort of critter before. We finally got it working well enough for most folks to get the idea, though. I showed some sample desktops (some mine, many not). Most of the samples were picked up at maccentral.com which features many desktops, start-up screens and other system tweaks.

Making desktop images for me is mainly playing in Photoshop or Bryce. I like to play in Bryce, MetaCreation's landscape creation software, now owned by Corel. I also like to play in Photoshop. A lot of the best images are usually some sort of accidental sideshoot of a main project. And space images from NASA and JPL are always a good starting point. I enjoy putting odd things together in odd places. This time around I decided to stick with Photoshop.

I took several images and started to play with different filters on them. Once you have opened an image in Photoshop and select part or all of the file, then you can go to the filter list and select one to treat the selected area with. There are many filters, some to help clear the image up and some to make the image less "normal". Like the distort filters. The glass distortion filter in the distort submenu is a good example. It is a filter that can scramble the original image quite a bit on some settings, but, also, not do much at all. It has settings that make it look as if you are looking though frosted, canvas, 'tiny lenses', and glass blocks, or load your own texture. The size, smoothness and distortion can all be adjusted.

Some filters are kind of picky. I have tried to use the Watercolor filter and have had the final project turn to mud. Sometimes this can be compensated for by lightening the original image. But, sometimes it just won't work at all. Some of my favorite filters are under Artistic: Neon Glow, Paint Daubs, Plastic Wrap, and Watercolor. Under Distort: Spherize, and Glass. Under Render: Lighting Effects, Lense Flares. Under Stylize: Emboss, Find Edges, Glowing Edges, and Solarize. These are the filters I find most useful for general use and play. When you get to cleaning up images or trying to get a very particular effect then some of the other filter come into play, like augmenting the feeling of a bicyclist speeding by running a motion blur on the image, or taking out some of the banding in a web-based image by adding a bit of Gaussian Noise to the background and then running a Gaussian Blur on the background or even the entire image. Also, on occasion, one is asked to make an image look like a watercolor or as if it is painted on canvas, or done with colored pencils, etc. Then, some of the other filters can be useful. But many of the filters you will never use except to experiment with.

Also, because Photoshop filters don't do everything the "right way", there are developers that have better ideas for new filters. One of those people is Kai. He developed a set filters for Photoshop a number of years ago. He likes nonconventional control systems, and packaged them in some unusual ways. Sometimes they can make you scream, but most are pretty intuitive. They, like the Photoshop filters, are not always in great demand. Some are just fancier versions of existing Photoshop filters. But some are pretty nice.

I find Texture Explorer the most useful. Some of the other fun and useful ones are the Spheroid Creator and the Vortex Tiling.

My favorite power tools in Kai's Powertools 3:

The rest of the list:

These filters are for special situations and thus I don't use them often. But most software has more features than you will ever use.

After showing a few of the KPT filters, I played with the layers feature in Photoshop. This feature has given me almost an insane amount of play control and much "indecision trauma." I have learned of the danger of having too many choices. It can be a lot like very loud feedback... your brains turns to goo. But layers are fun because you can turn their transparency from solid to clear. There are also several other ways one layer can effect layers below it. It can be added or subtracted, elements of it can be used to effect color or luminescence or... or... or... far too many choices to stay sane.

Ultimately though, a steady hand and a good eye are the artist best friend. Having all these really neat filters and processing software doesn't do any good if you can't get your cursor to go where you want it to. Or, if you can't figure out where that head of hair ends, your friend looks like he has water on the brain. And while one would have a hard time making the image look exactly like a hand painted image on canvas, one could get pretty close to the effect without too much effort.

As for the demo... I ran out of time as usual and had to scramble to get things packed up to go. I didn't get to show and do nearly everything I wanted to. But there will be another time. And there is always more software and more images and more ideas to screw around with.

ToC

The Linux SIG: Kris Klindworth shows how to install Software in Linux

reported by Kris Klindworth (kris.klindworth@carle.com)

In the April Linux-SIG meeting, Kris Klindworth did a presentation on installing software under Linux. The bulk of the presentation was on RPM's and compiling from source. He touched briefly on the Debian package management format, but did not go into detail.

RPM stands for RedHat Package Manager. The RPM format and the rpm program were developed at RedHat and released as open-source software. It is the most common file format for installing and transferring binary software under Linux. A .rpm file is an archive of information about the package and the files that will load onto your system. The rpm utility is the command line tool for managing rpm installed application on your system. It maintains a database of information about which packages loaded onto your system, which other packages they depend on, and what files on your system are part of which packages.

The three primary applications for managing RPM packages are the command line 'rpm' utility and the GUI utilities GnoRPM and Kpackage. GnoRPM is part of the Gnome project while Kpackage is part of the KDE project. As part of the demonstration, we saw how to use both of the GUI applications to browse the packages loaded on the system, see what other packages they depended on, and install new packages. We also used the 'rpm' command-line utility to install a new package, but we did not go into great depth on other uses of the command-line tool.

