Caught In |  | by Al Massey |
I picked up a copy of the Bloomberg 100 list of top performing stocks of 1995 and it reaffirms once again why my wife refuses to let me anywhere near the family finances. I am the genius that passed on Netscape at eleven dollars, and back when PC Quote decided to market stock quotes over the internet it was trading at around a dollar.
Well, I quit looking at Netscape when it went over one hundred thirty and PC Quote is over twenty dollars a share now. In fact the top 100 list is riddled with internet and high-tech stocks from Ascend, Quaterdeck and Iomega to Boca, Computer Products and AOL. In 1996 I see Quarterdeck, Iomega, HP, Borland, Macromedia, Adobe, Sun Microsystems and a host of other high-tech internet related companies climbing through the roof. It's a no brainer and no doubt this time next year I will, once again, offer up my brainless head to science.
" A penny saved is ridiculous."
Back in 1990 three Sun programmers started work on a small hand-held electronics device featuring a new kind of graphical user interface. About a year later they decide this interface could be used to connect all sorts of electronic devices and began work on a prototype. In the process they developed an object oriented programming language code named Oak. Seeing the potential for this new product Sun created a subsidiary, FirstPerson, Inc. to market the Oak technology to makers of consumer electronics devices, games and cable set-up boxes. However, when by 1994 Sun discovered that none of the target industries was buying FirstPerson, they began adapting Oak for the Internet. In April of 1995 Sun, in a stroke of marketing genius, renamed Oak Java and developed a browser, HotJava, to show off the technology. In May of 1995, Netscape took a look at Java and decided they were the proper forum to showcase its full potential so they licensed it for Navigator 2.0. On Dec. 4, 1995 Netscape and Sun announced JavaScript and since then Microsoft, Borland, and half the software developers in the known universe have jumped on the bandwagon.
It's a sure bet that wherever Web Browsers take us over the next few years, Java will be along for the ride, if not the fuel that drives us. Web developers are increasingly likely to find themselves in one of two camps: on the development side with skilled programmers or among the less valued coders whose programming skills are limited to HTML. Our view of what a good web site is will change drastically over the next few months. Some feel, myself included, that Microsoft got on the Java bandwagon so that they can make their Browser Java compliant while developing Visual Basic scripting to compete with JavaScript. Microsoft finds itself in a peculiar situation of being number two in the "free" browser market and they are not comfortable.
Indeed, Microsoft seems to have as its cornerstone the motto "Beat Netscape." Their decision to include the Internet Information Server free in its NT Server Software and to allow users to download it free off the net and their willingness to let Internet Access Providers offer Expolorer to their subscribers at no charge shows they are not going to go away quietly and leave this market to Netscape. Future versions of Microsoft Office will enable HTML output from all Office applications.
Before we leave this subject it should be noted that IBM, stung by criticism that its Internet efforts lacked focus, has leaped into the fray by naming a fifteen year IBM veteran Irving Wladawsky-Berger, to coordinate their Internet efforts. Topping his agenda in 1996, Wladawsky-Berger said, will be a push to get all of IBM's customers "Internet-Enabled," regardless of their hardware or application platform. "Once you buy into that philosophy, no products can be isolated," he said. He went on to state that IBM intends to accelerate the use of the Internet for commerce and communications among its customers. Yes, this is going to be an interesting year.
"Brain - the apparatus with which we think that we think."
Tim Berners-Lee, the man responsible for creating the World Wide Web, started off his presentation at the Fourth International World Wide Web Conference in Boston by defending the Web against criticism that it is impossible to find anything there. He began by referring to a book used during his presentation and noted that the Harvard Librarians had required a full week to unearth it from the library stacks. "Who said information was a problem the Web brought on?" he asked.
Berners-Lee asked users to imagine there's no browser and accused Netscape and other Browsers of "trying to do everything and hook everything up to the browser," and drew a comparison between the browsers we now use and early word processors and spreadsheets that attempted to incorporate the functionality of many different applications, often resulting in mediocre products.
He went on to praise the development of Java and object oriented programming in general and urged the software industry to adopt advanced agent technology, describing a kind of "guardian angel" that "remembers where you have been, saves all your writing, holds your security keys and generally acts as your representative in cyberspace." He said he felt today's Web had lost several of the strengths of his original creation including the ability to edit pages within a browser window and lamented what he called the "loss of the collaborative aspect."
Halfway through his presentation Tim came face-to-face with one of the downsides of the Web as we know it when the browser he was using suddenly stopped working because the license had expired.
"Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are."
VDOLive is an attempt to conquer the technical challenges presented by the low bandwidth and complex communications environment of the internet and bring live full motion video to your desktop. Until now video on the internet has been of the store and forward variety which means it has been slow and difficult. The best uses of this medium up till now have made use of wide bandwidth communications lines making it impractical for those of us with 28.8 dial-up modems.
Because it uses new technology that compresses video images so they fit into small pipes which make up much of the internet, VDOLive is able to bring motion video to your system through low-bandwidth dial-up modems.
Download the player from http://www.videolive.com and check out the sites that have encompassed this technology. You can get to them from the VIDEOLive home page.
"Quoting one is plagiarism. Quoting many is research."
Care to guess who the big Web moneymakers are going to be in `96? Lawyers! Issues such as copyright infringement and pornography are heating up the `net and lawyers from CompuServe, Prodigy, and other on-line services are dancing through the legal minefield trying to anticipate problems in a field where case law is in its infancy. In trying to read the signals coming from Congress I would advise anyone thinking of bringing their business on-line to get their attorneys involved at an early date and make sure you understand the legal ramifications as well as the technical.
Martin Garbus, a New York civil liberties lawyer whose client list has included Prodigy, Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, former Czech Republic president Vaclav Havel, and comedian Lenny Bruce has been quoted as saying "The Internet brings up many of the legal problems that exist with other interstate communications, only more so-because the effects are potentially more harmful."
"I'd insult you, but you're not bright enough to notice."
Jerusalem-based Accent Software International Ltd. (info@accentsoft.com or 800-535-5256) has created Internet With An Accent, a suite of applications that allows users to read and send e-mail and read and publish Web pages in 30 foreign languages. The $129 Windows-based software includes six applications: a viewer, stand-alone browser, browser add-on, HTML authoring tool, e-mail add-on, and e-mail reader. The viewer lets users see a page in Japanese, for example, using the original Kanji or Han characters rather than in the default system's characters. The browser add-on lets programmers program options into their pages, allowing users to view sites in the language of their choice. It activates when a user clicks on a link to a Web page created in a different language and is compatible with most versions of Mosaic and Netscape.
The authoring tool enables creation of Web pages in Latin, non-Latin, and bi-directional alphabets in the same document, while the e-mail add-on allows users to create messages the same way. In order to do this, users create a file using Accent's word processor program called Accent Duo with Translation. The recipient of the message can read it with Accent's viewer, which is available free for downloading at the Accent Web site at http://www.accentsoft.com.
Al Massey is a HAL-PC member.
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