Our February Issue Picks

A Look Inside Touch PC, PC Wave, and Nikkei Science

by Yuh Nagano
With more than 200 Japanese computer-related magazines to choose from, it's always a difficult yet fun task to pick just three or four to review. My selections for this month are Touch PC, PC Wave, and Nikkei Science.

Touch PC (\343, published by Mainichi Communications) literally takes computing right from the basics, such as using a keyboard. Overall, the magazine explains PC use to novices and beginners in a hand-in-hand manner, something that can be very reassuring amid the flood of publications targeted at expert users.

In the Best PC section of the March issue, Touch PC dedicates four pages to Sony's popular, super-thin aluminum mobile PC Vaio PCG-505 and Mitsubishi's desktop Apricot MS540. Another section offers an easy-to-understand guide to Excel functions -- a good reference for those who find it tiresome to skim through Excel's thick manuals.

The Spring Special corner, meanwhile, presents 98 tips for making best use of Windows 95, application software, digital cameras and images, and the Internet. Example tips include how to double your floppy disk capacity, how to customize function keys on notebook PCs, and how to transfer Excel graphs to a TV screen. This is a compact collection of usable FAQs (frequently asked questions) for readers of low to intermediate technical literacy.

The section of the March Touch PC that I found most useful covers file compression in detail. It includes a step-by-step guide for downloading and using compression shareware and freeware from Mado no Mori, a popular Japanese software site. (The downloadable LHA Utility 32 compression program remains my favorite software.)

PC Wave (\952, published by Rasseru Shuppan) is written for experienced users. The magazine looks distinctively different from Touch PC -- more meticulously detailed text, more technical terminology, and incredibly thorough research. The price is nearly three times that of Touch PC, but both magazines are well suited to their respective target readers.

In the product section, the February PC Wave also spotlights Sony's Vaio. One of the most interesting articles in this issue offers the magazine's predictions for 1998 by looking at the various aspects of information technology. For example, given stable compatibility of MO (magneto-optical) media, the magazine predicts that gigabyte MOs will do well in the Japanese market. If 640MB MD (mini-disk) data drives become established, however, and music MDs achieve widespread distribution, MOs will drop in popularity.

The magazine also predicts that, as routers become less expensive, power users will gradually shift to routers from TAs (terminal adapters). As a result, some late-start TA vendors may abandon in-house development and shift to OEM supplies. PHS (personal handyphone system) mode TAs have already been developed, the magazine notes, but it forecasts that PHS and mobile PCs will continue to be merged, producing notebook PCs with antennas as well as PHS LANs (local area networks) and PHS printers.

Peripheral makers and PC vendors will actively support USB (universal serial bus), says PC Wave, logically enabling connections of up to 127 USB devices. Most Windows 98 machines will utilize USB ports with PCI-based USB cards. If Windows 98 supports easy use of USB, predicts the magazine, by early 1999 many PCs will be sold without RS-232C and parallel ports and PS/2 connectors.

Monitors will also change, forecasts PC Wave. Notebook PCs with low-temperature crystal polysilicon TFT (thin-film transistor) displays will appear in 1998, along with thinner, power-saving, reasonably priced TFT LCDs.

PC Wave articles are meticulously researched, each covering three or more pages. This magazine is a very rewarding read, but one that demands a very high level of technical literacy. (The section on TFT displays, for example, explains the raw materials and manufacturing processes.)

Nikkei Science (\1429) is a magazine I buy regularly. As I mentioned last month, it is a translated version of Scientific American but also includes a good deal of original Japanese material. What makes this magazine intriguing is that many of the articles are written by researchers rather than writers.

One such example from the February issue is an article by IBM anti-virus researchers about "digital immunity systems." Since 1990, the authors have investigated several hundred thousand PCs to gather statistics about infections, recording dates, numbers of infected disks/PCs, and type of virus for each attack. They found that some two-thirds of virus infections were caused by only ten types of viruses.

The authors have applied pathological models for birth and death rates to figure out viruses' life cycles. They also explain why boot sector and file viruses have been made almost extinct, replaced by macro viruses that hide in documents.

In IBM's digital immunity system, when a monitor program detects a virus, it sends a copy of the infected file to a central analysis computer, which disinfects the file in less than five minutes and sends a clean copy back to all clients on the network. The authors note that viruses and anti-virus programs evolve together, just like parasites and their hosts in nature.



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