The Chaos Manor Graphics lab is awash in fast machines. Downstairs, Jerry is adding a fax machine and printer to the network, but he's also musing on new possibilities for the paperless office. For that, be sure to read "New Synergies for Computing" in the September issue of BYTE.
Jerry Pournelle
I have two great items from Panasonic.
The KX-P6500 laser printer is one of the best printer deals I know. It does 300-dot-per-inch text at something like 6 pages per minute (a test printing of double-
spaced manuscript from one of my books was more like 8 ppm). It does 600-dpi pictures, and you can crank up the resolution to what they call "1200 equivalent," whatever that means; the result is very nice, good gray scales and nice tones.
It works on networks, it took about 5 minutes to install, and it's small and light enough that I am contemplating stuffing it into a large duffel bag to take to the beach house next time I go
down. It comes at a suggested retail price of $399. I've seen them at Fry's for somewhat less.
This isn't an industrial-grade printer, but it would be all I'd ever need. The press release says, "It will be some time before an end user will outgrow the KX-P6500," and I believe it. I've put it on SuperCow, the Gateway 2000 486DX2 we use as a fax server, so it will get a good workout and torture test. It looks rugged enough. This is a lot of printer for the price. The only reason it's not the main printer at Chaos Manor is that my old boat-anch
or Hewlett-Packard LaserJet III refuses to break. Recommended.
SuperCow has been the designated fax server for months now,
but there have been some delays. Part of it was sloth: there was just so much going on around here that I didn't get to it.
Mostly, though, another Panasonic device has taken the urgency off getting SuperCow downstairs to the fax lines to replace the curly-paper fax machine that was driving me nuts. Just as I was about to move SuperCow downstairs, we got a Panafax UF-344 plain-paper fax machine.
It's big. This is an industrial-strength system, with enough memory for 30 pages (expandable to 190 pages). That works: we've more than once had paper jams, and when we got them cleared, out would come pages and pages of faxes received while the system was unable to print. You can also tell it to receive to memory only and not print until someone gives it a password.
The paper tray holds 150 sheets. Add the 190-page memory, and you've got the ability to receive a whole
novel unattended.
The print mechanism is a dry-ink-cartridge system. Replace that (which is easy to do), and this thing becomes a color copier/printer/scanner. I can't say we have used it for that beyond testing that it will do it, but in an office that doesn't need many color copies, this would be good enough.
I can run on about this, but the bottom line is that it doesn't claim to do anything it won't do. The manual is extraordinarily complete. It's also remarkably dense, or maybe I'm getting stupid; anyway, I had to read things about four times before I could set it up the way we want it.
The Panafax UF-344 can answer the phone on the first ring or later; answer in "fax mode," or listen to see if it's really a fax, and if not, get out of the way for a human to answer on another extension; print immediately or hold things in memory; and a whole bunch of other options. It sends faxes as easily as it receives them and has the ability to store 100 station numbers. In a word, it's all the fax
machine any medium-size office would need, which is why I may never get around to carrying SuperCow downstairs. Recommended.
I'm replacing laptops.
The Nimantics Orion 8X has served me well, with no problems other than an out-of-alignment floppy drive. It is heavy, and the battery life is pretty short, but you expect that with a full-featured system with good sound, an active-matrix screen, and an integral CD-ROM drive.
There are two candidates to replace it, a Compaq (
http://www.compaq.com/
) Armada 4160T and the new Gateway 2000 (
http://www.gw2k.com/
) full-featured 2200 S5-166. An earlier version of the Arma
da won BYTE's Best of Comdex Award as best portable last year, and the Gateway Solo 9100 multimedia notebook won in that category last week in Atlanta. I haven't enough experience with either to make a recommendation yet; stay tuned.
The trend today is to full-featured laptops. Toshiba has gone the other way as well, with small, limited-feature systems. They even have a palmtop. I've seen them only at shows so far, but I'll probably be trying them as well.
