Current Shareware 1994 January

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RAndY s RumOR RaG October 1993 NEWS IN YER FACE Intel caught Microsoft off-guard recently when it demonstrated Indeo 3.0. Intel recently demonstrated software drivers which let Indeo compression/decompression communicate directly with graphic hardware, rather than using the Windows graphics interface. Of course Microsoft said they had been working on similar technology. The speed of Indeo 3.0 is as much as two times faster. Insiders say that Microsoft was miffed because it bypasses their objective of setting a standard. --------------- Information seems to change weekly, but Microsoft is now hinting that MS-DOS 6.2 will be shipped by Christmas. Resellers are concerned about having to "eat" their inventory of DOS 6. --------------- Alpha copies of Microsoft's Chicago (Windows 4) have been released to a few select software vendors. Developers expect to see a more complete beta version in October. The idea is for Chicago to combine multithreading and multitasking into a 4MB footprint. In other Microsoft happenings, the number of Word users could increase by 300,000 with their recently awarded contract from the Department of Defense. --------------- Shana has filed for a preliminary injunction against WordPerfect to protect its trademarked name, Informed. --------------- Lotus and Novell are talking about a strategic alliance revolving around Lotus Notes. (Remember their near merger three years ago?) No one is talking, but it is rumored that Lotus will put out a version of Notes for Unix-Ware and distributing Notes through Novell resellers. This scenario would be to thwart Microsoft's dominance, of course. --------------- Are you having problems with CorelDraw 4? Corel is now distributing Patch B which corrects problems with remembering kerning, and some other things. Contact Corel for the update disks or a new CD. There is also a new print engine for PostScript users. --------------- Central Point is now beta testing an OS/2 version of their anti-virus product. This is a true 32-bit application that supports the OS/2 High Performance File System and Presentation Manager interface. No word yet on price or release date. --------------- I have a friend who has installed Windows NT. I haven't seen it, so I'm going on his word. He says that the intelligent installation correctly sniffed out his Pro Audio Spectrum card, CD- ROM drive, and Colorado tape backup. Impressive! He tells me that it takes twice as long to boot up and that 16-bit applications are very slow. However, he says that the included 32-bit applets are very fast and is looking forward to seeing more 32-bit applications. Be prepared to give up about 40 megs of hard drive space, too. --------------- Independent software vendors who attended Egghead's recent sales convention were shocked enough at having to pay $12K for booth space. To compound their ire, there was no liquor at the Saturday picnic and the Sunday cruise on Lake Michigan had a cash bar. Hey, Egghead sucks! --------------- TOLL-FREE TECH SUPPORT This fall, Microsoft will launch a tiered support program. The tiered support will be by product clusters, such as desktop, development tools, and advanced systems. Some baseline "free" support will be offered for desktop applications, but they will offer other services using annual fees, 900 numbers, and per- incident charges. One source who has knowledge of the plans says users would pay $195 per year to support a desktop level including operating systems. Charges for tools and Windows NT will be higher. Other sources say Microsoft will continue to provide free support on new products for 60 days. WordPerfect recently replaced their traditional toll-free number on Office 4.0. Borland is considering fee-based support for their products. Industry experts (not me) estimate a cost to vendors of $25- $75 accounts for personnel, database, and expert systems. Others estimate a cost of support calls between $8 and $200 each. --------------- WORDPERFECT NEWS Look for more cooperation between Borland and WordPerfect in terms of marketing suite products. No one is talking, but it will not be a surprise if WordPerfect Office will be combined with Quattro Pro 5, Paradox, and WordPerfect for Windows 6. Speaking of WordPerfect 6, beta testers report that this rewritten application is a powerful, polished, industrial-strength application. Performance is significantly faster and it has a much more polished appearance. The button Bar can float while adding a Power Bar with smaller icons. Descriptions of each icon button will appear as the mouse cursor is dragged over them. The tables feature will allow complex formulas, data fills, and named ranges with dozens of border and formatting styles. Coaches are modeled after Microsoft Wizards for help with certain functions. WordPerfect Draw supports Bezier curves and fitting text to a curve, and is also OLE compliant. The Open File dialog has file- management features that will replace the current stand-alone file manager. Intelligent support for the right mouse button is abundant. An API for writing tools allows third-party products to hook into the program. Reveal codes remains, but is not necessary. Improved automatic code placement and deletion of superseded codes address this current weakness. We'll finally have a collapsible outliner, enhanced merge with hundreds of new commands, creation of formatting styles by example, and Text Art (a Bitstream utility) is included for special effects with type. QuickFormat lets you extract formatting or styles from text and apply them to text in another document. A new Insert menu lets users select predefined bullets and numbering styles or create their own. The Abbreviations feature will replace an abbreviation in a document with a longer piece of information which can include text, graphics, formatting - anything that can be placed in a document. The customizable Button Bar will let you run any Windows