Crawford's Corner

Citation

Crawford, W. (1999), "Crawford's Corner", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 16 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.1999.23916hab.001

Crawford's Corner

Perspective

Time for a Change

Long-time readers (both of you) may remember a perspective entitled "Turn Off, Tune Out, Take a Hike" (July-August 1995) and another entitled "Non-Virtual Reality" (May 1997). The theme of both essays was the same: you need to get away from it all. At least once a year, and preferably two or three times, you need a vacation.

That's still true, perhaps more now than ever. Even Modern Maturity (America's most widely distributed magazine, with more than 20 million circulation) recognizes the problem on the cover of its May-June 1999 issue: "America at work: are our jobs taking over our lives?" When a publication whose readership is (almost) entirely 50-years old or older (two-thirds retired) runs a headline like that, there's a problem.

Or, rather, there are many related problems, since nothing's ever as simple as we'd like it to be. Some people take such joy in their work that they can't imagine breaking away for any reason. Some people plow their entire waking lives into work in the hope of future rewards--plausible if you're 20-something in a startup company with stock options, but a little sad if you're my age and working in a service profession like librarianship. Unfortunately, too many people have forgotten how much you gain from a break.

Getting Away From It All

Good vacations restore your mental and physical energy. The best vacations expand your horizons as well. Ideally, you'll return to work caring more about who you are and what you do; that almost automatically means you'll work better--and it certainly means you'll have a healthier outlook.

To my mind, the best vacations last at least a week and involve getting away from it all. That probably means leaving town. It also means disconnecting: putting away your notebook computer, turning off your pager, letting your cell phone recharge. You can't go a week without e-mail and the Web? Why not? You're too important to be without a pager, even for one week a year? That's a shame. I may envy your importance, but not the chains that bind you.

Try dropping out once. Then do it again, at least once a year. I'm guessing your work will survive your absence. In the long run, you and your work will both benefit.

Trying Something New

Many of us fall into vacation ruts as well as work ruts. We go to the same place every year, doing the same activities, probably at the same time. Those aren't bad vacations--they still refresh you, particularly if you stay out of touch--but there's a lot to be said for trying something new. Maybe not every year, but at least once in a while. How long has it been since you've planned an entirely different vacation?

Can't afford it? Don't be so sure. This year, travel to many areas is much less expensive than you'd expect. That's true through much of the Pacific region, thanks to the strong American dollar and weak Asian economies. When tourist-dependent regions are missing regular visitors, they need to fill in those spots.

Have you priced a week's vacation in New Zealand, Australia, or Hawaii? You may be pleasantly surprised. If that's too rich for your blood, there must be parts of the continental United States or Canada that you've never visited. Closer to home, have you tried playing tourist in your own region for a week?

Some serious readers will say this is all too frivolous. If you're going to take a week off, you need to accomplish something. That's great. If you spend your working days getting frustrated by problem patrons or budget difficulties, what about a week getting hot and sweaty helping someone help themselves? Try building a house. Habitat for Humanity has lots of projects going on all over the place; they're always looking for volunteers. You can visit a new area, work those frustrations out of your system, help someone in need build his or her own house and discover skills you never knew you had. Or go on a Nature Conservancy trip: you'll see new places, learn and contribute to Nature Conservancy's work. Those are only two examples: there are hundreds of other ways to combine the break you need with the social good that you want.

Do I practice what I preach? Absolutely--albeit less so this year than most. For us, it will be Costa Rica later this year. We've never been there, and we're looking forward to it. Next year? Somewhere on America's heartland waterways, for sure; somewhere outside the continental US, probably.

Turning Off--Meeting Other Needs

You need long breaks at least every year (or two, at worst), vacations where you get away from it all. For many of us, another kind of break is worth exploring. This one doesn't take a week and need not cost one red cent, but it can improve your mental health and your life in general. You need to turn off and tune in: set aside technology and get in touch with yourself.

It's easy to make fun of the excesses of the 1960s, and Timothy Leary's advice may seem annoying or even dangerous. I'm not suggesting that you drop out, and I'm certainly not suggesting illegal chemicals. If you despise all mind-altering chemicals, that's your decision. I'd find it hard to give up caffeine in coffee, alcohol in wine, and aspirin when needed--but mind-altering chemicals have nothing to do with turning off and tuning in.

Turning off is just that: disconnecting from your television, your personal computer, your cell phone, even your stack of books and magazines. That sets the stage for tuning in: getting back in touch with yourself. Call it contemplation, meditation or just relaxation; whatever the name, it's free, not very time-consuming and valuable. I almost wrote "free and easy," but I suspect that's wrong. Many of us find it difficult to do nothing--to just walk or sit with no apparent purpose.

Can you do that for half an hour, once a week: sit and think--about nothing, about who you are, about almost anything except work and your daily concerns? Try it for a month: that's only two hours total out of your incredibly busy life. See if you find it helpful. If not, just call me an old hippie--I won't mind.

Why am I chattering on about vacations and meditation in a newsletter devoted to effective use of technology and media for libraries? Because it's important to keep technology and media in their places as tools and because it's important to maintain some balance in your life. The growing European readership of Library Hi Tech News may find this all insane: of course you take annual vacations, and they're a good sight longer than a week. Good for you, but don't let those vacations become simple ritual. Make the most of them--even if that means doing only half as much as you planned.

