REALVIDEO PLAYERS/SERVERS LET YOU START YOUR OWN TV NETWORK
Well, not quite. You still won't be able to reach a million viewers with a
single transmitter, but 10 viewers for a one-time investment of $295 is not bad
(yeah, yeah, start a porn video site, make a million bucks - it's been thought
of). Significantly, the standard embodied in these Net video servers has been
endorsed by a number of big media heavyweights, and the product is not
vaporware. The player (free) and server ($295-$1000) were developed by
Progressive Networks, the company behind the popular RealAudio streaming sound
format. The software runs on various combinations of Windows, Mac, and a
zillion Unix systems (including Linux). Naturally, the site shows off streaming
video demos, including a short film by Spike Lee. A guide leads to about 60
other sites featuring RealVideo and RealAudio content. <http://www.real.com/>
GERMAN HACKERS USE ACTIVEX CONTROLS TO SNAG CASH
One of the problems with ActiveX controls is that they, unlike Java applets,
can read from and write to your hard disk and control applications. Some good
(as in technically adept and apparently socially responsible) German hackers
took advantage of this versatility to demonstrate an unauthorized money
transfer using ActiveX controls and the European version of Quicken accounting
software. Quicken lets you pay bills online, and the European version
apparently could be hacked so as to not require a personal identification
number as verification for money transfers. ActiveX has been known to have
security problems for some time. CNET has a short article about the problem,
and the Chaos Computer Club home page has a German press release. CNET:
<http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,8015,00.html>
Chaos: <http://berlin.ccc.de/>
FIRST COOL SITE OF THE DAY COMPETITION
It's happening on February 24, and features a faceoff between teams from our
own Silicon Valley and New York's Silicon Alley to create the coolest bleeding
edge site within eight hours. It's all part of the Web 97 conference in San
Francisco, and the two teams will race to create a Web site for charity. Tune
in to this site to find the final URLs.
<http://webreview.com/universal/web97.html>
AUTONOMOUS AGENTS CONFERENCE AND LINKS
There's something spooky yet exciting about autonomous software critters. Maybe
it's the lack of predictability, that thrilling possibility that our creations
may run amok and replace our shareware game collection with the latest copy of
the Federal budget snagged off the Net. The recently held Autonomous Agents '97
conference was all about such agents which interact with people, each other, or
the environment in all sorts of interesting ways. Their list of "Related Sites"
in particular features a great collection of links about the subject, and leads
you to autonomous agent projects, more links, and even instructions on how to
write your own agent. There are also a couple of mainstream press articles
about the subject. <http://www.isi.edu/isd/Agents97/info.html>
NETSCAPE RAISING PRICES ON SERVERS, BROWSER
Looks like Netscape is rising its prices by as much as 30%. The cost of its
Enterprise Web server is going up from $995 to $1295, and the SuitSpot
software's price will climb from $3995 to $4995. The Communicator browser will
now set you back $59, up from $49. In addition, Netscape is moving to per-user
licensing of their software bundles and is introducing extensive technical
support options. One can only assume that this move comes in the face of strong
demand. <http://home.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease345.html>
PERFORMANCE STUDY SHOWS HTTP 1.1 GIVES DRAMATIC DOWNLOAD GAINS
The cognoscenti know that the current HTTP 1.0 protocol, used by Web servers to
talk to Web browsers, performs like a lazy hound dog napping on a mint-julep
southern afternoon. That's part of the reason your favorite sites take so long
to show up on your screen. Some of the best minds of the Web generation are
working on the problem and have come up with a partial solution. According to
some recent experiments, the next revision of the protocol, plus other tweaks,
can give users from 15% to 35% faster downloads. Some of the changes are
already incorporated in the latest beta of the wildly popular Apache server.
This fairly technical paper has the details, of interest to network pros and
content creators.
<http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Protocols/HTTP/Performance/Pipeline.html>
LATEST DIZZY HOST/DOMAIN GROWTH STATISTICS
The numbers of both hosts and domains on the Net continue to climb, which is
only to be expected. If you're following along with graph paper at home the
latest numbers, from a survey by Network Wizards, show that between July of
1996 and January of 1997 hosts increased from 12,881,000 to 16,146,000
(+20.22%), and the number of domains went from 488,000 to 828,000 (+41.06%).
More trivia: the five favorite host names are www, host, mail, ftp, ns, and
ns1. More fun details and statistics going back as far as 1993 can be found
here. This page also has links to several other interesting Internet survey
sites. <http://www.nw.com/zone/WWW/top.html>
Journalists, marketers, advertisers, bankers, and others with a stake in the
dizzying growth of the Internet will find NUA Internet Surveys a good place to
research reports and predictions. The site provides an overview of the state of
the Net with a review of Net activity in 1996 based on surveys it recaps and
links to. There's a wealth of info here - did you know that employees with
e-mail spend an average of over an hour a day with it, and that "e-mail will
continue to be the dominant activity on the Internet into the next century"?
