NewsScan Daily, 30 November 2004 ("Above The Fold")

"NewsScan" <[email protected]> Tue, 30 Nov 2004 09:06:22 -0700

Newsgroups	gmane.culture.it.newsscan
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

NewsScan Daily, 30 November 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
PC Makers Facing Hard Times
New Browser Vulnerability Targets Non-IE Models, Too
Smarter IM-ing
Better Travel Deals Available Off the Beaten Path
Topic Maps Provide Context for Search Results

FEATURES
Flash Card
Worth Thinking About: City Life
Mailbag: The World As We Find It

PC MAKERS FACING HARD TIMES
Three of the top 10 PC makers may drop out of the global PC market by
2007, starved by stagnant demand during the 2006-2008 timeframe, according
to a new report by Gartner. The near-term forecast is a little brighter --
Gartner predicts annual shipment increases of 11.3% and annual revenue
increases of about 4.7% between 2003 and 2005. But by 2006, most
corporations and consumers will have replaced their oldest computers,
completing the latest PC replacement cycle, which occurs about every four
years for PCs and every three years for laptops. Emerging markets such as
China will boost revenues during that time, but not enough to offset slack
demand elsewhere, says Gartner, which declined to say which companies might
drop out of the PC race. "The bottom line here is that the vendor landscape
will look very different in the next couple of years," says a Gartner
analyst, adding that there's still time for PC makers to enact cost-cutting
measures that would enable them to survive the anticipated drought. (CNet
News.com 29 Nov 2004)
<http://news.com.com/Are+PC+makers+poised+for+major+hit/2100-1003_3-5470068.html>

NEW BROWSER VULNERABILITY TARGETS NON-IE MODELS, TOO
Since its debut, Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has been
plagued by a steady stream of "flaw discovery" announcements followed by
the requisite patches. Usually those flaws are exclusive to the Microsoft
model, but a new vulnerability also affects the Mozilla Browser, Mozilla
Firefox, Opera and Apple Safari browsers. This latest bug, called the
Infinite Array Sort Denial of Service Vulnerability, causes the affected
browsers to execute an infinite JavaScript array sort, which in turn causes
a crash. The flaw was discovered by independent security researcher
Berend-Jan Wever, who also uncovered the IFRAME vulnerability that affects
banner ads. (InternetNews 29 Nov 2004)
http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3440971

SMARTER IM-ING
Now there's a new service called IM Smarter that stores copies of
conversations for later retrieval, a feature that could become quite handy
as instant messaging makes inroads into the corporate world. Inventor David
Weekly characterizes IM Smarter as an electronic "secretary" that takes
notes and alerts you to important events. "The logging will appeal to
people who passed notes in school and would keep them in a shoe box. And
there are people who use IM for business purposes and want to keep those
conversations." IM Smarter's storage capabilities lend fuel to an emerging
debate over how ephemeral instant message conversations should be. Many
IM-ers assume their conversations disappear when they (and their
correspondents) log off. The IM Smarter service is currently free, but
Weekly hopes to add advertising to support it, and eventually launch an
ad-free premium service that allows users to set up IM alerts for tracking
changes to Web sites or eBay auctions. (San Jose Mercury News 29 Nov 2004)
<http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/10293868.htm>

BETTER TRAVEL DEALS AVAILABLE OFF THE BEATEN PATH
The Web has revolutionized the travel business, but road warriors and
leisure travelers should look beyond the Big Three -- Orbitz, Expedia and
Travelocity -- to find the best deals. A group of upstart "travel
aggregators" such as Mobissimo, SideStep, Cheapflights, Qixo, Kayak
Software and FareChase are hoping to snag some of the more intrepid
bargain-seekers as people look for holiday get-aways. "Many consumers are
becoming frustrated with the online travel experience," says Mobissimo
co-founder Svetlozar Nestorov. "Our goal is to make it better." The
potential is huge, according to Forrester Research, which estimates 29.4
million U.S. households will use the Internet to book $53 billion worth of
travel in this calendar year. "The online agencies really represented
'Travel 1.0' because they democratized the process of booking travel and
made it available to all of us," says SideStep marketing VP Phil Carpenter.
"The next generation is represented by the travel search engines. We're
'Travel 2.0.'" (AP/Los Angeles Times 29 Nov 2004)
<http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-onlinetravel29nov29,1,5268484.story?coll=la-headlines-technology>

