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Geoff Duncan

Geoff Duncan

Geoff joined TidBITS in 1994 as Managing Editor, served as Technical Editor through 2006, and is now Editor at Large. Geoff's also a working musician, freelance writer & editor, and sometime Web developer.

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Image is Everything: ShrinkWrap 1.2

Anyone who's dealt with floppy disk images knows what a pain they can be. The idea behind a disk image is simple enough: instead of distributing or storing a floppy disk as a physical object, you store it as a file on a larger disk

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The End of the GIF-Giving Season

On January 3rd, 1995, an announcement appeared in CompuServe's GRAPHSUPPORT forum that sent a shock wave through the online community. Apparently, the popular GIF graphics file format was now proprietary and users must have secured a license from CompuServe by January 10th in order to keep using GIF files

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Excuse Me, But Your Slips Are Showing

Microsoft announced last week that the next version of its Windows operating system - dubbed Windows 95 - would be delayed until August of this year, postponing its release date another six months

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Clone Alone

On December 28, 1994, Power Computing Corporation of Milpitas, California, became the first company to announce it had reached a licence agreement with Apple for rights to build Macintosh clones

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IBM Halts Pentium Shipments

IBM Halts Pentium Shipments -- IBM said Monday that they are halting shipments of Pentium-based PCs because the risk of floating point division errors in Intel's chips was "worse than previously described." Intel has asserted in press releases and public announcements that the bug's probability of occurring is only once in every 27,000 years of typical use and that the majority of off-the-shelf software would not be affected

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Got those MacTCP 2.0.6 Updater Blues?

Got those MacTCP 2.0.6 Updater Blues? Many MacTCP 2.0.4 users have had bad experiences trying to use the MacTCP 2.0.6 updater (see TidBITS-255). Specifically, the updater application often refuses to update the existing version of MacTCP because the driver resource ".ipp" doesn't match what the updater expects. The updater works properly on a "clean" copy of MacTCP 2.0.x that's never been installed; however, if you're absolutely stuck without a "clean" copy, this particular problem may be fixed with ResEdit (but no guarantees): ftp://ftp.apple.com/dts/mac/tools/resedit/ resedit-2-1-3.hqx 1) Make a copy of the MacTCP 2.0.x control panel. 2) Using ResEdit 2.1.1 or higher, open your copy of the MacTCP control panel. 3) Locate the DRVR resour

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PowerBooks, Quantum Daytonas, & SCSI Manager 4.3

During the last few weeks, reports have circulated on the nets about failures to properly spin up PowerBook hard disks after putting a PowerBook to sleep

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OS Directions: Marconi, Copland, and Gershwin

With rumors that the next major revision of Apple's system software (Copland or System 8) is set for the tail end of 1995, Apple is gearing up for an interim system software release in early 1995 to pave the way for new Macintosh models and critical new Apple technologies

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Pentium Bugs, Part II

Pentium Bugs, Part II -- Following up on the Pentium division bug reported in TidBITS-253, Intel has confirmed that the math error can occur in single, double, and extended precision divides and potentially impact the precision of results from the 4th to the 19th significant digit

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Math Bug Confirmed in Pentium Chips

Math Bug Confirmed in Pentium Chips -- Earlier this month, reports of a floating point division bug in Intel's Pentium chip began to surface on CompuServe and in Usenet newsgroups such as

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Life in the Fast Lane

In the electronic magazine InterText, I write a sporadic column that's mostly used as a soapbox for my opinions on electronic publishing. Responses to the columns are intriguing: sometimes personalities from the early days of network publishing (only about ten years ago) appear out of nowhere to agree, disagree, or corroborate certain points - and I feel like I'm talking back to my elders