Crawford's Corner

Citation

Crawford, W. (2000), "Crawford's Corner", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 17 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2000.23917aab.001

Crawford's Corner

Perspective

Two Thousand and Fifty

How's it going on the other side of the dread Y2K? Here I sit in October 1999, typing on a Microsoft Natural Keyboard connected to a Gateway Celeron-400 PC, looking at an 18" display and listening to Randy Newman on my Altec Lansing Dolby Surround speakers. And there you are, staring bleakly at your manual typewriter while a gramophone plays in the background, since all this new-fangled stuff disappeared on January 1. Right?

Or has civilization collapsed entirely, thrilling the survivalists in their mountain hideaways and verifying the predictions of some Y2K consultants who weren't getting enough business? Presumably not, if you're reading this.

Let me hazard a guess. The disruption faced by most Americans, Britons, Australians, and Europeans on 1 January 2000 was milder than that caused by a severe winter storm. Total economic damage in the U.S. was a fraction of that caused by Hurricane Floyd, and probably not a large fraction. Total damage in all industrialized nations combined probably didn't equal Hurricane Floyd. Most of you dealt with near-trivial nuisances, possibly felt a little silly for having more cash on hand than usual, and--if you live in California, at least--congratulated yourself for freshening your earthquake supplies.

Already, the concern over Y2K seems to be ebbing, but some of the coverage is still a bit odd. Popular media have covered the cancellation of many New Years airline flights with the note that many people seem to be avoiding travel on 1 January 2000. Travel Weekly covered these cancellations as part of normal reporting, since they happen almost every year. Yes, travel on 1 January 2000 was probably much lighter than on an average day--because New Year's Day just isn't a big air travel day, regardless of the year. When it's on a Saturday, it's natural for travel to be even lighter: if people are out of town, they'll wait until January 2 to return.

Now the hotels, cruise ships, resorts, and Endtimes people can start gearing up for the Other Millennium: 1 January 2001, which has nothing to do with computers and everything to do with calendar sticklers who fail to realize that there was no Year 1, either.

Has The Artist changed his name back to Prince yet, and can anyone still stand that song?

...and Fifty?

This is the fiftieth edition of this newsletter-within-a-newsletter. Trailing Edge Notes (T.E.N.) first appeared in Library Hi Tech News 120, March 1995. "What you have here is an experiment, one that will probably continue for at least a year." That experiment, always taking up the last five pages of each issue, continued through December 1996.

Trailing Edge Notes moved inside and grew a little in January 1997, taking up either six or eight pages of each issue in 1997. Since I stopped writing the "Trailing Edge" articles in Library Hi Tech after 1997 and the section was no longer at the back of each issue, the name no longer made sense--so we changed it to Crawford's Corner in January 1998. Then, as my "Notes from the Literature" pieces in Library Hi Tech turned into "Review Watch" in these pages, the section grew to ten pages in September 1998--and it's been that way ever since.

The first few years included too much experimenting with typefaces, but you were surprisingly tolerant. The experimenting diminished in 1998 and ended in early 1999, as MCB University Press took over (and I no longer know exactly what typefaces are being used).

Consider my introduction to T.E.N. way back when:

T.E.N. will combine regular features with some quite irregular ones. Perspectives, such as this one, will appear in every edition: short personal essays on almost any topic related to libraries, personal computing, technology, and whatever else seems appropriate. PC Values should be in almost every edition... Most editions will include some combination of Press Watch and List Watch: brief comments on interesting or disturbing items in the press (computer and otherwise) or on the Internet.

Other sections will appear as space, time, and interest permit. My bias is not so much for "the road less traveled" as for "the items less mentioned"-so that, for example, CD-ROM Watch will cover some of the inexpensive CD-ROMs that don't get reviewed in The Big Magazines, and Type Watch and Clip Watch will occasionally offer notes on inexpensive typeface and clip art collections that don't get reviewed anywhere....

Ad Watch and Product Watch will cover interesting, amusing, and disturbing ads, products, and trends... I hope to add Emperor Watch two or three times a year; the section title should make sense when the first example appears.

Did Type Watch or Clip Watch ever appear? List Watch was a nonstarter--and Emperor Watch faded away. Otherwise, that introduction was a good projection. Review Watch appeared when Notes from the Literature ended, and I've added new sections when it seemed appropriate.

What About "Looking Ahead"?

What of my predictions for 1999, made in the January/February 1999 issue? It's too soon for me to comment on them: after all, I'm writing this in October. Even in December 1999, it will be difficult to tell whether some of them were right or wrong, given the delay in tracking aspects of society.

But I'll give it a try. No new predictions, at least not this issue.

