Dec 95 News

by: Dave Gabel

The home computer market already seems to have exploded. But imagine what it could do if multimedia components were just a little--or a lot--more affordable.

Silicon Valley startup Chromatic Research thinks it can help bring multimedia prices down to earth. The firm has developed a chip it calls the Mpact media engine, incorporating technology that promises to provide seven multimedia functions in PCs for what it now costs to get just two functions.

The chip will allow a PC to provide full-screen video, 2-D and 3-D accelerated graphics, audio, fax modem functions, and telephony and videophone capabilities. And it will do this for about $150 (to OEMs, who would build the features into PCs). It also means competing against, for example, sound cards from Creative Labs and Turtle Beach and graphics adapters from Diamond Multimedia and Matrox.

For consumers, this means home PCs with multimedia trimmings should get quite a bit less expensive quite soon. Too good to be true?

"This is something we've not dealt with before," said Dean McCarron, an analyst with Mercury Research, "and it's something that looks like it has a lot of potential."

McCarron added that the Chromatic chip, as the first in a category, aims to solve two problems: the cost of providing all the claimed multimedia capabilities, and the question of complexity. "If all you care about is audio, that's one thing," he noted. "But if you want to add more [like full-motion video and telephony], you run into interoperability problems." In other words, the kind of interrupt conflict you face when installing a sound card, with seven capabilities being added instead of one.

Chromatic is coy about details, but claims the engine has elements of supercomputer and digital signal processing compatibility, including a very-high-bandwidth parallel architecture, very long instruction word (VLIW) and single in-struction/multiple data (SIMD) execution, and vector processing. So, the processor will be able to operate on very large chunks of data, and on several chunks at a time.

The chip should be available during the second quarter of next year, which means PCs featuring it will likely hit the market by the end of June. But a lot of pieces will need to fall into place first.

by: John D. Ruley

"Ultimately, everyone will use the NT Kernel." That's the gospel according to Rich Tong, general manager of Microsoft's Business Systems Division, as proclaimed recently to WINDOWS Magazine. But it won't happen for at least a few years--and questions persist about whether Microsoft will retain its current split between consumer and corporate products.

Some trade newspapers recently claimed that Microsoft has decided to maintain separate Windows 95 and NT core code indefinitely, but Tong labeled those reports "totally incorrect." Technical sources inside Microsoft's NT development group were less diplomatic: Res-ponding to a story that implied Microsoft would extend the Win95 code base to support future 64-bit processors, one said, "Yeah, right--we'd run a 64-bit CPU on 16-bit code!"

Sometime in the future, of course, a common code base might allow Microsoft to merge today's Windows 95 and NT Workstation into a single product. But then again, it might not. "In our present positioning, the average secretary should probably run Windows 95--it just isn't worth the extra cost for hardware to support NT Workstation," Tong noted. "On the other hand, a securities trader or engineer should probably run NT."

The high-end market has apparently begun doing just that. According to Microsoft, 20 companies in the Fortune 500 have committed to installing more than 10,000 NT systems each; 10 of those companies will install in excess of 20,000 NT systems.

by: Eileen McCooey

Have a question about Windows 95? Call Microsoft tech support: You should get an an-swer in a minute or two.

That wasn't the case immediately following the launch, when some irate callers reportedly fumed for much longer. Waits averaged 15 minutes the weekend after the rollout, Òso it was possible some callers had to wait an hour,Ó said Deborah Willingham, vice president of support. This despite the fact that Microsoft had geared up to handle 20,000 Win95 calls a dayÑalmost double the typical number

of calls for the entire product line.

Reacting to demand, Microsoft added staff and sent out a busy signal if there were too many calls in the queue. Waiting time dropped to less than 10 minutes by the second week and less than two by the third.

OEMs faced the same onslaught. For example, Gateway 2000 saw a 30 percent spike in calls, upping waits to six minutes. The company expected to be back to the usual two minutes last month.

