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"I took a course in speed reading and was able to read War and
Peace in 20 minutes. It's about Russia." - Woody Allen
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BBB III TTT SSS BBB Y Y TTT EEE SSS ONLINE EDITION:
B B I T S B B Y Y T E S =THE ELECTRONIC
BBB I T SSS AND BBB YYY T EEE SSS =NEWSLETTER FOR
B B I T S B B Y T E S =HIGH-TECH
BBB III T SSS BBB Y T EEE SSS =DUMPSTER DIVERS
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Volume 1, Number 12 (October 10, 1993)
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CONTENTS: =
The World at Your Fingertips -|- Microchip Wars =
Free Faxing Service -|- Virtual Nations =
Don't Believe the Hype: -|- Software for Good Health =
Two Oversold Technologies -|- The Virtual Community =
Telecommuting Benefits Business -|- Internet 101 =
AND MORE..... =
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The World at Your Fingertips
Gross and/or rapid changes in quantity can make for equally
discontinuous changes in the quality of a phenomenon, when "emergent
behaviors" kick in. When you can transfer the Library of Congress from
one place to another in under a minute, the very notion of what it
means to have a place called the Library of Congress changes. As it
goes digital, that place in Washington, D.C., is virtualizing. I can
already get the Library of Congress catalog from my desktop. When I
can download the source text itself to my desktop, my sense of where
that information resides changes. It's at the other end of my modem
line, along with the rest of the Net, which means it is more or less
on my desktop. (Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community, p. 79. See
B&B Bookshelf for more information)
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That's a Nice Macro You Wrote. Too Bad Lotus Now Owns It.
"What set me off is the recent ruling in the Lotus-Borland lawsuit
that found Quattro Pro's macro key reader a violation of Lotus'
intellectual property rights because it allows Quattro Pro to execute
1-2-3 macros. That ruling finally brought home to me the underlying
nature of these lawsuits. The party whose intellectual property rights
are being violated here is not a software vendor at all, but the
user -- you and me."
"Think about it. You, as a user of 1-2-3, may have developed a number
of macros over the years for your organization that are part of the
way you do business. They're your macros, your intellectual property,
not Lotus'. The Lotus position (if you'll pardon the expression) is
that if you decide another spreadsheet program offers you something
that 1-2-3 doesn't, you shouldn't be able to run those macros on it.
You must rewrite them to run on the new program."
. . .
"Yet a user's ability to work more quickly with the familiar slash
commands is due again to your efforts, not Lotus'. Nothing was
terribly innovative about the slash command interface over many other
programs that existed when 1-2-3's was introduced; WordStar had
already proven the basic concept. What made 1-2-3's command interface
worth cloning was the skill 1-2-3 users had developed with it over
the years. Shouldn't that be considered the user's intellectual
property, too?"
. . .
"So what do we do about it? It's clear that the patent and copyright
laws are a complete anachronism for this industry. Waiting for
inspired legislation to clear up the mess is a pipe dream. And,
judging by this latest ruling, hoping for precedent-setting wisdom in
the interpretation of the laws is probably just as futile."
"The only time you get to be judge and jury of these vendors is when
you buy products, so it might be wise to take a company's track record
on these issues into account at that time. It's probably not relevant
now to worry about Lotus' behavior when buying your next spreadsheet,
as they've already lost a lot of their leadership position there. But
what about Notes? How much of your company's energies should be put
into a development environment whose publisher, on precedent at least,
will try to keep it closed? It would be an interesting question to
put to your Lotus sales representative."
