NewsScan Daily, 19 January 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 19 January 2004 ("Above The Fold")
***********************************************************
NewsScan Daily is underwritten by RLG, a world-class organization
making significant and sustained contributions to the effective
management and appropriate use of information technology. NSD is
written by John Gehl and Suzanne Douglas, [email protected].
***********************************************************

"ABOVE THE FOLD"
       Peer-to-Peer Software Theft
       Slowdown Slowing Down
       Biotech: Silicon Valley's New New Thing
       64-Bit Laptops From Emachines
       What's in a Name? Ask a Lawyer

FEATURES
       Flash Card
       Honorary Subscriber: The Leakey Family

PEER-TO-PEER SOFTWARE THEFT
     Peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing programs like Kazaa are increasingly
being used for software piracy; in fact, William Plante of the security
company Symantec thinks that roughly half of the illegal copies of his
company's software are made through P2P electronic downloads. The thieves
are "truly ghosts on the Internet" who are "virtually untraceable." One
approach to curbing software piracy is mandatory online activation, and even
though Plante admits those methods can be broken, he says it's "extremely
inconvenient to try and use the cracked version." Michael Weiss of
StreamCast Networks, which makes the P2P program Morpheus, says the software
industry should get an entirely new attitude, which would "embrace the
technology, just like the movie studios ended up embracing VCR's. This is
not going to go away. Technology always wins out. You would think the
software companies would know that more than Hollywood." (New York Times 19
Jan 2004) http://www.partners.com/2004/01/19/technology/19soft.html

SLOWDOWN SLOWING DOWN
     With technology companies reporting their strongest earnings in years
and the three-year decline in corporate computer purchases beginning to turn
around, the sector is now seeing a steady economic recovery. Gary Beach of
CIO magazine says, "It's real. The missing link has been corporate spending.
Consumers have carried the economy for two years and they are passing the
baton to businesses. We are on the cusp of a major build out." (San Jose
Mercury News 17 Jan 2004)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/7735371.htm

BIOTECH: SILICON VALLEY'S NEW NEW THING
     Silicon Valley is known for its ability to reinvent itself (having
shifted from chipmaking to PCs in the 1980s and then to e-commerce in the
1990s); now it's moving with dispatch toward biotech, medical devices, and
other tech-driven health industries. A new study by the consulting firm
Joint Venture indicates that biotech and medical device start-ups got 24% of
Valley venture-capital investments last year (up from less than 7% in 2000).
In contrast, information tech services fell from 10% to 4%. (USA Today 19
Jan 2004) 
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techinvestor/2004-01-19-valleyecon_x.htm

64-BIT LAPTOPS FROM EMACHINES
     EMachines is introducing the first 64-bit laptops from a major PC
maker. The new EMachines laptops run on an Athlon 64 processor from Advanced
Micro Devices and have a 60-gigabyte hard drive, DVD reader and CD
reader/burner, WiFi wireless connectivity and a large, 15.4-inch wide-aspect
screen. The systems will sell in the $1,449-$1,549 range. Industry analyst
Nathan Brookwood says: "For anybody doing numerically intensive computing --
architects or engineers, who may move from one work site to another, maybe
stay at a work site for weeks at a time, and need to do some heavy-duty work
away from the office -- this would be a great machine for that." Machines
with 64-bit processors are also highly desired by players of games with
advanced graphics. (Los Angeles Times 19 Jan 2004)
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-laptop19jan19,1,6711179.story?coll=l
a-headlines-technology

WHAT'S IN A NAME? ASK A LAWYER
     Your name is Mike Rowe and you think it would be funny to add "soft" to
your Web site name so that it becomes MikeRoweSoft.com. A little pun, why
not. But pause to reflect: Will Microsoft think it's as funny as you do?
Maybe not. In fact, not a chance. The 17-year-old 12th grade student in
Victoria, B.C., now says: "I didn't think they would get all their
high-priced lawyers to come after me." Wrong. They did. Then he wrote back
to Microsoft's lawyers asking to be compensated for giving up his name. The
lawyers offered him $10 in U.S. funds. So he asked for $10,000, because he
was "sort of mad at them for only offering 10 bucks. It's not their name.
It's my name. I just think it's kind of funny that they'd go after a
17-year-old." Now he's got a lawyer. Microsoft says it has been in
communication with the young man "in a good faith effort to reach a mutually
agreeable resolution. And we remain hopeful we can resolve this issue to
everyone's satisfaction." (AP/Washington Post 19 Jan 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28846-2004Jan19.html

