[This is actually Vol2, Num1, Rev1, fixing the misattribution of the open quote, below, as reported in BNB Vol2 Num3] I programmed three days and heard no human voices. But the hard disk sang. -Geoffrey James, author of The Zen of Programming, The Tao of Programming and Computer Parables. ====================================================================== BBB III TTT SSS BBB Y Y TTT EEE SSS ONLINE EDITION: B B I T S B B Y Y T E S =THE ELECTRONIC BBB I T SSS AND BBB YYY T EEE SSS =NEWSLETTER FOR B B I T S B B Y T E S =INFORMATION BBB III T SSS BBB Y T EEE SSS =HUNTER-GATHERERS ====================================================================== Volume 2, Number 1 (January 31, 1994) ====================================================================== CONTENTS = - The Search For Intelligence | - Chaos is the Form = - Planning For the Future | - That's Infotainment = - Top Ten Technology Hits and | - Thrown For a Loop = Misses of the Decade | - The More Things Change... = - Playing the Wisdom Game | - Explicit Talk = - Bits and Bytes Bookshelf | - SPECIAL SECTION: = - On The Newsstand | FOCUS ON BUSINESS ISSUES = - RIDING THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY | - PLUS: High Tech News = ====================================================================== Chaos is the Form (Dave Hughes) Things are not the way they seem. Tom Peters warns that anyone in a business who understands it completely is probably already failing. Last summer at the BBSCON in Colorado Springs, Colorado, 2,000 intense individuals - not hackers and hobbyists, but serious economic players - pursued their futures with a zeal that would startle many people. One bulletin board system operator, whose BBS operates out of his basement, grossed more than US $5 million last year. That BBS will probably be gone next year, but the operator had recovered his investment in the first two weeks of operation. A lot of smug businesses, organizations, and implementations built around technology are going to be bypassed in the next few years - so fast it won't even be funny. I'll bet the Internet as we know it will be passe in five years - just as the largest number of people are waking up to it and making investment decisions about it. They will soon look foolish. Wireless will yank the cords of an awful lot of companies who think they have it with LANS, TCP/IP, fiber, and cable. And who knows what is "beyond wireless?" Perhaps some incarnation of Tesla's crazy experiments in Colorado Springs in 1899, where he got electrical resonance using the earth as a transmitter, signals pulsating so strongly that they made a roar across the city and blew out the town's power station? Maybe that annoying "noise" around Santa Fe is a 14- -year-old working on it. Change is driving everything. Chaos is the form. Maybe a fractal is more descriptive of a company than a spreadsheet. (WIRED 2.01, January 1994, p. 44) ====================================================================== FUTURE TECH => PERSONAL AGENT SOFTWARE. The software of the future will be capable of sorting your e-mail, paging you for important news from your office, faxing you a shopping list from home and brushing off unsolicited sales calls. "It sounds like science fiction, but folks are working on this right now," says Marc Porat, president of General Magic Inc. Watch for more information on personal agents in an upcoming B&B. (St. Petersburg Times 12/9/93, p. E1) (E/P) => SINGLE ELECTRON CHIP. Hitachi Ltd. has demonstrated what it says is the world's first memory chip that uses only a single electron and can operate at room temperature. The technology could be the basis for development of a chip capable of storing 16 billion bits, about 1,000 the capacity of most advanced chips sold today. (NYT 12/8/93, pg. D5) (E/P) => TI'S QUANTUM CHIPS. Texas Instruments announced lab tests of a new chip that operates three times faster than the speed of conventional microprocessors at room temperature. The chips are based on principles of quantum physics, and use wavelength filters rather than traditional circuitry for directing the path of electrons. (WSJ 12/9/93, pg. B4) (E/P) => FROM RADIATION TO RAYS. Samsung announced that next year it will begin marketing a "Bio-TV" next year that turns harmful electromagnetic radiation into ultraviolet and infrared rays, capable of making plants bloom and grow. (Telecommunications Policy Review 12/5/93, p.10) (E/P) => WIRELESS E-MAIL. Wireless e-mail has great potential, but the systems now available still have a few kinks to work out. Improvements are needed in service range, cost, transmission speed, capacity, security and integration with e-mail systems on local- area networks. (Communications Week 12/6/93) (E/P) ====================================================================== The Search For Intelligence (Lee Gomez) The elusive intelligent machine one of mankind's grandest dreams, appears to be slipping through the cracks. Take the results of this year's "Turing Test," in which people try to discern whether they're communicating-via keyboard-with a computer or a human being. In 1991, five people were fooled into thinking they were conversing with a live person; this year, the number was zero. (In Artificial Intelligence Test, Humanity's Hubris Is The Loser, San Jose Mercury News 12/13/93, p. 