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TidBITS#283/26-Jun-95
=====================
Need ammunition for the Mac versus PC debate? Macworld columnist
Cary Lu weighs in with a solid article on computing's
decade-old holy war. Also this week: software giant Adobe makes
eyes at Frame, information on new versions of eWorld and
ClarisWorks, and details on the AppleDesign Keyboard and the
6100 DOS Compatible. Finally, we have the conclusion of
Luciano Floridi's article, focussing on problems likely to
result from the Internet's explosive growth.
This issue of TidBITS sponsored in part by:
* APS Technologies -- 800/443-4199 -- <sales@apstech.com>
Makers of hard drives, tape drives, and neat SCSI accessories.
For APS price lists, email: <aps-prices@tidbits.com> <----- NEW
* Northwest Nexus -- 206/455-3505 -- http://www.halcyon.com/
Providing access to the global Internet. <info@halcyon.com>
* Hayden Books, an imprint of Macmillan Computer Publishing <- New
Free shipping on orders via the Web -- http://www.mcp.com/
Mac Tip of the Day & free books! -- http://www.mcp.com/hayden/
Copyright 1990-1995 Adam & Tonya Engst. Details at end of issue.
Information: <info@tidbits.com> Comments: <editors@tidbits.com>
---------------------------------------------------------------
Topics:
MailBITS/26-Jun-95
Computing's Holy War
The Internet & the Future of Organized Knowledge: III of III
Reviews/26-Jun-95
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/issues/1995/TidBITS#283_26-Jun-95.etx
MailBITS/26-Jun-95
------------------
**Adobe Hoping to Frame Unix Market** -- Another nibble in the
computing industry's recent tendency to purchase major parts of
itself: Adobe System announced last Thursday it was making a $500
million bid for Frame Technology, makers of FrameMaker, a high-end
publishing package primarily used for lengthy technical documents.
With its recent acquisition of Aldus and PageMaker, why would
Adobe be interested in another publishing package? The answer is
Unix. Adobe products sell well into the Mac and Windows markets,
but are virtually non-existent in the Unix arena. Conversely, an
estimated 70 percent of Frame's business is in the Unix market.
However, Wall Street didn't seem to agree with Adobe, whose stock
fell significantly the day after the offer was announced. [GD]
**Apple Design Keyboard Conflict** -- Thanks to Jim Mueller
<jim@pharmacop.com> for posting the details of the conflict
between the Apple Design Keyboard and the DOS Compatible card for
the Power Mac 6100 (Steven Lee mentioned this briefly in his
article in TidBITS-282_). Apparently, if your Apple Design
Keyboard has a serial number starting with the letters PK, you may
experience the problem, which is that if you hold down the right-
hand Shift key and type while using DOS or Windows, the first
character won't appear. Call 800/SOS-APPL or contact your dealer
for a replacement keyboard. [ACE]
**ClarisWorks Turns Four** -- ClarisWorks 4.0 for the Macintosh is
now shipping, and upgrades are available for $49 (list price is
$129). The Windows version of ClarisWorks 4.0 is slated for
release before the end of 1995 and will have the same interface as
the Macintosh version. ClarisWorks 4.0 requires System 7, and runs
on any 68020-based Macintosh or newer. New features include a new
way of doing styles, called ExpressStyle; an HTML translation
tool; general improvements and easier report generation in the
database module; and WorldScript support. Overall, and especially
given the price, the feature set looks impressive. My only quibble
is that Claris hasn't yet updated their Web site to provide
information and a demo about for new version. Claris -- 408/987-
7000 -- 800/544-8554 [TJE]
http://www.claris.com/
**eWorld Turns One** -- To note the one-year anniversary of its
eWorld online service, Apple announced version 1.1 of the eWorld
client software, which should be available online via eWorld and
will also be pre-installed on Macintoshes in all countries where
eWorld is available. Users of this new version will have access to
Usenet and Internet FTP within a few weeks, and Web access is
scheduled to become available in July. The new client software is
also supposed to incorporate new multimedia capabilities and a
sophisticated email agent allowing filters and automatic
responses. Apple also announced it is moving its employees to
eWorld from AppleLink, with all AppleLink subscribers expected to
be moved over by the end of the calendar year. [GD]
**Microsoft Antitrust Victory** -- On 16-Jun-95, a federal appeals
court ruled that an agreement between Microsoft and the Department
of Justice regarding the company's software-licensing practices be
approved. (See TidBITS-264_.) In an unusual move, U.S. District
Judge Stanley Sporkin - who had rejected the agreement in February
- was removed from the case and the matter was assigned to another
district judge who was ordered to approve the settlement.