• Microsoft and Visa announced a secure method for transmitting sensitive information across the Internet. Competitors complained that Microsoft stands to benefit greatly since the standard had no third-party input.
• Cyrix has begun initial commercial shipments of its new M1 processor, a competitor to Intel's Pentium.
• More signs that ISDN is heating up: U.S. Robotics is launching its new ISDN terminal adapter, combining an ISDN adapter and conventional modem, and CompuServe said it will test ISDN lines to its service in 10 U.S. cities, along with live audio from online conferences.
• Lotus and Borland's dispute over menu commands made it to the Supreme Court, the first software copyright dispute to reach that far.
• Microsoft and SkyTel agreed to allow Microsoft Network users to send and receive SkyTel pages.
• An International Data Group study shows HP and Apple PCs command the greatest buyer loyalty, while Packard Bell has the least; Compaq, meanwhile, is still the preferred business brand.
• Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, reconfirmed by Forbes magazine as the richest person in America, will release his book, an evaluation of the information superhighway, in early December.
• A nine-month study found that children watch dramatically less TV when there's a PC at home, particularly when a CD-ROM is attached to that PC.
• Perennial also-ran commercial online service Prodigy underwent a major face lift and released its new access software, commonly known as P2. However, analysts continue to predict that Prodigy may yet become the first major casualty of the heightened competition in this market.
• Already set to become the world's most profitable company with its dominance in the chip market, Intel signed a contract to build . . . supercomputers.

by: John D. Ruley

Cross-licensed products and technologies, plus a greater push for Windows- and Windows NT-based products in the enterprise: Those are just two of the lofty goals of a wide-ranging agreement recently signed by Microsoft and Digital Equipment Corp.

The deal gives rise to some interesting product combinations. For example, Microsoft will be able to license Digital's clustering technology, which will permit multiple NT systems to function as a single "virtual server." Meanwhile, Digital will implement a VMS-compatible SpiraLog file system on Windows NT, permitting NT systems to participate seamlessly in VMS environments. Digital will also enhance its OpenVMS operating system with selected Microsoft Win32 and BackOffice APIs, effectively allowing VMS-based systems such as VAX to participate seamlessly as servers in a BackOffice environment.

Digital will also provide seamless integration between Microsoft's forthcoming Exchange messaging system and its own All-In-1 and MailWorks e-mail offerings. Through that part of the deal, incidentally, Digital will become Microsoft's very first Exchange customer.

by: James E. Powell

Get ready to back up data in a whole new way--over a modem. XactLabs Corp. has developed a technology that will scan your hard disk; compress, encrypt and password-protect the changed files; and upload them to an off-site storage location. You can also display the files in a File Manager-like hierarchy and transfer them back to your PC.

At first, off-site storage capacities for home users may be limited. Since backing up an entire hard disk using a 28.8Kbps modem and XactLabs' technology would take at least 30 hours per gigabyte, the goal is to back up critical data only. More space will be available at higher costs for small firms.

The service eliminates the costs associated with buying backup drives and blank tapes, and courier deliveries. There are other advantages, too: Data backups can be scheduled overnight, and the process uses current communications technology. The technology--expected through online and telecom vendors early next year--should cost less than the price of couriers alone.

The Unix world saw further turmoil as Novell sold its UnixWare business to The Santa Cruz Operation. For its part, SCO announced plans to consolidate its SCO OpenServer System with UnixWare into an integrated PC-based Unix operating system featuring common interfaces with HP-UX. The consolidated product will offer binary compatibility with existing SCO OpenServer and UnixWare apps. SCO will ship "enhanced" editions of OpenServer and UnixWare in the first half of next year; the merged product should be out in 1997.

It seems the public can't get enough technical hand-holding, even as free support becomes an increasingly rare commodity. One third-party supplier is offering a new twist: guaranteed results. PC Crisis Line (800-828-4358) says it won't charge callers unless it solves the problem. Calls are billed to the user's credit card at the rate of $3 a minute, with a two-minute minimum. And if the lines are busy, the company will call users back rather than keep them on hold.

