ion that there's a severe performance hit for making your DOS session protected, so you're better off not doing it. (I've noticed no performance effect at all.) Other books have less.
For exa
mple, not only does it tell about the DOS "Protected" box, but it has the only solution I've seen so far to a Win 95 registry bug that makes it inadvisable to designate your Win 95 machine as a "network server" in the "Typical Use" dialog box. There's much more like that. The book is written for someone who maintains a number of Win 95 systems. However, individual users can benefit from both the specific bulletproofing tips and the general discussion of how Win 95 does things. Highly recommended.
The only problem with this book is that it adds to the things that make me feel stupid: stuff I ought to have known. I've had several of those experiences this month.
Example: we opened up Cyrus the Cyrix 6x86-P166 the other day. While we had him open, I decided to install a new video board. There was nothing wrong with the Orchid Fahrenheit board we had in there; but several new 3-D video boards had come in, and I was feeling a bit guilty about not doing anything with them. The board I installed was fast
and came with good drivers, so I left it in when we closed Cyrus back up.
The next day, I found vertical stripes in my video. Turning the machine off and back on didn't cure them. Leaving it off for an hour got rid of the stripes, but they soon came back. Time to put the old board back in, which I did.
We've had this problem before, and every time it has turned out to be caused by one or more bad memory chips on the video board. In one case, three successive boards from the same manufacturer had nearly identical problems. It turns out they had bought a bad batch of memory and had to recall that board series. I expect that was the problem here, and I told the board maker, who sent another board, which I'll get to Real Soon Now.
Alas, the vertical stripes remained in one place: on the small icons on the Office 95 toolbar. Resetting the machine, changing the location of the toolbar, and changing the color of the toolbar: none of that helped. Then I noticed: right-click on the toolbar and up co
mes a menu; the last item on it, just above the customize command I used to change the colors, is "Refresh Icons." Duh.
Games in DOS windows blew up more frequently under Microsoft IntelliMouse (i.e., wheel mouse) software than vanilla Win 95 mouse drivers, so I uninstalled the IntelliMouse driver; but now that I've found the "Protected" box in DOS Properties, I've installed it again, so far with no problems. The IntelliMouse is about the best mouse I know of, and the IntelliMouse software makes it better. Recommended, but if you play DOS games, be sure to use the "Protected" trick.
Another thing to make me feel stupid: Princess, our Compaq Professional Workstation 5000
, is more and more becoming the main machine here. The main limitation has been the time needed to transfer all my daily-use software over and get Princess configured properly.
There's the secondary problem that while Princess runs Win 95 just fine, she's much faster in Windows NT 4.0 because Win 95 has no way to use her
dual Pentium processors; and while NT is more stable than Win 95, it's also harder to configure some programs for NT. Indeed, with some programs such as Earthlink's Total Access, you're better off letting your Internet-access company's automatic installer set up under Win 95, logging all the data such as Domain Name System (DNS) address numbers and the like, and then doing a manual installation in NT.
Actually, you ought to keep a good logbook anyway. I'm partial to Boorum and Pease bound composition books. Logbooks are important because neither Win 95 nor NT keeps any decent journal of what you have done; and sometimes the only way to get back to where you started is to painstakingly undo each thing you've done since the system last worked. I wish Microsoft or someone else would do a computer program to generate a journal, but if there is one, I don't know about it. The best substitute is a real logbook, not scraps of paper and fragile memory.
Anyway, we recently used the Win 95 settings to insta
ll Dialup Networking in NT. I'm pleased to report that I now have very fast and reliable Internet communications with the U.S. Robotics 56-Kbps Sportster external modem. Earthlink has an experimental 56-Kbps link that ought to be public about the time you read this.
A few of us remember that we weren't supposed to have these problems now. Cairo was supposed to integrate DOS, Windows, and NT into a single OS. Somehow, On to Cairo! got bogged down in the Second Battle of Tobruk.
However, I'm told by good sources that NT 5.0 is as close to Cairo as you need to be: it will do everything DOS, Windows, Windows 95, NT, and Memphis will do. It's a memory hog. You won't want to try it with less than 32 MB, and most of us will want 128 MB. Memory is cheap and getting cheaper. It's a small price to pay for a reliable integrated system. We'll be testing beta versions of Memphis and NT 5.0 in the next few weeks; stay tuned.
We spent last Monday at the Santa Monica offices of Softimage.
Softimage is
a wholly owned but independent subsidiary of Microsoft. It's symbolic that Microsoft has offices next door in the same single-story converted warehouse as Softimage, but there is no internal connection between the office suites.