In the second part of the demonstration, we saw a typical sequence for installing Linux software from source code. This sequence goes something like this...

  # Download a tar ball from a website (.tar.gz, .tgz, or .tar.bz2 file)
  #   and copy them to the /usr/local/src directory.
  # Change directory to /usr/local/src
  cd /usr/local/src

  # See what sub-directory the tar file will create.
  gunzip -c file.tar.gz|tar tf -|more

  # extract the files from the tarball
  gunzip -c file.tar.gz|tar xf -

  # change directory to the new sub-directory and
  # check the readme's for special instructions

  # Configure the package for your system.
  ./configure -prefix=/usr/local

  # Compile the software using Make
  make

  # change to root and install the newly compiled software
  su
  make install 

While we waited for the hamsters in Kris' P166 system to crank out the binary code, we discussed the reasons one might choose to compile from source instead of using an RPM file. The biggest reason was that in the open-source world, the latest version of your program may not yet be available as a binary RPM. The other big reason that a non-programmer might compile from source is for a faster running binary. RPM binaries are frequently compiled for the generic 386 instruction set. When you compile from source, you may get a performance boost because the binaries are compiled for your specific CPU.

Resources:
      http://www.rpm.org/
      http://www.getlinuxonline.com/omp/distro/RedHat/rpm.htm
      http://www.rpmfind.net
      http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/
      http://www.general.uwa.edu.au/u/toivo/kpackage/

ToC

The WinSIG: Members analyze a system

reported by Kevin Hisel (khisel @ kevinhisel.com)

Having no formal presentation prepared, President Lewis proclaimed we would have the old tried-and-true, Question-and- Answer, Hints-and-Tips meeting.

We spent the entire SIG meeting addressing the first question.

CUCUG member Debra Smith had what seemed to be a simple enough query, "Which video card would the group recommend for a new system?" It turns out that the reason Debra asked was because she was building a new system for a co-worker who was into capturing, storing and editing digital video. We couldn't stop at just the video card--we picked the entire system apart, bit by bit.

The video question was easy. The group almost unanimously recommended an nVidia-based graphics card, most likely a GeForce 3 Titanium. Just about any brand of card would be fine but some have varying amounts of memory.

Sound, Debra had already picked out a high-end Creative Audigy Platinum. The group was in wide agreement due to the fact that this is one of the most advanced of the current crop, has a very nice drive-bay-based front connector panel and includes an IEEE-1394 (FireWire) interface for easy downloading from a digital camera.

Debra was torn between an Asus P4S533 or Soyo DRAGON P4 mainboard, both with DDR2700 memory. The group agreed that the Soyo had some really hot features but that the Asus was a solid performer that might be a better choice for the long haul. She's going to be using a Pentium 4 Northwood CPU, the most advanced processor currently available. The group nodded in approval. Even the AMD fanboys were mute.

Up until this point the group was fairly harmonious in its affirmations and recommendations. Then the question of which hard drive to use came up. There were as many opinions as members. The only thing everyone seemed to agree on was to avoid IBM drives like the plague. They have had quality problems and just announced this week that they were getting out of the hard drive manufacturing business. Other brands mentioned as possible substitutions were Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital. Maxtor seemed to be the crowd favorite. President Lewis almost had Debra talked into installing three different hard drives and a complex backup regimen but cooler heads prevailed due to budgetary constraints.

The backup solution finally arrived at was a tried-and-true CDRW drive. Plextor was discussed, but President Lewis pointed out that Lite-On was #2 in speed and quality and about #10 in price (read: cheap). Really, it would be hard to go wrong with either of these choices. The end-user is a casual video editor, so an elaborate (read: expensive) method of saving large video source and editing data (to DVD-R or tape) seemed to be uncalled for. VCDs will probably be the distribution choice for these casual productions, which will require a burner anyway.

Dial-up modem--it doesn't matter anymore. They are a commodity and all work pretty well. Avoid U.S. Robotics since you're paying extra for the name only. Diamond and Creative were mentioned as good, solid choices. Do stay away from so-called "winmodems" or any modem that requires Windows to operate. They use your computer to do some of the signal processing and should be avoided.

DVD writer. President Lewis declared that these are not quite ready for end users. They are expensive, hard-to-use and since a clear standard has not emerged, compatibility is still a big question. Wait and install one six months from now.

This was, for me, one of the more enjoyable SIG meetings and ironically was almost a complete accident. We touched on many different areas and I think everyone learned something they didn't know before the meeting. The new machine Debra is building is going to be a great computer!

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April Board Meeting

reported by Kevin Hopkins (kh2@uiuc.edu)

The April meeting of the CUCUG executive board took place on Tuesday, April 23, 2002, 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, Dave Witt, Mike Latinovich, John Ross, Richard Rollins, Kevin Hopkins, Jack Melby, Emil Cobb, Rich Hall, Kevin Hisel, Jim Huls and Debra Smith.