Microsoft argued that Judge Sporkin was biased against the
company; apparently the appeals court agreed, saying he had
overstepped his authority. This effectively ends the antitrust
action against Microsoft's software licensing policies, and
Microsoft officials were pleased with the decision. However,
Microsoft may not be entirely out of the antitrust shadow. The
Justice Department has been requesting information from both
Microsoft and its competitors regarding the upcoming Microsoft
Network, and the European Commission announced last week that it's
examining whether Microsoft Network would harm competition within
the European Union. [GD]
Computing's Holy War
--------------------
by Cary Lu <carylu@eworld.com>
[Published in the Seattle Times, June 18, 1995. Revised June 26 to
include support numbers from Microsoft. Copyright 1995 by Cary Lu.
This article may be freely copied and distributed in paper and
electronic form without charge if this copyright paragraph is
included.]
The battle between proponents of Macintosh and IBM PC computers
has for many years resembled a religious war, and as in all
religious wars, much of the rhetoric has been driven more by
ignorance than knowledge. Very few people are truly skilled with
both Macs and PC. Since PCs outsell Macs by a wide margin - seven
to one or more - most people with computer experience actually
know only about DOS and Microsoft Windows on an IBM PC or clone.
Not surprisingly then, if you ask which computer should you buy,
the most common answer - from computer sales people, data
processing managers, and newspaper columnists - is a PC. But
before you take that advice, ask if your adviser actually uses
both Macs and PCs. If he or she knows only one system well,
consider the advice suspect. Steer clear of PC bigots and Mac
bigots who use jargon: "Only PCs support true pre-emptive
multitasking and multiple processors." "Only Macs have dual-
channel SCSI for fast disk arrays." These techie issues are
irrelevant for most users; in any event both systems will offer
all these features in the coming months.
Which computer do I recommend? I think you should get the same
kind of computer that your most technically astute friend uses - a
friend you can call at midnight on Sunday when you really get
stuck. If you buy a Mac, you won't need an expert, since you won't
get stuck nearly as often. And if you don't have a technical
friend, you will be much better off with a Mac - with some
exceptions that I will discuss later.
**Troubleshooting and Multimedia** -- Is the Mac really that much
easier to use? Consider this: One quarter of all the questions
that Patrick Marshall has answered in his Q&A column in the
Seattle Times deals with PC problems that never occur on a
Macintosh. Macintosh users never have to deal with memory
management, interrupts, DMA channels, or a SYSTEM.INI file. Inside
a Mac, there are no jumpers to set, either on the main board or on
the vast majority of accessories.
PC users have to learn these details or else they can't get
software to run. The computer industry estimates that PC users
have trouble running 25 to 35 percent of multimedia CD-ROMs. I'm
accustomed to trouble. This morning, I installed a CD-ROM for my
five-year-old on my Pentium computer and got a message: "Increase
DMABuffer Size." I doubt if most PC users would know how to
respond; what's more, no message explained two additional problems
beyond the DMABuffer size. Through long experience, I have learned
most of the hundreds of technical tricks necessary to get CD-ROMs
running on a PC, although a few discs still have me stumped.
