August 31 - September 6, 1997

from the Up-To-Date dept

Sponsored by the Technology Management Club of Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management

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                                                  UP-TO-DATE      
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                                            The not always serious, 
                                            not always weekly update 
                                            on the Hi-Tech Industry 
                                            August 31st - September 6th 
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                              Sponsored by the Technology Management Club of 
                              Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management 

-------------------- 
Say that again... 
------------------- 
"It's like Coca-Cola. No one has ever known the exact mix outside the 
company." 
-Michael Barclay, a Wilson Sonsini patent partner, on Intel's plans 
to make its new chip-plug design a trade secret, News.com, 4 
September 1997 

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Weird Lawsuits of the Week... 
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The law firm of Oppedahl & Larson has filed suit against other law firms 
that have put their name as a keyword for search engines to classify suits. 
In other words, competing law firms are hoping that searches will land on 
their page instead of the official Oppedahl & Larson page.  Should be a fun 
lawsuit. 

Lycos is trying to patent its "spider" search technology.  Being that this 
is the underlying technology of most search engines, now might be a good 
time to dump that Excite stock. 

DirecTV has pulled the oldest scam in the book: offer up a set of services 
and then later say that's not available, but something similar is at just a 
wee bit more per month.  The class action suit calls it "bait-and-switch". 
I call it a desperation play by DirecTV to make some money. 

Novadigm has sued Marimba claiming that the application, distribution, and 
replication protocols Marimba submitted to be made standards are actually 
proprietary technology patented by them.  What Novadigm apparently fails to 
notice is that UNIX has had these techniques (known happily as diff and 
rdist) for many years prior to Novadigms very existence.  Now, that takes 
guts... 

Not yet a lawsuit, but I imagine it will be soon:  The whitehouse is *not* 
looking at all favorably on the person who decided to register 
"whitehouse.com" (don't you think the whitehouse should have thought of 
this before?) and has turned it into a *porn* site.  The real whitehouse 
web site is available at http://www.whitehouse.gov.  I definitely see a 
lawsuit coming out of this one.  Interestingly, in checking this one out I 
also came across http://www.whitehouse.org with a somewhat clever parody of 
the official site. 

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Berating the obvious: (they call this news???) 
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The U.S. Government has announced they will appeal the recent encryption 
ruling which basically makes all their policies concerning exporting strong 
encryption null and void... At the same time Senators call for mandatory 
U.S. encryption controls... The military wants to shoot down a U.S. 
Satellite to test a new hi-powered laser weapon... Excite offers an 
e-commerce "guarantee" to users of credit cards via their site... SGI and 
Netscape to work together on web servers... California school bans 
Tamagotchi virtual pets... WebTV and related devices are dropping their 
prices - Sony is introducing a box in the $199 price range while Microsoft 
may adopt a "rebate" program bringing the net cost of buying a WebTV down 
to $99... Netscape expands their site to include basically an "online 
service"... Kinko's adds ISDN service (why go to the local CyberCafe when 
you can web surf under the neon lights and pleasing copier hum of 
Kinkos?)... Paradigm Music and Entertainment has filed for an IPO.  They're 
hoping to raise $15 million while they have recently announced losses of 
$6.7 million and have demonstrated no real prospects for making money... 
ISPs announce support for IP Multicast... Gateway 2000's third quarter to 
miss expectations... Thirty one Web advertisements advertising 
coupon-related business schemes have been found by the Federal Trade 
Commission to be potentially illegal... Intel has released it's 
BunnyPeople(TM) beanbag dolls to the world - does anyone else think Intel 
believes a little too strongly in their own marketing prowess on this 
one?... Sun, Netscape and IBM have announced a Java Porting and Tuning 
Center (keep trying...)... H&R Block is *still* close to selling 
CompuServe... AMD loses more money... GM tries to sell cars on the web... 
Pathfinder discovers they don't have enough traffic on their Money or 
Fortune sites and hires Saatchi & Saatchi to help fix the problem.  Hell, 
if they want, they should hire me and I'll tell them what they should have 
done a *long* time ago: put those damn magazines at www.money.com and 
www.fortune.com so they're easy to find... Capitol Records will try to sell 
songs over the internet at $0.99 a pop... Macromedia has been accused of 
publishing false sales figures, false business prospects and false 
financial results in order to boost its stock value. The company's top 
directors allegedly sold their stock at artificially high prices... Apple 
focuses Newton group on the Emate (their amazing product that no one has 
heard of)... Motorola cell phones to access the net... The government needs 
money to investigate "cyber-threats"... 

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Surprises: 
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Yeah, the big one:  Apple buys out its competitor, Power Computing.  How's 
that for running scared?  Can't hack the clone market?  Buy 'em out. 
Overwhelming reaction to this has been negative.  In fact, a number of 
online Apple customers have stated that this is the last straw in driving 
them over to the Intel platform.  Ouch.  In the search for a positive 
review of this little purchase the only place where I could find one was 
www.macosrumors.com of which it has been commented "Hell, Cupertino could 
get nuked and they'd [macosrumors.com] see it as a brave new dawn for Apple 
to geographically decentralise..." 

Can you franchise computer repair?  A company in Seattle called PC Fixx is 
trying.  They plan to combine "offering Nordstrom-style service with 
McDonald's-style convenience" and will open up franchises nationwide. 
Interesting concept.  Anyone have any feelings on the potential here? 

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(Mis)Uses of Technology: 
------------------------------- 
Adding another blinking dumb light to your car's dash is OnStar.  When 
"something" goes wrong with your car, this new technology will blink a 
light, at which point you can jack into the car with your handy laptop and 
get a full diagnosis.  Won't that be fun?  "Your car is dead.  You should 
have changed the oil 6 months ago." 

Warner Broadcasting has decided to webcast the People's Court with Judge Ed 
Koch.  There *must* be something better to webcast... 

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Studies on the Net: 
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Analysts predict that shortly after the turn of the century, 50% of the 
world's communications will be carried over the Internet... Subscriptions 
to Internet service providers continues to grow at record paces according 
to an Electronic Information Report - biggest among the gainers was AOL who 
added 1.1 million users in the past 6 months... A World Research 
survey has determined that 60% of internet users are ready and willing to 
purchase things online... A new Forrester Research study suggests that a 
"subscription" model of pricing on the internet will never work, even in gaming... 
IntelliQuest Information Group Inc. says that there are now 50 million 
users on the internet... 

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Predictions: 
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Netscapes "NetCenter" will close down and undergo a major overhaul causing 
much news, but no one will really care.... The Russians have announced that 
in 1999 the Russian Mir Space Station will be discontinued and will fall 
into the Pacific Ocean.  My prediction is that even the downing of Mir will 
be a catastrophe in the making...  The Social Security site which is now 
back online, will go off again when more security holes are found... 

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Too much free time: 
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Crazy Joe's Internet Bungee Jumping.  Too scared to do the real thing? 
Check this one out: http://wwwvoice.com/bud/crazyjoe.html 

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Up To Date is written by Mike Masnick from whatever news he hears from 
whatever sources they happen to come from.  It is not intended for any uses 
other than as one of many possible ways to follow what's going on in the 
hi-tech industry. I certainly wouldn't rely on it as your only source of info. 

If you would like to subscribe to the email version please send an email to 
mdm8@cornell.edu with "Subscribe Up To Date" in the subject heading. 
Up To Date is also available on the web at 
http://www.gsm.cornell.edu/Students/clubs/TMC/uptodate/ 

Comments always welcome. 
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