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. €Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) MicroTech has come out with a line of products permitting up to 127 devices (drives and Macs with SSA PCI cards to connect in one file­sharing loop, with up to 20 meters of inexpensive serial cable, communicating at about 40 mb/sec (Ethernet is 500k/sec). Theoretically, it can reach 160 mb/sec. The modular 'CrossRoads' system is based on the Pathlight Technologies High Speed SSA Data Pump PCI card. MicroTech's version will be about $1KUS. http://www.microtechint.com/ €Design interacting Database OpenDoc parts dtF Americas offers a package. 1-800-383-1790. €PC-Mac File exchanges Windows utility to read most Mac media include:    MacDrive 95 - Media4 Productions 515-225-7409    MacOpener - DataViz 1-800-733-0030    Here and Now - Software Architects (see below)    Mac­In­Dos Plus ­ Pacific Micro 415-948-6200    TransferPro - Digital Instrumentation Technology 1-800-467-1459 (also speaks 36 file formats) Mac Utilities to read PC Media:    All PCs, regardless of their system, use DOS formatting for the disks.    The MacOS comes with EasyAccess, but it won't read DOS zip or magneto­optical.    AccessPC - Insignia Solutions (800-848-7677)    DOS Mounter 95 - Software Architects (206-487-0122) (permits you to put both Mac and DOS partitions on      a single disk. File Format Converters    Once the file is on your disk, you still want it to look meaningful when some application opens it.    MacLinkPlus - DataViz (above) - also available for Windows, but called Conversions Plus. Several of its       translaters come with the MacOS    DeBabelizer - Equilibrium Technologies 415-332-4343 knows 70 graphics type formats and supports       plug­ins for effects and editing.    Transverter Pro 3.0 (Mac & Windows) - TechPool Software 1-800-925-6998 for vector file formats like       PostScript & EPS & PDF    TransferPro (Windows) - see above €PageMaker Tip to Recover Damaged Files If you can open them, run these functions. Option­shift then Hyphenation (A beep means it is fine, two beeps means it is fixed, 3 beeps is bad). Shift then Go To Page, then let it run through each page, then press a key to stop it. Choose Links, and unlink anything with a question mark. Do a Save As. If these fail, export the text using the Story Import filter. €Salvage SIMMs DIMM Tree lets you insert 2 same­sized SIMMs into a DIMM slot to creat a pseudo­DIMM. Newer Technologies 800-678-3276. Or try SIMM Savers 800-636-7281. €Font ID Conflicts System 7 automatically renumbers fonts where there is a conflict. Does it work for those in suitcases? It certainly doesn't for those in resources, such as those in Hypercard or its stacks. €Finding Pesky 68K system stuff They slow you down. Conflict Catcher's report on Patched Traps indicates them with asterisks. PowerPCheck 2.0 does it for $5. €May 1996 Apple Stats (Dataquest Survey) Worldwide - Placed third, with 7.8%, down from 8.3% in 1994 despite record sales of 4.7 million macs. It lost especially in Japan to Fujitsu. 60 million PCs shipped. Compaq was 1st (10%) and IBM second (7.9%) US - placed third, with 11%, down from 11.5% in 1994. Compaq was 1st (12.3%) and Packard­Bell (11.5%) was second. Worldwide Laptop - Fifth, with 6.7%, way down. Toshiba was first (15%), then Compaq (11%), then NEC (10%), then IBM (9.9%), then Apple. US Business - Slipped 7% from an already poor position. Overall, it grew 19.9%. Education - first, rising 50%, almost all of the 36% growth overall. Home - up 14% of overall 22% growth. Government - up 2% of 17.9% overall growth. €Rumours of LERP Apple might offer its licensees the Low End Reference Platform standards, which will run only the MacOS. €OLE news Microsoft changed the name from OLE Controls to ActiveX Controls, which requires v.2.0 of OLE. Macromedia will help bring it to the Mac, in order to ensure that it interoperates with Macromedia's XTras (their new plug­in architecture). Like plug­ins or OpenDoc parts, it is a way to add functions to applications. €MacUser Luke Warm of SoundEdit 2.0 It is now native PPC, but they think the improvement didn't warrant a full integer jump. New items are: batch conversion of file formats, cleaner interface, support for .au files, 4:1 IMA compression, and plug­ins. As before, you can edit, record and play 8 or 16 bit soundtracks in many formats and apply effects. The formats include System 7 sound, resource, Sound Designer II, AIFF, .wav, .au, SoundEdit, SoundEdit 16, QuickTime. MacUser says DigiTrax and Deck II are more powerful and the same or lower cost. Also available is BIAS' Peak (offers non­destructive editing, unlimited undo, unlimited zoom, complete interactivity). It comes with accessory packs. €MacUser loves One Click. 