Jaques Law Bits 9609 (© Kevin Jaques 1996) ©(c)1996 Kevin Jaques. All rights reserved excepting that this file may be copied for non-commercial purposes, unchanged. No warranties apply. I am just a user volunteering my observations and collecting those of others. €We¹re so superior Soquel, CA -- The results from a study of U.S. PC and Mac User Groups are in, and they show Mac User Group members differ from PC User Group members in demographics and computer usage. This was an independent disk-based survey by Para Technologies, sponsored by User Group Connection (UGC) and several vendors (see below). The full press release and key findings can be found at . Here are some of the most interesting statistical differences between Mac and PC User Group members... 1996 (vs. 1990 & 1992) UG Study Key Findings MUG members PCUG members ---------------------------------------------------------------- Age (mean) 49.2 55.3 Household Income (mean) $66,239 $59,725 Gender (% male) 77.9% 80.6% Education (% w/ college degree) 77.9% 52.5% Influence work computer purchases 87.5% 70.2% recommend/specify/approve (mean) $37,951 $52,499 Access the Internet (%) 76.6% 63.1% Daily computer use (hours) 5.6 5.1 The study also disclosed the growth of User Group organizations. The average size of a PC User Group and a Mac User Group is 220 members and 175 members, respectively. While this statistic was not measured in the past for PC User Groups, average Mac User Group membership has grown from 162 members in 1990 and 157 in 1992. According to anecdotal data, the number of User Groups has increased steadily for several years, and today UGC tracks approximately 2,400 Mac User Groups and 1,600 PC User Groups in the U.S. and Canada. (Note: The study did not sample Canadian User Groups and computer-related associations registered as User Groups, which could increase the average size of a group). The study was sponsored by User Group Connection. Contributing sponsors include Adobe, America Online, Aladdin Systems, Apple Computer, APS Technologies, Claris Corporation, Corel, Intuit, Macworld Communications, and Symantec. The 67-page study report is available for purchase from UGC by calling 408-477-4277 x239. This press release and key findings are available on UGC's web page at . - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - User Group Connection (UGC), a privately-held California Corporation, was founded July 26, 1993, as a department spin-off of Apple Computer, Inc. UGC is dedicated to supporting User Group leaders and helping bridge relationships between User Groups and the computer industry. UGC provides marketing services to high-tech companies and operates the User Group Store, a mail-order catalog exclusively for Macintosh User Group members. Individual users can locate a PC or Macintosh User Group near them through an online locator at . For further information, you can reach UGC and User Group Store at 2840 Research Park Drive, Suite 100, Soquel, CA 95073, 408-477-4277, FAX 408-477-4290, E-mail: . €More Info on souping up your Floating Point Math LIBMOTO for Mac OS and Windows NT PowerPC users is available! Motorola's LIBMOTO is a highly optimized memory, string, and math library. LIBMOTO replaces several commonly used functions provided by the standard C library. Many customers see tremendous performance gains for some operations when using this library. LIBMOTO is available for Mac OS PowerPC end users, Mac OS PowerPC software developers and for Windows NT (PowerPC Edition). And it is FREE!! Download it at: and check out the Motorola PowerPC home page at: €Game Sprockets from Apple CUPERTINO, California--July 2, 1996--Nine months from its inception, Apple Computer, Inc. today announced immediate availability of Game Sprockets Version 1.0--a new developer-driven software development kit (SDK) to create advanced multimedia and Internet-enabled games for MacOS computers. Using Sprockets, all games that run on Mac OS-based computers can feature real-time 3D graphics, 3D sound, Internet support, speech recognition, and input device/monitor control. €Ram Shopping Tips One says: You can find the best prices on quality Mac RAM at RAM Watch: http://www.cs.miami.edu/~stevent/macresource/ramwatch.html Another says: for the best in RAM prices check out RAM Tracker: €That sneaky Netscape! [In the System folder, Netscape maintains a mysterious file called MagicCookie] Magic Cookie writes info from the server that you have conectted to on the www to so that the next time you connect to that same server the server can obtain info off of your system. Cookie monster removes this log from your hard drive every time you start up. You need to place it in the startup folder. [It might conflict with ZTerm.] Mike Kelly, mike@m-kelly.demon.co.uk €Open Transport Speed In a recent MacWorld article in the June issue titled the Open Transport advantage, Jim Heid says " In preliminary Macworld Lab tests, Netscape Navigator 2.0 was nearly twice as fast with Open Transport 1.1 as it was with MacTCP when downloading files from a remote Web site." June 1996 Document ID: NW130614 €Named FTP Access Syntax The URL syntax for named (vs. anonymous) ftp is ftp://username:password@host/ where username and password are replaced with your username and password and host is the name of the computer you are connecting to (like zoomer.accounting.apple.com). [or from another user: ://:@/] €Magic Cookie - The Last Words A few good articles that cut through the hype and horror of the magic cookie: Other very good resources for info on the dreaded cookie: Andy's Netscape HTTP cookie notes: Malcolm's Guide to Persistent Cookies resources: Netscape's preliminary spec, Persistent Client State HTTP cookies: If, after reading through the above, you're still paranoid, just delete the magiccookie file in your Netscape folder (it's in the netscape folder within your system preferences folder) or get the "cookie monster" which will delete it automatically when you restart your mac: To see what's in it, drop the MagicCookie file into a netscape window. €Speech and the WWW The following two plug-ins require that you install PlainTalk, Apple's speech recognition technology, which comes with Apple's System 7.5 and can also be downloaded from various online venues. Written by Bill Noon, ListenUp 1.41 enables you to follow links by speaking their names. There are a few catches: you must have a Power Mac equipped with a PlainTalk microphone, run System 7.5 or newer, and be following a link on a Web page specially coded to work with ListenUp. In addition, you must be lucky enough to have voice recognition usually work for you; I've only had moderate success in this department. Web authors who wish to support ListenUp must include a short bit of additional HTML on their pages (for those in the know, that short bit is an tag), and they must also place on their Web servers a text file that associates link text with URLs. In contrast to ListenUp, which helps Web browsers listen, Talker 2.0 makes Web browsers talk. The free plug-in from MVP Solutions lets you hear the text displayed on Web page. A Talker-enabled Web page displays onscreen in the normal, visual fashion, but your Mac automatically speaks the words on the page. Web authors can even set up pages such that different bits of text are spoken, or even sung, in different voices. To use Talker, you must have the English Text-to-Speech component of PlainTalk installed. The Talker Read Me file helpfully discusses how to tell if you have the right software installed, and what to do if you don't. €A coherent explanation of FPU problems on Power PCs Both Apple's and Connectix's emulators imitate a 68LC040, which is a problem if you need to use a 68K program with a program that specifically requires a floating point unit (FPU). In the 68K family, FPUs were originally a separate chip devoted to floating point math operations. With the 68040, Motorola built most FPU functions directly into the processor, then (in a cost-cutting move) removed them in the 68LC040. Programs requiring an FPU won't run under emulation on a Power Mac because they correctly determine that an FPU isn't available. If you need to use programs requiring an FPU on a Power Macintosh, you have two choices: SoftwareFPU and PowerFPU, both from John Neil and Associates. These programs emulate a 68K FPU, allowing 68K programs that require an FPU to function. SoftwareFPU, a $10 shareware product, works fine, though it's not PowerPC native and must pump its math calls through the 68K emulator. PowerFPU is a $75 commercial product that provides PowerPC-native FPU emulation. Since native PowerPC floating point functions are speedy, PowerFPU's performance can be quite good. €TidBits on Buses * Bus Width: The bus width is literally how many bits can move across the bus at the same time. Power Macs have a 64-bit bus, meaning 64 bits can travel across the bus simultaneously. Previous Macs had a 32-bit bus, and early Macs had a 16-bit bus. As you might expect, a 64-bit bus is about twice as fast as a 32-bit bus, since it can move twice as much material in the same amount of time. However, a 64-bit bus is also more expensive to manufacture. * Bus speed: The clock oscillator controls bus speed, as well as processor speed. Basically, a clock oscillator is a tiny quartz crystal that vibrates a certain number of times per second. It's like a metronome for a computer, controlling everything from disk access and screen redraws to memory access and networking, and making sure everything happens in sync. * Hardware architecture: How traffic flows over the bus is a function of the computer's hardware and operating system design. For example, in older computers, writing data from RAM to a disk meant every piece of information in RAM had to go across the bus to the processor, then back across the bus to the disk system, which would write the information and report back when it finished. These days, it's more common for computers to have a "private road" between RAM and disks. There are numerous other instances of hardware and software engineering in all Macintosh models that strive to improve bus efficiency. **Dishing Your Buses** -- The analogy above is a vast over- simplification - in reality, a Macintosh has a number of different buses, most of which exist in sub-systems. SCSI, Ethernet, serial ports, RAM, expansion slots (NuBus