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January 2, 1999
News
- I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season, good Christmas
and a Happy New Year! It promises to be a great one. If you received any great high-tech
toys for Christmas, let me know. If you just got your first computer and you’re
totally confused give me a call. And if you want to hear what I got, well, just keep
listening. Actually, what I bought myself was Nintendo’s new Game Boy
Color—it’s the color version of their popular hand-held gaming device. Now,
I’m not really an avid gamer, but I have to admit that I was intrigued by this little
guy and so far, it’s lived up to my hopes. It’s got a tiny 3" color screen
that, although it isn’t backlit, uses what they called highly-reflective active
matrix technology. So, you can’t see if there isn’t some kind of natural or
ambient light, but as long as you have some, it looks great. It also has a built-in
infrared wireless port, in addition to the standard wired datalink connection, and runs on
two AA batteries for 10 hours. And, best of all, I paid $65 for it. Pretty cool if
you’re into games. Of course, the games themselves cost almost half the price of the
player…
- Well, the countdown has begun—just 364 days until Y2K.
As I’ve said before and I’ll say again, there’s no need to worry, but
it’s good to be prepared. If you want to check your PC easily, quickly and cheaply
right now, you can download a free utility and fix from Symantec. Available from the
company’s Norton 2000 web page, the utility will check your BIOS for Y2K
compatibility and, if it finds that it’s not compatible, it provides a simple patch
that will keep you from having to worry about the rollover between December 31, 1999 and
January 1, 2000. Of course, if your PC does happen to get the data wrong, in most cases
all you have to do is manually change it once yourself and you should be fine, but if you
don’t want to be bothered, then you can go ahead and use this utility.
- This week marks the annual MacWorld Expo show in San
Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center. Starting Tuesday, January, 5 and running
through Friday, January, 8, the show promises to offer all kinds of good news and good
products for Mac aficionados. At the top of the list are the expected debuts of the new
line of PowerPC G3 desktop systems that have been code-named Yosemite. While no pricing
information is available, there’s lots of info about what the systems are expected to
offer. Visually speaking, they’ll feature a translucent plastic iMac-inspired casing
and inside they’ll be powered by 333 to 400 MHz PowerPC G3 processors. The new
systems will also offer two USB ports, two IEEE 1394, or FireWire, ports—which offer
speeds up to 400 Mbits per second—as well as a standard ADB port and a 10/100 Mbit
Ethernet port. Like the iMac, however, they will not have SCSI ports or a floppy disk.
Technically speaking, the Yosemite systems will feature a 100 MHz system bus, 4 DIMM slots
that support up to 1 GB of SDRAM, and 512K to 1 MB of backside, or L2, cache. They will
also include built-in 2D and 3D acceleration and will offer 3 PCI slots that can work in
either 32- or 64-bit modes. In addition to these new machines, the company may debut the
next generation iMac with a faster 266 or 300 MHz processor, and MacOS 8.6, which is
expected to offer only minor improvements over 8.5. In other OS news, the company is
expected to introduce OS X Server, which is the renamed Rhapsody project that originated
with work from the old NeXT. The consumer-oriented version of OS X is not due until the
end of this year.
- Iomega has introduced and will soon start shipping a 250 MB
or their popular Zip Drive. The new drive, which will retail for $199 in either parallel
or SCSI versions, is compatible with old disks, which means any 100 MB Zip disks can be
used in the new drive. The performance of the new drive is expected to be the same as the
older Zip in the parallel port version, but the SCSI version is supposed to be about 1.5
times as fast as the SCSI version of the 100 MB drive. Disks are about $17 when purchased
in packages of six.
- Look for some new processors to be introduced this week by
Intel. The company is expected to introduce some faster versions of its Celeron A
processors to help it compete in the rapidly-growing sub-$1,000 computer market. The
company is rumored to be debuting 366 and 400 MHz versions of the Celeron, which now comes
with 128 Kbytes of onboard L2 cache. In addition, there may be new versions of high-end
Pentium II Xeon processors for servers. The next big desktop CPU introduction will be on
March 1, when the company debuts 450 and 500 MHz versions of its Katmai processor. Katmai
is an enhanced Pentium II that incorporates 70 new MMX-like instruction enhancements to
the processor’s core capabilities. Like MMX, they’ll only work with applications
that were specifically designed to use them.
- Deneba has started shipping version 6.0 of Canvas, the
company’s all-in-one drawing, photo-editing, page layout program. The new version of
the $375 Mac or Windows program, which has a $199 upgrade price for existing users or
users of competitive programs, offers over 300 new features. Some of the most notable are
a new technology the company calls Sprite Layers that lets you easily combine digital
images, vector art and text without losing the ability to edit any of them individually.
In addition, you can use different elements to impact the other so that, for example, you
can use one object’s lightness and darkness attributes to "mask" another,
which lets you create complex, layered graphics easily. The program also has a refined
interface that features extensive user-customization options and more tools. You can read
more about it from the link on my "This Week’s Links" page.
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