WEB EXCLUSIVE: Orchids and Upgrades

Jerry visits MacWorld, and graphics associate David Em offers a few bouquets to the overachievers in the world of computer graphics. And don't miss "Good Enough Is Good Enough" in the April issue of BYTE; it's time for Jerry's Orchid and Onion parade and the annual User's Choice Awards.

Jerry Pournelle

MacWorld this year was confusing. The big news was that Apple had earned a profit, which sounds better than it is. Last year, they lost money with a third again more revenue. The way they made a profit on less income was by liquidating a good part of the company; and while that may have been necessary, they can't keep it up for long. It's not a plan for growth.

And, in fact, the hard part is seeing just what Apple's growth path is. Understand, I wish them well. What I'm looking for is just who has to have a Mac and doesn't yet have one.

Steve Jobs's speech at MacWorld said that we are once again hearing "first on the Mac" and "only on the Mac." Unfortunately, he didn't go into details. When I look at the Mac, I see two major exclusives. First, Macs are still better for working with printed graphics. If you intend to print your color output on paper, you will undoubtedly be better off using a Mac.

Second, largely due to Dr. Kim Silverman, the Mac has far and away the best text-to-speech generators in the business.

Unfortunately, printing pictures on the husks of dead trees isn't a high-growth industr y, and most of those who do that work already have Macs. Also, while Macs have the best text-to-speech programs in the industry, there are not too many programs that make use of that feature. (One is my wife's reading-instruction program, but so far she hasn't been able to convince Apple that they ought to feature her program because it makes use of one of their best features.) Worse yet, while Macs still have the best text-to-speech programs, PCs now have the best speech-to-text programs, and that's not likely to change for a while.

One possible Mac growth path is in the rapid expansion of video. My agent told me today that "everyone is buying sci-fi," which is good news for science fiction writers. A few years ago, that would have meant an automatic expansion of Mac's market; you used either a Silicon Graphics system or a Mac, and there were no alternatives. Now, that's not true. SIGGRAPH this year had Silicon Graphics and Windows NT systems. Macs were there, but NT was more common, and programs like De Babelizer, which used to be Mac-only, are now only "first it was on the Mac." It's a possible path, but Apple needs to work fast if they want to take it.

The second big announcement Jobs made at MacWorld is that Microsoft has ported Office 98 to the Mac. While hardly a Mac exclusive, that is good news for Mac owners; Office with Word is one of the more important productivity tools. One Mac writer said "at last we have some first-class tools," which I thought a bit unfair to what they had last year.

Finally, in discussions, there was some glee over the Department of Justice beating up on Microsoft; that's supposed to be good for Apple. I wouldn't know; it seemed to me that Microsoft porting Office to the Mac was more significant.

MacWorld was smaller this year than last year, but it was still a good show, with a number of exhibitors and some new products. With luck, Apple has passed the worst and is on the way back up. We can all hope so.

One thing the Mac has over the PC world is Plug and Play . The PC Windows variety doesn't work very well, and sometimes Plug and Pray is worse than nothing at all. If I had a mind to, I could tell you several stories of hope and disaster from this month's attempts to bring up new systems, but I'll save those for another time when I have a happy ending. Just at the moment, I have had all the Plug and Play adventures I need.

The Mac has the advantage in text-to-speech, but PCs are way ahead on speech-to-text tools. Last year, Dragon Systems surged ahead; now, IBM has a new dictation system that may be better than Dragon's. I make no doubt that Dragon is working hard to surge ahead again, and that this will continue.

Right now, either one, Dragon or IBM, is getting close to good enough for dictating nearly anything you would like to write, assuming that you know how to dictate. I don't, and so far my attempts haven't been very successful; it's easier to pound the keyboard. That may change as I get older, but barring really bad arthritis, I probably will go on typing my stuff another decade or two. The good news is that anyone interested in dictating to a computer now has a choice of tools, and by the time you read this, it will be a toss-up as to which is the best-and that will change, too.

