*** Crowd 'oohs' at infrared demo *** Monday April 19 8:33 PM ET, By MARTHA IRVINE, AP Business Writer
Company officials say the latest test version of Windows 2000 will be distributed to companies nationwide by next month and be on the market by the end of the year. Improvements include easier ways for company employees to transfer computer documents into laptops to take on the road, Gates said. His employees also demonstrated Windows-based computers' ability to receive images and data by infrared light, rather than a hardwIRe connection - an option that brought "oohs'' from the crowd.
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*** The biggest round of applause ***
Gates: Simplified power where you want it
By David Hakala, The Daily, ZDnet, April 20/99
The biggest round of applause during Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates Monday keynote came when an insurance claims adjuster successfully imported a photo from his digital camera to his laptop by holding the camera near the computers infrared port. It sounds trivial, and it should be but users and IT managers have waited over 20 years for such simplicity.
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MR. GATES: Good morning. It's exciting to be back here in Chicago. As Eric said, the last year has been a year of incredible change. The importance of using technology in the right way has never been more clear. I think the opportunity is really quite incredible.
Now, today I wanted to spend some time updating you on these latest developments........
(several pages of transcript deleted)
So, there's one more piece of work we've got to do here. We're at the customer site, and we need to basically take a picture of some of the damage that's happened as a claims adjuster. So, what you'll notice is, it looks like someone put a golf club through theIR TV set, which is a typical scenario that we see as a claims adjuster.
So, I'm going to sneak down here and take a picture of this. Now, what I'm using is a Casio digital camera. As many of you know, with digital cameras you either have a wIRe that you have to connect into a serial port, or you have a floppy disk that you get the file from in order to transfer it to your computer.
Well, we've made this much simpler with Windows 2000 Professional. In fact, this camera is an infrared camera, so it has a little infrared port here. All I have to do is put it close to my infrared port on my PC, and transfer. And if you look at the bottom right of the screen, you'll see a little infrared pop up, and it will automatically transfer the files from the device into the PC itself. So, I didn't have to set this up, I didn't have to tell it what camera I was using, any device, you can do that automatically. It's pretty cool.
(Applause.)
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*** Here is what PC Magazine said about AIR ***
PC Magazine, January 19, 1999, By Bill Machrone
**ON IRDA-AIR**
A World Without Wires Will IRDA and Bluetooth coexist? IRDA executives concede that IRDA has been hard to use, and they have some very attractive wares to show for IRDA 2.0 (AIR): speed in the low megabits, better range, local area networking, and vastly easier setup and configuration.
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*** Here is what PC Magazine said about Bluetooth ***
*** A Wireless Entanglement.(Company Business And Marketing) ***
By Machrone, Bill, PC Magazine, March 9, 1999 / 85(1)
COPYRIGHT 1999 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company
I would like Bluetooth better if it weren't a radio-only specification. Unless the FAA reverses its longstanding ban on intentional transmitters (which I'd advise it not to do), you won't be able to use Bluetooth devices on aIRplanes. Also, there is the potential for interference that you can't see or do much about. For instance, you might not want to inhabit the offices dIRectly above or below those of PC Magazine, with its always-busy wIReless LAN. I'd be happier if the same protocols could switch seamlessly to infrared and hardwIRed communications.
ACTiSYS will shortly be detailing publicly its development of an IRDA PC Card. An announcement is also looming with regard to ACTiSYS and the AIR standard.
The Fall, will be highlighted with the release of our VfIR adapter, capable of 16M bps. The ACT-IR3000M will also be upgraded to VFIR and AIR capacities