TOPIC MAPS PROVIDE CONTEXT FOR SEARCH RESULTS
Databases and search engines can spew out thousands of "results," but
how many of them are really on target? And how much time do you want to
spend sifting through straw to find the gold? Enter "topic maps" -- smart
indices that improve search by categorizing terms based on their
relationships with other things. For instance, topic maps can sort out the
different results for "Franz Ferdinand," the doomed Austrian archduke, and
"Franz Ferdinand," the alternative rock group named after him. "The payoff
(of topic maps) from the user standpoint is that you are no longer
confronted with everything in the world that is known about the subject,"
says Patrick Durusau, chairman of a topic maps technical committee at
OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information
Standards. Topic maps are currently used at the Internal Revenue Service to
organize its tax forms and to coordinate with the Social Security
Administration, and at several U.S. Department of Defense agencies for
intelligence-gathering purposes. According to one expert, the legal and
pharmaceutical industries are the next ones likely to adopt the topic map
approach to indexing their data. (Wired.com 30 Nov 2004)
<http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65840,00.html>

*****

FLASH CARD
"Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of
settlements (except dream cities) have problems." (Jane Jacobs)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: CITY LIFE
Journalist and fiction writer Suketu Mehta uses his personal
experience to alert us to what city life may be like in the near future:
"There will soon be more people living in the city of Bombay than on
the continent of Australia. Urbs Prima in Indis reads the plaque outside
the Gateway of India. It is also the Urbs Prima in Mundis, at least in one
area, the first test of the vitality of a city: the number of people living
in it. With 14 million people, Bombay is the biggest city on the planet of
a race of city dwellers. Bombay is the future of urban civilization on the
planet. God help us.
"I left Bombay in 1977 and came back twenty-one years later, when it
had grown up to become Mumbai. Twenty-one years: enough time for a human
being to be born, get an education, be eligible to drink, get married,
drive, vote, go to war, and kill a man. In all that time, I hadn't lost my
accent. I speak like a Bombay boy; it is how I am identified in Kanpur and
Kansas. 'Where're you from?' Searching for an answer -- in Paris, in
London, in Manhattan -- I always fall back on 'Bombay.' Somewhere, buried
beneath the wreck of its current condition -- one of urban catastrophe --
is the city that has a tight claim on my heart, a beautiful city by the
sea, an island-state of hope in a very old country. I went back to look for
that city with a simple question: Can you go home again? In the looking, I
found the cities within me.
"I am a city boy. I was born in a city in extremis, Calcutta. Then I
moved to Bombay and lived there nine years. Then to New York, eight years
in Jackson Heights. A year, on and off, in Paris. Five years in the East
Village. Scattered over time, another year or so in London. The only
exceptions were three years in Iowa City, not a city at all, and a couple
more in New Brunswick, New Jersey, college towns that prepared me for a
return to the city. My two sons were born in a great city, New York. I live
in cities by choice, and I'm pretty sure I will die in a city. I don't know
what to do in the country, though I like it well enough on weekends."
[Source: Suketu Mehta, "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found," from
Knopf. To find a library copy of Mehta's book "Hunger," visit RLG's
RedLightGreen.com:
<http://www.redlightgreen.com/ucwprod/servlet/ucw.servlets.UCWController?ACTION=EDITION&WORKID=19009584&>
-- or to purchase a copy of his "Bombay Lost and Found" go to:
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375403728/newsscancom/ref=nosim>
Note: We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy
programs.]