Browsing for Trouble

While Netscape enjoys success on the business front--a record-breaking IPO, the acquisition of Collabra--the company keeps getting hit with security glitches. In the third such incident in a month, a Cornell University student demonstrated a "hole" in the program that potentially allows an intruder to add an extra line of code that brings down a user's machine. As in the other cases, Netscape hastily made fixes available. But the security breaches gave further ammunition to critics of online commerce.

The anticipated war between online service providers in the post-Windows 95 world failed to materialize. For starters, Microsoft decided to limit the number of MSN subscribers to 500,000 and hadn't even reached that number by October. At the same time, OEMs such as Compaq and Packard Bell opted for a graphical front end on their entry-level machines that conceals Win95, and the PC vendors made sure that other online services such as America Online, Prodigy or CompuServe are also installed on those systems' hard disks.

by:Jim Forbes

Want to share files with someone across the hall--or across the country? Vendors of every stripe are scrambling to build those capabilities into a variety of forthcoming applications.

"What's driving this concept is the appearance of desktop computers that have powerful processors, fast modems or network adapters, and high-resolution graphics adapters," said Neil Starkey, co-founder of document-conferencing supplier DataBeam.

In essence, collaborative computing, as it's sometimes called, in-volves a few lines of software code that, when added to a program, let users click on a menu item and share an image of a data file with other users connected to a common wide area network or online service. The shared file is an image of the file created with an application.

Microsoft and Apple, among others, have al-ready signed licensing deals with DataBeam to incorporate these features in their products. Crosswise and Visioneer Corp. are also developing products designed for collaborative computing. Applications in-clude software tools that can be used to annotate charts and graphics files.

Some manufacturers have tried to address this market with videoconferencing products, such as Intel's ProShare. But document sharing clearly presents other opportunities--one reason Intel is readying a new version of ProShare that offers collaborative computing.

by:James E. Powell

CIMPLICITY Monitoring and Control, the new factory-automation software line from General Electric Fanuc, touts itself as the first offering in its category to automate the controllers found in everything from assembly lines and fabrication setups to high-precision machining and monitoring devices. The software lets users combine Plug and Play, drag-and-drop, and customizable displays to simplify the addition of new controls to manufacturing processes.

Much of the technical expertise behind CIMPLICITY, however, came from Microsoft, and the companies' two-year research venture marked the software behemoth's first real foray outside the desktop realm. With the new products, Microsoft is furthering its effort to establish Windows NT as the operating system of choice in some very new markets. "Manufacturing is a key business segment that Microsoft is targeting for industry growth," explained Bob McDowell, vice president of the Enterprise Customer Unit at Microsoft, adding that of the 779 large customers the company is concentrating on, 80 percent are already licensed users of NT.

by:William Gee

A new crop of offerings from Microsoft could slash the number of trips you make to the server closet. Windows NT Server Management Tools for Windows 95 provides client-side utilities that let administrators stay at their desk to handle basic management duties. LAN overseers can use the Event Viewer, Server Manager and User Manager for Domains tools through a Win95 client. Administrators can also establish trust relationships or reassign passwords from their desktop.

The tools let you change security settings on an NTFS drive or modify a print queue from within Explorer. They are available as a self-extracting .ZIP file from http: //www.windows.microsoft.com/windows/support/istools.htm.

by:Philip Albinus

by: James A. Miller

Desktop color printing could soon be taking on a new speed. The Fiery XJE color printer controller from EFI enables color printers to spit out documents three to five times faster than current models. Better yet, you'll get 600x600dpi photo-quality output at a comparable cost per page.

Two chips--one based on RISC, the other on EFI's own XJ RipChip ASIC--handle the image processing, letting the CPU work on PostScript processing. Other pro-cessors perform such tasks as communicating with the print engine. The technologies integrated into the three chips that comprise the controller are Continuous Print, which cuts the time between pages being output, and RIP-While-Print, which pro-cesses one page while another is printing.

