**** JULY 2000 *********************************** ISSUE #218 ****
VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY, ST. AUGUSTINE CENTER
MEETING STARTS - 09:30 - JUL 8 th
Time to Upgrade???
As has been our recent custom, we will start with a round-the-table for news/info items, then a second round for problems that do NOT relate to upgrading of your system.
Next, we will turn things over to our Linux guru, Pete Whinnery. Pete has been unable to make recent meetings, but he'll be here this time to go over the new Corel Linux cum Word Perfect combo - a new industry trend?
And finally, we'll tackle the question of upgrading vs. buying new. It is a perennial question that has no universal answer. However, with all the new stuff out there, the options are numerous. Here's a chance to jog your thinking.
MAIN LINE AMIGA USERS - John's Place
Though our June agenda was virtually non-existent, we were able to come up with a few subjects for discussion. I refer you to the meeting summary details below to learn more.
For July we do have a couple of specifics. First Bill Bacon would like to get the Power PC version of Linux installed on his A3000. So, we will be doing our second installation of Linux in about 3 months. It will be interesting to observe if there are any significant differences between the PPC installation and the M68K installation process. Second, we have the Amiga Y2K Bounce Back Video for viewing. This video is about an hour long and features a cameo appearance by Dick Van Dyke, a 7 year
[continued]
This last month brought a couple of instances of nostalgia material. For the
one, see the item later in this issue on "museum". For the other, Charles
Curran was in a Stp and Save software store and came across a copy of the
spreadsheet "SwiftCalc PC" - for a mere $3! Some of us are still using the
predecessor - SwiftCalc 128 (or even SwiftCalc 64??) by TimeWorks. These folks
stopped developing the C= software and moved on to the burgeoning PC field; so
it was interesting to see what they had wrought. Unfortunately, they did NOT
provide for converting the C= files - darn!!! We'll have it in July.
########################################
The following is a news item that I thought would be of interest to our
members:
MATTEL Interactive announced that it would no longer be using its "Brodcast"
utility that has been included in many of their popular children's software.
These are programs like "Reader Rabbit", "Arthur" and "Little Bear".
Brodcast runs in the background and transmit information, when the user goes
online, about what that user of their program is doing or has done. This has
all been done without the knowledge of any purchaser or user of their programs,
and without any public notice that they were using such a "marketing" tool.
They did not discontinue the use out of conscience - but for fear that they
will violate a recent Federal law that prohibits gathering information from
children 13 and under without the express permission of parents. Obviously,
the target audience for the software involved is smack within the Federal
prohibition!
This is a very clear example of the kinds of intrusions on privacy that are
becoming more and more common with any use of the internet.
Hopefully, tools will be made available to computer users that will let them
know when background applications are doing just this sort of thing. If any
member is aware of some such utility, we would appreciate hearing about it.
In lieu of such an aid, our club is a good forum for folks to pass on info
about systems like the Mattel Brodcast.
At our July meeting, perhaps we can chew this one over a bit - plus any other
internet privacy/security issues???
DEAR ABBY - is NOT the place that you expect to get deep insight into the
computer world, right? But, the April 1st (no fooling!) column commented on
the ephemeral nature of color documents. Both color printing - on your home
computer - and color prints from your film camera have limited lifetimes.
Much of the color printing we all do is particularly limited and inferior to
photographic prints. So, if you have color images that you really want or need
to preserve, it will take careful measures on your part to make that happen!
Color images - stored as computer files - have POTENTIALLY infinite lifetime.
But, between here and infinity is a big gap. To take advantage of the
potential in computer images, you need to KEEP in place: 1) the files on a
durable medium, 2) hardware that can access that file, 3) software that can
control the drive and 4) software that can convert the image file to a viewable
document. With all these elements needing to be maintained, computer images
may be just the opposite of infinite - namely, ephemeral!!! Think about it!