EBook Watch

What isn't happening in the electronic book field: sales worth touting in press releases. You don't see sales figures from NuvoMedia (the Rocket eBook) or SoftBook press (SoftBook), even though the Rocket's been out for considerably more than a year now. In science, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In commerce, that's not quite true: if there were hefty sales, you can be sure there would be press releases heralding them.

What is happening: the Open eBook Initiative, an XML subset that could make ebooks a little less proprietary. Most companies involved in eBooks have signed on (even those who haven't bought readers to market). That doesn't resolve most problems of eBooks, but it's a step in the right direction.

Then there's netLibrary, which claims to have spent $100 million to build an Internet-based collection of electronic books aimed primarily at libraries and consortia. NetLibrary doesn't use a proprietary reader; instead, it involves special software loaded on readers' ordinary desktop or notebook computers. You read the book on your regular computer, after "checking it out" (and downloading it) from your library or consortium. After you "return" the book (and wipe it from your hard disk), someone else can borrow it.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of netLibrary. The concept certainly deflates some overblown promises for digital books. A netLibrary book is not available for any reader any time it's needed; unless a library or consortium has purchased multiple copies, nobody else can see the text while one user has it checked out. They're just like regular library books--except that they don't have to be reshelved and can't disappear.

There are a few other disadvantages. If you find reading a book on your PC intolerable, that's tough: you can't print out a netLibrary book. You can print out a page or two, but netLibrary protects publishers by freezing up if you try to print out several pages in a short period of time. (As a paranoid computer user, I'm not wild about having software installed that's designed to cause malfunctions in my system, but that's a different issue.) You can do word searches. In some ways, netLibrary combines most of the disadvantages of eBooks with key disadvantages of circulating library books, but there are some advantages (word searching and labor savings, and possibly cost savings at a consortial level).

I see netLibrary as offering "semi-books"--book-length items that aren't expected to be read in full, but rather used to find a few key paragraphs on something. There are a lot of semibooks out there, in addition to the reference materials that are too much in demand to make sense as circulating items (whether digital or physical). So far, most netLibrary sales seem to be consortial, and this seems like a plausible (if expensive) way for a consortium to add thousands of secondary materials to its members' resources. For an individual library? NetLibrary ebooks don't take up shelf space and don't require reshelving, but it's an awful way to read a book.

Is there a big enough market to justify $100 million in advance investment? Did netLibrary actually spend $100 million? I haven't a clue. It's certainly an interesting twist on ebooks.

DVD Watch

Talk about timing. EMedia Professional's June 1999 issue includes a first-rate article by Debbie Galante Block, "Will Divx ever be welcomed into the DVD family?" The Divx people answered that question conclusively a couple of weeks after the issue came out--but they clearly kept any hint of that demise secret until the last. There will certainly be obituaries for Divx. Meanwhile, this report on the state of the debate in early 1999 makes poignant reading. Note particularly the final sentence, one that may or may not turn out to be true:

"Regardless of the outcome, the pros and cons of Divx and DVD will continue to be debated long after the dust settles."

Columbia House

At the beginning of August, my junk mail included a strong sign that DVD is becoming fully established as a consumer medium. Columbia House has established a DVD club: three DVDs for $1 each (plus shipping and handling) if you buy at least four more at normal prices. That's about as mainstream as you can get.

The Numbers

EMedia for September 1999 (they've dropped Professional) includes two brief items on the same page, which between them indicate how well DVD is doing--and how far it has to go.

One item is that more than one million DVD-Video players were shipped in the second quarter of 1999, while as many DVD titles sold in the first half of 1999 as in all of 1998. More than 200 new DVD titles appear each month, and the total should be more than 5,000 by the end of 1999. That's the positive side: DVD-Video is becoming established as a broadly successful medium.

The other is a chart showing the installed base of DVD-ROM and CD-ROM drives worldwide. On one hand, there are a lot more DVD-ROM drives than DVD-Video drives: this chart shows 10.3 million as of the first quarter of 1999. But the rest of the chart shows why DVD-ROM titles aren't appearing rapidly: that 10.3 million is a tiny little slice of the pie. The total installed base for CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives at that point was just under 280 million drives. It's tough to concentrate on 3.6 percent of your potential market.

PC Values: October 1999

October's standard configuration includes 64MB SDRAM, 24x or faster CD-ROM, AGP (128-bit) accelerator with 8MB SGRAM, V.90 modem or Ethernet adapter, a 15.9-16" viewable display (usually called 17"), and wavetable sound with stereo speakers. Note that all the systems exceeded the standard: each one comes with at least 128MB SDRAM and all but the cheapest "other" system include DVD-ROM drives. The Gateway and Quantex systems use 7200RPM hard disks, which don't earn extra credit because their real-world advantages over 5400RPM disks are unclear.

This is an encouraging set of systems: it appears that the tendency to strip out features may be ending.

