BREAKING SURF
| Odd Searches Lead to Blogs |
| How to Bypass Net Restrictions at Work |
| Web-Standards Checklist |
| Watch the Ground Zero Rebirth Cam |
| Expanding Frontiers West and East: 19th-Century US and Russia |
| Photo Journey into Bollywood |
| Cameras Over Florida |
| Avant-Garde Design and Photography |
| Flat, Portable Seat Competition |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Moyers Matters |
| Guide to SF Criticism Jargon |
| Amazoning the News |
| The Reykjavik Grapevine |
| Hurricane Havoc |
| Creatures of the Deep |
| Liquid-Crystal History, Research, and Photographs |
| Orcam |
| Google Desktop: Search Engine for Your PC |
| ManyOne: Designing The Next Generation Web Browsing Experience |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
CIA Report Says No WMD in Iraq
If Bush administration officials really did believe that Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) posed an imminent threat in 2002, the report by the Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) makes it crystal-clear that they were wrong. The report totals three volumes and nearly 200 MB, but the key findings file is more modest in size. The report breaks no new ground in its portrayal of a duplicitous and calculating Saddam Hussein who harbored murderous ambitions particularly against Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. But the report picks through the Iraqi concealment and secrecy that made it difficult to assess actual capabilities. Having used WMD in the past, the Hussein regime cleverly maintained the expertise to resume WMD development but when the US decided to take him down, he had merely nuclear ambitions, no current program, and work on advanced ballistic and cruise missiles remained at the design stage only. In addition, there is no evidence that Iraq resumed making chemical weapons after 1991, its capability having been destroyed during the first Gulf War. And there was no active program to develop or deploy biological weapons. Potential threat? Sure - with his systematic circumvention of UN sanctions, Saddam Hussein was always going to be someone who needed careful watching. Clear and immediate danger? Nope. The report leaves some wiggle room for diehard believers in WMD, but precious little. With the Presidential debates still rambling on, and Iraq taking up much of the talking space, the report is topical.http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd_2004/index.html
In video taken during the second Presidential debate, a lot of people noticed a suspicious rectangular bulge under President Bush's suit jacket. Rumors started flying - had the President been wearing an electronic prompting system that would allow somebody to feed him answers remotely? The speculation is just that, speculation, but the pictures clearly show something there, Bush administration spokesmen are not forthcoming with anything but ridicule, and many security and electronics experts express confidence that that was exactly what was happening. Two sites cover the issue well. The Is Bush Wired blog follows the story day by day and Cryptome has a more sober assessment, which points to the possibility that Bush's bulge is a security device meant to keep him in touch with the Secret Service.
Cryptome: http://cryptome.org/bush-bulge.htm
Is Bush Wired?: http://www.isbushwired.com/
With the American election just around the corner and the specter of the messy Florida election results of 2000 still haunting the state, the security of new electronic voting systems is on everybody's minds. SiliconValley.com's contribution to the debate is a first-rate online roundtable that addresses two crucial questions: is e-voting secure and trustworthy, and if not, can it be made so? The roundtable is populated by a who's who of people involved in online voting efforts, including technical experts, academics, reporters, lobbyists, and present and former government representatives. Notably absent from the room is any representation from the embattled Diebold, which makes voting machines and which was invited to participate but declined. The discussion is of high caliber and quite informative, and will interest anybody concerned about making voting a trustworthy and reliable process.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/9851518.htm
The Mackris vs. O'Reilly Lawsuit
Is a fine institution like NSD willing to sink to tabloid level and bring you source material on the latest national sex scandal? You bet. This has all the makings of a career-ender for one of the most popular conservative TV talk show hosts in the US. Bill O'Reilly and Fox News sued Andrea Mackris, a staffer on "The O'Reilly Factor" for extortion; Mackris turned around and sued O'Reilly for sexual harassment. The affair brings a refreshing and entertaining salacious factor to the grim political mood in the US. You can judge just how salacious and entertaining by reading Mackris's complaint, complete with links to the good bits courtesy of the Smoking Gun.http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/1013043mackris1.html