PC Values: June 1999

June's standard configuration includes 64MB SDRAM, 16x or faster CD-ROM, AGP graphics adapter with 8MB SGRAM, V.90 fax/modem or 10/100 Ethernet adapter, wavetable sound card, speakers, and a 15.6-16'' viewable display. "Pluses" and "Minuses" are shown where applicable, along with hard disk size and software. In several cases, these are worse deals than in May 1999. While that may be a sampling problem, it's part of the "defeaturing" that accompanies the price pressures in today's market. Vendors are making cheaper computers--but they're doing it by downgrading components in a number of ways. The result is that new computers sometimes represent worse value: you get less for your money.

• •

  Top, Budget: Gateway Essential 400c: Celeron-400, 4.3GB HD. Minuses: 13.9'' display. Extras: Corel WordPerfect Suite 8, Cambridge SoundWorks speakers. $999, VR 8.82 (+11% since 3/99, +28% since 12/98).

• •

  Top, Midrange: Compaq Prosignia Desktop 330/450: Pentium III-450, 13.5GB HD. Pluses: 128MB SDRAM, 16MB display SGRAM. Extras: Zip drive, MS Office SBE. $2,039, VR 6.84 (-3% since 3/99, +3% since 12/98).

• •

  Top, Power: Dell Dimension XPS T500: Pentium III-500, 20.4GB HD. Pluses: 128MB SDRAM,18'' display with 16MB display RAM, 6x DVD-ROM. Extras: 250MB Zip drive, MS Office SBE, Altec Lansing speakers with subwoofer. $2,599, VR 6.61 (+7% since 3/99, +4% since 12/98).

• •

  Other, Budget: Microworkz GameWorkz: AMD K6-2/450, 10GB HD. Minuses: 14'' display. Pluses: 128MB RAM, 16MB display RAM. $1,275, VR 9.07 (+7% since 3/99, +14% since 12/98).

• •

  Other, Midrange: Quantex QP6/450 SM-3x: Pentium III-450, 17GB HD. Pluses: 128MB SDRAM, 18'' display with 16MB display RAM, 6x DVD-ROM. Extras: Zip drive, MS Office SBE, Altec Lansing speakers with subwoofer. $1,999, VR 8.04 (+12% since 3/99, +14% since 12/98).

• •

  Other, Power: Quantex QP6/500 SM-4x SE: Pentium III-500, 20GB HD. Similar to midrange, but with CD-RW drive and Ethernet port. $2,499, VR 7.15 (+20% since 3/99, +16% since 12/98).

Perspective

Living on Internet Time?

History: dead. Economics: washed up. Print: long gone. The Internet? It's all about business--always has been, always will be. And "the Internet Economy is moving so fast it hardly even has a past--only a confusing, exhilarating future."

That's the subhead for a surprisingly interesting anniversary special in the 3 May 1999 Industry Standard consisting of several articles covering pages 48 through 68. The weekly "newsmagazine of the Internet economy" is just over a year old (it began 27 April 1998) and has itself grown much faster than anticipated. Their business plan called for 100,000 readers by year three; they now have 105,000 print "subscribers" and more than 300,000 online readers. I put subscribers in quotes because a substantial percentage of those print copies are like mine: they're freebies, provided to people like me who are (ahem) the "architects of the Internet economy."

Much of the material in this special issue makes me uncomfortable, possibly because I believe in mixed economies and that the Internet is about a lot more than business. Then again, I regard every statement in the first paragraph of the article you're reading as nonsense. Some of the material may be nonsense, but it's mostly well written and includes comments from a fair number of big names in the field. It's worth looking up. If you accept it all at face value, you're probably not one of my readers in any case. Let's look at a few notions, however.

First of all, "Internet time" is currently valued at seven years per calendar year. Oddly, most people making these observations can't see more than about 18 months back. As a result, we don't have 70+ Internet years; we have maybe 14 Internet Years. Apparently, we're not supposed to remember anything before (say) mid-1997. After all, the Internet didn't exist back then--did it?

So we get Michael Wolff, a failed publisher turned columnist, claiming that "one online bookstore will survive--one portal, one brokerage, and one ISP." Why? Because Wolff says so and because the Internet changes everything, I guess. Never mind that there is no real-world analogy. We don't have one automobile company, one brokerage, one TV network, or one physical bookstore. Apparently, Wolff feels that Web users lack sufficient attention span or brain power to deal with more than one best choice, so everything else fails: we're all getting stupid on the Internet.

Don Tapscott assures us that "kids ages 2 to 22 are the first generation to grow up digital" and this will "change every institution in society." Reed Hundt, former FCC chairman, chimes in with a number of thick-headed remarks that can be summarized as "the Web changes everything."

This all sounds rather negative and I don't intend it to be. The Industry Standard is a bit disturbing because it doesn't see the Internet as anything but a way to make money. That's sad. They also seem to see an ever-increasing rate of change, even though the numbers published make it clear that the rate of change is slowing. The Internet isn't doubling every six months any more--not even every year. The revolution? Like most "revolutions" in society, it's a bit overstated.

Does the Web change everything? Not really. Are many aspects of society influenced by the Internet? Absolutely. Can we predict the magnitude of those influences? Not a chance.

Press Watch

Pogue, D. (1999), "Differently cabled," Macworld, April, p. 53.

