h to cover that few products will get the space they deserve.
My daughter Jennifer is managing editor at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. They hold conferences where scholars and officials from nations in dispute talk to each other. There's more to it, but that's the general idea. Last December, Jennifer went to the Middle East to set up a conference involving Israel, Jordan, and 25 other countries. She discovered that electronic communications in and out of Israel and Jordan are almost impossible, partly due to technology, but mostly due to politics. Demonstrating the Internet and World Wide Web was a nightmare.
The conference generates two Orchids. The first one goes to Sean Conley of CompuServe technical support for arranging CompuServe accounts. Because of political complications, CompuServe was the only live on-line system working, and many discussants had never seen an o
n-line discussion.
The second Orchid goes to Bob Rosenschein of Accent Worldwide. He arranged for demonstrations of the Internet With An Accent multicharacter-set Web browser and provided free copies to conference participants. I don't know how much the conference helped further peace in the Middle East, but it surely did some good.
Accent Professional 2.0 also gets a User's Choice Award. It's a multicharacter, multilanguage word processor that handles Hebrew and Arabic as well as dozens of other languages and alphabets. As I've said before, not everyone needs this, but if you do need it, you need it bad.
A big Orchid to IBM for using its clout
to bring about standards for the new digital videodisc (DVD) standard. There were several proposed formats, but IBM seems to have knocked enough heads together to get agreement on one--remember Beta versus VHS? When the CD-ROM technology first appeared, I said it would change the world by making high-quality data available to everyone
at low cost. Digital CD-size videodiscs with their huge storage capacities as well as multimedia continue that information revolution.
A large and smelly Onion to AT&T for not only wrecking their Safari laptop, but also running NCR into the ground. Now they're liquidating 10 percent of the company in hopes of getting healthy enough to break themselves apart, not even preserving the Western Electric name. Meanwhile, many of their phone stores are staffed by surly louts who know little about the equipment and can't even be polite. I went to my local AT&T phone store intending to buy my wife a cellular phone for Christmas. This was a vast mistake. Eventually, I got Roberta a Motorola flip phone at Circuit City, where they understand what to do with a customer.
My largest Onion goes to all the government officials
who either don't understand the notion of freedom or pretend not to. The Department of Justice finally told Phil Zimmermann they won't prosecute him for releasing PGP to the
general public. This might have been taken for good will if they hadn't spent years harassing him to the point of impoverishment.
Meanwhile, the White House demands legislation making it easier for government agents to tap an astounding proportion of the nation's telephones by punching a few buttons on a desktop computer. Of course, they'd never do that without getting a warrant--and I am Marie of Romania.
This has been the year of the Internet and the Web,
and many of my awards go to communications products. The User's Choice Award for modems goes to U.S. Robotics. Now that I'm regularly connecting to the Internet at 28.8 Kbps, I've had many chances to compare modems. If you're going someplace with noisy phone lines and you absolutely must have a 14.4-Kbps (and would like a 28.8-Kbps) connection, you won't do better than to carry a U.S. Robotics external modem in your checked luggage.
I also use Megahertz PC Card Data/Fax Modems in my portables (they're the ones with XJack
, so you don't have to carry a special cable). Megahertz is now the mobile communications division of U.S. Robotics. Their PC Card modems run cool enough to use, and they're often reliable at 14.4 Kbps unless the lines are really noisy. Every PC Card modem I've tried has problems at 28.8 Kbps; but when I carry a U.S. Robotics external modem, I get reliable and fast communications every time.
We've had great success with Xircom's Performance Series CreditCard Ethernet Adapter IIps cards, and they get a User's Choice Award. A User's Choice Award also goes to the Garrett Communications Magnum H80-B Personal Hub. This is a paperback-size box with one thin-wire and eight 10Base-T connectors. Plug in its little power supply and hang it on a wall somewhere, and problems of Ethernet connectivity go away. It also has diagnostic lights. We use it to connect portables and test machines to the Chaos Manor Ethernet, and it has not failed us. If you use thin-wire Ethernet, get a Magnum H80-B Personal Hub so you can
connect 10Base-T into it.