and PCI), and input devices all have separate buses, each of which has its own width and (sometimes) its own oscillator. Bus speed is an important factor when considering upgrades. Clock chipping, a popular, inexpensive method for upgrading Quadras and first-generation Power Macs, involves replacing the computer's clock oscillator with a faster one. Although it invalidates Apple's warranty and not all Macs can be clock chipped successfully (success rates are around 90 percent), replacing the clock chip speeds up the computer's processor and bus, often making for a good all-around performance improvement. For detailed information on clock-chipping, check out Marc Schrier's clock chipping FAQ. Many PCI Power Macs and clones have both their clock oscillators and processor chips on a removable CPU daughter card, providing a built-in upgrade path to faster clocks and processors. This design permits you to replace the processor and the clock oscillator at the same time. However, in many cases there's still a limit to how fast the main bus can go. In Apple's current models, the upper limit is 50 MHz; Power Computing's PowerTowers go to 60 MHz. This doesn't mean that daughter card upgrades won't be worthwhile for these machines, but rather that they won't improve the performance of every aspect of the system beyond a certain point. Similarly, upgrade cards for from vendors like Apple and DayStar for earlier Mac models (from the IIci through the Quadra series) should be evaluated not only on the basis of the promised clock speed of the PowerPC chip, but also in terms of the performance constraints imposed by other hardware. In many cases, these cards must traverse a comparatively slow, narrow bus to get data from disks, ports, other devices, and/or RAM, yielding real-world performance levels considerably lower than Power Macs with equivalent processor speeds. Though these upgrades might be adequate for being able to run PowerPC code, they're rarely equivalent to the performance of a used Power Mac and often cost just as much. ŠPower Macs achieve their high processor speeds by using clock multipliers built into their PowerPC processors, allowing the chips to run faster than the machine's clock oscillator. There's no question this improves performance, but there are limits to how much bang-for-the-buck this technique will produce. There's a real performance difference between a 120 MHz machine using a 6x clock multiplier on 20 MHz bus and a 120 MHz machine using a 2x clock multiplier on a 60 MHz bus. Though both machines would function, the first machine will take much more time to access disks, networks, memory, and peripheral cards than the second machine. Even though they'd be roughly equivalent in terms of raw processor performance, the first machine is going to spend more of its processor cycles waiting for its hardware. €new version of TypeIt4M €QuickTime 2.5 Out [some time in July, that¹s all I know] €New Machines from Power Computing In late July, Power Computing will release a trio of new Mac OS machines, including the PowerTower Pro 225, which will feature a 225-Mhz PowerPC 604e processor €Plug-ins plug-ins everywhere! Now that WebStar supports third party plug-ins, MacWEEK will maintain an index of all available (and soon to be available) Web server plug-ins. Just like our Netscape plug-ins page, the WebStar plug-ins page can be found at: WWW: http://www.macweek.com/server_plugins.html €Keep up with the Mac market The MacWEEK index is updated each month with the best-selling Mac products. It can be found both on CIS and on the Web: WWW: http://www.macweek.com/mw_1027/extra_top_sellers.html €RAM Doubler 2 Coming Connectix has announced that it expects to ship RAM Doubler 2 in time for Macworld Boston this August. Among other changes, RAM Doubler 2 will offer a control panel interface, a faster compression engine, and allow users to triple the amount of memory your Macintosh thinks it has available. Rebates on RAM Doubler 2 will be available for current users; free upgrades will be available for very recent purchasers. Otherwise, registered users will get a $25.00 rebate coupon. [GD] €Retrospect 3.0A Updater Dantz has finally released the 3.0A update to its popular backup program Retrospect. The new version adds support for Windows Remotes, using TCP/IP and Open Transport to communicate with them. Now supports Sony DAT drives with older firmware and the ability to format 8mm Exabyte tapes. Corrects problems including troubles relating to RAM; better support for Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese characters; and a fix to seeing spurious volumes on Novell servers. RAM Doubler users should note that 3.0A improves compatibility with RAM Doubler, and that Dantz recommends that you use version 1.6.2 or later with System 7.5.3. You can download the 1.6 MB updater file from Dantz's Web or FTP site, but be aware that both sites are pretty busy right now. [ACE] €MacHTTP ŒMandatory Update¹ Chuck Shotton , author of the shareware MacHTTP and its commercial version, WebSTAR, has released what he calls an "important, mandatory update" to correct a potential security problem with MacHTTP 2.2 and earlier versions. In