Don't expect snappy comments poking fun at Macintosh zealots. Pogue's "Desktop Critic" has a revealing subtitle that's entirely platform-independent: "A cable modem isn't just an expensive gadget--really, it's not."

He signed up for a cable modem recently: after all, how can you resist "100 times faster" Internet access? After getting a new cable jack installed near his desk, technicians set it up: a big external box connecting to the Mac's built-in Ethernet.

The first improvement was obvious with his first e-mail: no dialing, modem shrieking and connection dialogue. With a cable modem, you're on all the time--which, if you frequently drop on and off the Internet, can be a real time-saver.

Then there was Web surfing itself, and his nasty little surprise after gathering the family to watch the wonderful new toy: "[cable modems] don't, in fact, make Web surfing much faster." You may already know that, if you have occasion to go to the same Web pages from a 56K modem at home and T1 line at work. Most of the time, there's not much difference between the two--because most bottlenecks aren't at your end. "Instead of waiting for my Mac to receive each page, I now wait for the other end to send it."

That's not the whole truth. The other part is that, like the T1 line to your LAN at work (if you're typical), a cable modem's impressive speed is shared. If your neighbors are also on the Net, that "hundred times" may come down to much less. Pogue seems to be finding typical speed roughly twice that of a regular modem under ideal conditions--except that file downloading can be extremely quick.

He figures he's saving six minutes a day in connect/disconnect time, which pays for the cable modem service. Good enough.

P!!! Paranoia

I promise I'll never use Intel's silly "P!!!" again, but it was too good to pass up this once. If you've paid any attention to the PC press lately (including its shadow in newspapers), you'll know about the Great Pentium-III CPU ID Number Controversy.

Each Pentium-III CPU has a unique serial number, a 96-bit number hardwired into the chip. Originally, Intel planned to ship motherboards with the CPU's self-identifying feature turned on: an inquiring program could acquire the unique number. As a result of the flap, Pentium III motherboards should ship with the feature turned off--although hackers already claim that it's possible to get at the number anyway.

On one hand, the serial number makes sense. Silicon Valley has a serious problem with theft, and that theft is accompanied by remarking and overclocking--changing the marks on CPUs and reselling them as faster (and more expensive) than they've actually tested. The serial number would make it trivially easy to determine the actual approved speed for a CPU and its original owner, making this high-tech theft (which has resulted in a number of deaths) less attractive.

On the other hand, the serial number potentially identifies you when you may not want to be identified--except, of course, that it doesn't. It identifies the computer you're using, not you. I use two different computers every weekday, and I suspect many of you use three or more (work desktop, home desktop, and notebook computer).

As usual, the critics go overboard. As summarized in the April 1999 PC World, "critics say" of Intel's default "off" position that "Sites may bar users who don't turn on the number." Hmm. How many sites will bar all Pentium-II, Macintosh, Celeron, Pentium Pro, and Pentium computer users, just so they can try to identify Pentium-III users uniquely? How many years will it be before Pentium-III computers represent the majority of installed home computers? Maybe, just maybe, this is excess paranoia.

Keizer, G. (1999), "Out-of-box experience," Computer Shopper, Vol. 19 No. 4, pp. 118-19.

An interesting two-page exploration of the realities of computer buying--which, as Keizer notes, requires going through the entire process with a real purchase, not just simulating the initial steps. He decided to buy a new notebook computer just before the end of 1998--during the Christmas season, hardly the time to expect wonderful results. He decided on a midrange Dell notebook. That's not what's noteworthy.

What's noteworthy is what happened after he placed the order. That was Tuesday, 15 December. The phone rep noted that Dell doesn't guarantee delivery dates and estimated that the computer would ship eight days later, meaning that--given Christmas--he could expect to get the computer on 28 December. For a custom-built notebook computer, two weeks from order to delivery isn't bad.

The computer actually shipped out on Thursday, 17 December, two days after it was ordered. He got it on Monday, 21 December. For that matter, it was on a delivery van in his city one shipping day earlier--but since Dell hadn't paid for overnight delivery, FedEx didn't deliver it.

This is not a unique story. I ordered a Gateway desktop system on President's Day; another person at RLG ordered a Gateway notebook right around the same time. They told me that the computer should ship four working days after I ordered it. As far as I can tell, it shipped the next day: I received it Thursday after ordering it Monday. The notebook buyer had the same experience: the notebook was shipped either one or two days after it was ordered, and considerably before the estimate.

These are custom-configured systems--in my case, including software upgrades as well as hardware changes. It appears that Dell and Gateway have both become consistent miracle workers in terms of fast, accurate, cost-effective custom production. As always, your mileage may vary.

Miller, D. (1999), "Who made your notebook? Don't believe the label," PC World, Vol. 17 No. 5, pp. 54-56.

Most notebook computers aren't manufactured by the companies that sell them. PC Magazine used to make that obvious in its comprehensive roundup reviews of notebooks: machines with several different brand and model names were reviewed together because they were essentially the same machine, built by the same manufacturer.

Ever hear of Quanta? It's a Taiwan corporation that claims to be the third largest notebook maker in the world, behind Toshiba and IBM. If you buy a Dell Latitude notebook, a Gateway Solo 5150, or any Apple PowerBook, you're buying a Quanta system. On the other hand, Dell's Inspiron line is made by Compal (a slightly smaller Taiwan manufacturer)--as are all HP notebooks and quite a few others. IBM builds its own notebooks--but only some of them. Currently, the ThinkPad I series is IBM-built, but IBM's other notebooks come from Acer.

