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April 17, 1999
News
- Thanks to everyone who came out to the KSFO Common Sense Convention, especially those
who pre-ordered my book. It was a great event and it’s always nice to meet listeners
in person.
- The Spring Internet World show was this past week in Los Angeles, and I was down at the
convention covering it for the Silicon Valley Business TV program and saw quite a few
interesting items. Surprisingly, some of the big hits of the show were electronic gadgets
that allow you to play music and audio. Their Internet hook is that these portable digital
audio devices get their files via the Internet. In the case of the Creative Lab’s
tiny new Nomad MP3 player, for example, you can download any MP3-format files from the Web
and then transfer them over to the Nomad via a serial port-based cradle for your PC and
then listen to the files anywhere. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s
functionally identically to Diamond Multimedia’s popular Rio MP3 player. The Nomad is
even smaller than the Rio, however, and includes both an FM radio tuner, as well as the
ability to record audio like a small dictation recorder. The Nomad comes standard with 32
MB of RAM and includes a slot for up to a 32 MB SmartMedia card. The standard memory
amount gives you an hour of CD-quality audio or two hours of recording time, and the
SmartMedia card doubles that to two hours and four hours respectively. The audio
recordings are also transferable back to your PC, where you can edit them, attach them to
an e-mail or use them in conjunction with speed recognition programs. The Nomad’s
retail price is $249.
- Over in the Microsoft booth, the company was debuting their new Windows Media Technology
audio format. This is one of several new digital audio standards that’s meant to
compete with MP3. Microsoft claimed that WMT, or MSAudio—as it’s sometimes
called, which can be either streamed or downloaded, provides audio quality that’s as
good as MP3 at half the data rate, or even better than MP3 at the same data rates. Based
on the listening I was able to do, I have to admit it does sound quite good. The other
interesting thing about this new format is that includes file locking, to avoid the
illegal copying and copyright infringement problems that have plagued MP3. With this
capability in place, musicians and record companies can sell their music and prevent it
from being copied. The problem is, IBM and RealAudio are also working on other,
incompatible formats.
- One other neat item in the Microsoft booth was the Casio Cassiopeia E-100, a Windows
CE-based color palm computer that also adds the ability to play back both audio and video
files. Microsoft was showing the device playing back its new Windows Media Technology 4.0
ASF-format files and it sounded great. It basically combines the capabilities of an
organizer and a digital walkman in one, which is a pretty neat combination. The E-100 is
expected to be available next month for around $500.
- The other big news at the Internet World show was low-cost web servers. Most individuals
and small businesses who create web sites use ISPs to host it for them, but with some of
the products available at the show, you may want to consider running your own server. In
the very recent past, both the costs and complexities involved have prevented most people
from doing this, but a new category of products called web server appliances prove that
anyone can do it. What’s neat about these products is that you can just attach them
to your PC through a network or serial port connection, and then configure them through
your browser. In fact, some of the devices I looked at, include the Cobalt Networks Qube2
and the Encanto Networks e.go web server, come with web authoring software and other
network software already built in. The Qube2, which starts at $999, is a more
sophisticated product and better suited for a small business that needs an open-ended
solution. The e.go, on the other hand, is available for free—yes, I said free—if
you’re willing to sign a two-year agreement for $69 a month. That monthly price
includes not only the use of the server itself, but also the connection services and
support for electronic commerce, including credit-card processing. In fact, the e.go
server (as well as the Cobalt Qube2) can provide multiple usable features for small
business including support for file and print serving, a shared Internet access account, a
built-in e-mail server, a built-in web server and the software you need to put together an
e-commerced-enable online store. If you’re a small business person looking to get
your business online, this looks to be a very neat solution. One seemingly odd, but
actually very clever feature I want to mention is that the device comes with and uses a
56K modem both for Internet access—which is not great—as well as web serving,
which would seem horrible. However, as part of the company’s service, they actually
store your web site’s most popular pages on their servers and only need to dial-up
and retrieve the uncached pages whenever they’re requested. As a result, you
don’t need to have your web server connected all the time and any connections that
are required are done automatically from Encanto’s end. Very clever indeed.
- If you’re interested in 3D graphics, you may want to check out a new package from
Play called Amphorium. Described as a real-time 3-D sculpting and painting program, the
$149 package—which is available now for both Macs and PCs—lets you build and
manipulate 3D images directly, without the need for wireframes and rendering. The program
also allows you to paint directly onto 3D sculpted objects. In addition, Amorphium
includes animation tools so that you can create complete 3D animations that you can use on
Web sites, on CD-ROMs and for other projects. You can also compose complete images by
combining several 3D objects with the appropriate backgrounds and shadowing and export
your results in a wide variety of different graphics formats.
- If you’ve been considering adding the Linux operating system to your PC to
investigate all the buzz around it, you might want to check out the new version of
Caldera’s OpenLinux. The $49 package includes an updated version of the core Linux
files, an enhanced graphical interface program and a new Linux Wizard, or Lizard, that
helps set up the OS easily and quickly. The Lizard handles both setting up the necessary
partitions, as well as finding out what hardware you have as part of your system and
installing the necessary driver software and other components to get your PC to work with
Linux. The new version of OpenLinux is also bundled with several applications, including
Netscape Communicator and WordPerfect 8 for Linux.
- Finally, if you’re looking for a good deal on a PC, you may want to check out the
new $399 system from Micro Center. The price itself, though impressive, isn’t a
breakthrough, but this system is actually based on a 300 MHz Celeron (without the L2 cache
onboard or even avialable) as opposed to a Cyrix or AMD chip. The PowerSpec Model 4300
includes 24 MB of RAM, a 3.2 GB hard drive, 24X CD-ROM drive and a 56K modem. A monitor is
not included at this price.
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