In the news of business and technology

Busy Techie (ronks) Fri Sep 22 '00 (08:29) 18 lines Small Shops Succeeding On The Net A recent study (oh boy, more statistics) of small businesses in downtown commercial districts of older cities by the National Trust For Historic Preservation shows that mom-and-pop retailers are benefiting from web sales more than expected, and in many cases more than pure e-tailers. The survey is not ideal because it focused on smaller cities where some downtown revitalization was underway, so it might be skewed toward the optimistic, but the findings are interesting nonetheless. About a sixth of the stores polled were making sales over the Internet, on average one-seventh of their sales volume. In-store sales were mostly flat, so their gains just about equaled their web sales. Many of the stores are in niche markets like prom dresses (timeforprom.com in Thomasville GA) or old movie soundtracks (www.bsmusic.com in Montpelier VT) for whom the global exposure has been significant. And with Amazon.com's network of alliances to small businesses called zShops, the appearance of such stores on the Net is expected to grow.

Internet Ad Companies, And Their Revenue, Shrink DoubleClick let go over 150 employees, or about 7% of its staff, this week; 24/7 Media dumped 200 last month and Engage will boot 175. DoubleClick's share price sank from $135 earlier this year to $12, while 24/7 went from $65 to $1.28 and Engage slid from $95 to $1.72. Analysts say the falloff in revenue is not just due to Internet merchants but includes traditional advertisers as well. Even the good news in a report by AdRelevance which says the number of retailers advertising on the Net quadrupled this year was tempered by the remarkable statistic that the median number of times each ad was seen dropped from 130,000 last year to 23,000. (I used to think it was just a coincidence that my spell-checker keeps trying to change "dot-coms" to "dot-comas"; now I wonder.) . - ronks

Creditors', Customers' Rights Conflict In Dot-com Bankruptcies If an online business promises never to sell information on its clients and then goes under, does the bankruptcy court have the right to treat its customer list as an asset to be sold? Yes but, seems to be the emerging answer from a number of cases to date. Creditors of the defunct toysmart.com site reached an agreement with the FTC, state AGs, and consumer advocates that any buyer "must be in a related business, must purchase the entire Web site, and must agree not to resell the data without the customers' permission". This is not a binding precedent, but it may point the way toward future compromises; in the toysmart.com example it's not gone to court because so far no buyers have appeared. Living.com, another e-flop, has sold its customer data to Martha Stewart and to direct marketer Maxwell Sroge (I wonder if he has a partner named Marley), with customers theoretically given the right to "opt out". While customer lists are regularly bought and sold in the offline world of merchandising, there seems to be a much greater resistance to allowing the practice among e-businesses. With Red Ink, A Nice Cabernet A Santa Barbara winery called SecretCellars.com is offering a bottle of 1996 cabernet sauvignon (which they modestly value at $1500) to "the person who in 100 words or less writes the saddest tale of an Internet firm gone sour". The deadline is December 13, and so far 2300 entries have been received. My favorite is the web designer who works now as an attendant at Bowl-0-Rama. The winery's CEO says she is not trying to reap a benefit from others' misfortunes, asserting that "I am not capitalizing on these poor schmucks who couldn't figure out that spending money on company picnics was not the way." Such compassion... Another e-business, findwhat.com, offers free advertising to any dot-com with less than $1 million in cash and still losing money, or who has announced layoffs and not raised any new funds. They say they have received about 50 applications so far, but turned most down for failure to meet the rules. Findwhat itself, with a stock price at $1 down from $18 nine months ago, may be eligible; they might even win the wine bottle. - ronks

Covad Cuts The Internet service provider will lay off about an eighth of its staff to cut costs. They are also canceling the construction of a third operations center planned for Georgia. Dot-Coms Cut Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray, & Christmas released its figures on jobs eliminated at Internet companies this year, totaling about 30,000 so far. Month Jobs Cut Jan 300 Feb 100 March 25 April 400 May 2400 June 1800 July 2100 Aug 4200 Sept 4800 Oct 5800 Nov 8800 (so far) Discover Offers Single-Use Account Number As a security feature akin to a single-use password, Discover cardholders may soon be able to buy over the Internet using an account number good for only a single transaction. The "Discovery Deskshop" service is said to resemble Amex's "Private Payments" disposable-number system introduced earlier this fall. - ronks

More of ronks stuff, he sure provides some good tech news. More L&H Woes A report commissioned by the audit committee of Belgian speech-recognition software maker Lernout & Hauspie says a pervasive disregard of the rules led to (among other things) overstating revenue by $277 million in the last 30 months. Besides recording sales before they had a contract, the company also sometimes attached secret side letters to a contract which changed the terms. The primary culprits were the US and South Korea offices and Belgian HQ, including the two founders. Criminal prosecution is a possibility. Sharps and Flats The Sharp Corporation says it will offer a 20-inch flat-screen TV for about $1960 next year, starting in Japan. Travel Web Sites A column for the business traveler lists some interesting and potentially useful Web sites: includes a clickable "Real-Time Airport Status" map showing reported airport-level delays. includes a "Flight Tracker" with flight status by airline and number, including prospective arrival time if it's in the air. has maps of airline terminals around the world, with info on gate locations and ground transportation. And lists the three-letter airport codes and relates them to their cities.

ronks: And the year after Chad... Free ISP Era Ends NetZero, Juno, and Bluelight have all dropped their policies of unlimited Web access for everyone - everyone willing to endure a torrent of on-screen advertising, that is. Caps on the number of hours per month, or charges for usage beyond a fixed amount, and tiered pricing have replaced the all-you- can-eat model, for two main reasons. One is the problem of a minority of users who consume a disproportionate percentage of the ISPs' resources, with some "using the service to run their business" according to Bluelight's CEO; the other is a sharp decline in online advertising revenues that supported the ISPs' business model. With 3.7 million active users between Juno and NetZero, the companies are likely to stay around, but most likely with a tiered pricing model, perhaps allowing low-volume users free access and charging for a premium service with fewer ads and no limits. Weight-Loss Gizmos Sprout At New Year As sure as there are new year's resolutions, there will be inventions to help achieve them with minimal effort. In the current crop: A Wisconsin man received patent 6,024,678 for a non-electric vacuum cleaner and exercise machine. You strap a tank on your back and attach special shoes with bellows and springs, that are attached to the tank with tubes. When you walk, or dance, or hop or whatever, the action of the bellows sucks dirt from foot level up to the tank. It is "nearly silent during operation" except for puffing and grunting sounds of the operator. Three guys from Montana got patent 6,042,508 for a dumbbell that is also a TV-VCR remote, to deal with the situation in which "valuable exercise time is lost" while changing channels. Evidently it differs from a remote taped to a brick in some way that makes it new. A New York woman has invented a stairstep machine you can use in the shower. And Yoshikata Yamamoto of Japan received patent 6,118,064 for "a karaoke machine that can calculate and announce how many calories have been consumed for each song." It can be set to total an entire evening's warbles, or individual songs. However, it should probably not be used while vacuuming in the shower.

More hot items from the awesome ronks More Bits On The Way According to a study at UC Berkeley, people and computers will create more data in the next three years than in the preceding 300,000. Admittedly, the study was sponsored by data storage company EMC, and the definition of data is unclear (remember Thoreau's observation "Much is published, little printed"). What is the resolution of a cave painting, anyway? EMC itself opines that storage expenses will amount to 70 percent of IT department budgets by 2005, and that the volume it will be able to fit into "shoebox- size devices" by then (though they don't say how many boxes or what size shoes) would in the 1950's have required "an area the size of Argentina". SDMI Hacked By Princeton Prof; Sshhh... Edward Felten, a witness at the Microsoft trial, accepted a music industry challenge to defeat the technology used in the Secure Music Digital Initiative, and he says he and his colleagues have succeeded. But he can't say how, because the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it a crime to "offer to the public" a means of evading such security algorithms. So you'll just have to take his word for it. Another Aggregator Packs It In MobShop is getting out of consumer group buying, to focus solely on B2B. With its announcement continues the rout that led Mercata, Priceline, and LetsBuyIt to fold. An analyst observes of the carnage "Consumers never warmed to the aggregated buy concept; what was missing was a better sense of affiliation, like group buying for Harley riders." I wonder if cheapbeer.com is taken. Waldos Patented Reader of Robert Heinlein stories should remember those; actually I thought the gizmos already existed, but anyway two southern California inventors got patent 6,049,327 for "a glove made of closely fitting elastic embedded with motion sensors" that transmits hand and finger movement to a computer for processing.

FuckedCompany.com is a good place for dot-com tales of woe. Very enjoyable :) The Register also has good tech-biz news.

Oh, and the perfect anti-dote to all dot-com craziness is this site.

Dot coms are biting the dust, sure, but the internet industry as a whole is still soaring. The big growth is in existing companies use of the internet, not companies that are only an internet presence or website but no backroom to back it up.

Im on my palm pilot 183 at Cameron Rd. Lucent laid off a lot of folks. anb netpliance is in danger of being delisted by the nasdaq .im at a stoplight listening to am radio. practicing my palm speedwriting

nerd :-)

Those stoplights get pretty long in the morning, so I whipped out my PalmPilot and tryied a new browser program I downeloaded the day before.

Mister Kerbango, He Dead Seeking to hack its way out of the heart of financial darkness (OK, enough of the Joseph Conrad shtick) 3Com plans major cutbacks, including the demise of an "Internet radio device" called Kerbango, and Audrey, "the company's short-lived kitchen-countertop Internet appliance". 3Com also plans a third round of layoffs in a year and de-emphasis of its high-speed modem line in order to concentrate on corporate and wireless networking equipment. CEO Bruce Claflin says he expects to reduce the company's operating losses to zero, or even turn a profit, by May; losses have been running about $225 million a quarter. from ronks@well.com Ron Sipherd

More from ronks, the tidbitmaster. Bogus VeriSign Digital Certificates Issued - By VeriSign An impostor posing as a Microsoft employee tricked VeriSign into issuing two digital certificates that would enable him to electronically sign files, including executable programs, as if they originated from Microsoft. The certificates were issued on January 29 and 30, and users are advised to watch out for them since no valid MS certificates were issued on those days. Microsoft hopes to make available shortly a program to check for them which can be downloaded from their Web site. (Or a Web site that claims to be theirs anyway.) Mahi deSilva, VeriSign's vice president and general manager of applied trust services says his company can still be relied on because "we found this problem. We've been very proactive about communicating this problem to the various authorities." Yeah, right. He also claims "the person who got the certificates had a sophisticated knowledge of ways to try to fool VeriSign", perhaps like giving a Seattle phone number.

Yes, I heard about that. Most amusing. Makes you wonder how many other digital certificates out there are bogus...

ronks: YAWS - Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Untethered Yet Another Wireless Standard has entered the ether derby; Atheros Communications plans to announce its implementation of 802.11a, which promises up to 73 megabits per second bandwidth over the 5 gigahertz frequency. It is not to be confused with the equally euphonious 802.11b standard, which offers up to 11 Mbits/sec in the 2.4 GHz range, and now likes to be called "Wi-Fi" in "an effort to sound consumer friendly". The Standard Formerly Known As 802.11b is said to lead the market despite news of how easy it is to eavesdrop on. Also in the running is Bluetooth, named for an obscure Viking but falling behind after Microsoft decided not to include it in Windows XP. And another called HomeRF, once an Intel entry but now slipping. (All of these are described as incompatible with one another, of course.) Continuing, we find another member of the 802.11 family called 802.11G which is faster than and intended to be compatible with little brother b. Come back here, we're not done yet; Europe shows its independence with yes, another incompatible standard called HiperLAN, and I haven't even mentioned the cellular standards 2.5G and 3G, which offer up to 64 Kbits per second. Gentlemen, start your protocols. Web Radio Stations Shut Down Over Royalties Clear Channel Communications has stopped streaming the broadcast of 381 radio stations it owns and about 120 others owned by various companies have followed suit after the AFTRA union notified them its members were entitled to three times their original fees if commercials they appeared in were broadcast on the Internet. Another show-stopper is the issue of how much compensation is due to record companies (that again) under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; the Copyright Office has not yet decided what the law calls for, and payments may be retroactive to 1998. Until the setback, Web radio was growing rapidly from 56 stations in 1996 to 5500 this spring. Dot-Com Bust, The Movie A film-making roommate of the CEO of GovWorks.com, an Internet startup that went from zero to 250 employees in one year and from 250 to zero the next, has teamed up with D. A. Pennebaker to produce "Startup.com" based on her voluminous cinema-verite recordings of the birth and death of the company. Release date is scheduled for May 11. Digital Communications Patented Patent number 6,222,465 was awarded to Senthil Kumar and Jakub Segen for a system of cameras and software "for using free-form hand gestures to command a computer". OK, who out there has *not* from time to time used free-form hand gestures directed at their computer? Didn't think so. Well, now it will supposedly read and interpret the command, though it may display "I'm sorry sir but I can't physically do that". http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/ MarchFirst Meets Chapter Seven After it filed last month for a Chapter 11 reorganization under bankruptcy court protection, the Internet consulting firm has been selling off assets to the point where a major unsecured creditor threatened to hold its officers and directors personally liable if they continued the fire sale. So the CFO has quit and the company has decided to liquidate itself formally under a Chapter 7 proceeding; it has already let go 3,450 employees or half its staff. Quote Of The Day Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, addressing winners of an economic-policy contest for high school students: "Remember, if you are practicing to be a central banker - you do not smile." Loudcloud Lowers Volume The company had 74 employees in January, rose to 629 last month, and will boot 122 as the result of a cash shortage. It plans to seek additional savings "through the reduction of a variety of headcount-related and discretionary expense items". How great to work for a company that refers to its staff as "headcount-related items". Micron Out Of PC Business Micron has apparently tried and failed to find a buyer for its PC division, unprofitable despite its $1 billion a year revenue; it wants to concentrate on Web site operations. (I thought it was also a big chip maker, but that's not mentioned.) Anyway they dumped the division on a turnaround group to spiff up and resell; Micron paid them $70 million to take it away, but may recoup if the operation is later sold at a profit. Dell Beats Apple In Education Market But Steve Jobs is fighting back, with a new light (4.9 lbs.) laptop for $1300 (a photo shows him tossing it in the air, Not A Good Example for bored students) and a plan to introduce wireless networks in schools for use with portable computers. Microsoft Exec Denounces Open Source Admittedly seeing the open-source movement represented by Linux and the like as a threat to its hopes of moving up into the corporate server market, Microsoft SVP Craig Mundie says the company is planning "a broad campaign" to discredit it (and sow FUD). Their primary target of opportunity is the General Public License, or GPL, which is one aspect of open-source and requires the licensee to make freely available the source code of any software created using licensed open programs. (E.g., if you write a utility based on say Linux you would share the source code for it). Mr. Mundie says "the viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it"; this is a follow-up to remarks by Jim Allchin of MS that legislators should be aware of the threat that free distribution of code poses to software innovation (and should presumably outlaw it or something). Mr. Mundie seems to want it both ways; he says Allchin is right *and* that MS already practices "the best aspects of the open-source model" because its "shared-source philosophy" allows hardware and software developers to see the code (with perhaps a few restrictions). Besides the dreaded GPL which Eric Raymond of the Open Source Initiative says is the one controversial aspect of the movement, Mr. Mundie also cites the horrors of Unix which has split into different incompatible versions due to the lack of an iron proprietary fist. His unspoken target corporate target seems to be IBM, which has embraced Linux; an IBM VP replied "If we thought this [GPL] was a trap we wouldn't be doing it, and as you know we have a lot of lawyers." Scientologists Sue It's not that again. The co-founder of the Earthlink ISP is a member of the CoS, and a bunch of people in the next pew claim he bilked them out of over $35 million with fraudulent investment schemes like a day-trading program that would produce 60%-plus annual returns. Reed Slatkin is accused of collecting over $300 million from them; it seems to have disappeared, since his attorney, a "Santa Monica criminal lawyer" (I think that means here that he handles criminal cases), says he will "file for financial reorganization" this week, which sounds like bankruptcy. VC Investments Plummet A precipitous drop in venture capital funding for startups occurred between the last quarter of 2000 and the first quarter of 2001 according to surveys. One shows the figure falling from $17 billion to $10 B, another puts it at $20.5 B down to $12 B, about a forty percent decline in three months. Analysts are now starting to think of the year 2000 spending as an "anomaly" that will skew comparisons for the future. Another Online Ad Agency Tanks Hook Media was founded three years ago, and expanded from Boston to Atlanta and New York; at the end of last year, they were planning to expand to Chicago and LA. No more. They just filed for Chapter 11, but their reorganization consists of selling the company's assets to a larger firm. The company's CEO blamed "one of our larger clients having financial difficulties"; candidates are PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Blue Cross of Massachusetts, and EMC, a disk-drive maker. Things are so bad according to the article that when another ad agency had phone problems for a day, clients who couldn't reach them figured they had gone out of business. :e :e .

Web Radio Stations Shut Down Over Royalties The DMCA is the biggest screw-up your country ever made, sadly. Dot-Com Bust, The Movie Mmmm...I'll enjoy watching that go Straight-to-Video ;-))) Things are so bad according to the article that when another ad agency had phone problems for a day, clients who couldn't reach them figured they had gone out of business *huge grins*

Dragon Systems Seeks Comeback AD 2000 was The Year Of The Dragon, but it was not a good one for the maker of speech-recognition software. Founders James and Janet Baker sold their company to rival Lernout & Hauspie for $600 million in stock. Unfortunately L&H stock has not been the wisest of investments; Messrs. Lernout and Hauspie have been ordered not to leave the country (Belgium in this case) while charges of fraud and stock manipulation are investigated, L&H has filed for bankruptcy, and the price of a share has declined a bit; from $72.50 to 63 cents. Dragon Systems as a subsidiary has basically been gutted, with 2/3 of its staff let go, development at a standstill, and tumbleweeds blowing down the corridors past the empty cubicles. What's left of it may be sold off to raise money to pay L&H's debts; the Bakers have hired David Boies to either retrieve the available bits of the company, or to get the earlier merger reversed. Chances aren't too good at this point. Napster, Meet Aimster The new service is also a form of peer-to-peer file sharing, but the software from Above Peer Inc. is for users of AOL Instant Messaging (hence the name) to swap files of all kinds including music, and it lacks a central directory which was sort of Napster's legal Achilles heel. The company is pre-emptively suing the RIAA for a declaration that the service does not violate copyright laws, after the RIAA threatened to sue them. Digital Signature ID To Be Built Into Microsoft Products Windows, Office, and other MS software will include a user-identification facility called Identrus, developed by a consortium of banks. Identrus relies on digital signatures for users; the banks will issue the electronic identity certificates. The software has been available for a while, but incorporating it into an application is said to be made easier with the MS adoption of the standard. "IBM Develops New Method for Making LCDs" Reuters (05/03/01) IBM has developed a new way to position the liquid crystals used in liquid crystal displays, a feat IBM scientist Praveen Chaudhari says is the "Holy Grail" of flat-panel display manufacturing. In the new technique, atoms are beamed at a sheet of carbon to line up the atoms in rows, upon which liquid crystal particles attach. The older method, developed 95 years ago, required using velvet to put the atoms in place, resulting in flaws difficult to detect. IBM says the new method will result in lower production costs and better picture resolution. RLX (formerly Rocketlogix) are announcing a new line of Transmeta Crusoe-based low-power webservers today, and IBM will resell them. The RLX can pack up to 24 *complete web servers* into a 3U chassis, which needs only eight fans total. The servers come on hot-pluggable blades (Linux blades will reportedly run about $1,500 - 2,200 and Windows from 1,700 - 2,400, while the chassis will be around $2,600), and will be available either pre-configured or build-to-order. Transmeta's on a mini-roll; Toshiba's new Libretto laptop models will use Crusoe CPUs as well. OTOH the company's stock sank 24% yesterday, when the IPO lockup period expired and people were free to sell shares. Reuters says 675 cuts at Exodus, 15% of workforce. http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010509/tc/tech_exodus_dc.html US Home Internet Access Declines In a first since records began to be kept on this in 1980, the number of American households with Internet access declined in the quarter ending March 31, according to Telecommunications Reports International. The reason given is "the failure of the free Internet service provider as a viable business model"; subscribers to free ISPs fell over 19 percent, leading to an overall drop of 0.25% to 68.5 million US home subscribers of all ISPs. EMachines For Sale The company as well as the hardware. The PC maker says it is the third- largest seller of home computers in retail stores, but its plans to offer ads on inexpensive machines and sell Internet services have not worked out as hoped, so it's looking for a buyer. Cray In The Black Supercomputer maker Cray Inc. showed a quarterly net profit of $3 million, compared with last year's first quarter loss of $8 million. Red Sky At Night Execs at Internet ad agency Red Sky seem to be making a dash for the exits. Evidently within days of one another, the CEO and chairman, the chief financial officer, the SVP for sales, the SVP for client services and production, and an EVP with the Orwellian title of "chief people officer" have all quit. Remaining amidst the wreckage are the "chief strategic officer" and the "chief technology officer"; and the "chief operating officer and president", who has been promoted to acting CEO. The fate of the Chief Officer In Charge Of Fancy Titles and Silly Walks was undisclosed.

ronks@well.com: Jury Finds Rambus Patent Fraud The holder of patents on high-speed memory sued Infineon Technologies for infringement, and Infineon countersued. A Federal court jury found that Rambus had obtained patents based on "information from an industry standards group"; the judge in the case thereupon dismissed the patent claims. Rambus says it will appeal, though generally a jury's findings of fact are not reversed by higher courts. Microstrategy's Auditor Settles; Avant's Is Fired PriceWaterhouseCoopers has agreed to pay $51 million plus interest for certifying the company's financial reports in 1999, before they read in a Forbes article that the numbers were wrong. They were restated from a $13 million profit to a $34 M loss; earlier years' claimed profits also turned to losses under inspection. The company made headlines in March 2000 when its CEO Michael Saylor announced plans to fund an Internet university to provide "free education for everyone on earth forever". Mr. Saylor learned a lot himself since then, as the price of a share sank from $333 to $1.75. Meanwhile in Fremont CA, KPMG warned the board of software maker Avant that it lacked controls to determine the accuracy of its financial statements. Avant then fired KPMG as its auditor; a spokesman says there is "no connection" between the two events.

ronks: Intel Gets Bigger Within a couple of months, they will start increasing the size of the "wafer", the round silicon-plus plate that circuits are etched on, from 200 millimeters diameter to 300 mm (roughly from 8 inches across to 12). The greater size will permit almost twice as many chips to be produced per wafer, saving an estimated 30 percent in manufacturing costs. Intel will need to save: costs to them for the new technology are estimated at $7.5 billion in capital expense plus $4.2 B in R&D (over an unstated period of time). Wafer-size history: in the 1960's it was about the size of a quarter; Intel pioneered the move to 150-mm wafers in the 1980's, and IBM led the way to 200 mm in 1994. This time the leader is Siemens/Infineon and Motorola in a venture called Semiconductor300. The leader usually has to pick up the tab for the initial fabrication technology, which is probably why Intel and IBM were happy to let someone else go first this time. Internet Gets Bigger Cisco Systems is expected to announce today the commercial availability of new router software to handle IP version 6. The current protocol, IPv4, merely provides for about 4 billion unique Internet addresses; with every subatomic particle from here to Alpha Centauri needing its own address, that is plainly inadequate. Kludges like Network Address Translation (NAT) have staved off address-space disaster so far but Cisco estimates it will hit the wall in about 9 years. Implementation of IPv6 is another matter; one analyst notes that "until the ISPs feel the pain, they aren't going to do anything". Internet Gets Useful Until now, the global network has merely offered information and the promise of wealth, knowledge, and sex (of the pictorial variety anyway). However patent 6,229,430, awarded to Mary Smith Dewey of Dallas, offers to use the Internet to provide sleep! The miracle device consists of a clock, a keypad, a modem, and a CPU chip. How it works is you program it for things like traffic and weather conditions that would make you get up earlier or later than usual (which you have to tell the gizmo, along with how much earlier or later, etc.) Let's say it's snowing, evidently a frequent problem in Dallas since that's the example Ms. Dewey cites. The invention would wake you at a predefined earlier time so you could plow your way into work - except suppose that means the airport is closed and your flight has been cancelled, this machine would know not to rouse you for the futile effort and let you snooze in some more. Similarly it would (somehow) monitor traffic reports to determine the amount of delay on Highway ###, to see if it should nudge you up a bit sooner. Sound good? Well, there is a dark price to be paid for this blessing: the diabolical Ms. Dewey notes in her application that "advertising may be substituted for the alarm signal". E-Caps Offered If you think the drive for more Internet address space is pressing, it's nothing compared to man's quest for a new place to advertise (see clock story above). A firm from media center Winnipeg, Manitoba offers hubcaps that don't move and you can print ads on. Well, of course they move when the car does, don't be silly, I mean they don't appear to rotate but instead stay with one side up so the ad remains readable to dogs and very short people stepping off the curb. They're 17 inches in diameter, 50 LA taxicabs are presently so adorned with an option for another 150, and they are apparently called E-Caps because that sounds trendy in Winnipeg.

 Brits Buy Island London-based Cable and Wireless just bought San Francisco Web host Digital Island for $291 million cash plus taking over $49 M of their debt. C&W can afford it, with $4.2 billion in cash from recent divestments. AMD Numbering Leap The chip-maker announced the Athlon 4 for laptops. Rival Intel's Pentium 4 is presently available only for desktop computers and is not expected to be offered for mobile uses till 2002. This remarkable feat was accomplished by jumping from the Athlon straight to the Athlon 4; there is no Athlon 2 or 3. It is not clear if Intel's next chip will be the Pentium 99999999999999999. Rogue Domains At Large Still on the name game, Prodigy has partnered with a registry called New.net to offer their own top-level domains like .free, .shop, and .sports that are not approved by ICANN. Since nobody else recognizes them, you have to either use special software or one of their partner ISPs. IBM Claims Openness They say their new release of middleware (DB2, Lotus, Tivoli, and WebSphere) will follow "open standards" that permit connection to other software that plays by the same rules. So, DB2 is middleware now; who'd a thunk it. ronks

ronks again! Microsoft Appoints CXO A new title has been created to join the ranks of Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating, Chief Financial, etc. Robbie Bach, described as the company's "Chief Xbox Officer", announced that the new game machine would be available in the US starting November 8, in time for the Christmas rush, listing at $300. They expect to have ~700,000 ready to put under the tree by that time, with 15-20 games written to run on them. That Ain't Chopped Liver George Shaheen, the former Webvan head (CWO? Big Cheese?) who lasted only 18 months at the "beleaguered company", will receive $375,000 a year for the rest of his life in accordance with a deal made when he joined the online grocer in 1999. The company says it will "honor our commitment", though he may end up taking those clams in the form of stale Oreos if the company doesn't pick up soon.

ronks@well.com Ron Sipherd Host of the Business and Technology (biztech or bt) conference on the WELL. Author of WDL, a Windows batch facility for Well access Day job: automation and communications project management software license drafting and negotiation Ron has given us permission to quote his great business tidbits, and it's a great service. Thanks Ron! !

ronks: Speechless Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products plans to either sell its "speech and language technology" to satisfy creditors who are owed about $500 million, or spin off a new company owning the assets to the creditors. L&H's staff and the remnants of Dragon Systems will be included in the divestiture; what will actually remain of L&H afterwards is unclear. Some swivel chairs and filing cabinets, maybe. CA Boils The Books Some More Computer Associates has gone to "pro forma" accounting in publishing its financial reports, which basically means they set the rules. Since they also have to publish figures in accordance with the generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) mandated by the SEC, the comparison shows how they are trying to make themselves look good. The company also acknowledges that its new figures include $658 million in revenue they credited twice, and that their pro forma rules allow them to book revenue from a long-term contract in any quarter they choose, perhaps to beef up a weak one just ahead of a new stock offering. The figures below are in millions, for the fiscal years ended March 31: This Last Last Last Year's Year's Year's Year's Profit Profit Sales Sales Pro Forma 931 787 5600 5300 GAAP 95 1800 4200 6100

ronks never fails to come up with interesting stuff. This guy is amazing. Where Home Pages Go To Die We all know that the Graveyard Of The Atlantic is, um, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean most likely, but how many know about the Museum of E-Failure? Where the corpses of boo.com, eve.com, Kozmo, PlanetRx and others remain like Lenin preserved for eternity (in Internet time this is about a week, though the MoE-F may continue at least till the owner loses interest). Archaeologists of e-commerce may visit according to the article for defunct pages and some that are put in a "protective zoo" or e-hospice against their impending demise, such as APBNews.com and NBCi.com. The creator of the sepulchre is a Yonkers programmer who once worked for Time's Pathfinder service and observes if he didn't save dead Web sites, "there's no proof I actually did anything." Just Add Water Borrowing a technique from mainframes, IBM has introduced a water cooler to some of its laptop models. Not the kind people stood around in 50's office movies to trade gossip but a little tiny water-filled radiator inside the case. Now that laptop processors generate over 25 watts, using them on one's lap without a padded apron has become uncomfortable if not hazardous, so the higher heat-carrying capacity of water over air is expected to make the units more efficient at dissipating waste therms. The radiators are powered solely by convection, so no fan is required and they run quieter than their air-breathing cousins. IBM also claims the amount of water used in their A20, A21, and T20 models is so small that you don't need to add antifreeze in the winter. Razorfish Lawsuit Dropped A Federal court judge in New York dismissed a class-action suit against the Internet consulting firm that claimed it inflated share prices with false info on i-Cube, a company it bought out two years ago. Plaintiffs may still proceed I think but without the class-action big bucks incentive. Dell Goes To War James Vanderslice, Dell's president (and presumably commander-in-chief), says the PC maker is in a "full-scale price war to increase market share". Prices for components are falling about 1 percent a week, and the benefits will be passed on to buyers within 3 days he says.

ronks, the busy techie: Be Very Afraid Buried in an announcement that Lockheed and Microsoft will collaborate on bids for government e-mail and e-commerce systems was the statement that Microsoft is developing the software for the US Navy's "next nuclear-powered aircraft carrier". When that baby BSODs, look out. Maybe they will station it in Madagascar. (Maybe it will just go there by mistake and run aground.) Covad Sinking The ISP delayed release of its annual financial statement for three months, for unspecified reasons. One of them may have been to put off the news that they lost $1.4 billion in the year; they also reduced previously published numbers for earlier quarters. They say their auditors doubt if they can remain in business; a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon people begin to wonder.

ronks: Outpost Bought Out New Hampshire based PC Connection (is that the company with the raccoon in its ads?) has bought the former Cyberian Outpost in a stock swap for an undetermined amount based on a formula involving the Outpost's sales in the next three months and the average price of PCC stock for the ten days before the close of the deal. TLC and Dragon Deal The Learning Company of Novato will sell speech products Dragon Naturally- Speaking and L&H's Voice Express in the US and Canada, under a deal that requires bankruptcy court approval. The two products are said to represent "the majority of the $35 million retail market for speech recognition software".

