NewsScan Daily, 6 August 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 6 August 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        EU Gives Microsoft a Last Chance to Reform
        XML: Extremely Confusing?
        Apple 'Thinks Different' About Its Future
        Research In Motion Loses Patent Case
        SBC to Create 6,000 Hot Spots
        Using Mobile Phone Data to Trace People's Location

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Jack Kerouac

EU GIVES MICROSOFT A LAST CHANCE TO REFORM
European Union Competition Commissioner Mario Monti says evidence collected 
during the EU's four-year probe of Microsoft business practices indicate 
that the software giant is unfairly leveraging the "overwhelmingly dominant 
position" that its Windows operating system enjoys in the PC market into 
the server market. Monti gave Microsoft "a last opportunity to comment 
before" imposing tough restrictions on the way it does business in Europe. 
The EU has the power to fine Microsoft up to 10% of its global annual 
revenue for antitrust abuses. Microsoft has argued that the changes it's 
made in business practices as part of its settlement with U.S. antitrust 
officials, combined with additional steps it's taken voluntarily, should 
allay European concerns over its practices. But today Monti demanded that 
Microsoft "reveal the necessary interface information" so that other 
vendors of server software can "compete on a level playing field," and 
ordered Microsoft to either sell a stripped-down version of Windows without 
its Media Player software, or agree to include rival versions of media 
players with Windows. An EU spokesman says a final ruling will come "in 
months, not years." (Wall Street Journal 6 Aug 2003)
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB106016430280301700,00.html (sub req'd)

XML: EXTREMELY CONFUSING?
Most experts agree that XML -- a meta-language designed as "a toolset to 
define building blocks for data identifiers" -- will play a major role in 
the future of digital content and how it's stored and found on the Web, but 
the fragmentation of XML standards and specifications is daunting. "At the 
very least, the proliferation of standards could result in millions of 
dollars in lost effort for organizations utilizing the meta-language; at 
worst it will corrupt data and compromise business-critical transactions 
and operations because different parts of the same company will process 
conflicting XML messages without knowing it," says a recent Gartner report, 
which predicts that of the $3 billion likely to be spent worldwide on XML 
modeling activities between 2001 and 2004, $2 billion of it will be wasted. 
"There are so many specifications under development in XML right now that 
no one can keep track of them. There are hundreds of them," says Gartner 
research director Charles Abrams. Abrams predicts that the current 
hodgepodge of standards will consolidate over time as companies gain 
experience in applying XML to their business operations, but that it will 
require additional cooperation among users and customers to make the whole 
system workable in the long run. "It's not just a matter of agreeing on 
specifications, it's getting experience of what you do with it. Just 
because you have letters, grammar and an alphabet does not mean you are 
going to press a button and end up with literature overnight." Meanwhile, 
McKinsey & Co. advises that for the time being, companies should stick with 
tried-and-true technologies such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) for 
e-commerce and other mission-critical applications. (ZDNet UK 5 Aug 2003)
http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020415,39115499,00.htm

APPLE 'THINKS DIFFERENT' ABOUT ITS FUTURE
Apple Computer's success with its iPod MP3 player and its iTunes Music 
Store are harbingers of an enterprise-wide change, says Charles Wolf, a 
Needham & Co. analyst. "It's a paradigm shift at the company… [The iPod] 
represents a shift in strategy, whether they realized it at first or not. 
The iPod was the first product that wasn't tethered to the Mac." Indeed, 
years after Apple's "Think Different" advertising campaign, CEO Steve Jobs 
appears to be doing just that, slowly transforming Apple into a high-end 
consumer electronics and services company á la Sony, and enabling it to 
move away from Apple's dependence on Macintosh PC sales, which currently 
account for 80% of company revenues. The strategy could work --- morphing 
into a consumer-electronic company would capitalize on Apple's "cult of 
cool" brand that it has spent billions building. Says one recording 
industry exec: "Until Apple, it wasn't cool to buy digital music. This was 
about getting to that pivotal group of people -- the people who buy the 
cool sneakers and wear the right clothes -- and showing them that legally 
downloading music could be cooler than stealing it." Industry veteran Tim 
O'Reilly, founder and president of O'Reilly & Associates, likens Apple's 
decision to push its services into the Windows world to the one Sony made 
when it abandoned its Betamax technology in favor of the more popular but 
inferior VHS: "At some point Sony decided to compete on brand, software, 
design, and quality. That's what Apple has to do." (Business Week 5 Aug 2003)
http://businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2003/tc2003085_3215_tc112.htm