I am pleased to say that the competition in monitors
is fierce, meaning that really good ones are available at reasonable prices. The User's Choice Award for this year goes to the ViewSonic Professional Series PT-810, a 21-inch monitor that takes most of the visual sting out of working with Windows 95. The screen is bright, easy to see in daylight, and large enough that I can keep a bunch of windows open, see everything, and get my work done. I don't understand how I ever got along without a big monitor, and I will not willingly part with it.
ViewSonic also gets an Orchid for its Optiquest V775 17-inch monitor. It has a nearly flat screen and is very usable for word processing. A story goes with this. Last week, I took a new V775 with me to the beach house. When I got it set up, everything worked, but the screen was dim. I called ViewSonic, who instantly offered to replace it, but I'd still be stuck at the beach with no monitor.
I made one more try:
I swapped the video cable end for end and reseated the video card. That did it: the screen came up bright and perky. In fact, the V775 is one of the most daylight-visible monitors I've ever worked with.
The User's Choice Award for computers goes to Gateway 2000.
We have several Gateway machines, some of them for a long time. I recently replaced Roberta's Gateway 386 with a Gateway 486DX2. SuperCow, a VL-Bus 486DX2/66, has been our test-bed for Windows software and hardware for two years, as well as the "portable" I carry to the beach house. I guarantee you we have used that machine hard without any problems.
Our most recent Gateway machine is the P5-133. It has a 1.6-GB Western Digital Caviar IDE hard drive, a six-speed CD-ROM drive, and a built-in modem that appears from the FCC number to be (and works like) a U.S. Robotics modem. It came with a Matrox video board and an Ensoniq Soundscape wave table. The Soundscape is compatible with Sound Blaster and plays all the games I've tr
ied without setup problems. Finally, there are Altec-Lansing speakers complete with a woofer. The result is great sound.
The Gateway P5-133 is a screaming games machine. You may buy it for business use, but games are a great way to test a system to its limits. Honest. You can tell your accountant that no business software uses every ounce of performance the way games do. I've run Doom, Wing Commander III, Mission Critical, This Means War, and several other resource-hogging games on the P5-133 (which we've dubbed RacingCow), and none of them faze it. They all run in Win 95, too.
Networking the new machine was simple: insert an Intel EtherExpress card and let Win 95 do the work. It took several restarts, but the P5-133 shuts down and starts up
fast
compared to the other machines around here. When I finish getting everything set up, RacingCow will become my main machine; and a User's Choice Award goes to the Gateway 2000 P5-133.
Speaking of games, the User's Choice game of the
year
is Mission Critical, which I reviewed last month. It's both role-playing and strategic, and I think it's wonderful.
That's the game of the year, but other games also deserve User's Choice Awards. The game of the month is This Means War from MicroProse Software; it's a tactics game that doesn't take itself too seriously but has got me hooked. On the arcade side, Microsoft Windows 95 Plus is worth buying just to get the pinball game. If you really like pinball, however, you need Full Tilt Pinball from Maxis, a CD-ROM with three neat, time-wasting pinball machines.
Games need joysticks. I've found two I like. My personal favorite is Logitech's WingMan Extreme. The handle fits my hand nicely, and I like the action. There are a lot of joysticks around Chaos Manor, and Alex took over a peach crate full for Larry Niven to try. He played Descent (another of those downloadable heroin-ware games; the first dose is free) with them all and has now bought a PC Optix.
I understand why. Wh
ile I like the feel of the WingMan Extreme somewhat better, the PC Optix has smoother and more precise action because it uses an optical sensor rather than the mechanical systems employed by most joysticks. Both of them deserve a User's Choice Award.
Two must-have utilities get User's Choice Awards. V Communications' System Commander lets you boot up your system in any OS you like. PowerQuest's Partition Magic, which eliminates the evil FDISK program forever, lets you change disk partitions among your OSes on the fly. It works like magic.
The User's Choice Award for personal digital assistant (PDA)
goes to Psion for the Series 3A palmtop. This isn't perfect, but it works well enough to be useful and comes with neat software. Every year there is a new spate of PDAs, and most of them end up gathering dust because they're too heavy to carry for what they can do. The Psion is still too heavy to carry in your pocket, but it does a lot and will fit into any kind of carry bag.