application from within WordPerfect. Availability is scheduled for October 19 (hey, that's just around the corner). In other word processor news, Microsoft will likely delay the release of Word 6 for Windows, giving WordPerfect the edge. See the details of Word 6 for Windows below. --------------- MORE NEWS IN YER FACE Microsoft's upgrade of Word for Windows will trail in release behind WordPerfect's upgrade. Included in Word will be AutoCorrect which will fix commonly misspelled words and typos without prompting. AutoSelect chooses words instead of characters for editing and AutoFormat modifies text based on predefined styles. --------------- Microsoft may stop retailing Video for Windows and bundle it with boards. Video for Windows will also be offered in Chicago (DOS 7/Windows 4). --------------- My report last month that Novell was not using NetWare 4 internally has been disputed. A Novell executive says that they're using it extensively with over 1,000 clients and 70 servers. --------------- Intuit, makers of the popular Quicken, has proposed acquiring ChipSoft, makers of TurboTax and MacInTax. The Justice Department is concerned about anti-trust issues and recently squelched a ChipSoft deal to acquire Meca Software, a competitor. The combined Intuit-ChipSoft deal would mean an estimated $200 million in annual sales with about 1,000 employees. --------------- WordPerfect is shipping version 6.0a of their new DOS word processor to fix several bugs and add new features. New to the interim release is the ability to edit footers and headers in Page mode, customizable graphics, printable help and macro documentation, and new Coaches. --------------- Get out your Mastercard - by the time your read this a new newsletter will be available called OS/2 Week. This is a multi- page newsletter which will offer news on product plans,personnel shifts, strategic alliances, and other industry news on OS/2. It is delivered each Monday morning to your fax machine and a 50-week subscription only costs $400. But if you ordered before publication, they offered a one-time rate of $200. --------------- Useless information: WordPerfect spent over $3 million on print advertising in July. --------------- Lotus will be soon offering a free bug-fix for their just- released 1-2-3 Release 4 for Windows. The fix includes the Application Field Exchange for tighter integration with Notes along with support for more databases. One of the more serious bugs which has been corrected is a problem some users had when using absolute references in specific sequences. --------------- It's all but a done deal. ComputerLand will be purchased by software distributor Merisel. Nobody is talking price. --------------- There are reports of problems with certain implementations of the Pentium. Errata in the core controller chip set that is used to pair the Pentium with the PCI local bus results in performance hits and compatibility. The level I write-back cache was not working in the Intel 82430 PCI chip, but Intel claims to have fixed the problem. --------------- Look for an upgrade to Windows for Workgroups soon. This version 3.11 has improved NetWare support including support for the 32-bit protected mode of the IPX protocol, support for ODI drivers and routers, and support for ArcNet. Users will be able to configure services and security from a central location and audit individual machines. Performance has reportedly been improved by supporting 32-bit network drivers and 32-bit file access. They claim more than 50% faster I/O throughput. Version 3.11 also includes a remote access client for Windows NT. --------------- Texas Instruments will be introducing their own line of 486 microprocessors soon, joining Cyrix and AMD in the Intel challenge for this lucrative trade. TI has been making 486 chips for Cyrix based on Cyrix's design. This new line is TI's own. --------------- PC STRIKES AGAIN I'd like to welcome another major computer company to the list of those promoting political correctness. Each year Corel Corporation sponsors a design contest. You design something with CorelDraw! and the winner gets some expensive computer stuff. All entries are published on a CD called ArtShow which is accompanied by a book showing all the entries. This year when you enter the contest, Corel will donate $5 to one of 6 charities: Friends of the Earth (a contradiction in terms to be sure), Amnesty International (on a par with the American Criminal Lovers Union), UNICEF, Red Cross, B'nai B'rith, or the American Foundation for AIDS Research. Isn't it bad enough that we have "green" computers because we're using too much electricity and chopping down trees? When will this madness end? Death to liberalism! --------------- A number of game developers are getting together to give ratings for sex and violence to their games. As with the entertainment industry, we seem more concerned with fake violence than the real thing. --------------- The Discovery Channel has a CD out called In The Company of Whales. It's a multimedia exploration into the lives of whales. Knowing the politics of the TV channel, it's OK to murder babies but we really ought to save the whales. --------------- ROLL OF QUARTERS Jump in the time machine back to the late 1970s. The biggest fad is video games - and Microsoft has resurrected five of the most popular games from Atari. Microsoft Arcade includes five of the hottest video games from Atari. Each game is customizable and runs in a window or full screen. The sound effects for each were sampled from the original machines. Included are Missile Command (save your battalions from bombs, missiles, smart bombs, etc.), Tempest (defend yourself against enemy aliens in a changing array of geometric playing screens), Centipede (the classic bug-shooting game), Asteroids (blast the asteroids and other enemies), and Battlezone (pseudo 3D tank shooting game). The graphics are crude as were the original. Each game seems quite faithful to the original, if memory