Digital cameras continue to improve. I've tried any number of them, and my favorite remains the Olympus D-320L. Like the original Leica, this will fit in your pocket, so you are likely to have it when you need to take a picture. This is another field that is advancing so fast it's impossible to keep up. As a general principle, it's easier to add electronics to a camera than to add good lenses and camera technology to the electronics. Olympus was originally a camera company, which is to their favor.

And having said all that, I have to say that BYTE senior editor Tom Halfhill doesn't much like any of the digital cameras, considering the picture quality of even the best well below his standards. For me, though, these cameras are wonderful. I can shoot a lot of pictu res, erase the ones I don't care for, and store the others on disk. I can print them (in 3- by 5-inch size) with the Alps MD-4000 for a snapshot that is plenty good enough for a photo album or leave it as video in a computerized album, as I choose.

My plastic surgeon friend liked my D-320L so much he bought two, one for his family and the other to do before and after pictures at the office. I've also used it as a very quick low-resolution "scanner" when I needed to get something into electronic form and didn't have any other way. Text shot with the D-320L using the macro capability isn't very pretty, but it is readable. It will go through an optical character reader the same as text brought in any other way, and once you've done that, no one will ever know how you "scanned" it in. Spies sure would have loved this thing even a decade ago.

We haven't changed to Office 97 yet , but we probably will. It took Microsoft a while to get the compatibility converters done, but now, so far as I can tell, y ou can freely move documents and projects back and forth between Office 97 and Office 95. I'll give it a bit longer, largely because when I convert, my co-author Larry Niven will probably convert as well, and I'm not quite up to teaching him; but it won't be long.

My original objection to Office 97 was its sheer size, a few hundred megabytes of hard disk space. "Bloatware" I called it, a term much resented by some Microsoft people. Now, 200 MB is about 10 bucks worth of hard disk storage. I saw a 5-GB drive for not much over $200 at Frys the other day. Program size isn't a critical factor any longer except for laptops, and with FreeSpace, even that's not as big a problem as it used to be. Word 97 has the advantage of doing quite a good job of converting standard documents to HTML, and indeed, my first Web-page designs were done in Word 97.

Meanwhile, WordPerfect Suite 8 users report high satisfaction. Our church uses WordPerfect 8 to create really complicated documents, bulletins, announcements, tract s, and service guides, all with illustrations and pasted-in text from a variety of sources. If you're a WordPerfect user, there's no reason not to upgrade, and WordPerfect Suite 8 has a lot of nifty new features. I use Word myself, largely out of habit, but WordPerfect is certainly good enough.

There are several ways to upgrade an older system. The simplest is a chip replacement. We've had good experience with Intel OverDrive processors. Comes now Evergreen Technologies ( http://www.evertech.com/ ) with their MxPro line. We put one of their 200-MHz MxPro chips in RacingCow, the Gateway 2000 Pentium 133 that Eric Pobirs has been using as the experimental system for testing Memphis (otherwise known as Windows 98). The MxPro 200 is based on Centaur Technology's IDT WinChip C6 processor; see http://www.byte.com/art/9710/sec4/art4.htm for BYTE's review.

Installation was simple, and everything works. The MMX features work -- Eric is something of a games fanatic. The only real objection to using the MxPro is the price; for about the same money, you can get an entire new motherboard, with chip, at Frys and have something left over for buying more memory.

On the other hand, replacing the motherboard can be a pain. It will take a couple of hours to do it right and test everything, and it could consume a day or more if you're not terribly handy with computer tools. You also have the question of whether your old memory will work in the new motherboard.

The Evergreen chip replacement is much simpler: open the box, pull out the old chip, insert the new one, connect the chip fan, and close up again. I t can be done in under 5 minutes. For those who run their systems without the covers -- not recommended by me, not because of the FCC or electronic pollution, but because most systems have better component cooling if the air path is the one designed in -- a chip replacement can be even quicker, under a minute once you have it shut down with the power off.

My own inclination is to replace the motherboard, but then I have all the tools, I'm used to doing things like that, and while I don't have infinite free time, experimenting with computer systems is part of this job. If I had only one computer and I wanted to upgrade in a hurry, I'd probably drop in a chip replacement. Evergreen studies these systems and works with the system BIOS to be sure everything will work properly. We've had good experience with them, and no one has sent me any complaints. Recommended.