Surveys show that PC users rarely buy CD-ROMs. A CD-ROM on a PC is
too often like a book with pages glued together or illustrations
torn out.
CD-ROM installation problems are almost unheard of on a Mac, aside
from a simple free update for recent system software (Apple's
Multimedia Tuner). Three other problems are easy to understand -
CD-ROMs that need color won't run on a black-and-white Mac, a few
CD-ROMs need more memory than the simplest Macs have, and some Mac
screens are too small to show a standard CD-ROM image. I've just
answered the bulk of all Mac CD-ROM installation questions. In the
past five years, I have not seen a single incompatible or even
difficult-to-install CD-ROM on a Mac. Because no one has to learn
any tricks, Mac users buy discs without trepidation. As a result,
CD-ROM publishers find that Mac users buy CD-ROMs out of
proportion to the Mac's market share.
**Support & the Software Question** -- David Billstorm, president
of Media Mosaic and publisher of Mountain Biking and other outdoor
recreation CD-ROMs, tells me that 40 percent of sales are for
Macs. Yet PC buyers call for technical support far more often than
Mac buyers. Although both Mac and PC versions have the same price,
Media Mosaic makes more money from the Mac versions because the
cost of answering a single call can wipe out any profit from the
sale. For Microsoft's CD-ROM titles, PC users call for help at
least three times as often as Mac users; on some titles, PC users
need help nearly ten times as often (1994 figures, corrected for
the relative numbers of PC and Mac users). On Christmas day, none
of my Mac friends called with problems; several PC friends called
(and each one started by apologizing, "The support lines aren't
open today...")
The Mac is not completely free of software conflicts, especially
for enthusiasts who tend to like complexity. But the conflicts are
usually resolved by simply moving clearly labeled icons from one
folder to another; if you make a mistake, you just move the icon
back. On a PC, you must use far more difficult techniques -
editing cryptic files (WIN.INI, AUTOEXEC.BAT, etc.), setting
environment variables, adjusting memory locations, changing
command-line switches in drivers. If you make a mistake, the
computer may refuse to start.
In the past year, the hottest new category of Windows software has
been "uninstall" utilities, programs that can remove Windows
software. Windows and Windows software can put dozens or even
hundreds of files on a hard disk; a person can't keep track of the
files without help from another computer program. The Mac neither
has nor needs an equivalent utility; removing a program is usually
simple and besides, every file is identified by its type and the
program that created it.
Quite aside from utilities, more software is available for the PC
than for the Mac. You may have a specialized need that can be met
only by a PC, particularly for business applications. In a few
areas, particularly graphics, the Mac leads. For the vast majority
of users, and certainly for anyone buying a family computer, there
is no significant difference in the applications - word processors
and so on - available for either system.
Microsoft's applications and many other major programs come in
both PC and Mac versions. The PC version may come out first,
presumably because the publisher wants to reach the larger group
of customers first. The real reasons may not be obvious. Aldus
(now Adobe) PageMaker, a program that was originally developed for
the Mac, came out in a version 5.0 first for Windows. The project
manager explained to me that the programmers disliked Windows
intensely. Aldus management insisted on the Windows version first,
because if the programmers were allowed to finish the Mac version
first, they might never finish the Windows version.
**For Novices or Experts?** Although the Mac has obvious appeal to
the computer novice, the people who really understand computers
also tend to prefer Macs. At the recent Electronic Entertainment
Expo in Los Angeles, most of the new, unfinished multimedia
computer software - even software destined for PCs - was
demonstrated on Macs rather than PCs. Famed supercomputer designer
Seymour Cray uses a Mac. Two division heads for major PC clone
companies called me independently last year; they were leaving
their companies and wanted to know which Macs to buy for their new
startups. I know of three companies in the Portland area started
in the past year by former Intel managers. Two of the three
companies chose Macs as their principal computers. (Intel makes
most of the CPU chips, such as the Pentium, that drive Windows
computers.)
