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April 10, 1999
News
- I’ve got a set of Microsoft’s Digital Sound System
80 USB speakers, along with some other Microsoft paraphernalia to give away today.
- Don’t forget, this Thursday, April 15 from 12 noon until
8 p.m., it’s the third annual KSFO Common Sense Convention Listener Party. This
year’s event will be held indoors at Herbst Pavilion in Fort Mason, which is right
along the Bay, near the Marina. If you’d like to meet KSFO personalities and hobnob
with other KSFO listeners, this is the place to be. I’ll be there from 4:30 until
6:30 p.m. shaking hands, saying hello, and providing the opportunity to pre-order signed
copies of my upcoming book, "Personal Computer Secrets." Stop by and say hello
after work if you can—I’d love to meet as many of you as possible.
- Intel introduced new home networking products this week
called AnyPoint that take advantage of the Home Phoneline Networking Association standard.
The AnyPoint products, which are packaged together in various configurations, consist of
an external device that attaches to a PC’s parallel port and to any phoneline in your
house. Another version of the AnyPoint is available as PCI card that plugs into one of
your PC’s slots and then, again, into any home phone outlet. Like other products that
have come before it, the AnyPoint products take advantage of those phonelines and the
basic network wiring they provide to enable you to create a simple home network without
having to fish wires through your walls. Unlike a traditional Ethernet network, which runs
at 10 Mbps and does require a dedicated cable to be run between all the various computers,
the AnyPoint products run at 1 Mbps. Functionally, however, the capabilities that they
provide are identical to a traditional network, including the ability to share a single
Internet account through bundled proxy server software, share printers, share files, play
networkable multi-player games and more. The installation process is supposed to hide all
the complexities of setting up a network, including the proxy server necessary for sharing
an Internet account, IP addresses and all the rest. This is important because one of the
most daunting parts of configuring a network is making all these types of settings. The
AnyPoint external adapters come with parallel pass-through cables so that you can insert
them between your PC and your printer, although as with all such arrangements, they simply
won’t work properly with some printers. Intel says they will have USB-based versions
later in the year, but I’m pretty disappointed that the inventors of USB don’t
have them immediately. Prices for the AnyPoint products are $189 for a set of two external
adapters, $99 for additional external adapters and $79 for single PCI card format
adapters. You can buy them directly from Intel’s AnyPoint website, which I have a
link to from my This Week’s Links page.
- To date, most of the home networking products have been for
Windows-based PCs, but Mac networking pioneer Farallon is apparently working on home
phoneline networking products for the Mac market. Scheduled for release later this month,
according to initial reports, the Farallon home networking products will let you network
several Macs or, even more importantly, easily network Macs and PCs together. The Mac home
networking products from Farallon will be compatible with and apparently come with the
software necessary to connect home phoneline network-based PCs.
- Speaking of the Mac, there have been reports of yet another
slightly enhanced series of iMacs on their way. The new versions, called Rev. D, which are
scheduled to have the same $1,199 price as the current models, will supposedly offer a 333
MHz processor.
- To complement the recent spate of low-cost PCs, HP has come
up with a sub-$100 color inkjet printer. The new $99 street price DeskJet 420C comes with
one three-color cartridge—a pure black cartridge is optional—and offers slow
print speeds (4-7 minutes per page for color and 2 pages per minute with the optional
black cartridge)—but hey, what do you expect for $100? The 600 x300 dpi printer (300
dpi when printing in color) uses a parallel port connection.
- If you need higher quality and you’re willing to spend a
few more bucks, the $279 Epson Stylus Photo 750 is the latest addition to the
company’s 6-color inkjet line. The Stylus Photo 750 offers 1,440 x 720 dpi
resolution, an ink drop size of 6 picoliters, USB, parallel and Mac serial port
connections, fast print speeds (only two minutes for an 8 x 10 photo) and the ability to
print directly from Epson’s PhotoPC 750Z digital camera.
- Creative Labs will apparently unveil a new handheld MP3
player device called Nomad at the Spring Internet World conference down in Los Angeles
this week. The Nomad will complete with Diamond Multimedia’s Rio, which has
apparently sold over 100,000 units. This week a Sony spokesman also referred to the
possibility of a digital Walkman or Netman device that could provide similar capabilities.
Because of its strong ties to the record industry (including its own major label),
however, the device would not use the MP3 format. Instead, it would use something that
provided copyright protection for existing music.
- Speaking of gadgets, Panasonic this week announced a new
version of Portable DVD Theater device. The DVD LV-50, which will be available in May with
a suggested retail of $1,099, looks a bit like a portable CD player, except that it packs
in a 5" color LCD display that show movies in either 16:9 or traditional 4:3 format.
The LV-50 is a successor to the popular LV-10, which was the first portable DVD drive. The
LV-50 adds onto its predecessor by incorporating digital audio outputs for decoding the
Dolby Digital signal, which you can use when you attach it to a home theater system.
- AMD this week announced a new 475 MHz version of its popular
K6-2 processor. Systems based on the new chip are expected from several major players,
including IBM, very shortly. In related news, both AMD and Intel are expected to reduce
their prices on their lower-end processors this coming week. This may or not be reflected
in retail prices of systems using those chips.
- This past week was the annual WinHEC Windows Hardware
Engineering Conference, where the new platforms and new technologies for PCs are typically
first unveiled. This year’s show didn’t actually have any real surprises in the
hardware arena—lots of sessions focused on the burgeoning home networking market, for
example, as well as the debut of the Easy PC concept—but there was a bit of a
software bombshell. Microsoft president Steve Ballmer said that the company has changed
its mind and will offer another version of Windows 95/98 sometime next year. This yet
unnamed OS will include new features over current Windows 98, but it will not be based on
the Windows NT/2000 operating system as it was originally planned to be.
- On the Y2K front, I just want to mention in passing that
nothing happened yesterday. I say this because yesterday was the 99th day of 99th
year and some of the Y2K doomsayers and other pundits predicted that it could (or would)
be a problem. They were wrong.
- In other Y2K news, Microsoft will make available on their web
site this Monday a complete Y2K fix for Windows 95. If you’re still running 95 and
want to make sure your system is completely compliant, then you should download and
install this update when it becomes available.
- If you want to check out a new shopping site on the Internet
that has great information on how to look for common PC peripherals, head over to
Cadabra.com. Of course, the fact that I wrote up the research articles as part of a
consulting job has nothing whatsoever to do with it....
- Finally, just to let you know that even big companies
can’t avoid virus problems, IBM announced this week that shipped a whole slew of
their Aptiva PCs with the CIH virus onboard. Aptiva models 240, 301, 520, and 580
manufactured in early March all have the CIH virus. If you think you may have one of the
infected machines, visit IBM’s Aptiva web site for more info.
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