That's an old story. The new story is that some fairly large notebook vendors no longer even design their own units. They buy off-the-rack designs, which changes the actual manufacturers from "OEM" (original equipment manufacturer) to "ODM" (Original Design Manufacturer) status. ODM notebooks tend not to be cutting-edge, but they also tend to be reliable. In the most recent PC World reliability and service survey, Dell and Hewlett-Packard were rated first and second for notebook reliability. Neither company currently designs or manufactures its own notebooks.

Of the ten vendors who sell the most notebooks in the US, six design some or all of their own notebooks (Compaq some; Gateway, IBM, Apple, Acer, and Toshiba all). Only three build some or all of them (IBM, Acer, and Toshiba). Does it matter? Probably not, since vendor testing and support services may be more important than the system design. You may be able to get the "same" notebook cheaper from a lesser-known vendor--but, in practice, ODM systems usually cost about the same regardless of brand name.

Bennett, H. (1999), "CD-R/RW on the go," EMedia Professional, Vol. 12 No. 4, p. 52.

Why aren't portable CD-R/RW drives as common as CD-R/RW drives for desktop PCs? While Bennett may overstate the popularity of desktop CD writers, he makes a good case in this column. CD writers may make even more sense in portable computers: CD-R and CD-RW disks are more durable than any other high-density storage medium, CD-R discs are almost universally readable, and CD-R blanks are dirt cheap.

While portable CD-RW drives are coming on the market, they're external--for good reasons. CD writers use four to 12 times as much power as CD readers and create considerably more heat. At this point, they also don't have the same level of miniaturization as in portable CD-ROM drives. That can change if there's market demand.

Bennett wants to see internal CD-R/RW drives. We shall see.

De Lancie, P. (1999), "Building ROM in a day,"EMedia Professional, Vol. 12 No. 4, pp. 68-76.

If you're interested in creating DVD-ROMs, or in why there haven't been many yet, this excellent article may be helpful. There's little here to summarize, but a lot of useful content and notes from developers. One interesting item: because of the way the DVD specification works, in one sense all DVDs are DVD-ROMs.

The Paperless Office

The Industry Standard continues to be frequently charming and interesting as a newsweekly of "the Internet economy." One highlight is the "posts" page with snappy quotes and one particularly interesting piece of data. For 19 April 1999, the data item was headlined "This is not my paperless office."

To wit: 87 million tons of paper were consumed in "pre-Web" 1990. By 1998, the figure hit 99 million. Source: the Papercom Alliance, from the American Forest and Paper Association. (The item doesn't say whether this is specifically office paper; I would assume that it includes the growing book and magazine fields as well.)

Product Watch

Slimline PCs

If you keep your PC on a desk rather than under it, the narrow range of beige colors and boxy shapes that most PC makers offer may offend you. There have always been exceptions, and the success of the iMac may be spawning many more. The general rules in considering such PCs are straightforward: consider expandability and value.

Take Sony's PCV L600 as reviewed in the May 1999 PC World. As with many other Sony VAIO computers, it's "cast in cool shades of lavender." The computer itself is pizza-box size: 11 X 13 X 3.6'' (It's a very thick-crust pizza). The keyboard's smaller than usual (they stripped off the numeric keypad, apparently), and it comes with an LCD panel for a screen, to make the whole setup slim and trim.

It's a high-end configuration: Pentium-III/500, 128MB RAM, 10GB hard disk, 24x CD-ROM. The LCD panel is only 14.1'', equivalent to a so-called 15'' CRT--a scrawny little display for a high-end system. In the review unit, the tiny speakers in the display created "tinny sound." Sony claims it will fix that in shipping units--but there's not a whole lot they can do. Software? A modest home bundle with MS Works 4.5, Quicken, Money, and Encarta. If you want to expand the unit, there's a Type II PC Card slot--but in a case this size, you can forget adding internal drives or, probably, any expansion cards.

The system costs $2,999. If you don't mind putting your PC on the floor, Gateway will sell you a system with the same CPU and RAM, similar software, bigger (and probably faster) hard disk, DVD-ROM, excellent three-piece speaker system, and an 18''-viewable display--for $500 less. Even if you upgrade to the Trinitron display, you're getting 63% more viewable space for $300 less. Dell offers a system that's almost as expensive as the Sony (and has the same CPU and RAM)--but not only does it have an 18'' Trinitron display, DVD-ROM drive, and first-rate speaker system, it also includes a Zip drive and a 20GB hard disk. Naturally, the Dell and Gateway include lots of room for expansion.

Is the Sony a ripoff? Not if you want the slender lines and can get by with the small display. But you're paying a substantial premium for those features, and expansion possibilities will be quite limited. Those are the choices you make for high style. (To be fair, the stylish new Mac G3 boxes don't seem to involve a premium for being stylish--just the usual Mac premium pricing. But they're colorful, not slender.)

CD-ROM at 52x?

Two or three years ago, I made fun of claims for incredibly high-speed CD-ROM drives, noting that spinning a CD-ROM disk much faster than 12x would raise all sorts of problems. I stand by those early comments, particularly as applied to the "100x" drive that one notorious mail-order merchant advertised.