serves. The ability to customize each game helps you to rack up points and "cheat". This is nothing but fun, especially if you remember the original machines. --------------- MEDIA VISION CD-ROMS During the month of October, Media Vision will be releasing five CD titles. The Forever Growing Garden (ages 4-8) grows a virtual garden in the computer. It uses the computer clock and grows whether the CD is loaded or not or whether the computer is on or off. Peak Performance (ages 8-14) is a geography game with the goal of making it to the highest point in each of the continental 48 states within 30 days. The game features cartoon animation and actual video footage. The Eden Chronicles: No One Dreams Here (ages 16 and up) is a science fiction title based in the year 2057. It has 16-bit sound and an all-video interface that Media Vision calls "virtual cinema". Critical path (ages 12 and up) is an action-adventure set in a post-apocalyptic factory. It uses video extensively and has a "very cinematic feel" to it. The user interacts with a female protagonist who has real emotions and doesn't always do what the user tells her to do. Daily PlanIt is a personal desktop organizer with voice annotation, desk accessories, entertainment modules, and a calendar with professional photographs. Three calendar versions are available featuring nature, action-adventure sports, and swimsuits. All titles are Windows-based. There is no word on what any of the titles will sell for. --------------- 10-YEAR ANNIVERSARY This October marks ten years that I've been involved with computers. Where did they go? Many of you may be unaware of my computer background or where the RaG came from, so every couple of years I do a short piece on the origin of this thing. Back in the early 80s, I could see the usefulness of a computer in business. Our photographic associations had speakers telling of all the wonderful things a computer could do for a portrait studio (accounting and word processing). So I looked around at what was available in hardware. The popular PC at that time was the Corona. Our area's only computer store at the time handled them, so I took a look. Here was an XT with 20 MB hard drive and 512K for only $2500. I thought I'd pass. Lots of my friends in the business were using Apples. I looked long and hard at the Apple IIe. And I almost bought one until I really did my homework and saw them for what they really were - an overpriced, underfeatured piece of junk. A couple of my friends locally used a TI 99/4A. It was certainly affordable. As fate would have it, I was in Seattle the day after TI announced they were dumping the 99/4A. On my way home I stopped at a discount store and plunked down $49 for the console and $49 for the P-Box. I new that was just the beginning. That was October of 1983 and I had just placed the needle in my arm. Over the next couple of months, I tracked down the necessary components to make a complete system. Whew - 2 360K floppies, a little black-and-white TV for a monitor, 300 baud J-Cat modem, and a whopping 48K!! WOW, we're doing some computing now! Actually, I eventually bought another system and ran a BBS for about a year and a half. In April of 1984, I bought the above mentioned J-Cat and signed up for The Source (remember them?). I became quite involved with the TI section there. Somewhere in 1985, the guy running the TI section had a contest for a newsletter that would stimulate usage in the TI area. I won the contest and RAndY's RumOR RaG was born. The guy running the contest came up with the name and I added the odd combination of capitals and lowercase to make it look funny. I joined GEnie in early 1986. The turning point came in the fall of 86 when it became clear that the PC was the way to go. The TI had served me well in business, but its days were numbered. Late in 1986 I sold all my TI stuff along with friends' equipment and four of us bought XTs. These were mono powerhouses with 640K and a 20MB hard drive. From there, I gradually moved up to a 286, bigger hard drive, then a 386SX, then a 386DX, a bigger hard drive, more memory, VGA, better printers, etc. During all this time, the RaG was published on GEnie as well as The Source. When The Source dwindled away, GEnie became the main outlet. I had uploaded it to the local BBS's and discovered that it eventually made it all over the country. Late in 1991, America Online decided to add it to their list of services and ModemNews had picked it up before that. I'm proud to announce that GEnie has made it official and RAndY's RumOR RaG is now part of the Digital Publishing RoundTable. The RaG has been a labor of love. I receive no money for it and am free to say whatever I please. Have you ever bought a piece of hardware or software, only to discover it's not all you thought it should be? In my capacity as a computer store, I have the opportunity to sample a wide variety of products. Based on my experience with computers, I am able to give an honest opinion. Thank you for your support and I hope I can help you get the best bang for your computer dollar. --------------- ================================= DISCLAIMER RAndY's RumOR RaG is published on a monthly basis by AINSWORTH COMPUTER SERVICES and is available on various local BBS's, GEnie, and America Online as well as in Modem News. In case anyone cares, RAndY's RumOR RaG is produced on a 486- 50 with 8 megs of memory, Diamond Stealth Pro VESA VLB (1 MB), 105 MB Toshiba IDE hard drive, Teac 1.2 MB and 1.44 MB floppies, Pro Audio Spectrum 16 running a Hitachi 3750 CD ROM drive, Sceptre SVGA display, Microsoft mouse, WordPerfect for Windows and transmitted through a US Robotics HST Dual Standard modem. Opinions expressed are those of the author. Comments should be addressed to Ainsworth Computer Services on GEnie, America Online, phone, analog mail, or whatever method makes you feel good. AINSWORTH COMPUTER SERVICES 605 W. Wishkah Aberdeen, WA 98520-6031 (206) 533-6647 GEnie Address: RAG America Online: RumOR RaG