I hope everyone had a good time with our opensource discussion/examples. Of course I knew that Lynn would wind up recommending PLI or APL, but the concept is really a good one of our club 'giving back' to all those other folks who have allowed us to keep OS/2 going with new device drivers and other open source ports of programs like PMSane. We'll keep up the discussion, and look for SCOUG CD's next month with all the open source goodies on it.

Oh yes (ho, hum) the powers that be at IBM have allegedly announced (again) that OS/2 is dead. Actually, if you read the text, the announcement is what we've always known -- there are no new releases of OS/2 from IBM, but service and support will continue. Duh. After fooling around with the latest releases of Windows, I'm grateful that all we have to look forward to are bugfixes and new/updated device drivers, thank you very much. And, by the way, Microsoft has announced that they are officially killing off Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. My cynical guess is now that Windows 98 is relatively stable, they'll be killing it off soon as well...

Finally for those who didn't attend the meeting, we have been informed that Regal Lanes will be no more as of January 3, 2003. We are looking for meeting space as I write, and if you know of a good candidate, let me know. Leading contenders at the moment are another bowling alley, the Concourse, in Anaheim off of the 91 by Fry's, and the Eastside Christian School by Cal State Fullerton. Someone else has suggested the Senior Center Auditorium at Cal State Fullerton (no, that's not a comment on our membership).

There's some other exciting stuff happening: after saying that GhostScript is dead for OS/2, there's a port of GhostScript 8.0 available, as well as two postscript to pdf writers in new release. I'll be looking at them in the next month for an Ink article. Also, a birdie told me that if you have a PostScript Level 3 printer, the onboard Postscript chip is able to handle both PostScript and PDF files. In theory, this would mean that you could do something like "copy myfile.pdf prn:" and simply have the printer do the rockin' & rollin' for you. Anyone with a Level 3 printer please give this a try and let me know if it works. Thanks.

Oh yeah, if you get this article in time, MicroCentre is selling Epson C80's (Factory Refurbished) for under $90. The store on Edinger had over 100 left as of Saturday afternoon December 21st. Grab one!

Oops, out of time and space again. See you next month.

Questions, comments, ideas for any presentations, contact me at tony@scoug.com.

Copyright 2002 the Southern California OS/2 User Group. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

SCOUG, Warp Expo West, and Warpfest are trademarks of the Southern California OS/2 User Group. OS/2, Workplace Shell, and IBM are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. All other trademarks remain the property of their respective owners.