EDM/2 - From the Editor

From the Editor

really feel lousy. If I had the time to dedicate to finding news-worthy items to report, this weekly column wouldn't be as bad as it is. As the immortal philosopher, Beevis, put it, "this sucks!" In all seriousness, I don't know of anything to report in the OS/2 world.
I will say, however, that we here at IQPac are about to make a few announcements in the coming days, some of which are rather significant. No, we aren't "closing shop"; in fact, we're expanding, and the announcements will detail everything for your curious mind.
The voting is going better than expected, but not as well as we had hoped. It was our thought that having a painless HTML would cause the web server to die because everyone was rushing to vote for their favorite article. Unfortunately, that's the "ideal" situation and we're talking about "reality". So far 30 and 1/6 of a person have voted - how did that happen? - which is more than the 14 people that voted in the very first "Reader's Choice Awards" but nowhere near the estimated 3000+ readers that we have. We need you to vote for your favorite articles!
EDM/2 4-6 in INF format was uploaded to hobbes tonight and the Back Issues page was also updated with the new issue.

It's Been a Long Road

I haven't reached my own goals for this column, but (alas) sometimes it's easier to let the people who know what they're doing "just do it." It's not that this has been a bad "thing," but I just seem to be so much out of touch that the column has become a disservice to the readers who want to, need to know the absolutely latest pieces of information.
Hell, it's not like we'll find it in PC Week, Infoworld, or any other trade magazines.
So, being the concerned staff that we are, we found someone that we have high hopes for. Someone who can do the job properly. Someone who has contacts in all the right places, has their "ear to the ground," someone who knows where to go for the answers. Someone who...(drum roll, please)
(Don't you love the ridiculous amount of hype that is necessary to accomplish anything in the computer industry these days?)
Please give a warm round of applause to C. Heldon, who is now the news correspondent for EDM/2. You can read all of the news that's fit to print in his column. [which is not here -- Ed]
You must realize, of course, that in order to have one's ear to the ground, someone else must be talking. If you hear anything, be the talker; tell it to him; let the rest of the community know. Send your news tidbits to edm2_eds@iqpac.com. (Yes, we'll get him a real email address soon. Bear with us, please.)
Is this the end of "From the Editor"? I'm afraid so, but I'll be in contact, albeit infrequently, to let you know what's happening here at EDM/2 and IQPac in general.

Faux Pas

This is hilarious. Last week was supposed to be the end of this column because we had a smash-em-up, bang-em-up columnist whose contribution to EDM/2 was to be the successor to this insanity that I write every week.
And then the real insanity began.
After the smoke cleared, we were minus one column (mine), one columnist (him), and had one weary editor who decided to forego that week's installment (not to mention the omission of the previous week's column due to a lack of material).
Some interesting things showed up, though. Take a look at the following HTML:
                 
Even though the stuff is obviously commented out and the original < and > symbols are now brackets, some browsers still displayed this as though it were the original HTML. Go figure.

Adding Insult to Injury

Ironically, this week's news comes from the new column that was supposed to appear last week; I had his submission before the infighting began, you see.
Apparently (you're going to see this word a lot this week), the fourth edition of the Device Driver Kit should be arriving at your door soon. But, beside the new GRADD drivers, nothing much has changed. GRADD, for the terminology challenged, is the new display driver architecture which has provisions for on-the-fly resolution changing and a host of other goodies.
The newest, "I gotta have it" addition to the developer's library is a four volume set of books called the "Debug Handbook," which contains much information that you won't find anywhere else including system internals and the like. The document numbers, which you would use when ordering, are SG24-4640 for volume 1, 4641 for volume 2, 4642 for volume 3, and 4643 for volume 4. No pricing information was available.
In the beta department, we have Visual Age COBOL which can be found on the DevCon 10 CD-ROM. I'd like to hear from you if anyone is or will be using this for new development; it's about time we verified or dispelled the "COBOL is a dead language" myth.
Available on the web is IBM's Visual Age BASIC beta, but it is 26 megabytes (count 'em) so have lots of free phone time or a separate phone line if you want to try it. This can only be the BART product that we've heard so much about, and we'd love a "First Looks" article if you're willing to write it.
Finally, there's yet another Pascal compiler on the horizon, this time called Sibyl. (I can't help but worry when I see a product with that name. They might as well have called it Dr. Jekyll.) You can check this out at: http://www.midilink.nl/speed/