Corporate data processing (DP) managers generally prefer PCs; most
have little experience with Macs. PCs do ensure full employment
for the DP staff. At Intel, where many employees are true computer
experts, the DP department figures on one support person for every
30 Windows computers. The DP department was astonished to learn
that one Intel division had 120 Macs and got along fine with a
single support person. Mac users rarely have problems, and when
they do, the answers usually come from other users rather than
from the DP department.
The hidden cost of support - and perhaps frustration - at least
partially offsets the Mac's higher prices. The price gap has
narrowed, but it will never close completely. Macs come with more
standard features - all Macs, including laptops, have sound and
networking built in. Apple has usually - but not always - used
higher quality components than the average PC clone. PC
accessories are generally cheaper, but then I've seen a lot of bad
keyboards and fuzzy monitors on PC clones. A good monitor costs
the same for either system. Ultimately, Apple spends more money;
it makes major investments in research and development. For the
typical PC clone company, R&D consists of reading spec sheets from
Taiwan.
Macs have a longer useful lifetime. I use a five-year-old Mac to
play today's multimedia CD-ROMs without difficulty. In the past
five years on my PC, I've had to change the CPU twice, the video
card twice, the motherboard twice, and the sound board once, just
to play ordinary discs. (I also switched to double-speed CD-ROM
drives on both systems.)
Apple has made many strategic errors. The first Macintosh clones
are only now beginning to appear. Ten years ago, I called for
Apple to license the Mac operating system at a MacWorld Expo
keynote panel. Many in the audience hissed at my remarks. Yet by
refusing to license the Mac system early, Apple made the enormous
success of Microsoft Windows possible.
Within the computer industry, the description "more like a
Macintosh" is always high praise. The description "more like
Windows" is rarely used as praise, except perhaps in contrast to
"more like DOS."
Microsoft tells everyone that its forthcoming Windows 95 is more
like a Macintosh. The key features of Windows 95 - long file
names, plug-and-play hardware installation, direct file display -
have been on the Mac for eleven years. Yet despite much clever
engineering by Microsoft, Windows 95 cannot overcome the chaos
inherent to the PC world, both for hardware and for the need now
to run three wildly different operating systems and application
software (for DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95). Mac users have
never had to cope with such jarring changes.
Microsoft's genius lies in getting things to work - more or less -
despite the PC chaos. Apple's genius lies in getting so many
things right in its fundamental Macintosh design and avoiding
chaos.
**Cary Lu** is a contributing editor to Macworld magazine and
writes about PCs for several other magazines. He is a Windows 95
beta tester. He wrote _The_Apple_Macintosh_Book_ (Microsoft
Press).
The Internet & the Future of Organized Knowledge: III of III
------------------------------------------------------------
by Luciano Floridi <floridi@vax.ox.ac.uk>
[Note: we thank Professor Floridi for kind permission to reprint
this material, which is a shortened version of a paper he gave at
a UNESCO Conference in Paris, March 14-17, 1995.]
Part Three: The Problems
In the previous two parts of this article, I argued for an
understanding of the Internet as a new stage in the growth of the
Human Encyclopedia, and showed how it allows us to do new kinds of
research by asking third-level (ideometric) questions about our
data. Here, we turn to new problems that the growth of a network
of information and communication has already caused or soon will
give rise to.
There are at least ten principal issues worthy of attention. I
shall deal with them in what I take to be their approximate order
of importance.
**(1) The Devaluation of The Book** -- We have already entered the
stage where digital information is preferred over non-digital, not
because of its quality, but simply because it is available online.
However, the more resources that undergo the conversion, the less
serious this problem will become.
**(2) The Devaluation of Information Processes** -- The Internet
helps to satisfy an ever-growing demand for information. In this
process, the _use_ value of information has increased steadily, in
parallel with the complexity of the system, but its _exchange_
value has been subject to a radical modification. Because of the
great and rapid availability of data, Internet has caused a
devaluation of some intellectual enterprises - such as
compilations, collections of images, bibliographical volumes and
so forth - whose original high value depended mainly on the
correspondingly high degree of inaccessibility that afflicted
information in the book era.
