INTERNET 201

P> The fast and furious wave of new resources populating the Internet makes it look like the bacteria now run the biotech lab. Here's a potpourri of new/improved and valuable resources/tools that have recently made an appearance.

Netscape Navigator Gold 2.0 Beta 1

ftp://ftp1.netscape.com/Gold/

The reference is Navigator Gold 2.0 or Netscape Navigator Gold Version 2.0GoldB1. Whatever you call it, this program now qualifies for my Death by a Thousand Qualifications Award.

It introduces editing to the browser environment and includes a pen icon on the tool bar. Once you spawn the editor, watch out! I accidentally shut down the program three times before figuring out how to use it. Is this a useful feature? I'm not sure. With the wealth of HTML editors already on the scene, I tend to believe not. But, of course, I thought Netscape stock would be in the teens by now. The history of the market shows that many stocks make major moves just before a split; after the split, they look like deep-sea divers searching for the bottom of Mariana's Trench.

Free Acrobat Reader Software for Windows

http://www.adobe.com/Amber/Download.html

This package is a prerelease for Windows 95 and NT. Updated last month, the self-extracting executable is 2 Mb. Why get it? Because more and more *.pdf files (Adobe's portable document format), including newsletters and fiction, are coming on the Internet. For an example, see the premiere issue of The Internet Teacher: The Internet teaching resource for the desk-top classroom. For information and qualifications, send e-mail to either raustin@unlinfo. unl.edu or yam@regulus.com. Ask for Internet Teacher Vol. 1/No.1.

WhoWhere?

http://www.whowhere.com/

Here's a slick e-mail white page database for finding people and organizations. It features a simple user interface and detailed, ranked results. It claims to have more than 2 million listings. The claim needs a bit of salt: searching on my name yielded "7 highly relevant matches."

Alta Vista

http://www.altavista.digital.com/

An offering from Digital Equipment Corp., Maynard, Mass., this search engine carries forward the grand tradition of Internet self-aggrandizing prose: "THE LARGEST WEB INDEX: find out what the other indexes missed. You have access to all 8 billion words found in over 16 million Web pages."

It sports a very nice feature: a full-text index of more than 13,000 newsgroups updated in real-time. Digital just announced an upgrade to 6 Gb of RAM. Whoa, Nellie! While there, you may want to download the demo of MediaWrangler (http://www.altavista.com/altavista/html/mwrangle/mwover.html), a multimedia tool and Web editor in one.

The Federal Marketplace

Update: http://www.fedmarket.com/

If you believe in buying straw hats in winter, you'll want to visit The Federal Marketplace. Included in the goodies are an on-line active federal contracts database, federal contractors database, Federal Acquisition Regulation and Cost Accounting Standards -- all searchable. For Netscape users, there are the requisite frames.

John Makulowich writes, talks and trains on the Internet. E-mail your tips to john@trainer.com; place the word "tips" in the subject line. His home page is http://www.cais.com/makulow/ or http://www.trainer.com/pub/journalism/