WinTip (for Win9x): Find Missing Windows
Has a folder or program window mysteriously moved off your screen? It can
happen for several reasons - the most common is that you've recently changed
your video resolution. Right-click on the taskbar, select either the Cascade
Windows or Tile Windows (Horizontally or Vertically) option, and the window
will magically appear (you may need to resize your windows).
This last month, we learned that Prof. Maloney - our VU sponsor - is planning a
display of devices that represent some of the early days of personal computing.
We do not have details yet; but we do know that it is based primarily on the
6502 CPU - that powered early single board computers, as well as the Apple,
Atari and Commodore personal computers.
Frank told me that he has got his hands on a KIM, a SYM, an OSI and will be
getting an AIM-65. This could be real interesting; so we'll keep folks posted
as the idea develops.
If you have any early stuff hanging around, you may be able to help Frank in
the endeavour. So, you might want to inventory such devices in your home for a
possible future home in his!
Help for You
[submitted by Marty Caulfield]
I saw the following article in the June 11, 2000 issue of the Sunday Inquirer
in the Financial Section. It was written by Reid Goldsborough and I thought
perhaps it might be worth including in the Newsletter.
"Learn more about the Web by searching these Web Sites"
We Live in the Age of Information, with knowledge exploding exponentially.
You need information to gain knowledge, and knowledge to gain wisdom. In
practical terms, as the noted economist Peter F. Drucker has written,
knowledge, more than technology, is key in giving individuals and companies a
competive edge.
If you're like me, though, your head often spins from the thought of how much
you don't know. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing. As the English
statesman Benjamin Disraeli said 150 years ago: "To be conscious that you are
ignorant is a great step to knowledge."
Information technology, particularly the Internet, can help you gain knowledge.
But first, you need to know how to use it. And even if you know the basics, if
you're not using the Internet to its full potential, you're likely missing out.
One of the things the Net has always done exceedingly well is help you learn
about itself. The following is a roundup of some of the best Web sites today
aimed at teaching you the ins and outs of Internet technology.
Unless indicated otherwise, all are free.
CNET Help.com, at: www.help.com, is a huge repository of well-organized tips
and tutorials about not only the Internet, but hardware, software, games and
consumer electronics. You can browse the categories or do a search. Business
and consumer topics, beginning as well as advanced, are covered. The site is
unequaled in quantity and quality of information provided.
The site also includes relevant discussion from Usenet newsgroups, and lets you
post your own questions right from the site. If you're not satisfied with the
answers, you can peruse a topic specific list of free and paid tech-support
services.
Webmonkey, at: hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/guides, isn't extensive in scope,
but it won't be overwhelming for beginners.
It links technical terms to a glossary and walks you through specific
procedures, such as using the Net to plan a trip, buy a car or home, find a
job, and manage your money.
Learn the Net, at: www.learnthenet.com/english, includes a wealth of basis
information about business topics such as e-commerce, along with more general
topics such as e-mail, Web surfing and multimedia. The site provides versions
in Spanish, French, Italian, and Dutch as well as English.
Yahoo How-To:A Tutorial for Web Surfers, at: howto.yahoo.com, does a good job
of covering the basics with easy-to-follow instructions.
Unfortunately, when explaining a subject such as chat services, Yahoo How-To
often lists Yahoo's own offerings first or even exclusively, which detracts
from the site's objectivity and usefulness.
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
FOR SALE: the club has an increasingly large inventory of Commodore stuff -
software, computers, disk drives, monitors, printers, etc. We have recently
been getting a number of sales via the info posted on the MLCUG web page. But,
those sales have just scratched the surface of ouinventory!
So, if you are in need of replacements or augmentation, please contact Charles
Curran (610-446-5239 or ccurran@icdc.com) - he has most of the stuff and the
prices are VERY reasonable!!!
