Bill Gates's woes made easy as ABC
Microsoft Encarta DVD Reference Suite 2001 (UK and Ireland edition)
CD-rom £99.99 DVD-rom £69.99 Windows 95 or later; 32MB Ram (64MB recommended)
A is for _ "antitrust [ánti trúst] adjective US; opposing business monopoly: intended to oppose trusts and cartels, for example from using monopolistic business practices to make unfair profits."
Not a bad place to start looking at the latest edition of Microsoft's Encarta series, combining dictionaries, encyclopaedia, atlas, thesaurus and quotations on one DVD. And to be fair to Microsoft, it has not tried to duck the big issues.
Looking up "antitrust" in Encarta's dictionary links smoothly to informative examples in the companion encyclopedia. "In a rapidly expanding software market, Microsoft has been subject to allegations of monopolistic business practices," it reads, before going into a detailed exposition of the various charges Microsoft has faced over the years, starting with the first investigations by the Federal Trade Commission back in 1990.
Encarta 2001 also remains bang up to date with current affairs: "In April 2000, the judge ruled that the company had violated antitrust laws by engaging in tactics that discouraged competition. Less than two months later, in June 2000, the judge ordered the company to be broken up into two."
B is for _ "Bill Gates is the chairman, chief executive officer, and co-founder (with Paul Allen) of Microsoft Corporation, the world's leading computer-software development company_. In 1986 Microsoft stock, of which Gates retained 45%, was offered for public sale. With the stock's subsequent growth in value, Gates became one of the wealthiest people in American history."
It is thanks to products like Encarta that Mr Gates has so much money.
In many respects Encarta is a typical Microsoft product: it takes up a heap of memory and offers more options than most people ever contemplate using. It even requires the company's Internet Explorer web browser to be used - it was Microsoft's integrating Internet Explorer with its Windows operating systems that led to the latest damaging round of antitrust actions.
Its parentage aside, Encarta has some nifty features, the most interesting being the "talking" dictionary's ability to pronounce words aloud, and the chance to download monthly encyclopedia updates over the net for free until the end of 2001.
The whole package is easy to use, although it can become slightly baffling when switching between the different features.
The addition of a multiplicity of resources (photographs, sound and video clips) makes the encyclopedia rather more useful in dealing with modern subjects. But this is not the Encyclopedia Britannica: the entries are less than definitive, even if they are comprehensive.
Z is for _ "Zyzomys, genus containing five species of rodents characterized by thick, long tails." (RA)
Dump the discs, keep the wisdom
Encyclopaedia Britannica 2001
CD-rom £49.99 DVD-rom £69.99 Windows 95 or later; 32MB Ram (64MB recommended)
Maybe we've grown too finicky, but it does get boring finding and loading all those CD and DVD-roms every time we want to use them. Now one of the dreams of the information age has arrived - a full Britannica that you can install in memory and open at a click.
If, that is, you have 2.4 gigabytes of spare hard disk space, or can clear it. If not, this facility alone will be, for some people, almost worth upgrading a hard drive for. Otherwise, you can get away with 1.5GB by inserting one CD during use, or take up only 170MB if you use two.
Encyclopaedia Britannica was - and to a large extent still is - the world's greatest reference, self-education and self-improvement work for young people and grown-ups. Owning its 32 handsome book volumes, which once cost £2,000, has been a tan talisingly impossible dream for millions for 200 years.
The full installation facility makes these new editions the first plausible rivals to the exemplary Britannica.com website made free last year. Compared to the website, they are drably designed. But consulting them doesn't clock up online costs and their extra tools are invaluable.
Using the Analyst tool for work, I was able very rapidly to draw up tables comparing individual GDP, literacy and tourist revenue statistics for Maine with those of other US states and other countries. A general search told me the methods by which the artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Camille Claudel destroyed their works in grief.
My first full installation confused some background programs and hurled Windows 98 into standby mode. But Hugh on Britannica's free helpline unscrambled that. It's still not quite as satisfying as having the books - but why cry for the moon? (JE)
