Nobody ever accused Consumer Reports of being wishy-washy about giving advice, but the venerable product-rating outfit has outdone itself by telling the world flat out which one to buy of the hundreds of computer models out there.
Entering ground upon which many a computer columnist fears to tread, CR’s brand new 1998 Home Computer Buying Guide (McClelland & Stewart Inc., $8.99, 192 pages) bluntly says the best computer one can buy is the $2,400 Dell Dimension XPS D266, based on “speed, convenience and upgradability.”
ETES-VOUS BLEU?
SPRECHEN SIE IBM?
International Business Machines Corp., which has been quick to see dollar signs in the Year 2000 repair business, is now salivating over euro signs.
Several European nations are switching to a new continental currency unit, the euro, in 1999, and the U.S. computer giant says that means businesses all over the world will have to change processes and systems dealing with European currencies. “This includes thousands of applications–from word processing through supply-chain management and payroll systems,” IBM says.
IBM’s John Downe estimated the changeover will cost $160 billion between now and 2002. And Big Blue will be glad to take a share of the Big Green (or whatever the color of the new money will be).
HAVE MAC, WILL TRAVEL
CORE COMPETENCY
With Apple Computer Inc.’s Macintosh personal computer line fighting for survival on a very dangerous battlefield, using the expressions “Mac” and “Temp” together sound almost as redundant as pairing “Microsoft” and “monopoly.”
But Shannon Malone, market manager of the Chicago division of MacTemps Inc., which places experts at using sundry Macintosh software titles like Quark or Photoshop with companies for short gigs, boasts that her revenues have soared 18 percent in the past year, despite Apple’s own upheavals.
The secret to her success? Talking corporations into farming out the jobs of creating World Wide Web sites to temporary Mac mavens, a crowd notorious both for their graphical skills and loyalty to the drab beige plastic box known as Mac.
CHIPLESS WONDER
BOOK ‘EM, DANO
The Internet is humming with a short essay by an uncredited scribe who tells of an exciting new information storage and retrieval technology called the Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge device (BOOK).
The device is said to be capable of holding thousands of bits of information, almost as much information, in fact, as a CD-ROM. Based on Opaque Paper Technology (OPT), a BOOK never crashes and never needs rebooting. Best still, the essay explains, the device allows for very easy data entry using optional devices called Portable Erasable Nib Cryptic Intercommunication Language Stylus (PENCILS).
