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[RRE]NewsScan DAILY, 20 April 1999
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Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 10:20:26 -0700
From: "NewsScan"
NewsScan DAILY, 20 April 1999
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NewsScan Daily is a 5-day-a-week summary of significant information technology news, prepared as a FREE service by NewsScan Inc. http://www.NewsScan.com/
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WE'RE BACK! And from now on we'll be with you five times a week with our patented secret formula for accuracy, brevity, and getting to the point. (And, yes, we'll be continuing our Honorary Subscriber series!) Thank you for subscribing with us ... and please urge ALL of your friends to follow your good example. Here are some things you might want to know about today:
"ABOVE THE FOLD" Web Sites To Comply With ADA Requirements NBC, Intel Ink Deal On HDTV China Falls Short On Y2K Fix Supremes Uphold Law Barring Indecent Speech Online What Does Compaq Want To Be When It Grows Up? Tech Stocks Dive: Are Virtual Investments Getting Real? New Mouse Needs No Mouse Pad
FEATURES Honorary Subscriber: Jonathan Swift (who was no yahoo!) Question Time: The History of Our Honorary Subscriber Feature Book Excerpt: Ray Kurzweil, "The Age of Spiritual Machines"
WEB SITES TO COMPLY WITH ADA REQUIREMENTS Web sites doing business with the government will need to comply with standards to be set next month that will make the sites more accessible for people with disabilities. For instance, sites that make heavy use of graphics will need to adjust to accommodate those with visual impairments, and audio content will need to be accompanied by text for those with hearing loss. (Investor's Business Daily 20 Apr 99) http://www.investors.com/
NBC, INTEL INK DEAL ON HDTV NBC and Intel have signed a multiyear pact to collaborate on making high-definition television programming available to viewers with appropriate equipment -- either a PC with a digital TV function, a digital television set, or a set-top box that can tune in digital signals. Intel will license its software, tools and applications to create and insert interactive features into NBC's existing programming. Viewers will be able to check an electronic program guide, chat online with other viewers, send e-mail greeting cards or take interactive quizzes. U.S. television networks are scheduled to begin broadcasting HDTV signals to 30 cities by the end of the year. (Reuters 20 Apr 99) http://www.infoseek.com/reuters/
CHINA FALLS SHORT ON Y2K FIX China's Ministry of Information Industry reports that although industries are making an effort in resolving the Y2K glitch, not all agencies are cooperating, and funding for completing the project is lacking. Zhang Qi, who is coordinating government efforts to bring computers into Year 2000 compliance, says foreign experts estimate it will cost as much as $600 billion to fix China's millennium bug problems. She reports that at this point, two-thirds of the national power network and 60% of telecommunications systems have been modified. The banking sector has made the most progress, after spending $605 million to upgrade its computer hardware and software applications. (AP 20 Apr 99) http://www.msnbc.com/news/260818.asp
SUPREMES UPHOLD LAW BARRING INDECENT SPEECH ONLINE The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a lower court ruling that affirmed the constitutionality of a provision of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that makes it a crime to transmit a "communication which is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy or indecent with intent to annoy, abuse, threat or harass another person." The provision had been challenged by a San Francisco company that had developed the "annoy.com" Web site to let people send anonymous (and allegedly "indecent") messages to public officials. (AP 19 Apr 99) http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/cte912.htm
WHAT DOES COMPAQ WANT TO BE WHEN IT GROWS UP? Having dumped Eckhard Pfeiffer after almost nine years as its chief executive officer, Compaq now faces the challenge of reconciling conflicting strategies that have been pulling it in opposite directions: a direct-sales strategy (meant to help it compete against Dell and Gateway, both of which build custom machines to-order, thereby avoiding dealer markups and high inventories), and a system-integration strategy (meant to help it compete against IBM and Hewlett-Packard as a major systems company). The management consultant Regis McKenna says, "They're caught between the low end and the high end, and that's why you see them constantly changing their mind. The first thing they have to do is figure out what they want to be when they grow up." (New York Times 20 April 99) http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/04/biztech/articles/20compaq.html