Links to a variety of surveys make this a fine place for dreamers and bean
counters, who can go off on a tangent into the dizzying realms of Dataland. You
can also sign up to receive a free monthly newsletter about Net surveys. As if
we weren't sufficient. <http://www.nua.ie/surveys/1996review.html>
There's a new show on Fox TV by Mike Judge, who used to be famous as the guy who gave birth to Beavis and Butthead. His new cartoon, "King of the Hill", is a hilarious look at what life is like if you're a run-of-the-mill, he-man propane salesman raising a family in Texas. Of course, new TV shows spawn new newsgroups, but this show, hardly a month old, has already spawned three. The winner seems to be the <alt.tv.king-of-hill> group. You can also check out the <alt.entertainment.king-of-the-hill> and <alt.conspiracy.black.helicopters> newsgroups, the latter mentioned on the show and full of good laughs.
ART PAST, PRESENT, AND PATHETIC
Glyphs is a difficult site to figure out, with obfuscated music, review, and
art linkss and little explanation preceding the meat. The site seems to have
died about a year ago, but art is timeless so we'll focus on that. The past is
represented by exhibitions of artists in a wide range of styles. You can view
for example Albrecht Durer's woodcut prints, Leon Polk Smith's abstracts, and
Aubrey Beardsley's black-and-white illustrations. The intelligent commentary,
with the exhibits and as stand-alone reviews, will perk up even the most jaded
of Web art watchers. Fractals represent the artistic present, but the highlight
has to be the pathetic. The Museum of Bad Art looks at the cheesy and the
chintzy with the same intelligence as the serious, but humorously displayed. It
would be a shame were this site truly dead, but what they have is pleasure
enough. <http://glyphs.com/art/>
DISCOVERING THE HOMELESS IN PICTURES
Entitled "Structure out of Chaos", this unique photo-essay offers a vivid study
in homelessness. Elegant sepia-tone photos are paired with descriptive text to
provide an in-depth and disturbing look at this taboo subject matter. It's a
heck of a lot of structure, so much structure that it takes a while to
download. But since it's one of only two Art Online sites in this issue, take
the time. <http://www.bridge.net/~marylou/>
With this issue come Joanne's reviews of "Internet BBSs: A Guided Tour",
"Creating Your Own America Online Web Pages", "CGI How-To", "Using Netscape 3",
and "Launching a Business on the Web".
<http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/books/book.03.06.html>
If you've wondered where William Katt is doing dinner theatre, or which
has-been is playing "Rizzo" on Broadway now, you can be updated and amused by
Greg Bulmash at the WASHED UPdate. His very tongue-in-cheek approach to the
question "Where are they now?" is refreshing and laugh-out-loud funny. Make
sure to check out the "Lee Atwater Memorial Dead Pool" and the column archives.
<http://www.imdb.com/washed-update.html>
Brillo exfoliates the tough skin of technology, exposing misogyny and the
aggressively hostile forces within. This is a place of awareness in cyberspace,
with offerings of essays from the Barbie Liberation organization, a handy
Hitlist of offensive sites, and tampon security tips (using tampons to protect
your goods, not protecting your tampons). Hitting out at attempts to "dumb
down" the Internet, Brillo wants to provide a pad for different women's styles
and has created a space welcoming minorities and people with limited access to
technology. Find what you've been looking for, and flame a few crappy sites
along the way. <http://www.virago-net.com/brillo/>
Rock is synomynous with being bad, and NY Rock is no exception, but maybe here
bad also has another meaning - its original. We found RealAudio clips as
expected and some cool interviews and info on the likes of David Bowie, Iggy
Pop, Sex Pistols, and more. Sadly the only female we found was the unrocklike
Jenny McCarthy (if Archie comics ever became live action, wouldn't she make a
great Betty?) to whom a large spread had been devoted, including various sites
devoted to her on the Web. The five toughest questions a girl can ask -
including "Am I fat?" - also gave us pause. We have to wonder.
<http://www.nyrock.com/>
A CLASSIC A DAY KEEPS THE LIBRARIAN AWAY
You know all those books on your "virtuous reading" list? The ones you keep
promising yourself you'll get to because, well, they're American classics? That
promise is a little easier to keep with the new "American Literary Classics - A
Chapter A Day" Web site. These virtual books let you delve into such immortals
as Moby Dick, Huck Finn, The House of the Seven Gables, and Little Women. You
can discuss your views with other online readers, and even vote for the next
classic. A Young Readers Library is coming soon.