5 mice! You select/design icons to go on palettes you create for each application. The icons will run a macro. You can use AppleScript, or EasyScript (OneClick's own) or a combo. It helps you grabs existing icons. WestCode Software. $129 list. www.westcodesoft.com €Internet Picture Storage Service Picture web stores your digitized pictures, and permitted password controlled access to them. $24/100/year. €Digitized Pictures Photo CD disks hold 100 photos, depending on the resolution, which ranges from 3,072 x 2,048 pixels (equal to 35 mm film) and down. Local Regina vendors charge 85¢/picture if you do it when you develop, or somewhere between $1 to $2.50 thereafter, depending on the number of photos in the order. The disk costs $12. €Printing Terms Direct To Plate - The plate is placed in the ImageSetter rather than the usual film. Can include laser ablation. Can produce lots of output types and eliminate both negatives and a dedicated platesetter. But the quality and duration of the special plates is reduced. Computer To Plate - The computer drives a dedicated platemaker. It is Direct To Plate, but the plates are better quality. Direct To Press - The computer 'burns' the plate which is already in place on the press. Digital Press - The computer just prints, with super quality color laser printers. In all cases, digital proofs are not as widely trusted as those made from the same film which will be used for the printing. €Make Your Own Maps MapQuest has maps of lots of places, especially in the US. You can add arrows, icons and legends, to suit your needs. http://www.mapquest.com €The 16 Live Objects Certified at the big Conference WAV, by Digital Harbor: a "work processor" that is designed to let users fully and easily utilize the wealth of the Internet and can be embedded into other OpenDoc containers. Virtual Field Trips in Geology, by Addison Wesley New Media Products Group/West: interactive, multi-media exploration of fundamental geologic concepts for college students. GeoInsight, by ComGrafix, Inc.: map insert part supporting map analytical tools. C-Graph and C-Table, by Corda Technologies: data-graphing and table-editing software components that will allow users to create charts and tables in Live Objects documents. WorldWrite, from WorldSoft Corp.: a multilingual word processor enabling users to add Live Objects to increase page layout, language writing, input capabilities and word processing capabilities. PageComposer!, from MetaMind: combines drawing capability with Live Objects embedding to let users construct live page layout documents. LEXI, from SoftLinc: a spelling checker, thesaurus, translation dictionary and verbal conjugator in English and 12 other languages. PartFinder, from Kantara Development: automatically finds missing Live Objects components at PartBank. Outliner, from Eclipse Services: goes beyond the standard outline capabilities by organizing interactive views of text, video, graphics, database and Internet parts. dtF Database Toolkit, from theta group: creates dynamic, interactive documents containing live data from relational databases. Sizzler from Totally Hip Software: a viewer part for streaming graphics capabilities for Cyberdog. WebPainter, a painting and animation program, will include exporting to a Sizzler OpenDoc part. Microbrew, from Network Multimedia: high-level graphical software development tool. WebBurst, from Power Productions: Visual Java applet authoring tool. Web Squirrel, from Eastgate Systems, Inc.: a Cyberdog part that builds spatial structures to keep track of Web pages, FTP sites and other network resources. AppMaker, from Bowers Development: programming tools to make it easy for developers to use OpenDoc technology. StuffIt InstallerMaker 3.1 from Aladdin Systems: allows users and developers to create installers that support the installation of Live Objects. €RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives This approach combines multiple hard drives so they behave as a single unit. The benefit is speed and/or reliability. There are six level, zero through 5, with varying combinations. Raid 0 is the