But, as noted here a while back, there's more than one way to supercharge CD-ROM speeds. Zen Research developed TrueX, a technology that reads multiple tracks simultaneously. If TrueX reads seven tracks at once and the disk spins at 4x speed, the resulting read rate could be as high as 28x--legitimately. (Incidentally, it's actually seven adjacent portions of one track. Just as an LP has one long groove, a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM has one long track.)

When I noted the first drive to use TrueX, I also wondered whether the introduction made much sense, given that DVD-ROM should replace CD-ROM over the next decade and most time-sensitive CD-ROM data is mastered at no more than 4x in any case. But there are applications where faster is better, and higher speeds are always bragging rights for makers and sellers. Here's the Kenwood 52X drive, which should cost around $130 and be available as a Kenwood or Hi-Val drive. It's actually a 45x to 52x drive; given TrueX technology, neither speed requires remarkable physical spin rates. I'm still not sure this is a huge market--and I'd certainly take my 4.8x DVD-ROM drive (with its tested 28x-32x CD-ROM rate) over an even faster CD-ROM drive. But if you need hyperspeed CD-ROM, it's available.

Big Handhelds with Color

PC Magazine for 25 May 1999 looks at four Windows CE devices with color displays from Casio, Compaq, Everex, and HP. These units cost $450 to $520, look a little like overgrown Palm units (typically measuring 5.2 X 3.3 X 0.8'' and weighing 9 ounces), and include 320 X 240 touch screens. No keyboards--these aren't ultraslim notebooks; they're oversized PDAs.

Editors' Choice is Casio's $500 Cassiopeia E-100, for its bright screen, color depth (it offers 16-bit color while the others use 8-bit), and stereo audio for headphones. Why would you favor one of these over a Palm? Because you're hot for multimedia, apparently: they suggest that these units could replace cassette and CD players for road warriors. Otherwise, the article suggests that you go with a 3Com Palm IIIx.

Mindmaker's Prody Parrot

Arkkh! You have a meeting! If you dislike Lotus Notes' annoying little yellow reminder box, maybe you're a candidate for Prody Parrot. It costs $100 and it does a lot more than alert you to meetings, e-mail, and the like. You can speak to it (if you use a microphone) and let it control some of your Windows interface. The parrot will fly around your screen, tell bad jokes, and grump at you if it feels ignored.

Just what you need at the reference desk.

Epson's Slick New Inkjet

Macworld for June 1999 gives four mice to Epson's $449 Stylus Color 900. While they note that it's "a bit pricey for an ink-jet printer," it's fast and offers excellent quality. If you keep resolution down to 360 X 360 dpi (or the crude 180 X 180), this printer is fast for a full-color unit (e.g., 55 seconds to print an 18MB Photoshop image or 98 seconds for a seven-page QuarkXPress document).

Epson has reduced ink drop size for higher quality (as has HP in its newest printers); photographic images range from very good to spectacular. For spectacular output, you pay two prices (with this or almost any other printer). First, photo glossy paper is brutally expensive, as much as $1 per sheet. Second, when you switch the Epson to 720 X 1440 dpi output and photo-quality settings, it slows down a lot--for example, that Photoshop page takes 10.5 minutes and the seven-page QuarkXPress document takes almost an hour to print.

This is a USB printer designed to work well with Macs, but there's nothing in the review that says it wouldn't work on a Windows system. Consumables aren't the cheapest for black printing (four cents a page at five percent coverage), but not terribly high for color (seven cents for five percent coverage).

Review Watch

Desktop Computers

Linthicum, D. (1999), "3-d power," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 10, pp. 132-55.

I'd be surprised if many readers of Crawford's Corner are considering high-end graphics workstations --but if you are, this group review may prove interesting. It covers half a dozen workstations equipped with dual 500MHz Pentium III Xeon CPUs, 256MB RAM, at least 8GB hard disk, a 20'' (viewable) display and graphics adapter with at least 31MB display RAM, and Windows NT. The systems cost $7,999 to $12,314: these are niche systems, where the display card alone may cost as much as a typical business PC.

All six systems are from well-known vendors: Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intergraph, and Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI). Except for SGI, all used the same chip set and ultra-high-speed Seagate disks. Three (Dell, IBM, Intergraph) used the same Intergraph graphics card--and failure to use that card knocked Gateway's system out of the top group. The SGI system is unusual, in that it relies on SGI's graphics chipset and memory architecture.

SGI makes big claims for its Windows NT workstations in many ads. I made fun of those ads a month or two ago, perhaps wrongly--but, in real-world tests, while the SGI system outperformed the others in real-time video editing, it lagged behind in ordinary 3D graphics applications.

Editors' Choice is the Dell Precision WorkStation 610, $7,999 with an 8.6GB disk. While the HP, IBM, and Intergraph units posted comparable numbers, the Dell was cheaper and its case offered excellent serviceability. Dell's superb support didn't hurt. Honorable mention goes to SGI's workstation for its video capabilities, but it's a nonstarter for business graphics.

Metz, C. (1999), "K6-III: AMD aims high," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 8, pp. 56-7.

How do you compete with Intel? Make a CPU that's as fast and sell it cheaper. AMD still hasn't turned this into a profitable idea, but they've taken a huge chunk of the low-end PC market away from Intel. This First Look considers two PCs with AMD's hottest CPU: the K6-III/450. The discussion of the K6-III architecture may be more interesting than the systems themselves, neither of which seems compelling in today's market.

