November's Ask Dr. Internet
Michael S. Hart
Questions and Answers for November, 1995
Send your questions to inte...@jg.cso.uiuc.edu.
If you just use the reply option, they do NOT usually go there.
Some VERY knowledgeable network people seem to have forgotten this.
***
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The major questions of this installment of "Ask Dr. Internet" are
0. What about PC prices?
1. Is there any more information on the 1996 Grolier's?
2. Why do my CDROM's load so slowly?
And why do they seem so out of date?
3. What about backups?
4. Can you list books and movies that take place in cyberspace,
can you add some comments about them?
***
0. What about PC prices?
COMPAQ AND ACER UP THE ANTE IN PC WARS
Compaq Computer and Acer are escalating the PC wars, slashing prices for
their entry-level systems by 25% to 50%. Compaq's new system will be
available next year for about $1,500 -- including monitor -- which is about
$500 lower than the current lowest priced model. Acer plans to introduce a
new PC next year for about $1,400, down from its lowest priced $1,700
machine, and also plans to distribute a $1,000 PC outside the U.S. "The
closer you get to $1,000, the bigger the market will be," says a senior VP
for industry research firm ARS Inc. While the machines will be cheap, they
won't be slow -- Compaq's likely will include a 100-megahertz Pentium chip,
8 megabytes of RAM and a 1-gigabyte hard drive. (Wall Street Journal 17 Nov
95 A3) From EduPage [edu...@elanor.oit.unc.edu]
1. Is there any more information on the 1996 Grolier's?
The only version out so far is for Windows.
It turns out that the problem is with the QuickTime module,
and it is not as bad with the Grolier's as with some others
we tested over the past month; we manage to recover most of
our other QuickTime programs after installing the Grolier's
but had even more trouble after installing other 2.x's.
We would suggest you install any Quicktime 2.x in a Windows
directory you make up only for testing, and to remove other
hard drives from your system before doing so. If you let a
whole install take place on a machine with several drives--
especially large drives with many files--the install should
take a long time, and delete your previous QuickTimes. The
option to not delete previous versions did not seem to help
other than to make the install shorter, and not to actually
delete the files. However, we couldn't use them, either.
2. Why do my CDROM's load so slowly?
And why do they seem so out of date?
We have heard of many instances in which the users realized
something was happening that took a lot of disk thrashing--
but nothing seemed to be happening.
Often this is the result of the CDROM attempting to play an
introductory sound clip; these not only take a long time to
play, but they also take a long time to load, sometimes the
time to load is nearly as long as the playing time.
If you don't have a sound card, or if yours is incompatible
with the drivers used by your CDROM, or if you have sounds,
but have turned them off, then you will often realize these
are very time consuming. Most modern CDROMs have some kind
of introductory sound as an effort at making it obvious the
CDROM is "multimedia." Most do NOT have a toggle to kill a
sound intro permanently, but most DO respond to a click. A
quick look at "preferences" or similar menus will tell if a
long intro can be permanently turned off.
Other reasons are the loading of a lot of subroutines. The
older versions of most usually CDROMs load more quickly; if
you only want the information, and these bells and whistles
don't seem worth the effort, you can pick up older editions
of many products for nearly nothing. A recent purchase for
one of our readers from Fry's [oh, you lucky dogs out there
in Silicon Valley] was only $80 for a 2X CDROM drive, card,
cable, drivers, and 8 CDROM titles, including that original
version of Grolier's Multimedia that loads in 6 seconds.
As for out of date, this question is usually asked by those
who have a 199x edition of some CDROM encyclopedia, almanac
or other reference material, and wonder why they can't look
up anything about 199x in it. Sometimes they are even more
annoyed because there is hardly any information from a year
earlier than the stated year.
If you buy a paper encyclopedia, it is usually laid out the
several months before publication, and a few pages are left
blank for the last events of the year. Some brands do this
only for their yearbooks, and don't really try to make this
year's edition include anything from late in last year, but
the yearbooks have to include at least those most important
events of the previous year. For example, assassination of
John F. Kennedy happened with only a week left for November
of 1963, which meant that had to go in. Interesting enough
that they also had time to take out some information he had
insisted be included in previous years, a kind of "personal
Freedom of Information Act" he was working on.
However, because "hype" [hyperbole] is being used so much--
especially by the makers of the CDROM encyclopedia, you can
already get an 199x edition during the Fall of the previous
year, which means they probably finalize the contents about
half way through the year. Thus you aren't going to get an
article about anything that happened in the last half of an
entire year, even when you look in the next year's edition.
3. What about backups?
No way to say enough about backups!!!
Recently a hard drive crashed at a major university you had
all probably heard in the new this month. I won't give ANY
clues about which department of which university it was. A
very nice multiple gigabyte tape drive was installed on the
computer, complete with a natural language command. You do
not have to know any command structure to type it.
Many famous people use this computer.
NONE of them had EVER backed up their data.
Suggestion: Make your backups automatic.
The easy way to do this is to use an extra drive. With 9+G
drives now under $1500, there is no excuse for not slapping
another drive on your system and backing up everything with
a simple line in your bootup command.
xcopy c:\*.* d:\ /m/v/s
is similar to the commands we use in our autoexec.bat file.
This simply copies modified files and verifies the copy.
/m = modified /v = verify /s = include subdirectories.
This is too simple not to do. Even if you don't have extra
drives, copying your most important files to a subdirectory
for backup copies AND to your floppy drives, is very easy.
4. A list of books and movies that take place in cyberspace.
Listed by author, in a semblance of the order most people read.
[*'s indicate at least one of our reviewers recommends it highly]
Please send in your recommendations.
Roger Zelazny
The Dream Master* [1966] [Analog, 1964]
James Tiptree, Jr., The Girl Who Was Plugged In*
William Gibson
Neuromancer* [1984]
Burning Chrome [1981-85]
Count Zero [1986]
Mona Lisa Overdrive [1988]
Virtual Light [1993]
Neal Stephenson
Snow Crash* [1992]
Diamond Age* [1995]
The Big U [1984]
Interface* [As Stephen Bury] [1994]
Mother of Storms, John Barnes [1994]
Movies
Tron [1982]
Brainstorm [1983]*
Lawnmower Man [1992]
TekWar [TV series and books by William Shatner]
[1995]
Johnny Mnemonic* [From Burning Chrome] [Omni 1981]
The Net
Virtuosity*
Hackers*
Strange Days
Goldeneye [Only really mentioned due to a prediction we made
to some of our readers. Obviously lots of movies,
tv shows, books, etc., are going to include scenes
on the Internet, we won't include these.]
Honorable Mention [Not quite really cyberspace]
The Day the Earth Stood Still [1951] [Klaatu = AI?]*
Forbidden Planet, movie, 1956 [Krell mind machine, Robbie]
Star Trek sometimes toyed with cyborgs, AI's, etc.
When Harlie Was One, David Gerrold [1972]
The Adolescence of P-1, Thomas J. Ryan [1977]
Zodiac, Neal Stephenson, 1988
Hyperion, etc., Dan Simmons, 1989
A Fire Upon the Deep, book by Vernor Vinge, 1992
[Someone mentioned "The Forbin Project" not in indexes]
***
Roger Zelazny, The Dream Master
Possibly the first story to happen in cyberspace, as a psychiatrist
uses a machine to enter the mind of his patient; a struggle of will
ensues, and after breaking away several time, the psychiatrist ends
up falling in love with his patient, and falls into the machine for
ever.
Previous issues can be retrieved from most Project Gutenberg site
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