News Common PC Linux Mac Amiga CUCUG
The March 18 gathering will be one of our split SIG meetings. The Linux SIG will not meet this month due to the fact that SIG Chairman Tom Purl is out of town on business and no one else leapt into the breech. The Macintosh SIG will be open for anything anyone wants to bring in. The PC SIG will have Ed Serbe demoing Flight Simulator 2004, which he won in a previous CUCUG drawing.
Here's the list of FREE products some lucky members will WIN at the next meeting, courtesy of Microsoft (please note, you must be a 2004 member of CUCUG to participate in the drawing):
Microsoft Digital Image Suite 9 (Street Price $103.99)
Digital Image Suite including Digital Image Pro and Digital Image Library offers one integrated complete solution for all of your digital imaging needs. Digital Image Suite is packed with all of the tools you need to organize your photos, edit them using wide variety of easy-to-use tools, create hundreds of one-of-a-kind projects, print and share your work, and archive photos for safekeeping.
- Complete photo system for finding, archiving, editing, and sharing
photos
- Two Powerful Products in One
- Includes the photo organization and archival power of Digital Image
Library and the photo-editing power of Digital Image Pro
- Smart tools make it easy to manage your memories
Zoo Tycoon Complete Collection (Street Price $29.99)
Combining 3 top-selling titles, Zoo Tycoon: Complete Collection includes the original Zoo Tycoon game and the Dinosaur Digs and Marine Mania expansion packs, allowing players’ imaginations to run wild as they care for more than 100 land, aquatic, and prehistoric animals in the most beautiful and lively zoo imaginable. Additionally, Zoo Tycoon: Complete Collection comes with loads of bonus content, including the entire new Endangered Species Theme Pack. This bonus theme pack features 12 animals on the endangered and/or threatened species list, such as orangutans, whale sharks, and Komodo dragons. Zookeepers can tend to these rare animals using more than 40 new objects based on four new themes, and can challenge their inner zoo keeping skills with three new scenarios.
- Design, stock, staff, manage, and develop the zoo of your dreams
- Includes the original Zoo Tycoon game and the Dinosaur Digs and Marine
Mania expansion packs
- Bonus Endangered Species Theme Pack features endangered animals such as
orangutans, whale sharks and Komodo dragons
- More than 100 land, aquatic and prehistoric animals in the most
beautiful and lively zoo imaginable
- More than 500 building objects and specialized staff let you create a
thriving, healthy, fun zoo
If there is time remaining in the meeting after Anthony's presentation, Mark Zinzow may briefly introduce some current computer security issues and get some feedback from group members regarding which issues they'd like to see explored in more detail in subsequent PCUG presentations.
Before the meeting (from 5:45 pm to 6:45 pm), we will have our usual (optional) dinner at Garcia's Pizza on Green Street for anyone who may want to stop by and join us. For more details on the dinner, see:
http://www2.uiuc.edu/ro/pcug/pizza.html
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(This FAQ is reproduced from www.freebsd.org)
What is FreeBSD?
FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible, AMD64, Alpha, IA-64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC. architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX. developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. Additional platforms are in various stages of development.
Cutting edge features
FreeBSD offers advanced networking, performance, security and compatibility features today which are still missing in other operating systems, even some of the best commercial ones.
Powerful Internet solutions
FreeBSD makes an ideal Internet or Intranet server. It provides robust network services under the heaviest loads and uses memory efficiently to maintain good response times for thousands of simultaneous user processes. Visit our gallery for examples of FreeBSD powered applications and services.
Run a huge number of applications
The quality of FreeBSD combined with today's low-cost, high-speed PC hardware makes FreeBSD a very economical alternative to commercial UNIX. workstations. It is well-suited for a great number of both desktop and server applications.
Easy to install
FreeBSD can be installed from a variety of media including CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, floppy disk, magnetic tape, an MS-DOS. partition, or if you have a network connection, you can install it directly over anonymous FTP or NFS. All you need is a couple of formatted 1.44MB floppies and these directions.
FreeBSD is free
While you might expect an operating system with these features to sell for a high price, FreeBSD is available free of charge and comes with full source code. If you would like to try it out, more information is available.
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Some helpful URLs:
(1) The above FAQ and much more info. can be found at:
(2) The live FreeBSD CD that Anthony will bring for his demo is from:
(3) A couple of URLs that Anthony may reference in his discussion are:
http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4linux1.php
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=580&page=1
It's probably not the first time that record company executives have been likened to Al Capone, but this time a judge might have to agree or disagree.
A New Jersey woman, one of the hundreds of people accused of copyright infringement by the Recording Industry Association of America, has countersued the big record labels, charging them with extortion and violations of the federal antiracketeering act.
Through her attorneys, Michele Scimeca contends that by suing file-swappers for copyright infringement, and then offering to settle instead of pursuing a case where liability could reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the RIAA is violating the same laws that are more typically applied to gangsters and organized crime.
"This scare tactic has caused a vast amount of settlements from individuals who feared fighting such a large institution and feel victim to these actions and felt forced to provide funds to settle these actions instead of fighting," Scimeca's attorney, Bart Lombardo, wrote in documents filed with a New Jersey federal court. "These types of scare tactics are not permissible and amount to extortion."
Scimeca is one of a growing number of people fighting the record industry's copyright infringement campaign against file-swappers, although few have used such creative legal strategies.
According to the RIAA, which filed its latest round of lawsuits against 531 as-yet-anonymous individuals on Tuesday, it has settled with 381 people, including some who had not yet actually had suits filed against them yet. A total of nearly 1,500 people have been sued so far.
The industry group says that "a handful" of people have countersued, using a variety of claims.
"If someone prefers not to settle, they of course have the opportunity to raise their objections in court," an RIAA representative said. "We stand by our claims."
Few if any of the cases appear to have progressed far, however. The first RIAA lawsuits against individuals were filed more than five months ago, although the majority of people targeted have been part of the "John Doe" campaigns against anonymous individuals this year.
Several individuals and companies have started by fighting the RIAA attempts to identify music swappers though their Internet service providers (ISPs).
The most prominent, known by the alleged file-swapper's screen name "Nycfashiongirl," resulted in at least a temporary victory for the computer user. A Washington, D.C., court ruled in December that the RIAA's initial legal process for subpoenaing ISP subscriber identities before filing lawsuits was illegal. Because "Nycfashiongirl" had been targeted under this process, the RIAA dropped its request for her identity.
However, that may have provided only a temporary reprieve. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that is closely following the RIAA's campaign, the Internet address used by "Nycfashiongirl" was included in the batch of lawsuits filed on Tuesday against anonymous individuals, raising the likelihood that she will be drawn back into the courts.
Separate attempts to fight subpoenas are ongoing in North Carolina and St. Louis, where the American Civil Liberties Union and ISP Charter Communications are respectively challenging the RIAA's information requests.
In San Francisco, computer user Raymond Maalouf has taken the first steps toward fighting the RIAA's suits. His daughters were the ones that used Kazaa to download music, and one of them even wound up in last month's Super Bowl advertisement for Pepsi's iTunes promotion, which featured a handful of teens caught in the RIAA dragnet.
In documents filed with San Francisco courts, Maalouf's attorneys noted that downloading through Kazaa was openly discussed at Maalouf's daughter's school by teachers, and they downloaded songs used in classes. That should be a protected fair use of the music, the attorneys said.
At a status conference held in San Francisco early in February, Maalouf's case was just one of five RIAA lawsuits moving through the courts together, attorney Ted Parker said. However, several of those others involved defendants who appeared close to settlement, he added.
Even RIAA critics look at Scimeca's racketeering-based countersuit as a long shot. But it's worth trying, they say.
"It is the first I've heard of anyone attempting that," said EFF legal director Cindy Cohn. "I guess that is a silver lining of the fact that the RIAA is suing so many people, that there are a lot of lawyers trying to figure out ways to protect folks."
Bottom line:
This is one of just a handful of countersuits. Even critics of the RIAA view it as a long-shot but one worth trying, and a sign that lawyers are working on arguments against the RIAA.
Related News
* RIAA steps up file-trading suits - February 17, 2004
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5160262.html
* Court: RIAA lawsuit strategy illegal - December 19, 2003
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5129687.html
* RIAA lawsuits yield mixed results - December 4, 2003
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5113188.html
* RIAA turns up heat on subpoena fighter - August 27, 2003
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5069019.html
* Get this story's "Big Picture"
http://news.com.com/2104-1027-5161209.html
Almost ten years to the day, this reporter was in New York listening to then Apple CEO Michael Spindler and hardware chief Jim Gable launch the first Power Macs: the 6100, 7100 and 8100.
Quite apart from offering a big performance jump over older, 680x0-based Macs, the new models were going to blast Intel out of the water. Originally due to be launched on 24 January 1994 - the Mac's tenth birthday - Apple's slipped and ended up launching on 14 March.
The three machines were based on the first PowerPC chip, the MPC601, a desktop-oriented implementation of IBM's RS/6000 line. PowerPC's Risc architecture and with the development efforts of two key semiconductor players, IBM and Motorola, would be a combination Intel, struggling alone with its x86 Cisc architecture, could never match.
Of course, what neither figured out - nor Apple, for that matter - was that Intel would leverage the same ideas. With the 486 to the Pentium and its successors, Intel created chips that decoded complex x86 instructions into a number of simple, Risc-like 'micro-op' instructions.
Still, the Power Macs, for a time, were impressive performers, and Apple's clever move of integrating 680x0 emulation software to retain backwards compatibility with older Mac apps proved a signal success that few other IT companies have achieved. Ditto its ability to allow new PowerPC code to co-exist with 680x0 instructions, allowing one program file to contain code for two very different processor types.
Not only did old software run on the new machine, but the bulk of the Mac OS remained in 680x0 code, with portions ported over to the new PowerPC instruction set over time.
Indeed, Apple sold 145,000 Power Macs in the two weeks following the launch, and went on to sell more personal computers in the US than market leader Compaq during Q3 of that year. Over a million were sold in the platform's first year. In those days Apple was a regular feature of the top five computer suppliers chart, usually in the top three.
[I remember having to write much of that issue of TidBITS that Monday, since although we knew about the Power Macs well in advance, the official information from Apple didn't become available until that Monday. - Adam C. Engst, Editor of TidBITS]
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=04032
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=04034
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=04066
Apple is known for drawing attention to itself, but last week even its harshest critics must have looked at the company in a new light. As reported by the Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required to view the first URL, below), Steve Jobs announced in an email message to employees that Apple had paid off the company's remaining $300 million in long-term debt. This means Apple is now basically debt-free and has over $4.5 billion in cash and cash equivalents - things it can sell off without penalty like bonds and short-term investments. This doesn't include any stock in other companies that might still have value, too.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,BT_CO_20040115_002273,00.html
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040116/101/ejkww.html
The next time someone tells you Apple is in danger of imminent demise because they have under $10 billion in yearly sales and three percent of the market share of all new computers sold, you might point out that $4.5 billion war chest, which compares favorably to Dell ($50 billion in yearly revenue, but $4.6 billion in cash minus long-term debt), Gateway ($3.5 billion in yearly sales, $1 billion in cash minus debt), and HP ($73 billion in sales, $7.5 billion in cash minus debt). For purposes of comparison, Microsoft has $35 billion in yearly revenue and nearly $53 billion in cash (no debt).