• •

  Top Budget: Gateway Performance 500: Pentium III-500, 13.6GB HD. Pluses: 128MB SDRAM, 16MB display SGRAM, DVD-ROM, Boston Acoustics speakers with subwoofer. Extras: MS Works Suite 99. $1,599, VR 8.99 (+1% since 7/99, +13% since 4/99).

• •

  Top, Midrange: Gateway Performance 550: Pentium III-550, 20.4GB HD. Similar to budget, but with 18"-viewable display. $1,999, VR 8.49 (+13% since 7/99, +22% since 4/99).

• •

  Top, Power: Micron Millennia Max 600: Pentium III-600, 27GB HD. Pluses: 256MB SDRAM, 18" display with 32MB SGRAM, DVD-ROM, Monsoon speakers with subwoofer. Extras: MS Office 2000 SBE, Zip-250 drive. $2,868, VR 8.18 (+23% since 7/99 and 4/99).

• •

  Other, Budget: Crossline Endeavor EX450: Pentium III-450, 10GB HD. Pluses: 128MB SDRAM. Extras: WordPerfect Office 2000. $1,058, VR 11.90 (+26% since 7/99, +15% since 4/99).

• •

  Other, Midrange: Crossline Endeavor SX 550: Pentium III-550, 20.2GB HD. Pluses: 256MB SD-RAM, 18" display with 32MB SGRAM, DVD-ROM. Extras: WordPerfect Office 2000. $1,898, VR 10.90 (+29% since 7/99, +47% since 4/99).

• •

  Other, Power: Quantex SM600 SE: Pentium III-600, 27GB HD. Pluses: 128MB SDRAM, 18" display with 32MB SGRAM, DVD-ROM, Altec Lansing speakers with subwoofer and surround. Extras: MS Office 2000 SBE, CD-RW drive, 10/100 Ethernet.

Product Watch

Web Audio and Video

I thought that the convergence madness had subsided, but the 21 September 1999 PC Magazine makes me wonder. A feature article ("Surf, look & listen," pp. 121-48) covers current software and sources for Web-based audio and video. The teaser paragraph states that "the Web has facilitated an audio and video revolution that will forever alter the way we are entertained." The lead paragraphs go on to assert that the "day is approaching" when we'll replace all of our home and portable entertainment equipment with "a PC and an Internet connection."

There's interesting material in this story even if you dismiss the extreme assertions in the lead. Sidebars offer the best sites for sights and sounds; a variety of tests reveal the best software choices for various purposes. Ignore the overenthusiastic parts and look for the nuggets in this roundup.

Editors' Choices are Real G2 for streaming audio and video, MusicMatch JukeBox 4.0 as a PC jukebox, RealProducer G2 as a tool for building streaming content, and just!audio for converting MP3 to recordable CD form. Choices among Web sites include RealGuide as the best format showcase, MP3.com for MP3 downloads, Broadcast.com for Webcasts, Spinner.com for Internet radio, fasTV.com for video, and Scour.net to search for multimedia.

The citation for fasTV.com says, "Plain text will never be enough after fasTV.com." That's an odd statement for a successful print magazine.

USB Desktop Videocameras

Speaking of Web video: if you have a yen for teleconferencing, the video part keeps getting cheaper and easier. The October 1999 PC World reviews two cheap little videocameras that connect through USB ports. Logitech's $50 QuickCam Express is a ball on a stand; $50 does include software. It doesn't offer great resolution (15 frames per second at 352x288, 30fps at 176x144), but it's good enough for such modest applications as one-to-one videoconferencing.

Creative Labs' $80 Video Blaster WebCam 3 includes more software and offers higher resolution: 640x480 at 15fps, 352x288 at 30fps. Software includes a WebCam application, for all you exhibitionists. The reviewer says that the Logitech camera is easier to use. So if you're ready for on-screen remote reference interviews, equipment price is no longer a major barrier.

PC Magazine for 5 October 1999 reviews the Logitech unit and two other USB cameras--but the other two run more than $100 each. Eastman Kodak's $129 DVC325 is light (2.4 ounces) and can focus as close as four inches. It will generate 8fps at 640x480, 20 to 25fps at 352x288, and 30fps at 144x176. Bundled software supports videoconferencing (with an external microphone) and other uses; the camera is sturdy and well suited to mobile use. 3Com's $130 HomeConnect PC Digital Camera can focus even closer (to one inch), comes with varied software including a Webcam application, includes automatic light-level adjustment (and can operate in very dim light), and supports faster capture than the others. It will support 12fps for 640x480 resolution and can go as fast as 60fps for a 76x144 thumbnail picture. It seems to be larger than the competitors with more businesslike styling.

Keyboard Power Generators

I want to believe this one can work, and just maybe it can. Compaq designer Adrian Crisan recently filed a patent application for a keyboard that keeps your notebook computer's battery charged. It's certainly scientifically plausible, using coils and magnets mounted on and around individual keys. Press the key, and the motion of magnets creates a current through the coils, which can be used to charge the battery.