Windows XP A Hacker's Paradise? The UC San Diego Supercomputer Center reports the number of "distributed denial of service attacks" in which a hacker takes over other PCs and uses them as zombies to flood a target site with spurious but time- and bandwidth-consuming requests is growing. During a three-week period in February, the center recorded 13,000 such attacks against 5,000 sites, with about 40 active at any time; while 90 percent lasted less than an hour, 2% extended for days or weeks. The center estimates it recorded only about half of the actual number of such attacks, which have numerous variants and for which instructions are available on the Web. Steve Gibson of Gibson Research suggests the new Net-centric Windows XP will create "a powerful network communications standard that attackers could widely exploit", especially with more users online all the time on DSL and cable modems. (The article doesn't say if Mr. G thinks the XP standards are vulnerable or if the popularity of Windows will just offer a large pool of similar targets.) The manager of Microsoft's Security Response Center says XP will have built- in features to prevent the zombization of PCs running it. Microsoft and AOL Negotiate - Or Don't Depending on who you ask and the time of day, corporate titans MS and AOL either are or are not talking about settling their licensing and legal concerns with each other. At one time last week it looked like both parties had given up over Microsoft's demand that AOL not challenge it over antitrust issues but they seem to have cooled off and started talking again. Talks began when AOL's license to use Internet Explorer expired a few months ago, but they have lots of other items on the menu. Viz., AOL wants a featured spot on the Windows XP desktop and needs to come to terms with IE even though it owns Netscape (a Web browser popular back in the twentieth century). AOL also wants to be a player, or at least not a victim, of Microsoft's new .Net and Hailstorm consumer-commerce initiatives. MS has a wish list of its own, of course, besides an antitrust "get out of jail free" Monopoly card. They want to pry open the clamshell known as AOL Instant Messaging standards so MSN Messenger can interact with it, and they want to add Windows Media Player to RealPlayer and other formats supported by AOL. AOL recently dropped plans for a direct assault on the Windows citadel with the "AOL PC", a cheap computer running GNU-Linux with a graphic user interface by the now-defunct Eazel Inc. software developer. "zombization" I like that. ronks

ronks again: So MS has not actually described those "other security measures that prevent DDoS clients from taking advantage of the openness of their sockets code"? That's expecting people to take a lot on faith, which is not a good way to run a security operation IMHO. Napster Near Deal With Record Companies MusicNet is a consortium of AOL Time Warner, BMG, EMI, and RealNetworks. They are said to be working out the details of a contract to license their music to Napster in Real format so long as Napster maintains some specified security level to ensure consumers don't hear notes they haven't paid for. The deal would also bar Napster from cutting a deal with MusicNet's enemy Duet, a Sony-Vivendi Universal partnership. A potential obstacle is the songwriters, who "want higher royalty rates on digital music than CD's." Data Storage Standards Developed Yet another consortium, this time a subset of hardware makers called the Storage Networking Industry Association, is putting together a set of standards to let users mix storage equipment on a system. Sun, who has not been invited to participate for some reason, says they have no details on the plan. Neither did the author of the story evidently, which is pretty vague on what the need is or how it will be met. Microsoft Tries To Enlist Press Against FSF Seeking to use reporters as a sort of fifth column against the Free Software Foundation, the company sent them three pages of questions it wanted them to ask Richard Stallman who gave a talk at the NYU B-school last week. Sample loaded question: "Does the all-or-nothing viral approach of the GPL [the FSF's framework license] severely limit business flexibility?" It's unclear if MS also wanted reporters to ask Mr. Stallman if he had stopped having carnal relations with barnyard animals. Quote Of The Day Not exactly a response to the planted MS queries but still a nice riposte, FSF general counsel and Columbia law professor Eben Moglen: "Microsoft, which used to say all the time that the software business was ruthlessly competitive, is now matched against a competitor whose model of production and distribution is so much better that Microsoft stands no chance of prevailing in the long run. They're simply trying to scare people out of dealing with a competitor they can't buy, can't intimidate, and can't stop." Incidentally, the IDC research firm reports that users of GNU-Linux rose from 1000 nine years ago to 9 million last year.

New Covad CEO Fights Doom In what the article colorfully calls "a desperate attempt to stave off financial doom", Covad appointed a new president. He has to deal with an unexpected $1.44 billion loss last year (a billion here, a billion there, where did it all go), a still-pending delay in announcing last quarter's results, and a possible Nasdaq delisting. Doom indeed. Amazon.com puter The former bookstore that now sells toys, hard drives, and air compressors will offer PCs in a few months. Unlike books, Amazon won't maintain an inventory of them but will instead have a distributor ship them. This "virtual inventory" approach hasn't worked out for other retailers like Buy.com, but it's been a winner for make-to-order manufacturers like Dell. Microsoft Takes Aim At AIM AOL Instant Messaging is the target of the new Windows Messenger due to ship with Windows XP this fall. MS says it will allow the sharing of documents (like NetMeeting?), transmission of audio and video files, and even remote access to other PC's. Copyright issues? Security concerns? Hahahahaha... ronks, of course

Sounds like Windows Messenger is a repackaged Netmeeting.

Virtual Storage Indeed Myspace.com had 7.5 million registered and 2.2 M active users for its free online storage service when it vanished from cyberspace four days ago. The CEO of the SF firm says it gave users e-mail notice six days earlier, but some say they saw nothing until they tried to visit the site and 404'ed. While Xdrive, i-drive, and FreeDrive remain, rival Driveway shut down four months ago for consumers, to focus on paid storage for businesses. Baby Domains Offered A domain name registry offers a free domain name for infants born at Redwood City's Sequoia Hospital through the end of the year. Presumably some older relative needs to contact www.namezero.com to take advantage of the offer unless the neonate is exceptionally precocious, though the hospital is in a high-tech region. Jason.com and heather.com are probably taken already, so if you want to be sure you might name it Torquemada or something. Chips Drop The Semiconductor Industry Association says global chip sales should fall 14% from last year to a piddling $175 billion, as buyers work off a glut from last year in a slow economy. Still not all is gloom: the SIA says 2002 sales should be up 21%, and another 25% in 2003. Perhaps after hearing the news, TI shut two Dallas plants with 1800 workers for one to three weeks. ronks. Who else?

ronks (Ron Sipherd): AT&T Dumps Microsoft Despite a $5 billion investment by Microsoft, AT&T has abandoned plans to use their software for interactive TV. For 18 months or more, the hardware (240,000 DCT-5000 set-top units) has been sitting in warehouses waiting for MS to develop the code to run it, and it apparently is still not ready; AT&T may convert the boxes to run as simple digital TV units and abandon the interactive concept altogether, to promote instead a variety of Internet services to cable boxes, PCs, and other gizmos. Microsoft's $5 B investment is now worth $1.1 B; boo hoo. Meanwhile Steve Ballmer says he has found a customer for his company's interactive TV software, namely TV Cabo Portugal. Well, it's a start... NetZero, Juno Merge Described as "the two biggest providers of free Internet access", the ISPs account for 7 million subscribers, and the combined firm will be the second largest ISP, after AOL Time Warner. Both companies will become subsidiaries of a new corporation called United Online Inc.

Wow!! that will be impressive . Had heard that AT&T was not going in with MS on that interactive TV deal. I don't think Bill Gates will be filing for welfare this week, however!

From the article: "In a conference call yesterday [June 15] with stock analysts, Mr. Roth [Joe Roth, Nortel CEO] revealed a troubling finding for Nortel's business and the industry in general. The company calculates that Internet traffic, which has climbed sharply in recent years, declined slightly in the most recent quarter, Mr. Roth said." What If They Built A Network And No One Came? In the 1870's after the Civil War, the easy availability of cheap capital led to a rapid expansion in railroad track mileage in the absence of corresponding demand. Often the entrepreneurs built lines to towns and paid no attention to how customers would get goods between the station and their homes and businesses. After a few years, the bubble burst and it took nearly a decade for the market and the economy to recover. Fast-forward 130 years: companies have spent $35 billion to lay 100 million miles of fiber- optic lines around the world even though only about 10 percent of US residences have high-speed links. Only 5% of installed fiber is "lit" and the remainder is unused. So far this year, investors have lost $12.8 billion on the default of $13.9 B of telecommunications bonds, over twice what they lost in all of last year. Those who do not remember the past etc. AOL-Microsoft Talks Collapse The parties don't even agree on what they disagree about. AOL says the only area unresolved was MS insistence that AOL drop RealPlayer for Windows Media Player, while MS says AOL wanted everything, gave up nothing, and "wanted to sue us over XP". Microsoft's goals in the negotiations seem to be getting AOL to agree not to raise antitrust issues in litigation and its cooperation in the rollout of Windows XP, with its many bundled consumer features. Since MS seems to be gearing up to do to AOL with XP and its "Hailstorm" project what MS Office did to WordPerfect and Lotus, it's perhaps not surprising that AOL declined to play ball (or play dead?). Besides agreeing not to sue MS over antitrust issues (which is a pretty major concession when you don't know what they're going to do) and ending AOL's arrangement with MS rival RealPlayer, Microsoft wanted concessions on AOL Instant Messaging; and it's not clear that MS really had that much to offer in return if AOL is willing to fight back for its turf instead of seeking accommodation. The End Of An Era Autodesk is reported to have stopped holding its free Friday afternoon beer parties. Sigh. One employee reacted by comparing CEO Carol Bartz's $1.5 million annual salary and $15.3 million stock options with the estimated $532 weekly cost of 30 pizza, a keg, 6 bottles of wine and 8 bags of chips. Quote Of The Day "The market has had the worst correction it's had in a generation, and yet it's still not cheap." - Chief Investment Officer Kevin Parke at MFS: noting that Cisco, down from $80 a share to $16.65, is still trading at 60 times its expected earnings. Still not cheap! Wow! AOL and Msft at it still.

Another 10,000 jobs are going at Nortel: Audience: Nortel Networks Employees This morning we issued an important announcement regarding our outlook and the steps we are taking to continue to align our business to a severe economic and industry downturn and what is a period of profound adjustment for our customers. As we indicated in our announcement, we believe that this downturn will be protracted. We should fully recognize how difficult this period will be. The six priorities in our "Alignment Plan" reflect the seriousness of the situation that we, and our customers and other market participants, find ourselves in. We must continue to: 1. Accelerate our cost reduction and reset to "break even" at current business levels; 2. Return to positive cash flow by management of expenses, inventories, capital and receivables; 3. Focus business around core growth areas and exit/dispose of/transition our ownership in others; 4. Retain employees by implementing initiatives such as the Stock Option Exchange; 5. Target top customers and direct sales opportunities for incremental and new revenue and ensure superior customer satisfaction; and 6. Deliver on our key product initiatives targeting high-growth markets. As I indicated today, and in our town-hall of last week, we are making good progress against this "Alignment Plan." The programs that we have implemented since the beginning of the year are expected to result in excess of US$3 billion in savings on an annualized basis. We have more work to do, but this is a good start. We have thus far notified approximately 20,000 employees. Sadly, due to the protracted downturn, we will be eliminating another 10,000 positions as we continue to align with the market. We will move as quickly as we can with the aim of having this completed by the end of the third quarter. Despite the times, Nortel Networks remains one of the best-positioned companies in our industry. Our leadership bench-strength and employees are among the best in the world. We have a world-class portfolio of solutions that lead the market today and we are on track to bring the next generation of solutions to market. Our sales and technical teams are lined up against the top service providers and are focused on delivering a superior customer experience. The challenge before us is clear: execute our "Alignment Plan" and emerge from the severe downturn and this period of adjustment as a strongly positioned company. I want to thank you all, along with our shareholders and suppliers, for the support we are receiving during this very difficult period. I do not underestimate the toll it is taking on you and your families, and I want you to be assured that we are doing everything we can to get through this period of alignment as fast as we can. By my retirement in April, my goal is to have Nortel Networks returned to profitability and positioned as the undisputed leader in our target markets and with the customers we serve. Although we will continue to face a challenging market environment for the near term, I am personally committed to building on our leadership, re-establishing our momentum, and getting our realignment completed. Thank you, John Roth

Dotcom casualties litter skid row Associated Press has uncovered evidence to the contrary after visiting the soup kitchens and homeless shelters that lie on the flip side of the American dream. Depressed database programmers and the like have joined drug addicts, alcoholics and the mentally ill as society's hard luck cases. ... more...

Webtoon Firms Not Ready For Prime Time A couple years ago before the dot-com bubble burst, the Internet was seen as a natural vehicle for online animations and other streaming real-time media into the home. Alas, Ye Olde Modemme is not fast enough to handle live video, and there are too few consumers with DSL or cable modems to keep the newcomer industry going. With pseudo.com and others fading to black, only a couple like Visionary Media and Bullseye Art, both located in Manhattan, are still creating products such as the WhirlGirl series featuring a female geek/superheroine who "prevents an evil media empire from controlling viewers' lives". The survivors are using their skills with Macromedia Flash to create animations for broadcast TV at a fraction of the old cost; the article says a half-hour episode of "The Simpsons" or "The Smurfs" costs around $400,000 to animate (not counting the writers admin costs, and voice actors); with Flash the estimated average cost is around $160,000. Does this mean WhirlGirl is about to sell out to the evil media empire? Yes, probably; the founder and "chief creative officer" of Bullseye says "Getting acquired and becoming part of a studio is not the worst thing that could happen." Perhaps she will start battling evil pre-IPO upstarts. Fastest Transistor Contest Heats Up Actually the physical heat production seems to have diminished, with IBM announcing its new 210-gigahertz(!) transistor needs 50% less power to run than current units. A single transistor doesn't seem very useful in these days of large-scale circuit integration, but IBM predicts it will form the basis of communications devices capable of speeds up to 100 GHz within two years. A couple of weeks ago, Intel announced a transistor for CPUs (and therefore "not directly comparable" with IBM's, the story says) that switches at speeds of up to 1.5 terahertz, and will form the core of processors running at 20 gigahertz. RIP Alpha When it was announced by DEC in 1992, the Alpha microprocessor was the first 64-bit CPU for general use outside of supercomputers. After Compaq bought DEC in 1998, they supported its development as well as that of a MIPS chip used in their Tandem Himalaya subsidiary. No more; in a deal with Intel, Compaq will phase out the Alpha and the MIPS by 2004 for its one million- plus users (though they say Alpha upgrades will continue through 2003) and replace them with an upcoming generation of Intel's 64-bit Itanium CPU called McKinley. That seems to leave as rivals only IBM's PowerPC and Sun's UltraSparc for high-performance machines. Napster Case Drags On It's easy to forget the lawsuit never actually went to trial; instead all the skirmishing was (and still is) over a preliminary injunction issued last July by District Court judge Marilyn Patel. Napster requested an en banc hearing by the entire Ninth Circuit of an appeal it lost to a three-judge panel; that request was just denied. Unless they go to the Supremes, the trial can now begin, though no date for it has yet been scheduled. Meanwhile, the RIAA who won that appeal has filed one of its own to Judge Patel's requirement that they provide file names to Napster in order to get them removed from the servers. And the Academy (as in Academy Awards) just sued Napster for making "live Oscar show performances" available. Perhaps simulated Oscar acts would be OK? Thanks again, Ron.

New Patent Threatens Microsoft Intertrust Technologies of Santa Clara just received a patent on authorizing the use of digital media over disparate types of hardware such as PCs, cell phones, and MP3 players. That is said to be "at the heart of Microsoft's .NET and Hailstorm software strategies" which in turn are key components of its Windows XP business plan. The patent breathes new life into Intertrust's two-month-old lawsuit against MS for infringement of its digital rights management technology patents by Windows Media Player, also an XP component. Intertrust is said to be a business partner and ally of AOL Time Warner and RealNetworks, neither of whom are apt to cut MS any slack out of goodwill. Dot-Com Job Losses Slowing? June job cuts were said to be down 31% in June from the month before, to 9,216. They averaged about 13,000 a month in January - May according to outplacement folks Challenger, Gray & Christmas. ISP Prices Rising Earthlink will raise its all-you-can-eat monthly charge $2 to $22, following AOL's recent increase to $24. Sneezeless GMO Cat Announced Well, the new genetically-modified feline might itself sneeze, but it is intended not to be a source of sneezing in others. Previous bio-pet research has focused on cloning departed Fidos and Muffys to make new copies for grieving wealthy owners, but Transgenic Pets is working on a cat without a protein that triggers an allergic reaction in humans. (Unfortunately, that protein serves to keep the animal's skin moist, so the bionic cat might have to be kept in a tub of water; they're working on that.) I'd like to see one crossed with a chameleon so its fur changes to the color of the pants leg it's rubbing against, but this doesn't seem to be in their plans. To protect their R&D investment, Transgenic will sell the cats itself and they will all be neutered to prevent knockoffs, otherwise known as kittens. Mobile Phones Dropped Citing a flat market, Philips will cease making cell phones, except for a minority share it retains in a Chinese company. They got into the business in 1996, but only managed to eke out about 3 percent of the market compared to Nokia who has around 30%, and the division never made a full-year profit. Ericsson has outsourced all its phone manufacture, and Motorola and Nokia announced they would expand their outsourcing as well. Ron Sipherd, ronks@well.com contributed these, as usual. Thanks, Ron!

ronks: Get Ready For Spim Jargon alert: unsolicited commercial instant messages are apparently now called "spim". Haven't got any yet? Chances are you will soon, if you use ICQ, AOL Instant Messaging, or one of those services. ActiveBuddy of NY and other startups are developing automated instant-messaging software that sends out messages for FAO Schwarz, Vans Sneakers, Radiohead ("the alternative rock band" in case you didn't know), and others. So far they are of the opt-in variety, but some users suspect they are harvesting buddy IDs for later advertising blitzes. In theory users can block them by sender, but that often involves declining to accept a message and then confirming that in a second window. Since spimmers can quickly change names, blocking may prove useless. Besides ICQ, which some say is already clogged with unsolicited porno messages, the new AIM 4.7 beta includes a "welcome screen" with promotions to commercial links. Roadrunner vs. Acme When James Turner returned his rental car to Acme Rent-a-Car in New Haven CT, he found an extra $450 charged to his account. Pursuant to the agreement which he signed but didn't read (and who reads those things), the car had a GPS that recorded him exceeding the speed limit three times, for which the contract said he would have to pay $150 each time. Oops.

Appeals Court have overturned the ruling Microsoft should be split up. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/20061.html

Metricom Goes Bust The wireless ISP who runs the Ricochet wireless ISP has only about 40,000 customers in fifteen cities where it operates, not enough to make a profit. The charges ($300 for the modem plus $70-80 per month) may be a culprit. Anyway it filed for bankruptcy; it will continue the service for now, but its future is unclear. Maybe Iridium will buy it, ha ha. Napster Goes Dark The music-sharing service has temporarily lowered its jolly roger while it revamps to comply with the court order and convert to a fee-based version later this summer. i-opener Gets Black Eye The Netpliance company who makes that web-only gizmo settled charges by the FTC that it failed to disclose extra fees and billed customers' credit cards without their consent. It will pay a $100,000 "civil penalty" and have to reimburse users an unspecified amount. Webvan Does Reverse Stock Split 25 shares will become one with a value of $1.75 at yesterday's price of 7 cents (down from around 70 cents in February), as the company seeks to stave off de-listing by Nasdaq by a July 23 deadline. Chips Sales Sink Some More May 2001 sales worldwide were down to $12.7 billion, in a steady slide from around $18 B last September and off 7% from April. Most of the falloff was in the Americas, down 32% from a year ago. The president of the Semiconductor Industry Association, who released the numbers, said he expected an upturn in the fourth quarter of this year. In related news Intel announced a 1.8 gigahertz Pentium 4, charging quite a bit more for it ($562 versus $352 for a 1.7 GHz). Web Ad Firms Merge Continuing the industry contraction, ValueClick of LA just bought Mediaplex of SF for $43 million in stock. thanks, ronks.

L&H Unit Gains Independence Had to work the theme of independence in there somehow today. Actually the Mendez division ("translation services and software provider") of Lernout & Hauspie just exchanged masters, as the Massachusetts firm Lionbridge bought it for $33 million. L&H originally asked $160 million for the unit which has $80 M annual revenue, but nobody bit till the price came down by about four-fifths.

ronks@well.com contributes these precious tidbytes: New Generation Of Fiber Optic Cable In The Lab Called hollow-core fiber, it is speculated to have the potential for a hundred-fold increase in the capacity of a single line. Basically, instead of using clear glass to conduct the light which attenuates over distance, the center of the wire is air, with a casing around it that reflects stray photons back into the median channel. It's a long way from deployment, but if it works it could reduce the need for periodic re-amplification of the light. He's Ba-a-ack Philippe Kahn, the founder of Borland and later of Starfish Software, has taken his share of the $254 million sale of Starfish to start yet another company with an idea he got as he assisted with the birth of his daughter. He wanted to be able to take snapshots and quickly send them to family and friends, but the hospital had no such facility. At that point the LightSurf company was born (along with its human sibling Sophie). The idea is for a cell phone attachment that takes photos and transmits them, with adaptations (unspecified) depending on the type of receiving device. While other companies are involved in the are, LightSurf is working "closely with telecommunications carriers to create an entire support structure" on the theory that ease of use is paramount for the target market of users. Just in case, Mr. K remains CEO of the Starfish Motorola division. So What Is An Online Division Good For, Anyway? Many traditional stores that shoveled megabucks into web counterparts just as the expected gold rush tanked are looking for value in the ruins. Data mining of customer attitudes seems to be it. As one analyst puts it, "Sales aren't there for the online folks, and margins are lower than everybody had expected, so they're looking for other ways to give back. So they're saying 'Hey, here's our data.'" For example, Nordstrom ran an print ad for clothes that had a woman wearing a navel ring; it was just a prop and not for sale, but lots of people went online looking for it, so now the store offers them and even opened a "body jewelry" store on the web. So What Is An Online Customer Good For, Anyway? A recent survey of 4000 adults (with 1700 responses) by BYU professors about their online buying habits found they broke down into eight groups, with big spenders and browsers-only separated mainly by one thing: fear of giving out their credit card number on the Internet. Here are the categories: - shopping lovers, 11.1 percent - adventurous explorers, 8.9% - suspicious learners, 9.6% - business users, 12.4% - fearful browsers, 10.7% - fun seekers, 12.1% - technology muddlers, 19.6% - shopping avoiders, 15.6%

Microsoft, Verisign In Security Deal MS will use Verisign to "improve the security of the personal information collected by .Net" to address concerns over the expectation that the new Hailstorm technology will provide a pool of personal data. Wasn't Verisign the company that was spoofed into issuing Microsoft ID digital certificates to an unknown hacker last year? Buzzsaw Bought Back In November 1999, Autodesk spun off a subsidiary called buzzsaw.com who made software that allowed architects and building contractors to exchange blueprints and other documents over the Internet, retaining a 40% stake. They subsequently put $22.5 million into the venture in hopes of a successful IPO. However as you may have heard, the market for dot-com IPOs has somewhat diminished in the last year; so Autodesk will buy back the other 60% for $15 million and re-integrate Buzzsaw with the mother company. Silver Lining Dept. George Shaheen, the former Webvan CEO who got a package of $375,000 a year for life when he quit last April, will have to go to bankruptcy court like all the other employees and creditors to collect it.

ronks: Putting The Ban In Taliban The Afghan government has forbidden its citizens, almost none of whom has a telephone, from using the Internet where "un-Islamic influences" reside. Apple Profit Down Net earnings for the most recent quarter were $61 million, compared with $200 M in the year-ago period. Its CFO explained that some of the shortfall was due to planned inventory reductions. The company has a large cushion of $4.2 billion in cash and liquid securities to tide it over bad times, and it is battling Dell for the lead in the K-12 school market. Russian Hacker Busted After (perhaps unwisely) giving a talk at the hackers' Las Vegas DefCon conference on how to break Adobe's e-book encryption, 27-year-old Dmitri Sklyarov was arrested on charges of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He faces five years of jail and a $500,000 fine for his role with Moscow-based ElcomSoft in writing software to decrypt Adobe e-books. E-Books Apply For Copyright In a first, two full-length publications issued solely in electronic form ("Business Week's Guide To The Best Business Schools" and "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Wireless Web") were transmitted to the US Copyright Office for registration and sent to the Library Of Congress. Netzeroistas Bail Following the merger of their firm with Juno Online to create United Online, which is in trouble just like its two predecessors as online advertising shrinks, four founders of Netzero have left, to form Layer2Networks, described as a "broadband networking company". Which they believe the world needs yet more of.

ronks: Post-Napster Peer-Based Swapping Services Proliferate While Napster remains shut pending appeals on whether 99.4% rejection of copyrighted file downloads is enough, other sites have rapidly picked up the slack. Unlike Napster, which operated with distributed files but centralized information on where they were stored, the new services (five of the six most popular essentially didn't exist 5 months ago) are more peer- oriented. Technically they resemble Gnutella but with better interfaces. Record companies are thus left with the unappetizing prospect of suing all the individual users, which will probably not happen. Some examples of file-sharing services mentioned in the article are MusicCity Morpheus, Audiogalaxy Satellite, KaZaA, iMesh, BearShare, and LimeWire. An Online Grocery Success Story Tesco.com, a division of the Tesco chain of supermarkets, is estimated to have made $7 million net profit on $422 M annual sales, on an investment by the parent chain of a mere $56 M. It took more or less the opposite tack from Webvan (and of course is showing the opposite in results): it charges about $7 for delivery, and it has no separate warehouses. Instead it uses the chain's 690 stores as stockrooms, with staff wheeling specialized carts that follow an efficient computer-generated route through the aisles and can load six orders at once. The CEO's observation following his visit to Webvan last year is worth quoting: "People were making some very strange decisions. They were saying things like 'I'm going to get the revenue first and work out the cost structure later.'" Worrying about costs, how quaint. Tesco is a British chain, but they recently entered a US venture with GroceryWorks in partnership with Safeway. PC Sales Down According to Gartner and International Data Corporation, worldwide sales of PCs fell about 2% in the last quarter, the first quarterly drop in 15 years. Sun Down Likewise posting an unaccustomed loss, Sun Microsystems announced a quarterly shortfall of $88 million, the first since 1989. The culprits were Japan, where sales dropped 27%, and Europe, off 17%. Earnings a year ago were $720 M. Excluding one-time events though, Sun made $134 M profit. Nortel Wa-a-ay Down The Canadian networking firm lost $19.4 billion (with a "B") for the quarter, compared with a profit of $637 million last year. Even excluding one-time charges, their continuing operations lost $1.6 B.

ron sipherd (ronks@well.com) Popular Pop-Unders Pose Problem A new type of advertising said to have originated at pornography sites, is appearing with greater frequency around the Web. Called the "pop-under", it's a separate window opened by the main page without the viewer's request. It appears "behind" the main page unlike a "pop-up" which displays in front, so you don't normally see it until you close your browser - or think you have closed it, only to find one or more of the pop-unders under. The new format raises two questions: 1. Are the Web publishers that resort to such tactics, who include Microsoft, Primedia, the NY Times, X10.com, and Yahoo, vile excrescences fit only for extermination? The argument goes that these ads are giving the industry a bad name for intrusiveness, since they are not asked for and don't appear in view at a relevant point but only when you are done surfing and are trying to close the browser. 2. Should the pop windows (up and under) count as visits to the host's site? X10.com uses them extensively, and if they are included it ranks as the Web's fourth-most-visited site, ahead of Lycos; but if not, it drops to #116. Some raters say counting pops is "as if TV ratings counted beer commercials as prime-time programming". (Of course some beer ads may be more entertaining, but that's not the issue here.) Jupiter Media Metrix counts pops, Nielsen doesn't, take your pick. DVDs Fly ...off the shelves, even as PCs and other electronic gizmos lag in sales. Retail US sales were up 69 percent at 5.2 million units in the first half of this year from the comparable period in 2000. So far, 20.4 M have been sold since the format was introduced four years ago according to the story, and 460 M disks to go into them. As of February 2000 8% of US homes had DVD units (96% had VCRs); 15 months later in May 2001 the figure was up to 12%. Apple Poised For Takeoff? Although it has less than 4% market share in America and less overseas, some analysts suggest Apple's time may be here. They observe that the "price- performance gap" between Apple computers and PCs has narrowed, so you get about the same bang for the buck with either, and that as the Internet has become such a focus of personal computing the importance of the operating system has diminished (hear that, Netscape/Oracle/Sun?). Also showman Steve Jobs has made progress in turning the Mac into a "digital hub" for consumer editing of audio and video files, leveraging its strengths with design professionals. The story also observes this initiative may be related to Apple's move to open its own stores even as Gateway is bailing out of its own: while billboards and magazine ads are fine for showing off a new translucent strawberry-colored laptop say, you need to get people to try new software features to appreciate them, and that means hands-on testing.

Popular Pop-Unders Pose Problem A new type of advertising said to have originated at pornography sites, is appearing with greater frequency around the Web. Called the "pop-under", it's a separate window opened by the main page without the viewer's request. It appears "behind" the main page unlike a "pop-up" which displays in front, so you don't normally see it until you close your browser - or think you have closed it, only to find one or more of the pop-unders under. The new format raises two questions: 1. Are the Web publishers that resort to such tactics, who include Microsoft, Primedia, the NY Times, X10.com, and Yahoo, vile excrescences fit only for extermination? The argument goes that these ads are giving the industry a bad name for intrusiveness, since they are not asked for and don't appear in view at a relevant point but only when you are done surfing and are trying to close the browser. 2. Should the pop windows (up and under) count as visits to the host's site? X10.com uses them extensively, and if they are included it ranks as the Web's fourth-most-visited site, ahead of Lycos; but if not, it drops to #116. Some raters say counting pops is "as if TV ratings counted beer commercials as prime-time programming". (Of course some beer ads may be more entertaining, but that's not the issue here.) Jupiter Media Metrix counts pops, Nielsen doesn't, take your pick. DVDs Fly ...off the shelves, even as PCs and other electronic gizmos lag in sales. Retail US sales were up 69 percent at 5.2 million units in the first half of this year from the comparable period in 2000. So far, 20.4 M have been sold since the format was introduced four years ago according to the story, and 460 M disks to go into them. As of February 2000 8% of US homes had DVD units (96% had VCRs); 15 months later in May 2001 the figure was up to 12%. Apple Poised For Takeoff? Although it has less than 4% market share in America and less overseas, some analysts suggest Apple's time may be here. They observe that the "price- performance gap" between Apple computers and PCs has narrowed, so you get about the same bang for the buck with either, and that as the Internet has become such a focus of personal computing the importance of the operating system has diminished (hear that, Netscape/Oracle/Sun?). Also showman Steve Jobs has made progress in turning the Mac into a "digital hub" for consumer editing of audio and video files, leveraging its strengths with design professionals. The story also observes this initiative may be related to Apple's move to open its own stores even as Gateway is bailing out of its own: while billboards and magazine ads are fine for showing off a new translucent strawberry-colored laptop say, you need to get people to try new software features to appreciate them, and that means hands-on testing.

from ronks@well.com Ron Sipherd Napster Foes Seek Knockout Punch Record-label plaintiffs in the copyright suit have so far achieved a "preliminary injunction" against Napster's operations, pending final resolution at a trial on the merits of the case. Tuesday they asked the judge to skip that part and issue summary judgement without a trial; they claim essentially that there are no issues of fact to be tried for which evidence needs to be presented, or in other words there's no reason to let Napster put on its case because there's no possibility they have one. Sun Gets Hot In a full-page newspaper ad yesterday they trumpeted their partnership with Hitachi to sell big storage systems to big companies with the statement that the only alternative was *E*xpensive, *M*onolithic, and *C*losed, playing on their main competitor EMC. Today's ad does not come out and literally say *M*ighty *S*limy, but it criticizes Microsoft for pulling Java out of Windows XP with the statement "Sure Microsoft believes in freedom of choice. As long as they get to choose". They also observe that you can thwart MS by downloading Java from java.sun.com any time you like. The Edible Resume? A Kansas company called Sweetart at www.sweetart.com takes H-P color inkjet printers and modifies them to print images on cake icings. The units, which use food coloring cartridges in place of ink, are integrated into systems with a scanner and a PC. And a movable arm holding the print heads, because do you know what a cake looks like after it's gone through a sheet-feeder? They say they have sold "several thousand" systems to bakeries and grocery stores, and one customer even uses his to create sand paintings. Iomega Shrinks The maker of cheesy removable storage devices (as the saying goes they didn't invent the click of death, they just made it popular) will cut over a third of its staff, from 3300 to 2050, and take a $65 million charge as part of a reorganization plan. Flooz Poofs The online-currency dot-com who spent $8 million on Whoopi Goldberg ads was created in 1999 by Robert Levitan, a co-founder of the women's Web site iVillage. It was named for (they say) an ancient Persian form of cash, back when air travel meant flying carpets. But it never really took off, since merchants had to modify their systems to accept the currency and consumers had to tie up funds till they bought something. Competitors like Beenz.com and eCash have faced similar problems. Lately, Flooz and Beenz.com have tried to move into B2B but Flooz looks to have abandoned all hope, as they shut their site, stopped accepting their own currency for payment, and asked retailers to remove links to Flooz. Host Floats At least I hope so. I'll be canoeing down the Missouri out of Fort Benton MT next week and seriously out of touch; don't let anything interesting happen while I'm gone, eh?

ronks rides again. @Home @End Of Road? A financial analyst briefly summed up the prospects for high-speed ISP @Home as "Put butter on them; they're toast." With a loss of over $346 million and only $183M in cash reserves, a statement from their auditors to the SEC that there is "substantial doubt" whether they can survive, and a stock price of 49 cents (down 40 cents from a day ago) which may cause it to be de-listed by Nasdaq unless they do a reverse split, this is not the best of times for them. Also, a deal expired two months ago that required three major shareholders (AT&T, Cox Communications, and Comcast) to use @Home for their high-speed service offerings, and the former captive owners have fled. Agilent Not Doing Too Well Either The 1999 spinoff from H-P will boot 4,000 employees (about 9%) after an April 10 percent pay cut proved inadequate to stem losses. They lost $219 million last quarter compared to a $1545 M profit a year ago, with sales down 23%. The Worm Turns A consortium of security businesses like McAfee has been formed to fight the attack of the killer worms such as Code Red I through LXXXXVIIII, and to develop technology to thwart distributed denial-of-service attacks, with input from three network firms called Arbor, Asta, and Mazu. Paul: Glad you're back from vacation Ron! Thanks! I enjoy writing them, though it was a relief to spend a week away from news of technology (not to mention the Middle East, Wall Street, and anyplace outside the Missouri Breaks). I read "Trent's Last Case" and a history of Glacial Lake Missoula, 500 cubic miles of water that drained in about a week onto the Palouse at the end of the last Ice Age. Blub. An Emmy For Apple Not to Steve Jobs for Best Supporting Actor, but to IEEE 1394 (nee Firewire) which was developed in the 90's and included in Macs since 1999 for high- speed data transport. Besides being used widely in TV production to transfer images among cameras, editing gear, and computers, it "has been adopted as a standard for high-definition television". The award should help Apple in its drive to sell its Macs as "digital hubs" for households as well as pros to edit home movies and the like. And Then There Were Two Two gigahertz, no waiting. Eighteen months after it offered a CPU that ran at one GHz, Intel will offer a 2 GHz processor starting next week. AMD will release its 1.5 GHz Athlon chip then too.

ronks rides again. Infrared, Release 2 Infrared beams have long (well OK over ten years) been used in low-bandwidth applications like TV remotes. Researchers at Penn State have developed a technique that involves a lattice of echoing IR beams to create a 2-gigabit/ second network within a room; previous attempts foundered on scattering of the beams creating a kind of IR echo, which they claim to have solved with "a holographic filter". While IR has some defects relative to radio waves used for most wireless nets such as the inability to go through walls, it has some major advantages. Such as the inability to go through walls, which makes eavesdropping from outside much harder and prevents one room-net from interfering with another. Also, IR is an unregulated wavelength unlike the radio spectrum. If low-level radio waves are ever found to pose health risks, IR will be at an advantage there too. Plus it keeps the room warm in winter.. Wanted: Chirpy Accountant One day after Ernst & Young, auditors for Excite@Home, announced in a filing to the SEC that the ISP might not generate enough cash to survive, they were replaced by their client with another auditor. A spokespern for Excite said "I know the timing looks kind of funny." What a sense of humor those guys have. The ostensible reason is that AT&T owns 23% of Excite, and they wanted to use the same auditor for consistency. Ya sure you betcha. Big Brother Loves You It's unlikely that the IRS will soon adopt the ubiquitous slogan from Orwell's 1984, but in practical terms they're moving that way. They just let a $10 million contract to Peoplesoft for a "customer relationship management" system, no doubt to keep taxpayers from going to a competitor. By next year, tax preparers will be able to access information on their clients' accounts, and by 2004 (twentieth anniversary; coincidence?) IRS agents and members of the public will be able to view their tax history online. "Perfect information about every customer" is the goal, according to a Peoplesoft VP. Oh, and of course the connection will be "secure". Online Broker Loses Things are so bad in the stock market that even the brokers are in trouble. TD Waterhouse, the third largest Internet dealer after Schwab and Fidelity, says it suffered its first-ever quarterly net loss. It was $22 million in the hole compared to a $35 M profit a year ago, with commissions down 36%. The volume of trades was off 18% from the previous quarter, to 101,700/day.