Because Apple has so much cash on hand and because it's regularly producing positive audited earnings (so-called GAAP, or "Generally Accepted Accounting Principles," earnings), the company isn't in imminent danger of anything. At the current rate, it will just keep amassing more and more cash.
With these types of numbers, it's possible that Apple might consider offering stock dividends, which Microsoft finally started releasing in January 2003. It would be a way to turn cash into stockholder-owned equity without necessarily hurting the business.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/jan03/01-16ds.asp
One final note. Apple's formal price-to-earnings ratio (P/E, or the value of its stock compared to its per-share net earnings) is nearly 60, far above the 10 to 20 range that most stock analysts believe is a sensible range based on continued reasonable growth of a mature company. However, the financial magazine Barron's recently noted that if you removed the $12 per share of cash that Apple has ($4.5 billion divided by 369.73 million outstanding shares) from the price, the remaining P/E is a more reasonable number - in the 20s.
(Although we're talking about financial performance and comparisons here, don't mistake us for stock advisers. We're not recommending Apple's stock, just providing some talking points.)
Apple announced today that the iTunes Music Store had hit its 50 millionth song sale, and was averaging 2.5 million songs sold per week, about half in the form of albums. In an interview this morning, Apple vice president Rob Schoeben said, "The milestones that we're hitting are not just the passage of time," but the store has been ratcheting up with major events, such as adding the Windows iTunes software, Christmas sales, the iPod mini launch, and the Pepsi promotion.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/mar/15itunes.html
Schoeben noted that the band Green Day released an exclusive single on iTunes, which shot to the number one position on the store within a day and stayed in the top three for three weeks. (Pepsi's use of the song in a commercial for the iTunes promotion, which ran during the Super Bowl, no doubt helped spread the word.) Radio stations picked up the song without any other form of the single's release. [GF]
http://www.apple.com/itunes/pepsi/ads/
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playlistId=5305681&selectedItemId=5305679
February 17, 2004: 6:59 AM EST
URL: http://money.cnn.com/2004/02/17/technology/msft_code/index.htm?cnn=yes
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The investigation into the leak of Microsoft Corp.'s source code has turned to a small software developer that has had access to the code since 1994, according to a published report Tuesday.
San Jose, Calif.-based Mainsoft Corp. said late last week it is cooperating with Microsoft and law enforcement officials after reports that some of the leaked code came from its computers, the Wall Street Journal reported.
"This may be the impetus for Microsoft (MSFT: Research, Estimates) to seriously take a second glance at how they protect their source code," Scott Marrs, an attorney for Beirne, Maynard & Parsons LLP, told the paper.
Microsoft makes its source code, or the blueprints to its software, available to about 3,000 entities, including customers and governments, the newspaper reported.
Access to the code may allow hackers to more easily break into Windows-based computers or write viruses that exploit flaws in the software programs.
Time appears to be running out for Microsoft Corp. to convince European antitrust regulators that a light touch is the best touch.
European Union antitrust leaders gathered in Brussels today and decided to unanimously support the European Commission's draft ruling to penalize Microsoft for alleged illegal monopolistic practices in Europe, The Associated Press reported. "The draft orders deep changes in the way the company operates. European Commission spokeswoman Amelia Torres said the closed-door session with representatives of the 15 EU governments ended around midday. 'The member states have unanimously backed the Commission's draft decision,' she said, without elaborating."
The New York Times reported that "the clock on the five-year-old antitrust case against Microsoft begins to run down. In less than two weeks, barring a last-minute settlement, the European Commission is expected to declare Microsoft an abusive monopolist, impose a fine of $100 million to $1 billion and order the company to make fundamental changes to the way it sells software in Europe. ... Such a ruling would be a significant setback for Microsoft after it overcame its most serious legal challenge by settling a sweeping antitrust case in the United States in 2001. And it would be the defining moment in the five-year tenure of Mario Monti, Europe's top antitrust regulator, whose term ends in the fall."
Microsoft has been public in its desire to reach a settlement with European regulators. Despite the setback of Monday's meeting, don't expect Microsoft to stop its intense lobbying across the pond. "A settlement is possible any time before the commission issues its final ruling, which could come as soon as March 24," The Times said.
Indeed, Reuters reported that Microsoft is still working behind the scenes to make a deal with the commission. Dow Jones Newswires noted that "Monday's meeting solely concerned the draft decision -- and not a settlement -- the regulator said. The Commission could still reach a settlement with Microsoft on the case, the regulator added. In this scenario, the Commission would not need to consult national regulators over a settlement with the software giant ....A Microsoft spokesman in Brussels said the company's legal team remained in daily contact with the Commission, trying to resolve the long-running case amicably." The same article, however, said that time is running out, though Microsoft would prefer a settlement to a formal decision so it can avoid admitting wrongdoing.
The Associated Press explained more about Microsoft's lobbying hopes. "Microsoft is seeking to avert a far-reaching order that would not only result in a fine of up to $3 billion (2.45 billion euros), but also force the company to change the way it sells its flagship Windows to computer-makers in Europe. A negative decision would be the biggest setback for Microsoft since a U.S. judge found it guilty of antitrust violations involving Internet browsers in 2000. ... Sources familiar with the EU case say the draft ruling similarly finds Microsoft abused its monopoly in computer operating software to gain share in markets for digital media players and low-end servers."
The Financial Times, however, said the "European Commission has scaled down its demands for Microsoft to change its business practices in a move that some of the software company's opponents fear does not go far enough against Microsoft's alleged abuse of its Windows monopoly. But Microsoft too is unhappy with Brussels' proposed solution to the long-running antitrust case, which involves giving a central role to computer manufacturers." Another Financial Times article said that Monti's draft ruling "would involve forcing Microsoft to share more technical information and provide computer manufacturers with a version of Windows that did not include its Media Player."
Agence France Presse said that though regulators "could recommend fines totalling hundreds of millions of euros, Monti has said he is mostly interested in market remedies to redress the distorting effects of monopoly behavior. In Microsoft's case, sources said, this could take the form of a requirement that it detach the Windows Media Player from the Windows operating system used on 90 percent of personal computers. The media player handles sound and visual data, such as radio and TV streams and MP3 files."
The New York Times explained more about the net impact of the EU decision on Microsoft: "The greatest effect of a ruling against Microsoft would be evident in the way the company sells its music and video-playing software program Media Player. Instead of bundling the program into its Windows operating system as Microsoft does now, the European Commission is expected to demand that Microsoft sell two versions of Windows to manufacturers of personal computers - one of them with Media Player stripped out."
More on the European regulators' sanction plans, from BBC News Online: "The panel is also expected to endorse a fine of hundreds of millions of euros, but not until a second and final meeting on 22 March. Brussels reportedly intends to give Microsoft a deadline to get its house in order or face additional action. Commission officials have worked and re-worked their draft to stand up to court scrutiny, since Microsoft is almost certain to appeal against any adverse decision."
A Long Way For Longhorn
Meanwhile, back at the bat cave... Microsoft's next version of its flagship operating system remains an embryo under the microscope. Inquiring minds still want to know when the operating system, dubbed Longhorn, will be ready. Don't hold your breath. "Sometime in the future," said Windows Group Vice President Jim Allchin, according to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. (Microsoft certainly isn't this vague with European regulators about its settlement desires.) "Allchin's response, more than showing his sense of humor, underscored the uncertainty surrounding the timing of the next Windows release, code-named Longhorn. It's an issue with deep implications for Microsoft's business and for corporate users of the operating system. Microsoft has been vague on the subject. Another top Windows executive, Will Poole, said at a conference last year that Longhorn would ship sometime in 2005. But more recently, company executives have declined to be so specific. That has led many analysts to assume that Longhorn is more likely to come in 2006 or even 2007 -- five or more years after the 2001 debut of the current version, Windows XP."
Lindows, Not Windows
At least Microsoft is making headway in its global battle with Lindows.com, a San Diego Linux-based computer maker. The company "halted operations in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg in the latest round of its cat-and-mouse legal battle with Microsoft," Reuters reported. The company ditched efforts there after Microsoft demanded the company pay a fine of up to 100,000 euros a day for not following an earlier court order, the article said. "Microsoft, which is often embroiled in legal battles with competitors, has pursued Lindows in courts around the world, alleging trademark infringement of its Windows brand name by Lindows, which offers a Linux alternative called LindowsOS."
Lindows chief executive Michael Robertson said in a prepared statement: "We have completely withdrawn our products from these markets and put notices on every page of our website, yet Microsoft is still asking that the Judge fine us 100,000 euros per day because non-U.S. visitors can view our U.S.-based website. Microsoft's actions demonstrate this has nothing to do with protecting their Dutch trademark or confusion in the marketplace, but is simply an attempt to put us out of business."
Government 1, Robots 0
The Pentagon's $1 million challenge for unmanned robotic vehicles in the Mojave Desert this weekend netted no winners, though be sure that Uncle Sam will keep tabs on interesting ideas from the competition. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Grand Challenge "ended with more of a whimper than bang as robot after robot succumbed to one malfunction or another. Within 41/2 hours, all 14 vehicles had been withdrawn or were disabled and were being returned to the starting line," The Washington Post reported. "We called it a challenge. We really wanted to push the technology forward," said DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker, according to the article. "We knew there was a chance of not having any vehicle finish. But what's important is the innovative technology that was developed here."
DARPA will hold another race in 2006, BBC News Online said.
My Government IT Review column from last week has more nitty-gritty on some of the technology players involved in sponsoring teams in the race.
A Google for All Seasons
The growth and power of search engine company Google and its place in shaping popular culture were among the themes in a New York Times article on the company yesterday. The article reminded readers that in just six years, "Google has become a verb, a way of life and new add-on for the brain." An excerpt from the article, on Google's role in recording history, both personal and otherwise: "Google makes it harder than ever to escape the past," Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig told the paper. "If you went to a state school before you enrolled at Harvard Business School or if your sexual orientation is something you kept private but someone discussed it on a blog, those facts are now in the permanent record."
In other Google news, talk about jumping the gun on the company's plans to go public: The FBI arrested a Dutch man based in New York for allegedly hawking $28 million in bogus Google stock, The San Francisco Chronicle reported. "Shamoon Rafiq, who was arrested at his home March 5, is accused of fraud as part of the scheme to sell victims shares of 'Series B Preferred Stock' in Google, prior to what he described as the company's impending initial public offering, according to authorities. Google, based in Mountain View, has no such shares and isn't raising any capital, the complaint said."
Man Is Spam's Best Friend
We might cringe and curse at getting junk e-mail offers for Viagra, losing weight and cheap mortgage rates. But some people (a lot, actually) respond to these e-mail pitches. The Wall Street Journal has a front-page piece today on one man who is a fan of spam's offers -- and appears to be a poster-child for spam supporters of the world. Orlando Soto, 45, told the paper essentially that he has an open mind and even finds spam to be a stress relief. "He buys spam-pitched aroma therapy oils for his wife and pharmaceuticals for himself. His bookcases are lined with first-edition mystery novels he bought via spam. In a corner of his two-bedroom midtown-Manhattan apartment stands an antique pinball machine bought via spam. He plays Internet bingo at five cents a game on a Web site pitched to him by spam a few weeks ago. He buys stuff via spam for himself and to resell on Web sites he sets up -- a business idea he got from a spam pitch," the article reported. "There must be a lot of Mr. Sotos out there. In a survey by MailShell, a San Francisco antispam company, 8% of respondents said they have bought products via spam. Spammers say that percentage is probably low because many people are too embarrassed to admit responding to spam."