MAILBAG: THE WORLD AS WE FIND IT

OF INFORMATION ARE WE COMPOSED
Re: <http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=11720>
Of information
are we composed, eternal
music of the spheres.
(Tom Pitts)

TIME TO ASK GOOGLE
Re: <http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=11720>
Memory fails me
Who what when where why how much?
Time to ask Google.
(W. John MacMullen -- I have no affiliation
with Google, by the way.)

WHEN ONLY BREATH IS HEARD
Re: <http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=11720>
You probably know about this: http://www.scifaiku.com/index.html
What goes on, I ask
When all machines are shut off
And only breath is heard
(Joel Anderson)

HAIKU ERROR MESSAGES
Re: <http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=11720>
From one of those joke emails that circulated in Australia in March 2003:
The Japanese have replaced the impersonal and unhelpful Microsoft
error messages with Haiku poetry messages. They are used to communicate a
timeless message, often achieving a wistful, yearning and powerful insight
through extreme brevity. Here are some haiku error messages.
*
The Web site you seek
Cannot be located, but
Countless more exist.
*
Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.
*
Program aborting:
Close all that you have worked on.
You ask far too much.
*
Windows NT crashed. I am the
Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.
*
Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.
*
Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen, Mind. Both are blank.
(Gavin Moodie)

HAIKU BEAUTIES, ENDLESSLY. TWITCHING, CIRCULATING.
Re: <http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=11720>
Nice one -- now you're for it. You do know, don't you, that Salon
magazine did this in 1998 -- there are some beauties here -- some of which
reflect the technology of 1998 (computer systems are *much* more reliable
now!):
<http://archive.salon.com/21st/chal/1998/02/10chal2.html>
I think my favourite is:
*
A crash reduces
your expensive computer
to a simple stone.
*
Though it's hard to pick just one, isn't it?
The infamous QuarkXPress [Sic] List also had a long tradition of
having Friday haikus, which must number hundreds by now -- but they were
all pretty much in-jokes. When the SicList moved on to a new server and a
new life early this year, there were many farewells, until one of our
number sent a haiku ... which prompted another to send:
*
How silly of us
Not to see: this is the way
That we say "Goodbye"
*
which caused un-ending haiku echoes, finally (weeks after the old list was
*supposed* to have finished) this beauty:
*
It has come to this.
Picked-over bones of old friends
still twitch in the sun. -- Tim Doherty
*
I too once composed Haiku or two ... but not today!
(John Law)

LIFE RETURNS
Re: <http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=11720>
Even if the technology involved in this particular haiku is rather
simple it saved my life. When I was 10 I got run down by a car. The
result was several broken bones, massive bleeding and six months in
hospital. Had it not been for excellent doctors plus litres and litres of
donor blood I never would have made it. Many years later I wrote this
haiku, and this seems like a good opportunity to share it.
The bag feeds the needle
drop by drop
life returns
(Bjørn Ingmar Berg)

WHEN IS A UNIVERSITY NOT A UNIVERSITY? (ANS.: WHEN IT'S DARTMOUTH COLLEGE)
Re: <http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit>
I'm guessing you're finding out which of your subscribers are
Dartmouth alumni after referring to Dartmouth College as Dartmouth
University in the latest NewsScan... :-) If you're interested in why
Dartmouth is a college and not a university, you can start at:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/home/about/history.html
(Robb Cutler)

GLORY TO DARTMOUTH
Re: <http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit>
As an alumnus of Dartmouth College, I thought you might find the
following link instructive:
http://www.danorr.com/webster/dartmouth_case.html. Daniel Webster
successfully defended Dartmouth College against the attempted encroachment
of authority by the New Hampshire legislature, which had sought to convert
the college to a public institution, "Dartmouth University," on the same
campus. While Dartmouth may now in fact be a university, it is unlikely
ever to be named so. (Robert Smith)

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