Virtual Publishing -- and Virtual Travel

Jerry takes to the skies with a new laptop -- and muses on some virtual possibilities.

Jerry Pournelle

Microcomputers went to Mars. That's appropriate. Single- chip computers were developed for on-board guidance of ICBMs. One cause of war is competition for scarce resources. Ninety percent of the resources available to humanity are not on the Earth. Now, microcomputers help explore the solar system and help make ICBMs obsolete.

At the 1986 meeting of the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy, we recommended that the U. S. abandon enormous missions in favor of smaller and more focused missions making use of the latest off-the-shelf technologies. That was first done by the Air Force with projects like Clementine. It took NASA longer than I thought it would, but, in fact, the change from expensive missions to the "smaller, faster, cheaper" missions epitomized by Pathfinder came at blinding speed for a big gov ernment agency. I can claim a little credit for getting NASA thinking in that direction (not so much me as the council I chair), but most of the credit goes to Dan Goldin, the best administrator NASA has had since Apollo. Congratulations all around.

Not only did we get images from Mars, but they were distributed over the Web. NASA's Web site -- that's http://www.nasa.gov ; nasa.com is a private- joke site featuring some mild sex ads -- got over 100 million hits in less than a week. Who says the American people aren't interested in space?

Now all we need is for Digital Equipment to perfect the Millicent cash-transfer system I wrote about in the July Web Exclusive column. This is a method for collecting small -- less than a dollar -- fees over the Internet with transaction costs of a fraction of a cent. I doubt that a dime a hit would have deterred many people from looking at the Mars pictures, and 100 million dimes would pay for 5 percent of the mission's cost. The 100 million rate wouldn't be sustained for 20 weeks, but even so, this could be the beginning of a new era in space-mission financing. After all, some movies have cost more than Pathfinder did. I'd rather pay 10 bucks to see more Mars experiments than to see Waterworld .

This has been a busy month at Chaos Manor. We had to tent the house to get rid of termites, there have been several trips, Larry Niven and I are hard at work finishing The Burning City , and there were a couple of medical emergencies, not serious, but time-consuming. There's a lot here this month, but I suspect the column will definitely live up to its name.

I'm writing this part of the column in the Denver airport and later on a United Airlines flight; which is to say, in the ante-room to purgatory. I can recall when I looked forward to a few hours on an airplane. No telephones, and I could get some work done. Now the seats are so close together that you can't open your laptop if the passenger in front of you leans the seat all the way back.

I don't know what happened to America, but suddenly the only thing anyone cares about is money. So many people are willing to endure acute misery to save a few bucks that there aren't any reasonable choices for people who would pay, say, 10 percent more in fares to get 10 percent more space. Since airline operation costs are driven by fuel costs, and fuel costs are driven by weight carried, it would n't cut much into profitability to have such a section for long flights.

I am no great fan of regulations, but I do wonder if the nation can keep its sanity when travel is both stressful and time- wasting, and our businesspeople and government executives are stuffed into seats 17 inches wide with no legroom and no way to open a laptop. Surely there's a better way than this!

One thing is certain: the misery of modern air travel (at least in tourist class) will hasten the development of tools for letting us avoid the travel altogether. Virtual reality, here we come.

I'm carrying a Compaq Armada 4160T, which I've named Armadillo. In case you're wondering, I like armadillos. This is about the best laptop I've ever had. It works extremely well, provided you can get the screen at the right vertical angle. Unfortunately I can't, because the chap in front of me has his seat back as far as it will go; so it's very hard to see the Word '95 menu items and toolbar icons. I've set Word to the Pournelle o ption: white letters on a blue background. (Chris Peters, who used to own Word at Microsoft, put it in at my request.) Thus, my text is visible; it's the menu bar I can't see too well. I can live with that; now if the kid behind me will stop pounding on my seat.

This is my second Armada. The first was an early model that had problems with the power management software. This one doesn't have that difficulty. There's an item in the Shutdown menu that says "eject PC"; execute that, wait a moment, and undock. It trundles for a bit and then you can either shut down entirely or put the machine to sleep.