******************************
We again started the June meeting with an intended hour of round-the-table
announcements, followed by Q&A (i.e. problems being solved???)! However, the
interest in the discussions was so high that the small group in attendance sort
of forgot the clock. Hopefully, that's a good sign...
So, the planned program - to check out websites of interest to folks - and that
might be of interest to others - got pretty truncated. In actuality, during
the discussion time, we jumped onto the net quite a few times to deal with
questions or check out something that was mentioned. Having the continuous
availability of the internet via the VU ethernet link makes it easy - almost
"natural" to check something net-wise just at the mention.
For future meetings, we hope that attendees will call especially interesting -
or useful websites to our attention. Should they prove generally worthwhile,
we can flag them out here for the members who do not make the meetings. Even
at our best attendance levels, we still only get about half the paid up members
making either this session or John's parallel Amiga SIG. So, that leaves half
or more of the folks who depend primarily on the newsletter (which we hope they
read in great detail
---------------------------
Following the general discussion at the meeting and prior to checking out some
websites, we had a short demo of the WinVICE Commodore emulation software.
Running the C-64 mode emulator - on the club PC - we gave a quick showing of
the rather special planetarium program called "SKY TRAVEL". This program was
written in the early '80s for the then rather new Commodore 64 with its then
industry-leading graphics. Considering all the features of the program, it is
still quite amazing what got crammed into 64K of memory - with enough space
left over to actually do calculations. The user interface is a bit cumbersome,
but the emulator runs the software at a good clip - around twice as fast as a
stock 64 (tho only around a fifth the speed of a 64 with the SuperCPU from
CMD). Having a disk image of Sky Travel on the hard drive makes for fast
loading - a real deficiency of the original and to some extent of the SuperCPU
system, which can only speed up disk operations a few X, while speeding up
computations by as much as 20X.
Some folks may remember that there are some hidden features in Sky Travel.
Mayhap we can take a look in upcoming meetings - what say?
We also ran the emulator in Commodore 128 80-column mode and did a quicky on
the spreadsheet program - SWIFTCALC 128. Again the program ran nicely at about
twice the speed of a stock C-128. This compares to a SuperCPU 128 with around
10X improvement. The main deficiency here is the fact that printing of your
spreadsheets can not be done directly. You have to have the emulated program
print to a file - then print that file from some other app. Maybe one of these
days, the emulator folks will deal properly with printing!
I am told that another weakness of the emulator(s) is with terminal programs
and the (in)ability to use a modem properly. Have not looked at that yet,
personally; but hope to in the not-too-distant future...
We'll take some more looks at future meetings.
NOTE: attendees are asked to nominate their favorite Commodore app(s) for a
look-see emulation at those meetings. Yawl let us know - right???
"Three things are certain: death, taxes and lost data. Guess which has
occurred?"
Though our June agenda was virtually non-existent, we were able to
come up with a few subjects for discussion. I refer you to the
meeting summary details below to learn more.
For July we do have a couple of specifics. First Bill Bacon would
like to get the Power PC version of Linux installed on his A3000.
So, we will be doing our second installation of Linux in about 3
months. It will be interesting to observe if there are any
significant differences between the PPC installation and the M68K
installation process. Second, we have the Amiga Y2K Bounce Back
Video for viewing. This video is about an hour long and features a
cameo appearance by Dick Van Dyke, a 7 year veteran of the Amiga and
avid computer user with 2 Amigas and 2 of those "other" computers.
SUMMER AMIGA SIG MEETINGS
As you probably know by now, the Amiga SIG will no longer meet
regularly at Villanova University. Instead we will continue to meet
at 2210 Lantern Lane in Lafayette Hill. We will also be trying to
start our meetings a half hour earlier at 9:00AM instead of 9:30AM.
So, please note the change of starting time.
During our last meeting we discussed our summer schedule. Since the
SIG is so small it is important that members keep each other informed
of their vacation schedules. I don't want to schedule a meeting that
has no attendees. As it is right now, non of the attendees at the
last meeting have a vacation conflict with the summer schedule. I
ask that members keep the SIG leader informed if there is a change
which would cause a conflict. Thank you.