TECH STOCKS DIVE: ARE VIRTUAL INVESTMENTS GETTING REAL? Internet and other technology stocks were hit hard on Monday, apparently because investors have decided that they are grossly overvalued. Industry investment strategist Byron R. Wien says, "This kind of sharp and dramatic reversal is not just business as usual. There's a message here. The message is that everything began to sell off from sheer exhaustion." But the generally bad news doesn't seem to have affected online magazine Salon.com's plans for a $34 million initial public offering over the Internet. Ron Rappaport of Zona Research says: "Salon has built up a fairly well-known community. That's one of those hot 'buzzwords de jour,' and probably will continue to be for some time. Customer acquisition is difficult; customer retention is key. They've got the community there, they just need to tap into it from an e-commerce perspective." (San Jose Mercury News 19/20 Apr 99) http://www.sjmercury.com/svtech/news/indepth/docs/market042099.htm http://www.sjmercury.com/svtech/news/breaking/merc/docs/028874.htm
NEW MOUSE NEEDS NO MOUSE PAD Microsoft has developed a new mouse device that uses optical electronics in place of the mechanical mouse ball that rolls along a mouse pad to move the cursor around the screen. A digital signal processor uses images captured through a small lens on the bottom of the device to determine which direction the mouse is moving. Microsoft says the device works on almost any surface, including wood, paper or cloth, but is not useable on desktops made of glass or highly polished marble. The new mouse devices are expected to be on the market in September, priced between $55 and $75. (Wall Street Journal 19 Apr 99) http://www.wsj.com/
HONORARY SUBSCRIBER Today's Honorary Subscriber is Dublin-born Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), the Irish writer and Anglican cleric who invented the word "yahoo," a word he used in "Gulliver's Travels" to designate a class of animals that have the forms of men but the low intelligence and vulgar passions of the lower brutes; thus, the word "yahoo" in any sense other than its new use by Yahoo.com essentially means "a boorish or stupid person." So if someone calls you a yahoo, be sure to ask whether the person using the word is referring to your use of yahoo.com or to some deficiencies in your intelligence or behavior. Swift's most famous work, "Gulliver's Travel," is definitely not a children's book, though it is usually treated that way in film and television versions. It is a bitter allegory describing Master Lemuel Gulliver's travels to strange new lands, including one inhabited by giants, one by tiny thumb-sized people; and one by intelligent horses (which both Gulliver and the misanthropic Swift considered intellectually and morally superior to humans). However, despite its harsh point of view, "Gulliver's Travel's" is a quite funny book. Swift's other works include "The Tale of a Tub" (an attack on the corruption of religion and learning) and the dark satire "A Modest Proposal" (in which he pretended to propose that the children of the poor should be eaten, to improve the country's economic problems). In 1738 his mind began to fail, perhaps caused partly by his horror of the world as he saw it.
QUESTION TIME
" I've always love reading about your Honorary Subscribers! What's the
history behind that feature?"
We started naming Honorary Subscribers a number of years ago, at a time
when the list-subscription process required a new subscriber's full name.
To avoid having to use geeky instructions like "Type the words 'Subscribe
WORTH THINKING ABOUT In a new book called "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence" (Viking), Ray Kurzweil looks into the future to consider a world in which the difference between man and machine begins to blur. (Kurzweil created the Kurzweil Reading Machine and the Kurzweil Synthesizer, and is a pioneer in the development of advanced speech recognition; he holds nine honorary doctorates and numerous science awards.) Here's a brief excerpt from the book: "It is reasonable to estimate that a $1,000 personal computer will match the computing speed and capacity of the human brain by around the year 2020, particularly for the neuron-connection calculation, which appears to comprise the bulk of the computation in the human brain." Subsequently: "Our thinking machines will improve the cost performance of their computing by a factor of two every twelve months. That means that the capacity of computing will double ten times every decade, which is a factor of one thousand (2 to the 10th power) every ten years. So your personal computer will be able to simulate the brain power of a small village by the year 2030, the entire population of the United States by 2048, and a trillion human brains by 2060. If we estimate the human Earth population at 10 billion persons, one penny's worth of computing circa 2099 will have a billion times greater computing capacity than all humans on Earth."
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http://www.newsscan.com/, and send us mail: John Gehl
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