The interesting issue is whether you can capture enough energy from keystrokes to justify the added complexity of the keyboard. Would it mean paying an extra $100 to gain, say, two minutes of use for each hour of heavy typing? If so, the whole thing would be silly--but if you could get half an hour's extra use for an hour of typing, it would start to seem fairly attractive. Don't look for a self-powered notebook any time soon, but there's no magic involved here.

Thin Clients and Network Computers

Larry Ellison is threatening that Oracle will get back into the network computer business. Sun has introduced a new Java-based thing. And Acute Network Technologies offers the $1,599 Acute ThinCast 8525, reviewed in the 5 October 1999 PC Magazine. Should you care?

As always, that depends. Oracle took a bath in its first foray into NC hardware, but Ellison's hatred for Bill Gates seems to have no bounds. He'll keep spending money to try to prove that PCs are inferior devices. Sun's device depends on the concept that Java actually makes sense for mainstream applications, that you could plausibly substitute server-based Java applets for PC-based applications. So far, the speed, stability, and security of Java applets don't seem to inspire much confidence, and the grand attempts to produce Java-based office suites seem to have failed.

The Acute device is a little different. It's a pure thin client, designed to connect to a Windows NT server running Citrix or Windows terminal services. For your $1,599, you get a 233MHz CPU, fast Ethernet, keyboard, mouse, Windows CE OS--and the whole thing's built into a 15" LCD display. (It also has USB ports.) The advantage is that it's slender and easy to install--and, of course, an administrator can assure full control over the unit. That's because it's really a terminal: no hard disk, no CD-ROM, and not all that much local intelligence.

Too many people figured out that Network Computers in general are terminals, and that "thin client" is usually a fancy name for a terminal. If you're a control-hungry administrator, that's exactly what you want. If you need lots of workstations that shouldn't be running any local applications, that may be what you need--but even today's online catalog terminals are likely to be Web browsers as well, and a terminal may not do the job.

If you need sleek and all you need is thin-client power, $1,599 isn't bad for an LCD-based unit. You're paying about $1,000 for the display and $599 for everything else. If you need flexibility, $1,599 will buy a lot of computing power.

Review Watch

Mass Storage

Miastkowski, S. (1999), "Big dog hard drives," PC World, Vol. 17 No. 10, pp. 159-76.

Bigger, cheaper, sturdier: that's the constant refrain for hard disks, as this roundup demonstrates. Internal IDE hard disks--called "UltraATA" by the cognoscenti--now cost as little as a cent a megabyte (July 1999 prices). The hot new UltraATA/66 interface doesn't necessarily buy much extra speed, but that's fine since you're not paying anything for its inclusion. For that matter, the five 7200rpm drives in the review weren't all that much faster than the seven 5400rpm drives.

The article indicates which drive fares best and worst in each of several categories, but all the drives performed well. Maxtor's $350 20.4GB DiamondMax Pro 5120 (7200rpm) and Western Digital's $279 20.4GB WD Caviar (5400rpm) took Best Buy honors. I'd steer clear of the Fujitsu drives: they're dirt cheap but lacked decent documentation and were harder to install than most others.

Notebook Computers

Begun, D. (1999), "The magnificent seven," Computer Shopper, Vol. 19 No. 10, pp. 188-96.

If you think "desktop replacement" is a reasonable term and you have a substantial budget, this article offers seven plausible candidates. The minimum configuration for this roundup was a 400MHz Pentium II, 64MB RAM, 8GB hard disk, 2x DVD-ROM drive, 14.1" active-matrix display offering 1024x768 resolution, and 2MB graphics RAM. Although Compaq, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard aren't represented in this group, most other major notebook makers are.

The most pleasant surprise for this fastest-ever group of Windows notebooks is that battery life was generally better than for 366MHz notebooks. In one case--the Best Buy, Gateway's $3,849 Solo 9300--battery life was fairly astonishing: just two minutes under five hours on ZD's BatteryMark 3.0 test, even though it has a 15" screen (as do the Dell and Micron units). All of the units lasted at least three hours, although only one other (Dell's $3,212 Inspiron 7000 A400LT) lasted beyond four hours.

These units are expensive and relatively hefty, with prices ranging from $2,799 to $4,399 and travel weights ranging from 7.5 to 10.4 pounds. Oddly, the two most expensive systems are two of three that don't include applications software and both seem compromised in other respects--but both (NEC and Toshiba) are configured for corporate buyers, where value may not be a consideration. Gateway and Micron (the honorable mention with its $3,499 TransPort NX) include MS Office 2000 Small Business Edition; Dell and Fujitsu include MS Works Suite. All but the NEC will play DVD movies; somehow, I can't imagine paying $4,000 for a DVD-equipped computer that will not play movies!

