Fw: Mike Elgan's Win Letter 34

["ng boon lee" <tabby11@tm.net.my>]

----- Original Message -----
From: Win Letter <winletter@list.0mm.com>
To: boon lee <boonlee@email.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 03, 1999 05:26
Subject: Mike Elgan's Win Letter 34




Mike Elgan's Win Letter 35 - Friday, April 02, 1999

'Bigger than the Melissa Virus!'

Forward to a friend!

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SINCE I LAUNCHED THE WEB VERSION of the Win Letter a
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And now, on with the show!


BARBIE GETS A LAPTOP
     Mattel and Working Woman Magazine penned an agreement
     this week for the toy maker to create what they're calling
     "Working Woman Barbie." The plastic employee doll gets a
     laptop, cell phone and - importantly - a cup of coffee. The
     doll will come with software that lets girls create Working
     Woman magazines of their own, as well as business cards
     and stationery. The whole thing gives me an idea: I think
     I'll call Mattel and propose a "Windows Magazine Barbie."
     My doll would have a mini copy of WinMag,
     a 3Com Palm V, a 500Mhz Dell Precision WorkStation 610
     running Windows 2000 and FIVE cups of coffee!


GEEK PEEK O' THE WEEK
     Samsung says they'll ship a Dick Tracy-style wrist cell phone
     poetically named the "SPH-WP10" this month. The device
     weighs just 50 grams and features voice-controlled dialing,
     an ear microphone and vibrating alert. Oh, and it also
     functions as a wristwatch.

http://samsungelectronics.com/news/cgi-bin/secnews.cgi?app=print&key=245&


HARD-TO-BELIEVE HARDWARE
     British Telecom is working on a pen that remembers what you
     write, automatically downloading it to your PC when you
     place the pen in its "inkwell" cradle. The pen uses gravity
     and the momentum of the pen itself to record your
     handwriting. Special handwriting recognition software
     transforms your scribbles into ASCII.

http://www.innovate.bt.com/showcase/smartquill/index.htm


ANTITRUST BARBEQUE
     State attorneys general may ask Microsoft to auction off
     Windows to settle the DOJ's antitrust lawsuit against the
     company, according to the Seattle Times. Another rumored
     settlement proposal is that Microsoft would be forced to make
     Windows an open-source operating system, something I
     proposed in my January Windows Magazine editorial. In
     related news, it appears that the trial - now on spring break -
     won't resume until May 10.

Seattle Times Article:
http://archives.seattletimes.com/cgi-bin/texis.mummy/web/vortex/display?stor
yID=36fe85a81&query=Microsoft

January "Open Windows" Editorial:
http://www.winmag.com/library/1999/0101/ana0001.htm


Y2K COUNTDOWN
     Gartner Group's top Y2K expert estimates that about 25% of
     millennium bug problems will happen in July of this year and
     get increasingly more frequent until the end of the year. Why?
     The reason is that many companies start their fiscal years in
     July, beginning with forecasts for the year ahead.


IS IT A BEER OR A COMPUTING PLATFORM?
     Citrix Systems, maker of MetaFrame and WinFrame systems
     software, is suing Coors because the beer company named its
     new beverage "Zima Citrix," saying customers will confuse
     the brands. (The beer is currently available only in Arizona,
     Florida and Tennessee.) In the spirit of compromise, I'm
     offering my mediation services free of charge. Here's my
     proposal: The two companies should enter into a partnership
     to cross-license and distribute each other's products under the
     meta brand "Citrix Systems and Beer." Citrix would bundle
     a case of beer with each client license, and Coors would
     maintain a sweepstakes to give away a complete Citrix
     network for anyone who can drink, say, 1,000 gallons of
     Zima Citrix. To cement the relationship and give each
     company a vested interest in maintaining it, Citrix would
     take over all IT services for Coors, outfitting it with and
     administering Citrix-based computers, and Coors would
     supply each Citrix employee with a lifetime supply of beer.
     Everybody wins, except maybe Citrix customers, who
     now get software coded by drunks.