PC Tech Guru Spends a Month with a Mac
Anand Shimpi is the titular man-in-charge of the popular AnandTech hardware analysis site. Curious about the Mac OS X platform and somewhat frustrated with aspects of Windows XP, he decided to buy a Mac G5 and report on the first month of his experience. What do you get when you turn a die-hard PC user loose on a Mac? You'll get the verdict in due time. The first hurdle Shimpi faced was sticker shock. No baseline eMac for him - he had to grab the cutting-edge dual-processor G5 for $3,000. The next issue he overcame was the single-button mouse, which, like any sensible Mac user, he ditched for a multi-button scroll-wheel mouse. He does comment that the Mac will adopt any USB mouse just fine (and, if you want to use a less confusing single-button Apple mouse on a PC, you can do that too). While Shimpi relates that Apple has set up OS X to be usable out of the box for the novice computer user, he comments that OS X performs best in the hands of advanced users who can manipulate the preferences and interface to suit themselves. All in all, Shimpi provides an excellent review for anyone considering the Switch. He concludes that OS X surpasses Windows XP but laments the cost of Mac hardware and a lack of games. Slashdot hosted the ensuing free-for-all, with one of the posters noting that Shimpi missed mentioning the real power under the hood - Mac OS X's Unix foundations.AnandTech: http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2232
Slashdot: http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/04/10/08/1954205.shtml
The Estimated Dollar Worth of the Linux Kernel
A man named Jeff Merkey recently offered the paltry sum of $50,000 for a one-time snapshot of the Linux kernel source, with the stated object of converting its license into a proprietary operating system. Merkey has been linked to SCO, which, as most Linux fans know, has aggressively tried to claim ownership of parts of the Linux code. The offer of $50,000 prompted several people to estimate the value of the Linux kernel. This is the latest and most detailed estimate from David Wheeler, who looked at the latest kernel version. According to Wheeler, Linux is worth roughly $612 million, based on the amount of work it took to develop the code. Read his excellent paper for details about his methodology and the various Linux worth-estimation projects.http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/linux-kernel-cost.html
Panning for Gold in the Shallow End of Online Retail
Movie theatres and stores selling entertainment products need a fairly high density of consumers with similar tastes in the areas they serve. That explains why book stores all stock the same bestsellers, why multiplexes show the same Hollywood blockbusters, and why music stores sell the same hit CDs. Without a critical mass of market, a business will fail. Online retailers, however, are discovering that their marketplace doesn't follow the same rules. The online audience is so huge that even thin slices of it can have sufficient mass to support a business. The online audience is a vast, rich collection of niches. If you cater to a niche, you can sell all kinds of products that the big brick-and-mortars can never stock. Wired reports that over half the books Amazon.com sells rank below the online shop's 130,000 top-selling titles - books that a Barnes & Noble never stocks. Netflix customers watch documentaries and foreign films that local multiplexes never show and local video shops never order. The audience for Rhapsody's streaming music service isn't concentrated around the top tunes, but extends deep into the list. Wired explains the dynamics of the diverse online marketplace and suggests why the dream of a marketplace where nothing ever goes out of print is more alive than ever.http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html
On Oct. 7, the FBI and UK police raided the hosting company used by popular alternative Independent Media Center, better known as Indymedia, and confiscated Indymedia's hard drives earlier this week. The authorities, acting on behalf of the Italian government, removed the hard drives from the premises of the host, Rackspace, and returned them a few days later without explaining why the raid took place. The Indymedia servers hosted a number of other Web sites, including a popular Linux distribution site. Indymedia speculates that the raid stems from an Italian investigation into an obscure anarchist organization. The Italians asked the FBI for information on Indymedia, and the FBI in turn asked the Brits for permission to raid the servers. Indymedia still has no official word on what the raid was about, who accused it, or of what it was accused, a situation it calls "Kafkaesque". The organization is treating the returned drives as hacked and is slowly restoring services from back-ups.