Regular readers of my column in the print edition of BYTE will know that this is the month I give out my User's Choice Awards. I rely on our graphics associate David Em's recommendations for the high-end graphics categories, but I give the awards. But that doesn't mean I don't welcome David's additions to the Orchid and Onion list. Here's his report.

The Chaos Manor Graphics Lab Orchids and Onions Report by David Em

I'm happy to report that this year's Chaos Manor Graphics Lab User's Choice Awards are heavy on Orchids and lean on Onions. True, I've been focusing my attention on products I believe are going to be worth spending time with, but in previous years, this has led to at least as much aggravation as joy. So perhaps this is a welcome sign the industry as a whole is maturing.

My grand Orchid in the graphics department goes to an individual rather than a product this year. The winner is James Cameron, director of Titanic . Never mind that the film cost 200 million bucks to produce. Titanic represents the most effective use of every computer-imaging technique ever developed, from 3-D modeling, to rendering, to texturing, to compositing, to motion capture, to you name it. In its way, the seamless integration of all these techniques into a live-action film is a greater accomplishment than last year's Toy Story from Disney/Pixar.

The majority of the computer imaging on Titanic was done at Digital Domain, an effects company Cameron is a principal in, but it is his vision and unrelenting personal drive that have pushed the state of the art to where no film has gone before.

The runner-up in this category is Steven Spielberg for Lost World , particularly for the groundbreaking virtual moving camera sequences in the midst of the fast-paced dinosaur herd scenes implemented by LucasFilm's Industrial Light and Magic.

The next award goes to a trio of related products from Macromedia ( http://www.macromedia.com/ ): Dreamweaver, Flash 2, and Director 6. Macromedia has made a real commitment to getting imagery on the Web to sing and dance, starting with Shockwaved Director movies a year or so back. This year's Director 6 upgrade (a big step forward for the already-powerful interactive content-creation tool) was followed by the release of Flash 2, a Simpsons -style Web animation tool capable of streaming real-time full-screen animations. Then at the end of the year came Dreamweaver, an outstanding Web design tool that creates pages that actually look the same on Netscape Communicator and Internet Explorer 4. My instincts tell me the best elements of these three products are heading for a merger, and when they do, it's going to be a hell of a tool.

The next Orchid goes to Corel for CorelDraw 8. The complete package also includes PhotoPaint, a Photoshop-like image-manipulation tool that's world-class. I've never been wild about most of Corel's offerings in the past, but the f irst time I cracked the shrink-wrap on this one, it kept me up until the wee hours. Corel is releasing the program on Mac and Alpha platforms as well, and the mountain of fonts it comes with alone are worth the price of admission. Anyone who owns an earlier copy should upgrade to the new version immediately. You won't regret it.

An Orchid is in order for Extensis ( http://www.Extensis.com/ ) for its indispensable Photoshop plug-ins. Photoshop is a great program, but it's always been deficient in a few key areas. The Extensis PhotoTools 2.0 package has several useful features (a really great button-creation tool among them), but I've no doubt that the ability to control and format text the way God intended it to be is going to sell a truckload of PhotoTools boxes. Add to this Extensis Mask Pro, a plug-in that grea tly simplifies the often miserable task of precisely pulling image masks, and a lot of the grumbling that accompanies certain Photoshop activities evaporates.

Another fine product that deals with masks is 4DVision's ( http://www.4dvision.com/ ) 4D Paint, a program that integrates with 3-D modeling applications to enable painting textures directly on 3-D models in programs such as Softimage and 3D Studio Max. There are other programs that do similar things, but 4D Paint's brushes, layers, and masks are the best implementation I've seen so far.

In another area, 3-D-on-NT was a true embarrassment of riches this year. Kinetix ( http://www.ktx.com/ ) gave us 3D Studio Max 2.0, an upgrade with a thousand new features that take the program to a whole new level. Softimage ( http://www.softimage.com/softimage ) released version 3.7 of Softimage 3D, which even though it is still quite NT-unfriendly and expensive, nevertheless has the best integrated modeling, character animation, and rendering in the NT firmament. NewTek's ( http://www.newtek.com/ ) LightWave 3D went to version 5.5 with a clean new interface and features that make it the undisputed price/performance king. And Caligari ( http://www.caligari.com/ ) released trueSpace 3, with inverse kinematics, metaball modeling, physical dynamics, and a host of other professional-level tools. All these programs are winners.

