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* Interesting pictures available lately from the
NEAR
mission
to Eros , and also from the repaired
Hubble. I've
always been a sucker for good space images.
PointCast said to be phasing out push technology. Some analysts
say the bandwidth-intensive PointCast service was seen as too slow. It was
also known to cause network congestions, especially on corporate networks
when too many employees subscribed to various PointCast channels.
Bob Thompson wrote on
his page Saturday:
... With the W2K rollout, Microsoft is apparently belatedly
admitting what a POS* Windows 98 is. They're also saying nasty things about
NT4. Apparently, W2K runs for 90 days without crashing, while Windows 98
crashes every two days, and Windows NT4 every five days, or something like
that. I don't know what planet they're on. ...
I would concur with Bob. NT4 has been my workhorse for a couple of years
now, and although I have over this time experienced a couple of recoverable
quirks and a few really odd situations, by and large the system runs very
stable. But MS is in a marketing mood -- they want to roll out their now
finished W2k, so it makes a perverse sense to now start bashing the earlier
products. Makes an interesting contrast to the earlier "mission critical"
stance on NT4. Then again, maybe it depends what software you run... If MS
keeps internal connectivity with Outlook and massive pst files, shared folders
and who knows what, then maybe they're right about those figures.
Speaking of W2k, I've had the release version running a while now, and what
strikes me is that it is noticeably slower than my NT4. This is on a PII/200
notebook with 64 Mb RAM. Perhaps things can be tweaked? Start-up is much
slower by a factor 3 or so, and I find it significant that the start-up has
to tell the user several times with different screens that Windows is starting.
Part of this delay may of course be due to the PnP shuffle. On the other
hand, once it's up and running, it seems very stable. The kids have played
a lot of Age of Empires II on it, and there is a glitch there that occasionally
crashes the sound system (garbled noise). When that happens in Win95 or NT4,
I need to reboot to regain sound. In W2k I was surprised to discover that
if left to its own devices, sound is eventually restored.
On the subject of sound, I followed
Chris Ward-Johnson's
tip about an MP3 CD-ripper/player called
Music Match
Jukebox.
After disabling some of its more dodgy online features, it indeed turns out
to be a useful DJ for tracks that one wants to keep on the harddisk. MMJB
recorded MP3 from several CDs (musicCD and gameCD with music tracks) at what
seemed to be x4. The features list claims "up to x12", but YMMV depending
on music type. I was using the unregistered version, which may not give full
speed. As it was, unregistered records "nearCD" quality, but with most PC
audio playback this is more than "good enough", and translates into somewhat
less than 1 Mb/minute file size. Registered, you have 128kbps MP3 as standard,
and an optional 160kbps mode, with a number of quality settings.
A good program of this type must first handle audio quality well, but it
is a distinct plus when it also is easy to use (almost automatic) and at
the same time provides a decent organizer for the tracks you collect. MMJB
does that, and a playlist is created as you record, using intelligently
configurable fields and filenaming rules. Check it out, it's worth a test
run. In v4.5 it sports "netradio" and "themes" (i.e. you select from a number
of pseudo-rack screen appearances).
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The
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