Flooz Bamboozled A couple of weeks ago the online-currency site stopped operating and merchants stopped taking their e-money. Last weekend the company officially went out of business. BTW another similar site called Beenz.com also suspended its operations last week, and Buy.com told the SEC it may have to close though it later said it would keep going for now. Anyway, one factor in Flooz's demiiz seems to be a bunch of credit-card-number-nappers in Russia and the Philippines who bought around $300,000 of flooz-bucks in the last three months with stolen ID. When Flooz's credit card processor learned of the fraud from complaints by the real cardholders, it stopped crediting Flooz for the transactions, holding up around a million dollars which "created an untenable cash flow situation". IBM Builds Tube Switch They took a step closer to the "post-silicon" era by making a carbon nanotube 10 atoms wide they can turn to "true" and "false" states like a 1/0 bit. They say they need to do another couple years' R&D before they can determine if the technology is practical to manufacture in volume, but if it is they believe they can achieve a transistor packing density of 10,000 times that of silicon, which may run into its physical limit in 10-15 years. Now We Know One distinction of Web advertisements is that their effectiveness can be measured accurately with "click-through", the number of times people respond to an online ad by clicking on it to visit the vendor's own site and buy something, unlike say magazine and TV commercials where one can only guess. Procter & Gamble even decided a few years back to base its online ad royalties on click-through volume. Alas, an article today notes that accountability has turned out to be Web ads' weakness not its strength, as advertisers discover that almost nobody clicks on those colorful animated dealies. Various reactions are surfacing: marketwatch.com will simply stop reporting click-through rates (well, that should solve the problem); other vendors will use "view-based conversions" that attempt to measure the number of people who visit their site after an ad has been sent to their browser, though that may raise some privacy questions. And some quote retailer John Wanamaker, who said more or less that half his ad budget was wasted, he just didn't know which half. Cable Beats DSL A report from Cahners research says there are 5.3 million US cable modem users compared to 3.1 M DSL customers, and that for the last nine months the sale of cable modems has exceeded DSL modems by 30-50%. They cite two problems with DSL: one is that it often requires dealing with two or more vendors who try to blame the other for any problems in lieu of fixing it; the other is that DSL providers keep dying, like Northpoint and Covad. Computer Error Of The Week A glitch blamed on video processing at HBO inserted scenes of African women playing basketball into a drama called "Six Feet Under" about a family who runs a funeral home. ronks

ronks: Lucent Drop Prompts Questions With its stock down 91 percent in the last year and a half, current and former workers at Lucent regret their participation in the company's stock purchase plan and taking bonuses in now-worthless stock options. But outside of that, they're asking why their employer sank 30% of its 401(k) investments in its own stock. And "sank" is the word. Economists involved with pensions funds suggest that the trustees' need to act "with prudence" dictates no more than 10% should ever be invested in a single company. Gateway Dumps Staff, And Most Of World The PC maker, whose sales are concentrated almost entirely in the weak consumer market and who is battling Dell in a margin-eating price war, saw its revenue drop last quarter to $1.5 billion from $2.2 B last year, and lost $21 million compared with a net profit of $118 M in 2Q2000. They earlier axed 3,000 staff, but they are laying off another 5,000 or a quarter of the remaining employees, and eliminating all operations in the Asia- Pacific area and nearly all in Europe, leaving only a small Latin America overseas presence. AT&T, Bells Duke It Out In DC A bill working its way through the US House of Representatives would free phone companies from having to open their local networks to rivals like ISPs and DSL providers at wholesale prices, claiming they would (they say) install more high-speed bandwidth, for the ultimate benefit of the consumer, if they could charge for it whatever the market would bear. ISPs and DSL providers, backed by cable companies including AT&T, seem to think their having to pay more would not be in the public interest. The two sides have already spent over $10 million in lobbying pro and con. Current betting is that the Bells may prevail in the House but will lose in the Senate. Sun Casts A Cloud On Domain Names In what one called a "scare tactic", Internet domain-name registrars got a letter from Sun's lawyers last week demanding they refuse to register any sites with names that include the words "sun", "enterprise", "ultra", "cobalt" and several others that Sun claims exclusive rights to. Companies like Enterprise Rent-A-Car (www.enterprise.com) expressed dismay.

This is the funniest thing ronks has ever written (Flops of Tomorrow, about the catalapult) Flops Of Today Flooz.com filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy; it says it has about $296,000 in assets and $14 million in debts. It blames a $300,000 credit-card fraud for contributing to its demise; the actual amount was not so much, but it triggered a panic among its card processors who stopped payments to Flooz. NetObjects will cease to be an object itself; the Redwood City software maker says it has shut down and will auction off its assets. 48 percent owned by IBM, its stock has sunk from $46 six months ago to 28 cents now. Come to think of it, I remember a product called NetObjects Fusion which I though was pretty successful, though I can't recall what it did. Flops Of Tomorrow I think the Patent Office must have a silly season in the summertime. Rodney Java of San Francisco received patent # 6024264 for a hiker's headgear (specifically not a hat, please) consisting of a retractable hood. On top is a swiveling pyramid covered with solar panels which power electric motors that run fans. "The purpose of the fans is to cool the head", he notes helpfully. Wait, there's more. Attached to a built-in water bottle are two tubes and pumps; one "delivers a measured portion of drinking water to the hiker", presumably in the vicinity of the owner's mouth. Another sprays water into the twirling fan blades which is "directed onto the head of the user in the form of a cooling mist". The unit also includes a net to draw down over the face, ostensibly for protection against insects but possibly, the story notes, to hide the fog-enshrouded, motorized twirling-pyramid-topped user from recognition. Rudolf Susko of Edmonton California (all these guys are from California - coincidence?) received patent 6,210,285 for a human-body-tossing "beach catapult". His application states that "Its use will be in ejecting projectiles into the air .. wherein projectile means people." "The use of the present invention has not been documented to date", he observes candidly, though its utility to certain organized crime syndicates is obvious. "He sleeps with the flying fishes" could become a new tag line. How it works: "Upon releasing the seat [containing the victim], the tensile bows are capable of recovering original positions and thrusting the seat in an inclined path, whereby an occupant placed therein is ejected into a free flight." Hopefully toward the water. And Mr. Larry Dunks (I am not making these names up) of Oroville got patent 6,152,461 for a covered wagon "which can be converted for use to a picnic table with benches and then back to a ranch wagon configuration for lawn decoration". I wonder if it could be catapulted into the ocean as well. Measuring Web Effectiveness, Chapter MDCCCLXVIII An analyst for Jupiter Media Metrix noted recently that "retailers find it difficult to measure their Web sites' impact on in-store sales". Well, duh. But he goes on to say that while online sales pay back directly less than half the money spent on them, the benefits in helping customers do pre-sale research, in customer service, and in operating efficiency constitute the primary benefits to the merchant. Consequently, thinking of a Web site solely as a "transaction engine" for sales is apt to lead to failure. And a Forrester Research analyst examined techniques used by catalog companies such as Sharper Image to track Internet-based sales, even when placed by phone; they use a different product code for the same item displayed on their Web site and in their paper catalog, so they can track purchases to their source.

ronks 10/5/01 There seems to be a great deal of skepticism over whether the HP-Compaq merger is good for their customers or the companies themselves, and whether in fact it will survive antitrust scrutiny or the shareholders' vote to approve. Compaq stock was down over ten percent after the announcement and HP shares sank more than 18%. Regulators are likely to ask if the public needs one less PC brand in stores now that Packard Bell and Acer have left; they may have been turkeys (PB and Acer, not the regulators) but they provided some competitive pressure. While the new company is expected to focus more on services and paid support there was a brief mention that it hoped to make a splash with an unnamed new "server operating system" that would compete with Sun and MS. Ellen Hancock Bails The former IBM executive who joined Exodus Communications three years ago as CEO has "unexpectedly quit", though her replacement says she left by mutual agreement: the stock price of the website operator has sunk 98 percent and it accumulated $3 billion of debt as it acquired rival GlobalCenter. In the last two months, three board members have quit and the CFO was replaced. Dell Buys Dell Michael Dell exercised his options yesterday. He bought 4.2 million shares of the PC maker named by him and after him. It was not a bad deal, since his options price averaged $3 and the rest of the world has to pay over $22 for them. He now owns 296.2 million shares personally, and his wife and a trust he controls hold another 49.1M, for a total worth around $7.7 billion. Yes, but is he happy?

Butter PDA Available A fifty-pound Palm VII made of butter, and first place winner at the Minnesota State Fair (though the category is unclear; "50-lb. slippery yellow PDAs" seems too narrow to attract many entries), is being auctioned off on EBay at . Purchase money will be given to the Minnesota 4H Foundation. The article says the device is compatible with toast and any flavor of jelly. EBay Picks WebSphere Speaking of EBay, they evidently need something more robust than a buttery PDA themselves to drive operations; they just let a contract worth an estimated $50 million to IBM to use WebSphere for their "e-business platform software". Bragging rights are probably part of the deal, with EBay as a trophy client; it's big, it's profitable, and it's growing, something that many other e-commerce sites are not (in case you didn't know). Its volume of transactions from 35 million registered users can be prodigious, especially at the end of an auction period. IDC and Giga estimate last year's revenue from this type of software at $2.2 billion and $1.6 B respectively, with a 40% annual growth rate. Maybe now IBM will auction off those dumb WebSphere spacesuits. Disney To Rent Movies On Demand They signed up with the News Corporation to operate movies.com, where users with video-on-demand facilities will be able to view new films directly from the Net with the ability to stop and restart them, and users without VOD will be able to download them to their PC for viewing. Charges are anticipated to be on a par with store rentals and pay-per-view. Another group of five studios (MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner) is working on a similar service.

PenCam Is Here The lead for Most Useless Gadget Of 2002 seems held for now by a new device that combines (as its name implies) a pen and a video camera. Its purpose, which vendor Upper Deck feels the world has been waiting for, is to ensure that a baseball or like memento has been signed by the person whose name appears on the orb. How it works: the superstar, or a flunky, swivels the camera lens up toward his rugged face to "establish identity"; then it is turned back toward the tip of the pen as he signs his name, or perhaps marks it with an X or whatever. The images "are sent wirelessly [so the PenCam also includes a transmitter?] to a computer and entered into a database"; the video file is then matched with the signed object for sale to a fan. Its first live test was with Michael Jordan, whose response was "he wanted us to make it lighter and smaller", understandably. Signing with both hands is probably awkward. Cyberboy Is Here Not a cartoon hero, but "a combination personal organizer, MP3 player, digital camera [with video capture], audio recorder, and FM radio", all it needs is a pen attachment and you could sign baseballs with it while playing music and checking your calendar. At $349 from CMC Magnetics, it may be priced for sports celebrities, but its name is perfect for product placement in a movie: Cyberboy meets Cybergirl, Cyberboy loses Cybergirl, ...

Good Customer Service Is Not Here A recent survey by Jupiter Media Metrix of 250 Web sites last month showed the following breakdown in time to respond to customer requests: Within 6 hours: 30 percent 6 to 24 hours: 18 percent 1 to 3 days: 18 percent Over 3 days or not at all: 34 percent The results were well below customer expectations: 1/3 or the respondents expected a reply within 6 hours, and all did within 2 days. Dream on. IBM Scores On Patents The company received 3,411 patents in 2001 (up from 2,886 the year before), well ahead of any other business, none of whom have ever exceeded 3,000 in a year. It collects $1.7 billion annually in royalties from patent licensees.

ronks: Nukes Drive Wee Batteries All those tiny micro-electro-mechanical (MEM) devices on the drawing boards to monitor roads, bridges, tires, etc. need power, and a wall plug would be larger by orders of magnitude than the gizmo. Groups at Caltech and the U of Wisconsin are experimenting with small (~ 1 centimeter long) batteries that use radioactive isotopes. Nickel 63 emits beta particles and is the present favorite; alpha emitters are promising except for their tendency to destroy their packaging. Tritium is another potential source - an Illinois company is testing it. Makers say that while all the units are "nuclear", their small size makes them no more dangerous than a smoke detector which uses radioactive americium. They say. Future Auto To Be Built On Skateboard Albeit a very large one. GM's new concept car, the Autonomy (clever, huh?) consists of a more or less flat base with four wheels, a fuel-cell engine, and on-board computers. Onto the "skateboard" base goes the body, with seats, steering, roof, walls, that sort of thing, which you may elect to change for different purposes (cargo vs. passengers) or just to suit your mood (SUV, sports car, humvee).

Visor Add-on Promotes Sleep The "Jetlog 24x7 PowerNapping Springboard Module" (I am not making this up) for $100 permits the user up to 40 minutes of light sleep so long as he keeps his thumb on a button. If he lets go, or after time's up, "an alarm with increasing volume blasts out of the Visor's speaker". The maker specifically disclaims responsibility for damage, in the event the user relaxes too much and drops the unit (or is set upon and mauled by everyone else on the bus). Credit Card Issuers Seek Online Teen Spenders Though the US under-18 crowd spends an estimated $155 billion a year, only a measly $1 billion of that is shelled out online. Seeing an untapped market there (sort of like China), plastic merchants are targeting the young'uns. Visa has something called Visa Buxx and MasterCard has plans they aren't ready to disclose yet, but American Express just threw in the towel on its Cobaltcard. The problems are daunting, and the article divides them into three types: fees, marketing, and uses for the cards. The fees are a problem because to avoid legal and ethical problems with underage kids getting in debt, the accounts are all prepaid debit cards that draw on money put into an associated account. No debt means no fat interest charges, so the plastic people (hmm, reminds me of a song) rely instead on transaction fees: to put money into the account, to check your balance, etc. Kids quickly learn the concept of being nickel-and-dimed to death, and stop using the cards. Marketing problems sum up to the eternal difficulty of pitching something that appeals to both the kids and their parents; if credit card makers can solve that one, achieving world peace should be a cinch.

ronks: Thumbprint Mistaken For Potato Chip The DigitalPersona company, maker of the U.are.U fingerprint recognition units, though it would be a swell idea to promote their product at the recent Consumer Electronics Show by hiring a guy to dress up in a thumb suit to walk around the floor. Unfortunately it mostly just resulted in a very high error rate, probably not DP's intention. Most attendees thought the actor represented: a lima bean an Easter egg a psychedelic cookie a raisin a jelly bean a cracked M&M an M&M on crack a potato chip a surfboard a germ an amoeba An embarrassed VP for product marketing tried to shift blame to his potential customers by observing "people aren't used to seeing a dancing biometric running around." The digital actor helped out: "When people stare at me long enough, I'll just blurt out 'I'm a thumbprint!'" Tue 15 Jan '02 (08:26 AM) Dot-Name Starts Today Around 60,000 .name Web and e-mail addresses registered through December 18 become active now, and another set registered later will go online later this month. End Of Internet Week The publication started in 1984 as Communications Week and changed its name in 1998. Its last issue was January 7, and employer CMP Media says that "some" of its staff will be reassigned. Guess what happens to the rest.

ronks: Apple Claims New Users The maker of candy-colored computers says forty percent of those who bought machines at its 27 retail stores were purchasing their first Macintosh. That would address one of Apple's main problems: a core of intensely loyal users who constitute 5 percent of the market, but not much new blood. Symantec Claims Income Gains Not easy when your quarterly GAAP profits fell to $100,000 from $14 million a year earlier; but by issuing a pro-forma statement that ignores expenses for acquisitions, closing of offices, and other unpleasant facts, they were able to show earnings of 78 cents a share compared to the expected 64 cents. Perhaps they hired some unemployed Enron auditors. Gates Claims Interest In Security In a company-wide memo likened to his 1995 declaration that the Microsoft battleship had to turn around to deal with the Internet, the maximum leader has told his minions to make their code "trustworthy". The article says all OS development will stop in the month of February while everybody goes to training camp on security. While skepticism is understandable, there are signs that top MS execs are feeling stung at having Gartner recommend clients abandon its IIS Web server software because of its chronic weakness, and announcing that all buffer-overrun problems were fixed only to have them resurface big-time in Windows XP with Universal Plug And Play, especially after they talked up XP as NT-based and hence more reliable than Windows 9x versions. Chances are they have even noticed people adopting Linux on high- profit-margin servers on account of MS security problems.

ronks: Dvorak Claims Broadband Dead The same day I read about a TechNet report requesting the president and Congress to declare a national policy to bring "high-speed Internet access to 100 million homes and businesses by the end of the decade", I saw John Dvorak's column in PC Magazine on who killed broadband. I think you have to take Mr. D. with a grain or more of salt, but he makes some good points, and DSL, cable, satellite, have probably not lived up to growth expectations so far. The reasons he cites for the "lost cause of the Broadband Revolution": - continued growth of dial-up, with V.92/V.44 modems at 300 Kbps - nobody but servers needs 24/7 availability anyway, and it's a big security headache - it costs more than POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service), $500-1200 a year - "clueless repair personnel", no roaming, low peak-hour bandwidth - broken promises: slow downloads, streaming media that stutters - "bad reputation" as the corpses of failed companies like Northpoint, Excite, etc. litter the field - "cell phone threat" if 3rd-generation broadband enables wireless high-speed hookups [this is a threat?] - "saturation" now that "everyone who wants high-speed access has it" - "AOL syndrome"; he seems to mean by this that the vast market of the Great Unwashed Public is quite happy with AOL's training wheels and dial-up.

Risky Business I The CERT center at Carnegie Mellon University for tracking Internet security issues logged six incidents in 1988. My, how times have changed. In 2001, the number had risen to 52,658 as both hacker attacks and public willingness to report them increased. Part of the graph is hard to read, but some of the numbers (from the Software Engineering Institute) are: 1988 6 1989 132 1990 252 1994-1997 ~2K-4K, with a slight decline in 1997 1998 4000 1999 10000 2000 21000 2001 52658 Risky Business II Worldwide estimated revenue at Internet gambling sites for both 2001 and 2002 is down by half a billion US dollars for each year (to $3B and $4.1B respectively) from earlier predictions. Not because half the states here prohibit betting on the Internet. Not because all states prohibit the operation of an Internet casino. Not because the Federal Wire Act bars sports betting (and possibly other forms) over the Net. But because so many gamblers are refusing to make good on their credit-card gambling debts that banks and CC companies decline to authorize the transactions. American Express and Discover have forbidden such use for "several years"; Wells Fargo, MBNA, and Providian do likewise; and Visa and MasterCard are tightening their restrictions and may bar it altogether. The article reports that some casinos are finding 80% of their transactions denied, and that some operations have been forced to close as a result. Matthew Katz, the owner of gambling consultant ECasino Solutions, complains "Nobody looks at gaming as an industry with any respect. Everybody says it's shady." from Ron Sipherd ronks@well.com

Fast Computer Sales Slow Dataquest reports that global sales of servers rose only 1.8 percent in 2001, the lowest rise in five years. Dell edged out IBM for second place behind Compaq's 23% lead. Workstation sales fell 11%; Dell remained on top with 32% of the total, followed by Sun and Compaq. Linux Goes To The Movies The open-source OS helped create "Shrek" and Dreamworks, the studio behind Mr. Shrek's success, just signed a "multimillion-dollar alliance" with H-P to implement GNU Linux on its animation systems. Pixar is also reported moving toward Linux on its workstations. Intel Off The Hook In Europe After investigating complaints by AMD and Taiwan's VIA Technologies that Intel abused its 83% share of the microprocessor market with its customer- loyalty programs and with connection-design licenses that allegedly raised compatibility hurdles for competitors, the European commission has decided to drop antitrust proceedings. Information Wants To Be Expensive The Motley Fool financial-advice site will soon join Salon, TheStreet.com, and Yahoo in converting some of its free sections to paid-subscriber only. Starting on Valentine Day, its discussion areas will be open to those who have committed $5 a month or $30 for a year. Salon says its premium services now account for 30% of its total revenue. Fast Company The International Solid State Circuits Conference takes place in San Francisco this week, and chip-makers are rushing to issue press releases and secure bragging rights. IBM seems to be focusing on power consumption, with a CPU that uses no more than needed for its chores by switching instantly between high and low-drain states. But Intel is swinging for the fences with news of 10 gigahertz circuitry in a demo CPU. Reportedly their current 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 contains sections that run internally at 4.4; the lab unit more than doubles that speed by a new means. Instead of shrinking the entire circuitry the old-fashioned way, their engineers are concentrating on reducing a particular portion called the "physical gate length" of the transistors. They say they have now got it down to 90 nanometers, or about 360 atoms; two years ago it was thought that 140 nm was the limit. IBM, Microsoft In Joint Venture After the results of their previous collaboration to produce OS/2 you'd think they would get the message, but those who do not learn from the past are condemned etcetera. Anyway the old monopolist and the new monopolist are back together again with BEA Systems as a third partner in WSIO, the Web Services Interoperability Organization. Its purpose per a participant is "testing Web software from different suppliers to verify that it really does allow the open sharing of data across the Internet". The driving force seems to be the reluctance of corporate and private users to employ the Web for transactions like inventory management and calendar scheduling out of concern that incompatible standards will lead to errors. Presumably WSIO will ensure that no one large vendor attempts to pollute the standards. Hmmm; fox, meet henhouse. Critical Path In Plea Bargain The Internet company reached a deal with the SEC over findings that it was "creating spurious sales contracts, hiding contingencies affecting revenue recognition, and back dating software license agreements" that led to a false doubling of its sales over two quarters. The former president and the ex-VP of sales agreed to civil fines and other penalties; they will also face criminal charges for fraud and insider trading. Acrobatic Accounting Claims Another Victim Enron and Tyco have to make room on the podium for Computer Associates, whose share price dropped 13.5 percent after Moody's lowered the company's bond rating. They did that because its cash flow was off 25% from last year. Unfair, says CA CFO Ira Zar: that happened because some big customers prepaid their license fees the year before which should be a Good Thing, no? Yes, but. Mr. Z left something out; Moody's (and investors) look at CA's cash flow as a measure of its performance because it has so twisted its standard financial reports (balance sheet, income statement) as to render them virtually unintelligible even by experts. About a year and a half ago, CA adopted pro-forma accounting, a method that according to the article lets them "double-count some sales that CA has already made and makes the company's profits appear far larger than they do under standard accounting". CA is still required by law to file financial statements using standard GAAP principles, but to avoid that inconvenience it "changed its contracts with customers that made the standard results essentially meaningless". Having now succeeded in that effort, they wonder why nobody believes them any more. Arthur Andersen to the white courtesy telephone, please. Network Associates Sued Over Censorship "The customer will not publish reviews of this product without prior consent from Network Associates Inc." That is the text that appears on media and until recently on the Web site for McAfee Virus Scan, Gauntlet firewall, and other NA products. In 1999 a reviewer for Network World received a demand based on that license clause for a retraction of an article on firewall software. The state of New York is now suing NA for infringement of users' First Amendment rights; the company through its general counsel responds that NA has "the right to set the terms of its license" and the state may not interfere. But just in case, they're hedging their bets by saying the intent was merely to ensure that reviews covered up-to-date products, and the Web site now says users may not publish "tests regarding this product without first verifying with NA that you possess the correct product for the test", or you may be guilty of "misrepresentation or deceptive practice". Prior notification would of course also alert NA that you should be sent a specially tailored product to ace the tests. Letters, They Get Letters The Tunney Act requires the court to allow a period for public comment in anti-trust cases. A rough tabulation of those received in the Microsoft case shows: 30,000 - total comments received 15,000 - opposed to the proposed DOJ settlement 7,500 - in favor of the settlement 7,500 - did not refer to the settlement 2,900 - "containing a degree of substance" (compared to e.g. "Bill sucks") 2,800 - form letters with "essentially identical text" 1 - "pornography" Healthy Chocolate Patented Candy-maker Mars received patent 6,312,753 for a method of roasting cocoa beans that results in "improving the health of a mammal". Which mammal was not specified, but it probably includes the species that buys chocolate. Anyway the process raises the level of cocoa polyphenols, said to work against "cancer, tumors, periodontal disease, gingivitis, atherosclerosis, and hypertension" as well as providing an antiviral antibacterial response. Suggested uses for the new medicine are cookies and brownies. Doctor Alice B. Toklas would no doubt be pleased. A Cellphone In Every Pot The US may be approaching the point where everybody who could possibly want a cellphone has one. The number of users is still growing, but less and less each year. In 1999 it was up 26 percent, in 2001 17%, and this year's prediction is for a 14% rise, to 126 million subscribers from 69 M at the end of 1998. Department of Chutzpah British Co. Claims Hyperlink Patent WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) -- British Telecommunications PLC claimed in federal court Monday that it owns the patent on hyperlinks -- the single-click conveniences that underlie the Web -- and should get paid for their daily use by millions of people. The patent application was filed in 1976 and granted in 1989 according to the full story, so its terms have to be strained to fit: for example, you have to consider mouse buttons as a "keypad". CERT, DoD Issue SNMP Warning A somewhat unusual collaboration between the CERT computer security center and the Department of Defense resulted in a joint announcement of a flaw related to the Simple Network Management Protocol that could allow hackers to take over computers or routers. The story says the flaw was discovered last summer by Finnish researchers; CERT determined that products from 3Com, Cisco, H-P, Microsoft and others were vulnerable and notified them then, but that the response was so underwhelming (even after CERT sent letters to their CEOs) that it went public this week when reports emerged that hackers were using the flaw to hijack machines. Basically there seems to be nothing wrong with the SNMP protocol for remote system operation, but some devices allow such operation without need and without controls against misuse. Comcast Is Watching You An AP story on today's wire says the cable company is recording and storing (for an amount of time it declined to disclose) which Web pages each of its customers in Detroit, Delaware and Virginia visits and will soon expand the practice nationwide. The company responded there was no need to tell subscribers of the change since its privacy statement states it may collect such data, and that the purpose is to configure its proxy server to store the most popular pages. Inktomi, whose software is used by Comcast for the purpose, says that tying sites visited to individuals is unnecessary for server balancing, and that its software may also be used to collect passwords and credit card numbers. Analysts noted that once the data had been collected, it would become available to law enforcement agencies and parties in lawsuits, even if that was not Comcast's intention in collecting it. I wonder if Comcast uses SNMP... Nvidia Suspected Of Accounting Shenanigans Enron didn't invent dishonesty, they just made it popular; so other companies' potential pecuniary peccadilloes have been popping up in papers ever since. (I wonder if I can work Peter Piper in there somehow; naahh.) Anyway Nvidia, the Santa Clara maker of graphics cards and specialty chips, is now under the microscope of the SEC and federal criminal prosecutors for illegally shifting expenses around and recording cash reserves to dress up the net results for a desired quarter. The company is said to be (until yesterday, when it sank 10% in trading after hours) one of the last high- flyers on the Valley, with sales up a hundred-fold in the last four years. IBM Is Too Not quite so serious, with no criminal investigation underway, but Big Blue may have fudged the $340 million sale of its optical transceiver business to JDS Uniphase last year, booking the revenue under ordinary sales as though it were a bunch of disk drives instead of listing it as a one-time event. The deal was not even mentioned until yesterday in passing at a conference call with financial analysts. Publish Or Patent? A number of companies with new ideas that would be too expensive or time- consuming to patent right away are publishing them, often at a site (IP.com) set up for that purpose, to establish "prior art" as a defense against anyone else who might try to claim the concept. Domestic patents are said to take an average of 25 months from filing to issuance, and run up a tab of about $15,000 ($50K for international patents), while publishing on IP.com costs $155 per document. Patent Models Required Not to pose for artists at the USPO though; up till 1880, inventors were required to submit scale models of their inventions as part of the application. In that year the requirement was waived for all inventions except flying machines and perpetual-motion devices. After the Wright brothers proved the former was possible, the rule was reduced to just require PM machine models. A number of the 19th century models have survived fire and budget cuts and were recently put on display at a museum in Virginia. Quote Of The Day "It seems to me that if your side has access to it, then the other side, frankly, should have access to it." -Judge Kollar-Kotelly, ordering Microsoft to allow review of the Windows source code by the nine states that have not signed on to the proposed DOJ settlement Cruel And Unusual Copyrights? The Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishments without specifying what they are; the courts have taken on the task of drawing the line. Similarly, the US Supreme Court has decided to look into the authority of Congress to issue copyrights and patents "for limited times", as the length of copyright protection has grown from 14 years plus another 14 if the author was still alive to over 100 years. The lawsuit, originally regarded by some as a "fanciful academic exercise", challenges the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act that extended the duration of existing rights by 20 years at the demand of Disney and other large publishers and copyright holders. The plaintiffs lost 2-1 in the DC Circuit last year, and the decision by the Supremes to accept the case took many by surprise. It could have a profound effect on the present balance between copyright holders and those, especially on the Internet, who seek to use the works. Be Stings Microsoft Remember BeOS? Well, the company is gone as an independent entity, acquired by Palm; but it has sued MS for destroying its business "through anti- competitive practices". The complaint alleges that MS imposed deals on PC makers that barred them from installing more than one operating system on any machine that used Windows. Who is bringing the copyright case to the supremes? Or, is there a link for that story. It would be too good to be true for the Bono law to be rolled back, but i can hope. The article says the plaintiffs in Eldred vs. Ashcroft are "a coalition of publishers and individuals"; Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law filed their USSC brief. It's on the docket as 01-618. CA Sinks A Sixth Computer Associates stock fell 17 percent on reports the company is being investigated by the FBI over its reporting of revenue, not a good thing to have published about you these days. A Federal criminal inquiry into possible overstatement of net profits for the purpose of boosting share prices and executives' bonuses is known to be underway, but a CA spokesbot says they have no information on the new trouble. EU Proposes Restricted Law On Software Patents Unlike US and Japanese law which permit a wide range of software business- method patents (like one-click buying), the European Commission's proposal would allow coverage only for "software applications of a technical nature" and none for business methods. The MS-backed Business Standards Alliance said the plan "departs from what we had hoped to see"; it may also raise some interesting international conflict-of-law issues for ideas that are protected in some places, not in others, and sold everywhere. all from Ron Sipherd ronks@well.com Thanks, Ron!!!!

ronks: The Modular OS As Death Sentence Microsoft is reported deeply concerned at the possibility it may be ordered to offer a core Windows system capable of being packaged by PC makers with third-party add-ons like browsers and media players. The article observes that while the appeals court affirmed MS used a dozen or so illegal means to protect its monopoly status, the "commingling of code" was the only one the defendant asked them to reconsider. Even though the court declined to do so, MS continues to fight the battle. The proposed settlement with the DOJ and some states would allow Microsoft to bundle all the features it wants into the OS, but permit their desktop shortcut icons to be hidden. An AOL VP testified recently that MS would retain substantial power to coerce PC makers not to hide the icons, and said there is a feature in Windows XP that urges users "to sweep competing icons off the screen after 14 days", which he said blocks "meaningful customization of the desktop experience by anyone except Microsoft". A Microsoft attorney countered that the proposed remedy would fail to create competition, except between different "customized versions of Windows". MS President Quits The president and chief operating officer of Microsoft, Richard Belluzzo, announced he will leave that position next month. Mr. B came to MS about 3 years ago; before that he was CEO at Silicon Graphics and an exec at H-P. He says he does not presently have another job lined up but wants to "run a business and be a chief executive", not a likely chance at Microsoft where Messrs. Gates and Ballmer have the best corner offices and the power; especially after a coming corporate reorg that will offer more autonomy to business unit heads under CEO Mr. Big B. New Release Due Bill's wife Melinda is reported to be expecting "Gates 3.0" sometime in October according to a "family spokesman". They now have a 5-year old daughter and a son, 2. There is absolutely no reason to believe the news is related to Mr. Belluzzo's sudden departure.