For years, my favorite portable was a Gateway HandBook. This was a small 286 system that you couldn't quite get in your pocket but which fit well in a briefcase or shoulder bag. The keyboard was about 80 percent normal size. It ran Q&A Write and was one reason I used Q&A long after the advent of Windows.
Eventually it died. Actually, what died was the batteries and power supply; the computer still runs. It wasn't full-featured, but with an external modem, it was able to access text information exchanges like BIX and take care of my e-mail.
The keyboard and screen were good enough that I could write both fiction and nonfiction on the road.
I still have the Windows replacement for the HandBook: SuperCalf, the Gateway 2000 Liberty. This lightweight marvel has a full-size keyboard and large bright screen. There's no sound, and the floppy drive is external. It runs Windows 3.11. While I have had no problems getting Ethernet and modem PC Cards to work with it, I have tried three PC Card-connected CD-ROM drives and got none of them to work. They would all work with Windows 95, mind you; but until I get a CD-ROM drive to install it with, I have been reluctant to install Windows 95. Feeding floppy disks to that Liberty is a hobby if not a career.
If I get the Liberty working properly, I'll probably carry it on airplanes and to meetings, with a full-featured laptop in checked luggage. Carrying two computers is wretched excess, but I don't see any other way to solve the dilemma of having a powerful system in my hotel room and a machine with d
ecent battery life and acceptable weight for carrying around.
The Armada is supposed to be both. It comes apart neatly, with the top half weighing about 5 pounds (with a floppy drive and two PC Card slots). The bottom half, containing speakers, another battery, a CD-ROM drive, and a docking-station connector, adds another 4 pounds and cuts down on battery life something fierce. On my first trip with the Armada, I got a bit more than 2 hours of work done before it shut itself down; but I didn't understand the battery management software very well, and I'm told I should get more. We'll see.
The bottom line is that portables have become good enough that some people don't bother with desktop machines at all. My son Richard doesn't have one. He carries an IBM ThinkPad and a Visioneer PaperPort, and has come as close to having a paperless office as anyone I know. He does have a good bit of disk-storage space accessible through the Internet, which is used for both primary and backup storage. With a PC Ca
rd SCSI interface, it would be easy enough to add an external writable CD-ROM drive or digital videodisc (DVD) drive. I'd feel more comfortable with physically accessible backup disks.
David Em has been hard at work with our new high-end graphics systems.
Here's his next installment of the Chaos Manor Graphics Report. It's long, but more than interesting.
"Memory and horsepower:
Windows NT 4.0 has made it possible for us to run some pretty demanding graphics applications on PCs for the first time, but it is very resource-intensive. I've been keeping track of RAM usage by going to the Performance tab in the Task Manager. I find that Larnu, our dual 200-MHz Pentium Pro Compaq Workstation 5000 graphics test-bed slurps up between 40 and 50 MB of RAM without a single application running. Simply loading a program like 3D Studio Max pushes the RAM count to over 70 MB.
"When we got Larnu up and running about four months ago, the 256 MB of RAM it came with seemed generous. Applications like
3D Studio Max and Softimage, however, quickly made it evident that 3-D programs, like nature, abhor a vacuum. As 3-D scenes become more complex, memory requirements go up astronomically.
"So far, I've been able to keep within the 256-MB limit, but barely; I frequently run at well over 128 MB. Friends in the movie industry tell me that 256 MB is typical for a workstation plugged into a render farm, and 128 MB is sufficient for many modeling applications (although they are generally running Silicon Graphics machines under Unix).
"Also, 3-D graphics are ravenous in the processing-power department. A ray-traced scene of a not terribly complex 3-D landscape with a little transparency and reflection, but no shadows, in 3D Studio Max peaked both of Larnu's Pentium Pro 200 processors at 100 percent, effectively locking up the system.
"Drivers:
The last few months have also caused me to develop a healthy respect for how difficult it is to write good hardware drivers for high-end graphics boards
. We currently have an embarrassment of riches in the graphics-board department, with offerings from Matrox, Elsa, Oxygen, and Intergraph. Alex Pournelle and I have spent a considerable amount of time phoning and e-mailing folks in the U.S., Canada, and Germany, trying to fix our driver problems, and we're still not there yet.