These are powerful computers. If having the screen two inches away from the keyboard doesn't bother you and you plug in external speakers, they could indeed replace desktop PCs--admittedly at roughly twice the price of comparable desktop configurations.

Printers

Labriola, D. (1999), "Ink the deal," Computer Shopper, Vol. 19 No. 10, pp. 226-31.

The cheapest inkjet printers still don't make sense, but midrange inkjets continue to offer better value as time goes on. This roundup covers five printers claiming at least six pages per minute (ppm) text printing and five ppm color printing and 600dpi resolution or better, with prices ranging $174 to $290 (after rebates, in most cases). All of the major inkjet brands are represented--but then, there are only five major brands.

Note "claiming" in the previous paragraph. Only one of these printers came close to six pages per minute on a test text-only Microsoft Word document: the $290 HP DeskJet 882C at 5.94 ppm. The Best Buy, Epson's $174 (post-rebate) Stylus Color 740, managed 3.09 ppm: just over half the speed. For color, results were even further from the supposed five ppm (which I wouldn't believe from any midpriced inkjet printer). How much worse? On coated-paper best-mode tests, the Epson was fastest, at 0.4 ppm running PageMaker and 0.34 ppm in PowerPoint. The HP dropped from best to worst: 0.13 ppm in PageMaker, 0.15 in PowerPoint. That seems right: in my experience, HP DeskJets are sprightly in draft mode (and produce very nice business graphics in that mode), but bog down considerably in best mode using special papers. The HP, incidentally, gained honorablemention for its outstanding output and "lightning-fast" text printing.

Cost per page shows a narrower range than in some past reviews. Asserted cost per monochrome pages (5% coverage, typical of text) was 3.7 to 6.1 cents; for a color page with 20% coverage, figure 61.5 to roughly 79 cents (not including special paper).

What of the other three brands? Canon's $175 printer had driver problems and flawed output, and it's tougher to set up. Lexmark's $182 Z51 Jetprinter performed well, but not as well as the top two. Xerox' $199 DocuPrint C11 had flawed output. Not at all incidentally, all of those prices except HP's include $50 rebates, which presumably aren't permanent; thus, the real range is from $224 to $290.

Shareware

Canter, S. (1999), "The 1999 PC Magazine shareware awards," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 16, pp. 171-86.

The glory days of mainstream shareware business applications may be long gone, but shareware continues to have its place. (I used PC Write for a while and PC File for years, so I do appreciate the glory days of business shareware.) ZDNet does an annual shareware competition, of which this contest is part. The article lists 40 finalists in eight categories and reviews the winner in each category.

Read the article to see whether these programs would suit your needs. The winners in each category (and their price, since shareware isn't really free) follow. Business applications: Master Converter 2.10 ($15), a program for converting numbers between systems of measurement. Desktop accessories: TravelJack 3.0 ($39), a traveler's system for tracking time zones, currency conversion (with updates from the company's FTP site), basic measurement conversion, and events converted to local time. E-mail and related: SpamKiller 2.55 ($30), pretty much what the name implies. Graphics and multimedia: Paint Shop Pro 5.03 ($99), an old favorite among shareware fans. File utilities: Find It 3.0 ($24), a replacement for the Windows Find facility. Internet utilitied: FTP Voyager 6.1.10.1 ($38), an FTP utility. HTML editors: HomeSite 4.0 ($89). Web development: GDldb Pro 5.01 ($76 noncommercial, $220 commercial), which converts databases and spreadsheets into static HTML documents.

Speech Recognition Software

Lindquist, C. (1999), "Speak easy," PC World, Vol. 17 No. 10, pp. 185-94.

Software that can recognize continuous speech at all is fairly young, but it's a competitive field that's improving fast. Today's PCs eliminate one barrier to speech recognition: it requires a lot of computing power, but even a "low-end" 400MHz Celeron or Pentium II should have more than enough speed--and the massive hard disk requirements don't seem like much on today's 10GB-20GB drives.

This article offers good background, lots of sidebars, and plausible reviews of the current PC-based programs. The Best Buy is no great surprise: Dragon's $199 NaturallySpeaking Preferred 3.5. Similarly, Dragon's NaturallySpeaking Mobile Organizer gets the nod for mobile recording (combining a digital recorder with recognition software): it's pricey at $399, but it works better than the competition. Although IBM, Lernout & Haspie, and Philips keep improving their offerings, Dragon manages to retain the best recognition.

Don't expect miracles. If you get 90 percent correctness, you're doing well; I would argue that 95 percent may be about the best that's possible for the English language. Typing is still faster if you're an accurate touch typist--but these programs make lots of sense if you're a terrible typist or really can't type at all.

Web Portals and Search Sites

Cohen, A. (1999), "Start here," PC Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 17, pp. 118-56.