http://www.indymedia.org/en/2004/10/112147.shtml
European Web Sites Quick to Fall to Copyright Complaints
How easy is it to persuade an ISP to shut down a Web site? According to research by Sjoera Nas, regrettably easy, at least in Europe. A similar, smaller experiment in 2002 tested two ISPs, one in the UK and the other in the US, each hosting public-domain material from John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" (1869). For that experiment, the researchers complained about copyright infringement as representatives of the fictitious John Stuart Mill Heritage Foundation, using a Hotmail account. The British ISP took down the offending site immediately, but the American ISP declined to play along. Nas's similar test targeted ten Dutch ISPs. Seven of the ISPs pulled the plug on the site that generated the alleged complaints without any investigation. Only one ISP challenged the credentials of the complainants. Freedom of speech seems to be an alien concept to European ISPs. Nas explains the legal background, clarifies why US providers are more resistant to this kind of gaming, and proposes some reasonable safeguards to protect the rights of Web sites against spurious or malicious complaints.http://www.bof.nl/docs/researchpaperSANE.pdf
This week marked the tenth anniversary of the release of the Netscape Navigator Web browser. The news that Mosaic Communications had released Netscape 0.9 Beta was the top item in NSD 00.26 in 1994. Ten years later, the Netscape browser lives an anemic life in the clutches of AOL, but the future belongs to the spiritual descendents of Netscape nurtured by the Mozilla project. To celebrate the anniversary, CNET is running a ten-part special feature which covers the pioneering browser's legacy. You can find out where the Netscape pioneers work today and catch up on the prospects of Firefox, the popular descendant of the original Netscape browser. CNET also has a copy of the original Netscape Navigator press release. It's worth reading both for nostalgic value and for some informed speculation about the ongoing Microsoft vs. Everybody browser wars.
Netscape: http://www.netscape.com/
NSD 00.26: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v00/nsd.94.10.26.html#BS1
Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.org/
CNET: http://news.com.com/2009-1032_3-5406640.html
Campaigns Don't Advertise Online Much
The Pew Internet and American Life Project looks at Presidential campaign advertising on the Net and concludes that the online medium is largely used for fund-raising, voter profiling, and generating mailing lists. The campaigns have spent 100 times more on television ads than they've spent on online ads, and Pew implies that the campaigns are missing the boat. Given that most people despise online ads, however, it seems as though the campaigns are doing themselves more good than harm by avoiding online advertising. In addition to a summary, Pew provides the entire report in PDF format.http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/134/report_display.asp
Several sources are reporting that pirated copies of the Xbox game Halo 2 have been leaked to the Net, continuing the grand tradition of hot games showing up online before official release. The version now wafting around on Usenet and peer-to-peer networks is a French version of the game, and some people have speculated that the source is a disk stolen from the manufacturing plant. Microsoft and Halo developer Bungie are mounting a major campaign to halt the spread of the pirated copy. Bungie has posted a statement about the incident on their forums. Halo, a slick, futuristic first-person shooter, was the bestselling first major game released for the Xbox game console, and gained an even larger following after it was ported to the PC. The highly anticipated Halo 2 is scheduled for formal release Nov. 9. GameSpot has a synopsis.
Halo 2: http://www.bungie.net/Games/Halo2/
Bungie: http://www.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=829516
GameSpot: http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/10/14/news_6110539.html
Segway has released pictures and videos of an experimental four-wheel version of their innovative mobile platform. The four-wheeled Centaur looks a lot like skeletal version of the small four-wheel all-terrain vehicles, but it sports a sophisticated control system that produces far more stability and lets the driver do persistent wheelies and tight turns with much less risk of crashing. It's certainly a cool vehicle but, according to the Web site, Segway is not planning on manufacturing the device at the moment - it's just a cool prototype. Meanwhile, the two-wheel Segway is apparently a hit with disabled users. The New York Times covers that story.