How does the CPU measure up to the Pentium II-450, Pentium III-450, or Pentium III-500? That depends. On a pure CPU test, the three-level cache used by AMD results in a better ZD CPUmark 99 score than even the Pentium III-500. But on actual business applications, as simulated in ZD's Business Winstone 99, the AMD boxes rank behind the Pentium-III/500 and just marginally ahead of the Pentium III/450. On 3D graphics, the Pentium pulls way ahead: a Pentium II/450 scores about 30% higher than the faster of the two AMD-based PCs.

Still, for most applications the AMD offers comparable speed at a considerably lower price. That represents a challenge to Intel's core market, and it's nice to see some competition.

Digital Cameras

Jones, M. (1999), "Hot pics, cool deals," Computer Shopper, Vol. 19 No. 5, pp. 222-29.

"Megapixel" cameras keep getting cheaper. This review includes six cameras priced from $350 to $599 with minimum resolution of 1152×864 pixels. When printed out on an Epson Stylus Color 850 on Epson's Photo Quality Glossy Paper (probably $1 per sheet), "the best of these megapixel cameras generated 4×6-inch prints that looked as good to the naked eye as the shots printed by the competent photo lab we used."

The Best Buy pick in this group is Fujifilm's $460 MX-500 Digital Camera, with the best image quality and highest resolution of the group. Also noteworthy: Kodak's $449 DC210 Plus Zoom and Konica's $350 Q-M100V.

Displays

Beale, S., and Gowan, M. (1999), "Think big," Macworld, June, pp. 80-7.

Big, in this case, means so-called 21'' displays, with viewable areas between 19.6 and 20.1 inches. A table covers all 33 displays that Macworld evaluated, but you only get one line of comments about most models. A sidebar covers five "professional" displays with bundled color calibration units.

I was fascinated by the resolution advice, which appears to be Mac-specific. They say that you should set these massive displays to 1152 x 870 pixels. That's roughly 72dpi, which is the "native" resolution of the Mac. Maybe so, but I suspect a lot of people will set these displays to 1600 x 1200--and all of them appear able to handle that setting.

Editors' Choice for a new Mac is Apple's $1,499 Studio Display with ColorSync. The choice for pre-G3 Macs is Mitsubishi's $1,499 Diamond Pro 2020u.

Do those prices seem high? They are (average price for the roundup is $1,200), and the monitors continue to be massive. You can get two first-rate 16'' displays for the same money, and with Mac multiple-display support, that's not such a terrible idea. Still, for some applications, the price and size make sense. The Mitsubishi has an essentially-flat screen, as do one or two other models.

Silvius, S. (1999), "19-inch monitors: flat-out fabulous," PC World, Vol. 17 No. 5, pp. 136-48.

A good roundup of today's best 18''-viewable displays, even if (in PC World's usual fashion) you only get details on the ten they liked best. The "flat-out" line has to do with today's flatter picture tubes: the top seven displays all come with either Sony Trinitron or Mitsubishi Diamondtron tubes, both of which now offer near-total flatness and lack of glare at this size.

Dell sells displays separately as well as in systems, and their $549 UltraScan P990 gets one of two Best Buy awards in this roundup. It's a Trinitron--and, based on the picture and the specifications, it appears to be the same monitor as the Gateway VX900T, which I'm happily using to write this review. If that's true (and the control panel is distinctive, so I believe it is), you could scarcely go wrong with the Dell, and the price is excellent. The other Best Buy is Mitsubishi's $799 Diamond Pro 900u: considerably more expensive, but also a first-rate display.

Modems and Telecommunications

Beckman, M. (1999), "Modems' last stand," Macworld, May, pp. 85-90.

The lead-in is classic Macspeak for 1999: "What do records, eight-track tapes, and floppy disks have in common? All three are gadgets that served us well in their time but have disappeared from everyday use..." Well, eight-track tapes never served people well--and, oddly enough, other writers in the same issue add external diskette drives to "perfect" Macs. Diskettes may be obsolescent, but they haven't exactly "disappeared from everyday use" just yet.

Not what this story's about, to be sure. This story is about how the modem is going to disappear any day now, replaced by several faster telecom techniques. It does appear to be true that V.90 modems are the end of the line for analog modems--I'd be a bit more positive, except that 33.6K modems were supposed to be the fastest feasible. And they are, for uploading: V.90 modems only run faster than 33.6K when downloading.

The article's a lot better than the introduction, discussing three alternative telecom techniques and including test figures for each. They leave out satellite downloading (an odd omission) and their tests leave a lot to be desired (they found V.90 modems to upload slower than 33.6K modems, which doesn't make any sense at all), but it's still a worthwhile article. As you might expect, the cable modem offered the fastest download and upload speeds, which might very well not be attainable in the real world--and Web downloads via cable modem were only four times as fast as their underperforming V.90 modem, not the "hundred times" sometimes claimed.

I'd be happier with this article if it didn't have some strange little quirks. A sidebar offers tests for five current V.90 modems ranging from $120 to $150 (although three are $120 each). Unsurprisingly, the Editors' Choice is the Mac-specific Global Village TelePort 56K V.90 Mac Modem, even though it's by far the most expensive: they know Macs better than any more broadly-based company. That's fine, but then you look at the comments for each modem. 3Com's U.S. Robotics unit ($120) is slammed as being "high priced"--although it's one of the three cheapest modems in the test. Zoom Telephonics' FaxModem 56K costs $139, and gets the notation "low price." Hello?