1C) ====================================================================== That's Infotainment (Katherine Fulton) Journalists don't have to be technophobes to be concerned about what will be lost in the digital future. What will happen to those who refuse to be "infotainers"? Will editors do nothing but create hypertext links from on-line libraries? (Future Tense, Columbia Journalism Review, Nov/Dec 1993, p. 29) ====================================================================== Thrown For a Loop (Jerry Michalski) The local loop's a mess: Should we have dumb devices and a smart network or distributed switching and a client-server architecture? Should the transport be all digital or hybrid? How far downstream can we carry fiber? How much, if any, upstream capacity should we offer? What protocols should we use? Who should be allowed to compete; who should be restrained? And where's the aspirin? (The Future Of The Local Loop, Release 1.0, Nov. 22, p. 1) ====================================================================== THE ONLINE WORLD => WELL, WELL, WELL. The Well (an acronym for Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) has been bought by businessman Bruce Katz, who plans to run it as a for-profit business. A technological overhaul is planned. It'll be interesting to see what happens to this respected online community at this juncture in it's history, and at this juncture in the net's evolution, when so many new services and technologies are being introduced. => INTERNET TO THE RESCUE. The Internet can help companies coordinate far-flung research and development, design, manufacturing and sales efforts. High-performance companies understand they must incorporate workers' knowledge and insight at all levels into their ongoing operations. Those that do this fastest and best tend to make superior products, deliver better service and build a bigger bottom line. (Chris Locke, "Time to Cash In" Network Computing, 1/15/94, p. 60) => WALL STREET JOURNAL/INTERACTIVE. The WSJ is scheduled to be be available in an interactive electronic format in the fall of 1994. Dow Jones, the Journal's parent company also plans an on-screen service called Personal Journal. Sounds like the technology used in Dow Jone's DJINN executive news service (B&B v1 #15) is ready for prime time. Or else DJ feels the interactive mating call and feels that urge to get out there and DO IT. The WSJ is a useful newspaper. If they can price point this thing so the savy executive or small businessman or entrepreneur can afford it, they might just have something here. On the other hand, a reader pointed out that in the WSJ's recent Internet pull-out section they identified trends and resources and never once listed an email address, a pretty glaring omission. => APPLE'S ON-LINE VILLAGE. Apple's new on-line information service will be called eWorld, and it will use a village as its metaphor for information services. Individual buildings in the village will designate particular categories of information, such as business news, entertainment, etc. (Atlanta Constitution 1/4/94 D5) (E/P) => E-MAIL PRIVACY. A high-profile Los Angeles Times reporter was recalled from the Moscow bureau after snooping into colleagues' e-mail. He will be reassigned to an as-yet-undisclosed position. The Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 protects the privacy of messages sent over public networks like MCI Mail and Compuserve, but it DOES NOT (emphasis mine) cover a company's internal e-mail. (NYT 12/6/93 A8) In November Sen. Paul Simon introduced a bill that would force companies to tell workers ahead of time if they regularly monitor e-mail messages. Companies would also have to disclose after the fact that they accessed an employee's hard drive. (WSJ 10/26/93, pg. A1) (E/P) ====================================================================== Planning For the Future (Marvin Weisbord) Representation in planning enhances democracy. It is not sufficient for productive workplaces. Dignity, meaning, and community come from deep engagement in our work. Each person needs real tasks that make a contribution to the whole. That means a form of corporate democracy still being invented. (from: Productive Workplaces (Organizing and Managing for Dignity, Meaning, and Community) Jossey-Bass Publishers 1987, 1991. 433 pp. $22.95) ====================================================================== Explicit Talk (Esther Dyson) "Explicitness" is the giving of names to things that were unspoken before. Explicitness helps us handle things, but it diminishes their true complexity. To automate business systems, we need to define their operations explicitly. The question for vendors and systems designers is, how can you balance the need for explicitness with the need to encourage that inexplicable, unpredictable process: human creativity? (An Explicit Look At Explicitness. Release 1.0, Oct. 31, p. 1.) ====================================================================== RIDING THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY => THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY: UNDER CONSTRUCTION. Twenty-eight companies have banded together to make recommendations to the Clinton administration on how best to achieve a seamless electronic superhighway. The Cross Industry Working Team includes AT&T, Apple, Citicorp, BellSouth, IBM and Hewlett-Packard.