(Excerpts from an editorial in Infoworld by Ed Foster (8/23/93, p.45)
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Chip Wars
What we now call platforms won't matter much in the future. When PC
horsepower becomes virtually unlimited, specific operating
environments won't matter; all that power will allow us to emulate
any operating system and still get speedy results. We will, at long
last, focus on the applications and tools that can help us do our
jobs. We won't have to settle for a computing environment that offers
the best compromise. You've probably seen the Power PC ads. The focus
has been on the relatively low cost of the new MPC601 processor, the
first product of the IBM-Apple-Motorola alliance. The price is
impressive: roughly half the cost of Intel's Pentium chip with better
overall performance, according to benchmarks I've seen. So you get
the muscle of a Pentium at the price of a 486DX. And this is the
least powerful of the Power PC family. ... But this is just the
beginning. Companies such as Insignia Solutions will provide Windows
emulation on the Power PC, and IBM is said to be working on an 80X86
emulator as well. Apple, as part of the Power PC consortium, will
offer Macintosh emulation. In fact systems based on the Power PC will
give users the choice of character-based Unix, OSF Motif, Windows 3.1,
and the Macintosh Finder as interface choices, with the ability to
switch from one to the other and to exchange data among these
environments. ... Still, we started with the notion that there was a
business advantage to desktop system environment transparency, not
just the option to play Stupid Computer Tricks. That advantage will
come with the ability to select the best tools for the job, regardless
of underlying operating systems. That will mean additional user
training and technical support-but it's beginning to look like it will
be worth the effort. (Excerpted from "Fast Chips: The Great
Equalizers" by Richard Dalton. Information Week, 8/2/93, p. 51)
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Don't Believe the Hype I: Whither Wireless Computing?
Cutting all these cords and cables is exciting, but it isn't
inevitable. The truth about wireless computing is that it isn't going
to pan out. Simply put, there aren't enough megahertz to go around out
there in our increasingly polluted electromagnetic ether. It is an
ecologically unsound waste of energy to broadcast bits in all
directions when they need to be received in only one. The ether is too
scarce to be wasted on nonbroadcast communications, and it won't be.
. . .
Need more reasons why wireless won't become widespread? There are the
privacy challenges of wide-area data broadcasting, which you'll
encounter as you demonstrate that you care. What about standards for
wireless computer networking, which will settle down right after ISDN,
HDTV, PCMCIA, and ATM are resolved. Consider governments around the
world reallocating spectrum for use by wireless computer networks,
which they will right after whale hunting is stopped. And there are
the health risks of prolonged exposure to increasing levels of higher
frequency electromagnetic radiations, which I hope are nil. And
finally, what about the vast amounts of money needed for building
wireless networking infrastructure, which will be raised right after
The Deficit is eliminated?
. . .
Is it any wonder then, that the TV industry, which has relied on
broadcast radio for most of its history, is in a full-swing switch to
cable? Increasingly we will switch data via fiber networks instead of
broadcasting it via radio.
And in case you're not upset yet, there's this angle: If half the
world's problems are caused by having too many people, the other half
are caused by all of us wanting to move around so much -- from home to
work, from work to our customer's work, from our picturesque hometowns
to identical airports, hotels, and tourist traps around the world. So
let's just wire up our homes and stay there. (Excerpted from "Wireless
computing will flop -- permanently" by Bob Metcalfe, InfoWorld
8/16/93, p. 48)
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NEW PRODUCTS AND SERVICES:
+COLOR WORD PROCESSOR. In Japan, NEC will release a dedicated word
processor that comes equipped with both a color LCD screen and a color
printer. The device has a supertwist nematic (STN) color display with
a resolution of 640 x 400 pixels. The printer uses a four color
ribbon, so users will be able to print documents in full color. The
machine includes programs for doing illustrations and graphics, as
well as regular word processing. A proprietary color scanner is also
available. (SOURCE: Newsbytes, 9/30/93)
+EMPLOYMENT DATABASE. Forty leading U.S. corporations have formed a
nonprofit employer association to develop and manage a national
public-access database on Internet for recruiting, outplacement,
career assistance, and communications. The database includes job
listings and full-text resume files with online keyword search to
assist both employers and individuals seeking employment. For info:
contact occ-info@mail.msen.com. (SOURCE: EDUPAGE)
+WABI INTERFACE. Sun Microsystems recently announced the final version
of its Windows Application Binary Interface. WABI will allow Unix
systems from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Novell and Sun to run Windows
applications on their systems. (SOURCE: Computerworld 9/20/93, p. 16)
+FREE FAXING. Chaos Corner (see administrivia section) reports that
Internet Fax services are being set up to provide the capability to
send free faxes to certain areas. People wanting to sign up to provide
the service can limit the area that they serve to just the local
community. For a current list of the areas served, send electronic
mail to tpc-coverage@town.hall.org and write to tpc-faq@town.hall.org
for more information. (SOURCE: Chaos Corner V03 N06 8 October 1993)
+HEALTH INFO ON DISK. Pixel Perfect Software Co. has released a floppy
disk that helps them diagnose their ailments at home, and gives
detailed information and a video on complex surgical procedures. The
program, which has been under development for five years, provides
diagnoses through an interactive process, and explains treatment for
over 600 diseases and 150 injuries. A multimedia version is planned
for next year. (ACCESS: Pixel Perfect Software: 407/779-0310) (SOURCE:
Miami Herald 10/5/93 B2, EDUPAGE)
+MOVIES FOR BUTTON-PUSHERS. The months ahead will bring video games
with characters played by live actors. For example, Sylvester
Stallone spent two days filming special footage that will be combined
with computer graphics in a video game due in the spring. (SOURCE: New
York Times 10/3/93 Section 2 p. 1, EDUPAGE)
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Don't Believe the Hype II: Desktop Video Teleconferencing
Another emerging technology that may not be ready for prime time is
desktop video conferencing. Ron Wilson, writing in OEM magazine, says
the technology promises a lot: all users need to do is drop in some
video cards and a little new software. But the reality is that desktop
computers can't handle the task, Ethernet networks can't handle the
data rates, and capable servers don't yet exist.
