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March 2 8, 1998
News
Guest this week is Robert Luhn, Editor-in-Chief of Computer
Currents
Is DOS finally dead? Well, if you read the front page story
in the San Jose Mercury News this week, it would certainly appear so. What the story was
actually referring to, however, was a speech that Microsoft CEO Bill Gates gave this week
at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, or WinHEC. In the speech, Gates confirmed
that Windows 98 will be company’s last operating system built from a DOS base, as
Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 were. Instead, the company is moving full bore to Windows NT
and plans to offer a consumer-oriented version of NT by the year 2000 or 2001. This will
be the next major OS upgrade after Windows 98. The next version of NT, version
5.0—which is expected to ship at the end of this year or the beginning of
1999—is a step towards that, but still is not a truly consumer-oriented OS. NT 5.0
will finally offer support for Plug-and-Play as well as standardized support to work on
notebook computers, which has been a bit of a problem for NT 4.0.
WinHEC is also an interesting conference for other reasons
because this is where Microsoft and Intel talk about their PC hardware specifications for
the next few years. At this year’s conference there was discussion of the PC 98 spec,
which was designed with Windows 98 and Windows NT 5.0 in mind, as well as early discussion
of the PC 99 spec. Despite the naming, PC 98-compliant systems aren’t expected until
the latter half of this year and well into 1999 and PC 99 systems won’t appear until
well into 1999 and the year 2000. Many current computer systems are actually based on the
PC 97 spec. The way you can tell if a system meets these recommended guidelines is to see
if it has a "Designed for Windows 95 (or 98)" logo—there is no such thing
as a PC 97 or PC 98 logo. One of the more controversial parts of these two specs, by the
way, is the complete elimination of the venerable ISA expansion bus from modern computers.
Expect to start to see it disappearing later this year.
Mac Office 98 finally shipped this week so now Mac users are
finally on par (and a little past) Windows Office users. Mac Office includes Word 98,
Excel 98 and PowerPoint 98, along with Outlook Express, Explorer 4.0, and in a surprise
addition, FrontPage 1.1, the most recent Mac version of the company’s HTML authoring
tool. Upgrades from existing versions of any Office application or the previous Mac
version of Office are $269. Interestingly, an obscure but potentially problematic bug has
already been discovered in an Office 98 utility that uninstalls the program. Apparently,
in some situations it can actually trash your Mac System Folder. The company is working on
a fix for the utility, and plans to have a fix on its web site within the next few days.
This does not, by the way, affect the normal installation and operation of any of the Mac
Office products—only uninstalling.
The final shipping version of Outlook 98, Microsoft’s
e-mail, newsgroup reader and contact management program is now available on the
company’s web site. As I mentioned last week, the full product is free to download
for the next 90 days or so, regardless of whether you have an earlier version of Outlook
or not. This is a full-fledged, non-time bombed version, which means it won’t
automatically stop working after a certain date, as many demo applications on the web do.
If you use Outlook 97 I highly recommend you upgrade to the new version—it’s
faster and more stable than its predecessor—and if you don’t, it’s still
worth a free look.
Adobe unveiled the upcoming version of their video-editing
package. Premiere 5.0, which will ship in May for $895 for Windows 95, NT and the
Mac—upgrades from previous versions will be $199, incorporates both a simplified user
interface, as well as a number of more sophisticated, professional-level capabilities. The
new interface is also more consistent with the company’s other products, such as
Photoshop and Illustrator. New to this version are enhanced title-making features,
improved editing functions and enhancements to the video and audio filters bundled with
the program.
On the lookout for a new color printer? Can’t decide
between a normal four-color inkjet and one of those fancy six-color photo jobbies? Well,
then you might want to check out Lexmark’s new 5700, a $250 1,200 dpi four-color
inkjet that lets you take out the black cartridge and replace it with a three color
(black, light cyan and light magenta) cartridge and turn it into a six-color printer for
more realistic photo prints. Of course, like many color inkjets, extra cartridges
aren’t cheap: its $45 for the two color cartridges and $33 for the black only. The
5700 also boasts fairly impressive print speeds—8 ppm for black and 4 ppm for
four-color—and is bundled with a whole bunch of graphics-related software. To find
out more, visit the company’s web site at www.lexmark.com.
Looking for DVD-ROM drives? Well, you’ve got some
interesting new choices available to you. This week Pioneer announced that they were
shipping a new 2.6x internal DVD-ROM drive for $175. The DVD-102, which uses the ATAPI
interface standard, can read both single and double-sided DVD discs, and offers access
times of about 150 milliseconds, which is nearly on par with some of the fastest CD-ROM
drives. The company will be selling a SCSI-based version of the drive to the Mac market as
of late April. The move DVD-302 will cost about $275. In addition, Sony announced that
they will be shipping a 5x DVD-ROM this summer that it will sell for about $349, including
a hardware MPEG-2 decoder card and two DVD-ROM titles. The drive offers an impressive 75
millisecond access time for CDs and 100 millisecond access time for DVD disks.
Want to try phone calls over the ‘net? Well, Yahoo has
hooked up with a company that offers Internet telephony service, where you can make long
distance phone calls typically at reduced rates via your Internet connection. As of this
week, when you use Yahoo’s PeopleSearch feature, you can search for a name and, if
the database has a phone number, simply click on the name and initiate a net-based phone
call. (You need the Net2Phone client software to make this work.) The quality of the
signal can vary according to your computer’s speaker and microphone—you’re
better off plugging a headset microphone into your computer's sound card if you’re
really interested. Long-distance calls handled by IDT, which is not related to the chip
company of the same name, must be pre-paid in $25 increments. The calls range in price
from 8 cents a minute for calls in the US, to 35 to 60 cents a minute for overseas calls.
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