[Filter is designed for hard-core techies, news junkies and technology professionals alike. Have suggestions, cool links or interesting tales to share? Send your tips and feedback to cindyDOTwebbATwashingtonpost.com. (Yes, those spammers have been having a lot of fun with my e-mail address lately.) ]
TOKYO - Matsushita Electric said it will join Sony Corp. in July as the second manufacturer to offer Blu-ray disk recorders.
Matsushita showed a prototype of its Blu-ray DVD-RAM recorder on Tuesday (March 9) that uses a two-layer 50 Gbyte disk. The prototype incorporates tuners that cover all digital TV broadcasting in Japan and is also compatible with present DVD-RAM and DVD-R formats. Other details won't be revealed for another several months, the company said.
Matsushita said it intends to introduce the recorder in Japan before the Athens Olympic Games to be staged in August. During the Olympics, viewers often use video recorders more often, said Shuzo Ushimaru, director of corporate marketing of Matsushita.
Matsushita said sales of DVD-RAM recorders are growing and the company is aiming to to produce 1 million DVD-RAM recorders a month.
Seizing the Athens Olympic games as an opportunity, "we are going to promote [Blu-ray disk] recorders as the high-end product of Diga [Matsushita's brand of DVD-RAM products] series, which can record HD programs," said Etsuji Shuda of Matsushita's Home AV Business Unit.
Matsushita has been developing a two-layer disk structure. Hence, Matsushita's Blu-ray disk recorders will feature recording capability on 50 Gbyte two-layer disks that can store 4.5 hours of HD video.
"It should be the world's first two-layer disk BD recorder," said Shuda. Matsushita also plans to manufacture and supply the two-layer Blu-ray disks.
"As the competing HD DVD supporters will soon introduce two-layered 32 Gbyte disks, 50 Gbyte disks will be one of important feature for Matsushita's BD recorder," said Reiji Asakura, a digital media analyst and acting vice president of the Japan Society of Picture Quality.
Other details about XP Reloaded are unknown at this time, although the update kit apparently will include a Web-based installer application that will let users choose optional features. Reports about an XP version 2 release first cropped up more than a year ago, but Microsoft officials repeatedly denied that the company planned to issue such a release. In early 2004, when the company revealed the new security features that XP SP2 will include, the rumors resurfaced. But the XP Reloaded OS refresh will clearly include a lot more than security updates, possibly in a bid to revive consumer excitement about XP while Microsoft preps the ever- delayed Longhorn release.
http://www.extremetech.com/print_article/0,1583,a=121163,00.asp
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies plans to announce this week a massive hard drive designed to store corporate data or record about 400 hours of video for consumers.
The new drive has a capacity of 400GB, spins at 7,200 revolutions per minute and uses ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) interface technology, according to a source close to Hitachi. The drive can come with either the parallel ATA interface long used in desktop computers or the newer Serial ATA interface. Dubbed the Deskstar 7K400, the drive is being tested by manufacturers and could be in digital video recorder (DVR) products available to consumers later this year, the source said.
Hitachi's product continues a push by hard-drive makers to play a larger role in the consumer electronics industry, which is using drives for devices, including DVRs and personal music players, like Apple Computer's iPods.
The company is billing the Deskstar 7K400 as the largest-capacity ATA drive with 3.5-inch platters. Currently, the largest 3.5-inch ATA drive is a 320GB product from Maxtor, according to John Monroe, an analyst at research firm Gartner. That drive, though, spins at 5,400rpm, which translates into slower performance than a 7,200rpm drive, Monroe said. He said 3.5-inch ATA drives running at 7,200rpm top out at 250GB.
Hitachi hopes that its whopper of a drive gets the attention of manufacturers in both the consumer and corporate markets.
In the latter, the drive is targeted at disk-based data storage gear called "nearline." That class of equipment has lower performance and is less reliable than systems with drives using the SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) or Fibre Channel interfaces, but it's faster for data recoveries than magnetic tape storage.
Hitachi recently announced a large-capacity 300GB drive designed for high- end storage devices, as well as a prototype of a small-size 2.5-inch drive for corporate customers.
The Deskstar 7K400 also aims to find a place in DVRs, which are devices that can record broadcasts as well as temporarily pause live programming. Hitachi already makes a 250GB drive that appears in DVRs. The roomier new drive is designed to store about 400 hours of standard broadcasts, or 45 hours of high-definition television, according to the source close to Hitachi.
DVRs are growing more powerful and popular. Monroe expects hard drives to play an increasing role in TV watching. "Every TV in the next five years will have a rotating magnetic device in it, on it or near it," he said.
It's not crazy to suggest that Linux could learn from Microsoft's example when it comes to security
In three months, Microsoft users will finally reap the benefits of the company's new focus on security. The release of the second major update to Windows XP answers many long-standing design criticisms of its operating system.
But this was not a pain-free learning exercise. Indeed, Microsoft paid a steep price in the coin of user dissatisfaction -- and in some cases, lasting mistrust.
In September 2001, the Nimda worm spread throughout networks worldwide, leading corporate customers -- including many financial firms -- to chastise Microsoft for failing to plug vulnerabilities in its code.
Two years later, the MSBlast worm and a variant of the program infected Windows computers and corporate networks, once again bringing consumer and corporate wrath on the company. But the attacks also compelled Microsoft to rethink how its provision of improved security.
Nimda resulted in the Trustworthy Computing Initiative, which is a companywide programme designed to prod Microsoft's development teams toward producing more secure code.
In the aftermath of MSBlast, Microsoft has refocused on security for its next update to the Windows XP operating system, Windows XP Service Pack 2. The changes feature an improved firewall, the ability to turn off pop-up ads and ActiveX controls in Internet Explorer and a control panel that will display the current state of a PC's security.
"One of the things that we really learned after August and Blaster is that... it is not enough to have the technology there; it has to be accessible as well," said Neil Charney, director of product management for Microsoft's Windows Client Group.
The aim is to bring ease-of-use concepts to security. The Windows Security Centre will have a simple set of status displays, showing whether the PC is protected by a firewall and has the most recent patches. It will also make sure that the antivirus software is turned on and updated. Users also will be urged to turn on the basic security protections.
The company still hasn't put an indicator on the desktop for the most basic security function: backing up data. Yet the service pack represents a solid step toward helping the overwhelming majority of customers who are not security-conscious enough to secure themselves.
Microsoft's focus on ease of security also offers an instructive example for the Linux world.
Historically, Linux has enjoyed an advantage in design and user education. Linux inherited its strength in design from Unix. In contrast, Microsoft has had to make sure that its products remained backward-compatible with its original Windows infrastructure, which treated security as an afterthought. Moreover, Windows users tend to be far less tech-savvy than those who use Linux.
However, from its Protect Your PC campaign to the coming service pack, Microsoft appears to have "got religion" about the subject. If Linux is to appeal to the general public, security must get easier.
Linux does have a wide variety of tools to secure a computer running the open-source operating system, but administering a system using the tools is relatively difficult. One tool, Nmap, checks for open data channels, known as ports, that could be vulnerable to an attacker; the tool, however, does not analyse which ports might be threats.
Another tool, Tripwire, creates a digital fingerprint of each important file on a computer and tracks changes to those files. While the software provides good security, it is so hard to configure and use that most users don't try to run the security check. (A company, also called Tripwire, makes a full-featured commercial version that is much easier to use.)
And a good backup utility that doesn't require magnetic tape is still hard to find.
As Linux slogs toward becoming a viable desktop alternative to Windows, proponents know that the battle may hinge on the ability of developers to integrate such security into major distributions. What's more, they must find ways to represent the results in an accessible way for average users. Speaking about the Linux user interface in general, Linux luminary Eric Raymond said as much in a blog that he posted recently.
"None of this is rocket science," he wrote, referring to a problem he was having installing printer software using the application's user interface. "The problem isn't that the right things are technically difficult to do... The problem is that the [software] designers' attitude was wrong. They never stepped outside their assumptions."
Some projects are doing it right. A good example of a tool that has focused on ease-of-use is Nessus, which scans a network for signs of vulnerabilities and not only tells the user what it has found but also explains why the issue poses a security problem.
Still, any Linux version that claims to be for the desktop might want to borrow a page from Microsoft's textbook and give users a central place to see the status of their data and computer system.
In the high-society circuit, they say you can never be too rich or too thin. So it goes that when developing operating systems, you can't ever make a product too accessible or too conscious about security.
Quick, easy ways to tame your operating system...from speed tweaks to security checks to troubleshooting tips.
I thought I knew it all. Or all about Windows, at least. But it seems like every time I turn around I find a new and better way to move a file, fix a disk error, patch a security leak, or browse the Web. Whether you need to record a CD, encrypt a folder, or find a wireless network, there are still plenty of new tricks to learn, even if you're an experienced user. Here are 76 fast and easy ways to make Windows work better than ever.
1. (ALL) Bring back the tree: You open a folder, but there's no directory tree on the left. What to do? Just click the Folders icon on the Standard toolbar (in 2000, Me, and XP), or choose View, Explorer Bar, Folders (in any version).
2. (ALL) Customize Details, part 1: To change the order of the Name, Size, Type, Date Modified, and other columns in the default Details view (click View, Details), just put your pointer over a column head and drag right or left.
3. (2K, ME, XP) Customize Details, part 2: Why settle for the default Details columns? Right-click any heading and choose an item with no check mark to add that information, or uncheck to remove it. Choose More on the right-click menu (or View, Choose Columns or View, Choose Details on the main menu) to make these changes via a dialog box.
4. (ALL) Get the big picture: Whenever you need to see more of a folder or Internet Explorer browser window, simply press F11 to view the window in full-screen mode. Then press F11 again to revert to normal view. Bonus tip: If you're using Windows 2000, Me, or XP, you can add a button to toggle between modes by right-clicking the Standard toolbar and choosing Customize. Click Full Screen under 'Available toolbar buttons', and then choose Add and Close.
5. (ALL) Autohide the folder tree: In full-screen mode, you can make the folder tree--or any option set via View, Explorer Bar--disappear to give you an even broader view, and yet reappear when you move the mouse to the left edge of the window. Click the pushpin button at the top of the left pane to unpin the current Explorer Bar, and then move your pointer to the right pane.
6. (ALL) Bring hidden files into the open: By default, Windows hides many system files. This can make correcting problems difficult. To see all files, choose Tools, Folder Options, View in any Explorer or folder window. In the 'Advanced settings' list, select Show hidden files and folders (Show all files in Windows 98). In versions other than 98, uncheck Hide protected operating system files (Recommended). Click Yes and OK.
7. (2K, ME, XP) Broaden your folder view: If your folders have a margin on the left with links to resources or tasks you never use, give more screen real estate to your files and folders by choosing Tools, Folder Options, Use Windows Classic Folders, OK. This will remove the Explorer Bar and its "common tasks" shortcuts.