Centaur: http://origin.www.segway.com/centaur/
Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/technology/circuits/14segw.html
Dilbert's Got a Brand New House
Dilbert writer Scott Adams asked readers to design a dream house for his hero of the cubicle. The resulting Dilbert's Ultimate House is more likely a melding of the houses contributors wanted for themselves, but could not afford. In addition to a workshop and garden, Dilbert's house has a theater and a guest dormitory. The best parts of the Web pages that show off the house are the descriptions in the guided tour. In these, you learn that since Dilbert was single when he designed the house, the workshop is inside and air conditioned rather than banished to the garage or basement. Also of interest are the links to various suppliers of Dilbert's new digs. It's all part of Adams's entrepreneurial empire.http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/duh/index.html
ONLINE CULTURE
The site encourages webmasters to check their referrer logs for folks who have traveled to the site via some bizarre search-engine query, preferably one that has nothing to do with how bizarre the site is. The webmasters then post these unlikely query strings to this blog to share their amusement with the world. For example, "'all your base' financial aid" doesn't seem like a very likely string unless you're a Macromedia Flash author looking to cash in on your cult phenomenon creation. Similarly, "barry manilow online stationary" (sic) might actually exist, but we don't want to find out because the concept just scares me.http://searchrequests.weblogger.com/
How to Bypass Net Restrictions at Work
More and more, it seems, pesky little IT wonks begin to ascribe to themselves godlike qualities, among other delusions of grandeur. These folks try to make your work life a disciplinary maze that can seriously disrupt your netsurfing. Help is on the way. You can sidestep such annoyances as access restriction, monitoring, and other typical IT killjoys, and how is revealed in this relatively non-technobabbly, user-friendly discussion. In other words, this information is designed for the rest of us. This handy guide describes how a student or employee can securely access the Net and bypass IT "security precautions". You need to have a computer at home in order to make the secure tunnel and proxy method work, but in many American households, that's not a problem. All you need are some basic computer skills, and the ability to follow directions. You may want to bookmark the place.http://www.buzzsurf.com/surfatwork/
Max Design is an Australian Web design firm with a mission (besides that of turning a profit). The folks there would like to see all Web sites work better, and they've put together a nice set of rules and suggestions that will help sites do just that. Many standards sites tend to ignore their own advice and lean to the pedantic and boring. The Max Design site is well organized, highly accessible, and useful. It does not offer "do-it-our-way" advice, but lays out, in text and example, sensible ways to build Web sites.
http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/checklist.cfm
ONLINE TRAVEL
Watch the Ground Zero Rebirth Cam
Project Rebirth pays homage to the tragic events of 9/11 and to those who were most severely affected by those events. Using time-lapse photography, Project Rebirth is documenting the day-by-day revitalization of the World Trade Center. At the ambitious project's online portal, you can view films made from the photographs and other video, and learn more about the project. As we hint in our headline, visitors can also watch a live webcam of Ground Zero, which streams a new image every five minutes. The concept of Project Rebirth combines modern innovation with a spiritual path of healing. The content is well worth the few extra moments it will take you to figure out how to navigate the Web site.http://www.projectrebirth.org/
Expanding Frontiers West and East: 19th-Century US and Russia
As Americans were moving across the West, Russians were carrying out a similar expansion as they explored and settled Siberia. Meeting of Frontiers, a bilingual and multimedia effort from the Library of Congress, compares and contrasts these two great movements. While it's hard to imagine two more different contemporary powers than 19th-century democratic America and Tsarist Russia, the two nations faced common difficulties and challenges in their frontier drives. Meeting of Frontiers covers scientific and military explorations, religious movements, economic growth and development, and other topics. Of course, as we've come to expect from the Library of Congress, the site is enriched with illustrations, facsimiles, transcripts of original documents, and plenty more. As the experience and scope of the American West shaped the US, so Siberia - with all of its sinister connotations - affected Russia. This is a valuable educational resource.http://frontiers.loc.gov:8081/intldl/mtfhtml/mfhome.html
Bollywood, the nickname for the Bombay-based Indian cinema cartel, churns out more movies than most of the rest of the world combined. Amateurish by Hollywood standards, the flicks are wildly popular as a means of escape from drudgery and facelessness among millions on the Indian subcontinent. Although the main purpose of the Bollywood Dreams site appears to be to sell you a copy of a documentary, it is loaded with cool photos of the culture, and it illustrates how deeply film stars and related ephemera affect the lives of the quietly desperate.
http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0306/jt_intro.html
Winds & Wings shows selected areas of Florida, mostly the Tampa area, from the air. Most aerial photographers take their shots from planes or helicopters. The photos and videos here are shot from ultralights. Given the nature of the platforms, parts of them often appear in the photos. This site is often not traditional aerial photography, but is more a visual diary. The parts of the ultralights and pilots simply add scale and feeling to the work. Some of the photos are wonderful atmospheric shots, but many are simply parts of the story. The stills are much higher quality and more carefully done than the extensive videos.
