NewsScan Daily, 22 September 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 22 September 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"  
       Game Wars
       Passenger-Screening System Debated
       Open Source Firm Stumbles
       Sun Sets Sights on Linux Vendors
       Living Life Without a Net

FEATURES           
       Flash Card
       Honorary Subscriber: Flannery O'Connor

GAME WARS
     In the war to achieve dominance in the handheld game console market,
Nintendo will be selling its new dual-screen "DS" model for $149.99, while
Sony plans to sell a smaller version of its own PlayStation 2 console for
$149; it will also be introducing a PlayStation Portable (PSP), of which
Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutaragi says: "We expect PSP to
create a new market, helping expand the entire game market. But PSP and the
DS will probably have different roles in the market." Takeshi Tajima, an
analyst at BNP Paribas, says: "My simple prediction is that Sony will expand
the market by about 1.5-fold by appealing to a different age group -- above
20 years old -- from Nintendo's focus, which is young children. Then both
Nintendo and Sony will each have half of the market."(Reuters/New York Times
22 Sep 2004)
<http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-tech-japan-games.html>

PASSENGER-SCREENING SYSTEM DEBATED
     Responding to recommendations from the Sept. 11 Commission, the
Transportation Security Administration is getting ready to test a new
computer-assisted passenger screening system and is ordering airlines to
turn over millions of passenger records for use in the test. Privacy
advocates oppose the plans for the system (called Secure Flight), which will
compare each passenger's reservation information with a list of suspected
terrorists (and will also attempt to verify each person's identity to
prevent false identification of travelers who might have similar names to
those on the various terrorist "watch lists"). Marcia Hofmann of the
Electronic Privacy Information Center complains: "This is a program where
TSA has complete discretion to let you see your information or correct
anything that is wrong."
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38578-2004Sep21.html>

OPEN SOURCE FIRM STUMBLES
     The shares of leading Linux software company Red Hat Inc. fell 12%
yesterday after it announced that it had missed revenue estimates for the
latest quarter. The combined average selling price (ASP) for new and renewed
subscriptions slid from $445 to $425, prompting analysts at SG Cowen to say
that the decline raised "legitimate concerns regarding customer demand and
competition from Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Novell Inc." (Dow
Jones/AP/San Jose Mercury News 22 Sep 2004)
<http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/9723667.htm>

SUN SETS SIGHTS ON LINUX VENDORS
     After years of battling Microsoft, Sun Microsystems has set its sights
on Linux vendors, seeking to jump into a low-end but high-volume market it's
been accused of ignoring. Sun executives planned to meet Tuesday with Wall
Street customers to tout their aggressive move into an area dominated by
vendors that sell systems running so-called commodity chips and low-cost
Linux software. The embattled server and software maker says tests show its
Solaris operating system, running on a server with Opteron microprocessors
from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), is cheaper and performs better than a
similarly configured system running Red Hat's Linux. (The Australian 21 Sep
2004)
<http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,10831046%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5
E,00.html>

LIVING LIFE WITHOUT A NET
     Paid $725 or more for their participation, dozen families in the
Northeast, Midwest and Northwest recently gave up the Internet for two weeks
as part of a study by Yahoo and advertising firm OMD to demonstrate the
emotional connection people have to the Net. The results? One participant
admits, "I didn't realize how tough it would be," and reports that he missed
online news and weather, door-to-door driving directions and e-mail. Some
participants had to rediscover such things as the Yellow Pages, TV,
newspapers and movies. In general, the study found that participants felt
lost and disconnected (both literally and figuratively). (USA Today 21 Sep
2004)
<http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-09-21-internet-usat_x.htm>

*****

FLASH CARD
     "Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers.
My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best
seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.' (Flannery
O'Connor) 

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: FLANNERY O'CONNOR
     Today's Honorary Subscriber is the critically acclaimed novelist and
short story writer (Mary) Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964), who despite years
of suffering from a debilitating illness produced a body of work that made
her a leading fiction writer of her generation.
     O'Connor was a deeply religious Southerner and generally used the rural
South as the setting for her stories, most of which dealt in odd ways with
an individual's relationship with God. She peopled her stories with an
assortment of alienated and troubled characters who found themselves in
starkly bizarre circumstances where violence and the grotesque mixed with
romance and religious fervor. She only published three books in her
lifetime: the collected short stories in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" (1955)
and the novels "Wise Blood" (1952) and "The Violent Bear It Away" (1960).
Yet these were enough to establish her unique literary signature as a writer
supremely capable of finding divine design in the midst of stark human
depravity. 
     O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, and grew up in Milledgeville,
Georgia.  She graduated from Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia
College) in 1945 and for two years studied creative writing at Iowa State
University's newly created Writers Workshop. She earned an M.F.A. degree in
1947, and began her writing career by publishing stories in quality journals
such as the Sewanee Review, Parisian Review, and the Kenyon Review. Thanks
to literary relationships O'Connor established at the Iowa Writer's
Workshop, her first novel, "Wise Blood," enjoyed a good reception by the
critics who were quick to note her "fine ear for Georgia dialect and a
pitiless eye for the tawdry aspects of modern life." O'Connor herself said
the novel portrayed "religious consciousness without a religion." The novel
also displayed the flair for the absurd that would characterize her
subsequent work.
     O'Connor's dream of a the independent life as a writer in the New York
area was sadly cut short when she was diagnosed with lupus, the same
connective tissue disease that caused her father's early death in 1941, and
would cause her own premature death in 1964. She returned to the South where
she would live with her mother at the family's farm in Milledgeville,
Georgia. Increasingly crippled by her lupus, she could only manage to write
for a few hours each day. Her only diversion was raising peafowls, and
occasional trips to give a college lecture.

[See 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374515360/newsscancom/ref=nosim>
for Flannery O'Connor's "The Complete Stories" -- or look for it in your
favorite library. Note: We donate all revenue from our book and media
recommendations to adult literacy programs.]

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