Baby XP?

Taxi Ride As Relationship Business Most city trips in a taxi are pretty anonymous: you go somewhere, hand over the money, and walk away. Fine, so long as you're not short on cash and you don't leave your umbrella behind in the cab. Patent 6,347,739 addresses those concerns as well as the driver's over being a rolling piggybank. It consists of a wireless modem and a credit-card reader attached to the taxi meter; you get a record of your expense and the ID number of the cab in case you left something behind, and the driver has less cash on board. Lights! Action! Credit! More and more institutions are issuing credit cards these days and people are carrying multiple plastic. So when they open their wallet (to pay the cabdriver, say) they see a card from every bank where they had an account, every university they took a class at, every jail they were paroled from maybe. Rising to the top of the stack is a challenge attacked by patent 6,325,284; a card using this idea flashes and/or makes sounds when it senses "a change in ambient light, pressure, or noise" and emits "different tones or phrases" and "intermittent pulses of light ... produced according to a predetermined pattern". The idea is for the card to call attention to itself, not (presumably) to antagonize other theater patrons or whatever. But the article observes that the inventors (who include security guru Bruce Schneier and Priceline.com patent-holder Jay Walker) may license their invention to many institutions, so every time you go to buy something you could face "a wallet full of flashing, beeping plastic". There may also be prior art: in Tolkien's _Hobbit_ Bilbo tries to filch a troll's purse. "''Ere, 'oo are you?' it squeaked as it left the pocket." Microsoft Reform School Extended Classes in how to write secure code for MS programmers were supposed to run till the end of February, after a series of nasty hits like Code Red and Nimda to its best corporate customers led many to wonder if its software was safe to use. Well, it's April and the re-education camps continue; the current phase may wrap up this month, though executives and PR types insist the new mindset will remain forever yadda yadda. The program director acknowledged that the students "initially showed some resistance to the project, but in the end the experience of seeing offending code on a giant screen in a large auditorium proved humbling". Skepticism remains especially among proponents of open-source software, who observe the absence of public scrutiny leaves the effectiveness of the training unknown until the next reported incident. Speaking of which, the FBI published a survey they conducted with large corporations and government agencies that indicates "about 90 percent detected computer security attacks in the last year but only 34 percent reported those attacks to authorities". ronks@well.com Ron Sipherd wrote this

ronks: Hailstorm Over, Skies Clearing Microsoft's "My Services" initiative (originally code-named Hailstorm) to give everyone a kind of roving identity so they could log on anywhere to get e-mail and buy stuff, with personal data securely stored on MS servers (I hear you laugh, but that was the plan) for global use is reported to be getting a quiet burial. Or according to Microsoft general manager Charles Fitzgerald, "We're sort of in the Hegelian synthesis of figuring out where the products go once they've encountered the reality of the marketplace." Well, you can see why he's a manager; anyone who talks like that is obviously incapable of doing useful work. The reality seems to have come in two doses. One is foreign restrictions on transborder data flow especially in Europe, which limits the transfer of personal information between countries. In the US there was the unexpectedly (to MS) stiff resistance of companies to letting The Octopus, or to a lesser extent any third party, maintain sensitive data about their customers. Despite MS' earlier predictions they would sign up vendors right and left, the article says "after nine months of intense effort the company was unable to find any partner willing to commit itself to the program". One possible Hegelian synthesis, or maybe just a way to salvage a few bucks from the effort, is to license My Services technology to companies so they can privately maintain their own customer info. YACIF Yet another consortium is formed; this time IBM, Microsoft, and VeriSign will join forces to create WS-Security, described as a set of extensions to SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). The goal is to persuade companies to share consumer, product, inventory etc. data for easier interchange. A sort of non-proprietary EDI, I think, so that for example one business's inventory system can query a supplier for items the buyer is running low on and place an order over the Web. Might use some leftover MS technology and staff from the late Hailstorm project too, come to think of it. DoubleClick Tombstone Up They're not dead; a tombstone is what they call those legal notice ads packed with tiny print. "All persons in the United States who have had any information about their computers or about them gathered by DoubleClick as a result of their Internet activity or who have had DoubleClick cookies placed upon their computers or browsers" are told "This Notice contains important information that may affect your rights." Namely that the class action on privacy has been settled, DoubleClick promises to change its wicked ways (for example, their cookies will now expire in a mere five years), and the plaintiff's lawyers get $1,800,000 for their pains. Of which the actual plaintiffs will receive $0,000,000. Details on this fabulous offer available at . Call now!

ronks: AOL Time Warner Loses $54 Billion In Quarter Their colossal flop seems due mostly to the AOL division whose new subscriptions have leveled off and whose ad revenue has plummeted; meanwhile the movie and other old-line segments of the company, "once dismissed by dot-com acolytes as stodgy relics, have steadily forged ahead". The CEO- elect Richard Parsons, who earlier "irked some investors" by observing that an obsession with individual quarters was shortsighted and suggesting a longer-term view, seems to have capitulated and says his new focus is on avoiding bad quarters. The current whopper may in fact be part of the plan: by taking an immense one-time charge, Mr. Parsons can get that out of the way and make the subsequent accounting reports look nicer. I mean it is pretty hard to do much worse than losing $54 billion net in three months. The company is also trying to get people to stop looking at standard GAAP measures like revenue and profit, and track "ebitda" instead. Even so, their expected "earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization" is now down to 7 percent from an earlier predicted 10%. Time to call in Arthur Andersen to pretty up the books..

Busy Techie (ronks) Fri May 3 '02 (10:54) 29 lines Why They Left Sun Microsystems is said to be planning a long-range effort, internally named N1, that led Scott McNealy to tell senior execs recently they should either plan to stay around for five years' minimum, or go now. Many went. He has also begun thinking Long Thoughts about corporate directions after joining GE's board and mulling the management philosophy of its former CEO Jack Welch. One of the goals of N1 is to reduce the company's reliance on hardware, which presently accounts for about 70% of its business but is evolving into a low-margin commodity operation. N1, which will surely have a catchier name when it's announced on May 22, is Sun's strategy to build the Internet computer, described as "a combination of hardware and software that will in effect combine the entire computing resources of a company ... to work as one vast computer", meshing mainframes, servers, and desktop units from different manufacturers running different operating systems. No Easy Cure For Sex, Say Researchers The National Research Council has released its study "Youth, Pornography and the Internet" on how to shield children from bad things on the Web. Their conclusion in a nutshell is there's no simple answer. "Though some might wish otherwise, no single approach - technical, legal, economic, educational - will be sufficient", they say, and there is no "'quick fix' to the challenge of pornography on the Internet". They observe for example that kiddie filters "can be highly effective ... if the inability to access large amounts of appropriate material is acceptable".

Busy Techie (ronks) Fri May 10 '02 (11:24) 42 lines High Speed To The Wall The current (May 2002) issue of Scientific American has an article on the future of "ultrawideband wireless" data transmission, particularly over short distances. The technology is based on the premise stated in the article that "Many in the developed world already spend most of the day within 10 meters of some kind of wired link to the Internet", so the field of greatest payback for vendors is in spatial capacity rather than raw bandwidth. Spatial capacity is a measure of bit rates over area, similar to how light fixtures are measured in lumens per square meter. UWB transmitters operating at 100 megabits per second, about today's level, really shine (so to speak) at spatial capacity and low power drain per the following matchup: Power, Kilobits/ milliwatts Sq Meter 802.11b 50 1 Bluetooth 1 30 802.11a 200 55 UWB 0.2 1,000 UWB employs a different form of transmission from your father's radio (or your kid's cell phone); it has no carrier frequency. Instead it consists of brief pulses over a wide range of frequencies, varying in amplitude, polarity, timing, and other characteristics to create Fourier approximations of square waves. This factor renders it more likely to interfere with other wireless devices, and in turn to suffer interference from them as well as from hair dryers and the like. (At present there seems no great danger that hair dryers will spontaneously turn on in the neighborhood of a wireless LAN, but when they start to get their own IP numbers, look out; we'll probably have to go back to fanning our heads with ostrich feathers or whatever people used in olden days.) Anyway, the likelihood of UWB being a source of interference is minimized by the devices' short range and low power: a 0.2 milliwatt UWB transmitter generates about 1/3000 the radiation of a 600 mw cell phone for example. Engineers are working meanwhile on electronic filters to address interference, multipath distortion, and similar input problems. The article concludes by noting that in 1976, before the advent of short-hop communications like cell phones, "telephone providers in New York City could handle only 545 mobile telephone customers at a time". That has changed.

Broadband For The Masses Only 7 percent of US homes today have high-speed Internet access, per the FCC. Cost is the primary reason; not just the monthly fees but also the expense of wiring the "last mile" to the house, and within ye olde domicile itself. Two guys in a garage (really; just six blocks from Apple's birthplace and probably not far from Messrs. H & P's house) have figured out a way to modify the code on 802.11b Wi-Fi circuit boards that allows for wireless high-bandwidth data transmission up to twenty miles, thus eliminating much of the need for DSL and cable Internet connections. Their company is called Etherlinx and with a whopping $200,000 of investor money already serves about a dozen paying customers in their Oakland trials. Larger companies have expressed interest, but most are said to be waiting on a new wireless standard under development called 802.16 that may address long-range transmission in a more buttoned-down official format. Apple's 12-Step Plan They intend to run a series of ads featuring people against a plain white background talking about they swore off Windows and embraced the Macintosh faith. One calls his MS usage like "being stuck in a bad relationship". Steve Jobs sounded almost pleading with Mr. Bill not to take offense, saying "What's a few marketing points between friends? It wouldn't matter to them, and we would be eternally grateful." This may call for a new definition of "friends" and "eternally". Ron Sipherd (ronks@well.com)

It Takes An iVillage The network of women's sites has undergone a makeover: two-thirds of the staff has been liposuctioned out, "flamboyant" CEO Candice Carpenter was replaced two years ago by a man, and instead of paying AOL and MSN to carry their content they may start to charge $5 a month for viewing privileges. They have also branched out into a line of branded "nutraceutical" pills, books with not very liberated titles like "How To Find and Keep A Man" and "Heirloom Recipes", and a "$35 six-week online sexual self-improvement course" which provided $100,000 in revenue. (Exactly how it improved the 2857.14 women who took it was not described, nor did the article suggest a need for lab assistants.) One thing remains, however: they have yet to make money. They had $60 million revenue in 2001, down from $76 M the year before and another net loss, though reportedly narrowing. Ron Sipherd, ronks@well.com. Thanks Ron!

Ron Sipherd ronks@well.com : The Empire Strikes Upwards The second generation of the Itanium CPU, evidently much larger than its parents, is to become available today; it represents according to the news story Intel's latest attempt to crack the data center ceiling. While Intel chips are in 85 percent of servers today, that's mostly in smaller ones like print and Web servers. About half the $49 billion annual revenue for servers goes to bigger machines, mostly from Sun, that drive back office operations like manufacturing and finance, and Intel wants a piece of that. Even the best hardware will take time to be accepted at those levels though, largely due to the cost of converting applications, so results are not expected to show up for a while. There They Go Again The US government, who brought us Ada and kept OSI on life support long after it had flatlined everywhere else, is set to develop a uniform standard for information interchange. A bill introduced in the Senate would create the "Office of Electronic Government"; despite its alarming name, it's not intended replace those pesky humans in the legislature with machines, but to set up a bureau to standardize the format of data both publicly available and for internal use. Chances are they will settle on XML, but that still leaves a myriad of details like whether you call a data item , , , and so forth. Even within the Defense Department they have not decide what a name is: first and last, first and middle initial and last, or all spelled out. Expect a long costly effort, followed by long costly hearings on why it failed.

Busy Techie (ronks) Mon Jul 22 '02 (09:24) 45 lines Real Challenge RealNetworks is expected to announce new server software that can distribute audio and video files in Windows Media as well as Real's own and other formats. Although the Helix product was developed with "clean-room" techniques, Real says it would not be surprised if Microsoft sued them over its proprietary streaming media features. Licensing of Helix is a variant of open-source called "community source": the source code is freely available, but a fee is required for development of Helix-based commercial products. The article says the Java license was a model; it also sounds like TrollTech's licensing strategy for its Qt GUI interface software. Although the RealOne player has the lead on client machines for now, it has to watch its heels: Jupiter says RealOne has 29.1% market share, Windows Media is right behind with 28.2%, and Apple's QuickTime has 12.1%. But if Real can persuade Sun and IBM to bundle Helix with their OS, much as Microsoft did with Windows Media, it could get a significant (almost said real) boost. Some Guys And The Future According to some guy named John Schwartz (), some futurist named Howard Rheingold () predicts that wireless phones and messagers could lead to a major new social phenomenon that he calls "smart mobs": groups acting in concert, perhaps without even realizing it. For example, word of a party or demonstration spreads out over the devices like ripples in a pond and people converge on the event. In Finland a cooperative called Aula runs a club for its 500 members whose "radio-frequency ID tags" not only let them in but also let others know they're there; its goal is to supplement the virtual community with a real meeting space; sort of like the Well picnic. The Internet Is Not Dead Another article says that despite the flight of investors, and the recent shakeup at Time Warner AOL that suggested the print media has ousted the webby usurper, the online world has shown considerable growth down at the consumer level where the revenue comes from. However, the reality is shaping up to be much different from the entrepreneurs' visions of a few year back; "the Internet has turned out to be more of a souped-up telephone than a delivery vehicle for media and entertainment". The story notes that 61 percent of adult Americans use the Net today, nearly a third more than in 2000, and e-mail is the most popular use. Thanks Ron!

(ronks) Thu Jul 25 '02 (08:54) 48 lines Got Laptop? Denver airport officials put up the sign above at security check stations after 95 computers were left behind by harried travelers in the month of February. Increased scrutiny of airline passengers since 9/11 means they have to take the PC out of its bag and show the National Guard it can play Solitaire; in the rush to gather raincoats, suitcases, explain why you packed forbidden nail clippers and other instruments of mass destruction, many forget to put the machine back in the bag. Seattle-Tacoma airport had 330 of them left behind in the seven months after they started inspections, and 204 in just the last three. It Isn't Easy Being Green Computer Associates spokesperns are at great pains today to explain that the ten million dollars the company gave Sam Wyly to drop his proxy fight to elect five members to the board, thus leaving shareholders with no choice other than management's pick, is not greenmail. They seem to feel the need to say that because everybody outside the company thinks that's what it was. .Net 101 Called by one participant ".Net For Dummies", Microsoft brass made an elaborate presentation to reporters and analysts to explain what the vastly trumpeted initiative is about, two years after it was introduced. The article seemed to suggest it's still not entirely clear; according to VP Jim Allchin, "It really is about plumbing and concrete and protocols", yet no plumbers or foundation contractors attended the session. From the story, it's also about fighting IBM, Oracle, Sun, and a host of smaller firms for control of the supposedly big-potential Web services business; it's about persuading customers to rent software rather than buy licenses; it's about ending the era of "open computing" and the "free exchange of digital information" through a group called the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance that MS seeks to influence to make PC builders include self-limiting circuits to limit the media they play and the code they will run. (Persuading people this brave new world of renting and crippled computers is an improvement sounds like a major challenge, for anyone but a monopoly.) And it's about a new "communications server" called Greenwich, a new SQL server called Yukon, a Windows Media Center to display ".Net-style information to the television in the living room" (so the whole family can crunch databases in the evening?); last and greatest it's about Longhorn, the new OS two years off that will be just better than anything ever before etc. One gets the feeling from reading the article that the reporter was not persuaded.

(ronks) Mon Aug 12 '02 (08:37) 19 lines Linux At The Edges As competition develops for its Solaris-based servers from rivals like IBM, and cost conscious buyers move to clustered Linux systems running on old or commodity-priced hardware, not to mention the slumparoonie in the dot-com and telecom industries, Sun Microsystems has seen its revenues fall by about a third. One apparent response is to rethink its strategy of pushing thin clients and fat centralized servers. Microsoft has graciously, if unwittingly, sent an opportunity their way; the new MS policy of forcing corporate customers to rent software seems to be leading many to look to Linux as a way to regain control over their systems and costs. So Sun will introduce its new LX50 server today, a $2800 model running a 1.4 GHz Intel CPU which the article compares to a $3700 Dell/RedHat unit. Analysts note Sun's timing is good, since the movement to Linux is still new and IBM and H-P, though pioneers, don't have a lock on the market. They also speculate Sun's strategy may be to retain its high-margin Solaris servers at the core while promoting Linux units "at the edge of the network and in desktop applications".

ronks rides again. iPhone On The Way? An article in today's paper suggests that Newton II may be on Apple's drawing board, despite the role of its daddy in ending CEO John Sculley's career there. The new device, whose existence is largely denied by Mr. Sculley's predecessor/successor Steve Jobs, would be both a cell phone and a PDA. While the present Apple management is mum about such plans, the story notes how the foundation is being laid with a license that allows the iPod's software (bought from a third party, Pixo) to be used on a second product and numerous handheld-friendly features in the new Mac OS X. Such as (takes deep breath) chat, e-mail, an address book, a calendar, automatic networking, data synchronization, handwriting recognition, and additions to the Sherlock information-search tool that include restaurants, movie times, and airline schedules. Apple faces a changed world since Newton I: on one hand the cost of components has declined greatly and the concept is no longer so new or risible; on the other, the playing field is already crowded with competitors like Motorola, Microsoft, Nokia, and Palm, and startups Handspring and Danger. Mist-On On The Way Patent number 20020088475 was issued to Texas inventor Thomas Laughlin for his "system for coating the human skin". The device, a sort of walk-in closet with nozzles, can spray the victim er client with suntan lotion, insect repellent, instant tanning cream, "skin bleaches" (presumably not at the same time as the instant tanning glop), "decontamination agents, muscle relaxants, and wrinkle treatments". Also with something called "massage aides", which appear not to be tiny large-handed homunculi but scented oil. After which I imagine a real person performs the rubdown, though Mr. Laughlin may be working on the Iron Masseuse; stay tuned. Video Spam On The Way Talkway Communications of Fremont CA has unveiled a software product for sending full-motion sound-and-video e-mail messages that don't require "any special software" on the recipient's end. The product, VmailTalk, is said to have "positive effects for customer acquisition"; soon spammers will be able to show just how much they can enlarge any desired organs, with animation yet (and make them talk too, another boon). Science marches on. Vanilla Ice Cream In Path Of Monster? The Toho Company of Japan, owner of the "Godzilla" name and character, has threatened to sue David Linabury, host of davezilla.com, over his "use of the 'zilla' formative" and his "emaciated cartoon dragon" for infringement of their rights. Mr. Linabury has refused and offered to battle Godzilla (in court) over it. Toho reps decline to comment, but with hundred of other sites using the dreaded formative including mozilla.org, the monster and his lawyers may be gearing up for a busy season.

ronks rides yet again. Novell Up The software and services company reports a quarterly profit of $10 million compared to a $19 M loss a year earlier, and a 13% rise in sales. Off The Clock A story in yesterday's paper covered much the same ground (though faster) as an article in the August issue of Scientific American: asynchronous computer circuits. In CPU chips today, a central clock sets the pace for almost all operations, like the drum-beater in a Roman galley ship. Besides providing the manufacturer with bragging rights (2 gigahertz! 2.2 gigahertz! 2.22 GHz! and so forth), the clock sets the pace so the operations of data fetching, calculation, storage etc. in different sections can interoperate. This uniformity comes at a price, though: up to a third of the chip's electrical power may be devoted to the clock and its circuitry, a particular problem on battery-powered devices; the clock always runs, generating waste heat even when the computer is idle; and the fixed frequency of the clock generates radio signals in tune with its harmonics that can interfere with wireless devices. Equally important, the clock forces faster sections of the chip to operate at the pace of the slowest component. By contrast, an asynchronous chip is more like a bucket brigade; if you are ready to pass the bucket onto the next person downstream and they are ready to receive it, you can do so without regard to some central metronome's pace. Of course, this approach poses its own problems: CPU clocks weren't invented just to slow everybody down. The two main issues identified to date are (1) determining when all the components of the predecessor task have been marshaled so that the next task can begin, known as the Rendezvous; and (2) arbitrating which of two requests (say for shared memory) is to receive precedence. The SA article goes into mind-numbing length on the resolution of these issues to date, including a 14th century parable about an ass placed exactly between two equal piles of hay who starves from inability to decide. Zzzzzz.. Oh yes, the story; anyway, more info for the terminally curious is available at .

Thanks Ron! Now We Know When the Arizona attorney general's office shut down Scottsdale Internet merchant CP Direct and inventoried its assets, they uncovered a number of facts about the world of e-mail marketing. The company was apparently a major source of those annoying ads for pills to increase the size of the, ah, male organ. The treatment was found to consist of pumpkin seeds, sarsaparilla, and "oyster meat" (for some reason in quotes, maybe they swapped in clam meat, no wonder it didn't work - never mind). Anyway their profits were wonderfully enlarged, probably since the bottles they sold for $60 cost them $2.45; the company's property included "$30 million in luxury real estate and a herd of Mercedes-Benzes, Rolls-Royces, and a Lamborghini".

Ron Sipherd ronks@well.com writes: The Next Twenty Years The effect on Social Security of the changing US demographic over the coming decades has been endlessly debated, but its larger effect on the economy is less well known. The nonpartisan Aspen Institute has just released a report comparing the previous two decades with the next two. A couple conclusions stand out, with most workers of 2022 already born; growth in the work force will be considerably slower, and disparities in income will widen as fewer skilled workers are available for more openings and fewer unskilled jobs are available. From 1980 to 2000, the baby boom and the influx of women workers pushed the workforce up 50%; by 2020, that figure should rise by only 16% as boomers retire and women's figures cease to bulge [must find better way of phrasing that]. The number of educated US workers grew by 19% since 1980, but will only rise 4% in 2020, and the pool of age 25-54 Americans may not grow at all. Potential effects of the diminished US labor growth are: - a slowdown in the annual growth of the GDP by up to a percent; - increased wage premiums for skilled applicants; - increased reliance on foreign workers (who accounted in 1996-2001 for 89% of US growth in workers 25-54, and 53% of those with advanced degrees), especially for occupations not requiring physical relocation to the US; - a rise in on-the-job training for needed skills.

Rather Ripped Napster Ripped as in R.I.P. The music-sharing company has been inactive for over a year, since a Federal court declared it abetted the infringement of copyrighted material. It entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy three months ago and planned to take a $9 million buyout from German media conglomerate and part- owner Bertelsmann; but that plan was just blocked by the court since Napster's CEO Conrad Hilbers had "divided loyalty" as a former Bertelsmann executive. Mr. Hilbers responded that the company would move to Chapter 7 (liquidation) proceedings. Then he laid off all his staff and quit; this is not considered a good sign for the future of the business. Time Slices, Like An Arrow The September issue of Scientific American is devoted to the concept of time: its physics, psychology, etc. One article describes divisions of time from one attosecond (a billionth of a billionth of a second, but still lots longer than a unit of Planck time, which is 10 **-43 second) on up to a billion years and the evaporation of the last black hole in 10 **100 years. Anyway, it introduces a new measure akin to the Standard Human Hair or the area of Rhode Island: 1/350 of a second, or the amount of time in which Americans (presumably in the aggregate) eat one slice of pizza. Thanks Ron!

Busy Techie (ronks) Mon Sep 9 '02 (10:32) 18 lines Promoting Open Source Can Get You Fired At least it seems to have gotten Bruce Perens fired from H-P. Before the merger with Compaq, Mr. Perens was H-P's GNU Linux evangelist, urging customers to consider it and then letting the company's sales force explain why H-P was the best choice for Linux products. After the merger, H-P became "the largest single buyer of Windows for personal computers" and hence at the mercy of the giant of Redmond who has funded a front er an "industry group" called the Initiative For Software Choice whose goal is to fight "legislative proposals, government statements, and studies" that support using open-source software. (Studies even? Once somebody starts to study the issue they become a potential enemy of the people evidently.) Mr. Perens was informed ten days ago that he was terminated. In related news, market-research firm StatMarket has pronounced Netscape effectively dead, with less that 3 percent share compared with Internet Explorer's 96%, all achieved you may be sure by free and unconstrained public choice.

A Step Forward, A Step Sideways H-P researchers say new molecular-level chip fabrication techniques, described as "an ultra-high-tech waffle iron" (hold the syrup), should lead within the next few years to memory densities of over a trillion bits per square centimeter. Today's memory is said to max out at around half a billion bits. They anticipate making wires within the circuits no more than an atom wide. The company just received a patent on aspects of the technology, which is also being pursued by IBM and probably others. Meanwhile Intel says its new processors will include "advanced security features" which create a sort of virtual vault for data secure from hackers; the "LaGrande" technology is intended to work with Microsoft's Palladium security software initiative, and will also prevent you from sharing music, video and other files that the suits don't want you to pass around. Thank you, Ron.

ronks is busy today. Hands Down IDC reports worldwide sales of handheld PDAs fell 9.3% last quarter to 2.6 million, the second decline in a row. Palm is still the leader followed by HP-Compaq, Sony, Handspring, and "Hi-Tech Wealth" of China.

ronks rides again. Poor Software Foundation Holds Fundraiser As Richard Stallman likes to point out "Free software is free as in freedom, not as in free beer". Companies make money selling it even if they don't have the same ownership rights as Microsoft and Apple over their creations; just ask Red Hat and IBM. But that doesn't mean they're putting much of it back into the Free Software Foundation, especially in the current business downturn, and the FSF has expenses even if most of its technical work is done by volunteers. So it held a benefit dinner and passed the hat last week at the NY apartment of a GNU software company founder, raising $6,000 from the 25 guests. Fat Pipes At Post Office One of the largest conduits for the delivery of digital media is - the US Postal Service, thanks largely to the growing industry of video on demand and DVDs. A company like Netflix who mails out movies for rent or sale to consumers accounts for an estimated 1500 terabytes of data a day, compared to around 2000-4000 terabytes a day for the Internet. Peregrine Lays An Egg Business-software maker Peregrine Systems filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy and sold off its Remedy unit to BMC Software for $350 million. Investors are still waiting for audited financial reports for fiscal years 2000 through 2002, and the company says it expects to restate revenue for 11 quarters downward by about a quarter billion to reflect transactions booked as sales that should have been called loans. They are suing their former auditor Arthur Andersen - take a number, guys - for negligence and fraud. Apart from the fact that AA will likely be picked clean before the case gets to trial, it will be interesting to hear the plaintiff claim to be a victim because its auditor went along with the plaintiff's own schemes.

Who Needs Moore's Law Anyway? This just in: humans are not getting any faster, and most don't need their PCs to do so either. With primary consumer uses like e-mail, Web surfing, and word processing, systems beyond 2 gigahertz look to many like a 1000- watt lightbulb; impressive but unnecessary. A recent review of households showed the number "very likely to purchase a new PC in the next six months" had fallen to 11%, from an average in the late nineties of around 14% and a spike in late 1999 of 21% as people rushed to buy new systems able to handle the year 1900 (oops). Demand has slackened despite the fact that for the first time in eight years, most home users have machines over two years old. Analysts suggest the industry is still in denial over the decline; as one put it, they're "walking around like members of the cargo cult after World War II." An indication of their attitude comes from their expressed belief that the new drivers for new-PC demand will be games and home video editing. Some of the downturn appears attributable to the recession, but it may also herald a shift away from spending "techno-lust" disposable income on PCs and toward other gizmos like cellphones, PDAs, and portable music players. Vicarious Revenge On Spammers When Sparklist.com, the host of Marketing Sherpa's e-mail address list containing 10 million names, was sold to a rival, disgruntled former employees sold the list to spammers. The resultant deluge of pornography, make-money-fast, and organ-enlargement ads sent to their customers was "mortifying" according a Sherpa executive. So for kicks they created where you can subject sleazy characters like Mr. Viagro and cartoonish nubiles to vats of boiling oil, hordes of crazed flying monkeys, and of course an avalanche of e-mail. We're All Bubble Boys On This Bus In the firm belief that every burnoose-clad barbarian is cooking up pots of anthrax and smallpox spores to lob at the civilized world, the homeland- security folks are beefing up hospital decontamination wards. But getting all the civilized sickos to the ward without spreading the stuff around is a problem. Enter the living-body bag, AKA the "personal pod". These things, for which patents are issuing, are described as a "giant Ziploc sandwich bag with a blower and a filtered exhaust". Another version seals "with an adhesive similar to that found on disposable diapers". I feel so much safer now. SIA Says Chip Sales Up A survey by the Semiconductor Industry Association shows a 14 percent increase in worldwide sales of chips from a year ago, primarily for use in consumer products such as mobile phones, DVD players, and digital cameras. It predicts sales this year should total around $143 billion. ASAP RIP Forbes ASAP, created in 1992 to provide coverage of the "digital economy", is no more; it has been shut by ailing parent Forbes. It came out six times a year, then four; now zero. A spokespern said "There is no market for a dedicated new-economy publication." Taking a longer view was John Battelle, former head of the company that published the now-defunct Industry Standard, who observed "These magazines are gone until they come back, though probably in different clothing. There will be another boom in the business cycle, and there will be a new crop of magazines to cover it." Follow The Money Charles James, the DOJ antitrust chief who capitulated I mean negotiated a settlement of the federal suit against Microsoft, is quitting for a job at Chevron-Texaco because he says it offered him more money and a place on its executive committee. Robert Pitofsky, former FTC head, noted that while Mr. James verbally "was very supportive of enforcement ... he didn't bring many cases of note at all", fewer in fact than Reagan's antitrust chief William Baxter. Tons O' Phone An EPA report estimates that in three years about 65,000 tons of old cell phones will be discarded annually. "Old" in this context meaning "replaced by something more appealing" as in "old ex-spouse", not just say a 1970's shoebox size cordless. Anyway, one approach is the "Take Back Your Phone" drive to make manufacturers accept returned units and recycle them, though simply rearranging the components for resale may not fool everybody; perhaps they can be made into postmodern 65,000-ton sculptures that comment on our throwaway digital lifestyle. Or perhaps not. Anyway, the makers of cell phones don't like the idea; they prefer that "old phones be turned over to charities or resold in less developed countries." So if a new mountain pops up on the banks of the Limpopo or wherever it might not be a volcano, just a pile of Nokias. - ronks

(ronks) Mon Oct 14 '02 (08:46) 34 lines Patents And Copyrights And Trade Secrets, Oh My As the US pursues its war on piracy of intellectual property, it's worth noting that the biggest Jolly Roger in the 1800's was flown by a country located between Canada and Mexico. Prior to 1891, only citizens and residents of the US could obtain copyright protection for their works, so that for example Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" sold for six cents here as opposed to the equivalent of $2.50 in England. By the 1890's however it had become apparent that Americans were producing books and other works that needed protection abroad, only available if we reciprocated, and since then the US has become one of the loudest voices decrying other countries doing what we did. The Trips ("Trade related aspects of intellectual property rights", sounds better than Traoipr I guess) agreement being pushed on members of the WTO would require nations to enforce a standard and a strong set of IP rules worldwide. The World Bank just did a study of who wins and who loses from Trips: it concluded the US would gain about $19 billion a year in additional royalties, Germany about $7 B, Japan $6 B, and France around $3 B. China would lose $5 B, Mexico $3 B, India $1 B, and Brazil about $0.5 billion. While Trips has been on a roll among WTO signatories, the World Bank study reinforces a feeling born of the AIDS epidemic and the high cost of patented drugs leading third world countries to rethink its virtues. Of course once they too become rich and famous, they may see things differently, just as we did.. In other news, the feeling among the plaintiffs seeking in the Supreme Court to overturn the recent extension of US copyright terms is not optimistic. At a meeting after oral arguments the general perception was that while the Supremes felt "disdain" for the law, they were reluctant to declare it unconstitutional. Still the plaintiffs felt they had lit a fire that might in time ignite public opinion and persuade legislators to see both sides of the issue rather than just Disney's. As one attorney put it, "A lot of us feel this is like the environmental movement before 'Silent Spring'".