8. (XP) Squeeze in more thumbnails: You can fit more icons in the right pane of Explorer's Thumbnails view (View, Thumbnails) by hiding the name listed under each. Click a different folder in the tree pane to change the view, and then hold down Shift as you click the folder with thumbnails to view it with no names.
9. (XP) Take folders to task: If you like Explorer's task pane but want the various tasks displayed there to match the folder's contents, right- click the control icon in the window's upper-left corner, choose Properties, Customize, and pick the most appropriate description under 'Use this folder type as a template.'
10. (ALL) Get a new disk view: Wondering how full your disk is getting, or how to clean it up? Right-click any drive icon in Explorer (under My Computer) and choose Properties. You'll see a pie-chart representation of your disk use, a button that launches the Disk Cleanup utility, and a Tools tab that lists other maintenance utilities.
11. (XP) Squeeze your disk, part 1: If your disk is formatted with NTFS, you can compress your files and folders to conserve space. Select the files or folders you want to smoosh, right-click the selection, and choose Properties. On the General tab, click Advanced. Check Compress contents to save disk space and click OK. You may be asked to specify which files and folders to include.
12. (XP) Plug AutoPlay: When you put a CD in the drive, Windows gives you a choice of actions. You can answer once for each type of content (music, say), but if you want AutoPlay off, right-click the CD drive in Explorer and choose Properties. Under AutoPlay, select a content type from the list at the top and pick your preferred settings below. To turn AutoPlay off for a specific type, click Select an action to perform, Take no action, and click OK.
13. (XP) Squeeze your disk, part 2: To compress an entire NTFS hard-disk partition, right-click the disk's icon in Explorer and choose Properties. Check Compress drive to save disk space and click OK or Apply. At the confirmation prompt, select the option to compress all subfolders and files (not just those in the root), and click OK.
14. (ME, XP) Squeeze your disk, part 3: You can squish your files automatically by moving them to a compressed folder. To create one, right- click in any folder window or on the desktop and choose New, Compressed Folder (in Me) or New, Compressed (zipped) Folder (in XP). If you don't see this command, make sure you've installed this feature (see tip 47).
15. (2K, XP) Take a letter: If you want to reassign the letters of your disk volumes, log in as an administrator, choose Start, Run, type diskmgmt.msc, and press Enter. Right-click a disk in the bottom of the window and choose Change Drive Letter and Path. Click Edit or Change, select an unused letter from the drop-down list, click OK, answer any prompts, and click OK again.
16. (XP) Preserve your password: Trust your friends, but cut the cards. And trust your memory, but keep a password reset disk nearby in case you ever forget your XP password. First, get a blank, formatted floppy disk at the ready, and then type Control Panel\User Accounts in the Address bar of any Explorer or Internet Explorer window. Press Enter, select your account, click Prevent a forgotten password in the Related Tasks list, and follow the steps presented in the Forgotten Password Wizard.
17. (XP) Bypass forgotten passwords, part 1: If you don't have a password reset disk, log in with another administrator account, open the User Accounts control panel (see tip 16), select the account with the forgotten password, click Change the password, and follow the instructions to reset it.
18. (XP) Bypass forgotten passwords, part 2: If you don't have another administrator account, reboot your PC and press F8 until you see the Windows start-up options as described in. Use the arrow keys to highlight Safe Mode, and press Enter. When you see the Welcome screen, select Administrator (a hidden account that by default needs no password). Follow the steps in to reset the account password, and then restart your computer.
19. (2K, XP) Be a power user: When you log in as an administrator, your system is vulnerable to Trojan horse programs and other risks. When you log in as a power user, however, you avoid these risks and get all the functionality you typically need (switching back to administrator when necessary is easy; see below). To demote yourself, choose Start, Run, type lusrmgr.msc, and press Enter. Click Groups and double-click Administrators. Make sure you have an account listed under Members that you can use when you need full administrator privileges. Select the account to demote, click Remove, and then click OK. Double-click Power Users, click Add, type your account name, and click OK twice.
20. (2K, XP) Become a part-time administrator: Power users don't need to log out and back in with an administrator account to run an administrator program (such as the lusrmgr.msc program described in tip 19). Instead, hold down Shift and right-click the program's executable (.exe) file in Explorer, or any shortcut to it. Choose Run as, select either Run the program as the following user (in 2000) or The following user (in XP), and enter the name and password (and domain, if necessary) of an administrator account. Click OK.
21. (XP) Camera Action: The initial time you connect your digital camera to your PC, you can select an action and check Always use this program for this action to keep from seeing a prompt. But what if you want something else later? Connect the camera again, right-click its icon in Explorer, and choose Properties. Use the settings on the Events tab to select what happens the next time you link it.
22. (XP Pro) Keep your secrets: To protect sensitive files and folders on NTFS-formatted drives, use Windows' built-in encryption. Choose the uncompressed files or folders to encrypt, right-click them, and then select Properties. On the General tab, click Advanced. Check Encrypt contents to secure data and click OK. Specify the files and folders to include. The files are accessible only to the user who encrypted them. To undo, uncheck the Encrypt box. (The encryption option is disabled in XP Home.)
23. (XP) Keep a no profile: Any administrator can see the files on your desktop, in your My Documents folder, and elsewhere in your profile folder by finding your account subfolder in the Documents and Settings folder. For additional privacy on NTFS-formatted disks, open the Documents and Settings folder, right-click the folder you want to keep private, and choose Properties. Click Sharing, check Make this folder private, and click OK.
24. (ME, XP) Turn back the clock: If your PC is acting strangely, use System Restore to return Windows to an earlier, stable state. Select Start, Programs (All Programs in XP), Accessories, System Tools, System Restore, click Restore my computer to an earlier time, Next, and follow the instructions.
25. (ME, XP) Put a finer point on it: Whenever you're planning to make any changes to your system, be sure to create a restore point before you begin. Open System Restore as described above, select Create a Restore Point, click Next, and follow the instructions. Bonus tip: Manual restore points aren't needed when you install software, updates, or device drivers; Windows creates them for you automatically.
26. (XP) Customize your restorations, part 1: To choose which drives System Restore monitors for changes and how much space it reserves for its backups, right-click My Computer and choose Properties. Click System Restore, select a drive, click Settings, and set the controls to your taste.
27. (ME) Customize your restorations, part 2: Adjusting the space System Restore uses for its backups in Me is slightly different: Right-click My Computer, choose Properties, Performance, File System, and under Hard Disk, drag the 'System Restore disk space use' slider to the desired amount. Bonus tip: Click Disable System Restore under System Properties' Troubleshooting tab to turn System Restore off.
28. (ALL) Seek solutions in Safe Mode: If something stops Windows in its tracks or causes it to misbehave, reboot and press F8 before Windows loads (you may have to press it a few times to find the moment that gets a response). This brings up the Advanced Options menu. Use the arrow keys to select Safe Mode, and press Enter to launch Windows using a minimal set of drivers. With luck, you can undo whatever you did to cause the problem, and then restart Windows normally.
29. (2K, XP) Revert your Registry: If Safe Mode doesn't solve the problem, access the Advanced Options menu as explained in tip 28, but this time select Last Known Good Configuration and press Enter. This launches Windows using the last version of the Registry that led to a successful start-up. No files are removed.
30. (2K, XP) Copy your error messages: When Windows tells you something's gone haywire, you may want to preserve the error messages to send to a support tech or your local PC guru. To do so, just press Ctrl-C to copy the message to your Clipboard, open a new e-mail to your tech helper, press Ctrl-V to paste the error alert text, and then send the message on its way.
31. (ALL) Get the big error picture: If you can't copy just the error message's text as described above, press Alt-Print Screen (the name of the latter key may be abbreviated on your keyboard) to capture an image of the error message box. Paste the image into your e-mail application (if it supports graphics) or into your word processor. You can also paste the screen into Windows' Paint imaging utility by opening that program and choosing Edit, Paste. Save the picture as a bitmap (.bmp), JPEG (.jpg), or other file format that you can send as an e-mail attachment to your friendly neighborhood Windows repairperson.
32. (ALL) Find help in Google Groups: To find help online, enter some or all of the text from the Windows error message into Google's main search box. If that doesn't help you find a fix, click the Groups tab on the Google search results page to see archived discussions that may relate to your problem.
33. (XP) Let Windows do the work: The first time you connect to a network, Windows XP's Network Setup Wizard steps you through the details. To run the wizard manually, choose Start, Run, type netsetup, and press Enter.
34. (XP) Go wireless: When you plug a wireless adapter into your computer, XP displays the Connect to Wireless Network dialog box. If it does not, right-click the wireless-network icon in the system tray and choose View Available Wireless Networks. (If you don't see this icon, go to the Address bar of any Explorer window, type Control Panel\Network Connections, and right-click the Wireless Network Connection icon.) Select your wireless connection and click Connect.
35. (XP) Link to an insecure wireless net: If the Connect button is disabled (grayed out) in the Wireless Network Connection dialog box, the network may lack Wired Equivalent Privacy or newer Wi-Fi Protected Access security. To get around this, check Allow me to connect to the selected wireless network, even though it is not secure. Be aware, though, that your privacy is at risk.
36. (XP) Do-it-yourself wireless: By default, Windows XP configures your wireless network automatically (the so-called Wireless Zero Configuration feature). But if your wireless hardware comes with its own software drivers, you may need to turn the Windows feature off. To do so, double- click the Wireless Network Connection icon in the Network Connections window (as described in tip 34, "Go wireless"), or click the miniature version of that icon in your system tray. Select the Properties button, and in the Wireless Network Connection Properties dialog box, click Wireless Networks. Uncheck Use Windows to configure my wireless network settings and click OK.
37. (XP) Switch accounts in a blink: If your PC has enough memory, you can move from one user account to another without first logging off: To do so, click Start, Log Off, Switch User. This can save time when you just need to make a quick visit to another account. But you probably don't want to make a habit of it, because your system's performance may lag, especially when you run games, system utilities, and other demanding applications.
38. (XP) Disable fast switching: There's another disadvantage to Fast User Switching: With this feature on you can't use Windows' Offline Files function, which automatically downloads Web pages for offline viewing. To do without Fast User Switching, go to the Address bar of any Explorer or Internet Explorer window, type Control Panel\User Accounts, and press Enter. Click Change the way users log on or off, uncheck Use Fast User Switching, and finally click Apply Options.
39. (XP) Disable accounts instead of deleting them: If Maria takes an extended leave, don't delete her account as a security precaution. Re- creating the account later with the same name won't confer the same permissions she enjoyed previously--and it won't let Maria access her encrypted files (see tip 22). If you think someone may need an orphaned user account again, you can disable it instead of deleting it altogether (note that this procedure doesn't work in XP Home): Press Windows-R, type lusrmgr.msc, and press Enter. Click the Users folder icon and then double- click the name of the user account. Check Account is disabled and click OK. To restore the account, simply uncheck this box.
40. (XP) Save files from a deleted account: If you're positive you will never need Maria's account again, you can delete it and still preserve her user files: First, log in with an administrator account, click in the Address bar of any Explorer or Internet Explorer window, type Control Panel\User Accounts, and press Enter. Next, select the account name to be deleted, choose Delete the account, click Keep Files, and lastly select Delete Account. Even though Maria's account will be gone for good, all of her desktop and My Documents files will be placed in a new folder on the administrator account's desktop. Keep in mind, however, that Maria's e- mail and all of the other settings for her account are lost permanently.