Jim Lewis: Jim said the meeting was pretty good due to Debra Smith's PC building project, which had launched the WinSIG into a hardware discussion that had taken the entire meeting time. This project had fostered several meeting ideas for the PC SIG and many ideas for future meetings were tossed around. Richard Rollins said he wanted to bring in a PC, a Mac, and a Linux box and network them all together. John Ross said the Linux SIG had planned to show an educational video at the next Linux SIG. It was decided to do a combined meeting next month based on the networking idea. A discussion followed on the hardware that would be needed to execute the plan.

Dave Witt: Dave said, "The Linux guys have been doing a hell of a job." He's very impressed with them. Dave commented that he'd like to see more command based stuff in upcoming meetings. The last meeting had been a good one all round.

Mike Latinovich: Mike said, It was interesting to see the stuff Kris was showing at the last Linux SIG, like RPM managers." He said it had inspired him to do some investigation and download a bunch of stuff. He said, "The information I'm getting out of the Linux SIG is pretty damn good. I haven't been disappointed by any of the Linux meetings yet." Regarding the WinSIG, Mike said it was interesting to deconstruct a plan to build a machine. Mike concluded, both SIGs were good.

John Ross: John said the last meeting had been fine. He noted that he has been watching the graphical side of Linux's development to see if it can't displace Windows in the business environment. He said Linux has become a decent server system in the last few years, but will it become a decent desktop system in the next few years? He said it is interesting that installing programs is getting easier. John concluded by saying that he really liked the last newsletter. It had a lot of good contributions.

Richard Rollins: Richard said he has been trying to attend all three SIGs. He observed that the Linux SIG is doing great things. The Mac SIG was pretty good. And, the PC SIG was very good. He emphasized that the group experience is very valuable.

Richard conveyed Lucy Seaman's request for another Social/Swap meet kind of meeting, which we haven't had for some time. After some discussion it was decided to slat September for such a meeting.

Kevin Hopkins: Kevin noted that he hadn't been able to attend the last meeting due to a work commitment. He said the tone of this meeting had been rather glowing of the Linux SIG as viewed from the CUCUG point of view. Kevin said he was just curious as to how the Linux SIG perceived the merger with CUCUG was progressing. John Ross said they had some of the same concerns a CUCG had: are we an association of knowledgeable users sharing information or are we a service group to help others learn and grow in computing. Kevin asked if there was any concern that advanced topics were being slighted in order to cover more basic topics. John said there had been some concerns in that regard, but he felt that over all it wasn't that big an issue. Members can go online to facilitate multiple meetings or address more arcane issues. All in all, John thought the merger has been working out very well.

Jack Melby: Jack said he had posted a URL: on the CUCUG forums regarding a controversy about OS X being based on Darwin. Supposedly a fundamentalist Christian was saying it was a plot to advance Darwinism and that the Open Source movement was nothing more than Communism. Kevin Hisel said the whole thing was a joke.

Jack reported that the Mac SIG had gone pretty well. He noted that the projector hadn't displayed colors accurately. More generally, Jack said he appreciates the scheduling of joint SIG meetings as it takes to pressure off him to come up with program ideas month after month.

Emil Cobb: Emil reported 21 members in attendance at the last meeting.

Rich Hall: Rich said there was not much new on the Treasury front. We had four new members last month. He noted that Lucy Seaman had renewed at the meeting in April.

Kevin Hisel: Kevin said that the WinSIG had been "very enjoyable." He said the Question and Answer Session had blossomed into a real meeting.

Kevin reported that CUCUG Folding@Home had gotten four members. We're now beating Scotland, the Illini, and Weazer fans. He said to check out statsman.org. We are team #3154.

Kevin said BBS usage is pretty low. The forums are pretty active on Starship CUCUG 2. He said we should promote the forums in the newsletter on an ongoing basis.

Jim Huls: Jim stated, "The last meeting was cool. The Linux side is nice to have around. The club has been more enthusiastic. OS X, XP and Linux have reinvigorated the meetings."

Jim said he had just purchased a new hard drive, a Western Digital drive rebranded by Dell, a 120 GB, 7200 RPM, 8 MB cache, normally $195 for $142.10 from dealmac.com .

Debra Smith: Debra said she really enjoyed the last meeting. She really learned a lot.

Mike Latinovich closed the meeting with the comment that there will be a joint announcement from AMD and Microsoft tomorrow regarding a 64 bit OS on AMD's 64 bit chip.

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The Back Page:

The CUCUG is a not-for-profit corporation, originally organized in 1983 to support and advance the knowledge of area Commodore computer users. We've grown since then, now supporting PC, Macintosh and Linux platforms.

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                714-1500                 lewisj@pdnt.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                714-1500                 lewisj@pdnt.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@johnmelby.com
   Mac SIG Co-Chair:   Charles Melby-Thompson   352-3638            cmelby@princeton.edu
   Linux SIG Co-Chair: John Ross                469-0208  hurricanejohnn@prairieinet.net
   Linux SIG Co-Chair: Kris Klindworth          239-0097       kris.klindworth@Carle.com

Surf our web site at http://www.cucug.org/

CUCUG
912 Stratford Dr.
Champaign, IL
61821

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