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TidBITS#160/25-Jan-93

This week brings news of a new, object-oriented database from Mainstay, Connectix’s better implementation of virtual memory, and responses to our booth bimbo and pornography articles. In honor of the issue number we have a PowerBook 160 tip, Chris Johnson releases Gatekeeper 1.2.7, and Craig O’Donnell passes on some cacophonous notes on Macintosh sound. Internet users: check out the searchable TidBITS archive available on the WAIS!

Adam Engst No comments

Administrivia

Boy, that rumor about the AppleCD 300 being in short supply was a bum steer (financially disadvantaged, reproductively challenged male bovine?). Numerous people wrote to tell me that they had seen units around, and I have one sitting on my desk right now

Adam Engst No comments

Word 5.x Not 32-bit Clean

Chuck Levine wrote an apt response to our comment in TidBITS-157 that Word 5.x-related items flagged by Compatibility Checker 2.0 are compatible with System 7: "I have found that a few of the Save As translators are NOT 32-bit clean (namely Text with Layout) Using these translators in 32-bit mode will crash systems

Adam Engst No comments

Sounding Off

Craig O'Donnell passes on some notes on Macintosh audio as of Macworld Expo in San Francisco: I verified that the IIvx, Performa 600, and Duo 210/230 do NOT reproduce the right channel of a stereo sound file, for example, a stereo System Beep or a stereo QuickTime soundtrack

Chris Johnson No comments

Gatekeeper 1.2.7

Gatekeeper 1.2.7 is a set of Macintosh system extensions (INITs) and related control panels (cdevs) that, when active (i.e. allowed to install themselves during the boot process), offer protection against attacks by all viruses known to the author at the time of this release. Gatekeeper also monitors computer activities for what are considered to be suspicious 'events' or 'operations,' in an attempt to intercept what could be variants of known viruses or even completely new viruses. Since its initial release in January of 1989, Gatekeeper has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to stop the spread of viruses which were unknown during its design

Conrad Halling No comments

PowerBook 160 Tip

[In honor of this issue number, we present the following PowerBook 160 tip from Conrad Halling. -Adam] If you set the screen to 16 grays using the Monitors control panel, you'll notice that the scroll bars and grow region of a document window draw using grays but that the title bar, including the go away box and the zoom box, show in black and white

Mark H. Anbinder No comments

When Memory Isn’t Enough, Try WAIS

Even with Easy View, you may find it difficult to find those little tidbits of useful information you know you read in TidBITS. Thanks to a dedicated TidBITS reader, those of us with Internet access now have another option: WAIS. WAIS, which stands for Wide Area Information Servers, is an Internet-based network approach to information retrieval developed jointly by Thinking Machines Corporation, Apple Computer, and Dow Jones

Adam Engst No comments

Virtual 3.0

At Macworld, Connectix showed their newly-released version 3.0 of Virtual, which implements virtual memory on the Mac. Although Connectix has had versions of Virtual 3.0 running on various accelerators that are incompatible with System 7's built-in VM (virtual memory), the generic version of Virtual 3.0 had been plagued by delays. Now that it's out, why would you want it? Frankly, because it works the way virtual memory should work, quickly and without using a ton of disk space

Adam Engst No comments

Species, Genus, Phyla

One of the more interesting previews of programs that I saw at Macworld was of Mainstay's new object-oriented database, Phyla. Unlike traditional databases, Phyla is neither flat-file (with a simple one-to-one relationship between all types of data, such as Person, Father, and Mother) nor precisely relational (with a one-to-many relationship between data, such as Company and Phone Numbers), although you can accomplish most everything in Phyla that you could in a relational database

Adam Engst No comments

Booth Bimbos

A number of people wrote in regard to our articles on booth bimbos and CD-ROM pornography. Several suggested that booth bimbos are used to attract people to a booth, much like a flashy demonstration or clever freebies