41. (XP) Run your ancient apps: If a pre-XP application doesn't run under Windows' latest incarnation (and an update isn't available for the program), right-click the program's shortcut and choose Properties. Select Compatibility, Run this program in compatibility mode for and choose the appropriate Windows version. Click OK. Safety alert: Never run an antivirus program, a defragger, or any other system utility under a version of Windows it isn't intended for. Doing so could damage your system.
42. (ALL) Fix broken uninstallers: If you try to uninstall a program using the Add or Remove Programs applet in Control Panel, but the uninstaller refuses to run, some or all of the program's files may already be deleted. Just reinstall the app to the same folder it was in, and use Add or Remove Programs again to delete it properly.
43. (ALL) Update your graphics driver: Many common Windows problems can be traced to outdated or buggy graphics drivers. If you can't find the source of recurring problems with one or more of your applications, go to the Web site of your graphics card manufacturer and see whether you can download a more recent driver.
44. (2K, ME, XP) Remove Devices the Safe Way: You can plug in and remove some peripheral devices (such as cameras) with no problems. However, other removable gear poses a greater risk to your PC's stability. For example, removing a network PC Card adapter from a notebook or an external hard drive from a desktop can cause you to lose data if you're working on files that reside on the network or on the hard drive. The proper approach: Click the Safely Remove Hardware icon in the system tray (you may need to click the 'Show hidden icons' arrow first). From the pop-up menu, select the hardware to be removed. You can now unplug the device. Double-click the Safely Remove Hardware icon if you prefer to work with a dialog box.
45. (XP) Make the smart move: The Files and Settings Transfer Wizard is the best way to move your Windows settings from one PC to another. You can transport files and settings from Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, and other parts of Windows via a network or a removable medium. Install your apps on the new machine, choose Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Files and Settings Transfer Wizard, and follow the instructions.
46. (XP) Don't forget your big mailbag: If you choose 'Settings only' in the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard and use a floppy disk to transfer the settings, Windows will move your Outlook Express mail only if it fits on the disk. Use a larger medium to make sure Windows brings your OE messages along, too.
47. (ALL) Get all the OS you paid for: Not all the Windows tools and toys you need may be installed on your PC. Open any Explorer or folder window, and in the Address bar type Control Panel\Add/Remove Programs (in Windows 98, 2000, and Me) or Control Panel\Add or Remove Programs (in XP). Click Windows Setup or Add/Remove Windows Components, select an item, and click Details (if necessary); you may need to click Details again to see more subcomponents. Check the items you want, click OK, and follow the instructions. You may be prompted to insert your Windows CD to install some of these programs.
48. (2K, ME, XP) Speed up your disk-keeping: To create a shortcut that cleans your disk the way you want, choose Start, Run, type cleanmgr /sageset:, enter a number from 0 to 65,535 (don't type a comma), and press Enter. (The number simply identifies the options you select.) Choose the settings you want and click OK. To make the shortcut that runs Disk Cleanup, right-click on the desktop or in a folder and choose New, Shortcut. In the location box, type cleanmgr /sagerun:x (replacing x with the number you entered previously). Follow the prompts to finish the shortcut.
49. (2K, ME, XP) Automate your updates: To automate the Windows Update feature in Windows XP, right-click My Computer, choose Properties, and click the Automatic Updates tab. In Windows Me and 2000 (Service Pack 3 or later), open Control Panel and double-click Automatic Updates. In Windows 2000 and XP, check Keep my computer up to date. In all versions, select one of the three available options.
50. (ME, XP) Undo your automatic updates: Windows creates a restore point before it performs an update. See tip 24 for instructions on starting System Restore. On the 'Select a Restore Point' screen, click the date of the update, pick the restore point prior to the problem, click Next, and follow the prompts.
51. (98, 2K) Add an update utility: Windows 98 or 2000 versions before Service Pack 3 need the Windows Critical Update Notification utility to check for patches automatically. Double-click the Scheduled Tasks icon in the system tray or Control Panel. If the utility isn't there, go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com, click Pick updates to install, and click Critical Updates and Service Packs. Look for and select this utility.
52. (ALL) Update manually: To freshen up Windows the old-fashioned way, check for available patches yourself: Choose Start, Windows Update or Start, All Programs, Windows Update and follow the prompts at the Windows Update site.
53. (XP) Enable CD writing: With a blank disc inserted in your recordable CD drive, press Windows-E to open Explorer, right-click the drive's icon, choose Properties, Recording, and make sure Enable CD recording on this drive is checked. Note that the tabs and options listed in the CD Drive Properties dialog box are driver specific; those available vary by drive.
54. (XP) Go the third-party route: If you use a CD recording utility such as Roxio Easy CD & DVD Creator (http://www.roxio.com/), follow the steps in tip 53, but uncheck Enable CD recording on this drive (or the equivalent option for your driver). That way, Windows' own recording features won't conflict with those of your utility.
55. (XP) Relocate your CD image: Windows reserves hard-disk space for data that will be written to a recordable CD--usually 650MB to 700MB, but as much as 1GB on high-capacity drives. You can tell Windows to use the drive with the most free space: Open the CD Drive Properties dialog box as described in tip 53 and click the Recording tab (or the equivalent option for your driver). Choose the drive, which in the example is listed in a drop-down list under 'Desktop CD recording'.
56. (XP) Do a slow burn: By default, Windows uses a CD-R drive's fastest transfer speed. If you're having problems, slow it down: Open CD Drive Properties to the Recording tab (or your driver's equivalent) and choose a slower speed, is under 'Select a write speed'.
57. (XP) Send files to CD: You can choose the files you want to burn to a CD in Windows Explorer and drag them to the drive's icon, or just right- click the selected files, click Send To, and pick your drive. Windows will copy the files to a holding area rather than directly to the CD. You can double-click the drive icon in Explorer to view the files. In the task pane on the left, click Write these files to CD when you're ready to transfer, and follow the steps in the CD Writing Wizard.
58. (ALL) Make media CDs with Windows Media Player: If you use Windows Media Player 9 to create a custom playlist, you can copy those tunes to a CD (providing they fit). With Media Player open in full mode, click Copy to CD or Device on the left. Select your playlist from the 'Music to Copy' drop-down list. If you see 'Will not fit' in the status column of your playlist, uncheck one or more files. Finally, click Copy Music in the upper-right corner.
59. (ALL) Make media CDs with another program: Windows Media Player 9 provides free, built-in file copying to CD-R drives, but third-party utilities give you more options, including the ability to copy your music CDs without the loss of audio quality that is a consequence of Windows Media Player's format conversion.
60. (ALL) Character-ize: If your documents need the occasional special typographic character, choose Start, Programs (All programs in XP), Accessories, System Tools, Character Map, or just press Windows-R, type charmap, and press Enter. (If you don't have the character map installed, see tip 47 for instructions on how to add it.) Set your font, double-click the character you need, click the Copy button, and paste the character into the desired document. In Windows 2000 and XP, you can also drag and drop from the character map's 'Characters to copy' box to WordPad and several other applications.
61. (ALL) Enable your player's controls: If you open a DVD or CD in Windows Media Player 9 but the player controls are disabled, make sure the player's menu bar is visible (you may have to click the button in the upper-left corner in full mode). Choose Play, DVD, VCD or CD Audio (the wording may vary).
62. (ALL) Zoom your DVDs: If you use Windows Media Player 9 to watch DVDs, use the full-screen icon in the bottom-right corner to zoom, or press Alt- Enter to switch to and from full-screen mode. Move the pointer away from the screen edges (and then keep the mouse immobile) to banish the controls and to fill the screen with your show. To keep the controls in view, click the pushpin at the top of the screen.
63. (ALL) Control your DVD speed: When viewing DVDs in Windows Media Player 9, click or drag the slider on the seek bar to move ahead or back. Press Ctrl-Shift-F to play in fast motion, Ctrl-Shift-G for slightly speeded-up playback, and Ctrl-Shift-S for slow motion. Ctrl-Shift-N returns the playback to normal speed.
64. (ALL) Control DVDs from your keyboard: Other handy keys for DVD are Ctrl-P to pause or resume, F10 to turn up the volume, F9 to decrease it, and F8 to mute it.
65. (XP) Tone down the bling-bling, part 1: If your PC's application windows open too slowly, you can help out by turning off some of Windows' razzle-dazzle visual effects. Right-click My Computer and choose Properties. Select Advanced, and under Performance, click Settings. Under the Visual Effects tab, select Adjust for best performance, or choose Custom and turn off all the effects you can live without.
66. (98, 2K, ME) Tone down the bling-bling, part 2: To pep up Windows 98, 2000, or Me, right-click the desktop and choose Properties. Click the Effects tab. Uncheck the items in the Visual Effects box until you find the balance of speed and attractiveness that's best for you. In Windows 98, turn off Animate windows, menus and lists; in all three versions, you can uncheck Show window contents while dragging.
67. (XP) Set your priorities: XP's Performance Options dialog box gives you limited control over how Windows uses memory and what tasks are given priority for your computer's processor. To check your settings, open the Performance Options dialog box as described in tip 65 and click Advanced. Under Processor Scheduling, leave Programs selected to give foreground applications priority over those running in the background. However, if you usually work in one application while another sorts a database, prints heavy-duty graphics, or performs some other kind of processor-intensive task in the background, select Background services to have the processor share its time with all running tasks equally instead of giving priority to the foreground application. You likely will want to use the default Programs setting under 'Memory usage'. Choose System cache only if you use your computer as a server rather than as a workstation.
68. (ALL) Check hibernation compatibility: If you'd like Windows to start in seconds with all your apps and documents open just as you left them when you shut down, try hibernation. Click in the Address bar of any Explorer or Internet Explorer window and type Control Panel\Power Options. If the Power Options Properties dialog box has no Hibernate tab, you're out of luck. If it does, click it to see if you meet hibernation's disk- space requirements.
69. (ALL) Snooze and win, part 1: If your system does support hibernation, enable it by clicking the Hibernate tab of the Power Options Properties dialog box (see tip 68) and checking Enable hibernation.
70. (ALL) Snooze and win, part 2: Once hibernation is enabled, choose Start, Shut Down or Start, Turn Off Your Computer when you're ready to leave. If you clicked 'Shut Down', select Hibernate and click OK. If you clicked 'Turn Off Your Computer', hold down the Shift key to change the Standby icon to Hibernate, and then click it.
71. (ALL) Big Borders: Make window borders easier to grab: Have you ever struggled to position your mouse over a window border juuuust right in an attempt to resize the window? To make resizing easier, right-click the desktop, choose Properties, and click the Appearance tab. (In XP, click the Advanced button.) From the Item drop-down list, choose Active Window Border and increase the value under Size.
72. (ALL) Build a bigger taskbar: If you have too many buttons crowding your taskbar and system tray, right-click the taskbar and make sure 'Lock the Taskbar' is unchecked. Now you can drag the top of the taskbar up to double its height. Move it to a screen edge and resize it to save space.
73. (ALL) Hide your taskbar: If you would like to make more room for other windows, right-click the taskbar and choose Properties. Check Auto Hide or Auto-hide the taskbar, and click OK. The taskbar will disappear, but it will slide back in place when you move the pointer to the proper screen edge.