Softimage was originally written for Silicon Graphics workstations and sold for $60,000 in the mid-1980s. Softimage 3D Extreme now runs under NT 4.0 as well as IRIX (Silicon Graphics' Unix) and costs $13,995. While the company doesn't publish sales figures, Softimage 3D Extreme is one of the two leading 3-D image-processing programs among professionals.
There are three basic tasks for computer-animated graphics. First is modeling: creating the image, including mapping the relationship of its parts. Second is animation: taking a number of poses of the image and blending or morphing smoothly among them so that you get realistic flowing action. Third is rendering, which is taking the animated images and building the final film frame by frame.
Computer graphics were rela
tively obscure until Jurassic Park demonstrated spectacularly just what was possible.
The special effects in that movie were largely done with three programs. Modeling was done with Alias, a Silicon Graphics program that runs exclusively on their systems. Animation was done with Softimage, also mostly on Silicon Graphics machines. Rendering was done with a program called Renderman. It required all the MFLOPS of computing power the industry could get. Note the specialization. That continues at the very highest level of computer graphics work, but Softimage has the capability to do all three tasks, and many shops now use it exclusively.
Softimage has always been a no-compromise professional system for professional artists. It is under continuous development, taking advantage of feedback from its professional user base to add features and improve its interface. There's an excellent Developer Kit for adding customization features. Big shops such as Industrial Light & Magic have developed whole sui
tes of plug-ins for Softimage.
Its strongest point is the integration of features and functions: where some systems require a variety of programs and plug-ins to finish a job, most of those features will typically be present in Softimage. There will be several hundred such tools, including ways to join two objects, explode an object (the function is called kaboom) and control what happens when the pieces hit other objects, smoothing functions, and so forth.
The result is a bewildering--one Softimage executive unapologetically said frightening--array of tools and options that can overwhelm a beginner. It's precisely the opposite of Microsoft's approach to software, although all future upgrades of Softimage will run in NT.
Those familiar with the software can do wonders. They're not up to Adam Selene, the computer-generated personality in Robert Heinlein's classic The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, but they're closer than I thought anyone would be now.
In particular, it's possible to model a
semiclothed human body so realistically that you have trouble determining if this is a computer-generated animation or a human actor. The face, however, is a dead giveaway; no one would think even the best computer-generated human face is a real person. Put a Darth Vader or storm trooper mask on it, though, and you could probably bring it off, and I doubt that it would be a problem to do a convincing alien. That may explain why my agent reports new interest in the movie rights to The Mote in God's Eye.
One of the impressive tools used by Softimage is a MIDI sound box--the kind with the sliders that sound mixers use--set up to control the movements of a computer object. One slider might control the mouth, another the hand. The result is something like the control of a puppet with a dozen invisible strings.
We saw other marvels, including talking dragons. It's hard not to leave there talking to yourself.
We now have Softimage 3D Extreme running in NT 4.0,
and my artist associate David Em
will be comparing it to its chief rivals. While Softimage at $13,995 for software alone won't be something you'll use this year, one of my goals in this column is to keep an eye on the future, and computer graphics is a fast-growing area. I suspect that a significant number of BYTE readers will be working in that field by 2001. By then, programs with this power will be available at office suite prices. Meanwhile, Softimage won't be standing still. Lord knows what capabilities they'll have programmed in by then.
If you're thinking of a career in 3-D graphics, the best preparation is to start off at home. You'll need NT on a Pentium system with a decent monitor, a Wacom tablet, as much memory as you can afford, and a lot of disk-storage space. That will be working space; if you want to keep your early efforts, add something like a Fujitsu DynaMO drive.
Then buy Caligari's trueSpace--the current version is called trueSpace3--and get to work. While trueSpace doesn't have anything like the capability
of Softimage, it's plenty powerful enough to learn with. There are tutorials to help you create and animate some objects, and more than enough power to teach the basics of computer graphics. The Softimage people estimate that even experienced designers need three months and more to learn Softimage; I've heard estimates of as long as six months. Practice with trueSpace can cut that time significantly.
I haven't taken a survey, but it's my impression that most successful 3-D graphics artists come from architecture and industrial-design backgrounds rather than fine arts or computer science. Of course, there are exceptions, David Em being one of them; but then David has always been as interested in sculpture as in graphic arts.
Anyway, if you're thinking of getting into computer graphics and you're still in school, you certainly won't go wrong by taking design courses. Meanwhile, spend a lot of time just fooling around learning the tools. To become a writer, you have to write, which includes finishing
what you write; to be a graphic artist, you have to produce finished graphic art. It takes about a million words to get started in writing.