Notebook Computers

Jones, M. (1999), "Traveling first class," Computer Shopper, Vol. 19 No. 5, pp. 188-96.

Seven early Pentium II/366 notebook computers, equipped with at least 64MB RAM, 6GB hard disk, either 2x DVD-ROM or 24x CD-ROM drive, 2MB graphics RAM, 14.1'' display and Windows 98. If you believe in "desktop replacement" as a useful concept, that's what these are: expensive (for direct-order computers), hefty (all but one over eight pounds), powerful notebooks.

Prices range from $3,099 to $3,549, with the three well-known brands (Dell, Micron, Toshiba) clustered at the top. The Best Buy award goes to Dell's $3,549 Inspiron 7000 A366LT, largely because it has a 15'' screen and fast 3D graphics. It's big and heavy and performance was only average; the speakers are muffled. Three other notebooks are marked as "noteworthy"--WinBook's relatively light XL2 366, Quantex' $3,099 I-1410 (essentially the same notebook as the Dell, but with more RAM and a slightly smaller screen), and Toshiba's Tecra 8000 as the corporate choice.

What's the portability premium here? It's impossible to configure an exact desktop equivalent: Dell doesn't sell Pentium II-366 desktops (and the Mobile Pentium II is a very different CPU). The closest comparison is probably Dell's Dimension V400: a Pentium II-400 with comparable RAM, display support, software, and hard disk space. That system comes with a CD-ROM drive rather than DVD-ROM, but includes a Zip drive: figure $140 extra (for DVD-ROM drive and hardware MPEG decoder) balanced by $100 less (for Zip drive). The desktop system, adjusted, costs $1,589: on that basis, you're paying a staggering 129% premium for portability.

Office Suites

Miller, M. (1999), "Microsoft Office 2000: should you upgrade?," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 10, pp. 101-130.

Despite the title, this is a comparative review of the three contemporary productivity suites: Microsoft Office, Corel WordPerfect Office, and Lotus SmartSuite. Unfortunately, the field has become monolithic: MS Office represents more than 90% of the market. (Easy for me to say "unfortunately"--I won't give up Word, Excel, or Access.)

The field has become strange. The newest versions from Corel and Lotus generally let you use Microsoft file formats as "native" for their programs--but the new MS Office 2000 will let you use XML/HTML as "native" formats for Office programs.

It's a good article, offering detailed notes as to the most significant advances in MS Office 2000 and how it stacks up against its competitors. Unsurprisingly, MS Office 2000 receives the Editors' Choice award. The editors recommend that individual users upgrade to MS Office 2000 Small Business Edition, which has made the standard edition redundant since SBE now includes PowerPoint and costs the same. They note that some businesses will find little need to upgrade right away, particularly if they're not ready for the Web integration features. Except for Access, MS Office 2000 uses the same file formats as MS Office 97--unless, of course, you standardize on Webcentric formats.

Comparative charts show only two areas in which Microsoft's competitors outshine Office (other than price). WordPerfect Office 2000 offers superior batch publishing tools for the Web, while Lotus SmartSuite Millennium 9.1 offers better stand-alone installation.

Printers

Karney, J. (1999), "Color network printers," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 10, pp. 172-96.

While this may still be a little rich for the average library back room, the primary conclusion of this article bears consideration. To wit, networked color printers are now fast, cheap, and reliable enough to be plausible as your only network printers. The roundup includes 15 printers in all, each printing at least eight pages per minute monochrome and four ppm color, and each with a management utility compatible with NetWare and Windows NT networking. Most of the units are color lasers; one is an LED printer; three are high-speed inkjet printers; one uses solid ink.

Both Editors' Choices are color lasers from Hewlett-Packard: the Color LaserJet 4500DN and 8500N. The $2,500 4500DN offers speed, fine software, and generally good printing. The $6,000 8500N offers higher speed and supports tabloid duplex printing. While several printers support tabloid (11×17'') printing, the HP is the only one to do duplexing.

Honorable mentions go to the QMS magicolor 2 DX ($2,200) and Tektronix Phaser 740/DP ($2,000) if you don't need tabloid output, and the Lexmark Optra Color 1200n ($6,950) if you do.

Reliability and Service

Grimes, B. (1999), "PC reliability & service," PC World, Vol. 17 No. 5, pp. 155-86.

Based on reports from 10,000 PC World readers as of December 1998, "outstanding" reliability and service is rare. Only Dell garnered this rating, and then only for home PCs. Three manufacturers rated good (or better) for work, home, and notebook computers: Dell, Gateway, and IBM. Nobody else rated good for work PCs; CyberMax, Micron, Quantex, and Sony achieved that rating for home units. Micron ranked good for notebook PCs as well. The only poor rankings (for vendors with enough responses to make the charts) were Acer and Packard Bell, both for home PCs.

The accompanying article and detailed review charts offer some worthwhile insights. Problems on arrival were less common in 1998 than in 1997. Gateway's ratings have improved, as have Quantex, while Micron and Toshiba both declined in some areas.

Removable Drives

Miastkowski, S. (1999), "Floppy killers?," PC World, Vol. 17 No. 6, pp. 143-56.