You can "suspend" the machine either by software or with a hardware button. For some reason, the button is more prominent than the power button. It works well, once you remember that you get back in control not by pressing the suspend button again, but by a single press of the power button. Pressing the suspend button wakes the system up just long enough for it to realize that the suspend button was pres sed, after which it goes back to sleep. This can be disconcerting until you figure out what's going on.

It wakes up right where you left it, for instance at the point where I left off typing this; and it comes on instantly. The suspend operation doesn't use much power, less than 10 percent for several hours.

Screen brightness noticeably changes when you go to battery power; it's still bright enough to see in broad daylight (from the correct viewing angle), although it's not as bright as the Nimantics Orion's screen. On the other hand, the batteries last a lot longer. If you're not using the CD-ROM drive, you can get nearly 4 hours of Word with the Armada, as opposed to a good bit less than an hour with the Orion. I also managed nearly 3 hours of battery life playing Interplay Productions' Conquest of the New World, a game that regularly uses the CD-ROM drive.

Conquest is a DOS program, and the Armada's power management didn't give much warning before it dumped me to the Windows 95 control sc reen; there's far more warning in Win 95 programs. On the other hand, an instant press of the suspend button preserved everything until I was able to bring up the system under outside power. I lost no data, not even the last move I made in the game. The bottom line is that I have got as much useful battery life out of the Armada as I have from any portable I ever had -- and a lot more than I got from most of them.

The Armada comes apart. The top half is a neat portable using the main battery as a handle -- a feature I like a lot. It's a bit heavier than the Gateway 2000 Liberty, but still small enough to carry to meetings. The bottom half contains the CD-ROM drive, better sound, the docking port, and another battery bay. You can wrap it up in pajamas and ship it in checked luggage, but I've found it no great hardship to take the entire machine on an airplane. However, I do appreciate the take-apart feature when I want to take notes in a meeting.

My son Richard runs his business from an IBM ThinkPa d. I could do the same with Armadillo, and I like its mushpad better than the eraserhead pointing device on the IBM systems. This Armada has a 166-MHz Pentium MMX, and I haven't found a game (or anything else, but games are a strenuous test) it doesn't run well. At 800- by 600-pixel resolution, text in Word looks all right (the higher the resolution, the better a good font such as Times Roman looks).

It's fast: Norton System Information reports a 26. By contrast, the Cyrix P-166 gets a 43. Benchmarks don't mean a lot: systems are either good enough or they aren't, and this one definitely is. For example, I can save this entire column, with Word set to make a backup -- don't ever trust fast save -- in a second or less, and all 100,000 words of The Burning City are saved in under 2 seconds. Even for someone who saves as often as I do, there's not much room for improvement with more speed. What more do I need?

The keyboard is small, but it's more than adequate. Back at the airport, I go t some real work done with this machine, and if I had any room, I'd be able to do some work now instead of playing Conquest of the New World. I was also able to do some Visual Basic programming while waiting in the doctor's office the other day. All told, this is a great portable.

A couple of complaints, neither exclusive to the Armada. First, the Caps Lock key. I've become used to the idea of Ctrl being on the row with the space bar, and given that the convention for select all is Ctrl-a, I even prefer Ctrl down there. It's all too easy to hit Ctrl-a on a portable with its smaller keys, and if you do hit Ctrl-a and then another key, you can lose all your work. Word has an undo feature, but some of the communications editors I have don't; so I am not only resigned to Ctrl being away from the A key, I welcome it. I realize that's a shock to some readers.

Alas, it was replaced by the Caps Lock key, and that one is also all too easy to hit; this doesn't result in a disaster, but it's very anno ying. If left to me, Caps Lock could be up with the numbers, or above them, or even on the back side of the machine, or require a key switch. I don't use it a lot, and when I do, I certainly don't need it instantly accessible. If they can't move Caps Lock, I wish they would give me the option of changing it so that I'd have to do Shift Caps Lock to turn it on.