(WSJ 12/13/93, pg. B3) In January, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown named the members of the NII advisory council. Members include Mitch Kapor, chairman of the Electronic Freedom Foundation; Nathan Myhrvold, senior VP for advanced technology at Microsoft; Bert Roberts, chairman of MCI; and John Sculley, former chairman of Apple. (InformationWeek 1/10/93, p. 10) => PUBLIC SERVICES. You'll be glad to know that Craig Fields, the CEO of Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, a research consortium, says his company will be supplying "the maps and gas stations necessary to use a national information highway." Please check the oil while you're at it, fella. (SOURCE: "Out of the Ivory Tower" Information Week 12/13/93, p. 57) => ROAD KILL ON THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY. Small cable operators will have a hard time keeping up with the Joneses as the industry giants spend the billions necessary to develop networks capable of carrying movies on demand, video telephone service and interactive games. The WSJ predicts small firms may become "the information superhighway's first road kill." (WSJ 12/13/93, pg. B2) (E/P) ====================================================================== Would You Believe FREE Long-Distance Calls? A small startup company in New York City could soon have the lowest long-distance rate of all: FREE. The only catch would be the radio- like commercials would periodically interrupt your chat. "Why don't you catch up on old times in person -- American Airlines fares from Philadelphia to Atlanta have never been better." This concept is also being considered as an option in the brave new world of online entertainment -- you'd pay a fee to see the commercial-free version, but those willing to put up with the ads do so on a See-For-Free (tm) basis. The commercials in effect subsidize your TV-viewing pleasure. This is actually the situation now. Things will just be spelled out more clearly, and consumers will have more say in how TV interacts with their lives. (SOURCE: Business Week, 8/16/93) ====================================================================== Top Ten Technology Hits and Misses of the Decade (Communications Week) HITS MISSES 1) E-mail 1) SAA (IBM's System 2) 10Base-T (though personally Application Architecture) I prefer 12Base-T) 2) ISDN 3) Novell NetWare 3) Public Network Reliability 4) Routers (used in LANS) 4) Manager of [network] Managers 5) TCP/IP (packet transfer 5) IBM's Telecom Strategy protocols used on internet) 6) Lotus-Novell Merger 6) SNMP (Simple Network 7) TRIP '92 (Transcontinental Management Protocol - ISDN Project) already I like it) 8) System One (Eastern and American 7) Switched 56-Kbps Services airlines flop reservation system 8) Cell Switching 9) MAP/TOP (Manufacturing Automation 9) Facsimile (FAX) Protocol from GM, Technical 10) Windows 3.1 Office Protocol from Boeing Computer Services) 10) Central-Office-Based LANS (Communication Week's 1/3/94 issue is a tenth anniversary "Rise of Networking" edition, and has some interesting articles and overviews, an essay by VP Al Gore and an interview with Alvin Toffler) ====================================================================== Statistically Speaking... => HOME SOFTWARE. Total spending on home educational software programs is pegged at $200 million for 1993 alone, according to market research firm PC Data. (USA Today 12/7/93, p. A11) (E/P) => MULTIMEDIA PC's. Link Research reports that nearly 718,000 PCs sold in the U.S. this year will be multimedia machines, and more than 550,000 upgrade kits will be installed on older systems -- a nearly five-fold increase over last year. (Business Week 12/13/93 p.117) (E/P) => CYBERSPACE MARKET. The market for on-line services is estimated at $800 million in revenue a year, and is growing at 25% annually. (Tampa Tribune 12/13/93, p. B&F11) (E/P) => TELECOMMUTING TRENDS. One million more people are telecommuting this year than last, a 15% increase in company employees who work at home part or full-time during normal business hours. A recent survey of more than 100 companies nationwide by Home Office Computing found that 30% had some type of telecommuting program in place. Another survey by Work/Family Directions found that 20% to 40% of employees surveyed would like to telecommute. (WSJ 12/14/93, p. B1) This trend toward working at home (supported by computers, modems, fax machines and cellular phones) accounted for 45% of all new jobs from 1987 to 1992 according to a Deloitte & Touche report. (Atlanta Constitution 1/2/94, p. E2). (E/P) => PC PRICES CONTINUE TO FALL. PC prices will continue to plummet in '94, following this year's downward trend. Cheaper components and stiff competition are largely responsible, with microprocessors, hard drives, and modems all going for much less than last year. (Washington Post 12/27/93 Business p. 15) (E/P) I read somewhere that Pentium system prices, currently in the $3000 price range, may be as low as $1000 by year's end. YOW!! => PRICE FOR SUPPORT TO RISE. That was the good new - with companies slashing profit margins to remain competitive, something had to give, and that something is support. Microsoft already has a 900 number where you pay for software support on any of their products. Expect to see this trend continue, with perhaps a certain amount of free support when you first buy