For
me, the big problem with PDAs is that I have totally lost the art of two-finger typing, and no PDA keyboard is large enough for a touch-typist. However, two-finger typists will find the Psion keyboard just right. I've seen old hunt-and-peck journalists bang out a whole story on it.
The Psion isn't as powerful as Hewlett-Packard's OmniGo, but it's a lot cheaper if you lose it. If you want to try a PDA, this is a good one to experiment with.
The bribe of the year comes from Golden Bow Systems,
who sent a month's supply of Christmas chocolate along with the latest version of their software. I've relied on their Vopt defragger for years. Version 5.0 understands Win 95. You exit and run it in DOS; but I don't trust a disk-optimization program running in a multitasking environment. Vopt 5.0 understands long filenames and has a neat feature for finding and deleting empty files.
Disk fragmentation can slow your system something awful. There are many disk-optimization programs, but I
've always liked Vopt's cautious manner, and I've never lost any data using it. If you're still using DOS or Windows, you really need Vopt. If you're using Win 95, you should have the Norton Utilities for Windows 95, which has an on-the-fly defragger that operates when no one is using the system. I guess it's safe; most Norton Utilities are.
On the other hand, last week something weird happened to one of my optical disks. I had to wipe it and start over. I keep wondering if the Windows 95 Plus "software agent" went off and did something to it in the middle of the night. Whatever happened, if you want to be sure that defragging your disks won't lose any data, Vopt is what you need. I'd recommend it even if they hadn't sent the chocolate.
Quarterdeck's CleanSweep gets the User's Choice Award
for uninstaller software. In these days of fatware, your hard disk can fill up with unwanted files that come onboard with new software and stay long after you've deleted it. CleanSweep finds many
needless files, and it's conservative about removing them. Erasing files can be chancy; some of them may be needed by programs you don't use often. CleanSweep compresses them and keeps an archive you needn't erase until they're useless.
Quarterdeck developed QEMM, the DOS/Windows memory manager I recommend; it works well with Win 95, too, and does a better job than the emm386.com that comes with MS-DOS 6.22 or Win 95. With QEMM you also get Manifest, a good memory-use display program.
QEMM and some other programs, including a disk cache that replaces Microsoft SmartDrive, are bundled into a package called GameRunner3, which also includes cheats for certain games. While there are a few games that don't work with QEMM installed, none I know of will work with emm386.com either; to run them, you must reboot in DOS with a very clean CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. The User's Choice Award for memory managers goes to QEMM, but if you spend much time playing games, the GameRunner3 package that includes QE
MM is worth having.
Quarterdeck also has WebAuthor for Word for Windows 6.0, the best Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) Web-page creation tool I know of. The manual is helpful, and I was able to create some Web-page stuff within an hour of getting WebAuthor installed.
My problem was installation. The symptom is an inability of the installer to find a path; if you get past that, WinWord can't find the WebAuthor tool. The cure in both cases is the same: go to the Windows root directory, find the file winword6.ini, and be sure that STARTUPPATH=C:\WIN WORD\STARTUP is somewhere in that file. WinWord is supposed to create that path statement on installation, but other installations may subsequently clobber it.
Once installed, WebAuthor appears on the WinWord Tools menu, and you're on your way to creating good Web pages. Alas, WebAuthor won't work with Word 7, which comes installed on many new machines, including the Gateway P5-133 and our wonderful new Intergraph Dual Pentium Pro 150 (possibly t
he fastest desktop in the world). However, Quarterdeck is shipping me the beta copy of a version that will work with Word 7 and run on Windows NT, so it may be available by the time you read this.
Also, Quarterdeck's WebCompass won BYTE's Best of Show Award at the fall Comdex. This complex program works with your Web browser to search the Web, organize the results into databases, and make abstracts. Searches can run as you watch or overnight. I haven't used this a lot, but I expect to when we get our Internet setup done right.
On that score: while the IBM Advantis Internet service provider is reliable, it's also expensive, as are all by-the-hour services. We recently got an Earthlink Total Access account at a flat rate of $19.95 a month; it has become the official Chaos Manor Internet service. They're growing so fast that there can be temporary congestion problems. Have faith. Most times the connection is nearly instantaneous, and I haven't had as many problems with Earthlink as I have with any
other (except IBM Advantis, which always works).