(ronks) Tue Oct 15 '02 (09:32) 15 lines Return Of The Mainframe Well, not exactly. But ancient computer maker Unisys, who has also branched out into the more up-to-date services biz, reported quarterly earnings of $59 million, up from $21 M last year even though revenue was off about 4%. Play With Your Phone In what is either a visionary breakthrough or one of the silliest uses of new technology, Intel is expected to announce a new generation of flash memory and stacked processor chips based on the ARM design that will "give cell phone users the ability to execute such performance-intensive applications as MPEG4 video, speech and handwriting recognition, and Java".

ronks: Return Of The Mainframe Well, not exactly. But ancient computer maker Unisys, who has also branched out into the more up-to-date services biz, reported quarterly earnings of $59 million, up from $21 M last year even though revenue was off about 4%. Play With Your Phone In what is either a visionary breakthrough or one of the silliest uses of new technology, Intel is expected to announce a new generation of flash memory and stacked processor chips based on the ARM design that will "give cell phone users the ability to execute such performance-intensive applications as MPEG4 video, speech and handwriting recognition, and Java". Funky Pundits A conference of high-tech boosters called Agenda, held in Scottsdale this year, was a gloomy departure from the usual optimistic mood of prior years. The major debate seemed to be over whether the industry had simply "matured" into a slower-growing phase that would last indefinitely, or whether the slump was temporary (maybe long-term but still finite) due to overbuilding and overinvestment in fiber optic pipes, chip fab plants, and other capacity that led companies to take on long-term debt just as demand plummeted. Voodoo Econometrics An article in the paper today (not meant to be taken seriously, I hope) tracks the correlation between the stock market and the reoccurrence of World Series between California teams. In 1974, 1988, and this year, (regular 14-year intervals, hmm) the rivalry is between a team from the north of the state and one from the LA area. A year after the first one, the Dow was up 26%; a year after the second, it was up 23%. Then there was 1989, when there was a recession, a threat of war in the Mideast, and the Dow went up only 2%, not to mention the earthquake; but that was between two Bay Area teams so any resemblance to this year is of course purely coincidental.. Flat Apple Not a new monitor, but the company's quarterly financial results. Gross sales were essentially the same as a year ago, though the number of units shipped was down 14 percent to 734,000. The $66 million profit of the quarter a year ago turned into a $45 M loss, mostly due to one-time charges like a decline in its Earthlink investment; without those, Apple made $7 M. CFO Fred Anderson was not hopeful for the future: "There's uncertainty in the economy and the PC industry and the possibility of war. I don't see any point in being optimistic at the moment." Don't invite him to your next party. How To Drive Customers Away Microsoft's new corporate pricing plan, which basically converts software license to a rental mode, is producing some short term gains as clients signed up to beat a July 31 rate increase, but a lot of grumbling and some defections. Overall, most companies will probably pay about the same, some a little less, and some will have to pay more; but the losers are the ones whose budgets were tightest in the first place and are the most sensitive to price gouging by a monopoly. The city of Nanaimo in British Columbia has responded by moving to convert its 350 desktop units to Sun StarOffice, estimated to cost about 15% of MS Office. Sun Down Sun may be the gainer from the MS plans in Nanaimo, but its reported to be losing the OS wars to Microsoft and Linux. As a result its prices reflect lower profit margins, and as a result of that, its credit rating was just lowered by S&P (to BBB from BBB+, still investment grade but nearer junk). More Layoffs At Adobe The graphics software maker is expected to let go about another 250 staff in the fourth quarter; it dropped 247 a year ago, out of about 3500 on its payroll. Talk Faster Lucent reports chip prototypes for cell phones that can send and receive at eight times the speed of today's units; it is expected to be used for wireless data as well as high-speed babbling. They use inverse multiplexing (which I haven't heard much of recently), merging signals from several antennas into a single stream. Sun Squeezed As one analyst put it, "They're a big company, they're not going away", but the challenge "would be to remain relevant to its customers". Facing a 4% quarterly decline in sales from a year ago and a $111 million net loss (though better than the $180 M loss this time last year), Sun has to deal with challenges to its proprietary software from Microsoft and open-source Linux as well as a decline in clients' capital spending on technology. Plainly losing less on lower revenue comes from cost-cutting, which Sun intends to continue with a planned layoff of about 4,400 employees or 11% worldwide. Longer term it remains to be seen if the company can be profitable as the Unix market shifts; Sun's one reported victory in the story was over H-P's own proprietary OS. Another bright spot, if a small one, was $6 million in sales of its Star Office suite. Quote Of The Day S&P energy analyst Craig Shere, on UBS's purchase of Enron's trading unit: "They bought intellectual capital, and if your intellectual capital winds up behind bars that's not going to help them." Billy Bass, Pirate Senator Ernest ("Fritz") Hollings of South Carolina has introduced the Consumer Broadband And Digital Television Promotion Act. This long-stemmed bill would require makers of "digital media devices" to incorporate copy prevention systems to ensure they do not unlawfully utilize copyrighted material. Unfortunately the act's definition of a digital media device is somewhat broad: according to Princeton professor Edward Felten's Web site , copy protection would have to be incorporated in digital hearing aids, baby monitors, Shop With Me Barbie toy cash registers, and Big Mouth Billy Bass. One imagines the FBI taking a break from dealing with people who shoot back to employ the majesty of US law enforcement in busting basster.com, a cartel devoted to downloading century-old (but still copyrighted) songs to a wall- mounted fish. Or hearing aids blasting rap songs into the ears of oldsters break-dancing on the floor of the rest home. An aide to the senator says "details of the legislation remain to be worked out". No Curb Cuts in HTML Federal judge rules that the ADA doesn't apply in Cyberspace, dismissing suit against Southwest Airlines: Loss At CA Embattled software giant Computer Associates reported a quarterly net loss of $52 million. This was down from its $291 M loss in the quarter a year ago, but the story does not say if the figures are GAAP or CA's own made-up "pro forma" figures. Games Lose Appeal Video-game makers Eidos and THQ are delaying new releases and reporting gloomy financials as analysts speculate on slow holiday sales. Eidos PLC was off 15 pence (how British) after announcing the delay of its next Tomb Raider game, and sales of both Nintendos and Microsoft Xboxen are lower than expected. Could it people are growing tired of this sort of thing?

ronks Return Of The Mainframe Well, not exactly. But ancient computer maker Unisys, who has also branched out into the more up-to-date services biz, reported quarterly earnings of $59 million, up from $21 M last year even though revenue was off about 4%. Play With Your Phone In what is either a visionary breakthrough or one of the silliest uses of new technology, Intel is expected to announce a new generation of flash memory and stacked processor chips based on the ARM design that will "give cell phone users the ability to execute such performance-intensive applications as MPEG4 video, speech and handwriting recognition, and Java". Funky Pundits A conference of high-tech boosters called Agenda, held in Scottsdale this year, was a gloomy departure from the usual optimistic mood of prior years. The major debate seemed to be over whether the industry had simply "matured" into a slower-growing phase that would last indefinitely, or whether the slump was temporary (maybe long-term but still finite) due to overbuilding and overinvestment in fiber optic pipes, chip fab plants, and other capacity that led companies to take on long-term debt just as demand plummeted. Voodoo Econometrics An article in the paper today (not meant to be taken seriously, I hope) tracks the correlation between the stock market and the reoccurrence of World Series between California teams. In 1974, 1988, and this year, (regular 14-year intervals, hmm) the rivalry is between a team from the north of the state and one from the LA area. A year after the first one, the Dow was up 26%; a year after the second, it was up 23%. Then there was 1989, when there was a recession, a threat of war in the Mideast, and the Dow went up only 2%, not to mention the earthquake; but that was between two Bay Area teams so any resemblance to this year is of course purely coincidental.. Flat Apple Not a new monitor, but the company's quarterly financial results. Gross sales were essentially the same as a year ago, though the number of units shipped was down 14 percent to 734,000. The $66 million profit of the quarter a year ago turned into a $45 M loss, mostly due to one-time charges like a decline in its Earthlink investment; without those, Apple made $7 M. CFO Fred Anderson was not hopeful for the future: "There's uncertainty in the economy and the PC industry and the possibility of war. I don't see any point in being optimistic at the moment." Don't invite him to your next party. How To Drive Customers Away Microsoft's new corporate pricing plan, which basically converts software license to a rental mode, is producing some short term gains as clients signed up to beat a July 31 rate increase, but a lot of grumbling and some defections. Overall, most companies will probably pay about the same, some a little less, and some will have to pay more; but the losers are the ones whose budgets were tightest in the first place and are the most sensitive to price gouging by a monopoly. The city of Nanaimo in British Columbia has responded by moving to convert its 350 desktop units to Sun StarOffice, estimated to cost about 15% of MS Office. Sun Down Sun may be the gainer from the MS plans in Nanaimo, but its reported to be losing the OS wars to Microsoft and Linux. As a result its prices reflect lower profit margins, and as a result of that, its credit rating was just lowered by S&P (to BBB from BBB+, still investment grade but nearer junk). More Layoffs At Adobe The graphics software maker is expected to let go about another 250 staff in the fourth quarter; it dropped 247 a year ago, out of about 3500 on its payroll. Talk Faster Lucent reports chip prototypes for cell phones that can send and receive at eight times the speed of today's units; it is expected to be used for wireless data as well as high-speed babbling. They use inverse multiplexing (which I haven't heard much of recently), merging signals from several antennas into a single stream. Sun Squeezed As one analyst put it, "They're a big company, they're not going away", but the challenge "would be to remain relevant to its customers". Facing a 4% quarterly decline in sales from a year ago and a $111 million net loss (though better than the $180 M loss this time last year), Sun has to deal with challenges to its proprietary software from Microsoft and open-source Linux as well as a decline in clients' capital spending on technology. Plainly losing less on lower revenue comes from cost-cutting, which Sun intends to continue with a planned layoff of about 4,400 employees or 11% worldwide. Longer term it remains to be seen if the company can be profitable as the Unix market shifts; Sun's one reported victory in the story was over H-P's own proprietary OS. Another bright spot, if a small one, was $6 million in sales of its Star Office suite. Quote Of The Day S&P energy analyst Craig Shere, on UBS's purchase of Enron's trading unit: "They bought intellectual capital, and if your intellectual capital winds up behind bars that's not going to help them." Billy Bass, Pirate Senator Ernest ("Fritz") Hollings of South Carolina has introduced the Consumer Broadband And Digital Television Promotion Act. This long-stemmed bill would require makers of "digital media devices" to incorporate copy prevention systems to ensure they do not unlawfully utilize copyrighted material. Unfortunately the act's definition of a digital media device is somewhat broad: according to Princeton professor Edward Felten's Web site , copy protection would have to be incorporated in digital hearing aids, baby monitors, Shop With Me Barbie toy cash registers, and Big Mouth Billy Bass. One imagines the FBI taking a break from dealing with people who shoot back to employ the majesty of US law enforcement in busting basster.com, a cartel devoted to downloading century-old (but still copyrighted) songs to a wall- mounted fish. Or hearing aids blasting rap songs into the ears of oldsters break-dancing on the floor of the rest home. An aide to the senator says "details of the legislation remain to be worked out". No Curb Cuts in HTML Federal judge rules that the ADA doesn't apply in Cyberspace, dismissing suit against Southwest Airlines: Loss At CA Embattled software giant Computer Associates reported a quarterly net loss of $52 million. This was down from its $291 M loss in the quarter a year ago, but the story does not say if the figures are GAAP or CA's own made-up "pro forma" figures. Games Lose Appeal Video-game makers Eidos and THQ are delaying new releases and reporting gloomy financials as analysts speculate on slow holiday sales. Eidos PLC was off 15 pence (how British) after announcing the delay of its next Tomb Raider game, and sales of both Nintendos and Microsoft Xboxen are lower than expected. Could it people are growing tired of this sort of thing?

ronks rages on. IBM As Water Company CEO Sam Palmisano is expected to unveil tomorrow his view of the future of corporate computing, as a utility service in which customers buy just what they need from bulk suppliers like IBM as they now purchase electricity or other commodities. Called "computing on demand", it is based on the ability of processors across a network to share tasks, like SETI@Home but more in real time. This "grid computing" is said to be one of the features that differentiate the concept from the failed 1960's model of computer time- sharing. Whether there is sufficient difference to make it a success remains to be seen, but it is an ambitious strategy that would require a major change in the mind-set of clients. It also sounds very like an attempt to resurrect Big Blue's old strategy (back in those halcyon days when the mainframe was king and IBM monopolized the mainframe business) of "account control". Proponents dismiss the gloomy time-sharing analogy with the observation that the Internet was also conceived in the 1960's, but only recently enabled by the evolution of hardware, software, and fat pipes. In any case, IBM is not alone in its effort to become the PG&E of computing: HP, Microsoft, Sun, and Accenture (who shed the Arthur Andersen name just in time) are trying to move in the same direction. I would guess that Microsoft's .Net architecture is a major part of MS's plan. Personally, as a matter of corporate sociology, I've seen real eagerness on the part of MIS execs to replace PCs with servers under their control and "thin clients", formerly known as 3270's, on the desktops; but I wonder very much if those same execs who want that control will be eager to cede it to old monopolist IBM or new monopolist MS, or anybody else for that matter. The would-be utilities will have to target a layer of management above them to succeed. Shazam! It's Beethoven Or possibly someone younger. A London startup named Shazam Entertainment offers a novel dial-up service: you call their number and point your cell phone (with a text display) at a music source. According to the article, their service analyzes the sound, scans its database of 1.6 million songs in less than a second, sends a text message naming the tune and the artist, and charges you 75 cents (or 50 pence in English). Users can later log into www.shazam.com for a history of their calls and links to merchants who sell recordings. The service was created by graduates of UC Berkeley and Stanford, but the founders have no plans to introduce it in the US because of Americans' "resistance to using their cellphones for anything but talking". Waywayback Machine Debuts A full-page ad on the back page of today's NY Times business section seems to have fallen through a wormhole from either the last or the next April Fool's Day. A company calling itself "Bagotronics.com" is advertising a time machine, for business travelers only who want to reverse bad strategies or perhaps sell their stock in Enron and MarchFirst.com when it was worth something. The "Business Time Machine", based on the latest (possibly even the future) "quark-gluon plasma chip technology" is pictured on the ad. Looking like an escapee from a 1930's sci-fi movie, the BTM is built on a sort of Chippendale, or perhaps Louis Quattorze, walnut base with brass handles. In front are two switches, knobs, and red lights; one each for the future and the past perhaps. The top is a sort of bell jar within which are set an alarm clock and a kind of Slinky in a cage, plus a couple of solenoids and what looks like a medicine bottle. The latter is probably where they store the Kool-Aid on which the process depends. Details alleged to be available at . Oh, and because the BTM is for businesspersons only, the ad states that the user will not be encumbered with hoi polloi like "travelers to Gettysburg" and "stage enthusiasts returning to Shakespeare's England"; still, you could probably pick up a First Folio of "Hamlet" there for cheap and resell it on EBay...

ronks: Here They Come According to a survey by Circle 1 Network and SpectraCom reported in the latest PC Magazine, last year forty percent of children aged 4 through 18 had a "wireless device". (It's true this could strictly speaking include a teddy bear, but I think they mean a wireless device as we know it.) One- third have a cell phone, a fifty percent jump from the previous year, and the top item on their wish lists is a laptop computer. Smaller Blackberry Not the device (or the fruit); the company, actually Research In Motion Ltd, will lay off about 10% of its staff to "tighten operational efficiencies". New Blueprint In other wireless news, Microsoft and Samsung will offer a set of design specs to "allow any electronics manufacturer to produce a relatively inexpensive version of a hand-held Pocket PC". The move is seen not so much as a desire by MS to increase competition as a move to squelch Palm's new $99 unit. Mr. Gates Goes To Delhi On a goodwill visit, with a large wallet. Besides contributions from his charitable foundation conveniently announced this week, his company will pump $400 million into the country to "increase computer literacy" and expand access to technology. And perhaps to blunt India's support of Linux. Short Term Storage Do not use this for file archives; a new type of DVD has been created by a New York company called Flexplay. Within eight hours after the sealed package is opened, a special dye layer oxidizes on contact with air and renders the disk unreadable. The dye can be formulated to let the DVD live for up to 60 hours, and the disk becomes unusable within a year whether opened or not. Copies are being given out free to fans of a group called Nappy Roots as a marketing experiment, evidently to test whether they are stupid enough to buy music disks that self-destruct. Perhaps you might pay for them with checks written in ink that becomes invisible in 30 minutes, but I suppose the vendors would consider that unfair. The article says the disk technology was originally designed for the distribution of software. Yes, it really says that. Can you imagine waiting an hour to talk with tech support who tells you to reinstall the app from the disk, unless of course you opened the package more than eight hours ago? Oy. Yet Another Accounting Firm In Trouble It might be simpler just to list the ones that aren't, but where's the Schadenfreude in that? Anyway, the SEC has reinstated charges against Ernst & Young that they violated auditor independence rules by partnering with PeopleSoft to jointly develop and market a software product at the same time as they were policing the software company's books, a conflict of interest. And why did the charges have to be reinstated? Because the first time around so many SEC commissioners had their own conflicts of interest that only one person was able to vote on whether to pursue the case. I believe that decision was unanimous.. Those Who Can, Do; Those Who Can't, ... Online credit card company NextCard was once a high-flying startup, but too many clients treated it like a VC firm or a free lunch. Failure of its customers to pay led regulators to seize its banking operations in February and cut off its card operations in July; the company was running on a "service contract" with the FDIC which expired at the end of last month. Yesterday it filed for bankruptcy, owing the FDIC up to $400 million and under SEC investigation. The interesting part is that it filed under Chapter 11 with a plan to reorganize "as a consultant to other financial services firms". Like Typhoid Mary could go into restaurant-hygiene consulting.. Optical Router At Heart of New Campus Network It had to happen. The slowest component of the network planned for UC San Diego is not the connections but the computers. The campus-wide system (called an "optiputer") is to be linked with optical fibers and a light- signal router from Texas-based Chiaro Networks. It will essentially constitute a grid supercomputer whose 500 Intel processors run the Linux operating system. Object-Oriented With Real Objects Bill Gates' keynote address to Comdex was expected to announce Microsoft's support for "smart personal objects" like Dick Tracy wristwatches that display weather, sports scores, news, and text messages. And probably spam, though he may not mention that. Microsoft is said to be working with National Semiconductor and appliance makers to develop gizmos of all sorts, available in about a year, that demonstrate his claim that "the industry" (there's only one?) is moving from personal computers, those boring old boxes with low profit margins even for a monopolist, to personal computing. O brave new world, where we have to buy an annual license to use our own watches... BTW, the promoter of Comdex is poised to declare bankruptcy after attendance dropped from 200,000 in 1999 to 125,000 last year with no signs of an upturn. If this continues, Las Vegas will have to return to its core values like gambling and prostitution. Which leads to: S&M Web Sites Tied Up In Red Tape Purveyors of Internet bondage sites are howling with pain as they feel the lash of increased credit-card payment restrictions. My, this is metaphor city. Anyway, the payment process works like this: subscribers and one-time visitors pay for whatever services and views they seek by credit card, with is often laundered through an "Internet service payment provider" who helps to mask the identity of the site on financial records. The customer pays his credit card service, the service pays the ISPP, who pays the smuttist. However, the system is breaking down at both ends. The johns have a high rate of repudiation of the charges, perhaps upon discovery by their wives, at which point they claim some bad kinky person stole their CC number (and dialed from their phone number too in many cases). Rather than fight and lose a customer, the bank reverses the charge and debits the leathery "merchant". But not all repudiations are false: there is some evidence these sites often fail to honor requests to cancel, and charge for lapsed subscriptions. Consequently, Visa and MasterCard are charging such merchants $500 signup fees and $250 annual renewals as "high risk" operations. This is no problem for large companies: Gerald van der Leun, recently retired VP of Internet activities at Penthouse, says many of his competitors have "a fast and loose relation with their customers' credit cards". But many smaller ones - mom and pop bondage sites, as it were - say they are being unfairly singled out for punishment (oops, another metaphor) as part of a campaign by the plastic companies to clean up their image after denying their facilities to gambling sites. The card companies say no, Internet gambling is simply illegal in many jurisdictions and they can't afford to sort it all out, and smut sites are just a bad business risk.

More ronks. Computer Associates' Wang Is Out Chairman Charles Wang, who founded CA in 1976 as an aggressive buyer of mainframe utility software companies whose products he then cut technical support for while he raised prices, has resigned his post effective immediately. He will retain the "honorary and unpaid title of chairman emeritus" and receive no pension. Don't worry about him going hungry, however; he made $670 million in pay alone in 1998, he owns the New York Islanders hockey team, and he has been ranked one of the highest-paid executives in the world. Although he built CA into the 5th-largest software firm globally with $3 billion annual sales (perhaps; see below) and 16,000 employees, he is leaving a troubled legacy. Besides practicing extortion on customers, the company's manipulation of accounting figures is under investigation. In one case Mr. Wang stood to receive over 12 million shares of CA stock if he could get the price up to a certain amount; during that time profits may have been artificially inflated. In another, CA adopted an accounting rule that allowed it report the same sales and profits two times. One analyst summed up his legacy as "They didn't have a pretense of saving the world through better technology - it was, we are sort of out to consolidate the industry and gather economic value in the process." Extremely Big Blue IBM has received a $290 million contract to build two supercomputers for the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore that together will exceed the computing power of the next five hundred fastest machines in the world. Leading the duo is Blue Gene/L, made of 130,000 specialized processors; it is expected to perform 360 trillion math operations a second, ten times that of NEC's next-place Earth Simulator. Its little brother, ASCI Purple, will consist of a mere 12,000 Power 5 processors. An IBM executive says that with these machines "we have the ability to help people solve some of the demanding problems of everyday life in the world we live in", perhaps forgetting that LRL is a nuclear-weapons development facility. CA Investigation Intensifies The Brooklyn prosecutor looking into Federal criminal charges against Computer Associates (the CA DA, as it were) has brought a grand jury into the case and is sending out subpoenas. At issue appear to be two actions. In May of 1998, the three top executives of the company received a total of over 20 million shares free, a grant that had been conditioned on the price of the stock remaining above $53.33 for 12 months. The value of that windfall, based on the price of the shares, was around $1.1 billion. In July the company announced sales and profits would fall, and the stock dropped below the $53.33 level, but only after the grant of shares was completed. The Feds are exploring whether (1) the execs manipulated figures up to 1998, such as by booking all expected revenue from long-term contracts as of the date of sale, to pump up the share price and fulfil the grant conditions and (2) continued to falsify the numbers afterwards to hide the previous shell game. The second count involves the company's accounting rule changes that allowed it to double-count sales and profits from transactions. A attorney described the status of the investigation as "When you really want to start compelling the production of documents and taking testimony, you do it by a grand jury subpoena. Otherwise it's just a request." ./

Busy Techie (ronks) Fri Nov 22 '02 (08:57) 46 lines Me And My Shadow A story in the paper today says the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA has been exploring the possibility of preventing Internet anonymity by requiring a digital signature for Net use which would tag every packet a user sends. Called eDNA, the idea was to first extend it to government sites, then financial institutions, and "after that [to have] been broadened even further". A summary of the plan sent to participants at a workshop on the proposal said "We envision that all network and client resources will maintain traces of user eDNA so that the user can be uniquely identified as having visited a Web site, having started a process, or having sent a packet." DARPA funded SRI to hold the workshop last August; it was chaired by Matt Blaze of AT&T and Victoria Stavridou of SRI, and included Whitfield Diffie and Marc Rotenberg. The workshop attendees reportedly criticized the proposal as both poor technology and poor policy; Mr. Blaze later said he had been fired by Ms. Stavridou who wanted to "hijack" the proceedings and give DARPA a more positive reply. After a planned teleconference with all participants was canceled, Ms. Stavridou privately briefed DARPA on the/her conclusions of the workshop. DARPA has also been in the news recently for hiring convicted but pardoned Iran-Contra felon John Poindexter to head the agency's Information Awareness Office to "mount a vast dragnet through electronic transaction data ranging from credit card information to veterinary records." DARPA says it has no plans to pursue the eDNA project further, but of course they would say that anyway... The Qubit Engineers An article in the November Scientific American suggests the possibility of practical quantum computing may be at least visible on the horizon. I won't try to do more than summarize the argument (trying to go too deep into this gives me a brain cramp), but the author, physics professor Michael Nielsen, suggests that we are moving from knowing the basic rules of quantum mechanics to understanding the "emergent properties" of the subject. Analogies in two areas seem to sum up his thesis. Perfectly understanding the rules of chess for example is of little practical use in winning if you don't realize it's foolish to sacrifice a queen for a pawn, or the use of positioning forces; those strategic issues emerge from the formal rules and are critical to success. Similarly, the science of thermodynamics consists of equations relating energy, heat, temperature and other variables which may imply that a steam or internal-combustion engine is possible but aren't sufficient by themselves to build a useful one. Nearly practical projects to use quantum computers for tasks like data compression or error correction of transmitted data hint the subject may be poised to move out of the lab. Verity Buys a Search Engine Verity, a brand leader in the enterprise knowledge management market, apparently discovered that companies wanted search to go with whatever it is that they get when they invest in KM and "social networking software". Having not changed the Verity core search engine significantly since 1997, they bought the Inktomi enterprise search engine for $25 million cash. Verity officials indicated that they are considering returning to the name �Ultraseek.� Ultraseek was originally developed by Infoseek Corp. in the 1990s. It was included in Go Disney�s acquisition of Infoseek in July 1999 and subsequently sold to Inktomi in June 2000 for more than $300 million in cash and stock. Verity has offered positions to 40 of the 100 Inktomi staff on the project, including all the programmers. Inktomi customers are uniformly unhappy about the change, with many of them pointing out that they left Verity for good reasons. Whither H-P? An article in today's paper says all but one of Dell's competitors have dropped out of the effort to contest it for overall supremacy in PC sales, opting instead for niche business segments. The exception is H-P, whose merger with Compaq in May briefly put it ahead of Dell; but they quickly lost the #1 slot when Dell's sales rose 21% in the next quarter and H-P's fell 3%. As one analyst observed, "H-P was the market share leader for about three minutes". Still, H-P has not given up; it has cut costs, reducing its PC sales losses in the last quarter to $87 million on $5 billion volume. And it is pushing its R&D people for innovative products as an edge. A sort of concept computer based on H-P's "Agora" project is being demo'ed at Comdex; it features enhanced videoconferencing, instant messaging, data sharing and collaboration components for the corporate market, and is planned for rollout in about a year and a half. The problem with that, critics note, is that the benefit from unpatented innovations lasts only till they are cloned by cheap rivals who didn't spend money on the R&D effort; or as another analyst commented, "In the PC business, innovation does not mean you can charge a lot more money for it." Will Streamline Tax Laws For Food Or ultimately for money: $10 billion in state sales taxes that goes uncollected from online interstate purchases, expected to grow to $25B by 2007. As customers of Lands End and Amazon know, out-of-state mail order sales do not include sales tax if the merchant does not have a "presence" in the buyer's state. The tax is legally owed, but Federal courts have repeatedly held that the merchant can't be required to collect it. Congress has the power to change the law, and retailers with stores in many states like Wal-Mart and JC Penney are constantly whining about the unfairness of the present rules, but one major obstacle has been the enormous complexity it would impose on the sellers. There are over 7,600 different tax districts in the country; besides the states, there are counties, cities, and agencies like BART and hospital and mosquito-abatement agencies. And many of them have conflicting rules: some tax food, some don't, some tax it at a lower rate, some consider candy a food, some don't; some tax clothing, some don't, some consider a hanky clothing, some don't, and so on. About three dozen states are trying to unify their tax rules and rates in hopes of persuading Congress to let them at that $10-25 billion revenue pie. But the lack of some unifying efforts is pointed out by potential losers like Amazon: for example, the proposed rules don't say if downloaded music or other content is a good or a (non-taxable) service, or if shipping & handling are taxable. The battle is likely to simmer for some time unresolved. This Year, Give The Gift Of DWDM Cisco Systems may have got into the spiked eggnog a bit early. A recent press release suggests "the gift of learning" with stocking-stuffers like _Digital Wave Division Multiplexing Network Designs and Engineering Solutions_, _Web Security Field Guide_, and _Voice-Enabling The Data Networks_. Perhaps tied up with colorful ribbon cable it would certainly be a surprise, and certainly more modern than a lump of coal . Bearded Hens, Come Not Near Kevin Ploetz hunts turkeys in upstate New York; although he has evidently shot so many that his wife complained the house was filling up with their stuffed and mounted carcasses, he says he finds the pursuit challenging. Or in his own words, "It's frustrating that a bird with a brain the size of a quarter can outsmart me." Right, Kevin. Anyway, it turns out that just like Indians collected scalps because it was inconvenient to attach the corpses of all your victims to your belt, turkeys have a symbolic token called a "beard", a clump of hairlike mutated feathers at the chest below that red rubbery thing. Like elk antlers, the size of the beard is considered a mark of the creature's (obviously former) virility, ranging from 3 inches for a young bird to 18 in prize specimens. Some hen turkeys have a beard, but hunters regard catching a bearded female bad luck. Well anyway to relate this back to biztech, Mr. Ploetz - you remember him, outsmarted by a coin-sized brain, has a house full of dead stuffed birds - has invented a convenient means of preserving the turkey beard by cramming it into the remains of the souvenir fatal shotgun shell. Apparently the beard feathers tend to fall apart easily, and some unscrupulous hunters have even been caught parading turkey beard toupees for lack of a presentable genuine. I mean is this weird or what? So Patent Number 6,451,393 has been issued to Mr. Coinbrain for his "turkey beard display device". K 2 H P Hewlett Packard has hired computer-design legend Alan Kay as a senior researcher. While he declined to say the direction his work there would take, most recently he has worked on using computers in children's education to help them understand "complex systems like software". Around 1968, when computers ranged in size from a refrigerator to a string of freight cars, Mr. Kay proposed the Dynabook concept: a portable computer with wireless communications that weighed about as much as a book, could be held on the lap, and included a flat screen and a keyboard, and could recognize handwriting done with a stylus on the screen. Later at the Xerox PARC labs he was in the lead of teams that created the mouse, the GUI, and windows for a system called the Alto. Later he and others developed one of the first object-oriented languages, called Smalltalk. He did say of his planned work at H-P, "The goal is to show what the next big relationship between people and computing is likely to be. ... I don't think the real computing revolution has happened yet." Which suggests work along the lines of David Gelernter to remove the hardware as a definer of categories. Supreme Court Shakes Booty This is not strictly speaking a business & technology matter, and I hope the hosts here don't find out about the irrelevancy, but a really funny "Summary Notice of Class Action and Hearing on Proposed Settlement" is so rare it's worth mentioning. Besides, the venture capitalists and Chief Technology Officers and Head Software Evangelists are probably all tucked away dreaming of sugarplums, or is that another holiday? Anyway, the Supreme Court of The State of New York has a message for all purchasers of Fruity Booty(tm); also buyers of Veggie Booty and Pirate's Booty. If you contact them - not the judges themselves of course, some lackey of theirs who handles such trivia - they may have a prize for you in connection with the matter of Victor Klein And All Others Similarly Situated vs. Robert's Gourmet Food. Apparently Mr. Klein either overpaid for his booty or choked on a toy whistle or something, so his law firm has sued Poor Robert and called it a class action. Chances are the "all others similarly situated" will end up with an edible whistle or the like while the lawyers get several zillion bucks, but surely that is a small price to pay for such an entertaining Summary Notice. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

ronks A New Front In The Software Piracy War The Well's reports in today's paper that expensive engineering programs with military applications are increasingly popular in the black market, and little effort is being made to fight the trend. A New Jersey software maker called Intelligent Light says its $12,000 package is available from "Chinese entrepreneurs" for $200 complete with a "step-by- step install guide and crack file". Several factors seem to hinder the effort to prosecute violations. First, the public still pretty much sees it as ensuring "that Bill Gates and Britney Spears get every penny" at the expense of students and the less well-off generally. Second, offshore prosecutions are not in the toolkit of most DA's: as one US Attorney puts it, "it's an issue of sovereignty and diplomacy, which is sort of outside my realm." Publishers suspect the federal government is afraid to annoy Red China during the current charm offensive, even though the Business Software alliance claims 92% of commercial software there is pirated. And finally there is the sense among some government agencies and prosecutors that the publishers are unwilling victims on a very selective basis. They recall that when they tried to enforce laws against exporting strong crypto, software makers were in the opposition, and they wonder if the present change of heart is real. That probably translates to a lack of enthusiasm in taking cases now, though of course none will actually say so. November E-Sales Up The numbers for the first three weeks of last month suggest a boom in online merchandising: $4.5 billion in non-travel goods, up 29% from the same period last year. Looks like a green Christmas at Amazon. Still, the figures may be a bit misleading. Thanksgiving came later this year than last, meaning a shortened post-turkeyday season; many merchants began promotions like free shipping earlier this year, perhaps for that reason; Hanukkah began last Friday, earlier than 2001; and outside of favored climes like California, the November weather turned cold and kept people inside at their computers. New Patents For the recipient who has everything, reversible shoes. You don't actually turn them inside out, you disassemble them first into a removable sole, side panel, and heel panel; South Carolina inventor Leslie Hunter notes they store flat that way and take up less closet space. Ehsan Alipour offers an iron that won't burn: if you leave it with the plate down, little legs pop out and lift it up out of harm's way. While making charitable contributions in someone else's name as a gift is not new, placing a bet for them on an online gambling server may be, according to inventor Adam Kidron of New Jersey. They get the winnings (if any) and you get the undying gratitude. James Logan offers the dubious value of a watch that races ahead several minutes at unpredictable times (so to speak) "to encourage punctuality". But my favorite is what might be called the "Sonny Bono Memorial Ski Parka"; not in fact named after the late Congressman-singer who skied into a tree and came off the worse for it, the garment includes an approaching-object sensor with an alarm, a microprocessor that detects if the wearer is too fast or too dumb to avoid the encounter, and an air bag in front that automatically inflates. I suppose calling something the Sonny Bono Air Bag would be redundant, though.

ronks rides again. Ron Sipherd. ronks@well.com. Thank you. The AOL Of The Future With ad revenues down, subscriber growth slowing now that every man, woman, and child on the planet has over a dozen free-offer CDs, rising costs and more competitors for high-speed access, AOL is reported about to reinvent itself; sort of. According to the story, its game plan emphasizes selling content to subscribers who get broadband Internet access from other ISPs. AOL presently has such an offering, but promotes it so feebly that half its subscribers who have broadband connections still pay AOL for dial-up access anyway. Besides offering productions from siblings like Warner Brothers and Turner, AOL will push online versions of Time Inc. magazines such as a children's version of Sports Illustrated, Time4Kids, People, Teen People, and Little People for pre-teens (just kidding). Upcoming AOL 9.0 will offer features like the ability to chat while watching the same movie online, thus recreating a typical if annoying quality of real theaters. They will also tailor their promotions and expenses more carefully, pushing more crud on the gullible (er, "sending more offers to customers who like them") and - I am not making this up - "providing less-attentive customer service to less- profitable users". And Then There Were Two West Virginia says it will join Massachusetts in appealing the trial judge's decision in the Microsoft antitrust case. BTW, still pending are "dozens of class-action lawsuits" as well as non-governmental antitrust cases filed by Sun and by Netscape's owner AOL. One Word Plastics. A Xerox researcher described as "Beng Ong of Mississauga" says his company is developing plastic transistor circuits that can be laid down with ink-jets in place of the current photo-lithography. These chips would be flexible, much cheaper than existing circuits, and resistant to oxidation which has been the bane of organic semiconductors to date. CA At It Again Criminal investigation of the company's finances and those of its hyper- wealthy execs shows that founder Charles Wang made a personal $40 million donation to a university (SUNY - Stony Brook) whose president was on the company board, one of the four nominally outside directors, and on the three-person audit committee that approved its deceptive accounting practices. She is described in proxy statements referring to the gift as a "non-employee" but not a board member. She is shocked, just shocked that anyone could link the $40 million gift to her votes as a director. So is former senator Al D'Amato, also on the audit committee, and who saw gifts of around $135,000 from the generous Mr. W to his re-election campaign and his party.