http://www.windsandwings.com/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Avant-Garde Design and Photography
Sometimes a Web site stands out because of its crisp design and elegant layout. Phoot.org is one of those sites. The site's designer/photographer calls it, or herself - it's not that clear - "an individual in constant reflection" which is a suitably high aim for such beautiful images. The Photos section displays a selection of still lifes, portraits, and landscapes with lyrical captions. A snap of a handful of raspberries makes the viewer re-evaluate the common fruit and recognize its remarkable color and form. The Journal lacks dates and plot yet provides an extended commentary on each day's image. The Projects page showcases various themed creations - such as unique, magical wands that even Galadriel would envy - captured in clean photographs that take advantage of rich color and atmospheric shadow. Nothing here is asking you to buy, nothing is shouting for attention. The site just shows how much simplicity can achieve on the Web.http://phoot.org/
Flat, Portable Seat Competition
The Ninetydays competition invited nine designers to submit a chair design. The rules were simple: the budget was $200; the chair must be capable of supporting 200 lbs; and the design must be accompanied by comprehensible assembly instructions. Oh, yeah - the designers had to submit their entries inside a 17-1/2" x 12-3/8" x 3" Fed Ex box. Anyone who has ever struggled with flatpack furniture will appreciate that this last stipulation was always going to be problematic. City Magazine showcases the designers' imagination, ingenuity, and in some cases chutzpah. We can't find any evidence that the competition declared a winner, but that's beside the point anyway. You can look at the photos and the video of the designs and pick your own. Even though we might not be prepared to plant our rear end on it, we liked the work of the designer who mailed in a tire inner tube, a circle of wood, and a footpump.http://www.city-magazine.com/projects.html
BOOKS & E-ZINES
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Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the image or title to order at a hefty discount from our affiliate Amazon.com, and send a few pennies our way as well.
For more selections, check out: Netsurfer Books: http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/ Netsurfer Library: http://www.netsurf.com/nsl/ |
On the Wing: To the Edge of the Earth with the Peregrine Falcon
The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror
The Pre-Astronauts: Manned Ballooning on the Threshold of Space
Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comicshttp://www.spj.org/convention_moyers.asp
Want to be a successful SF author? Try the lottery - you have better odds. If you insist, however, you must read the remarkable Turkey City Lexicon. Put simply, this is the glossary that will help you understand what your critics are saying when they criticize your story for too much "squid in the mouth". Jargon aside, the entries also teach you how to write.
http://www.sfwa.org/writing/turkeycity.html
If online news sites were built like Amazon.com, things would be different. Three years ago, CNET produced a whitepaper that tried to develop the concept of Web storytelling. The three authors attempted to explain why "Amazoning the News", as they titled their paper, was a good idea. They explained that online news agencies continued to deliver the news in the same old pre-Net manner, when it's clear that the Web is novel in its lack of time-dependence. It's interesting to read this now, and then go surf through your favorite news sites to see if anything has changed.
http://www.hypergene.net/ideas/amazon.html
We didn't think they grew grapes in Iceland, although we're aware of its bananas - no, seriously. Then again, we didn't think Icelandese did funky news sites, either. Originally launched as a tourist paper for the capital, the Reykjavik Grapevine is now going for the full-year market and they're doing it in some style, if perhaps not all that successfully - the online issue still dates to early August. The Grapevine editor has the wit to respond to a letter about Celtic influence on Icelandic hair-color by pointing out that "the Icelandic are more sarcastic than Norwegians" and that sets the tone: intelligent humor is the aim. The pages bring you knuckle-clenching rides in wide-tired taxis in the ice-bound mountains, recommendations for restaurants that rely on local fish and berries (and maybe bananas), and a lament by a man who is distracted by the skimpy apparel of ladies during a recent heat-wave. However, you'll also find well argued incisive political features about local and foreign affairs. If you've ever wondered what goes on in the land of Bjork, here's a place to find out.