But that's not all in the NT 3-D department. AnimaTek's World Builder 2.0 ( http://www.animatek.com/ ) is an amazing terrain modeler with which you can create and animate worlds complete with seasons, rainbows, water, grass, snow, and lots more. When integrated with 3D Studio Max, you can use the objects and animation capabilities of the two programs together. This is good stuff.

Another new terrain modeler deserves mention as well, MetaCreations' ( http://www.metacreations.com/ ) Bryce 3D. Bryce 3D doesn't have the range of World Builder, but it's loaded with features for creating gorgeous animated landscapes. I saw an ad for it today for $167.95, and at that price, it would be hard to find a better introduction to 3-D terrain modeling.

An Orchid in the video category goes to Digital Fusion 2 from eyeon Software ( http://www.eyeonline.com/ ). Digital Fusion 2 is a multilayered video postproduction tool that lets you mix, match, and composite video clips, effects, and transitions, literally by plugging icons of them into each other, for a true Plug and Play experience. The interface is ver y much in your face, which I normally object to, but in this case, it works beautifully. Digital Fusion runs on both Intel and Alpha platforms; we ran it on our Carrera Alpha 500 with impressive speed results. Digital Fusion's plug-in architecture is supported by 5D Ltd., which makes an awesome set of plug-ins that puts Digital Fusion within a few inches of similar Silicon Graphics platform programs that are in the $100,000 range.

The best thing that happened in my life audio-wise this year was RealNetworks' ( http://www.real.com/ ) RealPlayer Plus. RealPlayer's RealAudio streaming Web-audio format is supported by enough quality news providers that it's modified my radio-listening habits forever. Being able to download whenever I want the stories I'm interested in from a variety of sources, many of them with catalogs going back years, is nothing short of fantastic. RealPlayer Plus also supports the Flash 2 format I mentioned above and, if you have a line fast enough to handle it, video as well. This is the kind of software that's morphing the Web into a rich medium for expression.

Speaking of liberating experiences, multimedia notebooks are becoming real powerhouses. They've been getting closer to being viable mobile creation tools for a while, but outside of doing PowerPoint presentations, there hasn't been much to crow about. That's changing with products such as Apple's Mac PowerBook G3 ( http://www.apple.com/ ). Equipped with a powerful processor, a 5-GB hard drive, a bright 12.1-inch (diagonal) active-matrix LCD, and up to 160 MB of RAM, the PowerBook G3 is ready to roll. It doesn't have built-in video inputs or out puts, and it supports only 800- by 600-pixel resolution; but until something a lot better comes along, this is a machine you'll want to take along if you decide to single-handedly build a multimedia production while visiting the Himalayas.

An Orchid for the most amazing display device goes to NEC for its 20.1-inch LCD2000 flat-panel LCD ( http://www.nec.com ). The 2000 has rich 24-bit color, supports resolutions of up to 1280 by 1024 pixels, and is just 5 inches thick. But what's most incredible about this screen is its brilliant 160-degree viewing angle. (Think of that as a conical viewing angle. You can see what's on the screen up to 80 degrees off center-axis, up, down, or sideways.) This is the best LCD panel I've seen. They aren't cheap, but prices have already dropped from the $10,000 to $12,000 range down to $79 99, and I'm sure steeper drops will soon follow. Few of us are going to rush out and buy one of these honeys at this price, but in a year or two, I suspect a lot of folks will have junked their 21-inch power-hungry real-estate hogs for this class of LCD.

Another outstanding LCD is ViewSonic's ( http://www.viewsonic.com/ ) new 15-inch VPA150. Its bright screen swivels vertically, it displays up to 1024- by 768-pixel resolution, and it's priced aggressively enough to be affordable if you really hate staring at CRT radiation all day long.