Following a lengthy section on personalized Web sites (not covered here), PC Magazine devotes another major article to the state of portals and search sites. Personally, I'm sick of the whole "portal" name and concept--but it's still hot stuff in the Internet business. Editors' Choice among portals is Yahoo! for its tools, content, and integration; Excite (last year's winner) "remains a strong contender." A features table and good individual writeups may help you decide which portal suits your needs--but most of us will use several of them in any case. (I use MyExcite as a home page at work but probably spend as much time at Yahoo!--but very little at the others, including GO Network, Lycos, Netcenter, Snap.com, AOL, and MSN.com.)

Naming one best search site would be a pure sucker's play, and PC Magazine doesn't fall into the trap. The article chooses three: Yahoo! for directory searching, Northern Light for research, and Hotbot for all-purpose searching. In my own occasional experience, that seems like a pretty good cut.

Comments on many other search sites are worth considering, as is the features table. They did devise a set of queries for some objectivity, judging the first ten hits for each of 50 searches as to relevance and recording the duplicate and dead hits--but only among the first ten hits. Look up your favorite search sites in this article; see whether you agree with their critique (for performance in midsummer 1999). I found them right on the money for Ask Jeeves, for example: good results if you have a common question, useless otherwise.

CD-ROM Watch

I Had One Grunch but the Eggplant Over There

If that headline doesn't mean anything to you, I can only offer this advice: It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide. If you're even further confused, enlightenment will follow in the second review. If you know what I'm talking about and are thoroughly horrified, I suggest you skip the second review: it will only confirm your already-low opinion of my taste.

We've gone too many issues of Crawford's Corner without "CD-ROM Watch." That's because my supply of CD-ROMs for review had almost dried up. It's healthier now, and I'm getting a few DVD-ROMs. These reviews cover ten CD-ROMs (in two packages)--and both sets are excellent by my standards.

On one level, this three-CD set is another trip planner--a competitor to De Lorme's AAA Map'n'Go and Rand McNally's TripMaker. It helps you to plan driving trips, produces routing and strip maps for those trips, and incorporates hotel and restaurant reviews from a trusted source. De Lorme uses AAA, Rand McNally uses Mobil, National Geographic uses Frommer's. Maps and routing quality appear to be comparable, at least between AAA Map'n'Go and this CD-ROM.

It's the extras that earn this set an Excellent rating. Along with 20,000 Fodor's ratings, you get extensive travel guidance from National Geographic publications and national park information and maps (in PDF form). The second CD-ROM includes 22 video presentations and five slide shows, all of them meaningful and nicely presented. The videos appear in half-screen windows at 640x480 and offer interesting essays on a number of U.S. travel topics. The slide shows appear as magnificent full-screen shots with good narration. In every case that I tried, the videos and slide shows were what you'd expect from National Geographic.

The second disc (which also includes the 48MB to 100MB of installation files) makes this set special. The third disc is an oddity: a street locator that includes every street in the United States, installs and runs separately, and seems to have no function other than to provide close-up maps of even the most obscure streets in the country. The disc supports a GPS interface, and that may be its best real-world use.

Both the installation program and the main program CD-ROM support AutoPlay--and I was astonished to find that the main program CD-ROM also uses Setup or an equivalent. There's really no excuse for that, given that you can't install the program from that disc. I had problems with the promotional and tutorial videos (some system mismatch), but everything else ran beautifully, including the video clips within the program itself.

The main menu runs at a fixed 640x480, but the program scales to any resolution and takes advantage of the full screen, providing more detail and more flexibility on a larger screen. Oddly, most guidebook pages occupy fixed small windows, but they do print quite nicely. Most text is in crisp, readable serif type; routing directions appear on-screen in a sans serif, but print out in readable serif form. As already noted, graphics and video are superb.

Other than the Setup quirk and the oddly disconnected third CD-ROM, I can't find much to complain about in this product. The publisher has considerable faith: they offer a full 90-day guarantee: "we'll refund your money if you're not completely satisfied."

This is a fine product, adding first-rate multimedia enhancements to a solid trip-planning product. The price is right, and this one will stay on my PC.

First there was Doonesbury Flashback, a complete collection of the first 25 years of Doonesbury cartoons. That fit neatly on a single CD. Then, Mindscape aimed a trifle higher: The Complete National Geographic, more than a century of magazines on more than 30 CDs (or, currently, four DVD-ROMs). Now, the usual gang of idiots has achieved the very Acme of popular culture: the first 46 years of Mad Magazine on seven CD-ROMs.

