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Information technology (IT) has been hailed as a great time and paper saver. How far is this true? Are you benefiting as much as you could from the computer on your desk or are you wasting time learning how to use complex software when it would be more cost‐effective to buy in expertise? This paper looks at what, for some, may be novel ways of using a PC and indicates areas where computer use may not be beneficial. The article is geared towards special libraries, but may have wider applications.

If you frequent computer or software stores, you must have seen them: 5ft. 10 PAKs, One Stop CD‐Shops, and other packs offering ten or more assorted CD‐ROMs for around $30. Some of these multipacks may be useful for libraries and librarians, either for back‐office or personal use or, possibly, at multimedia workstations that patrons can use. The author refers to another article that discusses the “philosophy” of these multipacks. In this article, the author goes through 42 CD‐ROMs in some detail and mentions another 20, speeding through quick comments on six multipacks.

Can you become more comfortable with your PC (and thus more productive) by playing with it? Probably—and, in any case, we all need a break now and then. Fun and games for the PC come in all varieties; the most widely reviewed programs require dozens of hours and your full concentration. Those programs aren't the topic of this column. The author writes about momentary pleasures or digital diversions: programs that can be fun on a fifteen‐minute break—although some of them, to be sure, can easily take up full days. If you have a VGA monitor and wonder where all those colors are, you'll find some answers here. If you want to sharpen your skills for a trip to Nevada—that's another kind of play, covered here as well. And if you've ever heard of the Game of Life (not the board game) or cellular automata and wonder what they're all about, read on: the answer is intriguing and can be incredibly time‐wasting. The usual notes from the literature follow, including this year's printer roundup and reviews of a remarkable number of top‐of‐the‐line 80386 computers.

This paper aims to present an evaluation of the crosstalk models developed for a shareware version of Spice.

The transmission line model is compared with π lumped circuit models by varying the number of cells. The influence of losses is also introduced, and some constraints regarding the models are examined, showing the suitability of the new Spice libraries developed by the authors. In order to validate the theoretical results some experiments were carried out.

The paper finds that Spice is a powerful engineering tool for students and technicians involved in EMC analyses.

The main aspects concerning the accuracy and integrity of the experimental data are emphasized and discussed in this paper.

Since I am also the system operator (sysop) of the Biomedical Library's WELLSPRING RBBS here at U.C. Irvine, I was glad to see Cathy Moore's article “Low‐Cost, High Quality Software” in the April 1986 issue of OCLC Micro. Both public‐domain and user‐supported software (i.e., “shareware”) have not always received the recognition they deserve.

Software is available for downloading from many Internet sources. This article lists and describes World Wide Web, FTP and Gopher sites where software is available, as well as software newsgroups that Internet e‐mail users can join.

An archive is a file containing several related files. Many Internet resources, such as freeware, shareware and trail software, are often packaged into archives for easy installation and taking. Additionally, thousands of users search for archives and download them from different sources everyday. In this paper, previous research on archive downloading is extended via proxy cache to support archive searching. Internet proxy cache servers are used to gather a significant number of Web pages, detect those that contain archive links, and then use the obtained data to search archives by description or filename. Two schemes, iterative and backtracking, are proposed to obtain Web pages with archive links. The experimental results indicate that the precision that both of the schemes can achieve is about the same; however, the backtracking scheme reduces the number of checked pages by a factor of 26. Finally, a real system was implemented to demonstrate the proposed approaches.

Somehow, without loading up on games or owning a sound card, the author has 28 CD‐ROMs at home, with more on the way. How did all these discs get there and what do they say (if anything) about the CD‐ROM marketplace? When are CD‐ROMs marvelous new publishing media, when are they essentially compact diskette replacements, and when are they wastes of good polycarbonate? The author goes through his motley collection, noting some highlights and some messy situations. After all this grumbling, the author adds notes on the personal computing literature for April through September 1994.

In the last installment of this series on network resources, we took a look at some of the services available across the Internet via remote log‐on. In this article, we will consider the vast array of resources that are available today as a result of a form of service known as the anonymous FTP server.

At our last meeting I strongly suggested that you learn some of the other things your micro workstation could do. To undertake those tasks, you need software, and we all know the high price tag of our newest form of enhanced library productivity.