More ronks Broadband Growth Slows A recent study by InStat/MDR says that while the number of US businesses and households with high-speed Internet access rose 50 percent this year, they expect the increase to taper off sharply: to 38% in 2003, then 23%, and down into the teens in 2005. Presently about one-sixth of American households have broadband, though 70% are able to get it; about 2/3 of the 15 million subscribers use cable modems, and the rest DSL with a small fraction using other means such as satellite. The cost ($40-50 per month) is viewed as the throttling factor; 28% of homes with incomes over $100,000 have it, but only 4% of those making less than $35,000. At the projected rates the story says less than a third of households will have broadband by 2006, casting doubt on AOL's plan to grow by offering premium content to them.

Fight Spam With Haiku Two companies are trying to create the electronic equivalent of certified mail, by striking deals with senders who agree to use their service only for good and with recipients' access providers to let the post through on faith. One company, Habeas of Palo Alto, sells a haiku poem to a sender for $200, plus a half-cent per message. The poem is embedded in the e-mail, and Habeas claims it has deals with AOL, Yahoo, and 18 others not to block such mail. Habeas says it will sue any sender who uses its poems outside of its license, which requires the licensee only send such missives to those who have agreed to receive them. (BTW another article in the paper titled "Enter Maze and Find The Opt-Out Cheese" notes that to tell mp3.com you don't want mail from them or their "partner product announcements" you have to click through 21 separate Web pages, which gives an expansive meaning to the term "agree to receive".) IronPort of San Bruno requires a similar contract with senders, and likewise negotiates with access providers to give its mail a free pass, though without poetry. The fee is not specified, but the penalties for violation are: 50 cents each for the first ten complaints, rising to a buck each for the next ten, on up to $1,000 per message. Since they do no checking, a vindictive recipient could just generate a flood of complaints, which seems to be a weak spot in the plan. IronPort says it has agreements with 700 access providers, but no big ones yet. Of course neither company's strategy addresses the zillions of real spammers offering Nigerian gold or big organs, and it's unclear how many virtuous senders will sign up to pay to do what they do for free now. Wee Circuit IBM says it has designed, and perhaps built, a transistor circuit less than one-tenth the size of the smallest transistor available today. It's nine nanometers in length; by comparison the infamous Average Human Hair is over 3,000 nanometers in diameter and could store several CPUs if you never shampooed. The Next Big Bubble? Many venture capital firms are still licking their wounds over the collapse of the dot-com industry. But some with either less scar tissue or shorter memories are rushing to fund tiny companies with weird names in the latest hot field: Wi-Fi. Although some analysts caution that the technology "is unlikely to represent more than a tiny fraction of the overall telecomm market", businesses like Boingo, Buffalo, Dlink, FatPort, HereUAre, and Surf And Sip are already lining up at the trough. from ronks@well.com Ron Sipherd. Thanks again!

Combo Phones A Drag Nokia reports lower current and anticipated sales, largely due to less than expected demand for its newer, fancier, higher-margin cell phones with cameras, color viewing screens, Web browsers, and other doodads. In what is described as a "worrying trend for the mobile phone industry", customers in areas like Africa, China, and Latin America are said to prefer cell phones they just use for, you know, talking, when the leaders of the industry want them to spend their food money on pocket mainframes. How perverse. The Unsold-Inventory Beowulf Gateway Computer has developed a new version of the "if you have lemons, make lemonade" adage. With eight calendar quarters in a row of declining sales they have a lot of PCs sitting on their shelves. So they are linking 8000 of them into a networked Beowulf-type supercomputer and renting out the claimed 14 trillion teraflop system to businesses who submit job requests and pick up output just like the old days of batch processing, except this time around it's done over the Internet instead of a counter. Noisy Refrigerator Developed This does not at first sound (so to speak) like much of an advance, especially when the unit is said to produce a volume level of around 173 decibels, which is considered pretty awesome acoustics. By way of comparison, the sound level right up next to the speakers at a rock concert is given as ~120 decibels, into the threshold of pain unless one's mental capacity has been sufficiently numbed by consumption of pre-concert anesthetics. And the story says a level of 165 decibels would cause your hair to catch fire. So far this is not a terribly useful advance. However the refrigerator research at the University of Pennsylvania, sponsored by Ben & Jerry's, actually uses the sound to cool the unit with compression waves that drive metal plates attached to heat exchangers, without Freon and other CFC gases blamed for global warming which is bad for ice cream and other living things. One has even been tested on the space shuttle, where presumably the noise is unlikely to disturb the neighbors. The systems as developed are designed to confine the hubbub to the interior cooling chamber without escaping even when the door is opened, and with fewer moving mechanical parts they may be more reliable than today's standard models. Big EDS-BofA Deal The Bank of America has agreed to a 10-year, $4.5 billion contract for Electronic Data Systems to provide services to "transform" the bank's voice and data networks. Also to be transformed are 1,000 BofA employees who will be turned into EDS staff. Froogle Test Site Opens Search firm Google presently allows ads to appear next to its "real" results; now it's getting deeper into commerce with a novel sort of shopping engine at . It will show pictures of the sought product and prices for it at different sites. Sellers don't pay for placement or for click-through purchases; instead Google plans to sell ads on Froogle (this is starting to sound like baby-talk; if they ever join up with Boingo I fear for the language) the same way as on their main site. Some analysts are concerned the company may be heading for a collision with customers like AOL and Yahoo, but Google may be looking to broaden its service in preparation for a Google-Froogle IPO oobie doobie next year. http://google.blogspace.com/ WiFi On The Radar The Department of Defense has floated a proposal to restrict expansion of the "unlicensed spectrum" (frequencies that can be used without a specific permit) in the 5 GHz range, claiming it may interfere with radar. The issue if raised formally would be decided at the World Administrative Radio Conference next June in Geneva where analysts say it would lose, since that band is already used internationally without ill effects and American industry is lobbying heavily against it. With 16 million WiFi devices already in use and Intel planning to equip all its new mobile processors with wireless capability, the technology is seen as a potential savior of the sagging tech industry but vulnerable to limits on its expansion. A technique called Dynamic Frequency Selection exists to enable transmitters to avoid interference with other sources, but the Pentagon wants it beefed up to such a degree of sensitivity that companies say it may no longer work. The Pentagon's insistence on pressing ahead alone with its proposal seems to rub many in the international regulatory community the wrong way and could doom it regardless of the merits. Thanks Ron (ronks) Sipherd again. y.

Vox Populi Once upon a time the Internet was the province of academics and intellectuals who filled it with talk about, oh academic and intellectual stuff I suppose. Now one of the most popular sites is called Yahoo, and just try asking them if they have a counterpart called Houyhnhnm. (BTW I was just reading that the term "yahoo" is "compounded from two expressions of disgust, 'yah' and 'ugh' (or 'hoo') common in the eighteenth century"; now we know.) Anyway, Yahoo the Portal Of Disgust has just named the top Web pages in Britain and Ireland, "selected by a panel of expert surfers". They include PoppedClogs.com with novel obituaries of dead celebrities, the Wallace & Gromit animations site, animation site RatherGood.com, "a site dedicated to watching the recovery of a sick cat", and IUsedtoBelieve.com which lists things that people, well, used to believe when they were kids. If only Swift were alive today, what material for a sequel to Gulliver. IP Phoning Grows A recent survey says that over 10% of all international telephone traffic last year went over the Internet instead of through traditional circuit- switched phone companies. That totaled 18 billion minutes, up from less than 10 billion in 2001. Much of the volume was generated by phone-card companies who route their long-distance business over the Net, but cable TV providers (who presently have 2.1 million US local-dial voice customers) are expected to jump into the act in a big way in the next few years. Microsoft On The Move Again The company is expected to license its Windows Media Player audio and video technology to makers of consumer-electronics devices like CD and DVD players at substantially lower prices than rivals such as MPEG 4 and probably Real Player. Offering it below cost to drive out rivals would constitute "predatory pricing" especially when done by a monopolist; it will be interesting to see if MS rivals call them on it. Speaking of monopolies, MS and its ally the DOJ jointly oppose an appeal of the recent trial-court ruling in its antitrust case. The Software Industry Association and the Computer And Communication Industry Association have requested appellate review; the two new buddies oppose having to "endure further proceedings". IBM Gets Away From Hardware Moving to what an analyst calls a "focus on design and customer service" in place of boring old computer making, IBM has already sold off its disk drive business to Hitachi in a phased deal; a story in Monday's paper describes how IBM lost its edge there when it sent its disk R&D offshore from San Jose to Japan, and let rivals take the lead. It has also let a $5 billion contract to Sanmina-SCI to make its NetVista PCs. Now it's in a second deal for about $4 B with Sanmina to make servers, notebooks, and other desktop PCs. Unlike say Dell, IBM seems unable to make much money in the PC business with an estimated $10 million pre-tax profit on $11 billion sales. Apple Gets Away From Microsoft Or at least takes some steps in that direction, with its own free Web browser called Safari based on open-source software (Mozilla maybe?) and a $99 rival to PowerPoint called Keynote. Chairman, co-founder, CEO, chief salesman and who knows what else Steve Jobs also revealed to rapt Macworld attendees two new laptop models (with 17 and 12 inch screens) and declared that over a third of Apple computers to be shipped this year would be laptops, though analysts are skeptical that the company can make much headway against Wintel portables selling for up to $1000 less. Apple is also an object of some unwanted buzz over its patent application #20030002246 for a computer that changes color with a rainbow of LEDs on its "computing device active enclosure", described by one writer as a sort of desktop mood ring. The problem is that Apple was recently working with another company called Color Kinetics on the same concept, but backed out of a deal with it just before committing to anything; Color Kinetics has also filed a patent application (#20020113555), for "self-illuminated consumer devices" including computers. DeCSS Creator Acquitted in Norway A couple of years ago Jon Johansen of Oslo found he couldn't play his legally acquired DVD movie disks on his Linux system because decoding software didn't exist for Linux. So he wrote some, called DeCSS, to unlock the security codes that prevent copying and other access. The Motion Picture Association filed a complaint in Norway accusing him of pirating and facilitating piracy by defeating the locks. A Norwegian panel consisting of a judge and two technical experts has just ruled that Mr. Johansen's development, use, and distribution of the software did not violate the law, and that "someone who buys a DVD film that has been legally produced has legal access to the film" on whatever system he wishes. Thanks Ron Sipherd ronks@well.com

Microsoft Goes Open-Source Ha ha, got your attention with that one. Actually it's true but in a very limited sense; to take advantage of it you have to be somebody like NATO or a national government. Under the new Government Security Program they can view 97 percent of the source code for Windows in the comfort of their bunkers; for the remaining super-secret 3% (the Clippy drivers, maybe) they have to go to Redmond. Microsoft will also let them use their own crypto and security code via API sockets direct to the operating system. The story says it suggests that MS is taking notice of the threat from Linux and GNU, as countries like China and Germany promote its use and emphasize its transparency. With "Microsoft security" seen as a self-contradiction on the order of "giant dwarf" or "military justice", and rumors spreading that their software includes secret back doors to permit wiretapping by the FBI or whoever, the company seems to be responding by inviting skeptical biggies to see for themselves. Of course, whether the source they will see matches the executables is another matter... In any case, this program seems to be just an expansion (or maybe only a public announcement) of earlier programs; some major customers including the US have already had a degree of access to MS source code for years as I understand. Record Companies Break With Hollywood Until recently, there were two camps battling over ways to prevent copying of copyrighted media: hardware and software makers on one side arguing that technological barricades like preventer chips would not work long-term, would make devices cost more and would slow the pace of development. And on the other, music publishers and movie makers ranting about piracy. But the music industry had a different kind of fight on its hands, since it has already faced what may be its worst threats in the form of Napster and its progeny; while the movie business with its vastly greater bandwidth and file storage requirements, and the upcoming move to digital TV, looks toward a future threat. Anyway the music biz in the form of RIAA has reached a sort of separate peace with the tech industry in the form of a loose agreement that one side will stop demanding laws to require anti-copying components in PCs and players, and the other will drop support for proposed amendments to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act which would expand the rights of end users. The agreement is so loose that Intel says it still supports the amendments but will maybe do so more quietly now, and some consumer- electronics makers say they will press on. The main effect may be to make it harder for Jack Valenti and the movie industry to muster support for more restrictive laws since one of their main allies has shown the white flag. Thanks, thanks, thanks, Ron Sipherd ronks@well.com for allwoing us to reprint these awesome observations of yours. I hope someones reading it!

The Penguin And The Crystal Ball As Linux World (opening this week in New York) becomes more of a confab for suits than open-source revolutionaries, articles are appearing on the future of the free operating system. Not so much for the user desktop, still owned by The Giant Of Redmond and The Feisty Midget Of Cupertino, but for servers and other back-office operations. The consensus seems to be that Linux is a credible competitor and serious threat in the short term to proprietary Unix versions as represented by H-P, IBM, and Sun; in fact both H-P and IBM are promoting Linux on their hardware at the expense of their own brand's OS which they may drop in time. Sun is seen as too tied to Solaris to abandon it and may be most at risk from the Linux trend. Online broker E*Trade for example says it explored Linux two years ago but found it initially "too risky"; then when it saw H-P and IBM moving there it recanted and converted about 2/3 of its data center to $4000 Intel/Linux machines from $200,000 Sun systems. Its chief technology officer claims the company saved $13 million in expenses last year alone from the move, though it has not yet gambled on moving its crown jewels - the customer and trading databases - over. Probably because of the cost of converting apps, a concern everywhere, which leads some to speculate the movement will be gradual and associated with new ventures. To sum up, a Goldman Sachs report titled "Fear The Penguin" concludes "All of Unix is more at risk than Microsoft's Windows in the next few years. But what is really at risk is the concept of a proprietary operating system. And that has to affect Microsoft." Non-Instant Non-Messages A recent study by Keynote Systems of San Mateo says that 7.5 percent of text messages sent via cellphone were not received within 2 minutes, and 5% never got to the recipient at all. Unplugged Colleges A series of surveys over the last 3 1/2 years shows the percentage of full- time college students with cellphones rose from 29 to 70, and at Columbia University where traditional long-distance service is centralized, revenue has fallen by half since 2001. As a result some places are throwing in the towel, yanking the cord, [insert metaphor of choice here], and removing wired phones for student and faculty use entirely from their buildings. ronks thank you!

c Multipath For Higher Bandwidth Most city dwellers are familiar with multipath distortion; the muddling of radio and TV signals as they bounce off buildings on their way to the receiver, leading to ghosts and echoes. Bell Labs researchers have found a way to use multipath for higher transmission speeds to wireless devices. Called "Blast", the technology grew out of a review of bandwidth limits in the writings of telecomm pioneer Claude Shannon. The reviewers noticed that his studies all presumed a single transmitter and receiver; to generalize the theory they tested dividing the data into multiple streams (sounds a bit like packet switching) that were picked up by antenna arrays and reassembled at the destination. To their surprise, they discovered that reflections of the waves actually improved the capacity of the system, apparently by creating additional temporary virtual transmitting antennas. Prototypes of Blast chips have been demonstrated running over 3rd-generation (3G) wireless networks at 19.2 megabits a second, close to 8 times faster than the present limit of 2.5 Mbits/sec. The limiting factors are (1) the need to space the antennas at least half a wavelength apart, not a major hurdle at the high frequencies used by cell phones and PDAs, and (2) the processing power - and electrical power - required to reassemble the incoming signal, which becomes hard to fit in a handheld device for more than four streams. Another concern is the slow adoption of 3G nets in the United States, which are essential for Blast; but once they are deployed, only the base stations and handhelds need to be modified for Blast. Of course, finding people outside New York City who can talk at 19 megabits/second may be a challenge.. Freedom Of Expression On Trial Literally. An Iowa professor named Kembrew McLeod says he registered trademark rights on the phrase "freedom of expression" in 1998 and is threatening to sue AT&T for using it in ads that offer free long-distance calls as a bonus for signing up with them. 54-Gigabyte DVDs On The Horizon A new technology called "Blu-ray" sponsored by a consortium including Hitachi, Philips, Pioneer, Sony and others uses the shorter wavelength of blue-violet lasers to store data at higher densities on an DVD-type disk. It is said to have the potential of holding more than 11 times the data of today's 4.7-gigabyte DVD disks, and is presently targeted at high-definition TV video. One such disk could hold two hours of HDTV, or 13 hours of standard video, and who knows how many copies of the Library of Congress. The units may become first available in 2004, and in affordable quantities three or four years later. To Pursue Personal Interests The co-founder of Broadcom, Henry T. Nicholas III, is described as "a man of large appetites" who "bragged about his all-night drinking parties, had a 15,000 square foot estate, a Lamborghini Diablo Roadster and kept a personal trainer on 24-hour call". Broadcom makes specialized communications processor chips for cable modems, TV set-top boxes, servers and the like; its stock has declined from $273 a share 29 months ago to a recent low of less than $15. He abruptly announced during an telephone earnings report conference this week that he is leaving the company to pursue his divorce full-time. Work can be such a distraction... Signs Of Hope Disk storage manufacturer EMC reported a slight upturn in sales; combined with positive results from rivals Storage Technology and McData, some analysts see a mild rebound in IT spending this year. EMC quarterly sales were actually down 2 percent from a year ago, but rose 18% from the previous quarter; it lost $70 million net, but excluding one-time restructuring charges it showed an operating profit of $53 M. More Signs Of Hope In a rare display of bipartisan unity, the US Senate unanimously approved limits on the government's Total Awareness Project that would bar it from "scanning information in Internet mail and in the commercial databases of health, financial, and travel companies here and abroad". Least Important Fact Of The Week The CEO of Amazon.com announced that since his company began offering apparel last November, it has sold 31,000 pairs of underwear and that "briefs outsold boxers but not by a statistically significant amount." Now we know. iThank you Mr. Ron Sipherd for the great news feed!!!!!

ronks The Next Big Thing, Chapter MDCCCLXVIII Venture capitalists, start your wallets: "Web Services" is hot. For some reason this is said to be symbolized by the fact that Microsoft just changed the name of its upcoming product from Windows .Net Server 2003 to plain Windows Server 2003, though they say it's only a clarification. Anyway, the battle lines are forming for what vendors think will be a major upheaval in how people and businesses use their computers, emphasizing machine-to- machine transactions. On the home side, the concepts sound a little silly and like a Web version of "Modern Times": somebody's computer negotiates unaided with his doctor's computer to set up an appointment (probably 3 AM on a Sunday when the largest block of free time is available on both sides), or the dutiful child's PC orders flowers for Mother's Day every year regardless of her demise. Businesses though may have an actual use for it to handle back-office stuff like inventory management and claim processing. In hopes they do, Microsoft is moving to link it all to Windows; the other side, basically everybody with IBM Websphere in the lead, is striving for a more neutral concept of middleware based largely on Java that would defeat the MS strategy to lock in customers to one line of software and run on a variety of operating systems. Walk This Way Researchers at Georgia Tech and England's University of Southampton are testing ways to identify individuals by their gait, or distinctive way of walking. For example they have determined that "women sway their hips more than men", a fact evidently unknown heretofore. While security types are interested in using it as a potential means of spotting bad guys (and hip- swinging bad women presumably too), the technology has a ways to go. For one thing, at present it requires that the suspect first be recorded walking through a lab while wearing metallic sensors on his butt, and even then he can only be spotted if he is observed solo and not in a crowd. And it appears the system can be fooled by adopting a different gait such as springing into the air every three steps, though a person seeking to avoid notice may prefer something more subtle. Remarkably the BBC story at does not once mention John Cleese and his Ministry Of Silly Walks. Sims Bore Game maker Electronic Arts is in general having a good year: Harry Potter, NFL football, Lord Of The Rings, and something called Medal Of Honor Frontline added to an overall total of over a million sales in the last quarter. But their most highly publicized effort, Sims Online, in which people pay $40 upfront and $10 a month to chat and carry on with other subscribers in real time, seems to be a dud with only 82,000 members. Reviews from users have not been good. One posted on Amazon that she was "bored to tears", and while she tried "leaving the game running while I went off to do other things around the house" to see if something interesting would happen while she was away, she eventually went back to her offline version after concluding the online form "has all the fun of watching your screen saver". The Last Big Thing Coffin salesmen are going online, after some initial hesitation and despite some states' laws that restrict sales to licensed funeral homes. Memorial Concepts Online and Funeral Depot (I am not making this up) offer theme coffins, such as one with an auto racing motif and another "done up like a special-delivery package and stamped 'Return To Sender'". ronks

Thanks again, Ron Sipherd, ronks@well.com for the good stuff. Electropants According to Dr. Michael Shur of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, "The clothing we wear doesn't contain electronic elements." Besides physics, he appears to specialize in Discovery Of The Blindingly Obvious; anyway, this is changing as companies like DuPont makes yarn with conductive fibers, and even a metallic form of bulletproof Kevlar called Aracon. First applications have been in the military, where a shirt can function as a less conspicuous and more convenient radio antenna, and bulletproof garments come in handy. Civilian uses seem a bit more of a stretch (stretch fabric, get it, um never mind). Some prototypes include a built-in warmer for football games like a wearable electric blanket; car upholstery that senses the occupants' weight and tunes the air bags to match, and a T-shirt that detects the wearer's heart rate and temperature. One proposal is to build radio receiver circuits into a shirt, with the radio buttons being you guessed it; and an MP3 player incorporated into a jacket and hood. Still to come is a power source, such as solar cells woven into the fabric; as Dr. Shur further observes, "people wear their clothes all day." New Day For Sun? Sun Microsystems has not been a sunny place lately: its stock is down from $64 a share less than two and a half years ago to $3.07 Friday, and it lost a record $2.28 billion in the last quarter. It is considered uniquely vulnerable to the challenge of GNU and Linux because of the degree to which it relies on a proprietary form of Unix, compared to IBM and H-P who are promoting the open-source alternative. This week the company is expected to announce a major initiative with the snappy name of N1, described as a "technology [that] links servers, storage systems, software and networking so the parts can be centrally managed". The goal is to shed its image as a seller of server and peripheral hardware, and compete with IBM, H-P, and others as a full-service general supplier of hardware, software and services for data centers of all sizes. Financial analysts don't argue with Sun's proposed strategy; one called it "absolutely the right thing to do", but notes that Sun's rivals have such a head start in the field that it may be too late for it to catch up. Push And Pull It has long (at least in Internet years) been recognized that TV viewing is qualitatively different from Web browsing. Both involve staring at a monitor but TV is essentially passive while perusing the Internet is typically more active, with the user choosing to visit a site. Advertising has not always been aware of the difference, assuming that what works for couch potatoes like a bunch of dancing frogs telling you to drink more beer naturally translates to an audience of sophisticated, intelligent, hip consumers like ourselves. Pop-up and pop-under ads are an example of how to infuriate a segment of the surfing audience. Some designers are now pursuing a "pull" strategy for their Web sites in place of the TV-style intrusive "push" approach. Microsoft Network seems to be one: according to the "chief media revenue officer" at MSN, they are creating custom solutions for clients such as Lexus.msn.com that try to provide value in various ways along with the opportunity to click on product-info links. MSN's Lexus site is said to focus on "Luxurious Living" lifestyle data like guides to hotels, high-tech homes, and farmers' markets. (I see jet-setters filling their SUV with fresh rutabagas and driving back to the Ritz to have them artfully prepared.) Other similar approaches are taken by subscription sites: the Economist waives its $70 annual fee to users who agree to get e-mail from Oracle, and some place called salon.com offers access to its paid sections to users "who agree to interact with an ad from Mercedes-Benz". Bye Bye, Bulb? Solid-state lighting, typically bright LEDs, is showing up in traffic lights, brake lights, exit signage, and flashlights, and analysts speculate it will start to expand into significant roles in home and office lighting within about four years. Its present drawback is price; most LED devices cost about 40 to 100 times as much as an equally bright incandescent bulb. But they draw only one-fifth the electricity and last about ten times longer and when they start to go they do so gradually rather than burning out at once. In addition, many devices consist of a hundred or more LED units, so even if a few fail the stoplight or whatever still works. The DOE estimates that wide adoption of LED light in the next twenty years could save US users overall about $100 billion annually. Another potential for the technology is mood lighting on a major scale; with simple chips driving the lights, they can vary the intensity and the hue of the units, possibly mitigating the effects of decreased winter sunlight and the constant sameness of institutional lights in offices and nursing homes. Theaters have already adopted LEDs for dramatic effects on the stage and in outdoor marquees. One company even claims to have keyed room lighting to a Star Trek computer game so when the Enterprise passes through a red nebula, so do you. Gosh. However, even more futuristic lighting technologies are in development that may give LEDs some competition by 2007; chief is "organic light emitting diodes" or OLEDs that can be manufactured as continuous polymer sheets at less cost than individual LED lens units.

Thanks ronks! The article on Connectix says they are also writing code to allow a single Intel box to run multiple servers such as Win 2000, Unix, and Linux. That might be a draw for MS, though I think they would prefer to drive out the competition; maybe they will buy the company and kill the project. Price Caps Are Off DSL Service Yesterday was not FCC chairman Michael Powell's day. In months of debate over new rules on how much the local phone companies can charge third-party providers, he wanted to take the lid off local voice service and keep it on high-speed broadband access. He lost on both counts. With caveats for the usual exceptions, footnotes and complexities of the bureaucratic decision, it seems to mean that the owner of the lines from home or office to the phone company's exchange (the "central office") can charge as much as it wants to somebody like Covad, who then sells it to an ISP like Earthlink. The article says Covad charges the ISP about $30 a month and Earthlink bills the end user around $50; that will likely increase in a kind of domino effect as Covad has to ante up more to the phone company. The new rules will not affect ISPs who buy broadband direct, such as AOL and MSN; but they and the cable companies can't help but notice the price increases all around them and think about hitching a ride on the gravy train. Imitation Of Life, At A Price Meanwhile for the unwashed masses who use dial-up connections, ESPN is offering a new service to bring TV-quality animation to a monitor near you. Called ESPN Motion and taken from ESPN owner Disney, it is intended to deal with the problem that over POTS, live action looks like someone "performing in a badly dubbed foreign film". It requires special downloaded software, which retrieves A/V film clips from ESPN during the day while connected and stores them on the users' hard drive for showing at local channel speed. However; the clips are preceded and/or followed by mandatory viewing of 15 to 30-second commercials. The premise seems to be that some advertisers won't pay for Web ads unless they effectively mimic television; but others observe that users don't access the Web passively the way they watch TV. The fat lady has yet to sing on this marketing ploy.

Ronks rocks. He reeally does! Another Month, Another Restatement At least this time it's not somebody's bogus revenue figures. When Jupiter Media Metrix collapsed last June, they sold off part of their Web-site audience measurement business to ComScore; but archrival Nielsen got the tracking software which they claimed patent rights to. Somewhere in the shuffle ComScore ended up undercounting visits, especially by viewers at work whose companies frown on letting them install tracking software. ComScore now says the most popular sites like About.com, EBay, Lycos, and so on had 20-25 percent more viewers in the last three months of 2002 than they thought; e.g., 56 million instead of 44 M for about.com. They still have a credibility problem though, largely because their numbers vary widely from Nielsen's (107 M Yahoo viewers vs. Nielsen's 81 M for example), leading many to disregard them both except as gross approximations, especially since both companies refuse to allow audits. Still, the effect of this whole dust-up may be largely internal: as one analyst observes, "Stock prices are no longer tied to the number of visitors you have. Now investors have this little idea of being profitable." Coke Issues Own Debit Cards The company says "Coca-Cola has built incredible relationships with its customers by being more than just a beverage provider; we have an obligation to help them solve their business problems." Incredible indeed; except they don't mean customers like you and me, they mean restaurants. Many have hourly staff with no bank accounts, making it hard to pay them via cheap funds transfer, so Coke is offering an ATM card that takes payroll deposits, issued via Citibank; it will split the transaction-fee revenue with Citi, thus helping Coke with some business problems of its own. Broadband Sellers Gear Up After FCC Decision Now that the FCC says phone companies can charge ISPs more for high-speed DSL access, hardware suppliers like Cisco, Intel, and Juniper are salivating at the prospect of a boom. The theory seems to be that since they can raise prices, the phone companies will rush to install more broadband routers and other gear; exactly how rising prices will translate to more end-user demand is not mentioned in the euphoria. The phone companies themselves, though active sellers of the Kool-Aid to the FCC, appear less ready to drink it: SBC for example is looking to buy DirecTV satellite operations, a direct competitor to DSL. Age-Old Principle Rediscovered Glenn Argenbright, CEO of security consultant Saflink, on customers' habits in purchasing access-control biometric recognition equipment: "Good-looking devices outsell ugly ones regardless of reliability; it kills me." Rockin' Ronks.

