Message-Id: <55206A473154D011924D0020AFF7ACB56A65A0@mail1.oulan.ou.edu>
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1998 09:55:24 -0500
From: "Swisher, Bob" <bswisher@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu>
Subject: Edupage, 5 April 1998
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Edupage, 5 April 1998. Edupage, a summary of news about information
technology, is provided three times a week as a service by Educom, a
Washington, D.C.-based consortium of leading colleges and universities
seeking to transform education through the use of information
technology.
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TOP STORIES
Should Net Phone Companies Support Universal Service?
NCs Lose Market Share To Cheap PCs
Technorealists Sound Off
The Whole (Corporate) World In Your Hand
Web Site Design For The Blind
ALSO
Bidding Online For Airfares
Used PC Market Up 14%
Apple Took Bite Out Of Amelio
Finding A Needle (Or 7,079 Pages On Needles) On The Web
Wombware?
SHOULD NET PHONE COMPANIES SUPPORT UNIVERSAL SERVICE?
The Federal Communications Commission wants Internet phone companies to
pay the same kind of fees that traditional long-distance companies do to
support universally available phone service in the United States. A
senior FCC official asks: "Does it make sense to treat phone calls
placed over Internet type facilities differently? They probably should
be treated just like any other phone call." (AP 3 Apr 98)
NCs LOSE MARKET SHARE TO CHEAP PCs
Network computers haven't made the big splash many in the industry
expected, largely due to the appearance of a new breed of Windows-based
PCs, which are thinner and cheaper than NCs. International Data Corp.
predicts that by 2002, these slimmed-down PCs will dominate 75% of the
market for less expensive business computing alternatives. That
estimate is bad news for Sun Microsystems and Oracle, which embraced the
network computer concept, but were unable to build the machines in time
to stave off the shift to cheaper PCs. Sun's initial NCs were slow and
unwieldy, taking too long to download applications programs from central
servers, and problems with the Java operating system caused shipping
delays. Sun CEO Scott McNealy still thinks the product has merit,
however: "Go ahead and write that the network computer is dead. If I
can scare everybody else away, we'll own the market." (Wall Street
Journal 3 Apr 98)
TECHNOREALISTS SOUND OFF
A group of 12 technology-literate writers and commentators calling
themselves "technorealists" have published a statement of principles
emphasizing a common sense approach toward technology and advocating a
balanced position between opposing camps of techno-utopians and
neo-Luddites. The statement includes an assertion that the government
has an important role to play in regulating computer networks:
"Cyberspace is not formally a place or jurisdiction separate from earth.
It is foolish to say that the public has no sovereignty over what an
errant citizen or fraudulent corporation does online." Other
technorealist doctrines include:
"Wiring the schools will not save them," and "Information wants to be
protected." < http://www.technorealism.org > (Chronicle of Higher
Education 3 Apr 98)
THE WHOLE (CORPORATE) WORLD IN YOUR HAND
Microsoft and Sybase are expanding their alliance on a project that
allows workers to access corporate databases via hand-held or palmtop
computers to include "smaller and smaller devices" using Microsoft's
Windows CE operating system. There is a $250 billion-a-year market for
devices such as hand-held computers, wireless communications and TV
set-top boxes. (San Jose Mercury News 3 Apr 98)
WEB SITE DESIGN FOR THE BLIND
There are a steadily growing number of the half-million blind people
nationwide who regularly use computers for work, education and pleasure,
and technological breakthroughs are occurring almost daily in
text-to-voice scanners, Braille printers and specially designed software
to help overcome the barriers of icons and other graphics of the
visually oriented World Wide Web. Recently, Blind Industries and
Services of Maryland in Baltimore opened a fully accessible site --
including graphics -- that contains information for both blind and
sighted people -- http://www.bism.com/ . The site was specifically
designed to include graphics: "We didn't want just a plain boring
screen because sighted people use the site as well." Creating the
graphics-friendly site required "a lot of major revisions" of
conventional Internet design concepts. (Washington Post 4 Apr 98)
============================================
BIDDING ONLINE FOR AIRFARES
Priceline.Com is offering a new way for flexible vacationers to buy
plane tickets -- they can set the price they'll pay, and Priceline.Com
will try to find it for them among the numerous unpublished fares
supplied by U.S. and international airlines. The search takes one hour
for domestic flights and 24 hours for overseas. Priceline.Com, which
launches Monday, requires that
customers be willing to depart on any available flight between 6 a.m.
