Campus Bytes! PAGE 8A TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1997
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
TECHNOLOGY • INTERNET • SOFTWARE • ONLINE ISSUES
Guest Column
E-mail accounts let users do more than just send messages
Shell users can browse the Web, have online chats, do other tasks
By David Voatch
watch@ukans.edu
University Relations Web Assistant
"I'd like to set up an e-mail account, could you show me how?"
"Yeah I'll show you, right this way..."
Yeah, I'm show you, right this way ... Having worked as a customer assistant at the KU Computer Center, I can't tell you how many times the previous scene has repeated itself. Each time I'd explain, as I led them to a computer, that the email account is actually a "shell account" on which one can do far more than just send and receive e-mail.
There are such things as e-mail accounts in which all you can do is send and receive e-mail. Many of the popular Web-based e-mail accounts fit this category. A good example of one of these types of accounts is Hotmail (www.hotmail.com/). With a Hotmail account, you can send and receive e-mail, but you can't do much else. Not as fancy as a shell account, but it serves its purpose.
"Oh, that's just a technicality — most people don't care," you might say, and you would be right. However, I'm of the opinion that people would generally be much better off if they knew the truth (maybe I've watched too many episodes of "The X-Files").
A shell account, such as what is offered on Falcon and Eagle, gives you access to far more than just email. Technically speaking, this type of account is an interface between an operating system (in our case, Unix) and you. It interprets the commands you type in order to direct the operating system to take the appropriate action.
When you log into your account, you are, in effect, opening up a window into another computer. For example, when you load up your favorite telnet program, the first thing you do is tell the program which computer you want to connect to, be it Falcon, Eagle, or a host of others.
Your program and the remote computer talk to each other, and the first thing the computer needs to know is your username and password. With this information, it knows what directory to place you in and what files to give you access to.
Once that is taken care of, you can send and receive e-mail, write papers and edit files, write and run scripts and programs, browse the Web, talk with other people online, send and receive files, and a wide variety of other tasks.
There are many types of shells with names like C, Korn, Bash, and Bourne. In some instances you can tell which shell you're using by the type of command prompt you see. For example, student account servers use the Korn shell, which has a dollar sign ($) for its command prompt. For more information, check out An Introduction to Unix Shells at farside.gsfc.nasa.gov/NCCS/misc/unix.shell.html. It can get technical, but if you're really interested, it's worth the read.
There are plenty of resources available at the University of Kansas for those interested in learning more about this and a wide variety of other related topics. If you have access to a computer that is connected to the Internet, point your browser to www.cc.ukans.edu/~acs/training/netcal.shtml for a calendar of classes offered at the Computer Center.
Calendars are also available at the Computer Center Lab and the Budig Hall lab. If you are interested in a more informal discussion setting, then you might want to check out the KU Campus Internet Association.
Point your browser to www.ukans.edu/kucia for information on the next meeting time.
A journey through tech-land
Computer Center is a silicon palace
By Daniel E. Thompson
dthompson@kansan.com
Kansan staff writer
The Computer Center is middle-aged, but there isn't a crisis, just high pressure.
The building joined the Academic Computer Center and the Office of Information Systems under one roof in 1976.
The air in the Computer Center, a two-story structure on Sunnyside Avenue, is pressured higher than the air outside. When the doors open, air and dust will rush out, not in.
But when the building was designed, keeping the roof on was one of the biggest concerns, Jerry Niebaum, director of the Computer Center, said.
Dynamite or a black-powder bomb exploded at 11:00 a.m. on Dec. 11, 1970, in the old computer center in the basement of Summerfield Hall. Three students were injured and rushed to Lawrence Memorial Hospital.
The only clue was a phone call three minutes before, when an unidentified male said, "There is a bomb set to go off in the computer room in three minutes. This is no joke."
First, if a bomb exploded, it would be harder to take the building down. Second, the building can be expanded easily by simply knocking out the walls. That is now the more likely scenario. Niebaum said one of the biggest challenges of the building was finding area for increased office
The walls in the new center are unimportant to the stability of the building. The pillars hold the weight. There is a twofold reason for this, Niebaum said.
Computers have gotten smaller," Niebaum said. "People haven't."
space.
The need for more people space means a need for more security.
Each Computer Center employee wears a card, which is part of the microcomputer-driven security system. All the cards have a bulge where a radio transmitter and battery are housed.
Next to each door is a 10-by-10-inch gray board which sends out a "challenge." Niebaum said. The card emits a response, and if the board accepts the response, the door opens.
All areas aren't accessible to those with a card, Niebaum said. Even the director gets a red light at one doorway: Niebaum can't get into the battery room.
The batteries provide the center with backup power.
Computers in the center don't take power straight from the outside. The juice comes through the wall into batteries and then to the building's outlets.
If lightning strikes a line, causing lights everywhere to flicker and alarm clocks to blink "12:00." the computer center has 39 minutes of battery power to shut down the systems properly.