My only real complaint is that the screen could be just a little brighter under battery power; but, of course, that would come at the expense of battery life, and it's not as if this isn't good enough for real work. I could also wish it were a bit lighter, but I've never had a portable I didn't wish that of. Faced with a trade-off between weight and features, I tend to take features every time and carry a roll-on travel case that leaves ruts in the Tarmac; and with the Armada, I can take the top half to meetings.

Incidentally, redocking is incredibly easy: just push the machine into the docking port. It realizes instantly that things have ch anged, trundles a second, restores the network, and Bob's your uncle. I love it. If you're looking for a full-featured laptop, either as a second machine or your only one, look at the Armada. Highly recommended.

I mentioned above that white on blue was a feature added to Word at my request. It's one reason I use Word, although the chief reason we switched was the document-comparison/revision-detection capability. Anyway, I have another request, this time for a feature Symantec added to Q&A Write when I asked for it.

I need a better word count.

Q&A Write had this neat feature: Ctrl- F3 brought up a small box that showed the number of words, the number of lines, and the number of paragraphs before the cursor, after the cursor, and in the entire document. The product manager said it was an easy feature to add.

This was wonderful for writers. I could set line lengths and then write the exact number of lines needed. For some assignments, that can be critical. Moreover, I could keep a bunch of notes at the bottom of a text file, start at the top writing finished text, put the cursor at the end of the actual text, and find out instantly how much real text I had as opposed to notes. This is a valuable feature. Of course, you can sort of do it with Word by cutting and pasting and getting word counts for different windows, but that takes excessive effort; it's much nicer to simply hit Ctrl-F3. Please, fellows?

The other night, I downloaded Netscape Communicator , which is a step up from the last version of Netscape Navigator Gold. It works pretty well and has some nifty new features. It's not hard to install, and it's fairly easy to use. Alas, it has some instabilities. I don't remember the last time Navigator Gold crashed, but I've had three crashes with Communicator. None of them were serious: the program shut down without terminating my Internet connection and didn't seem to affect Win 95.

I say seem to because hours later I did have some problems, applications runnin g unusually slow, that sort of thing, which were cured by shutting down and bringing the system back up. That sort of thing used to be fairly common but hasn't been for weeks now, and since the only unusual event in the last hours was the Communicator crash, I have my suspicions.

For all that, I'll keep using Communicator, which has a nicer interface and works well indeed when it's working.

I consider the Internet a form of black magic anyway. Half the time on the Internet is spent waiting for something -- anything -- to happen, and half the remaining time, what is happening isn't interesting. On the other hand, it's a bit like fishing for steelhead trout. Most of your time is spent being miserable, waist-deep in freezing water; but catching one is rewarding enough that you will try again. Every now and then, the Internet delivers rewards great enough to make you keep trying.

Meanwhile, I've also been improving my Web site. Go to http://home.earthlink.net/~jerryp/ to have a look -- and while you're on the Web, drop by the BYTE site and read the Web Exclusive part of this column for much more on some of the problems I've encountered.

I've added some photographs taken with my wonderful Olympus D300-L digital camera, and mind you, that wasn't one of the problems. Olympus sent me a parallel-port version of the software; it works, and so does what they have up on the Web now. It may not be simple enough for unsophisticated users yet, but BYTE readers won't have any trouble with it.

Eric Pobirs, the Chaos Manor intern , has been testing ATI's All-In-Wonder board and has this to say:

"At $329, the ATI All-In-Wonder (AIW) video board deserves the title. In a single slot, ATI provides 2-D and 3-D video acceleration, MPEG-1 decoding with full-screen scaling, video still capt ure, motion-video capture, NTSC output (via composite and S-Video), NTSC input from direct and cable (up to 125 channels), close-caption display and capture, and channel scheduling. While some competitors offer comparable feature sets by adding daughterboards, ATI's approach is more compact, more convenient, and less expensive.

"Installation gave some problems. RacingCow, the Gateway P-133 I installed the AIW into, also has a recently installed digital videodisc (DVD) kit. The first generation of DVD drives cannot read CD Recordable (CD-R) discs. One guess what format the ATI software came on.

