HIGH TECH CORNER: THE iMAC AND WINDOWS 98 SOURCE CODE

Apple finally is showing profit again with Steve Jobs running the show unofficially. The founder of Apple has a true focus of direction for the company that until lately has lost ground on a daily basis to the Microsoft/Intel (BOLD)(WILTEL)(UNBOLD) juggernaut.

I have always been a very anti-MAC person. The GUI interface originally came from XEROX who apple copied. Then of course Microsoft copied both to create windows. This is why Apple lost its suit against Microsoft.

The iMAC has caused me to look at Apple in a different light. At a base price of $1299 for 233Mhz G3 processor, 32 Meg of ram, and a 4 Gig hard drive it is not as inexpensive as an Intel-based machine. And they are shipping over 10,000 a week, which will make the stockholders very happy.

However it is truly a family computer designed for Internet access. The built in 56 modem and the Ethernet 10/100 Megabit I/O for cable modems makes this a great Internet machine.

But Apple did not do everything right when they created the iMAC. There is no floppy drive in the box. If I can buy one 3 1/2 floppy drive for $23 bucks, what can Apple get them for? The mouse or Hockey Puck as I call it is horrible. My young 6-year-old may be OK with it but any person who has ever used a real mouse will pitch it in the trash and buy a PC type mouse.

And gone is any type of expansion slot. Microsoft has finally released an up-to-date Office for the MAC. Gone are the days of the old WORD 5.0 on MAC. Microsoft actually likes the MAC even thought it competes with Windows. The real reason they like the MAC is that they can charge so much more for Office on the MAC than they can for the PC.

I was glad to see so many people e-mail me from my last article on hooking up multiple modems to connect with the Internet. Yes I do agree with all of you who tried it that getting 112K baud from two 56K modems is really nice. For those of you who missed it check out WebRamp PC at (BOLD) www.rampnet.net (UNBOLD).

With the Microsoft lawsuit less than a month away, their legal team is running in all directions to put out fires. Microsoft has been ordered to present all of the SOURCE CODE for Windows 95 and Windows 98. If you were the richest man in the world and were ordered to turn over the very source that no single person except Mr. Bill has total access to, how much security do you think follows all those hundreds of CD ROMs?

This source code for both Windows 95 and 98 combined is over 60 million lines of code. Of course the justice department told Microsoft that all source code would remain secret while they looked for Microsoft hidden secrets.

After all, look at how well all the secrets from Stars inquiry of the Presidents problems have been keep secret. The justice depart wants to prove that Microsoft could remove all Internet support out of windows.

Myself, being a C++ programmer, I can tell you that if Microsoft wants to, it can hide any thing inside complex and massively nested function calls on hundreds of CDs so that government programmers could never find it. If government programmers were as good as the Justice Department thinks they are, this country would not be in a Year 2000 crisis.

Even more to the point on the quality of government programmers is their actual salary as paid by the US government. If they were so good to actually understand all the inter workings of the Windows operating system to help the US government make its case against Microsoft, Mr. Bill would have already hired them for a 6 to 7 figure salary to work for him.

But potentially more damaging to Microsoft is the fact that U.S. District Judge Thomas P. Jackson ordered the remaining depositions in the case to be opened to the press and public. This all stems from a 1913 law allowing access to pretrial depositions.

Microsoft has taken this ruling to the appeals court. The real question is what does Microsoft not what the public to know? Could it be that they actually used all their power and money to squash the competition?

Good or bad as this may be, this is really how big business works. The government's position is that Microsoft "engaged in a comprehensive plan and pattern of anti-competitive conduct to monopolize markets."

Specifically, it wants to know whether Microsoft pressured Intel or Apple into curtailing efforts related to Netscape's Navigator. Let me know what you think.

As always feel free to contact me at (BOLD) digital@ldd.net and www.digitallabs.com (UNBOLD).

Rich Comeau is an electronics scientist and owner of Digital Labs of Cape Girardeau.