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Internet Story: 20 Apr 1999
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Connected in the Air Soon you will be able to surf the net, send emails, receive faxes and all other Net related activities from the first or business class seats of specially furbished Boeing 747-400s that have been purchased by All Nippon Airlines for its new nonstop service between Chicago and Tokyo. Now that could just about make my trips to Los Angeles bearable... except All Nippon Airlines don't fly there from England, sob. Maybe BA or AA will have these soon. See the ZDNet article for more info.
Freeserve sues AOL? Legal action is being taken by Freeserve against AOL after comments that AOL allegedly made through its CompuServe division that customers should not sign up with Freeserve as they wouldn't be around for long. Both parties hope to settle this before they meet in court. See ZDNet article.
Virtual Autopsies So you fancy yourself as the next Silent Witness? Well go and try your hand out at Leicester Medical School's site for Virtual Autopsies. You can try your hand out at trying to determine the cause of death for the 12 cases presented on the site. You get to click on various parts of your cadaver and see either more detailed pictures or a text description of what's there. Don't worry too much, there's nothing very gory (that I've come across anyway!). You may also want to check out Autopsies.com - a site with links and information about related sites.
State of the Internet Last week the US Internet Council published its latest demographic research on Internet usage. As you would expect the overall figures are sky rocketing but one interesting gem from the report is that the ethnic differences that were apparent a couple of years ago are leveling out. You now don't have to be educated, well-paid, white, young and male. The black and Hispanic communities in the US are catching up rapidly. Obviously at the current price of PCs, telecoms charges and ISP charges it still helps to be well paid. In an interesting article in the San Jose Mercury they predict that as prices plummet and access becomes as affordable as a phone then it will be education (or the lack of) that will pose the biggest barrier to Internet use. If you want to see some pretty pictures about just where the Net has reached and in what numbers then pop over to An Atlas of Cyberspaces.
Have your say! Yesterday the US government opened up a site so that people can discuss what "National Security" should mean in the 21st century. It's getting difficult for the US to find enemies now that the cold war is over so the National Security Study Group is soliciting suggestions from any interested party. So far the discussions have been mundane but I wonder what it will be like when the anti-american lobby gets wind of this! "I believe this is the first time a government study has had such a direct connection to the American public while the study is actually being written," said Jonathan Nemceff, the NSSG's director of information systems. "New times call for new tools."
Accountants Cringe And so they should, especially at Price Waterhouse Coopers! "It turns out that the Dutch branch of PWC decided to commission a company song, and succeeded in producing a piece of peerless naffnitude. A heady mixture of the most glutinous Euro-pop and bright-eyed Los Angeles MOR, it includes such gems as "We don't sell no dogmas/What we've got is skill/Price Waterhouse Coopers/For each and every client's will." It goes on like that for quite a while." - according to Rupert Goodwins. You can hear the whole debacle that Fortune Magazine picked here (it's 2Mb in size so be warned!).
News in Jive For amusement only, here's a site that caused me some degree of mirth. You can specify a web site name at the Dialectizer site and it will then present that page in the selected dialect. Try looking at the BBC main page in Jive, man! (I especially like the way that Jack Straw is translated as "de Plantation Secretary, Buckwheat Straw" :-)
Andrew Stringer, © Pendle.Net Ltd, 1999
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