"One advantage of having all these fast boards to play with is that we've finally been able to determine that lots of bugs we thought were software- or OS-related turn out to be driver issues. Considering hardware foul-ups (like the bad memory problems we had a few months back), OS problems, and faulty drivers, I have no idea how mere mortals are expected to troubleshoot problems like this on their own.
"The Graphics Lab: Our loose confederation of graphics systems is quickly turning into a full-fledged Graphics Lab. In addition to Larnu and Lola (our dual 180-MHz Power Mac), we now have a Carrera Computers (
http://www.carrera.com/
) Cobra EV56 500-MHz Alpha-powered system equipped with an Oxygen 202 graphics card and an Intergraph (
http://www.intergraph.com/I
) TDZ 425 workstation outfitted with dual RealiZm V25 superfast geometry accelerators and two 266-MHz Pentium IIs. Interestingly, each one of these machines has qualities that distinguish it from the others.
"The Mac continues to be an excellent choice for video (we'll be looking at new video boards and systems on both Mac and PC platforms in coming months) as well as 2-D applications. Larnu, with its dual Elsa Gloria L graphics cards, continues to be the best all-around 2-D and 3-D workstation, and we will continue to use it as
our primary test-bed system.
"We've just started to work with the Carrera Alpha/Oxygen system, and our preliminary rendering tests indicate that for raw processing power, nothing in the NT universe even comes close (more on this below). Which brings us to Lazarus, our new Intergraph TDZ 425.
"Lazarus rising:
We had a devil of a time getting Lazarus running, not from any problem inherent to the system, but due to the fact that FedEx managed to nearly demolish it in transit -- no mean feat, given that Lazarus weighs nearly 85 pounds and is encased in solid steel. We had to send Lazarus back to Huntsville, Alabama, for repairs, and when he came back, he worked like a dream.
"Since the machine was coming apart at the seams anyway, we took a look inside, and the insides are impressive. The box has 10 fans in it, two each on the RealiZm boards alone. We also got our first look at the Pentium II chips, which have huge heat sinks on them, but no fans. Now that Lazarus is risen, I can attest th
at the airflow engineering really works, because he runs cool as a cucumber.
"In terms of performance, I'll get right to the point: If your mission is to produce 3-D graphics on a PC, this machine is incredible.
"Alex and I did some rendering tests and found that Lazarus's Pentium IIs do indeed run significantly faster than Pentium Pros. Intergraph's RealiZm V25 boards can calculate up to 1.2 million triangles per second, resulting in the best 3-D scene previsualizations I've ever seen on a PC (caveat: triangle calculation numbers seem to me to be misleading, because there are always processing hang-ups in the pipeline, and besides, you're not always calculating triangles).
"The results instantly astonished us. Using Softimage 3.7 and 3D Studio Max 1.2, we were able to quickly model shaded and textured 3-D objects, move them around in simulated space, and see real-time lighting updates on the surfaces. This represents a giant step forward for artistic creation on PCs.
"What does this p
revisualization speed mean for artists and designers? Obviously, people have been productive over the years without it, but this kind of display speed puts the user into a whole new conceptual space: the interactive design space. The big deal here is that the visualization process suddenly becomes less of a "construction space" and more of a "creative space."
"Imagine the plight of a novelist working with a word processor that, instead of displaying characters on the screen, displays pixelated blocks that "sort of look like letters." Imagine further that our novelist is then required to invoke a separate program that takes anywhere from seconds to minutes to run before he can see what he's written.
"Essentially, there are two approaches to design. One is the engineering approach, where you start with a preconceived idea, such as making a blueprint for a bridge. The other is the art approach, where you try out different things as you go along. This is what Pablo Picasso was talking about when he sa
id, "I do not seek, I find." Most really good work is a combination of these two approaches. Immediate feedback lets artists move away from a bridge-building mode to an operational mode that is more like painting as Monet did it or sculpting in clay like Rodin.