RESEARCH IN MOTION LOSES PATENT CASE
A judge has ruled that Canada's Research in Motion, maker of the popular 
Blackberry device, must pay $53.7 million in aggravated damages to NTP 
Inc., a patent-holding company based in Virginia. At the same time, the 
judge stayed an injunction that would have prohibited RIM from selling the 
Blackberry handhelds and associated services in the U.S. until the 
expiration of the last of NTP's patents in 2012. The two companies have 
been in litigation since late 2001, when NTP accused RIM of infringing on 
its patents covering the use of radio frequency wireless communications in 
e-mail systems. Meanwhile, RIM has asked the U.S. Patent and Trademark 
Office to reexamine NTP's patents, and RIM attorney Henry Bunsow says: 
"While the remaining reexamination and appeal processes may take several 
years to complete, we remain confident that RIM will ultimately prevail in 
this matter." RIM is expected to appeal the ruling and the matter could 
take at least another year to reach conclusion. (CNet News.com 5 Aug 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-5060296.html

SBC TO CREATE 6,000 HOT SPOTS
SBC Communications, the Bell regional phone company based in San Antonio, 
is going to be providing Internet access at 6,000 WiFi "hot spots" located 
at hotels, airports, convention centers, restaurants and other public 
locations in its 13-state territory -- which includes Texas, California, 
and Connecticut. Gartner Group industry analyst Lydia Leong regards the SBC 
plan as "a relatively aggressive move" intended not to be "a gigantic 
revenue driver in the near term" but rather a foundation on which to take 
advantage of the growth potential of WiFi technology. (New York Times 6 Aug 
2003)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/06/technology/06SBC.html

USING MOBILE PHONE DATA TO TRACE PEOPLE'S LOCATION
Carphone Warehouse PLC, a U.K. company, has launched the first major 
commercial service that traces people's locations using their mobile 
phones. Called mapAmobile, the service is charging £30 ($48) a year and 30 
pence (48 cents) per request, and claims accuracy to within 50 yards. 
Carphone chief executive Andrew Harrison says, "We are responding to a real 
consumer need by bringing to the market a reliable, affordable and 
effective way for people to locate each other without disturbing them." But 
privacy advocate Barry Hugill of a group called Liberty worries: "Once the 
technology is there, it is there to be abused and I find it very hard to 
believe that it would be watertight. Potentially we could see stalkers 
moving in on the act." MapAmobile locates users by tracing the unique 
identifier each cell phone transmits and triangulating between the network 
towers that transmit and receive signals to and from phones. (AP/San Jose 
Mercury News 6 Aug 2003)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/6463498.htm

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Men are generally idle, and ready to satisfy themselves, and 
intimidate the industry of others, by calling that impossible which is only 
difficult." (Samuel Johnson)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: JACK KEROUAC
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the American poet and novelist 
Jean-Louis (Jack) Kerouac, leader and spokesman of the Beat movement, who 
gave the movement its name and celebrated its code of poverty and freedom 
in a series of novels of which the first and best known is "On the Road" 
(1957). The book drew the attention of the public to a widespread 
subterranean culture of poets, folksingers, hipsters, mystics, and 
eccentrics, including the writers Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William 
Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes, Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder and Philip 
Whalen, all important contributors to the Beat movement. As a group they 
epitomized the questioning, rebellious spirit of American youth during the 
1950s and were named the Beat Generation by Kerouac.
      Born of French-Canadian parentage in working-class Lowell, 
Massachusetts, Kerouac spoke a local dialect of French called joual before 
he learned English. The youngest of three children, he was an intense and 
serious child, devoted to his mother and constantly forming important 
friendships with other boys, as he would continue to do throughout his 
life. From a young age, he was inspired to create stories, first by the 
mystery radio show "The Shadow," and later by the novels of Thomas Wolfe, 
the writer he modeled himself after. Kerouac was a star on his high school 
football team and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York. But 
after an argument with the football coach, he was forced off the team. 
Disillusioned and confused, he dropped out of Columbia and joined the Navy 
at the outbreak of World War II, only to be discharged as a schizoid 
personality. He then served out the war years as a merchant seaman. After 
the war he roamed the United States and Mexico, working at a variety of 
jobs that included railroad man and forest ranger, before he published his 
first novel, "Town and the City," in 1950. Dissatisfied with prevailing 
fiction conventions, he developed a new, spontaneous, nonstop, unedited 
style in writing "On the Road." Written in three weeks, it dealt in a 
formless manner with a number of frenetic trips back and forth across the 
country by a number of penniless young people who are in love with life, 
beauty, jazz, sex, drugs, speed and mysticism. They have only contempt for 
alarm clocks, timetables, road maps, mortgages, pensions and the American 
work ethic. After the success of this work Kerouac produced a series of 
thematically and structurally similar novels, including "The Dharma Bums" 
and "The Subterraneans" (both 1958), "Doctor Sax" (1959), "Lonesome 
Traveler" (1960), and "Big Sur" (1962).
      Literary critics, objecting to the Beat "fad," refused to take 
Kerouac seriously as a writer and began to ridicule his work, hurting him 
tremendously. He developed a severe drinking habit that aged him 
prematurely. He kept busy, appearing on TV shows and writing magazine 
articles, but his momentum as a serious writer was gone. Defeated and 
lonesome, he finally went to live with his mother, from whom he would not 
stray for the rest of his life.

See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140042598/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for Kerouac's "On the Road" -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We 
donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy programs.)

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