and 10 p.m., and flights may include one stop or connection, making the
service less attractive for business travelers. "We're not a discount
ticket warehouse, and we're not for everybody," says the company's
founder. < http://www.priceline.com > (USA Today 3 Apr 98)
USED PC MARKET UP 14%
The market for recycled PCs is up 14% this year, according to research
by International Data Corp., with most of the growth in the education
and small business sectors, where budgets are often tight. IDC expects
the market to continue its upward spiral, from 6.4 million units this
year to 7.3 million in 1999. (Investor's Business Daily 3 Apr 98)
APPLE TOOK BITE OUT OF AMELIO
His new book "On The Firing Line: My 500 Days At Apple," in which ousted
Apple chief exec Gil Amelio takes shots at many of his former
colleagues, Amelio explains that his severance check "represented an
all-in settlement for the remainder of my five-year term in the amount
of $7.7 million. What I actually kept, after taxes and other government
deductions and after paying off part of my $5 million loan from Apple
was about $2 million. I still owe $2.5 million on this loan, so my net
was actually negative by about $500,000. The 130,960 shares of Apple
stock I received -- plus another 50,000 shares promised -- is far under
the million shares spelled out in the original term." Amelio says that
if he had stayed at National Semiconductor he would have continued to
accumulate wealth at about $5 million a year. "I made a bad decision for
myself and my family. But like the majority of major-company CEOs, I'm
a risk-taker; most of the time risks pay off. Sometimes they don't."
(USA Today 3 Apr 98)
FINDING A NEEDLE (OR 7,079 PAGES ON NEEDLES) ON THE WEB
A study by the NEC Research Institute says the Internet has exploded to
more than 320 million Web pages, an estimate that does not include
millions of pages that are protected by passwords or "search walls" that
block access to browsers or search engines. The study indicates that the
HotBot search engine has the most comprehensive index of the Web, but
even so, covers only about 34 percent of the indexable pages. Coverage
of some of the other search engines includes: AltaVista (28%); Northern
Light (20%); Excite (14%); Lycos (3%). One of the report's coauthors
says that the Web's data explosion may be better controlled by the
"meta-search engines," such as Meta-Crawler and Ahoy!, which have
developed thinking techniques that sense what readers are looking for
and seek out pages not found on most indexes. (AP 3 Apr 98)
WOMBWARE?
The research firm PC Data Inc. says sales of software for children up to
the age 5 have increased by more than 133% in 1997. Child psychologist
Corinne Rupert says, "Just as books are adapted in both form and content
to meet the needs of babies and toddlers, computers and software can be
adapted to delight and educate even the very young. There is no minimal
age level to computer introduction." But Judah L. Schwartz of the
Educational Technology Center at Harvard counters: "Computers are
transforming our society in both good ways and silly ways. And this
seems to be one of the sillier ways." And Ann Stephens of PC Data says:
"What's next? Wombware?" (New York Times 3 Apr 98)
Edupage is written by John Gehl (gehl@educom.edu) and Suzanne Douglas
(douglas@educom.edu). Telephone: 770-590-1017
Technical support for distributing Edupage is provided by Information
Technology Services at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Translations & Archives... Edupage is translated into Estonian, French,
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translations@educom.unc.edu. Archives of Edupage can be found at
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Today's Honorary Subscriber is mail-order pioneer Richard Warren Sears
(1863-1914). Once upon a time there was no Internet, and no electronic
commerce -- and not even any mail order. Historian Paul Johnson writes
in his new book "A History Of The American People":
"The United States was the first to introduce voting democracy.
Almost equally central to the ethos of the country was market democracy,
in which ordinary people voted with their wallets and, in doing so,
insured that they got what they wanted. Salesmanship, market research,
advertising, the rapid response of production machinery to perceived
customer requirements -- all these forms of materialism which, in their
more raucous aspects, are identified as American failings, or rather
excrescences, are in fact central to its democratic strength. The story
of Sears, Roebuck, for instance, is a tale of how high-quality products,
once the preserve of the rich, were humbled and distributed literally
everywhere.
"This mail-order firm was one of the greatest single benefactors of
mankind in the 19th century because it was targeted on perhaps its most
overworked component -- farmers' wives. It made a huge range of goods
readily accessible to isolated households and communities for whom good
shops were remote, and it specialized in products, such as
cooking-stoves, plows and washing-machines which were efficient,
required little or no servicing, and lasted a long time -- yet were
nonetheless cheap. Richard Warren Sears was a Minnesota farmer's son
who, while working the railroads, suddenly made $5,000 in six months by
selling watches wholesale. What struck him was the selling power, and
therefore wealth-creation power, of sheer cheapness. In 1886 he founded
the mail-order R.W. Sears Watch Company in Minneapolis, and sold it
three years later for $100,000. By 1891 he had set up what became
Sears, Roebuck. It represented the conquest of geography by using the
postal system -- and enormously helping it in the process -- and turning
the entire nation into a market."
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Educom -- Transforming Education Through Information Technology
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