Fabrics Woven From Nanotubes Scientists at universities in Dallas and Dublin have developed a technique for constructing extremely strong thread from carbon nanotubes, which normally are less than .00005 inches long. Even a petite size garment needs longer threads than that, and these have been spun to lengths of up to 100 yards, enough for an XXL. The news article suggests fancifully that with their electronic properties they could be woven into a bulletproof shirt that plays MP3 files and acts as a cell phone. On the other hand, someone wearing a shirt-phone that played music might need for it to be bulletproof. In any case, these threads now go for $15,000 an ounce, pricey even by the standards of Paris couture. Everybody seems to be suing everybody today: Connecticut Sues Oracle; Oracle Sues PeopleSoft and JD Edwards PeopleSoft was suing Oracle already, so they don't make the marquee, but that was with the claim that Oracle's hostile buyout offer was "diabolical" and a "sham" meant to destroy competition from PS. (You know, with that beard of his Larry Ellison does look a bit like Mephistopheles; I wonder..) Oracle is suing PS on behalf of PS's own stockholders who it says were deprived of the opportunity to vote when PS made the JDE takeover a cash deal. Connecticut, which is a couple of weeks away from turning on a $100 million PeopleSoft application and is unhappy about Oracle's stated plan to kill PS software, is suing Oracle for violating state antitrust laws, claiming the number of vendors for enterprise software would effectively be reduced to two with Germany's SAP the only comparable rival. Private Groups Sue Microsoft Massachusetts is not entirely alone as a plaintiff in the MS antitrust case. The Computer and Communications Industry Association (which before it took on communications used to be the CIA, much to the confusion of many) and the Software and Information Industry Association filed anti-MS friend-of-the- court briefs at the original trial(s) and received permission from the judge to oppose the settlement before the appeals court. MS is arguing they lack standing to object, apparently because they merely represent rivals crushed by the monopolist and are hence of no account legally. Spam On Senate's Plate Again For the third time in four years, Senators Conrad Burns and Ron Wyden have introduced a bill to curb the excesses of unsolicited commercial e-mail. This year's edition appears stronger than before, and the opposition to it weaker, giving it a better chance of becoming law. The Commerce Committee unanimously approved the bill which would declare a Federal crime the use of fraudulent or deceptive return addresses and false headers or subject lines. It would also outlaw the robotic harvesting of addresses, and this year's bill prohibits dictionary attacks, hijacking other computers to send mail, and opening large numbers of false e-mail accounts; and it requires the sender to provide a physical mail reply address, offer an opt-out mechanism, and label the mail as an ad. Businesses who knowingly employ spammers to promote their products or services would also be held liable. The bill would allow states "to enact and enforce their own antispam legislation". While the Commerce Committee bill declares violations a misdemeanor (though with up to a year in jail), the Judiciary Committee may beef up the penalties. Besides growing clamor among the public to Do Something, former opponents are coming around to see its value; a spokesman for the Direct Marketing Association gets the Quote Of The Day award for his "We can't communicate with our consumers because their in-boxes are full of Nigerian widows and body enlargement stuff." Thanks Ron!

Sun 1, Microsoft 1, Java 0 A Federal appeals court yesterday held that Microsoft did not have to include Sun's version of Java software with Windows but that it could not include its own either. The decision reversed a lower court's ruling that MS as an OS monopolist needed to bundle Sun's Java lest it "tip" the market toward its own .NET standard, saying that while a "serious danger" of that existed as the trial court found, it did not threaten the "immediate and irreparable harm" needed to justify an injunction. But it held Microsoft's own version of Java probably violated Sun's copyright and could not be bundled with Windows; the actual case to decide that and settle on the amount of damages will most likely not get scheduled before 2005, but even now it is of mostly academic interest except for the $1 billion Sun is asking for. One analyst notes that "history and market forces have largely passed this case by", since MS has already stopped including either kind of Java with Windows and PC makers like Dell and H-P load Sun's version on machines they ship. I suppose it depends on the dog? Anyway I checked the story and lunch is what the man said; maybe he had a different excuse in mind. In Microsoft We Trust An article today discusses the "Trusted Computing Group" backed by monopo- er, industry leaders such as Microsoft and Intel, with support from wannabes like AMD, IBM and H-P, to create a special chip on motherboards with secret identifying keys. Never mind that Intel tried something like this in 1999 that led to the phrase "Big Brother Inside" and was a PR flop on the level of their floating-point processor who-needs-accuracy gaffe, they're at it again. Intel says the activation of hardware features will be "voluntary" on the users' part, though it may be an offer they can't refuse if they want various features. Coupled with the proposed Windows Palladium initiative, now known as the "Next Generation Secure Computing Base" to be included in the Longhorn release, it involves two operating system partitions, one of which is like today's and the other locked down with security features to protect the record industry I mean the user. Though MS denies it, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor opines they may some day offer Office software and other applications only on the locked half. Other criticisms are that the initiative focuses on turning the PC into a media conduit for commercial entertainment despite the inappropriate nature of such uses for corporate and most SOHO users, though it would provide companies more tools to control employees' use of desktop systems. Another is that it facilitates creation of a secure illegal "Darknet" for file swapping and other nefarious activities among trusted conspirators. Apple meanwhile relies on software for music-file protection with its iTunes function, but the Wintel companies appear to take no lesson from its success. DHS.com Shopping is fun when you can print money; the Department of Homeland Security has a big budget and means to use it on buying tech toys to spy on us. (The name DHS.com was coined by the department's Assistant Secretary Robert Liscouski.) Unlike the DOD who designs say a bomber and puts out bids for it, the DHS is going out to procure stuff already available; partly out of the current administration's belief in Private Enterprise and partly because a government-designed router would probably bring the net to a dead stop if they turned it on. Speakers at the "Information Technology Leadership In A Security-Focused World" painted a picture that "involves collecting vast sets of personal information in computer databases, then sorting and analyzing the data to look for suspicious activities". Whether that collection of users' data would be hindered or helped by the secret features of the Trusted Computing Group was not mentioned in the story. SAP To Oracle: Hold Your Coat? The battle for control of PeopleSoft and JD Edwards leaves SAP smiling, the way a bruising primary battle among Democrats is a welcome sight to Republicans. With current and prospective customers wondering if Oracle will drop PeopleSoft's products, and whether PeopleSoft will do the same to JDE's, and if the whole set of deals will be snarled in legal challenges for years (the DOJ just said it is extending its query), SAP is taking out ads asking "Will your needs continue to be addressed? Or will you find your business playing second fiddle to the turmoil of mergers and acquisitions?" SAP, which stands for Systems, Applications, Products for Data-Processing (no wonder they abbreviate it) was founded in 1972 by four ex-IBM engineers and is now "Europe's largest software developer and the world's leading supplier of business software". Per the following figures from the paper: $Bil 2002 Market Revenue Share SAP 7.8 35% Oracle 2.5 13% PSoft 1.9 10% JDEdw 0.9 5% Oracle Bid Delayed Some more on the DOJ's statement that it will "extend its review" of Oracle's $6.3 billion hostile takeover proposal to PeopleSoft shareholders. The review is expected to take several months to run its course; that goes past the present July 7 expiration of the tender offer, though Oracle can and probably will push the deadline rather than give up its effort. More serious for them, it gives PS time to complete its $1.75 B buyout of J D Edwards, which poses three problems for Oracle. First, it makes PS bigger and would likely require raising the offer price for it; second, it means merging three companies instead of just two; and finally it increases antitrust scrutiny by reducing further the already small number of vendors offering enterprise software. Of course, it means more and longer uncertainty for current and potential customers of PS and JDE as well. The 40-Hour Laptop NEC says it has developed a laptop power source based on a fuel cell that provides about ten times the useful life of today's lithium-ion battery. It hopes to market the system by 2005, though if it uses a hydrogen tank for a power source it's unclear how many airlines will allow it on board. Chances are NEC will not use images of the Hindenburg or the Challenger in its ads. Quote Of The Day US District Court Judge Milton Pollack, dismissing class-action suits against Merrill Lynch by investors (not ML clients) who claimed their stock market losses were due to overly optimistic company evaluations: "plaintiffs would have this court conclude that the federal securities laws were meant to underwrite, subsidize, and encourage their rash speculation in joining a free-wheeling casino that lured thousands obsessed with the fantasy of Olympian riches." Why The Bubble Burst An article by two NYU B-school professors in the latest Journal Of Finance looks at causes behind the spectacular rise and fall of tech stocks and finds two main explanations. One was public faith in their value, which far exceeded the belief of insiders and institutional buyers. The other was a sort of structural limit on short selling, which kept pessimists from having the market effect they might exert in more widely traded companies. The latter arose from the fact that most tech stocks were recent IPOs, prevented by underwriters from offering for sale more than 15-20% of authorized shares until after a "lock-up" period; with so few shares publicly available, the cost of selling them short was raised by brokerage rules. At the end of the lock-up term, tech stocks dropped in value about twice as much as other types and they continued to drift downward. Move now to the spring of 2000: an unusually large number of tech stocks came out of the lock-up period at about the same time, releasing $300 billion of essentially new shares at a time when the level of public optimism was insufficient to absorb them all at existing prices. So prices fell, further disillusioning the potential buyers, leading to more declines, and the rest as they say is history. Reviewer Hal Varian, dean of the School of Information Management and Systems at Berkeley, notes that already in the latest market rise it is speculative issues like biotech, Chinese Internet companies, and penny stocks that are leading the advance with individual buyers while institutions lag behind them; or in other words "Here we go again". Laptops On Top Per the NPD market research firm, retail store sales of laptops accounted for 54% of the total, exceeding desktop systems for the first time ever and more than double their 25% share in January 2000. Pneumatic Hose Makes News From the BBC at comes the story of aerosol stockings, evidently a craze in Japan. They don't snag, they're more comfortable than the woven kind in hot weather, and even in monsoon season they don't run (as in dissolve). Available for $12 a can of about 20 pairs worth, they come in terracotta, bronze and "natural"; fishnet seems to be beyond the technology, though with a screen who knows. They can be washed off with "a bit of scrubbing".

More Wireless Burger Joints McDonald's is super-sizing its network menu. It's beefing up its NYC outlets so equipped from 60 to 75 (access is free through the end of next month, then goes to $3 a day) and plans to install the facility in up to 20,000 locations. Already 75 restaurants in SF have it and Chicago is next. Thanks Ron.

My old uni town, Brighton, has just wirelessed the beach up. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3068915.stm

Do you have a wireless rig of some sort, Mike?

no...don't even have a network at home at the moment. Will have by the end of the week...building myself a second machine as part of the very early phase of starting a company.

Cool Mike, what's the company going to be doing?

if it happens we're going to be providing tech support/installation/config services to small/medium companies who don't have the need/money for a full time IT person.

Good business to be in! What's your company called?

no name as yet...still in the planning stages...but we might be associating ourselves with my friend's girlfriend's PR company, "Bamboo PR". So it could be "Bamboo Technology" or something along those lines.

That's a great name and suggests all kinds of possibilities for logos.

Check out www.bamboopr.co.uk. I particularly like their "panda feet" logo.

Yay Mike! Way to insert yourself into a niche market! Good luck!

fingers crossed...have some potential clients, too. This thing could actually work...

ronks rides again: Who Is Mr. Big? While the author of the Sobig worm is still unknown, a few clues to his identity are emerging. Over the last eight months six variants of the program have been issued as he refines it to evade countermeasures. The main functions of the worm appear to be obtaining information about the victim's e-mail lists and mailing the worm to those on it. Just like spam with a toxic twist. Speculation centers on the likelihood that the author is building a tool to flood the Internet with e-mail from either the primary victims or a secondary set (like the 20 IP addresses the victims were to be told to contact on a given day); doing so from these machines would bypass blacklists of known spam sources. It's unclear if the author has commercial or simply disruptive intent; the latter would include a sort of distributed denial of service attack on the entire Internet. The current version, Sobig.F, expires on September 10 with self-inactivating code; some time after that a new release is likely to appear with possibly more clues for the white hats to unravel. Shareholder Web Site Proposed For Worldcom As the scandal-ridden telecomm company (now renamed MCI) tries to emerge from bankruptcy as less of a poster boy for corporate fraud, one innovation is a Web site for owners of stock. That is probably not a new idea per se, but this one has some novel features. According to the report, "investors can bring concerns to the attention of the board - and other shareholders. The site will allow them to have resolutions voted on without having to win approval to do so at the annual meeting." It's not clear from the story if the votes would be binding, or how shareholders without Internet access would vote. Phone Games Bored SUV drivers with no one to talk to on their cell phone who might be tempted to waste their attention on driving don't have to worry now. Nokia is coming out with the N-Gage handheld phone, radio, Web browser and music player, and if that isn't enough it will include games from Electronic Arts. Silicon Shrinks Silicon Graphics will reduce its staff by a sixth (600 jobs) in its quest to cut expenses and "return to profitability". Its high-end systems, largely targeted to Hollywood and the military, have not sold well lately. Earthlink Sues 100 defendants were listed in the ISP's complaint against spammers in Alabama and Canada, said to have created "an elaborate chain of fake names and nonexistent companies" to shield their issuance of over 250 million unsolicited commercial e-mails. Bank fraud, identity theft, and stolen credit cards are also alleged in the complaint.

Float Like A Penguin, Sting Like A Big Blue Bee IBM is rolling out a new suite of curious ads identifying itself with Linux. In them, the operating system (which is about ten years old) is played by a 10-year-old boy like a young Luke Skywalker receiving "words of wisdom" from Muhammad Ali, professor Henry Louis Gates, and coach John Wooden; also a movie director, an astronomer, and a plumber. Some of them (the ads that is, not the Jedis) are said to be interactive at www.ibm.com/open and some will run during the US Open tennis tournament if it ever stops raining there. Use the Force, Linus. Ronks - ron sipherd is the source!

Busy Techie (ronks) Security Patches Breed Viruses An interesting article today suggests that Microsoft's publication of a fix actually provides fodder for exploitation of the weakness it corrects. Writers of worms and viruses are said to dissect the patch to analyze the flaw it addresses and take advantage of it on machines whose owners are slow to (or simply fail to) apply the patch. The infamous Blaster worm for example appeared 25 days after the issuance of a fix for it; as it happens, a similar patch to another area of MS code came out 19 days ago so look out. The story also includes the: Understatement Of The Week "The PC business model has not placed much value on building secure, well- engineered software." RF Tags In The News The conference has a more in-depth topic on radio-frequency tags, but there was an overview of the business in a recent news story. While they a still a ways from replacing those bar-code tags you see on items in the store, they're gaining. The Defense Department and Wal-Mart are expected to require some or all of their suppliers to attach the tags by 2005 at least to cartons and pallets of materiel delivered for inventory control, using a newer version that can "be read by scanners anywhere in the world". The present cost of each tag at about 25-30 cents makes them impractical for cheap mass-market items today, but they are still so ubiquitous that a group originally formed to protest data mining of credit and grocery-store cards is raising the alarm over RFID's privacy issues. They paint a 1984+ picture of "companies and government agencies ... able to monitor what people read or where they assemble, from radio tags embedded in their books or woven into clothing". The industry is expected to have revenue (for the tags, the readers, and associated software to pursue novels and trousers) of about $1.13 billion this year, with projected annual growth rates in subareas like: Security & access control: 9.5% Automobile immobilization: 6.4 Transportation: 18.9 (when not immobilized) Supply chain management: 38.3 Toll collection: 9.8 (like CalTrans' Fastrak) Asset management: 21.5 ("tracking people, equipment, or documents") European Ruling A Threat To Microsoft A squabble in Brussels between two American health services could cast a shadow on Microsoft's licensing policies. Atlanta's NDC Health sued IMS Health in the EU Court Of Justice over an obscure issue: the Connecticut defendant's refusal to let NDC license its drug-sales database structure. The preliminary finding by the European Advocate General, likely to be adopted by the court, is that "a company should have access to a [dominant] rival's intellectual property if it planned to offer a different product, or if the sharing was necessary to create competition". The decision could serve as precedent in a European case involving Microsoft's refusal to license its software code to rivals like Sun and IBM who want to use it to create server operating systems that interface with Windows, the dominant desktop OS. An analyst observes the court could hold that "a refusal by Microsoft to license the necessary parts of Windows could be an abuse of its dominant position". The EU court has no jurisdiction in this country, but once the code is out of the bag... "Dominant" is borrowed from another sentence by the Advocate General: if the court finds that NDC intended to offer a better or different product, "that would render a refusal to grant a license an abuse of IMS's dominant position". Basically as I understand it the EU law somewhat tracks US law in holding that a monopolist is subject to more scrutiny and limits than a player in an atomized market (many competitors, none dominant) or one with a small market share. Icann Do It; VeriSign Caves A couple days after domain-name registrar VeriSign announced its strategy on September 15 to hijack misspelled .com and .net URLs to its own advertising- supported site with the hope of reaping millions, the Internet oversight group Icann asked them to stop, since the unannounced change wrought havoc with some spam blockers and caused other problems. VeriSign refused. Yesterday, Icann decided to stop being Mr. Nice Corporation; it told VeriSign if it did not terminate the "service" by 6 PM today, Icann would "seek promptly to enforce VeriSign's contractual obligations" such as being a neutral registry administrator and not a rival to other search sites, resulting in a possible $100,000 fine and the termination of VeriSign's registration rights. Mighty VeriSign responded with a request "for a few days' reprieve". Icann refused. VeriSign then agreed to stop. Perhaps the good guys don't always finish last after all.

Caller ID For E-Mail? A sort of Internet-wide whitelist feature is being proposed as a solution to spam. "Whitelisting" is used by the Well and many ISPs to allow users to define senders of mail who should be let through spam filters, but many fail to list say Land's End before placing their first online order, so the confirmation and subsequent mailings are treated as spam. The original trusting nature of the Internet, from back when users were PhD's swapping theses and obscure jokes about John Von Neumann, has left a legacy structure that may have to be completely revamped to be more secure from unwanted Viagra vendors, but the big legitimate online merchants are pressing for a solution. Outside of the technical challenges, which are not trivial, is the problem of widely divergent goals among the players. Merchants want a sort of seal of approval that gets them a blanket pass unless the user specifically blocks them; ISPs worry about their customers and disfavor the free-pass idea out of concern over complaints from users who don't want any more @#$% Land's End turtleneck ads; and some of the bigfeet ISPs already have proprietary spam filters they see as selling points to their customers; and there is also a smaller group that presently sells e-mail filters and doesn't relish the idea of being superseded by a free global solution. A major issue is how to keep Mr. CheapViagra.com from passing himself off as Land's End. Kevin Doerr of Microsoft waves away the issue with "IP spoofing is hard to do and easy to detect", but others are not so breezy about it. There seem to be two major solution candidates, akin to the pea-shooter and the howitzer. A simple registry of good-guy e-mail servers could be set up quickly and used as a kind of good-faith badge; if it is not spoofed. To guarantee against that, the heavy-duty solution is digital certificates based on long binary keys like those used for encrypting online orders. Whether either solution could avoid the necessity for all recipients of e- mail to install new software is unclear. MS Sued Over Bugs LA film editor Marcy Hamilton says she suffered a case of identity theft because the Windows software on her PC where her Social Security number and other ID codes were stored is defective. So defective as to violate California consumer-protection laws and be an unfair business practice. Her lawyer is seeking class-action status for the case on behalf of all Windows users. It could serve as a major precedent and a test of MS and other vendors' software licensing terms. Unlike other products which are sold and are subject to product-liability statutes, software is licensed; the user gets a right to use the code, but not much by way of a "product" other than a shiny CD. So far the article declares "Microsoft ... has suffered no reverses in court that would establish any liability for flawed software." The plaintiffs may claim that Microsoft's disclaimer of responsibility in the license agreement is void because nobody reads that stuff before clicking "Yes"; this has been tried before, but with limited success, mostly against vendors who stupidly don't show you the agreement before telling you to consent. More broadly, they may try to override the license provision on consumer-protection grounds like the implicit guarantee a product is "fit for its intended purpose", which in some cases cannot be negated by agreement of the parties. from Ron Sipherd ronks@well.com

Ron Sipherd (ronks@well.com) has more great stuff: Borland Slumps The company that imagined itself a contender for the office-software market, ran afoul of the Microsoft juggernaut years before Netscape and was turned into a corporate grease spot on Highway 17, is still alive but struggling. Its shares fell 17 percent on announced plans to let go 125 staff, declining sales, and barely break-even profits for the last quarter. Execs Out At CA Computer Associates is shedding people too, but closer to the top of the pyramid. It fired its CFO and the SVP and VP of finance following an investigation of how sales were booked. The company has been sued over charges it manipulated its accounting to show a pretend profit and give the CEO $1.1 billion in unearned bonuses. No State Regulation Of Internet Phone Calls, Says Judge A federal trial court in Minnesota has declared the state may not treat a company offering VoIP (Voice over IP) services as a local phone company. Vonage offers unlimited calling in the US and Canada for $35 a month over the Internet. Reasons for the decision are to be announced Friday, but it may be on interstate-commerce grounds. Speculating on the growth of the industry, a UBS analyst made the Quote Of The Day "VoIP technology has the potential to do to [phone companies] what file sharing is doing to the recording industry." Hot Products Nokia cell phones have lately developed the unfortunate habit of spontaneous combustion. The company blamed earlier instances of blazing communications on third-party replacement batteries, but two recent cases in Holland, most recently of a teenager whose Model 7210 burned a hole in his pants, involved all Nokia components (other than the trousers). Even Hotter Products Rod Sprules, a Canadian engineer, has received a patent on fireplace logs made from coffee grounds. Called the Java Log, it all started when he found in a reference book that burning coffee grounds produce more heat than burning wood. Several years later, he began to capitalize on the idea by scrounging used grounds from the dumpster of Ottawa's Planet Coffee. This entrepreneurial approach to obtaining raw material was not without its drawbacks, he says: "Have you ever seen a wet bagel? It swells to the size of an inner tube." He now hopes to strike deals with Starbucks, Krispy Kreme, and the like which will obviate the need to rummage in wet trash. And he says his company Robustion is working on a log that doesn't smell like coffee for those who prefer a non-aromatic variety. Et Tu, SCO? SCO, who is suing IBM over the latter's claimed incorporation of its code into Linux, is controlled and mostly owned by an investment firm called Canopy, who until recently also owned a software developer named Lineo. Lineo has just settled a claim that it incorporated the proprietary code of another company into GNU and stripped off the copyright notice of the developer, Monte Vista. Lineo required that the terms of the settlement be sealed, and neither party will discuss it on the record, but it is speculated that Lineo claimed the infringement was an innocent mistake deserving of only token damages, a defense that IBM could as easily raise to the embarrassment of SCO. Overseas Profit Up At Two Companies Philips Electronics reports quarterly net profit of $145 million, compared to a loss over twice that size a year earlier, largely based on sales of its LCD monitors and despite sluggish sales of consumer products in the US. Similarly Intel doubled its quarterly profit from last year, mostly on strength from Asia, Europe, and high-end notebooks while US and flash-memory volume lagged. Transmeta's Got A Secret Another one, from the company who kept their low-power CPU under wraps till rollout. They are said to have lost ground to Intel for general mobile- computer use and to be making a stand with specialized applications. However, Intel made no presentation to this year's Microprocessor Forum and is reported to be dealing with problems as they reduce circuits to etched lines of 90 nanometers. Tiny circuits and fast-switching ones leak current; and tinier and the faster they get, the more they lose. Enter Transmeta. They say they have a software solution to the hardware dilemma, though they declined to provide details. E-Mathoms Katie Hafner reports that many computer users accumulate useless gadgets that look good in the catalog but end up gathering dust on the shelf or being sold off on EBay to the next gullible fool, to the point where NIB or "new in box" has become a standard abbreviation on auction offers. No one here would do this of course, but she says there are people with webcams, a "universal remote that came with a manual as thick as a Russian novel", massive CD duplicators to share music with friends whose tastes differ, GPS locators that give the exact latitude and longitude of your backyard (in case you need to call in an airstrike on the gophers), belt-clip monitors that tell how many dozen miles you ran that day for uploading onto your database (with optional heart monitor and perhaps a navel thermometer), flatbed scanners, cordless everything, probably even cordless cords, PDAs for storing all your committee meetings, and oh so much more. She observes "all too often the buyers find they cannot really change their lives just by acquiring something new and different." If this fact gets out the economic recovery is done for. From One Ster To Another Wayne Rosso, described as "a colorful music business veteran", has left his post as president of the Grokster file-sharing company to become CEO of Blubster. Owned by Madrid-based Optisoft which he will also head, the Blub is said to offer secure and anonymous file-sharing for music lovers that dare not speak their name. Especially to the RIAA. Data Mining For The Rest Of Us A recent news story discusses the expansion of data mining to something called "text mining" that doesn't require as much structure to the information it sifts through, and is adaptable to a wide variety of uses outside the business world. Phone call transcripts, articles, e-mail and other sources feed into products from ClearForest and SPSS at up to 250,000 pages per hour to look for correlations among terms, for medical research and spotting of behavior patterns. One of the most dramatic uses of the technique however occurred long before the current generation of tools: in the mid-1980's a researched at the University of Chicago observed an unexpected linkage in articles on Medline between the terms "migraine" and "spreading depression", and another with the use of magnesium to forestall occurrences of the latter, suggesting that "magnesium deficiency might be a causal factor in migraine", which had not been thought of before. Sun Down Yet Again With the regularity of the fall of dusk if not the frequency, Sun Microsystems announced another quarter of declining sales (the tenth in a row) and a widening net loss. The loss amounted to $286 million compared with $111 M a year ago, and revenue was off 8 percent. Cash flow was a negative $49 million and margins are off 1.1%. Last year Sun let go 11 percent of its staff, and last month it said it would boot another 3%; no plans were announced in the latest gloomy report to lay off any more of the company's employees. Either of them, ha ha. A Merrill Lynch analyst says it may soon become "acquisition bait". The Fish Is Back Red Herring magazine is described as "an early messenger of the new economy"; it is of course dead, along with many other once-shining stars of those heady days back in the previous millennium. However, it may make a comeback; Frenchman Alex Vieux, impresario of fancy confabs like the European Technology Roundtable, has bought the brand name and hopes to re- start it up. He can't send it to the magazine's subscriber list, or even print it till next fall - Time Warner bought the list with an 18-month no- compete clause last April - but he says he is hiring writers and other staff, perhaps for an earlier Web edition. Emphasizing a global perspective from his present offices in Mountain View, he made the Quote Of The Day (Utterly Obvious Division) "Silicon Valley is not America. It is not a mirror of the country." XP x 5 = 2003 Microsoft's new Office 2003 product which officially went on sale this week is not getting a lot of good press: PC Magazine's summation is "end users will probably not find Office 2003 a compelling upgrade". The main features seem to be in Outlook (a program for the transmission of viruses and e-mail) and workgroup authorship-sharing tools. And XML, for those who write letters in Extended Markup Language. In fact, MS Office appears to be in trouble: of the company's major product lines, it has the slowest sales growth rate over the last three years now that every man, woman, child and vertebrate life form has a copy, and there is actually a hint of competition from Sun's StarOffice and Linux-based products. So, what to do? Build on your strength, which in Microsoft's case is a cash hoard the size of Neptune, and quintuple your advertising budget over the rollout of the previous (XP) release. They plan to shovel $150 million to persuade users to upgrade and not to defect to rivals, with ads on "The West Wing", "CSI", and the Travel Channel. The first to appear in the newspapers give a hint of the new "tongue in cheek" tone, as well as the lavish budget: in yesterday's NY Times they took out four full-color full-page ads featuring: a baseball diamond, empty except for a guy on a tractor raking the infield and desks on the mound, in the outfield, and so forth (title: "Swing for the cubicle wall"); a basketball court, again empty except for a conference table at center court ("Light up the scoreboard from a swivel chair"); a football stadium filled with cubicles ("Split the uprights with a keystroke") and finally a bunch of wage slaves in a huddle ("Great moments don't just happen on a playing field"). Gee, I think I'll buy two... The Ultimate Apple Virginia Polytechnic Institute has just built the world's fourth fastest supercomputer in one month out of 1100 Macintoshes for about $5 million (plus an unstated amount of free pizzas and football tickets given to the assemblers), rivaling units that cost around $100-250 million and take years to construct. Its speed was ranked by testers at 7.41 trillion operations a second. National ID Card Proposed The interesting thing is that it's proposed as a private business venture by Steven Brill, creator of CourtTV and the American Lawyer and Brill's Content magazines. His Verified Identity Card Inc. startup wants people to pay about $50 up front and "a few dollars each month" for cards that vouch the possessors "are not on terrorism watch lists and do not have certain felony convictions on their records". He says data about the customers' misdeeds or lack thereof will be stored on a central database, which others have criticized as "an attractive target for subversion" and a "single point of failure for multiple security systems" that rely on it, but he is unfazed by these issues. He also says that while the system will be developed "in close cooperation with the government", customer data will not be sold or shared (except with anyone who hacks into the system), and the card will never be used to track a customer's movements from place to place. What, never? No, never. What, never? Well, hardly ever. The idea is to speed impatient air travelers through lines and skip searches, though not envious looks from the other passengers; but that requires airports and agencies to agree to accept his word the client is a loyal citizen. The Future(s) Of Computing A story in today's paper examines the diverging visions of IBM ("on-demand computing") and Microsoft ("seamless computing") for the direction of PC and Web technology. Both are not above lobbing the dreaded mainframe analogy at one another, with an IBM VP calling Windows "a superb legacy business" and MS execs likening IBM's plan to dumb 3270-like browser terminals driven from a central server. While they cooperate on developing standards for Web services like XML and SOAP, the article suggests they agree on little else. (For example, IBM is a big Linux champion; MS wishes it would just go away.) They agree that the future involves more than downloading stuff; for example they both see business computers automatically conducting transactions such as parts purchases, and consumers' PCs scheduling dentist appointments for their unhappy owners. But how they do it is where they part company. MS is said to focus on "technology tools" such as the upcoming Indigo project that lets programmers write code to run on PCs, cell phones, hand-helds, and perhaps even mainframes without modification. IBM by contrast wants to "free companies from the previous constraints of technology" and let them focus instead on their business requirements by shedding their server farms and buying technology services from suppliers - like IBM. The article doesn't mention it, but it may be that people don't actually *want* their computers to buy parts or trundle them off to the dentist without their knowledge. Both of these future have a whiff of "Modern Times" about them. Microsoft Deals - And Finds An Unlikely Ally Five states (the Dakotas, North Carolina, Tennessee) and DC agreed yesterday to resolve their consumer class action suits against Microsoft for about $200 million total. Earlier this year it reached a deal with Florida, Montana, West Virginia, and California to compensate buyers for claims they were overcharged. The California arrangement in brief provides buyers of MS products in (roughly) 1995 through 2001 with vouchers: $16 for Windows or DOS, $29 for Office, $26 for Excel, and $5 for Word or Works; multiple purchases (e.g., Windows 95 and 98) get multiple vouchers. Details and claim forms at . The company still faces suits by Massachusetts, Sun, and the European Union over its practices. It is also being sued for patent infringement by Michael Doyle and his Eolas Technologies over its browser technology to execute programs from another site, and two months ago a jury awarded the plaintiffs $521 million. Comes now the World Wide Consortium into the battle; in a letter to the director of the US patent Office, director Tim Berners-Lee asks him to re-examine and invalidate Eolas' patent on the grounds that it is not a new idea, having been preceded by (for example) the Write program in Windows 3.1 which summoned other programs. The letter from a group not normally though of as a friend of MS also cites the "substantial setback for global interoperability and the success of the open Web" if the patent is upheld, with potentially mortal threats to Java, RealPlayer, Flash plugins, Adobe Acrobat, and Apple Quicktime.

ronks brings us more great stuff. Awesome, Ron! The End Of Silicon? Just in time with Saudi Arabia saying it's nearly out of sand (see : Saudis 'fear sand shortage'), Intel says it has a new material to replace silicon dioxide as an insulator in semiconductor chips. They haven't yet said what it is, though they may have more details today when they discuss it at a tech confab in Japan, but it addresses the problems of separating circuits that are growing (so to speak) ever smaller, from 130 nanometers now to 90, then to 65, and later to 45 nm around 2007 when the new stuff would become necessary. It's been reported that Intel's next-generation Prescott CPU is being held up on account of current leakage across insulation. The human hair has long since disappeared as an analogy: the story today says transistor gates are "approaching thickness of just five atomic layers". The End Of SuSE? Not so, says Novell, who just bought the German Linux company for $210 million with $50 M help from IBM (who got 2% of Novell in return). Novell says SuSE and its staff of 400 will remain largely independent and the product separately branded from Netware for "the foreseeable future". With the Netware network OS battered by Microsoft and other rivals, Novell has moved to shore up its line by emphasizing Linux; it bought developer Ximian three months ago. SuSE is Europe's largest Linux vendor, though it trails Red Hat in the US; I almost installed it myself until I read the company "goes through CEOs faster than drummers with Spinal Tap". Maybe it will find the groove now. The Bounty Hunters Of Redmond Microsoft is offering rewards for catching virus writers. Bringing the head in to their corporate offices is not required, or even encouraged, and in fact the reward is not that easy to achieve by its terms: up to $250,000 for evidence leading to the *capture and conviction* of the *original authors* of MSBlast and SoBig, with a total pot of five million in the program. Some cynics suggest MS might better spend the money to make its code secure; but the company calls that criticism "unfair", saying it already spends on that and a variety of approaches is useful. One analyst thinks "It will probably be easier to get a $250,000 reward than to break into some company's network." I wonder.