certain rare circumstances, this problem could allow unauthorized access to files on your server. You should download the complete MacHTTP 2.2 distribution from StarNine's Web site and then update it with the patch application. €Microsoft MacIntosh Empowerment Pack Registered users of Microsoft's Excel 5, PowerPoint 4, Word 6, or Office 4 should keep an eye on their mail for a free CD-ROM, called the Microsoft Empowerment Pack for the Macintosh. The CD includes both the System 7.5 Update 2.0 (which updates System 7.5, 7.5.1, or 7.5.2 to version 7.5.3; see TidBITS-318_) and System 7.5.3 Revision 2 (which should be used on some computers running System 7.5; see TidBITS-332_). According to Microsoft, System 7.5.3 makes Office applications launch faster. The CD also offers the Word 6.0.1a update, Internet Explorer 2.0.1, a collection of cached Web sites, Internet Assistant for Word and Excel, an offer for a discount on RAM from Kingston, and more. Registered Microsoft Office 3 users (or people owning individual applications that comprise Office 3) will receive a mail-in card that they can send in order to acquire the CD, or they can call 800/469-6520, department MCA. Unfortunately, the CD only contains English language versions of Microsoft software, and Microsoft does not currently have plans to offer it outside the United States or to create non-English language versions. The Empowerment Pack uses Internet Explorer to run its installation system, so don't be startled! If you are using Word 6.0, you almost certainly want to [also] run the updater in order to take advantage of the many fixes version 6.01 offers. () €Claris OfficeMail Debuts The $299 OfficeMail is a LAN email server that supports SMTP and POP, the main ways of sending and receiving Internet email, and claims to be easy to set up, with three steps for internal use and an additional three steps if you want to send and receive Internet email. OfficeMail requires a 68020 or higher, with 4 MB of RAM for a 68K Mac and 8 MB for a Power Mac. By using UUCP and tying OfficeMail to a specific Internet provider, Claris removed the complexity of dealing with TCP and potentially PPP, both of which can prove troublesome for novices to set up, particularly without sufficient documentation. In the process, Claris also opted _against_ making OfficeMail a full SMTP server, something that's not clear from Claris's propaganda about the program. But in an undocumented feature, you can use, or at least try to use, any UUCP account with any Internet provider. Claris doesn't advertise or document this feature because setting up a UUCP email connection isn't easy. €Keeping Robots Out of Your Corner of the Net Search engines on the web [like Yahoo, etc.] acquire much of their information through robots. Also known as spiders or crawlers, robots traverse the Web, looking for and recording information. Robots typically start with URLs that seem like a reasonable starting spot, such as a URL submitted by a user, a page having lots of links, or the top level of a site. A robot accesses the initial page and then recursively accesses all pages linked to from that page. Conventions exist to keep robots out of specially-marked Web pages or news postings, though whether individual robots comply to these standards is purely voluntary. So far, mainstream searching engines appear to respect these conventions. Using the Robots Exclusion Protocol, you can ask robots to ignore Web pages that you don't want indexed. You place a robots.txt file on the local root level of a Web site. Using a specific syntax, this file tells robots that they should keep out of certain (or all) sections of the server. [See]Š the World Wide Web Robots, Wanderers, and Spiders page: If you don't have enough control over your server to set up a robots.txt file, you can try adding a META tag to the head section of an HTML document. For instance, a tag like this: tells robots not to index that particular page. Or, a tag like this: tells robots not to follow links on the page. Support for the META tag among robots is more sporadic than the Robots Exclusion Protocol, although most of major Web indexes currently support it. Information on the robot META tag can be found in the Spidering BOF (Birds of a Feather) Report: For your Usenet news postings, you can create an "X-no-archive" line in of your postings' headers: ³X-no-archive: yes². Some groups may  not allow this, but at least one engine, Deja News, will ignore your posting if you make the following text the first line of text in the body of your message: ³X-no-archive: yes². In addition, if you inquire personally,  Deja News will remove your posts from their archive; to ask, send email to . If you're highly concerned about the privacy of your email and Usenet postings, check out anonymous remailers and PGP, a controversial strong encryption program from Phil Zimmerman. Both topics are beyond the scope of this article. €Apple Finances in Detail CUPERTINO, California--July 17, 1996--Apple Computer, Inc. today announced financial results for the quarter ending June 28, 1996. The Company recorded a quarterly net loss of $32 million, or a loss of $.26 per share, compared to net