A few days ago, we got the new Fujitsu DynaMO 640
, an external SCSI big brother to the DynaMO 230 we've had for more than a year. We have a big dual Pentium-based server running under NT 4.0 back in the cable room, but it already has enough external devices that adding another makes the SCSI string long enough to be unstable; so we decided to install the DynaMO 640 on Princess.
My usual routine with new SCSI devices is to ignore the cables they come with and set up with Granite Digital SCSI cables. Since about 90 percent of all SCSI problems are cable-related, and Granite Digital cables always work, I can get things running with one less darned thing to worry about and then switch to the included cables. Granite Digital cables and terminators also have diagnostic lights. If you don't have a set for SCSI setup, I bet you wish you did.
We powered Pri
ncess down, installed the cables, noted that the green light on the cable came on, and powered up. Alas, the controller didn't see any SCSI device. We fooled around awhile and concluded that the unthinkable had happened: we had a bad Granite Digital cable. So we swapped for another one. That didn't work either. Then I swapped the DynaMO 640 for the DynaMO 230 hooked up to Cyrus. It worked fine over there. However, the DynaMO 230, which had no problems on Cyrus, wasn't visible to the Compaq's controller.
We must have fooled around for an hour. I was very reluctant to believe there was anything wrong with Princess's SCSI controller, because that runs her hard drive just fine. What was there about the external connection that made it fail?
Eventually we got back there with a flashlight. The external SCSI connector is attached to the case with two small hex nuts that are themselves tapped to accept the screw fasteners on the cable. Princess is a preproduction model, and whoever assembled her put two t
iny lock washers under those hex nuts. Those caused the nuts to stand away from the case by about a millimeter more than normal, but, of course, the SCSI connector didn't protrude any further. The result was that while some of the SCSI connector pins made contact--enough that the lights came on in the cable--at least one didn't.
We removed the nuts, attached the SCSI cable without fasteners, and voilà! As I said, 90 percent of all SCSI problems are cable-related. There are two morals to this story: doubt everything else before concluding you have a bad Granite Digital cable, and use a strong light to examine your connections.
Meanwhile, the DynaMO 640 works very well indeed. There was one more problem: if you boot up your system with an unformatted disk in a SCSI drive, the controller will hang up. There's no problem with a formatted cartridge or with no cartridge at all.
One test was to transfer files from the 230 to the 640; it's clear from watching the lights blink that the 640 wri
tes about as fast as the 230 reads. The 640 will read and write to 230 disks, so any archives in 230 format are available after an upgrade to the 640. The 640 is a larger and more rugged unit than the 230. The 640's power supply is integral; the 230 uses a line lump. Unlike the 230, the 640 has a "power on" light as well as a "being accessed" light, which is just as well. At one point, we had everything working right and then tried to bring the system up with the 640's power off, and wondered why the SCSI controller couldn't find it. Duh.
SyQuest SCSI cartridge drives are fast and reliable, but Iomega drives are fast becoming standard for data exchange: Zip for text and Jaz for big image files. You'll find Iomega drives at Kinko's as well as in image-processing houses. They work, although I'm inclined to think of them as a little less reliable than SyQuest drives.
Both are faster than DynaMO drives. However, I never tire of saying, Zip (and SyQuest) cartridges are both larger and more fragile; I c
an put a DynaMO 640 cartridge in my shirt pocket. The files on that cartridge will be safe for years, and the cartridge costs only a fraction of what a Jaz cartridge costs. I have long been a fan of glass disks. I still have a Maximum Storage 300-MB-per-side cartridge drive on-line on the network as part of my backup system. The 640 gets that much on a single side (the cartridges are single-sided), takes up less room, and is much faster.
When you absolutely must use your cartridge drive as a hard drive, go for SyQuest or Iomega. However, for archive-quality storage with reasonable speed, you can't beat the Fujitsu DynaMO.
One last point: my associate Alan Ogden has managed to get a system working using my SyQuest SyJet 1.5-GB cartridge drive as the boot disk. He can now boot up in NT 4.0, DOS, Win 95, and OS/2 Warp depending on the disk cartridge he puts in at start-up. Alan reports that it's tricky getting it to work, but it can be done. I'll have details next month.
