MailBITS/26-Aug-91

TidBITS readers are nothing if not opinionated! Reader Andrew Lewis commented on our recent article about the Help Menu that the "Apple propaganda" seemed a bit much for TidBITS, and that [as Ken Hancock pointed out last issue] SuperClock 3.9 works fine with System 7 and the Help Menu anyway. Andrew’s got a point, but it’s important to realize that, with a company the size of Apple, not everyone is a propagandist! Apple employee Rick Holzgrafe, who wrote the original article, is "just" a System 7 user, as entitled to an opinion as any of us. 🙂

Another opinion-holder is Mike Kobb, who was astounded at Earl Christie’s evaluation of Intelligent Resources’ Video Explorer Card as the "multimedia dud" of the recent Macworld Expo. Mike wrote that "I spent about a half hour at the booth, and I thought it was a stupendous product. The quality was tremendous, and the modularity of the product means that you can not only add S-Video and composite input modules, but also mix-and-match input products, so you can use one RGB source and one S-Video, etc. Furthermore, the company is working on a non-linear effects board, that will be able to wrap video onto spheres, and other neat things. Yes, it’s expensive, but with the software bundle, it’s almost a bargain. Yes, it only does RGB right now, but that’ll be remedied soon." Phew! Imagine how adamant Mike would be about this if it weren’t for those two "Yes, buts" at the end. Just goes to show you that no two people will agree on the significance and value of every product that comes down the road.

Michael Lee, a TidBITS reader and fellow fan of the space program, left a message while logged onto Memory Alpha BBS to retrieve the file containing details about this month’s Atlantis mission and its Macintosh-based experiments. Michael says that the folks at NASA Spacelink, a free on-line service provided by NASA which you can reach by modem at 205/895-0028 (300-2400 bps, N-8-1 settings), hope to post MacSPOC, the software mentioned last week, so that Mac users can download it soon. Spacelink is located at NASA’s Huntsville, Alabama facility, and is lots of fun to poke through. I spent some time looking through the press releases, technical documents, programs, and graphics files that are available on-line, and wish I had free long distance phone service so I could afford to spend more time exploring!

Apologies to those of you who depend on comp.sys.mac.digest to get your weekly TidBITS fix. The distribution of issue 77 didn’t seem to go as smoothly as usual; most sites only got the first few lines of the issue’s index, though a varying amount reached each site. Issue 77 will be reposted shortly, and as usual, you’re welcome to take advantage of the other distribution sites if you’re in a rush, or if such things happen in the future. Two good bets are America Online and Memory Alpha BBS, as neither depends on the intricacies of the Internet. Anyway, my thanks to all of you who reported the distribution problem this week, and I appreciate your patience.

Information from:
Andrew Lewis — AOL: Andrew El
Mike Kobb — [email protected]
Michael Lee — [email protected]
Mark H. Anbinder — [email protected]