From Our Sponsor
Before I begin, here are some brief words from our sponsor: Some of our SPCUG volunteers need help, and one of those volunteers is me. My professional life has taken a dramatic turn for the better in the last month. I was named publications director of a small yet rapidly growing company in El Dorado Hills. What's more, I recently signed up to write a Windows 2000 Server how-to book for IDG Books. These projects help my bank account but take time away from the user group. I don't intend to step down from my posts as publicity chair and chapter/SIG coordinator, but I do need to delegate some duties. The jobs aren't hard, and they don't require anything scary like getting up on stage at the meeting. Please consider helping me out, and if you'd like to do so, contact me right away.
The SPCUG begins 2000 trying to stanch the flow of red ink. As our contract with the Sacramento Association of Realtors building runs out at the end of March, the Steering Committee is looking for new, cheaper quarters to start the new group year in April. We're also exploring the possibility of producing Sacra Blue quarterly instead of monthly, but the difference would be that the quarterly magazine would be the 64-80 page size we know and love. In between publication months, we would send out postcard reminders of the upcoming meetings. To me it seems this is a good opportunity to bring eBlue and our Web site even closer together. Perhaps in time our site will look like ZDNet or one of the other major computer news portal sites, but ours would provide the added service of having local news and views.
It seems the gathered crowd at the December meeting liked the idea of a quarterly publication; you can let SPCUG's leaders know what you think by leaving a message on the members' e-mail discussion list or contacting Chris Graillat directly. Speaking of the December meeting, if you were there, you know that Microsoft didn't fulfill its promise made to Milt Hull at COMDEX about showing Windows 2000. It seems that once Microsoft reps returned to Redmond, they found that they couldn't make our meeting. Of course, we didn't find this out until the day before the December Steering Committee meeting, and by then the newsletter and press releases had been delivered. There's word that Microsoft has rented the downtown Memorial Auditorium for the Windows 2000 launch on February 17, the day after our scheduled February meeting. Could we latch onto that event next month? Stay tuned.
New Toys
I had an opportunity to beta test Blue Sky Software's Robohelp Office 2000 (RHO2000), and now that I have the full version I can report on those new features. For you Robohelp 7 users, you won't find a whole lot that's changed, so a mini-review here will do as everything I wrote down in my last review still applies to RHO2000. You will find plenty of enhancements instead, and the first ones, of course, are Word 2000 support for WinHelp projects and the latest version of Robohelp HTML Edition for HtmlHelp projects.
The Classic edition lets you create WinHelp projects using Word 2000, letting you publish to HTML so you have the ability to publish help projects from Word in the major Windows formats. As always, the Classic edition lets you create a single-source document for many different types of help including WinHelp, HtmlHelp, and Javahelp; RHO2000 has much-improved JavaHelp support. The HTML edition supports the latest version of its WebHelp engine for creating HTML-based help documents you can view in any Web browser. Perhaps best of all is that this version has more and better diagnostic tools and templates.
Perhaps the only thing missing from Blue Sky's arsenal is strong support for Framemaker documents. If Blue Sky adds Framemaker support, or buy a company that does, Robohelp will truly be a product that meets the needs of a vast majority of users. In the meantime, RHO2000 is still the help system of choice, especially for Word users and/or those who construct HTML Help systems exclusively. Recommended. You can read more about RHO2000 on Blue Sky's Web site.
The Same Toys
Roseville Telephone Company (RTC) has been adding various communication services as it grows from a small regional telephone company to a large, regional high-tech communications company. RTC now offers Internet services as well as ADSL services. As my contract with DGWeb was up last month, and RTC had a special ADSL offer last month, I decided to check it out.
ADSL has several advantages, notably increased speed, no time limits, and the ability to use voice and data transmissions on the same phone line. ADSL comes in two speeds: fast and faster. Fast is 384 Kbps downloading and 128 Kbps uploading; faster is 1.5 Mbps downloading and 384 Kbps uploading. If ADSL is available in your area and you're considering moving to it, be advised that your phone bill will be considerably higher, then you'll have to add your ISP costs on top of that.
If you sign up for a year, RTC charges you $39 per month for fast service and $129 per month for faster service. RTC's Internet service provider charges $49.95 per month for fast, single-user ADSL service and $179.95 per month for faster single-user service. If you want multi-user service, the price jumps to $250 per month for fast service and $400 per month for faster service. I checked out other ISPs, like CalWeb and Verio, that offer ADSL service and found that RTC's ISP is the same, so there seems to be an industry pricing standard for ADSL services. On top of these costs, you would have to pay a $99 setup fee. If you sign up with RTC's ISP, you only pay $99 for the modem. If not, you pay $350 for it. Then you have to have a 10 Mbit Ethernet card installed in your computer so the modem can plug into the card.
As a person with an ISDN business account (i.e., 128 Kbps upload/download, unlimited hours, and Web hosting) with DGWeb, I decided to compare the costs between keeping my ISDN account and moving to ADSL. I found that if I wanted to move to just a single-user ADSL account with RTC's ISP I would pay about $400 more per year (not to mention setup and equipment costs) than I would with DGWeb and ISDN. An ADSL business account for fast service would cost me nearly $3,000 more per year than my current ISDN account. As an ISDN user with 128 Kbps, dual-channel access, and with a modem connected to a high-speed ISDN card, I can't justify paying so much more for faster downloading speeds.
So what should you do? If you're an ISDN user, stay with ISDN. Only the faster ADSL speed will give you a significant performance boost, but it's too expensive. If you're a 56K modem user and are itching for faster speeds, be prepared to pay a lot more. If you're not willing to pay so much, stay at 56K for now. Cable modems will be coming in the next couple of years, and since cable promises to be cheaper the prices of other high-speed technologies should drop. Whether you're a 56K modem user or ISDN, I still recommend DGWeb as an ISP. They have very good rates and offer lots of Web space.
Toys Gathering Dust
I feel bad that I haven't had an opportunity to test out Dragon Software's NaturallySpeaking with Wordperfect 9. The microphone still sits in its little bag ready for action, but illness or business gets in the way. The biggest reason why I haven't used NaturallySpeaking is because I don't use Wordperfect 9 all that much, either. I'll have to remedy this situation so I can give you a field report in the next couple of months.
In the meantime, I haven't had a chance to try TestOut's video training for A+ and MCSE certification. Now that Windows 2000 is on the horizon. there is no escaping my fate that I'll have to train for it by paying even more. My current certification CDs are for Windows NT 4.0. TestOut's literature says that if you buy its product and the product you're training for becomes obsolete within six months after you buy it, TestOut will ship you its updated product tutorial and charge only shipping costs. Of course, like the product that bursts into flame as soon as the warranty runs out, Windows 2000 will be shipped a little more than six months after I purchased TestOut's package.
TestOut says that upgraders outside the six-month window will get a discount, but the amount has yet to be determined. Once I find out, I'll let you know, and maybe by then I'll have a review of TestOut's training as well. It's about time I caught up around here.