Chaos Manor intern Eri
c Pobirs reports that if you don't have Microsoft Word but you need to read Word documents
, WordPad, which comes with Win 95, works just fine. Eric says:
"I've gotten in the habit of using the WordPad accessory bundled in Win 95 and NT for most text generation. While supposedly limited to 32-KB files, this is rarely a problem for the length I tend to work in. Although it loaded the 69-KB Chaos Manor column without any problem, Netscape wanted to launch Word even though it isn't on this machine. This has never happened before.
"The vast majority of what I do gets transmitted, so the compact size of WordPad keeps the system from dragging. On the receiving end, WordPad has one big advantage: it understands Word 7 files but has no macro functions. If someone sends an infected file, the code is never run and is stripped during the save. No macro virus, ever."
If you have Windows 95 or NT, you have WordPad, and it's often good enough.
The game of the month is Fragile Allegiance from Int
erplay
, but I'm not really recommending it. There's a good game in there, but it's hard to find. Fragile Allegiance is a game of asteroid mining, a sort of SimCity in space with the complications of enemy missiles. There's also trading activity. Alas, while it's supposed to be a game of strategy in real time, it soon becomes a form of whack-a-mole.
Fragile Allegiance is vastly improved if you have a second computer available: there are a number of complex decisions you have to make, and the game gives you no help. What you need is a spreadsheet to add up the income potential of an asteroid so you can decide what kind of investment to make there. You can play Fragile Allegiance in a DOS window (be sure to check the "Protected" box in the program information file [PIF] launching it), but it won't restart: you still won't be able to get at Excel and return to the game. There's nothing for it but to bring in a second computer, which is wretched excess.
Fragile Allegiance assumes a major corporatio
n would send you out to manage a multibillion-dollar operation with inadequate manuals and about half the equipment you absolutely must have to do the job. They graciously allow you to buy that equipment, but they don't tell you what you'll need. There are other insults to your intelligence, and I'm afraid my willing suspension of disbelief went all to hell quite early on.
The good news is that Interplay has made a number of improvements to Conquest of the New World. These are available from their Web site. I'm undecided which is the better game, the old one with bugs fixed or the new Deluxe Edition, which not only has bug fixes but new features. Either is more fun than Fragile Allegiance as released. Maybe they'll improve it, too.
The
book of the month
is The Trap by James Goldsmith (1994, Carroll & Graf, ISBN 0-7867-0185-4).
The theory of free trade is that the competition will keep your domestic industries efficient, and thus provide cheaper and better consumer goods. I have of
ten asked economists, including one Nobel winner, what happens to that theory if you impose the political constraint (in economic terms, an externality) that those U.S. workers unemployed because their company couldn't compete with low-wage offshore workers must be supported at above-poverty levels by those who retain jobs.
Given that unemployment has social costs--my mother used to say idle hands are the devil's workshop and certainly high unemployment seems to be accompanied by high crime rates--and given the costs of unemployment compensation and welfare, are those taxpayers who retain their jobs sufficiently compensated by the availability of cheaper consumer goods? I have never got a satisfactory answer, and one well-known economist literally shouted at me, "You haven't read Ricardo," as if that were a sufficient answer to what I thought was a reasonable question.
James Goldsmith has read Ricardo. He asks my question and others like it, and concludes that global free trade is a deadly trap fo
r the West. Whether he's right or wrong, I think his questions need answers.
The first
computer book of the month
is the previously mentioned Bulletproofing Windows 95. I've found two others I can recommend. The first is Dan Gookin's Web Wambooli (Peachpit Press, ISBN 0-201-88597-2). Most beginner's guides to the Internet break off just as they get to the interesting parts. Gookin goes a bit beyond that, and his irreverent style makes this a good book to read as you sit and watch nothing happen on the Web. If you know someone contemplating Web entry, this is a good book for them to start with.
Paul Gilster's The Web Navigator (Wiley, ISBN 0-471-16495-X) isn't as good a beginner's introduction as Gookin's book but goes well beyond it. There's a lot about browsers and plug-ins and customizations. All the information here is available on the Web itself, but here it's well organized and available for reference. Most Web and Internet books are obsolete before they're published, but this one shou
ld be useful for another year or so.
I can see five other items I wanted to write about, but I'm way beyond my word limit, both for the magazine and the Pournelle Web exclusive.
Where to Find
Fragile Allegiance....................................$49.95
Interplay Productions
Irvine, CA
Phone: 800-468-3775
Phone: 714-553-6655
Fax: 714-252-2820
E-mail:
info@interplay.com
Internet:
http://www.interplay.com
Enter 976 on Inquiry Card.
Some T
hings Make You Feel Stupid