(SOURCE: Ron Wilson, "The Other Video Conferencing," OEM Magazine,
October 1993, quoted in Information Week)
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Object Orientation
Q: What about programmer retraining in object technology? Doesn't that
present a fairly steep learning curve for most IS organizations?
A: It's very analogous to the time when people programmed in
Assembly language. They had to then learn Fortran or Cobol as a higher
level language, and there's definitely training involved. But once you
go through that, the productivity increase is tremendous.
It takes a while to 'get it' with object oriented programming [OOP].
You can take someone from the procedural world and teach them OOP, but
the first programs they write will still look and feel procedural in
style. Yon won't get the benefits of the higher level language until
you make the mind shift.
Q: Is there a simple way to envision that mind shift?
A: Imagine that you're cooking a cake. You can make It from scratch,
from a recipe, by assembling a list of ingredients and following the
directions step by step. That's procedural programming.
In the object-oriented world, you don't think about cooking as a
sequence of steps. You think about it as a package of cake mix, a cup
of water, a bowl and an oven. It seems to be pretty obvious what you
do with those elements.
(from an interview with Guy "Bud" Tribble, VP of end user software at
SunSoft, Inc., which appeared in Computerworld, 8/11/93, p.48)
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Virtual Nations
"In two years, there will be more network users than residents of any
state in the United States. In five years there will be more network
users than citizens of any single country except India or China. What
will happen when McLuhan's global village becomes one of the largest
countries in the world? Using two-way communications, not broadcast?
And crossing boundaries of space, time, and politics?"
(John Quartermain, "How Big is the Matrix," Matrix News 2, no. 2,
quoted in The Virtual Community (see B&B Bookshelf)
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ACCESS: Internet 101
The Internet has reached a crucial juncture in its 20 year history. It
is experiencing an amazing spurt of growth, estimated at 10% monthly
-- when you have an estimated 5-10 million users worldwide, a 10%
monthly growth rate seves up some dizzying numbers. The pressure is
increasingly on to turn the internet over to be managed by the private
sector. To some degree this is already happening. Whereas previously
the internet has been a medium for researchers, scientists, and
academicians, nowadays the business segment of the internet is the
fastest growing one. Not everyone is thrilled with this state of
affairs, but the facts are stubborn things, and these new users (I
guess I'm one of them) are not going away. Business and private
citizens in growing numbers are realizing the benefits of being able
to tie into a network that enables them to communicate with people
around the world and to tap into huge amounts of online information
and resources.
But it's not exactly easy to navigate these waters: the Internet is
not a unified whole, but an amazing patchwork quilt of networks that
have agreed on a set of standards that (under ideal circumstances)
allow everyone to talk to everyone else. Finding a given piece of
information in this vast sea of possibility is more of an art than a
science. Tools do exist to help find and retrieve a given document or
program, and more are being developed and refined. You might have
heard of some of them: archie, gopher, veronica, WAIS (Wide Area
Information Search), WWW (World Wide Web), USENET, IRC, FTP (File
Transfer Protocol), and telnet. But for someone just starting out it
can all seem a little intimidating.
Fortunately, there is help available. There has been an explosion of
beginner's books on the internet recently -- all part of the newfound
interest in the online world and interactive media. I was ready to
print a list of these books, but when I went to the bookstore, I found
half a dozen titles have been added in recent months; clearly a little
more research is in order. In the meantime, here is a list of three