TED DEAN EMAIL
Members wishing to stay in contact with Ted by email can reach him at:
HELP FOR CASELLA'S VIDEO AMIGA
During the week before Memorial Day, I received a call to our
computer club for help at Casella's Video in south Philadelphia.
They have an Amiga 2000 running OS2.04 which they use maybe a dozen
times per year to add titles to wedding videos. They bought their
Amiga used several years ago from another Amiga user.
They use a program called BROADCAST TITLER 2 to add the titling. The
problem is that they launch this program from floppy because it
doesn't run from the hard drive like it should. Casella's had
damaged their only floppy and the program would obviously not run.
Luckily, the bulk of the floppy was salvageable except for the main
program, but there was a copy on their hard drive.
To make the story short, I was able to reconstruct the BT2 floppy. I
spent about 3 hours at Casella's Video tuning up their system,
installing an old version of DOpus, and removing dead and redundant
files from their hard drive. I left them with 2 working copies of
BT2 and received a copy in return for the favor.
At our meeting, I did a brief demonstration of this somewhat archaic
and no longer available program. Members who desire their own copy
of this program should contact me.
OS3.5 MAILING LIST
Interested Amiga users can join the Amiga OS3.5 Support Email List at:
http://www.amiga.com/3.5/support.shtml
In return, you will be in the thick of what is mostly really a bug
report mailing list, and receive about 30 emails a day. On occasion
you will be rewarded with a work-around for a bug.
A hint of bug fixes for OS3.5 and the bugs in the BOING BAG 1 update
was made today by a representative of Haage & Partner. Here is
the content of that mailing list message.
From: "Martin Steigerwald" <m.steigerwald@haage-partner.com>
Hi!
I want to repeat that there have never been an official announcement
for Boing Bag 2. There have not been any promises. We thought we
would have been able to release the Boing Bag 2 sooner, but we also
had to get out AmigaWriter 2 and ArtEffect 4. And as the latter are
more likely to get us earning some money it had a higher priority for
this time. H&P employees also have to live from something.
Also this is not yet an official announcement. We are working on what
we can release as Boing Bag 2. Quite some work has been done already.
Many annoying and even more quite harmless bugs have been removed,
for example the nasty Workbench menu freeze when media inserted bug.
There has been quite some work done on the AmigaOS ROM Update by
Heinz Wrobel, who did some enhancements on FastFilesystem and there
is now also a console.device patched in containing some fixed and
faster text output on graphic cards. An update for AmigaMail and
ReAction classes will enter the betatest quite soon.
But there still needs some stuff to be done before it all together
can be released as something worth being called Boing Bag 2. Please
have some more patience and understand that we are not able to put 20
full-time developers behind AmigaOS current to get things done
quicker.
--
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN OS3.1 & 3.5
Though not covered in detail at the meeting, I believe I did mention
that OS3.1 can be enhanced with bits and pieces of OS3.5 and the
Boing Bag 1 update without a complete installation. Here are some of
the files worth installing. NOTE: A fair number of the files come
from the free 3.6MB Boing Bag 1 download at:
http://www.amiga.de/amigaos35/download/boingbag1.lzx
FUTURE MEETINGS
If you have either software or hardware for your Amiga that has taken
your fancy, please bring it to our attention. I'm sure your specific
interests will be of interest to others. Let me know if this is the
case at the next meeting, or leave me email on our BBS. Remember, a
user group is only as rewarding as the sum of the efforts of its
individual members.
Meetings are in the St. Augustine Center at Villanova University. The 8-bit
and PC sessions will be in Room 110 (Amigans at John Deker's house).
[Map goes here]
Enter from the ITHAN AVENUE main gate, then proceed to the 2-level parking
building adjacent to St. Augustine, on the Ithan Avenue side.