the product. => AND THE LOSER IS... The mainframe computer. A Dataquest survey indicates that personal computer gained 5% of market share in 1993, at the expense of mainframe systems. (Atlanta Constitution 1/6/94, pg. F2) (E/P) ====================================================================== The More Things Change... "We trained hard, but it seemed every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation." (From Petronii Arbitri Satyricon AD 66, attributed to Gaius Petronus, a Roman General who later committed suicide) (SOURCE: Unplastic News) ====================================================================== SPECIAL SECTION: FOCUS ON BUSINESS ISSUES ================================== Pay Up If You Want to Keep Your Staff (John P. McPartlin) After many months of relative stability on the IS staffing front, you may need a scorecard to keep track of turnover in 1994. Perlin's firm, New York-based Edward Perlin Associates Inc., just completed its 1993 professional salary survey. They talked to IS executives at 50 large corporations with an average staff of 700. The executives surveyed expect turnover to increase rapidly in 1994 as the economy continues to warm up and companies compete for experienced IS people. The competition could be costly. Perlin has heard of companies putting money into contingency funds in case they have to react to an increase in turnover. "They've tucked away maybe half a percent of their salary budget, pre-approved by top management, so they're ready to defend their good people if those employees start to go," he explains. IS staff turnover peaked in the early 1980s at 18% or so, then dipped to the single digits in the uncertain economy of the past few years. Now, as companies seek specialized skills, "things are definitely heating up again," Perlin adds. This year's average staff turnover rate at companies surveyed by Perlin was around 11%, but nearly a third of the respondents expect an increase in turnover in 1994. How to hold on to people? Perlin suggests bonuses. In 1993, according to Perlin, bonuses paid to IS employees ranged from nothing to under 20%, while bonuses for senior IS managers ranged from zippo to a 92% (schwing!), with 30% the average. The survey also found that the average starting salary for entry-level IS jobs ranges from $24,000 to $43,000. For next year, executives surveyed by Perlin expect starting salaries to increase by only about 2%. For more information, call Perlin Assoc. at (212) 714-0588. (InformationWeek 12/13/93, p. 80) ================================== Outsiders Looking In (Mickey Williamson) Hiring an outside consultant to help with an IS project can be tricky. Such arrangements require the CIO to cede control of many of the project's aspects to outside consultants. Yet, in the end, it's the CIO who's accountable to top management for the project's success or failure. The solution? CIOs who have worked happily with consultants say the only way to make it work is to stay involved. (Improving Your Outside Chances, CIO, Nov. 15, p. 30) ================================== Avoiding the Query from Hell (Doug Bartholomew) Don't look now, but your Achille's heel is showing. Information users in business units demand a skill many IS shops lack: forethought. ... "Solutions are being built in an ad hoc way instead of a strategic way," says Howard Dresner of the Gartner Group's Burlington, Mass., office. ... To better handle business-user demands, Dresner recommends that IS shops create a new position: the business-applications specialist, a business person trained in technology. That way, he explains, "information systems will be designed to support business intelligence." (Sidebar to article "Mining For Data", Information Week 11/22/93, p. 26) ================================== Taking Email Seriously (David Morrison) As electronic mail matures from a cutting-edge curiosity to an inte- gral part of the business world, many firms are grappling with issues such as E-mail etiquette and conflicting standards. The rewards for getting it right can be great: One firm that used E-mail at the core of its reengineering project to automate processes saved itself $250,000. (Electronic Mail: What Hath Samuel Morse Wrought, Beyond Computing, November/December 1993, p. 24) ================================== How to Let Your Team Succeed (John P. McPartlin) How do you keep a self-directed work team from falling apart at its carefully sewn seams? Wilson Learning Corp., a Minneapolis management-training and development firm recently studied 4,500 such teams at 500 organizations has some advice for any IS chief looking to make teams the basis of a companywide strategy. Their conclusions? Managers should not make all the decisions. Instead, try to help team members confront problems on their own. Develop ways for the team to resolve conflicts without always needing your input or involvement. Communicate a clear vision to self-managed teams and explain how the team's daily activities fit into the larger goals of the department -- even the company. Never control or withhold information from the team, the study adds, and actively encourage team members to freely debate their own ideas and proposals. That way, they can stay focused and remember they're not working in a void. For more information, contact the Wilson Learning Corp. at (800) 328- 7937, ext. 