*****

FLASH CARD 
     "If a man hasn't discovered something that he would die for, he isn't
fit to live." (Martin Luther King Jr.)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER  THE LEAKEY FAMILY
     Today's Honorary Subscriber is the British paleoanthropologist Louis S.
B. Leakey (1903-1972), who together with his second wife Mary Douglas Nicols
(1913-1996), and their three sons, especially Richard (b. 1944) and Meave,
his wife, have become known as the first family of paleontology. Louis and
Mary Leakey investigated early human campsites at Olduvai Gorge, in what is
now Tanzania, and found important hominid fossils more than 1.75 million
years old. Richard conducted research in the East Turkana area of Kenya and
discovered even earlier hominid fossils dating from as much as 3 million
years ago. The Leakey's East African fossil discoveries became the basis for
claims that man was far older than had previously been believed and that
human evolution was centered in Africa, rather than in Asia, as earlier
discoveries had suggested.
     Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey was born in Kenya, the son of a missionary,
and grew up among Kenya's Kikuyu, actually undergoing rites of passage into
that tribe. He studied archaeology at Cambridge University from 1922 to
1926. Louis met and fell in love with Mary while they worked on a Neolithic
dig site at Devon, England. She came from a family of artists and
archaeologists and had brought to her studies in geology and archeology an
exceptional talent for drawing early tools and other Stone Age artifacts.
After their marriage in 1936, they moved to Kenya where they spent the next
30 years working together in reconstructing a long sequence of Stone Age
cultures. They documented the early history of stone technology from simple
stone-chopping tools to relatively sophisticated, multipurpose hand axes,
attempting to understand how prehistoric hunter-gatherers obtained their
food. In 1959 Mary's discovery of the Zinjanthropus cranium at Olduvai in
what is now Tanzania captured worldwide attention and made the Leakey's a
household name. Building on this find, Louis and Mary attracted a
multidisciplinary team of specialists to work at Olduvai and launched the
modern science of paleoanthropology, the study of human origins. They also
used their research to encourage such well-known social scientists as Jane
Goodall and Dian Fossey to study chimpanzees and gorillas, in the belief
that such studies would increase understanding of early humans.
     After Louis Leakey's death in 1972, Mary Leakey and her second son
Richard continued field research in East Africa. Richard had made his first
fossil find at age six -- a part of an extinct giant pig, but at first he
resisted following his parents' career, feeling he didn't want to ride on
their coat tails. It was only after dropping out of high school to lead
photo safaris in the early 1960s that he returned to the family's calling
and together with his second wife, Maeve, explored a large area of Northern
Kenya, where among many other fossil findings he found fragments of a more
advanced hominid, which has been dated to be 2.6 million years old.
     The Leakey family has been remarkable in the sheer numbers of fossil
and tool discoveries and the vast amount of data its members have
contributed to the fields of paleontology and anthropology. Based on their
work scholars have reversed many of their previous conclusions about the
early history of the planet and its many species.

See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385467923/newsscancom/ref=nos
um for Richard Leakey's "Origins Reconsidered" -- or look for it in your
favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book or other
recommendations to literacy action programs.)

SUBSCRIPTION INFO FOR NEWSSCAN DAILY:
     To subscribe or unsubscribe to the text, html, or handheld versions of
NewsScan Daily, send the appropriate subscribe or unsubscribe messages
(i.e., with the word 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' in the subject line) to
the addresses shown below:
     Text version: Send message to [email protected]
     HTML version: Send mail to [email protected]
     NewsScan-To-Go: http://www.newsscan.com/handheld/current.html

TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT NEWSSCAN DAILY! Send them our little frog:
http://www.newsscan.com/newsscan/newscup.html

***********************************************************
Please visit the site of RLG, the great organization that makes NewsScan
Daily possible. (RLG has no influence over, nor any responsibility for, our
editorial content.) Created in 1974 as the Research Libraries Group, RLG is
a not-for-profit membership corporation of more than 160 universities,
national libraries, archives, museums -- and other institutions with
remarkable collections for research and learning. Its major initiatives are
long-term retention of digital materials, resource sharing among member
institutions, and improvement of researcher access to primary source
material. RLG supplies online research resources worldwide. Visit RLG at
http://www.rlg.org.

*********

To subscribe or unsubscribe to the TEXT version of NewsScan Daily, send an
e-mail message to [email protected] with 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' in
the subject line. To subscribe to our HTML version of NewsScan Daily, send
mail to [email protected], with the word 'subscribe' as the
subject. (Subscribing to the HTML version won't automatically unsubscribe
you from the text version; please unsubscribe yourself as explained above.)
Please note: To unsubscribe from an account to which you no longer have
access, send mail to at [email protected].

*********

We call our news section "Above The Fold" to honor the tradition of the
great "broadsheet" newspapers in which editors must decide which news
stories are of such importance that they should be placed "above the fold"
on the front page. The NewsScan Credo: Be informative, have fun, and get to
the point! See http://www.newsscan.com/, and send us mail: John Gehl
<[email protected]> and Suzanne Douglas <[email protected]>, or call
770-704-7517.

*********

Get a free 6-week trial subscription to Innovation Weekly, an executive
summary of trends, strategies and innovations in business and technology.
Send mail to [email protected] with the word 'subscribe' in the
subject line.

What customized news and information services do you need for your company?
Get in touch with us at [email protected] or call 770-704-7517 to talk
over the possibilities.

Copyright 2004. NewsScan Daily (R) is a publication of NewsScan Inc.
***********************************************************