NOTE: maps on our webpage - http://astro4.ast.vill.edu/mlcug/
----------------------------------------------------------
64/128/PC/Amiga Meetings 2000 Steering Committee Meetings
July 8 July 19
August 12 August 16
September 9 September 20
* = first Saturday ** = second Wednesday
**********************************************************
EDITOR: Emil J. Volcheck, Jr. 1046 General Allen Lane West Chester, PA
19382-8030
(Produced with C-128D/SCPU 128, RAMlink, HD-40/85, 1571, FD-4000, THE WRITE
STUFF 128, XETEC Super Grafix, Canon BJ-200ex, Swiftlink and Motorola 288
modem)
MLCUG BBS: 610-828-1359 ( 300 --> 33600 bps ), 24 hr/day
WWW: http://astro4.ast.vill.edu/mlcug/
PUBLICITY: Robyn Josephs 610-565-4058
DISK ORDERS: Charlie Curran 610-446-5239
VILLANOVA SPONSOR: Prof. Frank Maloney, Dept. of Astronomy
MLCUG STEERING COMMITTEE:
PRESIDENT: Emil Volcheck 610-388-1581 SECRETARY: Charles Curran 610-
446-5239
TREAS/MEMBERS: Dewitt Stewart 610-623-5145 SYSOP/AMIGA SIG: John Deker 610-
828-7897
INTERNET/Linux:Peter Whinnery 610-284-5234 DATABASE: Layton Fireng 610-
688-2080
AT LARGE: Tom Johnson 610-525-3440 AT LARGE: John Murphy 610-
935-4398
NOSTALGIA KICK?
ANNOUNCEMENTS & COMMENTS
########################################
WIN TIP OF THE MONTH
THE 6502 MUSEUM
#@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ How about an aid for your faithful @
@ editor? In the form of an article @
@ for YOUR newsletter? It can be a @
@ short or long one - in one or many @
@ parts. It can be a tip, review or @
@ harangue (polite, of course) on the @
@ software, hardware or technology of @
@ your interest and choice. @
@ @
@ You can get it to me by snail mail, @
@ on a floppy or zip - by email to @
@ emilv@ccil.org - by email on the @
@ MLCUG BBS (in the message body or @
@ as an attached file - it can take a @
@ file of ANY kind). @
@ @
@ With that much latitude, I'm sure @
@ that every MLCUG member surely has @
@ an item of value to pass on to the @
@ rest of us. How about it????? @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
$ TRADING POST $
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
LAST MONTH'S PC/128/64 MEETING
******************************
EMULATION
MAIN LINE AMIGA USER HAPPENINGS
by John Deker
======================================
_ __ _ <>_ __ _
/\\ |\ /|| || / ` /\\
/__\\ | \ / || || || ___ /__\\
/ \\_| \/ ||_||_ \__//_/ \\_
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MEETING REVIEW...
& BROADCAST TITLER 2
____________________
To: os35list@amiga.com
Subject: AOS35: Boing Bag 2 status report - There is NO release date
yet and set-in-stone announcement!
Date: 27 Jun 2000 22:01:34 GMT
Unless otherwise stated, my posts represent my personal opinions and
not necessarily those of my employer.
____________________
FILES WORTH A GRAB VER LOCATION
------------------ ----- --------
CPU 44.3 BB1
DiskCopy 44.5 BB1
FastFileSystem 45.1 OS3.5 CD
Info 39.18 Aminet
List 43.2 BB1
ShowConfig 44.7 BB1
These files offer improved hardware support for newer CPU's, bigger
hard drives and partitions, and better identification of expansion
boards and devices. I recommend that you backup your existing files
before replacing them with the ones listed above. Do this just in
case the newer files don't work on your system. In which case you'll
need to restore the originals.
DIRECTIONS FOR ST. AUGUSTINE CENTER MEETING ROOM