Banasonic has launched a gadget to display three-dimensional things on a video screen. It is good for displaying small items of medical apparatus, electronic gadgets, tools or any product at all to large audiences. It has the advantage over displaying photographic images of an item because you can move your product around during your presentation.
You can swing the unit’s cameras around to take images off the wall. ($6399 02 9867569).
The information super-highway is like the Holy Roman Empire, which was described as not being an empire, hardly at all Roman and certainly not holy.
Critics of the phrase to date have objected to the “”super” and “”highway” elements of the phrase. They have argued that linking electronically to various databases is extremely difficult. Modems, arcane codes and sheer cost defy the patience, intelligence and pocket of most of us.
But the “”information” element of the phrase is also a misnomer.
Only a tiny percentage of the CDs or bits and pieces on bulletin boards is “”information”. Much of it is garbage and games.
A recent press release hailing a new CD ROM series illustrates my point.
The series is called “”Inner Alchemy”.
“”Each “Inner Alchemy’ title will be based upon the work of a respected best-selling author specialising in personal development,” the release said.
And the first will be “”Creating Health”.
Needless to say it comes from California in the United States where they find personal improvement so necessary, never-ending and never achieved.
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But to be fair to the CD market. There are some gems in the trash. Beethoven’s Ninth and Mozart are on CD ROM with the music and lots of goodies about the composers. So is the National Portrait Gallery (the Tate) previewed elsewhere on these pages. And our own National Museum of Australia is working on one. The trouble with that one is that like TV, CDs whet the appetite for the real thing, which may become a little difficult for the unbuilt museum. Then again it might be part of the plot.
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The marvels of CompuServe will be unravelled by the ACT PC Users at it monthly meeting on June 27 Manning Clark Complex Theatre ANU 7.30pm. (For more info 2396511.) CompuServe has several million members worldwide and gives you access to oodles of news services and more specialist medical and legal journals via modem and a local call.
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Computers in the home get out-dated before they get worn out. Keyboards, monitors and the plastic and metal shell do not get the thrashing they get in offices.
However, modern software does not work well on a 386 let alone the old 286s and it is ever more hungry with the hard disk.
Many people are trading them in, or handing them down to the kids.
Some are upgrading by taking them in to the computer shop for a new hard disk or a 486 motherboard or perhaps a CD ROM drive and so on.
Now you can do it yourself. A company called Reveal is marketing upgrade kits in computer stores, claiming all you need is a screwdriver.
They range from various capacity hard drives, tape backups, CD ROM, multimedia, speakers, keyboards and scanners.
They have a help line if you get stuck.
It is true that a lot of computers are more like commodities than products these days. The various bits from separate manufacturers are clipped together in a box and there is no reason why ordinary mortals cannot unclip bits and replace them.
But before fools rush in where angels fear to tread, get prices of the do-it-yourself kit, several computer store prices, and the price of a total trade in. Weigh up the costs with the risk. Look at the classifieds for the value of old computers and old bits (386 boards are still saleable at $50 or $60 through the classifieds).
But there is no reason to replace a whole computer just because a couple of bits need upgrading.
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Dataflow has launched Kid Pix 2 (DOS, Windows and Mac $89.95). It has drawing, painting and language tools and runs on a 286 with only 2mb of RAM (or for DOS 640k). Wouldn’t it be nice if the producers of business software could be so economical, producing cheap software that runs on low-grade computers? Business software companies will take whatever the market will bear and will happily borrow chunks of code from previous versions without condensing them so users lose slabs of hard-disk space and require large amounts of RAM.
Programmers of children’s software know two things: children usually do not have expensive computers nor big budgets for software, so they write and price accordingly.
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Software by mail has launched some translation software at $149 each for French, Spanish, German and Italian into English and vice-versa. (1-800-809-546). But cultural traps in translations are legendary. Presumably the software is for people reasonably fluent in both languages. The software gets down a basic translation which does not have to be keyed or thought about from scratch, but can be modified as you go.
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A puzzling program called Windows UnInstaller is available to clean up hard disks made messy by the loading an unloading of applications.
Most Windows applications add to system files and add files to Windows directories. When you remove the application many of those bits stay on disk, taking up valuable disk space.
The only trouble is that the program takes up 3Mb of hard disk itself, so it seems a little self-defeating. Moreover, it costs $199 (on special at $99 from Software Suppliers 02 888 1955, but shop around, especially locally first), which is some way to a hard-disk expansion. Only of use on a large site with lots of PCs