CBMIGSTR.RVW   961019
 
"Focus on the Future: Migration Strategies for Emerging Technologies",
Bellcore, 1996, 1-57305-084-9, U$695.00
%A   Bellcore
%C   Room 3A184, 8 Corporate Place, Piscataway, NJ   08854
%D   1996
%G   1-57305-084-9
%I   Bellcore
%O   U$695.00 +1-800-521-CORE +1-908-699-5800 fax: +1-908-336-2559
%O   llavoie@notes.cc.bellcore.com mgordon2@notes.cc.bellcore.com
%T   "Focus on the Future: Migration Strategies for Emerging Technologies"
 
Bellcore must have great plans for this one.  Juan kept calling and asking if I
had had time to review it yet, implying that I needed the "exposure" such a
review would provide.  Well, Juan, let this be a salutary lesson on what
happens when you bug reviewers and your product is mediocre.  I don't think
either of us are going to get any benefit out of this "exposure".
 
First, while it does warn you that it needs twenty-seven megabytes of disk
space (I was able to fill out two pages of a densely packed questionnaire and
still get halfway into the "Scientific American" before it was done loading),
it doesn't say anything about the requirement for a 256 colour driver, which
sent me scurrying around for old system disks.
 
Once I got it running, it was pig slow.  Now, I don't have an absolutely state
of the art machine for testing, but it's still fairly common.  The program lost
track of itself several times on the way through, lost track of where I had
been in the program (frequently), occasionally entered strange graphics modes,
failed to respond to selections (incidentally, the "Return" and "Enter" keys
are not handled identically), and finally crashed the machine.  (When I
restarted, it had lost all data about how much of the "training" I had already
been through.)
 
It would be wrong to say that this program is a page turner.  Instead, it is a
page turner through a complex and twisty little maze of mini-lessons.  After a
while they all begin to look alike.  It's almost like an adventure game, in
that you are never sure, when you click on one of the mandatory (and, oh yes!
they are mandatory) links, whether you will find a single page, and then return
to where you started, or go off through another huge subsection.
 
All of which is probably beside the point, since the important thing is the
information.  There are four parts to the program.  Two are sales brochures for
advanced telephone services.  One is an extremely simplistic guide to planning. 
The last module allows you to develop a plan--for the Westville County phone
network.
 
(By the way, when it comes time to deinstall the program, Bellcore cheerfully
states that all you have to do is delete the files.  What they don't tell you
is that all the files were made read-only when they were installed.  You
remember where you put ATTRIB, don't you?)
 
copyright Robert M. Slade, 1996   CBMIGSTR.RVW   961019

======================
ROBERTS@decus.ca      rslade@vanisl.decus.ca      Rob_Slade@mindlink.bc.ca
    The client interface is the boundary of trustworthiness - T. Buckland
Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" 0-387-94663-2 (800-SPRINGER)