fastest, with no additional fault tolerance. Raid 1 is mirroring. It just writes the file on each of two drives. How senseless. Raid 5 stripes data across multiple drives. Striping means that some bits of the byte are put on one drive at the same time as other bits are put on another, and so forth. Normally it includes parity information so that a loss of 1 (or even more) drives does not damage your data. Only those levels are prevalent for the Mac. You still must back up. Fire, flood, or even a failure of too many of the drives can destroy your data. But perhaps with RAID 5 you can dispense with daily backups. They start at $2,799US for a 4 gb drive. Normal SCSI buses only handle about 5 mb/sec, so putting on a 20 mb/sec drive is senseless. I have written previously about other buses. Interestingly, the normal Apple 1080 matched or even outperformed some RAIDs on some seemingly disk intensive tasks, like saving a QuarkXPress file as an EPS file. Apparently, the time is spent in the CPU. There are varying approaches on how to hook up all the drives. Some come in a single box, attached with a single cable. Some use removable drives. Some are modular, so more can be added. Some are daisy-chainable. Some use a dual-channel SCSI interface card. That handles up to 15 devices on each of two separate buses. Would you just add more drives as you chose, letting the card and software handle it? Cool. Some just bundle two cards, which is slightly cheaper. You just add drive and let the software handle it, I guess. Daisy-chaining the drives is called a spanning configuration. However, the writes will occur sequentially, so the speed advantage is lost. Presumably the benefit is a big consolidated drive, plus the data integrity of striping. However, users of the MacOS normally partition big drives, to avoid the penalty of minimum file sizes about which I have written previously, so until Apple fixes that, this configuration is unattractive. Some are optimized for a particular kind of disk work. e.g., DPT SmartRAID specializes in small files. It seems the magic is in the software, and most let you pick levels 0 or 1. €Monitor Pricing Insight MacUser maintains that monitors with speakers cost on marginally more than those without. In short, if you want speakers, it is cheaper to bundle them. It will never be top quality, due to the necessarily small size and the conflict between the desire for big speaker magnets for sound, and small to avoid affecting the picture. MacUser managed to make some of these devices impair the picture at high volumes anyway. €Collaborative Painting Fractal Design's Painter 4 permits two users to work on the same piece of art, even over the Internet. €Apple prefers NetWare System I tend to forget that DOS and Windows are not the only competing systems. Novell's Netware is apparently a very small, very efficient piece of code, permitting the addition of Netware Loadable Modules. So it is great for reliability for servers. Apple plans to sell NetWare for PowerPC for such a purpose. The advantage will be speed. It will run 51% faster on a 120 mhz Power Mac than on a 120 mhz Pentium. Even more shocking, it will be administered by Novell's Windows based Netware Admin tool. €Public Libraries on the Internet Makulowich's Awesome List http://www.clark.net/pub/journalism LibWeb http://www.lib.washington.edu/~tdowling/libweb.html English Server (lots of downloadable books) http://english-server.hss.cmu.edu/ Library of Congress (features a web-based card catalog) http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/gateway.html €Word 5.1 tip (Index All) To index a word, you put, in hidden format, ".i.[word]" right before the word. So, to do all the occurences of a word at once, search and replace. Replace the word with "[word].i.[word]". Then do another search and replace, searching for ".i.