September 1999

Input/Feedback

The following letter refers to Tom Keating's Cc: column, “The Future Of Cable Telephony,” in the July 1999 issue of CTI�

I just wanted to add that you are giving the set-top converter too much intelligence. Yes, there will be a coaxial drop with a twisted pair in it for telephone power. This drop will split — one leg to the set-top converter for TV/VOD, and the other to a DOCSIS standard cable modem for the telephone and the computer. Pretty soon the home wiring will be Firewire or wireless to interconnect all the devices.

The wisdom of the industry has been to keep TV for video or HDTV, and to talk and surf from the computer terminal. And the set-top? It’s there to translate digital TV to analog, until we can afford digital TV sets. Web-TV, an alternative method for people who do not want to own a computer, and does not require a set-top. So, while the set-top may be good for VOD commands, it will not be usable to access the Internet.

Ernest Tunmann

The following letter refers to Tom Keating’s Cc: column, “Windows Tips To Keep Your CTI Apps Running Smoothly,” in the January 1999 issue of CTI�

Your Cc: column from January of this year mentions the Windows 98 memory leak. I’m also having that problem. To your knowledge, has there been a fix for this? Do you have any other information regarding this problem? I am certain that it must be an OS problem, because when I close all the applications after running them for a day, my 128 MB of memory is down to around 20 percent. When I fresh boot, it is at better than 70 percent. If it were an application problem, the memory would be released when the app was closed.

Jeff Stryer

Tom Keating replies:

You seem to be confusing your PC’s regular system memory (128 MB) with your PC’s “resource” memory. As my January 1999 Cc: column stated, it doesn’t matter whether you have 32 MB, 64 MB, 128 MB, or even more — every Windows 95 and 98 user has roughly the same amount of resource memory when they first boot up. When you run the resource meter under the Accessories program group, you can monitor your PC’s resources, which are broken down into System, User, and GDI resources. These three resource indicators, however, have nothing to do with your system memory. Your resources are specially allocated, and do get used up each time you run a program. Unfortunately, as I wrote in Cc:, often a program doesn’t entirely free up the allocated resources when you exit the program. This is a form of a memory leak, which I hope Microsoft will address in a future release or patch of Windows 98.