Printers featuring the Fiery XJE will include a customized software suite. The price should be in the $10,000 range.

by: John Gartner

Exchanging data between hand-held devices and PCs, until now a big problem, is getting a little solution--one very small storage device. CompactFlash memory cards, each no larger than a stamp, allow digital cameras, PDAs, cellular phones and pagers to seamlessly swap data with notebook and desktop PCs. Manufacturer SanDisk has joined forces with 10 companies to propose CompactFlash as a standard. Because CompactFlash cards are reusable, they'll probably find an early home in digital cameras.

The two best features of CompactFlash are its portability and durability. One 2MB card can store up to 24 images and withstand a drop of eight feet. Pagers, audio recorders and cellular phones will be able to store dozens of messages on one card.

The cards will range in capacity from 2MB to 15MB; prices start at $150.

Word is that a strange document virus is spreading fast, and we have first-hand knowledge to prove it. If you're having problems saving Word documents as anything but template files, you've got the Prank virus. Check the software areas of the online services for a fix that will scan and clean your documents.

Here are some gotchas on Microsoft products that we've picked up on recently. (Did you know that Redmond means "reboot" in French?)
Word 95: Pressing F1 when no files are open causes an illegal operation and shuts down the program.
Word 95: "ofd" is not flagged as incorrect by the spell checker.
Kids Explorapedia World of Nature: The Earth rotates in the wrong direction (or have you also wanted to see the sun set over the Atlantic?).
Windows 95: Removing a floppy disk while the drive is being accessed fatally crashes Win95. Kaboom. Sayonara. The Big Ugly. Trust us on this one.

Here's one flaw that we can certainly fix ourselves: November's Windows 95 upgrade feature neglected to credit WinLab's Ian Etra and Will Gee, who worked until sunrise on several occasions to complete the testing. Thanks, guys!

Engineers at AST seem to be students of the Bad News Bears school of how to design a serviceable system. We bought an AST Bravo MS-T P/90 slimline unit and it's turned into a maintenance nightmare. Disabling the on-board video requires changing a jumper on the motherboard, which requires removing an adapter card, the hard disk and the power supply. Servicing almost any component involves at least a half-hour of taking out peripherals and screws.

Tired of Windows 95's ability to run multiple apps without slowing down your system? Try running a screen saver--both MS Plus and After Dark make systems run at the speed of molasses down a New Hampshire tree in January. Norton Utilities seems to have the same effect.

Like an inept vacuum cleaner salesman, Exchange and MS Mail are having problems with attachments. Right-clicking on a file in Explorer and choosing the Send To option, which sends a file from Exchange to an MS Mail recipient, doesn't work. The intended will receive a mail message, but with no attachment. Better to compose a mail message, then drag and drop the files.

The tale of the tape for Windows 95 is woeful. The Microsoft Backup applet (it's too puny to be called an application) is not part of the default installation set for Win95. You have to ask for it by clicking on the Windows Setup tab of the Add/Remove Programs applet in the Control Panel; then you must select Disk Tools and click on the Details button. You'll find a disappointingly small list of supported tape, and no ability to back up files with the archive bit turned on. The Help file indicates that the program will not back up the Registry, and incremental backups only include additions to files already stored, not new files. Your old Windows backup software isn't any help either if you've started to use long filenames.

We're still waiting (as of early autumn) for the third-party backup software suppliers to deliver. Hopefully, there will be some products out soon and we won't have to suffer through a long winter of discontent.

In our April feature "Take a Drive," we reported that one of the limiting factors of Enhanced IDE (EIDE) was the loss of performance when attaching an ATAPI CD-ROM drive to the same connector as a hard drive. Thanks to a new EIDE controller from CMD, this isn't a problem anymore. Motherboards that began shipping a few months ago feature the CMD 0646 controller, which can discriminate between different-speed devices.

The highly touted--but still highly theoretical--Universal Serial Bus is inching closer to reality. A standard connector interface was recently unveiled in a joint announcement by Compaq, Microsoft and others. The first devices are slated for preview at Fall Comdex.