[word]" and replacing with the same thing, but in hidden formatting. €More ways to identify non-native PPC applications If get Info shows anything about virtual memory (or Ram Doubler, if installed), it is native. Or select the icon, and press command-option-I. If it lists programmers which helped with the port, it must have been ported. Non-native ones will just show the regular GetInfo box. €Weird finder bug If you have chosen the smallest icon view in the Views Control Panel, and then set folders to view by name (View Menu in the finder), your desktop icons will/may turn generic. €Why Normal Mikes won't work. PlainTalk mikes are powered. They receive the power because their jack is extra long, to hit the contact. Preamplified normal mikes would work. €Apple History In 1989, Apple buried 2,700 Lisa computers in a landfill in Logan, Utah, evidently to obtain a tax write-off. That is just bad. €Project X - Meta Content Format (MCF) Among the new Internet technologies previewed by Apple at Macworld Boston last week was Project X (http://www.atg.apple.com/go/projectx/), which will open a variety of developer opportunities once it's commercially available. Before then, Apple needs your feedback to be sure this technology is headed in a direction that will be truly useful to both customers and developers. Project X provides a new metaphor for navigating Internet-based content. The Meta Content Format (MCF) on which it's based essentially does for Internet content what the Dewey Decimal System did for books in a library, identifying the content in such a way that it can be easily organized and found. There is currently no standard to define how and where information is stored; Apple is contributing MCF as a way of solving that problem. Project X is a 3D viewer that lets users view Internet content that has been defined in MCF. Essentially, users can fly through Web sites and other Internet content to locate the information they need; they can also design their own ways of organizing the content. Developers will have opportunities to provide their own viewers for MCF-defined data, for providing tools to render and cluster the data within viewers, and to provide interpreters for MCF. The technology preview of the Macintosh Project X plug-in, as well as documentation about how to use it and a white paper describing MCF, is now available at the Apple Research Labs Technology Preview Web page (http://www.atg.apple.com/go/projectx/ or http://mcf.research.apple.com/). We urge you to download it, play with it, and then let Apple Internet Technologies Evangelist Jeff Ganyard know what you think. He can be reached via e-mail at ganyard@apple.com. €Apple out of the LapTop Business? 960827 - your editor called Customer Relations at Apple, 1-800-263-3394. All the powerbooks are discontinued except the PB5300cs and the Duo 2300c, but they aren't in stock for the foreseeable future. €OS8 in Trouble? Apple announced that the plans to provide developers with a "Developer's Release" of OS8 was discontinued, after many delays. Developers are most jittery as a result. €Digital VideoDisc (DVD) CDRom sized disks hold 4.7 gb on a single­sided, single­layer disc. Using MPEG­2 compression, that will hold a feature length full screen full motion picture including 3 channels of CD quality audio and 4 channels of sub­titles. Double­siding and double­layering will each, well, double the capacity. The drives will play normal CDROMs at 6x speed and audio CDs. The standard is supported by Apple, Toshiba, Sony, Philips, Time Warner, Pioneer, JVC, Hitachi and Mitsubishi. They are expected in 96. €Web Arranger Demo Our heroes at CE Software (QuicKeys) were briefly offering a free download of WebArranger, but now it is just a 30 day demo. It is apparently a version of the Personal Information Manager, Arrange. It handles URLs as if they were contacts. Also, it keeps a log of your internet activity, and its URL Agent will determine if a web page has changed since the last time you looked at it. http://www.cesoft.com €V.34 Plus A new version of v.34 for modems is now offered, which will reach 31.2 and 33.6 kbps on high quality lines, nearly at the theoretical 35 kbps limit. It is still insignificant beside ISDN (64 kbps) or cable modems (100 kbps). €Netware Client Previously, for a mac to get on a PC network which was based on Netware, the server had to have the Macintosh Network Loadable Module (NLM). Now, this free software lets Macs on, in parity with PCs. And only 5 mbs! http://netware.novell.com - the home page http://support.novell.com/home/client/mac/updates.htm - the site €Zip Drives have more vendors. Epson is making them now, with a smaller power supply. The usual Iomega supply easily outweighs the whole drive. Fuji & Maxell are just putting their logos on Iomega drives. Megamedia of Taiwan is making the cartridges, and soon Sony, Epson, Fuji and Maxell will be. €Atari 2600 Action Pack These are packages of ported games from the old Atari 2600 Activision game players. $30 each. €MacUser Web Tips You can't travel to another