"As a final note about Intergraph this month, I might add that the TDZ 425 represents a powerful argument for buying integrated special-purpose hardware systems. Lazarus is the only system we've tried to date that didn't come with significant driver problems. We'll have a lot more to say about Lazarus over the next few columns as we continue to test our most demanding 3-D applications; this is just a first taste.
"We've just installed the Carrera Cobra EV56,
and it's a screamer. Ours came with a 500-MHz Alpha chip and an Oxygen 202 graphics card made by Dynamic Pictures (
http://www.dypic.com/
). The two-processor Oxygen 202 is one of the premiere graphics cards in the business (there is also a four-processor 402). We'll be talking about it in more detail next month.
"As we never tire of pointing out, you can never have enough processing power when it comes to serious graphics. No matter how many cycles you throw at a complex render, it's still easy to bring everything to a crawl (I'm looking at an image on the screen that's been calculating for 4 hours, even as we speak).
"We've installed some nonnative code on the Cobra EV56 under FX!32, but it will take a while to evaluate performance, since FX!32 gets "smarter" over time. Photoshop runs pretty slow so far, but Word 97 already runs just fine. When the Alpha sees native code, however, there simply is no contest. We rendered a test Softimage 3.7 scene on the Cobra EV56, Larnu, and Lazarus. The Cobra's single processor outperformed Larnu's dual Pentium Pro 200s handily and ran neck and ne
ck with Lazarus's dual Pentium IIs. There are some important implications here.
"Anyone considering a networked rendering environment for programs like Softimage or LightWave should consider the Alpha option. Alpha systems are very aggressively priced at the moment, and faster processors are about to roll out the door. Beyond the speed enhancement, there are potentially great economic advantages here for outfits using dozens or hundreds of rendering stations. The ability to run, say, Word on the box in FX!32 extends these machines' "hand-me-down" life cycle, too.
"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if companies like Softimage currently charge a $2500-per-processor license fee for distributed rendering environments, and Alphas run twice as fast as the current crop of Intel chips, the savings are significant.
"In addition to our hardware adventures,
there is a lot happening on the software front, which will have to wait till next month. Some of the programs we'll be tes
ting include some wild new plug-ins for 3D Studio Max, including ClothReyes from REM Infografica in Madrid, Spain, HyperMatter from Second Nature in London, and RayMax, a ray-trace renderer from Absolute Software in Hamburg, Germany. With these great plug-ins, 3D Studio Max may truly rival Softimage.
"Also, we'll be looking at Macromedia's fantastic new Director 6 multimedia bundle (still the multimedia deal of the century), an outstanding drag-and-drop Java applet maker from Kinetix called HyperWire, and, now that we finally have it running, Softimage 3.7 from Microsoft. By the time we digest all of this, it will be time for the national ACM SIGgraph convention, the premiere computer graphics convention, where a whole bunch of even newer products are being promised."
Coming back to earth,
longtime readers know that I enthusiastically recommend ViewSonic monitors. I have several, and they all work wonderfully well, from the PT810 I'm staring at now to the older 17-inch one upstairs in my "mon
k's cell" where I write fiction. We also keep a 17-inch ViewSonic at the beach house, and Roberta uses the model with built-in speakers on one of her Macs. In every case, we have nothing but good to say about them.
I've used the PT810 as my main system monitor for about a year. When we brought in Princess, the dual Pentium Pro Compaq Workstation 5000 that runs Windows NT 4.0, it was set up with an NEC 5fg monitor.
Last week, we got a new ViewSonic Professional Series PT813. Once we got it up the stairs -- the PT813 has a half-inch (diagonal) larger screen than the PT810, but it seems to weigh nearly half again as much -- we set it up on the Compaq machine and plugged it in without turning Princess off. It worked, but it looked truly horrible. Then we went to the control panel for the Matrox Millennium board and told it that we had a ViewSonic PT810 (there not being any NT drivers for the PT813). The picture instantly cleared up and became just plain gorgeous.