Once the opening dumpster leaves you in the main Trash Heap, you can wander over to the cover browser, check out nonprint stuff on the juke box, or find specific content using the Search-O-Meter. Sooner or later, you'll probably wind up in The MAD Veeblefetzer, which helps you look at the pages of Mad. Not that you really need to use the Veeblefetzer--it's just the only way you can get inside the covers. If you really and truly despise Mad, avoid the Veeblefetzer at all costs. Then again, you may not be a good candidate for this set. What, me worry?

I wasn't making anything up in the previous paragraph. The main screen really is the Trash Heap, the page-reading interface really is The Mad Veeblefetzer, and the Search-O-Meter provides surprisingly robust search capabilities. Beyond the silly names, and providing access to 47 years of silliness, this is all remarkably well done: the 93 rating would be even higher but for some weaknesses in secondary aspects of this first-rate package. For all the oddness of its material, this is a surprisingly polished product.

Externals and Installation

The box is almost as big as the National Geographic box, but it's mostly empty space, a 30-page user's guide, and a roll of Mad toilet paper (I haven't unwrapped it yet, but would guess the entire roll is printed with a variety of Mad sayings and images). The CDs are in a neat little box with four folders, all but one containing two CDs each. They're labeled, from "The Earliest Years, 1952-1960" through "The Latest of the Early Years, 1969-1974" to "The Latest Years: 1995-1998." The big outer box sets the tone for the product, with cartoons, silly comments, and a content flap made from Alfred E. Neuman's face in glorious embossed color, seven inches wide ear to ear. Inside is "Our 100% Ironclad Guarantee--You Will Not Find a Dumber Product Anywhere!" The box back offers the actual contents with typical dumb remarks and there's very little hype here: indeed, these scans are detailed enough so that "High-quality images of low-quality humor offer excellent readability!"

The bottom of the box offers detailed system requirements, beginning "To run this program properly you should have a computer. (Our technical research shows that a working one is preferred.)" It goes on to list typical requirements: Windows 95 or better, Pentium 90MHz or higher ("Any slower and you'll be dead by the time you get to reading issue #245."), and so on. It even specifies 9" shelf storage space for the box--but you can get by with two inches if you give the big box to someone else or (gasp!) toss it.

The set installs from Disc 1. Installation supports AutoPlay, lets you choose a 27MB or faster 38MB install, and lets you choose a directory but forces its own program group. I chose the smaller install, which actually used 33MB: close enough.

Once installed, you can start Totally MAD by inserting any disc. Wonder of wonders, the AutoPlay startup does not trigger Setup. You're prompted to change discs when that's necessary, with the kind of message box you might expect from Mad: it begins "Nice going, Clod." There's a brief click-through opening sequence, which leaves you in the Trash Heap. The Trash Heap is fixed at 640x480--on a disturbing background of repeated Alfred E. Neumans if your resolution is higher. All other screens scale automatically to any display resolution, and this is a product that can use as much screen space as you can spare.

Content and Features

The set includes 376 regular issues of Mad published through the end of 1998, beginning with the remarkable series of full-color comic books initiated in 1952. They've also included 133 MAD Special issues, 12 Worst from MAD annuals and 12 More Trash from MAD annuals, and another 24 special issues. You don't get the many paperback books that originated from Mad artists and writers, but you do get more than 20,000 pages of Mad.

Extras include animated Spy vs. Spy cartoons and other animations, short video clips featuring Mad's usual gang of idiots (the juke box label for this section is "U.G.O.I."), some "MAD Minutes" radio spots, and a fair number of music clips from the flexi-disks that Mad used to bind into some issues. (Remember flexi-disks? Very thin sheets of plastic bound into magazines that could be played as short phonograph records if you were very lucky and everything worked just right. As the user's guide says, "even if you had these old disks, what would you play 'em on? Huh?") There are also three special features: a MAD Desktop theme for Windows 95 or 98 (I didn't try it), a MAD Cow (never mind), and the vital MAD Panic button, which brings up a phony Excel graph "when your parents, boss, teacher, or sweetheart appears." The Panic button is on every screen. Although I haven't tried it yet, there's also a special Web site for owners, offering the latest and dumbest MADstuff.

The cover browser shows lots of covers at once, always in chronological order; you can scroll up or down or jump to a specific year. Double-clicking on any cover takes you to the Veeblefetzer, initially showing the front cover and a live table of contents. But if you're subject-oriented (which makes some sense if you treat Mad as a deranged view of contemporary popular culture), the Search-O-Meter works extremely well, combining set lists of features, themes, artists, and writers, as well as date ranges and sophisticated keyword searching. Keyword results are ranked by relevance (there's an explanation of relevance); other results appear chronologically. You can save result sets as bookmarks, just as you can bookmark pages, arrange bookmarks into multiple folders, export folders as external files...do you get the sense that this may be overdesigned for a juvenile humor magazine? (I was impressed with the only italicized instruction in the Search-O-Meter chapter of the user's guide, halfway through a five-page discussion: "NOTE: You can type in a keyword using any foreign language. However, if you would like Totally MAD to actually find something, use English.") I don't believe the keyword index includes all text, but it seems to cover most key words and phrases.