Today, much of the raw data that in the past had to be collected
at great expense of time and energy are freely available on the
Internet. The result is that the era of the great collections on
paper is practically over.
**(3) Failure to Acknowledge New Scholarly Enterprise** -- So far,
Academe has been slow in recognizing that new forms of scholarly
activity have appeared, like moderating a discussion list, keeping
an online bibliography constantly updated, or publishing a paper
in an electronic journal. The sooner such activities are properly
recognized and evaluated, the easier it will become for
individuals to dedicate more time and effort to the digital
encyclopedia, and the more the encyclopedia will improve.
**(4) Too Much Knowledge to Access** -- A fundamental imbalance -
between the extraordinary breadth of the system and the limited
amount of knowledge that can be accessed by an individual mind at
any one time - arises because the quantity of information
potentially available on Internet has increased beyond control,
whereas the technology whereby the network actually allows us to
retrieve our data has improved much more slowly. The result is
that we are once again far from being capable of taking full
advantage of the full extent of our digital encyclopedia.
The challenge of the next few years will consist in narrowing the
gap between quantity of information and speed of access, even as
the former increases. Projects like the American Information
Superhighway, or SuperJANET in Great Britain, are of the highest
importance in this regard. However, we should keep in mind that
closing the gap completely is impossible because of the very
nature of the Encyclopedia.
**(5) Too Much Accessible Knowledge to Manage** -- This is the
problem of "infoglut," as BYTE has called it. Throughout past
history there was always a shortage of data, which led to a
voracious attitude towards information. Today, we face the
opposite risk of being overwhelmed by an unrestrained, and
sometimes superfluous, profusion of data. No longer is "the more
the better." If knowledge is food for then mind, then for the
individual mind to survive in an intellectual environment where
exposure to the Human Encyclopedia is greater than ever before,
for the first time in the history of thought we desperately need
to learn how to balance our diet.
Without a new culture of selection - and tools that can help us
filter, select, and refine what we are looking for - the Internet
will become a labyrinth which researchers will either refrain from
entering or in which they will lose themselves. One can only hope
that the care exercised today during the conversion of organized
knowledge into a digital macrocosm will soon be paralleled by
equally close attention to the development of efficient and
economical ways to select and retrieve the information we need. In
data-retrieval, brute force does not work any longer: we need
intelligence. The Internet needs to be improved by the inclusion
of expert systems.
**(6) The Threat to Paper** -- Some libraries are destroying their
card catalogues after having replaced them with OPACs (online
public access catalogs). This is as unacceptable as would have
been the practice of destroying medieval manuscripts after an
_editio_princeps_ was printed during the Renaissance. We need to
preserve the sources of information after the digitalization in
order to keep our memory alive. The development of a digital
encyclopedia should not represent a parricide.
**(7) Some Knowledge Exists Only Digitally** -- Because for large
sectors of the new encyclopedia there will be no paper epiphany,
access to the network will have to be universally granted in order
to avoid the rise of a new technological elite.
**(8) The New Illiteracy** -- Information Technology is the new
language of organized knowledge. Therefore elements of that
language must become part of the minimal literacy of any human
being, if free access to information is to remain a universal
right.
**(9) The Internet as Rubbish Heap** -- Because the Internet is a
free space where anybody can post anything, organized knowledge
could easily get corrupted, lost in a sea of junk data. In the
book age, the relation between writer and reader was and is still
clear and mediated by cultural and economic filters - e.g., you
won't get published if what you say isn't somehow "true." For all
their faults, such filters do provide some positive selection. On
the Internet, the relation between producer and consumer of
information is direct, so nothing protects the latter from corrupt
information.