WORLD WIDE WAR
     As NATO warplanes pound military targets in Kosovo and
     Serbian forces burn villages to the ground, a parallel virtual
     battle rages on in cyberspace:

  * NATO's web site is being hit by "denial of service" attacks,
     thousands of daily e-mail messages that have successfully
     slowed or halted access to the site.
     http://www.nato.int/

  * The NATO site and some pro-NATO sites are getting
     bombarded with Word macro viruses like "Melissa"
     coming from Yugoslavia.

  * A group called the "Beograd Hackers" have been altering
     web sites all over the world by replacing home pages with
     a "Yugoslav citizens' message to NATO World Criminals."

  * The White House web site crashed last weekend. Rumors
     circulated in Washington that it was brought down by Serbian
     hackers, though officials claim that unrelated technical
     problems are to blame.
     http://www.whitehouse.gov/

  * Just after NATO bombs began falling, the Serbian-
     controlled government closed down on March 24 an
     independent radio station called B-92 and arrested the
     station's editor-in-chief, Veran Matic. Thinking that he
     was powerless without his station, Serb officials released
     him after eight hours. Big mistake. A group of Dutch
     computer nerd volunteers is keeping the radio station
     alive on the Web using software donated by Seattle-based
     RealNetworks, Inc. Now the station's listenership is bigger
     and more influential than ever, with 24-hour-a-day
     broadcasting and print reports in both English and Serbo-
     Croatian. The site is getting hundreds of thousands of daily
     hits, and the BBC is broadcasting B-92 reports worldwide,
     including all areas of the Balkans.
     http://www.siicom.com/odrazb/

  * The British Ministry of Defense Web site is publishing
     counter-propaganda for Yugoslavians who are getting news
     only from official Serbian government sources. The site is
     reportedly getting more than 1,000 hits a day from Yugoslavia.
     As I worked on this story, I noticed that the site was down.
     It's unclear at this point whether the site crashed because of
     hackers, traffic or the proverbial unrelated technical problem.
     http://www.mod.uk/


PC PLAY-DOH
     New software from Play, Inc., gives you a big blue ball of
     clay with which you can create anything. Called Amorphium,
     the product gives you intuitive tools that empower you to
     rotate, color, shape, combine, re-light, zoom through and
     generally do anything you want to do with your blob of clay.
     Though the software just shipped this week, I've been
     playing with Amorphium for a month and I've got to
     admit: I'm hooked. If you've got a creative side and
     want to doodle in blazing, photorealistic 3-D, this is what
     you're looking for. Oh, and it's useful for serious business
     illustration, too.

http://www.play.com/products/amorphium/gallery.html


MAD ABOUT MICROSOFT
     More than 1,000 South Korean PC retailers staged a rally
     recently over the high price of Windows. The Korean price
     of 154,000 won, which is about $125, contributes to piracy
     and stunts PC sales, according to protesters. They complain
     that Microsoft spends a lot of effort (i.e., money) cracking
     down on Korean piracy without addressing its root cause:
     The high cost of Microsoft software.


UNDOCUMENTED TIP
     If you screw up your Registry - or even think you may have
     damaged it - there's still hope. Windows 98 backs up your
     registry the first time you boot each day, and keeps the five
     most recent backups. To restore from one of the backed-up
     copies, restart Windows in MS-DOS Mode, change to the
     C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND directory, type "scanreg /restore"
     (without the quotes), then choose the backup from which to
     restore. When you're finished, reboot, and Windows will
     load with the restored registry. If you'd like to increase the
     number of backup copies, find the file SCANREG.INI, open
     it in Notepad and change the MaxBackupCopies= value
     from 5 to the number of your choice.