<http://www.mindport.net/~arezis/>
Connect-Time Magazine claims to have over six million readers and to be "the
largest Internet publication in print." Its Web companion may remind you of
America Online: it's easy to navigate, it has a lot of eye candy for everyone
and tutorials for novices, and it seeks to create and nurture a community or
communities of users by emphasizing interactivity (but there are no busy
signals...). It's designed for fun. You can read articles for adults or stories
and letters for kids, send and read electronic greeting cards, and find out the
favorite Web sites of other readers and submit your own. Parents can guide
their kids here with confidence, and many will learn a thing or two from the
kids. Of course, teens will say it's kid stuff. <http://www.connect-time.com/>
THE MAGIC LIFE - A NOVEL PHILOSOPHY
"The Magic Life" is available free on the Internet. The book is mystical and
practical at the same time. An interesting main character and his magician
mentor lead the reader though the lessons of a philosophy of life that is
rooted in Eastern religions. During the story, the central character comes to
believe that his magician friend is his guardian angel. Readers are invited to
respond to the author by e-mail, and to contribute towards the eventual paper
publication of the book if they wish. <http://starry.com/novel/magic1.htm>
With the Hubble Space Telescope getting an upgrade, it seems a good time to
surf around and find out more about this splendid machine and the work it does.
The Space Telescope Science Institute site has an excellent set of links to
various aspects of the Hubble, such as a full technical overview, discovery
press releases, and of course a gallery of Hubble images. A neat, if somewhat
slow netsurfing site. <http://www.stsci.edu/>
Do you remember that green patch on the ice in "2010: Odyssey Two"? That scene
(movie and/or book) took place on Europa, the true protagonist planet of Arthur
C. Clarke's 2010 and 2061 books. This week, NASA's Galileo probe will pass
within 600 km of that body, the solar system's other watery sphere. Because it
holds so much water, Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, is thought to be a prime
candidate for evidence of early stages of life. While 600 km is too far for any
conclusions, you can be certain the people who research this sort of thing are
glued to their monitors. As is, we're sure, Arthur C. Clarke. Read the foreword
of "2061: Odyssey Three" for a clue as to just how excited he must be.
<http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/>
THE COMPLETE ALBERT EINSTEIN, RELATIVELY SPEAKING
If you'd like to learn more about the famous genius or his theories, this is a
marvelous place to start. Featured are links to sites worldwide covering nearly
every aspect of the man, the myth, and the legend that was Einstein. You'll find
biographical information, quotes, theories, equations and more.
<http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~smfriedm/einstein.html>
If you watch what you eat, or don't but wish you had a healthy lifestyle, put
CyberDiet on your Web menu. "Exercise Tips" may make your experience with
workout machines more enjoyable and includes articles to read while you catch
your breath. For fun and possible horror, check out "Interactive Nutritional
Profile." Be prepared for a shock or three after you fill out the form and
receive an instant evaluation of your weight. Banish bingeing at breakfast,
lunch, or dinner with sample fare at "Food Court". Don't miss the "Recipe"
section, which includes desserts (Poached pears with Gorgonzola Chantilly,
anyone?). Perhaps the best motto for this site is a heading in the feel-good
"Diet Preservers" section: "Happiness is an inside job!" Your monitor glows
when you treat it right. Why shouldn't you? <http://www.cyberdiet.com/>
You and almost every other living organism have had intimate experiences with
viruses, so there's inherent appeal in a site devoted to these nasties.
Although this may be one reason All the Virology on the WWW has won plenty of
Web awards, the main reason has to be that this site is the Web equivalent of a
research library. Virologists will want to spend many lunch hours here (oh, heck
institutes of virology around the world, drug and vaccine development sites,
databases, and collections of images. This site is devoted not only to human
health, but also to the well-being of plants and animals. Some future Nobel
laureate may be making important connections at this site even as you read
this. <http://www.tulane.edu/~dmsander/garryfavweb.html>
MICROSOFT RELEASES JAVA SDK 1.5
A variety of new improvements come in this free developer's kit for building
Java applications under Windows. Most notably, there's now a script debugger, a
Microsoft Java virtual machine plug-in for Netscape, and a bunch of new classes
way too technical to deal with here. Suffice to say it's free and you can find
out more here. <http://www.microsoft.com/java/sdk/>
The "Welcome to Puerto Rico" Web site we featured in NSD 3.03 has changed URLs,
as has Turtle Trax, a site dedicated to researching and recording the activities
and health of the sea turtles off Hawaii.
Puerto Rico: <http://welcome.topuertorico.org/>
Turtle Trax: <http://www.turtles.org/>
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