Centreline 2000 wins web award

CENTRELINE 2000 WINS "VALUE TO READER" AWARD FOR WEB SITE

We were pleased to receive an award from BizCardz, one of the US leading search sites for being the best provider of value to our readers in the computing category. Thanks to BizCardz users for your votes.

This is not the first award we've received, PC Dealer awarded us 5 stars last year and said we "tell it like it us, not like the vendors would have us believe".

MICROSOFT ADMITS "You'll need more RAM"

At the WinHec 98 conference last week Microsoft owned up and said the manufacturers should really be shipping entry level machines with 64MB RAM on-board (anybody here remember the old 0.640MB (640K) RAM maximum?).

They also officially declared that Windows 98 would be the last PC Windows release and that Windows NT will take over from all previous Windows releases.

Finally, there has been confirmation that NT 5.0 will not be shipping until at least June 1998 (my bets on November 98 personally). I suppose on the bright side at least they will have had a chance to fully test the Beta which is out now.

Meanwhile, Gartner Group have released their estimates of the code size of the various NT systems:

NT 3.51	5 million lines of code
NT 4.0	8 million lines of code
NT 5.0	31 million lines of code

OK, so we all know its going to be bigger, but the real concern here is that the bug rates rise exponentially to the size of the code.

And for the poor souls who support it in the real world it also makes it significantly harder to find out and understand what's going on inside the "black box".

FIRST MICROSOFT ACCESS VIRUS WARNING

Although its been known to virus writers and anti-virus companies alike that MS-Access could be attacked no-one had done so, until now.

A97M/AccessIV.A is a new virus, which fortunately is not destructive, but does replicate itself into any other Access databases on your system.

Our prediction is that the regular anti-virus companies won't be talking about this one much. Why? Because none of them have a product which solves the problem.

Now, granted this virus may not actually travel far, after all people tend not to email Access databases around in the same way as they do documents.

On the other, viruses of this type that did attack your database could be phenomenally destructive and damaging to your business.

ECCO PRO NO LONGER SUPPORTED

Ecco Pro is a widely used PIM (personal information manager) which has gained many plaudits over the years, but sadly the pressure from "free" products like Outlook has forced Netmanage, the authors of Ecco Pro, to drop support for the product.

Sad really, Ecco Pro was never my favourite, but I know many who swear by it and they will mourn its passing. Unfortunately, Outlook doesn't do everything that a really good PIM can. But it does enough to cut out the profit from the market.

It is one of those daft positions where Microsoft gains no benefit (its a free product after all), but the consumer loses out as competitors drop out of the running.

Maybe someone will explain to me the rationale behind Microsoft giving away free products in areas which are not vital to its core business? I can understand them trying to kill off Netscape, but why PIM's, or for that matter faxing solutions, time managers, graphics packages and a whole bunch more.

It seems to me that there is no inherent value of these functions to Microsoft, nor that they will ever be able to charge money for them. I can't see someone purchasing an operating system on the basis of it does, or does not, include a PIM.

Answers on a postcard....

IBM RESEARCHES BLINDNESS WITH LASERS

I loved this report from a review of IBM's research labs of a sign posted in their optical lab

"Please do not look into laser with remaining eye"