74. (ALL) Quash giant menu icons: By default Windows uses large icons in the Start menu but small ones in all its submenus. To get rid of the supersize pics, right-click the Start button (in XP) or the taskbar (in all versions) and choose Properties. In XP, click the appropriate Customize button and select Small icons (if you use the XP Start menu) or Show Small Icons in Start menu in the 'Advanced Start menu options' list (if you use the classic Start menu). In other Windows versions, click Show small icons in Start menu on the first tab you see.
75. (98) Clean your desktop, part 1: Tired of icons cluttering your desktop? To hide them in Windows 98, right-click the desktop and select Properties. Click the Effects tab and check Hide icons when the desktop is viewed as a Web page. Click OK. Now whenever you want to see a cleaner desktop, all you have to do is right-click it and choose Active Desktop, View As Web Page to send your icons into stealth mode.
76. (2K, ME, XP) Clean your desktop, part 2: Desktop icons can take up a lot of space in other versions of Windows as well. To hide them in 2000 and Me, right-click the desktop, choose Active Desktop, and make sure Show Web Content is checked. Right-click the desktop again (if needed) and choose Active Desktop, Show Desktop Icons to bring your icons back into view. To hide desktop icons in XP, right-click the desktop and click Arrange Icons By, Show Desktop Icons (to uncheck it). Then repeat the steps to bring the icons back.
I was very impressed with the creative suggestion in your Circuits article a few weeks back on using the Windows Sound Recorder to record more than a minute by concatenating empty sound files together.
Many inexpensive CDR or CDRW drives include a free Nero, or Nero Express CD Recording software. I'm not sure about express, but the full Nero includes the Nero Wave Editor making it a cheap alternative to the Windows Sound Recorder that many folks may already have. It uses a trial mp3 encoder that expires after writing something like 15 or 20 mp3 files, but it records and edits wave files beautifully, and includes many additional features Sound Recorder lacks.
The free lame encoder does a great job of converting wav files to mp3, so I see no reason to pay extra for the one bundled with Nero. While the editor is included with the cheap OEM versions of Nero 6, I don't think it's licensed to run. Last time I looked, Nero 5 was like $5 a copy in Pricewatch.
Anyhow, I thought I'd share a simple batch file I wrote that makes it easy to convert wav files to mp3 right from Windows Explorer. Feel free to share it, and/or this entire letter, with your readers if you like it.
Batch programming is very simple and handy. This program could be easily modified to run virtually any program on files selected in Explorer. There is enough information in the XP Help & Support for anyone to learn the basics of batch files. Search for "Command-line reference A-Z" as most batch commands cannot be searched for themselves, nor are they indexed. Google can also find thousdands of instructive examples online.
As much as I'm unhappy with Microsoft's security efforts and code quality, and how they bury this documentation, I must say I'm pleased that they have continued to enhance the cmd.exe shell with new features. Type "cmd /?" in a command window sometime and you'll see some interesting, but little known features.
This bat should be fairly easy for most anyone to follow or modify to suite their own needs and preferences. Excluding comments, there are only nine lines of actual code.
I suggest modifying the shortcut properties for extra screen buffer size under the Layout tab. I also prefer to change the font and color scheme myself. I renamed this shortcut to simply "MP3e" in my sendto folder.
Most flavors of Windows allow you to open your Sendto folder by typing sendto in the open box of Start, Run...
I also like to copy a shortcut to Notepad and Wordpad in my Sendto menus. To get fancy, one can do this in the All Users' Sendto folder, so that it will be there for everyone who uses that system. This is very handy for viewing text files with out extensions.
:: MP3e.bat MP3 Encoding batch file for sending waves to the lame encoder.
:: http://www.trudyholler.com/pages/download_razorlame.html
:encode
:: Change to drive and directory containing file to convert
:: Delete or rename any matching .mp3 files before sending wav files for encoding.
:: Since this is intended to run via sendto, there should never be a case of
if not exist %~n1.mp3 C:\YourlameDIR\lame --alt-preset extreme -Z %~n1.wav %~n1.mp3
:: Edit the line above to specify the location of your lame executable.
:: Process next file if it exists
pause Press any key to close window after viewing results
End **** MP3e.bat
Begin **** MP3e.bat
P.S. The reason I do not simply create a shortcut directly to lame,
is that it defaults to keep the old extension in the output filename
which I don't like. E.G. Encoding foo.wav yields foo.wav.mp3,
but I prefer to get foo.mp3.
:: Quick and dirty alternative to Razorlame.
:: http://lame.sourceforge.net/
:: http://www.hot.ee/smpman/mp3
:: See also: http://www.lameb.fsnet.co.uk/ Lame Batch encoder
:: Place this batch file in the Windows Sendto folder to easily convert wav files
:: to mp3 files. Mark Zinzow 3/11/04 Tested only under XP. Older versions
:: of Windows, or systems with batch extensions disabled may not work or
:: require modification.
:: I'm not sure when the %~d, %~n and %~p features were added. They are
:: described under XCOPY in XP Help & Support.
cd %~d1
cd %~p1
:: I don't want to wait for files already encoded to re-encode, or to overwrite
:: an mp3 file by mistake.
:: no arguments, but if this is run standalone the worst that could happen
:: would be a tiny bogus mp3 file generated.
:: Newer releases do not need the Z option. Change arguments to suite
:: your quality preferences.
shift
if "%1"=="" goto end
goto encode
:end
You can download it using bittorrent http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/torrent/Mandrakelinux-10.0-Community.torrent or via ftp http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/ftp.php3.
The 10.3.3 Update delivers enhanced functionality and improved reliability for Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther" and is recommended for all users.
Key enhancements include:
For detailed information on this Update, please visit this website:
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n25711
Apple last week released iDVD Update 4.0.1 for owners of iLife '04. In now-typical Apple verbosity, the release notes read simply that the update is "highly recommended for all users of iDVD 4 and will provide for improved reliability when authoring and burning DVDs." iDVD Update 4.0.1 is a free 2 MB download via Software Update or the link below. [JLC]
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/idvdupdate.html
Apple posted an update for owners of AirPort Extreme cards and base stations that fixes a troublesome bug that could cause a kernel panic when switching network locations. The update is a free 1 MB download via Software Update or from Apple's Web site. [JLC]
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/airportsoftwareupdate.html
Let's say you own Alsoft's excellent DiskWarrior 3.0 disk repair utility, and let's also say that you've upgraded to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. You need the DiskWarrior 3.0.1 update for Panther compatibility, but for DiskWarrior to be entirely useful, you need its CD-ROM to be capable of booting your Mac in case of emergency. How can you update a program on CD-ROM? As I recently discovered, Alsoft has created a clever updater that reads your existing DiskWarrior 3.0 CD-ROM, makes a disk image copy of it on your hard disk, updates DiskWarrior on the copy, and then burns the updated image back to a CD-R that you supply. The DiskWarrior 3.0.1 CD Update is a 3.0 MB download, and in my testing, updating the CD image and burning a new CD worked like a charm.
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/support.html#Panther
It's a great trick, but what Alsoft apparently couldn't do (possibly for licensing reasons) is update the copy of Mac OS X on the DiskWarrior CD-ROM that boots the Mac. So, if you have a Mac released after August 2003, or if you don't have a CD burner, you must order a new CD from Alsoft for $21. Be sure to read all the information about the CD update on the DiskWarrior page linked above, since the new CD has somewhat more strict system requirements. If you don't currently own DiskWarrior, a new copy costs $80. (For a full comparison of then-available disk repair utilities, see David Shayer's "Shootout at the Disk Repair Corral" in TidBITS-707_.) [ACE]
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07451
Apple has improved the software for its sleek iSight video camera. The iSight 1.0.2 update improves auto exposure, auto white balance, and overall performance. It also enhances compliance with IIDC, the specification governed by the 1394 Trade Association used for PC-to-camera communications over FireWire. The iSight 1.0.2 update is available via Software Update or as a free 512K download, and requires Mac OS X 10.2.8 or Mac OS X 10.3.2 or higher. [JLC]
http://www.apple.com/isight/download/
http://www.1394ta.org/
Apple today released Security Update 2004-02-23, adding fixes for a number of Mac OS X components, including DiskArbitration, IPSec, and Point-to-Point Protocol. For Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, the update includes a fix for tcpdump; for Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, the update also includes fixes for Safari as well as Security Update 2003-11-19, which included fixes for Personal File Sharing, QuickTime for Java, and a number of Unix components. Security Update 2004-02-23 is available as a 1.6 MB download for Panther (5.1 MB for Jaguar) via Software Update or via Apple's Web site. [ACE]
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07448
Apple recently released a pair of software packages that resolve corruption problems occasionally encountered when saving AppleWorks files on a server. The corruption, which prevents users of AppleWorks 6.2.8 or earlier from opening files, occurs if you are running any version of AppleWorks 6 under Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar and use AppleWorks's Save or Save As command to save your work on an AppleShare or other Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) server.
As a workaround, you can save files on your hard disk then copy them to a server using the Finder without fear of corruption. Users running AppleWorks 6 under Mac OS X 10.3 Panther won't experience this problem.
Apple's two new software releases fix the problem and let AppleWorks users repair previously corrupted files; they add no new features to AppleWorks.
Fixing the Problem
Apple's new AFP Client Update 1.0 resolves the AppleWorks file corruption problem on the Jaguar user's Mac, enabling files to be saved to a server without corruption. Installing AFP Client Update 1.0 also reportedly prevents open AppleWorks files from being corrupted on logout. The AFP Client Update 1.0 is a 580K download from Apple's Web site.
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/afpclientupdate.html
We recommend this update to all AppleWorks 6 users who are running under Jaguar and saving files on a server. Users running under Panther need not install this update; nor is there any reason to install it if you never save files to a server.
Fixing the Files
AppleWorks 6.2.9 includes built-in file repair routines that automatically fix these corrupt files when they're opened. The repaired files may then be saved without corruption as long as the user is using Panther, or Jaguar with AFP Client Update 1.0 installed. And once those files have been repaired, older versions of AppleWorks 6 can open and save the files with no trouble (as long as the users of those older versions are also running under Panther, or Jaguar with AFP Client Update installed).
The simple fix for corrupted files is thus to upgrade to AppleWorks 6.2.9 and, if you're still using Jaguar, to install the AFP Client Update. However, network administrators who want to fix many files at once may find it worthwhile to use Apple's new AppleWorks File Repair Utility 1.0 to fix damaged files. To fix a damaged file, just drag it onto the AppleWorks File Repair Utility. Unfortunately the utility works by creating a new version of the file, after which you need to remove the old file and rename the new one. You can download the 436K utility from Apple's Web site.
http://www.apple.com/appleworks/update/
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/appleworksfilerepairutility.html
To stay up to date on important news about AppleWorks, consider subscribing to the AppleWorks News Service, a low-volume mailing list run by the 15,000-member AppleWorks User Group.
http://www.awug.org/news/list.html
http://www.awug.org/
Let's not beat around the bush. iPhoto 4 is better than iPhoto 2 in almost every way, and its performance is so much improved that if you currently use iPhoto 2, you should immediately ante up $50 for iLife '04 or, if you've been hankering for one anyway, a new Mac. On the other hand, if you rely on other programs to import, organize, and edit your photos, iPhoto 4 doesn't offer enough new to warrant the cost of iLife '04 on its own.