Those systems aren't nearly as big as you'd think. Falcon, Eagle and Lark look like desktops in a stack.
And the mainframe, an AMDAHL machine, has 120-140 gigabytes of disk space to store everything from student enrollment to pavrolls.
A Silicon Graphics supercomputer, in racy colors with a tiny screen, is used for serious numbercrunching. It has 4 gigabytes of memory and 16 processors.
When the University of Kansas sends out its bills, they come from the Computer Center. A 4,447 square-foot warehouse on the first floor stores paper to print University enrollment forms.
"It's about a 30-hour print job for full enrollment."
This supercomputer in the Computer Center does the research processing for all of the chemistry, physics, engineering, and computer science classes. Next to the computer is Jerry Niaebau, associate vice chancellor for information services. Photo by Pam Dishman/KANSAN
Bill Pesek, manager of production services, said. The heat from the computers heats the building. In the 21 years the Computer Center has been running, the furnace has been on for fifteen minutes.
Great-looking game ruined by glitches
'Twinsen's Odyssey' is fun, fatally flawed
Kansan Webmaster
By Andrew Rohrback webmaster@kanson.com Kansan Webmaster
Software Review
If Sherwood Schwartz met Tim Burton in Play-Doh Dland, something like "Twinsen's Odyssey" might emerge.
The game begins with idyllic images: big-eyed, goofy-voiced couples smooching on park benches while a big-eyed, goofy-voiled dragon swoops overhead. But, as is the case with all of these innocent-looking role-playing games, the dark side of reality eventually emerges.
"Twinsen's Odyssey" is the sequel to "Little Big Adventure," a marvelously presented and significantly successful game starring Twinsen (surprise), who saves his planet from being blown apart by an evil scientist. The premise makes no pretense toward realism, as is expected from this genre. Fine.
The game is actually fun to play, with clever sounds and animations which can best be described as cute. At the beginning of the game, Twinsen's wife is expecting a baby and his pet dragon, Dino-Fly, gets struck by lightning. From there,
Twinsen sets out to cure the dragon, free a wizard to stop the lightning storm, learn magic and find treasure. He ends up fighting mysterious — and, I must admit, cleverly drawn — aliens from the planet Zeelich. It's a long story in between, and that's where the game has its problems.
First of all, there are reasonably significant programming problems. This game runs a little like a philosophy exam: abstract, bizarre, and fun, up until you get stuck. Quite literally. On more than one occasion, I found myself wrestling with my keyboard and mouse to get Twinsen free from rocks, walls and hillsides which
seemed solid but turned out to be just gelatinous enough to allow the character to entangle himself in them. Eventually, I had to force the program to close through Window 95's Task Manager. Bothersome.
The most significant of these problems is near the beginning of the game: on the version I tested, if you don't find the weather wizard and clear the storm before you set out to find the cure for your Dino-Fly, you end up stuck at the end of one cinematic scene. The ferry which carries you between islands apparently has no qualms about taking passengers in the rain but just couldn't forgive itself if it let you out in the downpour. Perhaps it's some kind of insurance clause.
That leads me to the other issue I had with this game. Most role-playing games are designed to be puzzling, I agree. They're supposed to challenge your mind and make you think. But "Twinsen's Odyssey" reminded me of add/drop: logic will get you nowhere. In fact, if you try to follow the obvious clues given to you by other characters, you'll wind up at a dead end. I started the game by trying to cure the Dino-Fly and got several steps into the process before I got stuck in the ferry and had to look up the walkthrough on the Internet to realize I needed to start over and find the weather wizard first. That
Twinsen's Odyssey
Manufacturer: ActiVision
graphics ★★★★☆
playability ★★
features ★★★
overall ★★★
ratings from one to five stars
System requirements
8-16 MB of RAM
Windows 95 or DOS 6.22
35 MB of hard drive space
486 DX4/100 or faster
256-color SVGA
4X CD-ROM
16-bit sound card
was frustrating, and it turns out to be one of the tragic hallmarks of "Twinsen's Odyssey": sometimes, the logical step just isn't the right one.
It's really too bad because "Twinsen's Odyssey" is a fun game. As if I didn't say so enough, it's a nice looking game, with spectacular effects and a built-in 3-D rendering engine which ran quite well on my $30 video card. The cinematic scenes are detailed and sometimes funny; the characters and voices are well-developed. It just seems like all these great pieces were hastily put together, and a huge chunk of quality was lost in the process.
We buy, sell and trade used and new computer equipment.
Computer
1525 W.6th.
Suite C
843-9922
Diabetes
paying for your supplies.
Test Strips-Monitors-Lancets-Lancing Devices
Call Express-Med now ...1-800-678-5733
*Medicare recipients must be on injectable insulin to qualify.
PRE-LAW STUDENTS
Interested in Prelaw? Send your name, KU ID number, and e-mail address to Aaron Hull at 864-2832, ahull@clasmain.clas.ukans.edu. Stop by 109 Strong Hall and set up an appointment.
Check out the Kansan's web site at www.kansan.com
---