The Hitchhikers Guide To OS/2


About The Guide  


Here and Now


SoftViews


TechnoWatch


OS/2 Tips 


Trivia Question 


DESKTOP CONTEST!!!


How to Submit

About The Guide


The Hitchhikers Guide To OS/2

     Issue #3 
     
      Published On 3/25/94  

         This guide is meant to give a concise report on current
OS/2 events.  Any and all contents are solely my opinion.  If you
don't agree with them run around the net and delete every copy
you can find.  Otherwise sue me, but all I have is a 2400 baud
modem and a bunch of credit card bills.  Anyone is welcome to the
latter :).  Read on and I hope you enjoy another issue of the
HitchHiker's Guide To OS/2.

       Any Comments Regarding The Guide or monetary donations can 
be directed to:

sdudas@austin.onu.edu

Steve Dudas.

       Special Thanks go to Dr. V. Phaniraj for letting me know
that wp2ipf/2 exists.  
       In you haven't guessed that is what this is done with. 
Thanks to Kim Kruse Hansen for the great job he has done with
this application.

       Copies of the HHGOS2 will be available for anonymous ftp
from ftp-os2.cdrom.com.  
look in /pub/incoming/hhgos2_#.zip 
every other Saturday for a new release or look in
/pub/os2/2_x/info/newsltr/hhgos2_#.zip  For back issues.
The .zip file will contain both a .txt and the .inf version of
the HHGOS2.
 Here and Now

The Hitchhikers Guide To OS/2

      Topic #1 More on The CSD.

      More small problems seem to be cropping up from what I
hear.  One magazine reported that users of ET4000 video cards
could not run their cards in anything but standard VGA mode. 
Shhh don't tell my ET4000 card, or it may slip out of
800x600x256. 
      Overall though, I have heard nothing that would stop any
sane person from installing it.  The speed increases still
outweigh any minor bugs that have cropped up. 

      Topic #2 More on Chicago 

          (What can I say it gets better all the time)

      Well the Chicago release was bumped up to "definitely" this
year.  But of course as they said last week "We won't release it
until it's ready"  If that were the case MS would be on DOS 3.1. 
The prior version being .95 of course.  
      MS also announced that the "slimmed down" version of NT,
code named "Daytona" has been delayed to the 3rd Quarter of this
year.  Supposedly this version will run in 12 megs.  It seems
that MS doesn't have any clue what they are doing here.  NT
should NOT be slimmed, its a server OS and from what I have seen
a damn good one.  It shouldn't have any Dos or W31 support.  It
should be the ultimate server OS.  It should make connecting any
computer, running any environment, to an NT server as easy as
installing OS/2!  
      As a server OS, MS should NOT worry about resources it may
use.  Servers these days should have 16 megs RAM, and a gig drive
standard. It's still fun to see MS screw things up, so Mr. Gates,
Keep up the good work!
    
      Topic #3 Stac Vs. MS

      Well Stac won the big decision, and even countless appeals 
won't affect this decision much.  Stac wins $120 million, MS wins
$13.6 million, and MS must re-release DOS 6.2 without the
Doublespace code.
      IBM however continues to ship PC-DOS, which has on the fly
compression.  Seems that someone at IBM actually got Stac's
permission before they used Stac's code.


      Topic #4 OS/2 SMP

      It's due out at the April Comdex, but I have looked into
buying a SMP and no luck.  They just don't sell them in the main
channels yet.   But that may soon be changing,  Intel is
apparently working on a set of SMP standards.  Hopefully they
will not botch this like PCI.  Wonder if the SMP boards will only
run at 33Mhz like PCI?....   

      Topic #5  Gateway P5 Owners Listen UP!

      There is a motherboard defect, courtesy of Intel. This also
applies to those who own a Dell Dimension X P560.  The bug lies
in your serial controller and is known to cause a lockup in
Win3.11.  They have built a new serial.386 that flushes the
buffers, which seems to fix it.  If I owned one I would be on the
phone and have a new chip and or motherboard on the way.  I
haven't heard anything about its effects on OS/2, but mail me
your experiences and I'll put your comments in the next issue.

SoftViews


The Hitchhikers Guide To OS/2

This issues review goes to PM DCopy.

      This app is small but very handy, it basically rawreads or
rawrites a disk onto or from an image file.  Its pretty fast and
fully multi-threaded.  Thus you won't even notice it while it
works its magic.  The version I tested was 1.5, and the program
was produced by Jason R. Shannon.  The format it reads disks into
is not a standard, but then again is there a standard for disk
images?  No matter, I find it most useful for making a quick copy
of an entire disk that I won't need for awhile.  Its great just
to let the image sit on the hardisk till you get around to using
it. 
     


