POWER USER
If you've been waiting for the right time to buy a couple dozen Palm OS personal digital assistants for your office'or one for yourself'now might be the time.
POWER USER
You wouldn't think I'd have trouble finding weather information. There's weather info to be found everywhere, from outside my own window to the local TV news and the newspaper. There's even a cable channel devoted to the weather.
POWER USER
The biggest problem a power user faces with dial-up connections isn't so much their slowness, it's the way they always seem to go bad about two-thirds of the way through a big download.
POWER USER
With software, it's sometimes difficult to tell the difference between muscle and bloat.
Call a meeting
E-mail is a fantastic productivity tool. Everyone has a complaint about it, but it saves you from waiting in line at the fax machine, playing phone tag, and navigating time-consuming and sometimes frustrating voice mail.
Videoconferencing tools
Some people love to travel, and there's no denying that a face-to-face meeting affords a depth and subtlety of communication unavailable by other means. But if you're getting on an airplane just to hold a half-hour meeting, chances are you can find more productive ways to spend your time and your agency's budget.
Sate visual appetite with Studio Max
3D Studio Max pros and cons: + NURBS support, keyframe animation and multiprocessor support + Excellent mapping and editing + Auto backup and auto filename increment – Too many hardware locks – Ray-trace rendering requires Radi Ray package 3D Studio Viz pros and cons: + Excellent, easy-to-use features in limited applications + Integrates with AutoCAD files
Optical jukeboxes
Optical technologies have cut deeply into the M-O jukebox market. Sidebars The measure of a jukebox varies with type of data and how it is used Difference between M-O and CD-ROM is in the details Magneto-optical disk jukeboxes, once the darlings of big-time mass storage, have fallen on hard times. Network managers in search of large-capacity data storage are instead turning in droves to tape libraries and CD-ROM jukeboxes.
Video makes the voyage to desktop PCs
If you think video won't become a mainstream office application in the next couple of years, remember how quickly charts and graphs have popped up in almost every document. Most of the factors that catapulted desktop graphics applications into the mainstream—faster computers, cheaper memory, bigger hard drives, larger monitors and low-cost scanners—also are driving PC video.
Database update | BUYERS GUIDE
In recent years, many database management system vendors struggled to move their products from a relational to an object-oriented model. Now the dust has settled a bit. Most databases described as O-O actually are what end users consider O-O, but this hasn't always been true. For a while, any remote link to object-orientation, including relational DBMSes created in an O-O language, were categorized as O-O.
Travelers can tap the Web while away
The Web can be a big help to a government traveler, not just for planning trips but literally on the fly. If your office is like most, only a few people are out traveling at a time, so the entire office can share access on one of the Internet services that have local phone numbers around the world. Some, such as CompuServe, offer reasonably priced toll-free numbers for connecting from truly out-of-the-way locations.
Fast installation, sharp OCR accuracy make scanner a good buy
How well does a very low-end scanner work? Surprisingly, quite well. A few years ago, I paid $125 for a low-end, grayscale hand scanner that forced me to open my test PC's chassis and install an interface board—never a fun experience. In contrast, I recently bought the OpticPro 4831P, a 30-bit, 300- by 600-dot-per-inch flatbed scanner that simply plugged into the parallel port. I had the $61 unit running within a few minutes of its arrival.
This suite tool makes it a snap to prepare glitzy presentations
These tips will help you draw conclusions If your graphics needs are small, your office suite might have the right tools. Before upgrading hardware to accommodate new software, check to see if old versions running under Windows 3.x are available. Leave the high-end products to the pros. They require lots of time to learn before they give you good results. If you have a pro doing your in-house graphics, don't restrict him
Graphics software
More and more images are appearing in agency documents and presentations and on Web sites—and for many reasons: the demands of a more visually sophisticated audience, low-cost high-resolution color printers and flexible, feature-full graphics software. Agency publications managers find that images are easy to include, enhance their products and make information a lot easier for their readers to apprehend. This buyers guide is an overview of presentation, paint and draw programs, and some business graphics applications,
Web site authoring tools
You can run, but you can't hide—the Internet is everywhere. Now that a federal mandate requires agencies to make information more freely available to the public, government interest in gaining an Internet presence is on the rise. As many managers have found, giving the public access to agency information by putting it on the Web isn't a good idea just for democracy's sake. It also can free workers from answering routine telephone calls and conventional mail, freeing
Navigating is easier than before with map app
Pros and cons: + Versatile software and great remote control – Requires notebook with CD-ROM drive – Database incomplete Real-life requirements: Win95, Pentium notebook, CD-ROM drive, 100M free on hard drive, PC Card slot for GPS connection, sound card for voice alerts If you drive in circles until you run out of gas rather than look at a map, don't read this review.
BUYERS GUIDE - Presentation hardware
"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players." —William Shakespeare Check this list before you hit the road If it's important, carry a spare. If you can't, rethink your presentation. Use a carrying case that can survive a drop by a luggage handler. Consider the size of your audience. Will you need a built-in public-address system? Does your presentation demand a whiteboard, and will there be one at
Online or off, DropChute tells you when a file is waiting
To send a file via DropChute, you designate the recipient and the file to transfer, but—and this is the important part—you don't send to the recipient's e-mail address, and the recipient need not be online. If you are online and the recipient isn't, DropChute from Hilgraeve Inc. of Monroe, Mich., sends a note saying that a file is ready to send. The note pops up on the recipient's DropChute icon when the person goes online again.
SCSI, IDE or Extended IDE—it is your choice, so don't get mixed up
Choosing between SCSI and IDE or Extended IDE can sometimes be a tough task. If you run many low-end PCs for standard office tasks or networked operation and connect only hard drives and CD-ROM drives via IDE or EIDE, SCSI doesn't offer enough performance advantage to compensate for its higher costs or more complex installation problems.
PhoneJack shows upside of full-duplex call quality over Internet
Pros and cons: +Free phone calls with good to excellent sound quality – Works with most Internet telephony software and PBXes – Inherent delays from nature of Internet Real-life requirements: Open half-height ISA slot, Win95, 16M RAM, CD-ROM drive, 2M free on hard drive, telephone handset or speaker and microphone.
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