Amen brother! I work part time in the service industry and know that “over the line” feeling all too well. Unfortunately, it seems that rudeness and vulgarity have taken over our society. Don’t get me wrong: my vocabulary can be quite snappish at times. I also work in the harness racing business where the ability to swear well is almost a must. However this is usually directed at a large beast who doesn’t understand the meaning of the words. I have been totally shocked by the personal attacks launched on some of the Internet forums. Fortunately, I also get a big laugh from the truly horrible spelling that goes with it.

—Kathleen O’Doherty

One other aspect where PNG shines is mixing text and images. I’ve created landscape designs, in Canvas 7, using colored vector and bitmap objects, including layers of transparent objects, combined with many small text labels. You can save to GIF, but the labels are blurry and unreadable, even if you blow it up 4x first; JPEG is even worse.

But save as PNG and it looks the same on the screen as it does in native format, but about 100 times smaller (I don’t have exact figures or access to my computer at the moment). It’s a great way to send plans, etc., via e-mail.

—Fenton Jones

This article is nice but has a couple of overgeneralizations that should be corrected.

It is not true that CD-RWs shouldn’t be used for music. While that is a good rule if you’re sending CDs to friends with typical CD players, some audio CD players are available that read CD-RW as well, which is great for those of us who like to reuse CD-RWs the way we used to “tape over” cassettes. I and a few others I know have a $70 Philips portable CD player that advertises its CD-RW compatibility on the box.

I don’t think it’s true that all G4 towers have internal FireWire. I remember reading an overview of some of the newer G4 towers where the internal FireWire is no longer present. Not sure if this is because of cost cutting or whatever.

The article’s tip about making a partition is nice. But another cool thing to do is to make and mount a disk image with Disk Copy and burn from that, particularly if you are trying to make a startup volume or something where your CD writing software wants to see a volume and not a folder. Could save you the trouble of reformatting to add a partition.

—Al Egrias

I wanted to mention that it is possible to record audio CDs at speeds higher than 4x. The potential problem is that recording at higher speeds can be more error prone. However, the newer CDR/CDRW drives seem to be better at minimizing errors.

I currently write audio CDs at 12x using a Sony FireWire 12x/8x/32x drive ($315 with rebates at buy.com) and have had no coasters. I copy audio files to the hard disk before burning my CDs. It takes about five minutes to burn a full CD.

—Ken Cohen

In your review, you mention that you cannot use MicroDrives with the frame. I have an IBM 1 GB CF MicroDrive and it works well in the Kodak frame and my camera.

—Steve Benfield

First of all, congratulations on a terrific site. Well organized and very informative.

However, I do have two questions about sharing a DSL connection that weren’t clearly answered in the April 2000 issue. I recently purchased an appropriate hub and router to connect up to four computers.

1. If I merely want to connect two computers so that they can share a DSL connection and I have no need for file sharing or anything like that, do I have to do anything other than connect the two, with Ethernet cable, to the hub and router?
2. If i want to connect a third computer that is a Macintosh to the same DSL connection, can I simply connect it to the hub and router with cable as well, or do I need special software or something?

—Clint