We're running the PT813 at 1152-
by 864-pixel resolution and an 85-Hz refresh rate. The Millennium board and the PT813 are a good match. Text on the screen is sharp-edged and rock-steady; you can stare at this all day without getting eyestrain. The PT813 has better color balance than the PT810. David Em says it's still not up to Nanao monitors for pure color fidelity, but frankly, it's a good bit better than my ability to detect the difference; and given the PT813's better text capability, I'd rather work all day with it anyway. This is one great monitor.
We're using it with the Labtec (
http://www.labtec.com/
) LCS-2612 speaker set; this has a heavy woofer unit and two magnetically shielded speakers, which use an ingenious adjustable bridge to hold them at ear level one either side of your monitor. The sound quality is more than good enough, t
hey look surprisingly good up there on the monitor, and they're up off the desk, so they aren't in the way. I like them a lot.
We also have the ViewSonic VP140 ViewPanel flat-screen monitor. It's less than 3 inches thick. The base footprint is 5 by 10 inches. The screen size, including bezel, is 11 by 14 inches (and 3 inches thick) with a diagonal viewing area of 14 inches. The recommended resolution is 1924 by 768 pixels at a 75-Hz refresh rate.
One neat feature is auto-adjust: after a resolution change, the display hunts around until it finds and fits in the screen edges. It works well and is a very digital thing to do, reminding us that while most monitors, being tubes, are extremely analog in nature, the VP140 is digital to its core.
You'd probably never do this, but for reasons of workspace geometry, we first set this up as the auxiliary monitor to the Armada laptop, so we had the same material on the laptop and the VP140 and could compare them. Actually, there's no comparison: if you l
ike laptop screens, you'll love this. It's sharper, crisper, and has less smearing and submarining; not that the Armada had many problems that way. Of course, it doesn't bear comparison to a real monitor like the PT813; it has only 256 colors, and there's nothing like artist-quality color fidelity. Still, it's good enough color for games and anything else most of us need.
I presume the intended audience for this monitor is the executive with limited desk space, and it sure would work for that. It's a handsome unit, and the base is heavy enough that it's extremely unlikely to be knocked over by shifting desktop clutter. It also has a wide-enough viewing angle to accommodate three people and perhaps four, considerably better than any laptop. It's a small, bright screen easily seen in all light conditions. It runs cool, has zero radiation, and is silent. All told, the VP140 is plenty good enough for what it's designed for, and some kind of flat technology is likely to be the wave of the future.
Final
ly, ViewSonic has recently begun marketing projection equipment. We saw their first effort, the PJ800 LCD Projector, at InfoComm, and we were impressed: for under $6000, an 800- by 600-pixel image 10 feet tall.
Unix-box users won't have this problem,
but for those maintaining Web sites with Windows 95 or NT systems, it's important to know the true name of a file. You can set things up so that Windows will show you that a filename is actually FOo.DOc; but what Windows wants to show you is that your file is named Foo.doc. Many file utilities won't show you the true name at all. This probably won't matter on your system, but many Web servers are Unix-based, and Unix is extremely case-sensitive.
Canyon Software's Drag and File 4.0 utility (due for release any day now; till then, a beta version is available on their Web site) will show true names. Some shareware authors are pretty cavalier about upgrades and bug fixes. Canyon is different, taking bug reports seriously. There have been many improve
ments to Drag and File since I last mentioned it, including the ability to show true names.
If you have Drag and File, it's time to get your upgrade from the Canyon Web site. If you don't have it, you may want to: Drag and File works intuitively and painlessly to do most copy and file management operations. It has options like "copy later files only," which make it a lot easier to build backup and archive files. I continue to use and recommend Drag and File.
Another utility I like is Cognitronix's Searcher Professional 4.0. Until recently, if I wanted to search through files to find specific text, I opened Microlytics' GOfer in a DOS window. GOfer still works, but the interface is a bit clunky, and it doesn't understand long filenames.