"We installed the software over the network. Note that the default for CD-ROM (and all other) drives is not shared. Once we set sharing on the remote machine, we could install the AIW software.

"A full installation of the ATI software is more difficult than it should be. To enable all the features (and why buy the board otherwise?) requires invoking the installer several times. Common off-the-shelf too ls such as InstallShield allow for complex installations and should be able to deal with the multistage operation called for here. At least the installation is covered in the printed documentation. Little else is. Mastering the interface is a bit confusing at first. I expect it's covered in on-line form somewhere, but a dozen pages added to the manual would have been appreciated.

"That aside, the software is good. The tabs added to the Display control panel allow more adjustments than most other video boards. The video capture/playback is well designed once you understand the basics. Video scaling is excellent. Playing Twister from DVD looked as good as any TV, even though the system was set at 1024- by 768-pixel resolution. Most inexpensive NTSC-over-SVGA products I've seen either produced a highly distorted playback or could fill only a small window.

"In full-screen mode, an optional row of icons provides access to the capture functions. Grabbing a perfect still from Twister was as simple as cli cking on the mouse. While not as portable as Play's Snappy, the AIW fills the same role and adds motion capture for a much lower price.

"In addition to displaying full-screen NTSC video, the AIW also handles close- caption display. The intelligence of the PC lets users do things they wouldn't dream of using a TV. You can specify key words or phrases to activate an alert if they appear in a broadcast. You can save captions as a text file to create free transcripts. By using the scheduler, you can produce a transcript automatically. Often, this may be more convenient than a videotape.

"One place the AIW falls short is in 3-D performance. Diamond Multimedia's 3Dfx leads in direct support by game developers. Support for the ATI Rage II+ chip is mostly in the form of Microsoft's Direct 3-D API, which currently doesn't support as many advanced features.

"Normally, this wouldn't be much of a handicap, since the add-on nature of 3Dfx boards lets them supplement a serious gamer's primary video device . But one of the most appealing features of the AIW is its output to TVs. None of the 3Dfx boards (or Power VR for that matter) can be used simultaneously with the TV output, thus putting a major dent in the AIW's value to gamers. ATI claims its new generation of 3-D chips will put it on an even footing with the leaders in 3-D, but for now, you can't have it all. If an AIW using the new chips could also decode MPEG-2, it would be an excellent DVD solution."

When the Diamond Multimedia Monster Sound card arrived, Eric, who's more enamored of computer games than anyone I know, was eager to get at it. He set it up with six speakers -- four tweeters and two woofers -- and soon I was listening to helicopters flying around the room. The 3-D sound effect is very good indeed, and the audio realism ( we're using Altec-Lansing speakers) is awesome.

Eric's report is in the Web Exclusive part of the column. There are some drawbacks to the Monster Sound card, but there are definite advantages. Recommended, but read the report.

Garrett Communications has done it again. A few years ago, I got an H-80 Micro Ethernet Hub. This is a small box that has one thin-net and six twisted-pair Ethernet jacks. One of the twisted-pair sockets has a switch that lets you use it to chain the hub to another. It runs at 10 Mb, never needs attention, and is indispensable for my system.

Now they have the Magnum 600ES Personal Hub Plus. This has six 10Base-T sockets and runs at 100 Mb. You can switch one of the sockets to connect to a 10-Mb hub such as the H-80, so the device serves as a bridge. You can switch another socket to plug into another 100-Mb hub, so you can daisy chain these.

Most of my Ethernet is 10 Mb, because I haven't made any serious effort to collect 100-Mb Ethernet cards. However, both Armadillo and Princess, the dual-processor Compaq Professional Workstation 5000, have 100-Mb Ethernet, and I make no doubt I'll get other 100-Mb machines soon. I plugged the 100-Mb systems into the 600ES, left the 10-Mb systems plugged into the H-80, connected the two Garrett devices, and whammo! Garrett is to Ethernet hubs and bridges as Granite is to SCSI cables: rugged, reliable, and worry-free. Highly recommended.