The best printer I saw this year was Hewlett-Packard's DesignJet 2500CP large-format ink-jet printer ( http://www.hp.com/peripherals/lfprinters/ ). The 2500CP prints copies up to 36 inches wide (35 inches full bleed) at 600 dpi and yields results that are remarkably accurate in tone and color, with excellent detail even with image resolutions as low as 100 dpi. The printer has a fairly lightfast pigment-based ink set. At $12,000 ($10,000 for the 2000CP, which lacks a raster-image processor [RIP]), the 2500CP is an incredible deal, as anyone who has had to pay the going rate for digital prints knows. HP also was awarded BYTE's Best of Show Award at Comdex for its LaserJet 4000 TN printer, so an Orchid to HP for the best printer solutions seems appropriate.

The other printer I was impressed with this year was the Alps MD-1000 ( http://alpsusa.com/md1000.htm ), a desktop un it that uses pigmented ribbons to make its prints. The MD-1000 uses white and metallic inks in addition to CMYK. It creates prints that are far more lightfast and resistant to water than comparably priced ink-jet printers. About the only complaint I can make is that it doesn't include an output tray; you must let the pages fall on the table. Incidentally, I saw an ad today for the model the MD-1000 replaces, the very capable MD-2010, for under $250. If you see one at that price, consider snapping it up.

Finally, the Orchid for best graphics workstation goes to the Intergraph TDZ 2000 ( http://www.intergraph.com/ics/ ). The Pentium II-based TDZ 2000 challenges octane-level Silicon Graphics machines, has one of the fastest 3-D boards known, features 10,000-rpm SCSI-3 drives, delivers good 2-D performance, and comes with a solid set of drivers. It also has a compact form factor and one of the best cooling-system designs I've ever seen. Coupled with Intergraph's spectacular 28-inch HDTV-format monitor, this is the best all-around graphics workhorse I've seen to date for serious 2-D, 3-D, and publishing work.

As far as Onions go, and while we're on the subject of awards, the only one I've got in my basket this year is for a certain major PC publication that gave a show award at Comdex to a product that never made it to the show.

David Em
Gallery: 
http://www.businesstech.com/art/emgallery.html

A Few More Things My Postman Brings Me

I was just reading your December Web Exclusive "Things That Come in the E-Mail." I've always loved your mailbag.

When using a Wind ows 95 DOS box, it is usually possible to mirror an old hard drive onto a new one by using XCOPY C:*.* D: /E /C /H /R /K, where C is the old hard drive and D is the new one. Then, just switch the jumpers/cabling to make the new hard drive C and the old one D (substitution is allowed).

This method seems to work well. Under certain circumstances, it may get rid of the bug (or feature) you complained about in DriveCopy. It should-in theory-be possible to copy the contents of a 7-GB drive with only 1 GB of data onto a 1-GB drive without making any modifications to the CMOS settings. Or without getting bombarded with complaints from the machine. Hope this helps.

Andrew Berg
grooveman@mediaone.net

Thanks. I keep forgetting about XCOPY, which is pretty silly. Actually, if you keep a copy of Commander for Windows open but minimized, it's very easy to call it up and use it to do command-line operations, such as XCOPY. Thanks for the reminder.

I read with i nterest that Diamond has the only "decent" PCI sound card. I am using the Ensoniq (only about $70) Audio PCI, and it works great. It has legacy drivers for DOS and plays everything I have without a hitch. The only fault I can find is that on certain MIDI files, percussion effects seem a little loud; but for high-quality sound and hassle-free use, I love it. Recommended.

Gus Kavooras
Hammond, IN

Thanks for the tip. When I wrote that, it was all true. There's a lag between the time I write these columns and their publication. Often, people read the column a month or so after it comes out. That was in the December issue, meaning it was out in November. Meanwhile, Ensoniq has been bought by Creative Labs. And don't forget Turtle Beach, which has long set the standard for professional-quality sound cards for the PC. We've had good experience with both Ensoniq and Creative Labs, and we're looking forward to a variety of PCI-bus sound cards, especially with the new PC- PCI connector to provide good backward ISA compatibility.

And best regards to all. More next month.
Jerry

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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-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://home.earthlink.net/~jerryp/ .