The lead paragraph bears repeating: "With apologies to Mark Twain, reports of the death of the floppy disk have been greatly exaggerated. Every year, as companies roll out new high-capacity media, the obituaries get rewritten. But the venerable 3.5-inch floppy disk lives on, like a wily old cat with more lives than good sense."

Diskettes still have their uses, at least for some of us. I use two or three diskettes each month to send machine-readable copies of proposed articles (and machine-readable source for Crawford's Corner). The size is right, I may never run out of recycled diskettes, they're fairly sturdy and cheap to mail. A single diskette will hold a complete book-length manuscript with room to spare (as long as there are no illustrations). But I could upload those manuscripts as e-mail attachments, and most people don't submit manuscripts very often. As much as I may like poking fun at Steve Jobs, maybe the iMac has it right: maybe the diskette's day is done. It's been around for a very long time: Sony announced the drive in 1982, and Apple used it for the Macintosh in 1984. So where's the replacement?

Only one "high-density" removable-media drive has sold well enough, to become a standard of sorts: Iomega's 100MB Zip drive. It should be no surprise that the fairly new USB external version of the Zip gets one of two Best Buy picks in this roundup of 13 removable-media drives. It's easy to install, cute as the devil with its translucent blue case, and Zip drives are everywhere--but it's still fairly slow, the cartridges cost a lot per megabyte, and it can't read diskettes. The review includes three SuperDisk versions that can read diskettes, but they didn't do well enough to be award-winners.

The other award comes as a shock: Castlewood's 2.2GB Orb, a $200 drive that uses $30 cartridges. That gives it the best cost per megabyte of any removable magnetic medium; it's also the fastest drive in the roundup and comes with good software. PC World doesn't seem concerned with Castlewood's unknown status, lack of a track record, or entirely proprietary, single-supplier nature of the drive and its cartridges.

There's a big piece missing from this survey; they hint at the omission but excuse it on the basis of somewhat deceptive numbers. To wit, there are no reviews of CD-R or CD-RW drives--even though, at today's prices, a rewritable CD-RW disk costs considerably less than a penny per megabyte (660MB capacity and prices between $3 and $5). Basically, you could buy 6.6GB worth of CD-RW storage for the price of one 2.2GB Orb cartridge.

Why didn't they review CD-RW drives? They say it's because "the drives are expensive--$350 to $400, compared with $79 to $350 for the devices in this roundup." Maybe, but I've seen prices in the $170 to $300 range for at least three months before this article appeared.

Utility Software

Morris, J. (1999), "The complete PC toolkit," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 9, pp. 100-204, 273-78.

This annual utility guide is a baker's dozen of comparative utility software reviews with an overall introduction discussing the state of the market in general. It's possible to get by without any utility software, but it's dangerous and foolish. This guide shows most of what's out there and offers worthwhile advice throughout. Unfortunately, they have dropped some categories (e.g., file management, where I still feel that third-party tools beat Explorer), but it's still a first-rate compendium. I might quarrel with one or two details--for example, they assert that today's applications (all?) uninstall themselves cleanly, which has not been my experience--but that's hardly surprising.

Norton SystemWorks 2.0--which includes Norton AntiVirus, Norton Utilities, CleanSweep, and some other stuff--is the Editors' Choice as a utility suite (although that doesn't show up on the contents-page summary, probably because of text-tagging problems). Norton AntiVirus 5.0 Deluxe is the choice for desktop antivirus support, while NeaTSuite is the anti-virus tool of choice for Windows NT networks. Norton Utilities is the winner among diagnostics.

If you think backing up over the Internet makes sense (which it may in some cases), Connected Online Backup is the Editors' Choice. SurfSaver is the winner among Web organizers, while ICQ is their choice for "buddy lists" (this is a utility category?). PartitionMagic 4.0 and RapiDeploy are Editors' Choices among disk utilities, WS_FTP Pro 6.0 is the FTP utility of choice, and SurfWatch@Work is their nod for corporate Web monitoring and filtering.

The second set of pages is the "home side" of the utility issue: Internet filters for use at home. Here, not surprisingly, Cyber Patrol 4.0 is the Editors' Choice.

On the Web

What are my criteria for CD-ROM point scores? What can you expect in the next two or three Crawford's Corners? Who is Walt Crawford, anyway? Check my home page: http://home.att.net/~walt.crawford. You won't find much in the way of stunning backgrounds, animations, or sound clips. You will find a table of CD-ROM evaluation criteria, maximum points for each criterion, how each is weighted, and a brief discussion of each one. There's a section that notes forthcoming appearances: the next two or three Crawford's Corner editions, columns in Database and Online, articles in American Libraries, scheduled speeches. That section also points to articles and speeches of mine that someone else has posted online.

You will also find online extras: items that don't appear here because I run out of space, essays that I don't plan to publish, early speeches or articles that might be worth looking back at, or even plain old rejects. When "CD-ROM Watch" appears here, I'll usually try to post color versions of the screen shots used.

The Details

Crawford's Corner is written by Walt Crawford, an information architect at the Research Libraries Group, Inc. Opinions herein do not reflect those of RLG or MCB University Press. Comments should be sent to wcc@notes.rlg.org CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs for review should be sent to Walt Crawford, 1631 Columbia Drive, Mountain View, CA 94040-3638; Windows 98/95 only.