TechnoWatch

The Hitchhikers Guide To OS/2

       Intel has announced that a 90 and a 100Mhz version of the
Pentium are being released.  They seem to have already made their
way into the direct channel.  It's a nice try but I wonder if
they will be able to run them to 135Mhz. 135Mhz being the top
clock speed that you can buy a PowerPC for this summer. :*) 
Motorola has announced 100Mhz and 135Mhz versions to be released
this summer.
OS/2 Tips

The Hitchhikers Guide To OS/2

         
              Adding a Program Choice to the Pop-Up Menu

                         By: Juhoon Ahn 

        If you want another method of accessing a program,  you
can add the program as a new menu choice on the pop-up menu of
any folder.  For example, the desktop pop-up menu can be enhanced
to add the "Reversi" item.

        To add a program to a pop-up menu:
        1. point to an empty area on the desktop.
        2. Click mouse button 2. [Right button]
        3. Select the arrow to the right of Open.
        4. Select Settings.
        5. Select the Menu tab.
        6. Point to a program object (for example, the Reversi
           object in the Games folder.)
        7. Press and hold mouse button 2.
        8. Drag the program object to the Actions on Menu list
           box.
        9. Release mouse button 2.
       10. Point to the title-bar icon.
       11. Double-click.

        The next time you display the desktop folder pop-up menu,
"Reversi" will be one of the available menu choices. If you
select this choice, the Reversi game is displayed.
        Note [not mine]: When you open a program object from the
pop-up menu of a folder object, the name of the object is passed
to the program object. This may cause an error when the object is
opened. To avoid errors, display the pop-up menu for the program
object, select the arrow to the right of Open, and then select
Settings.  Type % in the Parameters field."
       Well, now it's clear, right?!  Actually "%" sometimes does
need.  Since it's of "Object," when I delete or make any change
to the object settings, it is not updated. In order to the
changes to be updated, you need to do "Drag-n-Drop" steps.  If
you find this to be not true, just let me know if you find any
way to make transparent. I am kinda annoyed to do all the updates
manually.
      If you look at the Available menus list box, there are
Primary Pop-up menu and ~Open. Simply "~" makes the next
character as the keyboard selection character.  So let's create
another menu item.  "~Xyz."  Select "~Xyz," and add some objects.
That's it! I guess this could bring the desktop to another ways
to put together.  I know this idea somehow conflicts with
"object-oriented" environment.  Yet, I think having all the app
sat the tip of the finger makes easier to navigate through the
desktop. BTW, I put "beaver" on the pop-up menu.  At the
Parameters, I put [Enter Filename to Edit].  So whenever I start
"Beaver" from Pop-Up, I just type the filename to edit. Actually
I didn't read this part from the manual until after I read an
article from "Inside OS/2"[the free copy from the company]. 

Sections of article taken from OS/2 Manuals, but who reads
manuals anyways? :*)

- Juhoon Ahn (jahn@mindvox.phantom.com, jahn at #OS/2)

Trivia Question

The Hitchhikers Guide To OS/2


      In 1985 and 1986 a computer named Therac 25 was built to
send X-Rays into patients in order to kill cancerous tissues. 
Due to a software bug this machine ended up administering doses
up to 100 times the safe level. 

     The question is: How many people died due to this software
bug?

     
     Answer to last Issues Trivia Question:

     Niklaus Wirth helped develop NELIAC, a dialect of ALGOL 58,
for the IBM 704 computer.

     Yes I know these are hard... but stop by the library and
look it up! Who knows, you may learn something.
DESKTOP CONTEST!!!

      The Contest will continue for another two weeks due to a
glaring error on my part.  I failed to make it easy to send me
your entries. I have gotten a number of entries but its only fair
to make it easier to enter. 
     
      Well we all make mistakes and the best way around them is
to fix them! So here goes, ftp all entries to moo.onu.edu login:
anonymous and put them in /incoming/desktops.

      Here again is my desktop to give some ideas to anyone who
did not get the last issue.

      FYI: one of the easiest ways to get a nice .bmp of your
desktop is to use PmJpeg 1.5 and its desktop capture option.

P.S. My desktop won't be entered for obvious reasons. :*)












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The Hitchhikers Guide To OS/2


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