Earthlink Total Access comes with the Eudora Lite mail handler and Netscape Navigator, with an 800-number connection to upgrades when available. Both programs are pretty good, but if you do a lot of Internet crawling, I recommend upgrading to Eudora Pro; and if your system can run it, get the latest 32-bit version of Netscape Navigator. It has good multithreaded multitasking.
Earthlink also offers pointers to a lot of software, including Forte's Free Agent newsgroup reader. I find Earthlink Total Access with Netscape Navigator a great deal better than my older services with Mosaic. But be warned: if you plan to do much with the Internet, get a fast machine capable of multitasking so most of it can happen in the background. No matter how good your service provider and software, you will waste an astonishing amount of time simply waiting for things to happen on the Internet.
The User's Choice Award for Internet service provider goes to Earthl
ink Total Access, and for Internet browsers to Netscape Navigator.
If you do important work with small computers
and don't have an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), you are a gambler; and if you have a switching UPS, you may regret it.
I have both switching and on-line UPS systems. The other day we had power failures, and I made a discovery. If you have not paid attention to your switching UPS systems, they probably won't work when you need them. I also have several Clary OnGuard on-line UPS systems, mostly hidden in closets--one is under a pile of boxes in the cable room. Once again, Clary gets my User's Choice Award for UPSes because I can truthfully say that I have never lost a byte of data to power failures on systems that are protected by a Clary OnGuard UPS.
Some readers tell me I write too much about Windows
and Win 95 and not enough about the Mac. I plead guilty. It's not that I don't like the Mac, indeed I own four, but there aren't enough hours in t
he day to do everything I want to do.
While we were at MacWorld Expo, Apple announced the highest fourth-quarter revenue and the greatest fourth-quarter loss in its history, the resignations under fire of about five vice presidents, and the impending liquidation of a good part of the company through layoffs. It was the largest MacWorld Expo yet, but there was open speculation in the pressroom that it might be the last one.
I don't believe that. Apple hasn't been well managed, but they have several things going for them. First, they have a good system. Macs have their peculiarities, but the Mac environment, once learned, is quite consistent and a great deal more accessible to software developers than are the "hooks" into Windows or NT.
Second, Apple has a core of fanatic loyalists; with luck, enough to help the company weather the storms to come.
Third, they have a good chunk of the education market.
Fourth, there are some excellent development tools. In particular, there's A
llegiant Technologies' SuperCard, a programming language and environment that's about as powerful as Visual Basic for Windows. However, it's a lot easier to learn and, because of the Mac environment, easier to integrate into the Mac system. SuperCard on a Power Mac will let you do amazing things in a short time without a steep learning curve. SuperCard gets the User's Choice Award for the most useful Mac software of 1995.
While it was criminal of Apple to neglect software to integrate the Mac into the mostly Intel-based corporate environment, third parties like Farallon are doing this, giving Apple opportunities for increased penetration into that vital market.
There will always be an Apple Computer, and I for one am glad of it. Microsoft desperately needs the competition.
Finally, a User's Choice Award to version 2 of
my wife's reading program, The Literacy Connection. It's not because she's family. This thing works. Version 1 needs a literate person to be a tutor. Version
2, for the Mac only, works by itself: the Mac talks to the student. The voice is Agnes, a Mac sound tool that can pronounce English words from text, and if there's anything that good on a DOS or Windows machine, I don't know about it. This is one of those amazing programs that you can do with SuperCard on a Mac.
The
book of the month
is
The Web Page Design Cookbook
(Wiley, ISBN 0-471-13039-7), an excellent tutorial guide.
Next month, the Diamond Flower Dual Pentium with OS/2, the astonishing Intergraph Dual Pentium Pro 150, and more about the Internet.
PRODUCT INFORMATION
Accent Professional 2.0
($399),
Internet With An Accent
($99), Accent Worldwide, Inc., (800) 535-5256 or (714) 223-0620, fax (714) 223-0629,
http://www.accentsoft.com
. Circle 1172 on Inquiry Card.
The Fragrant and the Foul