What's New and Improved?
The iPhoto engineers deserve credit for speeding up iPhoto to such a great extent that it's impossible to quantify the performance improvements. Scrolling through a large iPhoto library no longer produces the spinning pizza of death, switching between modes happens nearly instantly, resizing the window fluidly is actually possible, and basically everything else works at a totally acceptable speed. The only actions I've found poky are occasional slowdowns between drawing a pixelated image and the final smooth one (mostly with very large photos) and occasional odd delays when Control-clicking albums to edit them.
Rendezvous-based photo sharing is probably iPhoto 4's sexiest feature, since many people wish to share photos with other people on their local network (but not the Internet), and it indeed works well for enabling someone to view and copy your photos. However, photo sharing is read-only; the other person cannot edit your photos, change titles or keywords, or use your images to build a book. For those activities, the photo must be copied locally first.
Perhaps my favorite new feature in iPhoto is photo ratings - a 1 to 5 star rating system that mimics the one in iTunes. Although I can't imagine someone expending the effort of distinguishing between a really lousy picture (that was somehow good enough to avoid being deleted) with 1 star and a somewhat lousy picture with 2 star, the higher star ratings simplify separating out your favorite images from the many plebeian pictures that have mostly documentary value.
iPhoto 4's addition of smart albums makes photo ratings useful. A smart album, like a smart playlist in iTunes (sensing a trend here?) populates itself automatically with photos that match the criteria you set. So, you could easily create a smart album that selects your favorite photos (4 or 5 stars), or even your favorite vacation photos (4 or 5 stars for photos taken during specific date ranges or in specific film rolls). iPhoto 4 includes some built-in smart albums that collect photos taken in each of the last four years, over the last few months, and the last few imports.
Smart albums can construct themselves according to a number of criteria, but as much as they're cool and useful, they suffer from one major problem - the need for manually created metadata. When you import a CD, iTunes automatically looks up the CD's title, artist, track names, and more from the Gracenote CDDB; any smart playlists you create use that information, along with metadata that iTunes generates automatically, like play count and last played dates. The only metadata you must assign manually is rating, although you can edit a track's ID3 tags if you desire. In iPhoto, by contrast, you must enter manually almost all the metadata you'll use with a smart album, and people are notoriously bad about adding metadata.
Part of the reason I'm bullish about ratings is that they're easier to apply than other types of metadata, thanks to omnipresent keyboard shortcuts (Command-1 through Command-5). These and other keyboard shortcuts work even when you're viewing a slideshow in iPhoto 4, so you can rotate, delete, and rate photos while watching, and you can do it all from the keyboard if you don't want to display the new slideshow controls. (Ironically, iTunes lacks these keyboard shortcuts, and I find myself using utilities to rate songs from the keyboard because of that.) Speaking of slideshows, iPhoto 4 can finally use an entire iTunes playlist instead of repeating just a single song (a painfully obvious failing that persisted into iPhoto 2), and they also provide a choice of Keynote-inspired transitions between slides.
People pining for a selective import in iPhoto (like Apple's Image Capture utility provides) will still be disappointed, but in iPhoto 4 selective import would be welcome primarily for quick imports of only a few select images from a large memory card. In earlier versions, many people (myself included) avoided iPhoto's all-or-nothing import to ensure that each film roll contained only related images. iPhoto 4 lets you create new film rolls from selected photos, and you can also drag photos from one film roll to another. It's a great feature, since film rolls are in many ways iPhoto's best organizational feature.
Along with these major features, iPhoto offers a number of smaller, but no less welcome, changes. You can now edit the titles, comments, or dates of a set of photos simultaneously, which makes fixing improperly dated photos a breeze and definitely makes adding metadata easier. A new Sepia button gives photos that old-time look. A new Collage book theme looks attractive, and Apple can now deliver books and prints to addresses in Japan and according to the iLife product manager, in several European countries starting 18-Mar-04. .Mac members now have the choice of a number of new HomePage themes (though I'd like to see some more elegant designs), and even better, iPhoto can now replace a HomePage album, so you need not login to .Mac to make changes (although iPhoto re-uploads the entire set of photos rather than just the changed photos or titles).
http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/books.html
What's Still Missing?
All that sounds great, so what's my beef with iPhoto 4? As soon as I saw the very first version of iPhoto, I was impressed, because Apple clearly understood what a consumer- level photo management program needed to do. But as much as iPhoto covered the necessary ground on paper, the application itself continues to suffer from glaring holes that have been painfully obvious from day one. I'm undoubtedly more familiar with iPhoto than just about anyone, since I've actually tested every function in every version of the program while writing my iPhoto Visual QuickStart Guide books, but the complaints I'm about to list aren't just my pet peeves, they're also the concerns I've heard from hundreds of iPhoto users in email and at talks I've given.
(As an aside, for amusing evidence that even Apple understands the importance of at least some these features, iPhoto's Help until today contained a document called "What's new in iPhoto 3" (it currently retains that title, but the content has been updated for iPhoto 4). There was no external release of iPhoto 3, of course, so this document must have been a wish list or been left over from a version left for the future. You can read the original text in TidBITS Talk.)
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkmsg=20081
For many people, iPhoto 2's abysmal performance with thousands of photos required the creation of multiple iPhoto Library folders. Other people rely on multiple libraries to separate unrelated photos (work and personal pictures, for instance). iPhoto 2 provided only the most half-hearted capabilities for creating and switching among iPhoto Library folders. It was saved by a hidden Mac OS X shortcut: if you Command-Option-drag a file to any application on the Dock, that application will attempt to open the file, even if it's not that application's file. In iPhoto 2, if you Command-Option-dragged an iPhoto Library folder to iPhoto's icon, iPhoto would switch to that folder. Unfortunately, since the iPhoto team wasn't aware of this shortcut, they managed to break it in iPhoto 4. Now the best way to switch among iPhoto Library folders is via Brian Webster's free iPhoto Library Manager utility. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to merge iPhoto libraries; the best approach is probably to burn photos to a CD or DVD and import them (thus retaining keywords, which doesn't happen when copying photos via photo sharing) again from disc.
http://homepage.mac.com/bwebster/iphotolibrarymanager.html
iPhoto Library Manager also provides a clumsy workaround for another glaring iPhoto 4 omission: the capability to share an iPhoto Library among multiple users of the same Mac. This points out a limitation in the concept of iPhoto 4's Rendezvous photo sharing as well. The problem is that for couples, photos are usually a shared resource to which either person can add titles, keywords, comments, or ratings. But iPhoto 4 doesn't make it easy for two people to work on the same set of photos from multiple accounts or multiple Macs. There are workarounds that involve external or network volumes (explained with detailed steps in "Take Control of Sharing Files in Panther") or changing permissions constantly (which is what iPhoto Library Manager does), but this should be built in to iPhoto. Apple is responsible for breaking everything apart for multiple users in Mac OS X; it's their responsibility to make sharing data between those users easy.
http://www.tidbits.com/takecontrol/panther/sharing.html
Perhaps the most troubling omission in iPhoto 4 is that it still provides no method of exporting metadata you create, which is yet another reason many people don't bother putting the effort in. Think about it - more so than any other data you create, you want your photos to last forever. They'll be even more important to you in 50 years than they are now, and you should be able to pass them along to your children or to institutional archives when you die. Ignoring the silly question of whether Apple will update iPhoto for the rest of time, the near term answer to this problem is an export capability that lets users retain any metadata they've applied.
Where should this metadata live? There's a specification called EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) that many digital cameras use to store metadata in the JPEG files they create. Perhaps there are technical concerns surrounding the use of EXIF data, but on the face of things, Apple could use it for storing titles, ratings, and more.
http://www.kodak.com/global/en/service/tib/tib4317.shtml
Smart albums are useful, but for many people who have become accustomed to hierarchical filing systems such as used by the Finder, iPhoto's lack of hierarchical albums is bedeviling. Sure, you can concoct a smart album to hold all your vacation photos, but you can't have a Vacation Photos album that contains sub- albums for each vacation. iPhoto has done a good job of mimicking iTunes; perhaps it should look at the Finder next.
There's one final omission made all the more egregious by comparison with the Finder. Perhaps the primary point of a graphical interface is direct manipulation of objects, yet iPhoto still refuses to allow direct naming of photos or film rolls, as you do with files and folders in the Finder or with songs in iTunes. Instead, you must select the item in question and then enter the name in the info pane. You can apply ratings directly, through a hierarchical contextual menu, but adding keywords and changing dates must also be done at arm's length from the actual target of the action.
Development Sloppiness
Apple fixed a number of bugs in iPhoto 2 that I ran across while writing about it, but they've managed to introduce an entirely new crop that you may find irritating. If you set the option to place most recent photos at top, creating or modifying film rolls reverses that setting until you open and close iPhoto's Preferences window. Control-clicking a photo in a separate image-editing window displays a contextual menu of editing commands, of which Sepia is always disabled. (Ironically, in iPhoto 2, Enhance was always disabled in that menu, though it works now.) If you duplicate a photo that you've edited in any way other than rotating (and sometimes even rotating), duplicates made of that photo do not get "copy" appended to their titles, making identification of the duplicates hard. You can delete photos from the Last Months and Last Rolls albums just as you would from the Photo Library, except for dragging to the Trash album, which works only from the Photo Library. And lastly, if you select any album, iPhoto shows you the amount of disk space the album takes up... except for the one album whose physical size on disk matters most: the Trash. (Work around this by selecting all the photos in the Trash album; the info pane then shows you the amount of disk space used by the selection.)
These aren't subtle bugs - I've found them merely by monkeying through iPhoto's interface while updating my iPhoto book, and I can't believe any of them would be hard to fix. Perhaps we'll see a 4.0.1 release that will fix these bugs, though I'm not holding my breath, since there was no 2.0.1 to fix the similarly obvious bugs in iPhoto 2. Looking forward to the next major release of iPhoto, I'm more than happy to do this with a feature-complete beta release so I can report the bugs directly to Apple for fixing rather than telling the world about them in the release version and attempting to come up with workarounds for my book.
In the end, I'm left frustrated by iPhoto because it constantly displays glimpses of greatness that are then promptly undercut by obviously missing features and boneheaded bugs. I expect better from Apple, and as I've done with the last two major releases of iPhoto, I'll hold out hope that a full year of development time will allow the iPhoto team to make great strides for iPhoto 5.
On April 23, 2003 Amiga entered into an Agreement with Itec LLC, later acquired by KMOS, Inc. for the transfer and sale of all of Amiga's right, title, source code, and all versions, from the "Classic Amiga Operating System" through AmigaOS 4.0 and all subsequent versions to KMOS, Inc.
"The expanding mobile market offers Amiga over 200 million potential customers that we need to focus on," said Bill McEwen - President/CEO of Amiga, Inc. "We began looking for a company that could focus and provide proper resources for the AmigaOS and the associated markets and we found that with KMOS, Inc." McEwen said.