earnings of $103 million, or $.84 per share, in the prior year quarter. The quarterly loss represents a $708 million sequential improvement from the $740 million net loss incurred during the Company's second fiscal quarter ending March 29, 1996. Included in the quarterly results was a one-time after-tax gain of approximately $39 million on the sale of the Company's investment in America Online. Revenues for the quarter were $2.179 billion, a 15 percent decrease from the year ago quarter but approximately equal to the $2.185 billion reported in the March 1996 quarter. Gross margins were 18.5 percent, a sequential improvement from the -19.3 percent (or 9 percent before inventory valuation and related adjustments) gross margin reported in the March 1996 quarter. The Company continues to execute its 12-month restructuring plan, first announced in the second fiscal quarter. During the third quarter, headcount decreased from 15,544 to 13,729, primarily in the areas of manufacturing and administration. Approximately 1,000 of the headcount reduction was related to the sale of the Company's Fountain, Colo. manufacturing site which was completed during the quarter. The Company also announced the closure of its printed circuit board assembly facility in Sacramento, Calif. Operating expenses for the quarter were reduced by $35 million to $519 million, or 23.8 percent of revenue, compared to $554 million (excluding restructuring charges) or 25.4 percent of revenue in the March 1996 quarter. Cash and short term investments at the end of the quarter were $1.359 billion, a sequential increase of $767 million from the March quarter. The Company's cash position was strengthened by a number of factors, including the successful completion of long-term financing, sales of fixed assets and investments, and improved asset management. Apple completed the redesign of its organizational structure during the quarter and established six new product divisions with full profit and loss responsibility. The Company also filled the remaining positions in its executive management team, naming Marco Landi Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer; and Ellen Hancock Executive Vice President, Research and Development and Chief Technology Officer. €Do your own Bar Codes? Enter a number, and this service will give you a bar code. http://www.milk.com/barcode/ €Immense Modem Speeds Possible? From: "Tom Harrington" OK, here's my basic understanding of the technology. One of the biggest problems on a POTS (that's "Plain Old Telephone Service", for those who don't know) is line noise. That's the limiting factor on current modems. The noise, however, doesn't affect all frequencies equally; some pass through more or less unaffected, while others see the full effect. If you can modulate a signal on a frequency that's unaffected by the noise, you can get a whole lot more bandwidth. But, the noise doesn't affect the same frequencies all the time; it's sort of a moving target. With DSP analysis at both ends of the line, though, it's possible to continuously monitor the noise, and avoid it as it shifts. This is ADSL. I believe that it works up to about 6Mbps over a POTS line. From: Michael Newbery Well, yes and no. If you buy an ADSL modem and I buy an ADSL modem, we won't be able to connect any faster. Line noise is only a limiting factor on the tail circuit from your line to the exchange. Once there, the analogue signal is sampled by an A-to-D convertor and put onto a digital trunk, the bandwidth of which is limited to 64kbps. No matter what you do, you can't extract more than that bandwidth for long line connections. In fact, because of sampling 'noise', the Shannon equation (which is closely tied to the Second Law of Thermodynamics) says you can't get much better than about half that even on a line with an infinite signal to noise ratio (i.e., 33.4kbps modems are where it stops on current telephone circuits.) If you throw out the modems and stick to digital all the way, you get ISDN, which gives you access to the full 64kbps channel (and I won't go into 56kbps ISDN here), or multiples of this, as multiple channels. Current ISDN gets 2 x 64 channels, plus a 16kbps signaling channel, on current copper tails---if they are good quality and not too long. If you hold your mouth right and choose your pairs right you can get 1-2 Mbps over that same copper, i.e. a T1 or E1 tail. If you try REALLY hard and use ADSL technology you can get multiple Mbps over quite ordinary copper, but only as far as the exchange. POTS has ZERO chance of going above 64kbps. ADSL and its competitors are new services (unlike ISDN which is just customer access to out of band signalling) and will no doubt be tariffed accordingly :-) [Editor - Do I read it right? Newbery does not seem to dispute that ADSL is capable of carrying 6Mbps, but asserts that it is bottle­necked by the phone companies.] €Sorry, that¹s all the time I have. This Jaques Law Bits was delivered by: Kevin Jaques, B.A. LL.B. of the Jaques Law Office #101 - 2515 Victoria Avenue Fax: 525­4173 Regina, Saskatchewan Home: 586­2234 email: jaques.law@dlcwest.com Tel: 359­3041 visit our web page at http://www.dlcwest.com/~jaques.law/