Maroon&Blue

15 February 1995.

1995 IBM Technical Interchange

"The 1995 IBMTM Technical Interchange gives you more variety than a big bowl of gumbo." (IBMTM brochure)

The 1995 IBMTM Technical Interchange at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans will be held May 21-25, 1995.

Over 300 sessions are planned with topics including: IBM, OS/2, LAN Server Interoperability; Warping the Internet; HPFS Internals; OS/2 Warp, Journey into the Unknown; OS/2 Plug and Play; Designing the Killer OS/2 Application. An extensive exhibit hall will showcase over 100 software and hardware vendors.

Full conference registration advance rate (before April 7) is $895.00 per person. After that, the cost will be $1,095 per person. Cost to attend the exposition only is $20.00 per person. For more information, call 1-800-872-7109 or FAX: 508-443-4715.

Meeting Notes

by George R. Welch

The monthly meeting on Tuesday, February 11, had about 11 people in attendance. It began with a brief plea from Neal for help from the group's members. Neal will maintain the unofficial role of chairman of the club, but several others will take over various jobs, including Frank, who will reserve the meeting room and publicize the club, and George Welch, who will record the minutes of the meeting.

Topics discussed at the meeting included a possible World Wide Web (WWW) Page for the user's group. The group is currently looking into a Web site in the Department of Agricultural Engineering. Suggestions for the Home page are welcome.

Another idea discussed was a "Good, Bad, and Ugly" hardware/software compatibility report by the members, which would appear in the newsletter and Web site. See the related article in this issue for more details.

The group also discussed the software review policies. Occasionally, the club receives copies of software to review. Any member may check out a copy of the software for evaluation purposes after signing an agreement with minor restrictions. One of the conditions of check-out is that the member present both a demonstration of the software at a meeting and write an evaluation of it which may appear in a future edition of the newsletter. The software currently checked out includes Sytos Premium [Dwight Miller] and PFS:Works [Bret McLaughlin].

Inventory of club property was also discussed. Neal pointed out that the club now owns various books, software, video cassettes, and a couple of years worth of back issues of OS/2 Professional magazine. All are available for check-out by members. At the meeting, Dwight donated an "IBM - Team OS/2 in Action" videotape to this collection.

George demonstrated a "head-to-head" display of the image viewers PMJPEG and PMView. He was clearly biased toward PMView in his demo. He used the software on his own PC, a 486DX-33, with 16 Megs RAM, Vesa local-bus ATI Graphics- Ultra-Pro video card running in 1024x768x16, OS/2 2.11, and ATI's cheesy-rodent OS/2 video drivers for the demonstration.

A Comparison of Elapsed Times for Rendering 24-bit JPEG Images 

Resolution  PMJPEG  PMView

300x300          3     1
640x480        9.5     2.8
800x600       12.6     3.7
1024x768      23.3       8
1536x1024       45      12

Times are given in seconds.

From the table above, one can see that PMJPEG is nearly three times slower than PMView for displaying JPEG images. For rendering GIF images, both rendered more quickly, but PMView was still the faster by a factor of two. Other factors considered in the review were PMJPEG's ability to do screen capture, and PMView's drag and drop slideshow paradigm. PMView also has a really nice/really annoying thumbnail capability, and outstanding WPS integration.

After two hours, the meeting then degenerated into various discussions, and broke up.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

by Neal (nealk@tamu.edu)

The OS/2 Users Group is looking for hardware and software experiences for an OS/2 compatibility list. This list will be similar to the "Good, Bad, and Ugly" INF document found on hobbes.nmsu.edu and other OS/2 FTP sites. In particular, we want to know:

1. The hardware or software.
This should be one component, not an entire system, along with the manufacturer and model or version number, if appropriate.
2. The installation description.
Here, you describe what it takes to install. In particular, we are interested in any drivers or necessary system requirements to make it work. If the drivers do not come with OS/2, be sure to let us know where they can be found. Also describe any installation problems and work-arounds you may know about
3. Operational description.
Let us know how it runs. Does it work in an OS/2 session, VDM, or under Windows? Does it work well? What problems have you run across?
4. System incompatibilities.
What system components does it not work with? Is there a way to make it work happily?
5. Your system configuration.
Just in case the problems are "just you." Let us know a brief summary of your computer system. This way, we may discover that problems only occur with certain system configurations.
6. Overall ranking.
By far the most important: how would you rank the hardware/software on a scale of 0 to 3. The scale is open to interpretation, but think of it like:
0
Doesn't work with DOS, Windows, or OS/2. Makes the machine smoke.
1
Had to fight with it every step of the way, but it works satisfactorily now.
2
Had minor installation problems or requires customizing for each VDM.
3
Works great! No problems here (and very little or no customizing)!
7. How to contact you [optional].
If someone else learns of a way to solve your problem, how can they contact you? E-mail or phone is preferred.

Send your hardware descriptions to nealk@tamu.edu with the subject "GBU."

``OS/2 Warp Shipments Reached 1,000,000 Worldwide on January 18,1995.''
source: IBM OS/2 Warp Home Page

Maroon&Blue is an independent publication and not an official document of IBM, Texas A&M University, the Board of Regents, or Bill GatesTM. OS/2 is a registered trademark of IBM.

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