Now, there is much to be said in favor of the free exchange of
information on the network, and I believe that any producer of
data should be free to make it available online. But I think every
user should also be protected from corrupt knowledge by an
intermediary service, _if_ she wishes. Unless academic and
cultural institutions provide some form of quality control, we may
no longer be able to distinguish between the intellectual space of
knowledge and a polluted environment of junk.
**(10) Decentralization Means Fragmentation** -- By converting the
encyclopedia into an electronic space, we risk transforming the
new body of knowledge into a disjointed monster, rather than an
efficient and flexible system. The Internet has developed in a
chaotic (if dynamic) way, and today suffers from a regrettable
lack of global organization, uniformity, and strategic planning.
While we entrust ever more vast regions of the Human Encyclopedia
to the global network, we are also leaving the Internet itself in
a thoroughly anarchic state. Efforts at coordination are left to
occasional initiatives by commendable individuals, or to important
volunteer organizations, but this is insufficient to guarantee
that in a few decades organized knowledge will not be lost in a
labyrinth of millions of virtual repositories, while energies and
funds have been wasted in overlapping projects.
The Internet has been described as a library where at the moment
there is no catalogue, books on the shelves keep moving, and an
extra truckload of books is dumped in the entrance hall every
hour. Unless it is properly structured and constantly monitored,
the positive feature of radical decentralization of knowledge will
degenerate into a medieval fragmentation of the body of knowledge,
which in turn means a virtual _loss_ of information. Already it is
no longer possible to rely on the speed of our networked tools to
browse the whole space of knowledge and collect our information in
a reasonably short time. If global plans are disregarded or
postponed and financial commitments delayed, the risk is that
information may well become no easier to find on the network than
the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Some people have compared the invention of the computer to the
invention of printing. To some extent the comparison is
misleading: the appearance of the printed book belongs to the
process of consolidation and enlargement of our intellectual
space, whereas the revolutionary character of Information
Technology has rested on making possible a new way of navigating
through such a space. But in one important sense they are similar:
in the same way as the invention of printing led to the
constitution of national copyright libraries to coordinate and
organize the production of knowledge in each country, so Internet
needs a coordinated info-structure.
**The Info-Structure** -- The info-structure would consist of
centers making coordinated efforts to fulfill the following five
tasks:
* guarantee the reliability and integrity of the digital
encyclopedia;
* provide constant access to it without discrimination, thus
granting a universal right to information;
* deliver a continually updated map to the digital universe of
thought;
* expand the numbers of primary, secondary, and derivative
resources available online, especially those that won't attract
commercial operators;
* support and improve the methods and tools whereby the
Encyclopedia is converted into a digital domain, and whereby
networked information is stored, accessed, retrieved, and
manipulated.
I'm not advocating the creation of some international bureau for
the management of the Internet, a sort of digital Big Brother. Nor
have I any wish to see national organisms take control of our new
electronic frontier. Such projects, besides being impossible to
realize, would be contrary to fundamental rights of freedom of
communication, of thought, and of information. Far from it, I
believe in the complete liberty and refreshing anarchy of the
network.
What I'm suggesting is that Internet is like a new country, with a
growing population of millions of well-educated citizens, and that
as such it does not need a highway patrol. However, it will have
to provide itself with a kind of Virtual National Library system
(which could be as dynamic as the world of information) if it
wants to keep track of its own cultural achievements in real time,
and hence be able to advance into the third millennium in full
control of its own potential. It is to be hoped that non-national
institutions (such as UNESCO) may soon be willing to promote and
coordinate such a global service, which is essential in order to
make possible an efficient management of human knowledge on a
global scale.
Reviews/26-Jun-95
-----------------
* MacWEEK -- 19-Jun-95, Vol. 9, #25
Apple Color LaserWriter 12/600 -- pg. 1
AppleShare 4.1 and Workgroup Server 9150 bundle -- pg. 41
SmartSketch 1.0 -- pg. 44
$$
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