page when you have started a file download from a page. But, when you're waiting, create a 'new browser' (file menu) and just start another. Most companies just use their own name, prefixed by www. and suffixed by .com. e.g., www.apple.com If you are trapped on a page with no buttons, or if there is something wrong with the path, delete the latter portions of the path (leaving a slash at the end of the address). Or, change the file name (the last item on the path) to "index.html". €MacUser features Interesting Guy - Bill Duvall In 1969, he wrote the software that "sent the first packet across the internet". He founded Consular, which brought out the first Mac development environment, MacC, in 1985. He was director of Hypercard Development at Claris. and then headed the software development team at 3D0. Now he has his own operation, SurfWatch, to permit personal censorship of his internet, to avoid public censorship. It is $50, plus $6 for each monthly update of bad sites. Wow. But re Surfwatch, oddly, you can't edit the banned sites or filters, so that reduces the advantage over state censorship. €MacUser Modem Purchasing Tip They (Levitus & Breen) swear that PC and Mac modems are exactly the same except the cables and the software. So if you have, or can get, those, buy the cheaper PC version. Or be a hero, and pay extra to encourage the industries to make mac-centric products. €Doom II Cheat codes iddqd - full health & some protection from injury idkfa - full ammo & keys idbeholdi - invisibility idbeholdv - invincibility idclev n - where n is a number 1-32. Entry to level n. 31 & 32 may never otherwise be seen. €Doom I now shareware Well, Doom I is now shareware, called MacDoom. $9US. €Doom II 1.02 updater out. Well, Doom II 1.02 updater is out. €More on ADSL There are some down sides to ADSL that Roland has glossed over: It is range dependant; The two DSL modems cannot be further than 18,000 feet apart. While there is a theoretical upstream data transfer rate of about 640kbps the protocol is very noise sensitive and practical implementations have tended to been as low as 16kbps. The technology is still in flux there are two competing and non-compatible carrier schemes CAP (Carrierless Amplitude Modulation - pretty poor acronym if you ask me) championed by AT&T (who owns the chip set) and DMT (Discrete Multitone) pushed by a consortium headed by Motorola. Frankly, I find the technology scary for the very reason the large telecommunication companies like it: Because it provides an asymmetric upload/download transfer rate it gives control of internet content to the ADSL providers (servers) and diminishes the role the individual (client) can play. Kevin O'Boyle" The range limitation really only matters if you are more than 18,000 feet away from the switch that you are talking to. ADSL is not intended to be used as the backbone connection between all of the switches. It is intended to solve the 'last mile' problem. By the way, there are variants of the technology (HDSL, etc.) that are symetrical with respect to their forward and backward data rates. The best technology will ultimately win in the marketplace. bob piatek - bobtek@fishcamp.com €Web via EMail, personalized news, and More Send the web address in the subject line to FarCast and they will email you its text contents. support@farcast.com. Do single word searches by putting the word, then "in [server]" as the subject. The server can be altavista, yahoo, lycos, or Infoseek. They have 70 newsletters. You can subscribe to any or all, and often even regulate the frequency at which they are sent. They have 'droids'. They let you have 15 named droids. You fill in search criteria, and tell it how often you want it to report. It will then regularly mail you with hits matching your criteria. Further, they subscribe and archive various news services, such as AP, UPI, Newsbytes, BusinessWire, and PR Newswire. You send email to newstand, archives, or library, with your search in the subject line. You can get titles, summaries, or full contents. You can get the full contents later if you choose. info@farcast.com support@farcast.com €Applescript re Ircle ircle will only alow one command at presant that is the "do" command... you can use it for a few things like:Š do "/me grabs"&theName&" and throws him out of the channel do "/kick "&theName&" Bye Bye lamer..." kriptik@gim.net (Jotham Read) €Now Mac File Names too short! When you generate html