And you never hear from them again! That is, no one else in the newsgroup gets to hear how our virtual community fixed the 1-2-3 issue-only our very selfish Taker and that's it!

OK, I'll stop ranting and get where I was going. I've got some taking to do. But, at least in the spirit of newsgroup give-and-take, I'll do some giving first. In this column I'll put out my give. In my next column, I'll be doing a sort of take. Here's my give.

On the PC, have you ever saved changes to a project and later wished you hadn't because the previous version was actually better? Or have you ever received files from friends and acquaintances over the Internet in some funky format? You know, you use good olde vi, yet you're getting important documents that you must be able to read that are in Word or Excel or any of a hundred other screwy formats that you don't have the software for? And you wished you had a universal translator just so you could get at the information?

Go to: www.digitalriver.com/aladdin/jasc and they'll sell you Flashback (an auto-backup tool) and Quick View Plus (a universal file viewer that can understand more than 200 file formats) for a combined price of about $110.

How did I hear about these tools and did you just read an infomercial? Hardly. David Black of Qualis Design, a fellow chip designer I've known for years tipped me off about them. "John, thought you might be interested in this personally. I use the Macintosh version and they work." (David wrote me on this is because we both have served on the Synopsys Users Group Technical Committee for years and we'd have to review 50 to 60 papers for the conference that were in at least a dozen file formats. Frustrated, I'd constantly whine about not being able to read these papers because I was "just a simple vi user" and I'd then need them FedExed to me in hard-copy form because I couldn't read them otherwise.)

So, was this letter from David his way of being helpful? Noooooo. No, David sending me this info was his way of finally getting me to shut up. Ouch!

-John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (esnug), is a contract ASIC designer and loves hearing from engineers at jcooley@world.std.com or (508) 429-4357.