8868. (InformationWeek 12/13/93, p. 80) ====================================================================== THE KULTCHUR KORNER => INTRO TO COMPUTING. Video games -- with their warrior and adventurer heroes -- seem to be designed mainly for boys rather than girls. "That's very disturbing," says media critic Marsha Kinder, "because video games provide an entry into the world of computers." (Atlanta Journal-Constitution 1/1/94 D1) (E/P) => VIDEO GAME RATINGS. In an effort to stave off government interven- tion in the face of growing public concern, Sega, Nintendo, Sears and others announced they're going to create a rating system for video games. Games will be rated for blood, violence and sex content. A spokesman for Sega said the plan was designed to give consumers more information about the products they purchase. That sounds reasonable to me, but for some, it's still not enough. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, for example had hoped the industry would "simply stop producing some of the worst stuff, in terms of violence and sexual content." Funny they don't tell Hollywood what it should make and not make. Too much entrenched power there. Let's blame it all on video games. "I'd like to shoot those idiots who think this stuff affects me!!" (Calvin) => I WANT MY FISH TV!! Last summer, the cable television station that serves Columbia S.C. aimed a camera full-time at an aquarium to occupy a vacant channel, which was awaiting the September start-up of the Science-Fiction Channel. When Sci-Fi replaced the 'fish channel,' complaints were so numerous that the company was forced to find another channel for the aquairium, which now runs 14 hours per day, sharing time with the Bravo Channel. (SOURCE: Unplastic News) => IN FASHION NEWS, men's suit sales have plummeted as men increasingly "dress down" for the office. "With so many offices going into electronic status, dealing with people through faxes and computers, there is no need for appearance to be as large a factor," says the president of a clothing store company in Kansas City. (St. Petersburg Times 1/3/94 p.19) (E/P) => NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT. Brian Moran is Manager of Technical Evangelism at Microsoft. "Our job is to work with folks who are interested in our technology and tell them all about it." Including the infamous undocumented Windows system calls, I wonder? => SUBJECT: SATAN CLAUS! Parents in Grand Saline, Texas, removed a picture of Santa Claus from a school because the letters in "Santa" can be rearranged to spell "Satan". This caused Esquire to note that the letters in "Grand Saline, Texas" can be re-ordered to spell "Grand Anal Sex Site". (SOURCE: Unplastic News) => WISHFUL THINKING. A Roper survey sponsored by IBM found that more than half of the respondents don't want a computer that requires a manual to use it. Two-thirds requested a computer that would recognize a user's face and automatically pull up the file s/he typically uses. (Washington Post 12/27/93 Business p. 13). (E/P) ====================================================================== "Why spend thousands of dollars on a personal computer? Why not spend your money on something fun, like a boat?" -- A question put to David V. Evans, VP and director of IS at J.C. Penney, when Evans bought his first PC in 1982. Evans replied, "That PC is my boat -- that's what I like to play with on weekends" (Information Week) ====================================================================== Playing the Wisdom Game (Howard Rheingold) [Shumpei Kumon is a former professor at the University of Tokyo and cofounder of the GLOCOM Institute, which is dedicated to studying and advancing the principles outlined below. This excerpt is from Howard Rheingold's book The Virtual Community (Addison-Wesley 1993) (see B&B v1 #12)] In Kumon's framework, the three most important stages in the history of human civilization are most usefully seen in terms of the social games that governed those civilizations' sources of power: first the Prestige Game, then the Wealth Game, and finally the Wisdom Game. The Prestige Game was triggered by militarization, the use of force and the threat of force to gain and maintain power over other actors. The idea of nationhood came along and the use of force was abstracted on a higher level, in which national economic and cultural power challenged raw military power for importance. The industrial revolution made possible the most recent era in which technologically produced wealth rather than either prestige or military power alone became the most important marker in the world's highest-level social games. The older games continue to exist, but the center of attention moves from royal courts to national elections to virtual, transnational, communication- mediated relationships as the system evolves. The current trigger for a transition to a new stage, in Kumon's theory is the world telecommunications network, and the next game will involve information, knowledge, and folklore-sharing cooperatives around the world that will challenge the primacy of traditional wealth the way industrial wealth challenged the primacy of military and national power and prestige. Today's virtual communities, Kumon came to understand firsthand, offer a small-scale model of a society in which people communicate in a way that creates collective wealth. A kind of wealth that includes the existence of Parenting conferences is more than a cold-blooded exchange of information, hence his characterization of the coming social framework as the Wisdom Game, in which the source of power is "consensus-formation through information and knowledge sharing." ====================================================================== Bits and Bytes Bookshelf: Balancing Act: How Managers Can Integrate Successful Careers and Fulfilling Personal Lives - by Joan Kofodimos [Jossey-Bass, 1993. 