Searcher Professional is faster and easier to use. It runs just fine under both Windows 95 and NT. It works just fine across networks, so I can use it to search the old BYTE column archives on Spirit, the NT 4.0 server that lurks in the cable room.
Unlik
e GOfer, which stops at each find and waits for instructions, Searcher Professional lists every find, much as the Windows Find utility does. The report includes the search key text, some context, and the complete path to the file. There are some other features I haven't used. The important thing is that it will search closed files to find text, and it does it quickly and efficiently. Everyone needs some kind of text-search program, and this one is more than good enough. Recommended.
I'm still torn between mice and mushpads.
On the one hand, the Microsoft IntelliMouse "wheel" mouse is convenient and easy to use, and I'm used to it. On the other hand, mushpads are often found on laptops, and once you get used to them, they are more intuitive than mice. For a while, I avoided the dilemma by telling myself how much I like the IntelliMouse wheel.
At Comdex, Cirque showed me a mushpad that has all the wheel capabilities: there's a special strip area that you touch exactly as you would use the wheel
. It can use the IntelliMouse software or its own, and you can program the wheel area so that a tap there is equivalent to a double-click or a click and drag lock, as you choose.
They're also building Cirque mushpads into keyboards. I'm already to the point that if they build a mushpad into a keyboard with the Backspace key on the QWERTYUIOP row where God intended it to be rather than up on the numbers row where engineers who can't type located it, I'd convert in a moment.
I'm still using wheel mice, but Cirque's mushpads get more tempting every day.
If you teach or study anatomy and physiology,
you need to know about SimBioSys from Critical Concepts. Their programs Clinics and Physiology Labs are wonderful full-color simulations of human physiological functions. These things can teach better than a hundred books. Find out more at
http://www.laketech.com
; if you're at all interested in the subjects, you'll be glad you did.
Finally, there's OrbitMaker.
This is another of those no-frills programs from Zephyr Services (
http://www.zephyrs.com/
) that do all they promise and a bit more. OrbitMaker lets you set up solar systems with any initial conditions you like and run them. It comes with a good model of our own system. There are a number of features, including the ability to zoom in. It's a program no science fiction writer should be without.
Where to Find
Armada 4160T......................about $3999.00
Compaq Computer
Houston, TX
Phone: 800-345-1518
Phone: 281-514-0484
Fax: 281-514-4583
Internet:
http://www.compaq.com
Drag and File 4.0.........................$35.00
Canyon Software
San Rafael, CA
Phone: 800-280-3691
Phone: 415-453-9779
Fax: 415-453-6195
Internet:
http://www.canyonsw.com
KX-P6500 Laser Printer...................$399.00
Panafax UF-344...$2195
Panasonic Communications & Systems
Secaucus, NJ
Phone: 800-742-8086
Phone: 201-348-7000
Internet:
http://www.panasonic.com
Profe
ssional Series PT813.........about $1599.00
VP140 ViewPanel...................about $2499.00
PJ800 LCD Projector...............about $5995.00
ViewSonic Corp.
Walnut, CA
Phone: 800-888-8583
Phone: 909-869-7976
Fax: 909-468-5838
Internet:
http://www.viewsonic.com
Searcher Professional 4.0.................$69.00
Cognitronix
Poway, CA
Phone: 800-217-0932
Phone: 619-549-8955
Fax: 619-549-8327
Internet:
http://www.cognitronix.com/
HotBYTEs
- information on products covered or adv
ertised in BYTE
Jerry Pournelle is a science fiction writer and BYTE's senior contributing editor. You can write to Jerry c/o BYTE, 29 Hartwell Ave., Lexington, MA 02173. Please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope and put your address on the letter as well as on the envelope. Due to the high volume of letters, Jerry cannot guarantee a personal reply. You can also contact him on the Internet or BIX at
jerryp@bix.com
. Visit Chaos Manor at
http://www.earthlink.net/~jerryp/
WEB EXCLUSIVE: The Graphics Revolution Continues