The computer book of the month is Edward Yourdon's Death March: Managing "Mission Impossible" Projects (Prentice-Hall, ISBN 0-13-748310-4). This is a manual on how to manage projects "doomed to failure" and turn them into successes. That sounds like pretentious nonsense, and coming from anyone but Yourdon, it probably would be; but this book is well worth your time and money. Yourdon's been there, and he can write; if you manage software projects and you're not the pointy-haired guy in "Dilbert," you will want this book.

The book of the month is a good novel by Victor Koman called Kings of the High Frontier . Unfortunately, it's intertwined with a bad novel and at least two dull political tracts. The book is about getting to space despite NASA and the government, and I kept reading it, but I have to say, I skimmed a fair amount. Mr. Heinlein said that he never saw a book that couldn't be improved by cutting from 10 percent to 50 percent; this one is no exception. It also suffers from putting characters in funny hats (literally in one case). In fairness, it covers a lot of territory, and big multi-viewpoint novels can get away from more experienced novelists than Koman.

Many years ago, I postulated "information utilities": places where you might put intellectual work, such as a novel. Those who want to read your work would pay a small fee direct to you. "Where," I asked rhetorically, "is the need for that bloodsucking publisher?" In those days, I didn't realize that the physical production of books was one of the least of the tasks of the publisher. That gets contracted out anyway: few publishers own printing presses. What publishers do is edit books, arrange for publicity, and distribute them.

In Koman's case, distribution is electronic; visit http://www.pulpless.com for instructions. You can download the book in Adobe Acrobat or other formats. You can also arrange to have a copy printed and mailed if you don't want to read it on-screen. Pulpless pays the author something like half the money received. I read the book on the airplane. I probably wouldn't have if I hadn't had a paper copy; reading it on-screen in an airplane seat would have been pretty grim.

Within a few years, however, I suspect we'll have small, portable "book machines" about the size and weight of a paperback and capable of reading discs off smaller versions of a CD-ROM drive. The book machines will be as easy to read and as convenient to carry as a book. When they become widely available, they will completely change the publishing industry. It's not that books, especially hardbound books, will go away; but much of the mass paperback publishing will be displaced by personal book machines.

When that happens, there will still be the need for editors; and there will be so many books available that there will be an even greater need for reviewers.

It's late, and I'm out of time and space. Next month, more of same. Stay well.

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Product Information

All-In-Wonder...........................$299 2MB


........................................$329 4MB

ATI Technologies
Thornhill, Ontario, Canada
Phone:    905-882-2600
Fax:      905-882-2620
Internet: 
http://www.atitech.ca/

Enter 1088 on Inquiry Card.
Information on 
this product


Armada 4160T....................about $3999

Compaq Computer
Houston, TX
Phone:    281-514-0484
Fax:      281-514-4583
Internet: 
http://www.compaq.com

Enter 1089 on Inquiry Card.
Information on 
this product


Magnum 600ES Personal Hub Plus........$1095

Garrett Communications
Fremont, CA
Phone:    510-438-9071
Fax:      510-438-9072
Internet: 
http://www.garrettcom.com

Enter 1090 on Inquiry Card.
Information on 
this product


Monster Sound..........................$179.95

Diamond Multimedia
San Jose, CA
Phone:    800-468-5846
Fax:      408-325-7070
Internet: 
http://www.diamondmm.com/

Enter 1091 on Inquiry Card.
Information on 
this product


Netscape Communicator 4.0...............$59 Standard Edition


..........
..............................$79 Professional Edition

Netscape Communications Corp.
Mountain View, CA
Phone:    800-638-7483
Phone:    650-254-1900
Fax:      650-528-4138
Internet: 
http://home.netscape.com

Enter 1092 on Inquiry Card.
Information on 
this product


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 - information on products covered or advertised in BYTE

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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-addr essed, 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 . You can visit the Chaos Manor Web site at http://home.earthlink.net/~jerryp/ .