documentation for your source code with "javadoc" it produces file names that include the full package name in it. For instance, we have files like this generated: GOV.nasa.gsfc.workplace.ActionList.html This is too long for the Mac! On the Mac it's truncated to: GOV.nasa.gsfc.workplace.ActionL NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Email: Stephen.Jonke@gsfc.nasa.gov €BeOS Be inc. (http://www.be.com) has a version of their exciting new OS that runs very nicely on power Macintosh computers. It will be availibvle for purchase, I believe, in early 1997. ŠThey have a real-time OS that runs all native on PPC processors, supporting true multitasking, multithreading, multiprocessing, and memory protection (correct me if I'm wrong on any of this). These are all the big items the Apple coders have had such a difficult time with. From what I read, this is turning out to be a real power-user's OS. Sean T. O'Connor seano@netexpress.net €Pretty Good Privacy News On the Wed 31 July edition of PBS's "Life on the Internet" (all links related to this story can be found at ), they featured the creator of PGP, Phil Zimmerman, in a discussion about the government's role (or appropriate lack thereof) in public encryption. Though it was never mentioned in the half-hour show, Phil Zimmerman utilizes two fine pieces of computing equipment: a PowerBook, and a Quadra 650, PM7100, PM7600 style desktop (impossible to tell on my TV). The PowerBook has a trackpad (most likely a 500-series Blackbird). Zimmerman demoed the PGP Phone secured-channel phone system with a fellow at MIT. The screen close-up was of the Mac version. PGP Phone and PGP public key encryption are available at MIT (see the PBS page, they should have the links). And if you are an EvangeLista from a country other than the US, you, too, can use PGP--the government dropped the suit against Zimmerman over this issue. (Kevin Kubarych) €TidBits 9608 re New Models Apple Announces New Macs Apple has announced faster versions of the Power Mac 7600, 8500, and 9500, along with a new top-of-the-line 9500/180MP that features two PowerPC 604e processors running at 180 MHz. The new 9500 and 8500 models are based on the PowerPC 604e, whereas the revamped 7600 sports a 132 MHz PowerPC 604 processor. All the new machines feature 8x CD-ROM drives and upgradable CPU daughter cards that should support speeds of up to 250 MHz. Prices range from about $3,000 for the Power Mac 7600/132 to $5,700 for the Power Mac 9500/180 MP. Also of interest to owners of recent Power Macs, Apple announced a 180 MHz PowerPC 604e-based CPU upgrade card for about $900. Availability of these systems varies; a few should appear in late August, others should arrive in September. Additionally, Apple officially announced the Performa 6400-series, sporting a mini-tower design and PowerPC 603e CPUs running at 180 and 200 MHz, priced from about $2,400 to $3,000. I've heard reports that some dealers currently have these Performas in stock. Apple also announced Avid Cinema, a PCI-based digital video editing system available for $459 as an option for 6400 Performas. [GD] In addition to its recently-introduced PowerTower Pro (see TidBITS-337_), Power Computing has announced a PowerBase line of consumer-oriented Mac-compatibles starting at about $1,500. Built around the PowerPC 603e, PowerBase systems range in speed from 180 to 240 MHz, sport three PCI slots, 8x CD-ROM drives, and (gamers take note!) video acceleration that improves 3-D texture mapping and QuickTime performance. DayStar is introducing the new Genesis MP 360+ (with two 180 MHz 604e CPUs, starting at $5,500), in addition to 180 and 200 MHz versions of its four-processor offerings, starting at $8,500 and $10,000. These systems are targeted at high-end graphics and video professionals, and DayStar is reportedly shipping them with _no_ hard disks or RAM to let customers more easily customize the systems. UMAX is expected to show a new spate of SuperMac-branded Mac-compatibles at Macworld, including revved-up versions of its S900L series and a set of 603e-based "SuperMac C" consumer machines due in September. The SuperMac C series reportedly range in speed from 140 to 200 MHz, sport 8x CD-ROM drives, and range in price from $1,600 to $2,600. As of this writing, DayStar's and UMAX's Web sites don't cover their new products, but they'll probably make information available soon. [GD] €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/