Stick It In Your Ear From the BBC at comes news of a new Japanese cell phone. A wristband functions as a microphone, and also as a transducer that will "convert the sounds of conversation to vibrations that can be heard when the finger is placed in the ear". The Finger Whisper phone from NTT DoCoMo is dialed by speaking the number into the wristband; you answer incoming calls by placing your forefinger and thumb together and jamming your finger in your ear; you hang up by placing forefinger and thumb together again. No date has been set for commercial availability of the unit, which is probably not for drivers or those who make a lot of hand gestures while they talk.

ronks: Grid Wars According to a story in today's paper, while the US is most often the catalyst and the initial innovator in a new technology, Europe is frequently in a better position to take advantage of it for two reasons, both related to the greater role of government there. Europe is said more likely to have a common mandated computing or communications standard, and the authorities there take a more active part in bringing new ideas to market. Sometimes this can backfire: the article says "Europe's telecom companies have wasted tens of billions of dollars" on third-generation cell phone services that nobody seems to want. In networked supercomputing, which depends less on the fickle public, the Old Country seems to be more successful; businesses like Switzerland's Novartis use their own office PCs (and American software) to sift for promising pharmaceutical compounds, and the EU has initiated two big grid-computing science projects to start next year. The goal of the "Enabling Grids for E-Science in Europe" is to link PCs into a 24-hour computing network for universities and research consortia, while France's National Center for Scientific Research is building an optical net to join seven supercomputers into effectively one. American scientists have applied to use the E-Science grid, but Europe in turn says it wants some NSF money if it is to share the benefits with its new-world colleagues.

Once again, a big thanks is owed to Ron Sipherd (ronks@well.com) for his brilliant and timely observations on the tech business scene. We are privileged that he allows us to republish these comments. Another big thanks, Ron! Just Want Somebody To Sue The SCO Group just gave $1 million cash and 400,000 shares of itself to its law firm Boies Schiller & Flexner; in return, David Boies promised to sue somebody, saying that within the next three months "we will identify a defendant" who uses Linux and hasn't caved in to SCO's license demands. SCO's suit against IBM is set to begin next March in Utah, and the company's CEO Darl McBride "predicted that the current General Public License that accompanies some open source software would not survive". The Itanium Jubilee? Intel's president Paul Otellini says "I'm going to declare this the year of Itanium" in a presidential proclamation honoring his company's two year old 64-bit CPU chip. So far it looks more like the winter of his discontent; while he expects to see 100,000 units shipped this year, analysts think it will take at least till 2006 for the architecture to become popular, since it requires special programming to take advantage of its new features. Intel's rival AMD offers a "more evolutionary" 64-bit chip that is reported to work better on today's 32-bit apps as well as providing an easier migration path for developers. Intel has prototyped such a chip itself according to industry reports; it's called the Yamhill, but the company is vacillating on whether to introduce it. Either they don't want to cannibalize sales of the Itanium, or the challenge of selling a new high- speed processor named after a pile of sweet potatoes is too much for them. YAPS Yet another patent suit: AT&T filed against EBay over claimed ownership rights to the business process of secure Internet payments used by EBay subsidiary PayPal. Today Is T-Day No, not turkey day; that's Thursday. This is "Transfer Your Wireless Service Without Changing Numbers" day, but TYWSWCN sounds like an obscure Welsh village, perhaps near Llareggub. The consequence of the long-delayed event is expected to hasten the shakeout and kill off one or more of the six major wireless providers (Verizon, Cingular, AT&T, Sprint, Nextel, and T- Mobile in decreasing order of size) as the friction of changing is reduced. The article on today's event suggests "tens of millions of consumers are expected to switch companies"; it says Verizon's reputation is for quality, but if that becomes more uniform across carriers, the price advantage of Cingular and T-Mobile may give them an edge if they have the deep pockets to last out the storm. The business is already cutthroat: with 70% of US adults owning a cell phone, there's not much room for growth except by stealing rivals' subscribers. A loss of 25-30% of a company's base in a year is typical and would be fatal did they not do unto their competitors as well. Machine Poems Ray Kurzweil, who created a melody-composing computer program when he was 16 and went on to other more practical ventures like text-to-speech and speech- to-text software (not to be used together, of course), is up to his old ways. An article on his latest venture notes, "Were he not such a successful entrepreneur, Mr. Kurzweil might be considered something of a crackpot". Anyway he has received patent number 6,647,395 for a "cybernetic poet" capable of producing lines like Sashay down the page through the lioness nestled in my soul. Yes; well anyway, perhaps in defense of his creation Mr. K belittles other similar software as the poetic equivalent of Mad-Libs. Poetry thrash! A free version of the software suitable for open-mike nights is available at www.kurzweilcyberart.com; a "deluxe" version, no doubt capable of tossing off dactylic hexameter, anapests, trochees, and casual references to the wine-dark sea, is $29.95. SpamCop - And Robbers IronPort Systems in Silicon Valley makes "a specialized computer with the reputation as the fastest way to send millions of junk e-mail messages"; they are known as spam cannons according to the ePrivacy Group. But times change and that business, though lucrative, doesn't do much for one's reputation as a good Internet citizen; also, there is probably money to be made on the other side of the street with the white hats. Last July, IronPort bought SpamCop, a service that publishes a list of spam senders; they didn't admit the purchase until this month in response to queries from reporters who found out elsewhere. Of course if they were to cripple SpamCop or retool it to let favored clients have a free pass they could make profits from both sides of the battle, but they say they do "not plan to water down SpamCop's current service". What, never? No, never. What, never? Well, yes a little actually; IronPort has opened a line of business called Bonded Sender for spammers who "promise to send messages only to people who request them". Such customers will go on a SpamCop white list and will not be blocked. Of course none of these customers would ever bury the "agreement" in tiny white letters on a white background. What, never? Etc. This just in, from the BBC at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/africa/3241710.stm "Nigeria is to launch an inquiry into internet fraud ... The "419" swindle - named after the penal code that outlaws it - will be targeted in particular. In the scam, people overseas are promised a share of non-existent riches in return for details of their bank account - which is then emptied. ... The 419 scam has been so successful in the past 20 years that experts say it is now the third to fifth largest foreign exchange earner in Nigeria. But ... the government is keen to stamp out the fraud as it is giving Nigeria a bad name." http://www.419eater.com/index.htm they made my day! Something New To Worry About Now that we're done being thankful, let's get back to our normal state of anxiety with a story on cell-phone viruses. This is almost as good as my all-time favorite, deadly invisible odorless radon gas seeping up out of the ground in your basement while you sleep, but we'll take what we can get. Anyway, the Japanese phone company NTT DoCoMo reports customers have received messages that caused their phones to freeze up and dial 110, Japan's equivalent to the 911 emergency number. Since the first complaints came in, NTT has installed central office filters that now block 55 percent of incoming text messages, and another 26% are blocked by filters installed in the users' handsets. Chip Sales Up October semiconductor sales rose over 23 percent from the previous year, and 2003 is up 16% from this point in 2002. Primary factors are global PC sales and strong growth in cell phone purchases in China, with about 5 million new subscribers added a month. Longhorn For Sale Although not supposed to be released until 2005 or later, the next release of Windows (code-named Longhorn) can be purchased for 5 ringgit (about a dollar fifty) in Malaysia software souks. Don't count on MS support, however - as if you ever could, eh? Anyway, the CDs are believed to be a beta version distributed to programmers at an LA conference in October. Google As Equalizer A story in today's paper discusses gains that small merchants and even SOHO entrepreneurs are making via use of search engines, auction sites, and Web portals. Unlike earlier Internet commerce efforts that made a big splash when they opened and another when they failed, these guys had "no venture capital to blow through" so they started at a level they could handle - what a concept - with a few EBay offerings, a virtual store on Yahoo, or a sponsored listing on Google. Unlike expensive banner ads and popups, Google and Overture search sites charge per search term, which puts small targeted vendors at an advantage over say Wal-Mart which offers zillions of types of merchandise. It seems to be working: the owner of a family-run New England hardware store chain that bought Google placement for "Christmas light sets" says "Instead of us chasing customers around, on search engines the customers chase us around". Visa reports that for the post-Thanksgiving week just ended, online sales rose 47 percent from last year while in-store sales were up just 9%. HP, As In Hit Parade Hewlett Packard has definitely come out of the garage, unless you count garage bands. Bye-bye oscilloscopes, hello "Hewlett-branded online music store" which the company is expected to open next month along with the announcement of an HP digital music player. Names In The News OK, this is not strictly biztech but I was surprised to see the name of Michael G. Tyson prominently featured on the stock page next to the S&P 500 and NYSE reports. Mr. Tyson, who is or was a pugilist of note, gets nearly a quarter page; unfortunately he heads the bill as "Debtor" in a tombstone ad published by the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. I don't think I ever saw his middle initial before. Microsoft Claims To Unclench A Bit Frequently accused in the US and Europe of blocking rivals from accessing its technology and preventing competitors' products from inter-operating with its own, even to the point of violating the weak settlement terms that ended the US antitrust suit, Microsoft announced "a more liberal policy" of licensing patents and copyrights. They say some will be let out free of royalties to industry standards groups in areas like Web services and machine-to-machine communications; others will be made available for a fee. Examples of the latter are ClearType, a technology for displaying text on LCD screens, and the File Allocation Table (FAT) protocol for disk file storage. Actually FAT is so old I suspect the core patents have already expired, but MS hopes to see it used in digital cameras and other hardware where it does not presently dominate. On Hold The FCC has asked AT&T Wireless to explain delays of over a week in some cases handling the transfer of numbers for customers who switch cell-phone service providers. The apparent cause is breakdowns in automation of the turnover: the customer's name, address, Social Security number, and other data must match between the from and to companies for the process to work, and AT&T's end has failed about three out of five times for the hundreds of thousands of transfers. When that happens the two companies must manually walk through the records, which is said to take days. (Though the idea of two phone company reps waiting for hours on hold is kind of delicious.) While AT&T is far from alone in the problem, its handling seems to be the worst of the major carriers, perhaps because it uses a different transfer agent from the others. If it's any comfort, the other companies fail about half the time, and AT&T is as bad at handling incoming customers as outgoing ones, though it's reported they're losing more than the other carriers. Topic 158 [biztech]: In the news for 2003 #755 of 764: Busy Techie (ronks) Mon Dec 8 '03 (10:12) 50 lines World vs. USA Yet Again The United Nations has created a working group to study Internet governance, with an eye to putting it more under global management; it is to report its findings in 2005. According to the BBC, "developing nations had been pushing for the UN to have a far greater role in the regulation of the net, while western countries opposed handing over control to an international agency." The NY Times has a similar story, noting that while Web users in China are expected to constitute over half of the world total in four years, the entire country has fewer IP addresses than MIT. Viruses For Fun And Profit "At least a third of all spam circulating on the Internet is now sent from or relayed by personal computers that have been taken over" and used in a Kazaa-like peer network that both expands the originator's capacity and shields his identity, according to an exec at anti-virus firm Sophos. Trojan horse programs like "Sinit" seen in the last three months create rings of zombie PCs to send spam and bogus credit-card number requests. Hacker Web sites like Carder Planet reportedly carry ads for "remote administrators" or "radmins" who offer the services of their controlled systems. After Wi-Fi, What? OK, so Starbucks now has 2600 out of its 4100 outlets equipped with wireless hot spots; but who doesn't anymore? With cities, non-profit groups, and merchants' associations offering free access to draw customers, you need something more, they reason. Besides coffee, that is. So Starbucks, McDonald's, and Schlotsky's Deli (a chain) are starting to offer new bonus items like free streaming blues, holiday stories, an interview with Sheryl Crow, and the like. A Starbucks rep suggests it may keep customers in the store long enough to buy a second cuppa. Web Site Of The Week Mr. Picasso Head may not be ignored. The site www.mrpicassohead.com is the product of Ruder Finn, a Manhattan PR firm; visitors may select facial features from a variety of Cubist and Blue Period works for assembly into a portrait of sorts, or a landscape of noses if you like that sort of thing, and have it displayed in an online gallery; though it will take some effort to stand out from the 40,000 already there. The firm's chief creative officer says he got the idea from his 3-year old son. Inasmuch as this is a Business & Technology topic, it would be remiss of me not to drag in some vague relation to business, however remote; the exec says it demonstrates "the power of viral marketing"; i.e., word-of-mouth, even off to the opposite side from the eyes. Think expressionist Fotolog. VoIP Set To Explode? Telephone call services that use the Internet, called VoIP for "voice over Internet Protocol" and rhymed with er, ah, xoip and qoip are poised for dramatic near-term growth. British Telecom plans to offer it to customers there, Time Warner Cable to its cable TV subscribers, and now AT&T has jumped in with plans for cheap unlimited local and long-distance calling. All of the services require an underlying high speed Internet connection, whether cable or DSL. At stake are "tens of billions of dollars in fees and taxes now paid" to phone companies for the use of their network which at present do not mandate fixed charges for data traffic (which is how VoIP is presently classed) as they do for circuit-switched voice calls. Needless to say, federal and state governments and local phone companies are the losers and may have something to say about that, but for now AT&T sees a savings of $11 billion a year; its CEO calls VoIP "the most significant fundamental new technology shift in telecommunications in decades". Besides the regulatory savings which could be undone, there are said to be genuine economies in treating voice calls as packet-switched data transfers: installation and operation are less costly, and users could employ computers to, say, not allow incoming calls after bedtime (or disable the ringer and route the message to a recorder), to forward calls to a cell phone, and to filter incoming calls like e-mail with whitelists and blacklists. On the other hand, VoIP is more subject to power outages and at present is considered less reliable in real time during periods of Internet congestion (though that can be a problem at present: think of Mother's Day). AT&T estimates that 23 million US households already have cable or DSL and would be eligible for their service, expected to run about $35-40 a month compared with $50-70 for regular unlimited calling plans. Which Paradigm D'Ya Like? The US telephone system is closely regulated, in the past due to AT&T monopoly domination, but today for the purpose of keeping phone service both affordable and accessible to low-income and rural users who are in effect partly subsidized by city and corporate customers. The US Internet structure is "essentially unregulated" out of concerns that the new technology will best develop without government interference. With the recent decision of AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and others to offer voice call service to millions of broadband users, the worlds have collided. Michael Powell, son of Colin Powell and FCC chair, believes "there is no functional or technical difference between an Internet phone call and other data" and therefore Internet voice service (VoIP) should be left alone. Consumers Union and other groups believe there's no functional or technical difference between an Internet phone call and other phone calls: they both involve somebody talking at each end and they are both carried over the same network paths for most of the way. CU and its allies also concerned that free competition could lead to the sort of thing that airline and energy deregulation have produced, in the form of a small number of providers charging as much as they can and ignoring low-margin accounts. A third view is expressed by Cox Communications, who suggests the degree of regulation should vary by market share, with large providers heavily overseen and smaller ones like, er, Cox Communications left alone. Analysts see an element of self-interest there and that plan is unlikely to go far, but battle lines are being drawn between proponents of the other two. UN Voices Ineffectual Support For Poor This is news? Well it's recent anyway: a conference in Geneva on the governance of the Internet fought to a standstill between industrialized nations who "feared that developing nations would vote for the UN to take administrative control of the Internet and call for a new pool of money [to be provided by guess who] to help poorer countries go online", and third world countries who wanted the UN to take administrative etc. The result? Why of course they formed a committee to study the issues, which made the delegates happy and insured they would all be able to get together again in fancy Swiss hotels for many fine lunches and dinners into the indefinite future. Besides the menus, one of the "working groups" will study "whether to introduce more international oversight" of the Internet's administration, and another will "review ways of paying for efforts to connect the world's poor to the Internet". The Geneva group also bravely voted in favor of "intellectual property rights as well as human rights and media freedom". Adding to the farce, Robert Mugabe lectured the delegates on human rights for an afternoon. However, the meeting was not a total loss since it produced the Quote Of The Day "Unlike the French Revolution, the Internet revolution has lots of liberty, some fraternity and no equality." - Shashi Tharoor, UN under-secretary for communications Just Bought A TV? Don't Read Any Further Intel is reported set to announce a new line of "advanced semiconductors that ... will improve the quality of large-screen digital televisions and substantially lower their price". The new products "integrate display, television receiver, and computer electronics on a single piece of silicon" and could "lead to lightweight 50-inch TV screens only 7 inches thick for about $1000." OK, OK, the gnashing of teeth is so loud I'll stop quoting. Anyway, chipmakers are looking into consumer electronics for profits as Moore's Law turns to Moore's Curse with buyers constantly expecting faster cheaper computers, and getting them. Intel's work is similar but not identical to Texas Instruments' development of Digital Light Processing (DLP) screens; while TI has concentrated on microscopic mirrors, Intel is focusing ha ha on tiny shutters in a technology known as Liquid Crystal on Silicon or LCoS. Intel will probably save its official announcement for the Consumer Electronics Show next month, but analysts expect sets using the chips to be available in time for next Christmas. Of course, by then there will probably be some reason to wait for 2005...

David Boies at SCO gets the $mil and 400k shares of SCO. Wonder if this is the same David Boies who took on Bush and the Supreme Court on behalf of Al Gore? With that Kurzweil poetry maker, I can now make the scene at the open mikes. Harold cohen looks a bit like Allen Ginzberg. He has software to create art as well.

Sashay down the page through the lioness nestled in my soul think i'm gonna have that printed on all my stationary... same david boies (he gets around)...

Is he a candidate for Saddams' defense attorney? I think Johnny Cochran is retired.

Format Wars A new generation of DVD players and disks is on the drawing boards, driven by the data demands of moviemakers and high-definition TV. Sony already has a model for sale in Japan; at about $3500 US for the recorder and $27 a disk it is not surprising they have sold only a few hundred units, even though the media has about five times more capacity than current models. With volume production not expected till 2005, a multiplayer standards battle is underway like the days of Betamax vs. VHS. Several factors seem to be at work here; the anointed winner at the DVD Forum's Technical Coordinating Group will probably be in line to collect major royalties from licensing the technology, and it will also be advantageously placed to thwart competition from its Chinese / Japanese / Silicon Valley rivals. The antagonists have more or less coalesced into two blocs. The NEC-Toshiba side champions the HD DVD, which uses mostly existing manufacturing techniques for their disks. Arrayed against them are Sony and Matsushita (who owns Panasonic and JVC) with their "Blu-Ray Group", whose candidate requires expensive new machinery to create the disks (which are enclosed in a protective jacket like a diskette), and whose players need two lenses if they must also read Ye Olde DVDs of Yore as well as their native kind. The Blu-Ray specs so far do not include read-only disks, only more expensive rewritable ones which Hollywood is not at all happy with; moguls want cheap unmodifiable media and are leaning toward the HD DVD in consequence. Looming over their shoulders however like Time's winged chariot is the growth of broadband, which could end up replacing disks altogether as a means of delivering movies to homes. The Rhodes-Jamison Weight-Loss Program R-J was a large-scale sand and gravel dealer in Berkeley; retail buyers of up to a few tons of stuff drove their truck on the scale when they went in, and again on leaving to determine how much they just loaded. Yefim Kriger of Connecticut received patent 6,649,848 for an intra-vehicle high tech version of the R-J scale designed to "weigh drivers, track pounds lost or gained, ad warn them when they overeat". On first entering your new fatmobile (garaged in the fatcave?) as the driver-on-a-diet, the system weighs you; it is designed not to be fooled by driving over a hill to reduce gravity, and requires the vehicle to be "parked or driving slowly" while the driver enters a profile of age, height, gender, and other data (more on that later). It continues to monitor changes to make the profile more reliable, and after it thinks it knows you well enough it responds to extra weight in the seat by (I am not making this up) "asking for information about shoes and clothes in an effort to account for the weight of the attire." If you don't come up with a credible story about heavy boots or an infant in your lap, the display screen issues a warning and brings up "a list of diet and exercise programs"; it can even - get this - use the car's cell phone to telephone or e-mail your doctor to snitch, if you have been so incautious as to enter the contact info. I suspect this gizmo will not be part of many people's New Year's resolutions. And another thanks goes to Ron Sipherd (mailto://ronks@well.com) for providing us with so much great information.

Ronks the Soothsayer and Future Seer The Year Ahead "For I dipp'd into the future, far as human eye could see, saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be"; - thus Tennyson in 1842. With 2004 upon us, here are some predictions and quotable punditries. PC component makers are rushing into the TV business, now that flat-screen sets are becoming a larger version of the monitor. Big names like Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola, as well as lesser fish like China's Konka, BenQ and Sampo of Taiwan, and South Korea's LG are all expected to offer sets: an analyst at Insight Media opines "you can pretty well expect anyone selling PC's appliances or TVs to have an LCD TV within a year." Cable service providers, long-distance phone companies, and "local" phone companies are all trying to offer it all at each others' expense, as well as Internet access and wireless service. Although bandwidth is usage-neutral and frankly becoming something of a commodity, repeated examples have shown that customer "churn rates" decline with subscribers who use multiple services from one source. From the Yankee Group: "Every company is going to try to provide every service to every customer." Venture capitalists; remember them? They're baaaack, though in a small way; money raised by VC firms in this country in the last three quarters totaled about $6 billion compared to the champion $76 billion raised 3Q1999-1Q2000. Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future observes "the turtle is cautiously poking its head out of its shell, but it's still protecting its vital organs". [Which evidently does not include its brain.] Other stuff to come: this may really be the year that 3G (3rd-generation) cell-phone service takes off, though that's been predicted about as regularly as the Year of ISDN. Software companies will continue to mate and merge whatever becomes of the Oracle-PeopleSoft bid. And for biometric ID, good old fingerprints are expected to gain in the marketplace over newer fads like iris and face scans and silly-walk analysis, er "gait patterns".

Who Owns Ya, Baby? That nervy orphan may have to move over for a new definition of chutzpah. Pentax Camera has taken out multi-page newspaper ads proclaiming itself "The Official Digital Camera Of The Internet" (TM). Canon, Olympus, and Sony are specifically declared ineligible for the title, which is "a trademark of Pentax USA". The copy declares the company's products are "recognized" as the ODCotI on account of their "greatness", but never says by who exactly; presumably the entire world, minus those three losers. This self-declaration could lead to some interesting imitators; imagine the official coffee drink, or lip balm, or paint thinner of the Internet. Or "the title of Official Ocean of the Internet, formerly the Atlantic, has just been outsourced to - of course - the Indian Ocean." Tanks ronks

Ronks Rocks, of course. Thanks again Ron Sipherd, at the WELL Taking The Heat Diamonds' crystal structure resembles silicon's sufficiently that they are candidates for use as semiconductors. Very pretty, expensive semiconductors, but still. They do have some practical advantages such as being able to operate at temperatures up to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, 800 degrees above where silicon stops functioning. Recent developments in growing industrial diamond crystals with vapor deposition suggest they may be practical in time. They've been grown from seed crystals in a methane-hydrogen mix in sizes up to 1/5 inch thick by 2/5 inch wide. Their depth? Sorry, the article doesn't say. Anyway, two types are needed as with silicon: positive and negative, to use the shorthand. P-types have been fairly easy to make so far using boron, but n-types have proved much more difficult to fabricate though recent lab tests with phosphorus doping and boron-deuterium show it's possible. CA Bond Rating Lowered Moody's has declared Computer Associates debt to be junk-bond level, in view of questions regarding its accounting practices. Its short-term commercial paper was also lowered to "Not Prime". The Matrix Retreated An article in today's paper by covers the declining fortunes of the Matrix or "Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange", a program developed by Florida company Seisint which received $12 million from the US Homeland Security Department to build a mega-database of everybody's personal information for use by law enforcement. All (Federal and participating state) government-held and publicly available data about individuals, drawn from criminal records, vehicle registrations, real estate transaction, drivers' licenses, credit bureaus, and so on is to be fed into the computer for retrieval in the event of suspected anti-social activity. At one time, up to 16 states had joined the jihad er program to monitor everything known about everyone; but after its auspicious rollout, some began to have reservations about the privacy implications of the thing and now all but five states have withdrawn their support and declined to provide information to it. With New York and Wisconsin bailing out last week, that leaves only its home state Florida plus Connecticut, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Many critics see Matrix as an end run around the killing off of the Bush administration's unpopular Total Information Awareness initiative; as the article colorfully puts it, "opponents of the Pentagon program regarded the development of Matrix as a sign that the bubble was simply moving under the wallpaper". Matrix was perhaps not helped by the discovery that the founder of Seisint, Hank Asher, "was involved in the 1980's with a group of cocaine smugglers". As states drop the project over concerns of misuse, supporters are reduced to arguments like this from Mark Zadra, Florida's Chief of Investigations: "It really comes down to trust. Do you trust law enforcement to do what is right?" Oh hahahahahaha.

Microsoft building China beach head June 21 issue - Microsoft's largest beachhead outside the United States is in the state most hostile to it: the People's Republic of China. Since arriving in Beijing in 1990, the Gates empire has assembled a network of business ...

Microsoft plans to clamp down on piracy and promote security by expanding the Windows Genuine Advantage program. This program requires users to verify the authenticity of their copy of Windows before they download patches to the OS. http://www.techtree.com/techtree/jsp/showstory.jsp?storyid=57366&s=ln

This will only serve to drive more folks to the Linux Desktop and the Firefox Browser. I see China moving to Linux in large numbers.

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel is going to give the Entertainment PC a makeover. The lukewarm response for the EPC--a living room computer that functions as a DVD player, a digital-video recorder and a media storage vault that sort of looks like a VCR--is prompting the company to rethink the design and function of the devices, said Don MacDonald, general manager of Intel's home product group. "I think there is an in-built inertia against anything called a PC in the living room." --Don MacDonald Intel home product group Future living room units will be smaller, more stylish and likely less costly, he said. They could possibly even be integrated with movie delivery or other content services. Equally important: The fact that the box is a PC will be heavily de-emphasized. "I'm not sure I want to call it an entertainment PC," MacDonald said during an interview at the Intel Developer Forum. "I think there is an in-built inertia against anything called a PC in the living room." An early example of Intel's new direction is a rectangular prototype computer shown off at the conference that resembles Apple Computer's Mac Mini. from http://news.com.com/2100-1042_3-5598948.html

What's the buzz? Teens don't want to hear it New York Times News Service Nov. 28, 2005 07:12 PM BARRY, Wales - Though he did not know it at the time, the idea came to Howard Stapleton when he was 12 and visiting a factory with his father, a manufacturing executive in London. Opening the door to a room where workers were using high-frequency welding equipment, he found he could not bear to go inside. "The noise!" he complained. "What noise?" the grownups asked. advertisement Now 39, Stapleton has taken the lesson he learned that day - that children can hear sounds at higher frequencies than adults can - to fashion a novel device that he hopes will provide a solution to the eternal problem of obstreperous teenagers who hang around outside stores and cause trouble. The device, called the Mosquito ("It's small and annoying," Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he says, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away. So far, the Mosquito has been road-tested in only one place, at the entrance to the Spar convenience store in this town in South Wales. Like birds perched on telephone wires, surly teenagers used to plant themselves on the railings just outside the door, smoking, drinking, shouting rude words at customers and making regular disruptive forays inside. "On the low end of the scale, it would be intimidating for customers," said Robert Gough, who, with his parents, owns the store. "On the high end, they'd be in the shop fighting, stealing and assaulting the staff." Gough (pronounced GUFF) planned to install a sound system that would blast classical music into the parking lot, another method known to horrify hang-out youths into dispersing, but never got around to it. But last month, Stapleton gave him a Mosquito for a free trial. The results were almost instantaneous. It was as if someone had used anti-teenager spray around the entrance, the way you might spray your sofas to keep pets off. Where disaffected youths used to congregate, now there is no one. from http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/1128teenbuzz-ON.html

India's Outsourcing Boom Runs Into Trouble Shortage of Skilled Workers Could Mean Losing Jobs to the Philippines and China A chronic shortage of skilled workers is threatening India's outsourcing industry. Call centers and outsourcing firms are growing fast, but their human resources employees despair because most of the young Indians they interview are, they say, "unemployable." Some people in the IT industry have said that only one in 10 graduates is worth taking on. "Just look at their English," fumed a frustrated Mumbai-based call center manager as he waved around letters written by employees. One read: "As I am marrying my daughter, please grant a week's leave." Another said: "I am in well here and hope you are also in the same well." India employs about 350,000 people in the outsourcing industry and adds 150,000 new jobs each year. But filling those vacancies is proving to be a nightmare. At this moment, the industry needs to hire around 9,000 people but can't find them. The crisis is set to worsen. The industry faces a shortfall of half a million workers in a few years' time, according to a study this month by McKinsey & Company and the Indian IT body Nasscom. The specter haunting the industry is that it could lose its leading position as the world's "back office." "If the industry has to go on paying higher and higher salaries to retain the staff it has, costs will rise and India will lose its biggest advantage � cheap labor," said Saurabh Wig, a former call center sales manager. If the industry fails to recruit workers at reasonable wages, India will lose orders to countries such as the Philippines and China, according to Nasscom. With half of its 1.2 billion people under age 25, how can India possibly be short of workers? The problem is not quantity but quality. Many of the 3.6 million graduates churned out every year by Indian universities are considered mediocre. The Nasscom-McKinsey report confirmed the experiences of HR executives. It said that only about 10 percent to 15 percent of eligible workers are fit for employment in the offshoring industry. Fluency in English apart, employers complained that graduates lacked computer skills, the ability to reason clearly, solve problems, think critically, analyze, work in teams and think creatively. The Confederation of Indian Industry said that what's taught at universities is not what industry needs. This is why the Indian government has set up a "Knowledge Commission" to improve Indian brainpower. Sam Pitroda, who is based in Chicago but visits India regularly, is the chairman of the commission. One of his tasks is to overhaul higher education from top to bottom. "About 80 percent of what is taught in Indian universities is obsolete. A professor boasted to me about how he'd used the same notes for 20 years. Think how much the world has changed, and he hasn't updated his notes." said Pitroda. Could Foreigners Benefit? The labor shortage, however, is good news for foreigners. Disgruntled British and American workers who have seen their jobs outsourced to India could get them back � with one catch. They need to move to India where their English and their accents will be an asset. "When foreigners take calls from their respective countries, it helps that they know the culture of the person they are speaking to. That can often be the differentiating factor between a successful Indian outsourcing company and a failure," Avaneesh Nirjar, chief operating officer of Hero ITES, an outsourcing firm. Young British graduates just out of college and looking for a year's travel and work experience are already taking jobs in New Delhi, Bangalore and Bombay. So are British call center workers looking for a change? Currently, about 30,000 to 50,000 foreigners work in the outsourcing industry. But a World Bank report says that by 2009, up to 16,000 of those jobs will be filled not by Indians but by Britons. It's estimated that, apart from fluent English speakers, the outsourcing industry will also need 160,000 professionals with European languages by 2010. Only 40,000 Indians are expected to have this specialization. The remaining 120,000 jobs will have to be filled by Europeans or Americans. At the New Delhi offices of Technovate e-Solutions, more than 100 foreigners from nine nationalities work alongside 900 Indians carrying out the sales, telesales and booking work for e-Bookers, a European online travel agency. Tea Westerlund, 35, from Finland, said she came for the challenge and experience of a new culture. "This experience will widen my career opportunities in the future. Most people in Finland tend to stay there, so it will be a big plus for me to have worked here," she said. "In the meantime, I'm being looked after and having a fantastic time." http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=1428299

Pent-up demand for the iPhone 3G is manifesting itself on auction site eBay, where eager buyers are bidding in excess of US$1,000 to get what's turning out to be a hot commodity. The demand for the iPhone remains high even off the Internet, with lines forming Monday outside an Apple store in New York to buy the limited stock of the devices. Launched on July 11, the phone sold more than 1 million units worldwide over the first weekend, according to analysts. The demand has continued with carriers, including AT&T in the U.S. and O2 in the U.K., reporting iPhone 3G shortages. The 16G-byte iPhone is priced at $299 in the U.S., with the 8G-byte version priced at $199. In some countries carriers are giving the iPhone for free with contracts. The bidding for a 16G-byte iPhone 3G on eBay is exceeding $1,000, with one bid ending at $2,325. The average 8G-byte iPhone 3G bid is reaching the $800 to $900 range. In one auction a potential bidder asked if the iPhone could be shipped to Indonesia, indicating that bids were coming from countries where the iPhone won't be shipped by the end of this year. The phone is currently sold in 20 countries, but Apple hopes to expand its availability to 70 countries by year-end.