Starting late with this months column was due to the excitement of attending COMDEX in Las Vegas in November 1997. Many of you are familiar with my ranting and raving about the Computer Dealers Exposition (COMDEX) which happens twice a year, In the spring where it is held in either Atlanta Georgia or Chicago Illinois. But the biggest and the best is held in November each year in Las Vegas. Anyone who is anyone in the computer software and hardware arena shows up in Las Vegas. I have been going since about 1983 and love it each time. So many goodies and the attraction of Las Vegas on top of all t hat. I will not bore you with the details until I get back and write my January column.
For those of you that go to the local computer shows I have some advice. Watch what software you purchase as some of the vendors are selling what is called NFR software. NFR stands for Not For Resale. It is software that many of the manufacturers send out to dealers to use for demonstration purposes. It is normally complete but in some cases it is not upgradeable or in the case of some server software, you may not add more users than the initial license. Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 NFR software will not allow you to update your users licenses. This is fine for those that are demonstrating the product but those of you that think your buying the complete package, your in for a surprise. Just be careful if you purchase a software product and some of the bar code area or description is scratched out. I have noticed that some of the vendors are scratching out the letters NFR from Microsoft products. I am not aware of what Microsofts policy is on this but they probably have bigger fish to fry. The same for Symantec and others.
By this time most of you will have been visited by the holiday person and gotten your new toys. I hope that you were fortunate in getting that new 300Megahertz Pentium MMX machine with the 64Megabytes of RAM and the 5.6 Gigabyte hard disk, 17" monitor and 4 Megabyte graphics board. Along with that, you should be having installed either your Cable modem or your Bellatlantic ISDN line. Hooray!. Now you can connect to the Internet much faster but your probably going to spend about the same amount of time waiting for some Web page to load in your Web browser.<G> I have found that there is a lot of slow downs on the Internet now that the use of the net has increased exponentially over the past 4 years. Just be patient, the new Internet will be around the corner and this should speed some things up. There are people working as I write this column in putting together a new faster fibre optic Internet II. This will start out to be primarily for the educational and government agencies as the Internet was originally designed for. Then they will slowly open up as the backbone for some of the larger Internet Service Providers(ISP) but something tells me that the RBOC's (Regional Bell Operating Companies) will get it first. It should be interesting to have much more instant communications via the net with this much higher speed pipeline. I predict that by the end of 1998, many of us that like to be on the bleeding edge will be on the new Internet II. I also predict that the costs of the Internet will change and not be based as much on the time online, as what you do. Byte count will matter in the computation of your bill for Internet access. After all, it is almost written in the sand that those that use the net more should end up paying more. Gigabyte file transfers will probably be much more normal instead of Megabyte file transfers. Back in the days of 300 Bits per second modems, we never thought or dreamed about 56K modems or 128K ISDN lines. Now along comes the newer technologies with megabyte file xfer capability. That means 1 million bits per second of data being transferred. Scary isn't it?
New toys: I went out and spent the bucks for one of the new Sony MVC-FD5 Digital
still
cameras. They cost around $500 at Compusa and other fine stores, but the
neatest thing is that
the storage medium is our old standard 3 «" floppy disks No cables to connect or
special
software. Just keep inserting them into the camera as they fill up. 640x480
and 256 colors is its
resolution and some of the other features are that if your diskette is not
formatted, it will format
the disk. It actually has a copy of DOS in the cameras memory. The battery
seems to last a long
time with No more AA batteries or cables to worry about. The battery charger
seems to get it
fully charged in less than an hour. It creates standard JPEG files which are
readable by most
graphics manipulation programs. I have taken some and our Editor Barbara Conn
has used them
in the Monitor. It has a flash if you need one but the cameras innards are such
that it takes
pictures in pretty low light levels. I find it difficult to remember that I
don't have to bring it up to
my eyes and look thru a viewfinder. It has a color LCD screen on the back where
what you see is
what you get. Another neat feature of the camera is that you can preview the
pictures on a
diskette and delete them if it did not turn out good. It is lightweight and
easy to use. Very few
controls (which is great for a twiddler) and they even sell a more expensive
model t hat has a 10-1
zoom feature. I had my fill of zoom a long time ago and felt that I would not
use that. Unless I
was taking pictures of dangerous snakes or alligators.<G> All in all a
great toy for those who are
into digital pictures.
The first casualty of the Y2K (Year 2000K Compliant) glitch: I wrote a program
for the office to
create some statistics for membership using the membership data base. Mr Harley
Wilbur was
using the output of this program (Written in Compiled Basic) to provide the
monthly membership
status charts. Well, back in 1994 thru 1996 this was great as we did not have
any memberships
expiring beyond the end of 1999. But the past year or so, we have had lots of
members renew for
3 years and guess what, 1997 plus three years puts them in the year 2000 and
beyond. So, my
program was just dropping them off the chart and the results were not correct.
I recognized this
and now I have to re-write the program to take this into account. Sorry
Harley...
Bottom line. Watch any program that you might run and use for forecasting beyond
1999 and test
it out to determine whether the data your getting is realistic. Most of the
programs you buy today
are Y2K compliant, but it still behooves you to check them out before you go
investing all your
life savings in some project..
Rich Schinnell is the 1st Vice president of Capital PC User Group and has been around since day one. He consults for a few business clients but enjoys most helping others learn to use their computers without having to be a Microsoft certified engineer or whatever. He can be reached via the Internet at schinnel@cpcug.org and by phone in the evening at (301) 949-9292. He sometimes attends the Senior SIG meetings on the first Saturday of each month, now that he is about ready to apply for social security in March of 1998.
http://www.cpcug.org/user/schinnel
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