Page spreads always display together on the Veeblefetzer's open frame, surrounded on three sides by narrow control areas (covers display alone). The top frame includes a help balloon, issue label (and issue selector), CD indicator (showing which disc is loaded), back hand (which goes back but also, if you pause on it, offers a full drop-down history), and the pull chain that offers most menu options. You can print (or copy) one or both pages using the pull chain, but you can also use a selection control on the left frame to mark an area for printing or copying. The left frame also includes the usual grabber hand to move the pages around the screen (arrow keys also work), zoom in/out controls, rotation arrows to rotate pages 90 degrees (useful for some magazine features), a search icon, bookmark icons, and three special features that deserve extra attention. The bottom frame includes page numbers and page turning controls, the panic button, a button to bring up the contents list, and a fourth special feature.

Special Features and Quality

You can zoom out far enough so both pages fit on any screen with room to spare--but you can also zoom in far enough to see the Benday dots in the early color comic issues. If you zoom in far enough so that only one or two frames of an article appear, two paneling controls light up. These allow you to move forward or back through the article while retaining your current zoomed-in view--and the panel movement is intelligent: it varies based on the article being viewed.

One Mad feature for many years has been the fold-in inside back cover: typically some form of commentary carried out through a picture and caption that become a different picture and caption when you fold the page so that the right third joins the left third. Naturally, there's a fold-in control in Totally MAD: if you're viewing an inside back cover and press it, the cover folds itself with appropriate silly sounds.

Finally, the bottom frame has a "More garbage like this" button. Press it, and you get a menu based on the current article, which will typically offer you more articles by the same artist, more by the same writer, or more of the current kind of feature or with the current theme. Not bad for a silly compendium.

That's about it--except for one sneaky little aspect of the Trash Heap. It's a rollover interface: when your mouse rolls over some things, they change color or take action to indicate that you've reached a live area. Nothing unusual there--except that, with this product, many of the live areas aren't really live areas. They're just things that change color or move when the mouse rolls over them!

I won't attempt to defend Mad's quality as a magazine. It is America's longest-running humor magazine, and in its own juvenile way offers considerable insight into the pop culture and political topics of whatever era you look at. No ads (except for affiliated merchandise), but loads of ad parodies.

The scanning is superb. If you remember my review of The Complete National Geographic, that was my chief complaint: the resolution was low enough and compression high enough that text was hard to read. No problem here--but then again, most text in Mad (except letters pages) is fairly large anyway. It looks like four gigabytes are used to store 20,000 pages; that comes to an average of 200K per page, which for mostly gray-scale material means midrange compression. There are compression artifacts, but they're not bad.

Summing Up

If you've never seen the first 25 issues of Mad, back when it was a full-color comic book, you don't know what you've missed. If you tried to buy those issues, even in replica form, you'd pay a lot more than $60 for them (I suspect). They're beautifully reproduced here.

Who is this set for? Certainly any library involved in popular culture studies and any library that collects comics. Many librarians who used to read Mad: I know you're out there. It's remarkably well done, the price isn't bad, and the content is what it is.

National Geographic Trip Planner Platinum 2000

****: Excellent [90]

Windows 95/98: ISBN 0-7630-2623-9

$25-$49

Brøderbund, 1-415-895-2000

http://www.broderbund.com

Totally Mad

****: Excellent [93]

Windows 95/98/NT, ISBN 0-7630-2621-2

$60-$70

Brøderbund, 415-895-2000

http://www.totallymad.com, www.madmag.com

Endnotes

What about the phrases at the top of this review? Anyone who read Mad for any length of time has them buried deep in long-term trivial memory: they were used in various places throughout the nonsense. Using the Search-o-Meter, I found "it's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide" starting in Issue 38, March 1958, but I suspect it was used earlier. (In July 1958, the slogan appears using "dropsky" rather than "dropsy," but that's as the slogan for their version of Pravda.) "I had one grunch but the eggplant over there"--as fine a statement of the human condition as I can remember--appears as early as Issue 28, July 1956, on a fake ad. A search for "veeblefetzer" starts with Issue 7, October-November 1953--one of the wonderful comic-book issues. Indeed, it's in a story I've never entirely forgotten: Smilin' Melvin, pilot with brains of an eggplant but the luck of all comic-book heroes.

The Details

Crawford's Corner is written by Walt Crawford, an information architect at the Research Libraries Group, Inc. (RLG). Opinions herein do not reflect those of RLG or MCB University Press. Comments: wcc@notes.rlg.org. CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs for review: Walt Crawford, 1631 Columbia Drive, Mountain View, CA 94040-3638; Windows only. Visit http://home.att.net/~walt.crawford.