OS/2 eZine - The Best OS/2 Reading Anywhere!

March 16, 2002

Buy the CD 'This Space for Rent' by Pete Grubbs

From The Editor

The Music Industry is looking to Mug Canadians

If you're Canadian, you need to write your MP (http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/about/people/house/PostalCode.asp?Source=SM) to get them to oppose the Copyright Board's proposal to increase the levies which are collected on behalf of those poor record companies on CD-R media and to stop them from expanding those levies to include miniature removable hard disks, compact flash cards and MP3 players. Based on today's MP3 players like Apple's iPod, MP3 players could easily reach 100Gb of storage in 2 years and under the proposed levy, you would have to pay $2,200.00 to the Canadian recording industry to buy one. If you have a PDA with removable storage, you'll be giving a whole lot more to the recording industry as well, their "tiny" 2.1c/Mb levy could translate into hundreds of dollars per device in 2 years when 100Gb devices become available.

With all of the large record companies currently test releasing copy-protected titles and giants like Vivendi-Universal publically stating that all of their titles will be copy protected by mid-2002, regular Canadians will no longer be able to exercise the right they purchase with this levy, and the government should be looking at reducing or eliminating these levies not increasing them.

Get out and get political. Now back to OS/2...

Scitech Display Doctor 7 Goes Gold

SciTech Display Doctor 7.0 Professional for OS/2 is now available with support for more than 170 chipsets. This means that you can swap over 170 different graphics cards (http://www.scitechsoft.com/t_hrdw_sdd_os2.html) in a single machine without ever changing a driver.

The package is U.S. $39.95 and you can find out more about it here: http://www.scitechsoft.com/sdd_os2.html.

Team Scitech also offers their thanks to everyone who offered feedback while they were developing the product.

Second Annual OS/2 World Awards

You can vote for the 2nd Annual OS/2 World Awards here. (http://www.os2world.com/award_vote.shtml) A number of great people and products are represented, go out and vote for your favourites.

JavaOne Conference

If you're into Java, you'll want to check out the JavaOne conference. (http://java.sun.com/javaone) Register before March 22, 2002 and save $200.00.

JavaOne Conference
March 25-29, 2002
Moscone Center
San Francisco, CA

Lines Solitaire Game

Daniel Valot has released another addicting solitaire game. Get Lines (http://dvalot.free.fr/games.htm) and give it a try.

JavaScript Required

JavaScript is now required if you want to email our authors. It seems that spammers are harvesting the OS/2 eZine for addresses, and several of our authors have started having spam problems. So starting this month, email addresses in the eZine are all obscured using JavaScript. The links still work just like regular email addresses, they just can't be extracted from the eZine's pages automatically anymore. If you have any problems with these new email links, let me know.

This Issue

I'm coming down to the last few days of a project I've been working on since last summer and it just hasn't left a lot of time for me to work on OS/2 stuff. It seems that most everyone else is in the same situation. Doug Clark will be back next month with the next installment of the ODBC series. We do have a couple good articles though. Thanks to Pete Grubbs for taking on most of the editing duties this month while I was busy with other stuff.

February Issue Prizes

Thanks to our sponsors last month, Gili Tzabari got a copy of Pete Grubbs' new album, and Cristiano Guadagnino got a copy of Norman Virus Control. Congratulations to our winning writers and thanks to our sponsors for their contributions last month.

Interesting Website of the Month

I had a great time this evening playing with internet radio. This is facilitated by Z!, the spiffy MP3 player by dink (http://dink.org/z/). Set up your browser as described on dink's page then go to ShoutCast (http://yp.shoutcast.com/directory/?genre=80s) and pick a genre. I spent an hour listening to moldy 80's tunes. I'd forgotten what a great album Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Welcome to the Pleasuredome" was.

Looking for More OS/2 eZine Content?

How about writing it? The OS/2 eZine has to be a community effort, the more writers we have to spread the work around, the better the issues will be and the easier it is for everyone. If you're working on a cool OS/2 project that you think the readership of the OS/2 eZine would find interesting, we're looking for one-off articles as well as short series and monthly columns to fill the pages of the OS/2 eZine. Trying some cool new software? How about writing a short review? It doesn't take much time and you can win some great prizes!

Please visit the OS/2 eZine Pressroom (http://www.os2ezine.com/pressroom.html) for submission guidelines and article ideas. If you have any questions, let me know by email .

Have a Product or Service you think our readers would be interested In?

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The OS/2 eZine is committed to serving the OS/2 and eCS community by providing accurate, useful, and timely information every month. We will deliver user-oriented hardware and software reviews, thoughtful editorial comment, and 'how-to' articles which will include useful tips for both the novice and the experienced OS/2 user.

Robert Basler is the president of Aurora Systems, Inc. (http://www.aurora-systems.com) and has been a dedicated OS/2 user since he tired of rebooting Windows 3.1 twenty times a day. He spends what free time he can manage travelling the world. Photo was taken at Franz Josef glacier, New Zealand.

This article is courtesy of www.os2ezine.com. You can view it online at http://www.os2ezine.com/20020316/page_1.html.