Streets & Trips 2004
$39.95, Microsoft Corp.
Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
www.microsoft.com/Streets
No matter where you go, as the vaudeville comics used to say, there you are. And few programs can determine where you are better than Microsoft’s 2004 rendition of Streets & Trips.
Based on the company’s business-strength MapPoint software for creating maps from databases like McDonald’s nationwide franchise directory, Streets & Trips can plot business trips and spur-of-the-moment escapes with highly accurate maps.
The reports include turn-by-turn directions and information about available motels, restaurants, gas stations, ATMs and other services.
More Top Picks Best Microscopes For Students
New features for 2004 include precise locations of one-way streets, current reports of highway construction snarls and coordination with GPS receivers to find a user’s current longitude and latitude within a few yards.
An included module can transfer maps from a desktop PC to a hand-held running Microsoft’s Mobile PC operating system. One can then use GPS devices to display maps and location on a hand-held’s tiny screen. This takes a tad of jiggling because you need to set your GPS device to deliver data in the format chosen by Microsoft.
A map created for this review of Chicago and most suburbs for viewing on a hand-held consumed 3.5 megabytes and permitted drilling down to individual intersections.
Beyond charting routes, the software includes a database of hundreds of thousands of attractions, ranging from restaurants to racetracks, that permit armchair planning delights.
IOMEGA MICRO MINI
Tiny drive fits on a necklace
It started with so-called thumb drives, which are sticks about the size of one’s thumb holding memory chips and a USB plug to connect to a PC or Mac to download or upload data.
Thanks to Iomega Corp., you can call the new generation of these devices thumbnail drives.
The company’s new Micro Mini Drives–in 64 megabytes for $49.95 and 128 mb for $69.95–are locket-size data giants that fit on a key chain or necklace.
They even offer two different case colors for fashion addicts (www.iomega.com).
DEEP BLUE
Inside look at all the right moves
The $19.95 paperback of the 2002 classic “Behind Deep Blue” tells how the Asian board game of Go showed programming wizard Feng-hsiung Hsu how to build IBM’s Deep Blue, the computer that outfoxed omnipotent pawn-pusher Garry Kasparov in the celebrated 1997 human versus machine chess match.
Part Cold War autobiography, part high-tech how-to and part chess primer, “Behind Deep Blue” underscores just how vulnerable all of our jobs have become.
Available from the Princeton University Press (www.pupress.princeton.edu).