"We welcome the acquisition of the AmigaOS intellectual property by KMOS. Together with KMOS, Hyperion looks forward to exploring new business opportunities for AmigaOS 4. I would like to reassure all our customers that the acquisition by KMOS will not have any adverse impact whatsoever on the release of the consumer version of AmigaOS 4.0 later this year." said Evert Carton, managing partner of Hyperion Entertainment VOF.
KMOS, Inc. is acquiring and developing technology enabling the company to participate in the worldwide communications market. Garry Hare, KMOS' CEO, said "KMOS is very excited about the commercial potential of this innovative operating system. At Amiga's insistence to which we totally agreed, we will honor the terms of the November 2001, agreement with Amiga One Partners: Hyperion VOF and Eyetech Group Ltd., an English Corporation, in their entirety. Mr. Hare continues, "I should point out, that except as they relate to the Amiga OS family of products, KMOS did not acquire the Amiga name, intellectual property or its DE line of products. These assets remain the property of Amiga Inc.".
About Amiga:
Amiga, Inc. established itself in 1985 as the premier provider of multimedia technologies to the world. Its award-winning software has been a mainstay for motion picture studios, government agencies, and entertainment enthusiasts from around the world. Today Amiga continues to lead the way in multimedia development by providing developers with hardware-independent technologies for writing and porting applications to a new hardware-agnostic, multimedia platform. AmigaDE and Amiga Anywhere powered with intent from the Tao Group, enables applications to run unchanged on a broad range of processors including ARM, StrongARM, Intel X-Scale, OMAP, MIPS, Intel x86, Motorola 68K, and Hitachi SH. It can run hosted on a wide variety of operating systems including Windows CE .NET, Windows 9x, 2000, and XP. AmigaDE and Anywhere applications can be purchased online at www.shopamiga.com. Amiga is based in Ravensdale, Wash. For more information visit www.amiga.com.
About Hyperion Entertainment VOF
Hyperion Entertainment is a privately held Belgian-German company, founded in March of 1999. The company specializes in 3D graphics and the conversion of top-quality entertainment software from Windows to niche-platforms including Amiga, Linux (x86,PPC) and MacOS (OS 9/X). Hyperion Entertainment has undertaken contract-work in the field of 3D graphics for companies such as Monolith (www.lith.com) and has developed a mature, fast, small foot-print technology to bring 3D graphics to low power digital devices such as PDAs and STBs. Hyperion is currently working on AmigaOS 4.0, a vastly enhanced PPC native incarnation of the ground breaking OS introduced by Commodore in 1985.
About KMOS, Inc.
KMOS, Inc. a State of Delaware licensed corporation develops and distributes enabling technology, software applications and specialty content to the wired and wireless communication market.
The latest release of the PC Amiga Emulator, WinUAE has been made available today, taking it to version 0.8.25.
Bugs fixed since 0.8.24:
New features:
Special thanks to Newtek Incorporated (including but not limited to Paul Lara & Tim Jenison), Bill Evans and Aaron "Aarexx" Ruscetta.
Born from the mind of Tim Jenison and several other high tech brains at Newtek Incorporated in Topeka Kansas in 1991. The Amiga Video Toaster launched an entire industry with its power to the people price and feature set. Replacing $250,000 of broadcast quality television studio equipment the Amiga Video Toaster allowed anyone that could afford to buy a car get into video production. Newtek did it again when they added tapeless editing hardware to the Toaster in 1994, The Flyer. The Desktop Video industry started with the Amiga Video Toaster and now Newtek in a awesome gesture to Amiga enthusiasts is allowing the source code to this amazing product to be released so it can be tinkered with and upgraded by the community. The worlds first video production system in a box now becomes the worlds first open source real time video editing system for your Amiga computer workstation. Join the team and upgrade one of the ultimate Amiga/Video editing tools of all time! e-mail: ovt AT discreetfx DOT com
Open Video Toaster.org is hosted by DiscreetFX and Bill Panagouleas, Video Toaster, Aura, Lightwave 3D is a registered trademark of Newtek (www.newtek.com).
http://www.openvideotoaster.org/
February 19, 2004 - The meeting began with President Rollins welcoming everyone. He then lead everyone in a moment of silence for Emil's iBook laptop which had died recently. He noted that Emil was going through some serious withdrawal. Then, turning serious, Richard had Emil talk about the logic board replacement program that Apple has had to institute because of this problem (which isn't isolated just to Emil's iBook). Emil took us to http://www.apple.com/support/ibook/faq/ which explains the iBook Logic Board Repair Extension Program for specific iBook models manufactured between May 2002 and April 2003 that are experiencing specific component failures. Emil explained his problem as the screen "going plaid."
President Rollins then threw the floor open for questions. However, there being none, discussion turned to online credit card number theft. Richard said he had been buying online for 6 or 7 years and this was the first time it had happened to him. Kevin Hisel added that it had happened to him 4 times in the last two years. Tom Purl said it had happened to him as well.
Richard then asked for Linux News. Linux Chairman, Tom Purl, reported the release of FreeBSD 5.2. Kevin Hisel commented approvingly on Tom's contributions to the newsletter and thought his stuff should be called "Purl's of Wisdom." Everyone laughed.
Tom reported on the legal controversy over the name "Mandrake" and said it was possible that Mandrake Linux will have to change its name.
Tom also noted the release of Mepis Linux v2003.10.2. Check out http://www.mepis.org/ .
Mac News was next. Emil reported that the Mini-iPods would be in stores Friday.
There was a discussion of the free MP3s being given away by Pepsi. It was noted that if you hold the Pepsi bottle above your head at a 25 degree angle you can see inside the bottle to see if it's a winner. This trick was supposedly revealed on Slashdot.org. This lead to a discussion of downloading music and movies.
Next, PC News. Mark Zinzow announced that Microsoft has released an new security update. It also comes on a Windows Security Update CD, which Mark brought to the meeting for those that might need a copy. It contains the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer 1.2. The advantage of the CD is that it can bring your machine up to current security standards before putting it onto the Net and exposing it to all the evils that lurk there.
Intel has released their roadmap for their 64-bit chips. They have also released a 4 Ghz processor.
There was a discussion of the Microsoft software source code leak. A company called Mainsoft was fingered as the source of the leak.
There was talk about a new PCI bus standard, PCI Express.
Tom Purl is looking for a used computer. Richard recommended the DuPage PC Computer show and said you can check out their web site as well - http://www.greatmidwestcomputershow.com .
Craig Kummerow talked about Obsolete Technology Recycling.
George Krumins talked about an Altair which sold on Ebay for $2500.
There was talk about the National Do Not Call List. The list is currently inactive. The telemarketers are still fighting it.
Kevin Hisel showed the screensaver Sun Clock 5 available from http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html. Kevin also pointed out another interesting site - http://www.heavens-above.com .
Kevin Hisel then conducted the give away of Microsoft donated items. Anthony Philipp won a Microsoft T-shirt and Ed Serbe won Works Suite 2004.
At the February meeting, I gave a presentation on using Plone to easily create robust web sites. Using Plone, it is very easy to create content management system (CMS) web applications with integrated security, searching, and a professional look-and-feel. For more information, please see my presentation at http://www.tompurl.com/Members/tom_purl/demonstrations/plone_preso.pdf.
[Editor's Note: My own notes of Tom's presentation were pretty sketchy. I made a note that he mentioned OpenOffice.org 1.1 ; that Plone was a content management system. Zope is the web applications server. Python is an object-oriented scripting language. You can check out Plone at http://plone.org . Tom's personal web site is at http://tompurl.com . You can run Plone through Apache. It will run on anything OS that Python runs on. Epoz is a WYSIWYG web page editor.
Tom also talked about the Lindows lawsuit. They may have to change their name to something like Lindash. There was also some talk about the Champaign Urbana Community Wireless Network project.]
http://wireless.cu.groogroo.com/
http://wifinetnews.com/archives/003128.html
http://www.ucimc.org/newswire/display/15836/index.php
The February meeting of the CUCUG executive board took place on Tuesday, February 24, 2004, 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: Richard Rollins, Rich Hall, Kevin Hopkins, Kevin Hisel, and Emil Cobb.
Rich Hall: Rich gave his usual, thorough financial report.
Tom Purl: Tom informed us that at the time of our meeting on March 18, he'll be in California on a business trip. So, he said there were a couple of potential programs in the offing. Anthony Philipp could show FreeBSD, or Kris Klindworth could show something on Perl. The Linux SIG will be back at 6:15 pm in March. Tom said the group will start pushing free software: they will have CDs, etc. with free software on them at the meetings.
There was talk about the DuPage PC show as a source of cheap hardware.
Kevin Hopkins: Kevin had no new business to raise. He asked Tom Purl for a write up on Plone for the newsletter.
Kevin Hisel: Kevin said he would send a list og the give away items to newsletter. Kevin reported rumor has itt hat Insight will offer various tiers of High Speed Internet service.
Emil Cobb: Emil asked that the membership chair email a current membership list to him.
Seventeen members attended the February meeting.
There was a discussion of Eudora SSL issues at the U of I. Richard said the new system would require Netscape 7, IE 6, and Eudora 6.0.2 or better to work. He also said that if your mailbox fills up, you will no longer be able to read your mail with POP. To clear it, you need to go in via Webmail and delete stuff to get POP to work again.
Insight upgraded their mail servers.
Kevin Hisel spoke about how to read Insight mail from outside the system, a topic that interested Richard a great deal. He said the trick was using Port 995. After the meeting, Kevin provided this link for further explanation.
http://help.insightbb.com/outlook/remote_access.html
He noted that the examples are all about Outlook but the settings are pretty generic for most other mail clients.
Richard noted that Eudora Personalities will allow you to check multiple accounts.
Richard Rollins: Ed Serbe will be demoing Flight Simulator 2004. Ed won it from our Microsoft donations.
Richard said he enjoyed the Linux demonstration. There was a discussion of USB thumb drives and MP3 players.
Kevin Hisel said that Bluetooth is dead. He feels it is being superseded by USB wireless.
There was talk about laptops.
Smaller laptops have smaller batteries and thus don't operate as long.
Meetings are held the third Thursday of each month at 7:00 p.m. at the First Baptist Church of Champaign in Savoy. The FBC-CS is located at 1602 N. Prospect Avenue in Savoy, on the NE corner of Burwash and Prospect. To get to the the First Baptist Church from Champaign or Urbana, take Prospect Avenue south. Setting the trip meter in your car to zero at the corner of Kirby/Florida and Prospect in Champaign (Marathon station on the SW corner), you only go 1.6 miles south. Windsor will be at the one mile mark. The Savoy village sign (on the right) will be at the 1.4 mile mark. Burwash is at the 1.6 mile mark. The Windsor of Savoy retirement community is just to the south; Burwash Park is to the east. Turn east (left) on Burwash. The FBC-CS parking lot entrance is on the north (left) side of Burwash. Enter by the double doors at the eastern end of the building's south side. A map can be found on the CUCUG website at http://www.cucug.org/meeting.html. The First Baptist Church of Champaign is also on the web at http://www.fbc-cs.org .
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: Richard Rollins 469-2616 Vice-Pres/MacSIG: 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 Corp.Agent/Web: Kevin Hisel 406-948-1999 Linux SIG: Tom Purl 390-6078 tompurl2000@yahoo.com
Visit our web site at http://www.cucug.org/, or join in our online forums at http://www.cucug.org/starship/index.php .