http://www.grapevine.is/default.asp
SURFING SCIENCE
The media love hurricanes. In August, Hurricane Charley wrought havoc on Florida. Its 145-mph winds caused widespread damage across the peninsula. If you missed the mayhem, check out the collection of Hurricane Charley videos at Weathervine. "Hurricane Charley Eyewall" is a convincing two-minute demo of the force of horizontal rain. Headlights show rain slamming in as if from a firehose, while someone yells almost inaudibly in the storm's din. What was it like to be there? In "View as the first 100mph windows move into Punta Gorda, FL", roofing, blown like leaves, tumbles across a street where a videographer in a yellow rainsuit struggles to stay on his feet in a version of the classic daredevil-reporter-in-the-storm set-up. In another video, shot from a car under partial cover, a short tree withstands gusts until it topples and sweeps back and forth across the sidewalk like a giant broom. Now and then, you hear a voice or two all but drowned out by wind and bangs of debris against buildings. The most impressive flying-debris sequences - also taken in Punta Gorda - are linked at the bottom of the page: "Everything go's flying" (sic; grumble) and "Mark hangs low as the buildings fly over his head". A broadband connection will help convince you to get the heck out of the way of the next monster storm that crosses your path.http://www.weathervine.com/hurricanes/charley/
Need to find an example of alien life for your upcoming low-budget horror film? Look no further. This image-packed thread isn't a site, per se, but part of a forum that's also loaded with links to other deep-sea stuff. Normally, you see creatures like this illustrated or poorly lit in their natural habitat, but their bizarreness pops out in surface photography like nowhere else. Some of the creatures seem rather mundane, but most are unimaginably horrific. Consider that some 70% of the planet is covered in water, that the average depth of the oceans is 4,000 meters, and that the sunlight can penetrate to only 300 meters. It's no wonder life down there takes on strange characteristics. Troll through these images and links, and you may want to reconsider booking that scuba cruise.
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=19383
Liquid-Crystal History, Research, and Photographs
The Liquid Crystal Institute (LCI) at Kent State University is the place to visit to see what's going on in the world of liquid crystals, which have many uses besides great monitors and TV screens. It's also the place to learn how these wonders developed and how they work. The LCI assumes visitors arrive with a good physics education and extremely technical language is common. Regardless, photographs of liquid crystals can be works of art in their own right, and the LCI site offers many spectacular examples. Even if the technicalities bore you witless, the photo make the site worth a long look.http://www.lci.kent.edu/
Instead of traveling on a dream vacation to whale-watch, finally getting on a boat to see them, and then missing the moment because you were getting another piece of gum just as they surfaced, you can experience orcas in their digital magnificence on your computer from the comfort of your living room, and you can get another piece of gum whenever you'd like. With RealVideo, you can listen to and watch whales swim by five cameras stationed off Hanson Island, near Vancouver Island, B.C.
http://www.orca-live.com/
SOFTWARE
Google Desktop: Search Engine for Your PC
Google has released a search-engine application that lets you do Google-like searches of files on your home computer. The program can search through your Outlook mail, AOL Instant Messenger chat logs, and Internet Explorer cache in addition to the expected search of text, Excel, and Powerpoint files. Google Desktop also lets you search the Web, and seamlessly integrates those results with those from the files on your computer. O'Reilly has an article that explains how it works in some detail. The program only works on Windows right now; Google Desktop's features resemble those of the upcoming and slightly more versatile Spotlight technology included in the next version of Mac OS X. It's worth noting that a searchable index of every document on your system is a significant privacy risk if it gets into the wrong hands.Google Desktop: http://desktop.google.com/
O'Reilly: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2004/10/14/google_desktop.html
Spotlight: http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/spotlighttech.html
ManyOne: Designing The Next Generation Web Browsing Experience
The ManyOne project aims to revolutionize the Web experience by totally rethinking the very concept of a browser. ManyOne approaches the browser like it's a software console, fully analogous to game consoles like the Playstation or Xbox, with similar graphic abilities. The hope is that content providers will deliver a rich 3-D multimedia environment to the user on any platform with a decent display, and across the full bandwidth spectrum. While modern browsers present pages and links, the ManyOne browser delivers virtual spaces and objects. ManyOne's business model is based on licensing the technology and getting a cut of subscription revenues. The company has an unusual business structure, with a philanthropic non-profit entity holding a controlling interest. There's far more to it than this, and you should really read ManyOne's whitepaper to understand the full scope of the project. The browser is only available for Windows for now, and most of the content at the moment is provided by educational entities.ManyOne: http://www.manyone.com/
Whitepaper: http://www.manyone.net/homesite/Pdf/ManyOneWhitePaper2003-07-07.pdf