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Tuesday, May 11
Did you hear the one about the Irishman, the cat, and the
lesbian? Brokerage house Edward Jones fired twenty-five
employees for what it termed email
abuse. At least some of the abuse consisted of sending
off-color jokes on the corporate email system.
Check out Yahoo! Life's annual list of the 100
Most Wired Cities and 100
Most Wired Colleges.
James Poniewozik's "Knee
Jerk Mafia" is the most intelligent piece yet on the
Littleton, Colorado shootings and the media fixation with
the shooters' use of the Internet:
In our broadly but shallowly religious
society, there are two people we distrust intensely, the
atheist and the deeply religious, and we've applied the
same principle to technology. The Heaven's Gate cultists
were seen as somehow dangerous not just because they made
a suicide pact but because they designed Web pages; Ted
Kaczynski was crazy not just because he blew people up
but because he spurned technology.
Steve Jobs announced Mac
OS 8.6 and the new
DVD-equipped Apple PowerBook G3s running at 333 and 400
MHz. OS 8.6 is a free upgrade for 8.5. MacFixIt is covering
OS
8.6 issues and troubleshooting. For PowerBook coverage,
check O'Grady's
PowerPage.
MP3
Last week RCA announced Lyra,
a US$150 personal MP3 player with 32 megabytes of memory.
The new kid on the block this week is the ZipMan,
a US$99 MP3 player. The base model has just 16 megabytes of
memory, but is expandable up to 64 megabytes.
Meanwhile, the MacPower
Peripherals MP3-ROM plays MP3-encoded CD-ROMs, which
hold up to 650 megabytes of music. Of course, any computer
CD-ROM can do that with the appropriate software. What makes
the MP3-ROM unique is that it doesn't need the computer.
It's a stand-alone device. Suggested retail is US$249.
Friday, May 14
Sega has decided
to include 56K modems in all Sega Dreamcast game/Internet
consoles as part of the standard $199 package. Dreamcast
games will support multiplayer action across the Internet.
Sean Gallagher's "DSL
Stands for Driveway Site Liaison" points to one of the
problems with DSL: that the phone company may not be
motivated to fix a problem with your DSL line, because
someone else is making all of the money from the Internet
service. This is already a problem with traditional modems
and traditional telephone service. It may soon be a problem
with cable modems, should Congress pass a proposed bill to
allow third parties to provide Internet access through
existing cable networks.
Ascend Chief Technology Officer Jeanette Symons believes
it will be five
years before voice/data networks offer the reliability
and quality of current voice networks.
Is there such a thing as a growing shortage? News.com
reports on the dwindling supply of IP addresses, the numbers
used by every device on the Internet. The shortage is being
exacerbated by the growing number of Internet users and the
adoption of DSL and cable modems. When Most analog modem
users connect to the Internet they are assigned an IP
address, which can then be used by the next person dialing
in. An ISP may need just one IP address per ten users. With
DSL and cable modems, the modems are connected to the
Internet continuously, so each user requires an IP address.
AOL plans to become a player in the set-top box business
as AOL TV, striking
deals with set-top box makers and DirecTV.
Hack
a computer and win a prize. That's the message at
InfoSecurity '99 being held in Singapore next month. There's
a US$10,000 prize for breaking into one of two servers whose
IP addresses are being given out. In other hacking news,
hackers
hacked the White House web site.
eBay is converging two of my favorite technologies:
online auctions and paging. Beginning
this July, eBay members can be notified by pager when
they have been outbid, when they have won an auction, or
when their item has sold.
After Tuesday's news, people wrote in that they hadn't
heard the one about the Irishman, the cat, and the lesbian,
so here it is.
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