* Occasionally here in my column I had been running a series on my history in the computer business. Recently I finished the series, and I said that this was "the end of this series of columns". Apparently some of my readers thought that I was indicating that I was no longer going to continue writing any columns at all and were a bit upset. It's gratifying to hear that people like to read my column and would miss it, but - never fear - I am still here. To paraphrase Sam Clemens, "The reports of my (column's) death are greatly exaggerated"!
* I see that the battle between the two competing high-definition DVD formats is going nowhere, and that the format that was going to be released first (Toshiba's HD-DVD) is now going to be delayed until some time in 2006. This is really terrible news. We need to have high-definition DVDs so that DVD image quality can match the quality of HD televisions.
Even if you have an HD television today, you are only seeing low definition signals from your DVD player. But having two competing "standards" will delay acceptance by the public for a long time. Consumers are just not going to pay for equipment that might be obsolete in the future if the standard changes. It's bad enough that DVDs currently in our collections will be usable but obsolete. And Hollywood is going to have to decide which format (or both) to manufacture DVDs in - and if nothing else that will add to the DVD price.
This needs to be sorted out, but the two industry groups seem to be miles apart. The one advantage of HD-DVD over the other standard (Blu-ray) was that it would appear on the market first, but now even that advantage is gone. We'll see how this works out, but I believe the consumer is going to suffer.
* I ran into a problem recently that was a bit humorous, but still very annoying. The cause of the problem was my 3 year old granddaughter Nora. Nora was brought up with a PC always available, and she took to the PC and various Internet sites for children very quickly. It's really amazing what a 3 year old can do on the various websites such as pbskids.org or Disney's Jetix (disney.go.com/jetix).
Jetix uses a graphics and sound system for the Internet called "Flash", from Macromedia. Flash is used to overcome the shortcomings in the original web "language" - HTML. Flash creates its own sound and graphics environment, and does it by loading small programs (called Java applets or ActiveX controls) into your PC.
We let our granddaughter use one of our PCs somewhat unsupervised to play on this past holiday weekend, and she seemed to be enjoying herself very much. But we were a bit surprised when sheet after sheet of paper came flying out of our printer. It turns out that one of the Jetix applications allows you to print coloring book pages, and Nora had actively been clicking away on the "Print" button. Perhaps this was because the printer is network attached, and in another room; not seeing the print come out, she just kept banging on the button!
Normally, print jobs go into the print queue, and the queue can be held or deleted. It should have been an easy task just to purge the remaining print jobs. Wrong! Apparently there is a Jetix resident control that has its own print queue and it stores the pending prints, releasing them one-at-a-time to the printer. But there seems to be no way to control Jetix. We rebooted the PC - Jetix nicely remembered where it was and like a Timex it just kept ticking. We turned off the printer - and when we turned it back on Jetix saw that the printer had returned to online status and just kept printing away! There was nothing we could do to stop it - I even tried to purge the resident Jetix task, but I was unable to find it. The only recourse was to let it finish.
The moral of the story? When the grandkids come to visit, you might want to supervise what they are doing on your PC, or at least buy a few extra reams of paper!
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)