WACKY WEB SITE O' THE WEEK
http://www.pcola.gulf.net/~irving/bunnies/index.html


WEB SITE FOR THE EASILY AMUSED
http://www.ben2.ucla.edu/~permadi/java/spaint/spaint.html


WEB SITE FOR PEOPLE WITH TIME TO BURN
     New York is a fascinating, vibrant and culturally rich city.
     Those of you who have never been here should definitely
     plan to visit. One of the least interesting aspects of Gotham
     is riding around in cabs. But if you'd like to experience that
     aspect of New York life, then here's a web site for you:
     The Taxi Cam!

http://ny-taxi.com/


WEB UTILITY O' THE MONTH
     Six or seven years ago, I wrote and distributed a document
     called "The Winternet" that gave detailed, step-by-step
     instructions for retrieving files by FTP using only e-mail.
     Remember, this is before the web when few people had
     FTP or Telnet access to the Internet. E-mail was just
     catching on, and despite the wild and wooly nature of the
     process, the Winternet was a relatively popular file. Fast
     forward to April, 1999: Just like everything else, you can
     now do this on the web. Emailfile enables you to identify
     either an FTP or HTML downloadable file, and the service
     will e-mail that file to you as an attachment. It's a great way
     to e-mail files to someone else without having to first
     download them yourself.

http://www.emailfile.com/


PROOF THAT YOU CAN FIND *ANYTHING* ON THE WEB
     Check out the FBI Freedom of Information act reading room,
     where you can find actual and recently declassified secret
     documents on:

A flying saucer found near Roswell:
http://www.fbi.gov/foipa/roswell.htm

Hitler's whereabouts after the war:
http://www.fbi.gov/foipa/hitler.htm

Lucille Ball's official registration as a communist:
http://www.fbi.gov/foipa/ball.htm

And more!:
http://www.fbi.gov/foipa/room.htm


FOLLOW-UP
  * In the last issue of the Win Letter, I reported that Microsoft
     was planning to take Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison
     up on his million-dollar challenge. Ellison offered the cash at
     his Comdex keynote to anyone who could get Microsoft SQL
     Server 7 with a 1-terabyte TPC-D database to run a query as
     fast as "100 times slower than Oracle8i." Microsoft and
     Hewlett-Packard last week not only met the challenge -
     according to, well, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard) - but
     actually beat the Oracle times by a factor of 70 and on
     under-$500,000 servers (compared with Oracle's $100
     million servers). Oracle says it doesn't count because
     Microsoft and HP didn't publish formal benchmarks.
     The Transaction Processing Performance Council may
     decide the outcome.

  * In mentioning Avid's academy award in Win Letter 34, I
     mistakenly said the company would win it for their Elastic
     Reality software. It turns out the company won an Oscar for
     Avid Film Composer digital film editing system. (Elastic
     Reality won an Academy Award two years ago.)

http://www.avid.com/products/film/film_composer/

http://www.avid.com/news/press_releases/corporate_financial/Avid_Congrats.ht
ml


  * My Win Letter 33 Cool Trivia question asked what the
     Japanese-only Microsoft Office Assistant character is. The
     correct answer was the "Office Lady." In the following
     Win Letter, I asked for screen shots so I could show her to
     you. Thanks to Brian Freeman for being first with the screen
     grabs. And here she is: The Japanese "Office Lady":

http://img.cmpnet.com/windows/people/melgan/office-lady.jpg


COOL TRIVIA WINNER
     Once again, Sharon Francisco is our Cool Trivia winner.
     Sharon was first to identify "Wyvern" as the code name for
     the version of Windows CE that supports color screens for
     the Palm-sized PC format. A Wyvern, by the way, is a two-
     legged flying dragon with a poisonous spiked tail.

http://www.winmag.com/news/1999/0101/0106c.htm


NEW COOL TRIVIA QUESTION
     The "success" of the Melissa virus (but presumably not the
     arrest today of its alleged creator) has inspired copycat
     viruses. Name three of the new Melissa like Word Macro
     viruses. Send your answer to me at mike@elgan.com; please
     type the words "COOL TRIVIA" in the subject line.


That's it for this week, folks. Have a great holiday weekend. Take care!



Mike Elgan
http://elgan.com



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