167 pp. $25.95] - "After 10 years of interviews and consulting with executives and managers, Joan Kofodimos has gathered insights that cut through trite rationalizations and force you to answer critical questions about how you conduct your life and, in turn, damage the lives of others at work and home. Kofodimos offers alternatives that can lead to personal as well as professional success." (Jerry P. Miller, Information Week 11/29/93, p. 58) The Internet Complete Reference - by Harley Hahn and Rick Stout [Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1994. 817 pp. $29.95] - This is the latest (last time I looked) in a seemingly endless stream of Internet how-to books. What this one has going for it is completeness. You've got 500+ pages of information on the Internet, from the basics (What is the I-net, A Quick Tour of the I-net, How to Connect to the I-net, I-net Addressing, I-net Mail) to chapters explaining the various tools available to net.surfers (Telnet, Finger, Usenet (seperate chapters for the rn,trn, nn and tin newsreader programs), anonymous FTP, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Gopher, Archie, Veronica, Jughead, WAIS, World Wide Web, mailing lists and more! Next come 150+ pages of Internet resources by subject area and 100+ pages of appendixes listing USENET newsgroups, public access providers, and lots more. All the details are here (with tables listing the commands for the utilities), but the book also explains things for the beginners in the audience. *IF* you're only going to have one Internet Reference book, this one would be a good choice. Insanely Great (The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything) - by Steven Levy [Viking Books, 1994. 292 pp. $20.95] - Seen but not reviewed. Levy is also the author of Hackers (1985) and Artificial Life (1992, see review B&B v1 #5), both of which are now available as paperbacks. Based on those books, I would venture to say that if you are interested in the subject, you will find this book to be informative and well-written. ====================================================================== = Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations? = ====================================================================== On The Newsstand WINDOWS MAGAZINE. The January 1994 feature a six page preview (with lots of screen shots) of Chicago, the Windows 4.0 prototype. BYTE. The January 1994 issue features a special report on advanced operating systems. Articles on microkernal architectures, object- oriented operating systems, and cross-platform OS's. Is your head spinning yet? No? Byte's regular State of the Art section features articles on next-generation CPUs, with much talk of superscalar processing, the Intel/VLSI Polar chip set, Cyrix's M1 chip, and a variety of RISC architectures. Also, the 1993 Byte Awards, which I'll be summarizing next issue. For the techno-weenie in all of us. NEW MEDIA. This special issue, titled The 1994 Multimedia Tool Guide, lists over 750 MM products for Macs, PCs. Amigas, and Silicon Graphics machines. Divided into functional categories (Presentations and Authoring, Graphics, Audio, Video, Optical Media, Display Systems and Multimedia PCs) each section gives an overview of the state of the technology, product features, and page after page of cross-referenced product comparison charts. Essential if you're in the MM market. (ACCESS: New Media 609/786-4430) ====================================================================== I recommend no sour, ascetic life. I believe not only in the thorns on a rosebush, but in the roses which the thorns defend. Asceticism is the child of sensuality and superstition. She is the mother of many a secret sin. God, when he made man's body, did not give us a fiber too much, nor a passion too many. - Theodore Parker ====================================================================== ### ADMINISTRIVIA ### DON'T FORGET to unsubscribe from your old email address if you are moving to a different one or (GASP!!) going offline. 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You figure it out. ====================================================================== Jay Machado = (Copyright 1994 Jay Machado) *unaltered* = 1529 Dogwood Drive = ELECTRONIC distribution of this file for = Cherry Hill, NJ 08003 = non-profit purposes is encouraged. = ph (eve) 609/795-0998 = The editor is solely responsible for the = ======================== editorial content or lack thereof. Opinions= ======================== expressed are not necesarily shared by the = ======================== editor. Just say NO to flame-fests. = ====================================================================== =============== End of Bits and Bytes Online V2, #1 ================= ======================================================================