| Home | Events | Newsletter | Club Info | Programs | Comments | |
|
August 1998 Newsbyte | |
EDITOR'S
CORNER
It is with a heavy heart that I write this column for it is my last one. I have
decided with declining health and energy to let someone that at least can attend
meetings edit the newsletter. I have talked this over with Willis and several others and
hope someone will step forward to take over. I will work with anyone to get the new
editor on track.
I really have enjoyed the last 8 years of membership in the club and am very
happy that the newsletter went over well. I have received a lot of encouraging remarks
about it. The only negative was from my predecessor, Ruth Kaplan, when I tried to get
tooooo much in the newsletter by reducing the size of the font so small that you almost
had to use a magnifying glass to read it. Anyhow, I will stay on as a member of the
club.
SPECIAL PROGRAM!
Demonstration of
Microsoft®
Windows®
98
Operating System
Presented by Jonathan Moeller,
Microsoft Corporation
| President | Willis Troyer | 669-3925 |
| Vice Presidents | Brian Powell | 828-8365 |
| Tom Zimmerman | 264-5521 | |
| Secretary-Treasurer | Pat Johnston | 264-8726 |
| Librarians | Joe Luster | 682-7815 |
| Phillip Crosby | 264-1444 | |
| Editor | Harry Geiser | 682-7486 |
| A Web Site for Dr. Kharbanda | PAGE 2 |
| Firing Up the Inkjets | PAGE 2 |
| Cranking It Up | PAGE 3 |
| 56K Gets the OK | PAGE 3 |
| Interactive Cable Computing... | PAGE 3 |
| Internet Call Manager | PAGE 4 |
| New NBC Web Site... Video-On-Demand | PAGE 4 |
| Article "XXXXXXXX" | PAGE 5 |
The big news last week was about Project Abilene, the pilot project that would
boost Internet transmission speeds up to 1000 times. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-04/14/078l-041
498-idx.html). Already, net-worthies are grumbling that the high-speed prototype is
being rolled out first to research universities, and not to them.
Hey, people. I have been corresponding for the past month with a gentleman
from Calcutta who would commit high crimes to have the ordinary dial-up service we
experience, waits and all.
His name is O.P. Kharbanda, and he is, like me, a business writer, having
authored some 30 books on project management, disaster response, and other topics,
including What Made Gertie Gallop? Lessons from Project Failures, co-authored with
Jeffrey Pinto (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0471287342).
In fact, I would paste the label of management guru on him, except that the word
guru seems suddenly very provincial. But at 74, he is of an age to have accumulated
some wisdom. He signs his email Om - because that is his name.
Dr. Kharbanda's complaint is that he can't be a full player in the online revolution
because the infrastructure where he is won't let him.
My system is admittedly not the latest, he writes. I have a 486 PC with 16
megabytes of RAM, a 200-megabyte hard disk, CD-ROM, and 2400 baud modem. I run
DOS, though I can run Windows 3.1 as well. I connect to the Internet via pine (email)
and lynx (a text-based browser).
So when I invited Dr. Kharbanda to visit my web site, he really couldn't. Lynx, a
miracle four years ago, is a poor way to grapple with the multimedia offerings of today's
WWW. And the phone connections he relies on in Calcutta are poor. Many
disconnects, lots of line noise, and nowhere near enough fiber optic. It's not a tin can
on a string, but it's not a T1 line, either.
Though the middle class in India is rapidly discovering and delighting in the
Internet, the experience remains substandard. There is only one official ISP, the
overburdened, government-sponsored Videsh Sankar Nigam Ltd (http://pulse.webindia.com/1603980
8.html). Only four metro
areas (Calcutta, Chenai, Mumbai and New Delhi) have service, and so far only a few
thousand customers are enrolled at each. Without infrastructure, there's only so much
you can do.
Because communications are crummy, Dr. Kharbanda has been unable to police
his work the way authors in the U.S. do. When he finally was able to contact
Amazon.com, for instance, they had no clue who he was, despite having about 20 of
his books, most of them covered with the cobwebs of neglect, on their list. Even his
publishers, owing to the departure of editors and the acquisition of whole houses,
weren't quite sure who he was.
Anyway, I have decided to put Dr. Kharbanda's writing back on the map. Starting
today, he has a Web site, backboned onto mine, at http://www.skypoint.com/~mfinley/kharbanda.htm. I'm going to
see if Ican teach him how to send me a photo of himself via pine. If you're into project
management, give his page a look.
And on the subject of Net connections in developing nations, you must know
about Muhammad Yunus, a most remarkable man. Dr. Yunus is an economist who has
spent the last 20 years trying to lift Bangladesh up from poverty. First he created
Grameen Bank, a bank dedicated to making very small loans. Dr. Yunus's bank lends
business start-up sums as small as $15 to the poorest people in the world -- money to
buy a cow, work tools, or a hand loom.
He came up with the idea of loan groups. Everyone in the group is lent money,
with the understanding that if one of the group fails torepay, no group member can
borrow again. The system works - its 98% payback rate is vastly superior to Visa's or
American Express's.
Then Dr. Yunus spun off into telecommunications. He created a phone company,
putting cell phones into distant villages, sometimes just one phone per village, so no
one is entirely cut off from instant communication.
But his latest idea is the most marvelous. He discovered his country's railroads
have fiber optic cable buried under their tracks, so that the trains can communicate.
The cable is vastly underused. Yunus hopes to put this underused cable to work giving
his dirt-poor country overnight one of the world's most advanced high-bandwidth
Internet connections!
I learned about Dr. Yunus from one of our own management gurus, James F.
Moore (http://www.geopartners.com),
during a recent visit to Minnesota.
You can read a tribute to the career of Dr. Yunus at (http://www.wfpf.org/1994.html).
Each of these men is a hero to me. Dr. Kharbanda, for being eager to learn and
undertake big new projects at a goodly age, despite the disadvantages of bad
technology. And Dr. Yunus, for showing that the brightest visions can occur where least
expected.
The rest of you, complaining about your 56k modems stuck at 33.6k -
shaddup!
Co-author of Transcompetition: Moving beyond Competition and Collaboration,
Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://www.skypoint.com/~mfinley/.
Today's color inkjet printers are capable of remarkable output, rendering good
color images on plain paper and truly photo-like results on coated papers. But they
tend to do their work slowly, and they often don't have the good manners to tell you
they are running out of ink before you start printing.
A new generation of color inkjets is changing that, both by putting the jet into
inkjet and by practicing good etiquette. The Hewlett-Packard 2000C ($799) may be the
fastest color inkjet to date, printing full-color pages at up to five times the speed of
previous models, typically less than a page per minute. Black print speeds are roughly
4 to 8 pages per minute, similar to personal laser printers. The 2000C also employs a
new ink-delivery system that not only uses separate ink cartridges and individually
replaceable printheads, but embeds a memory chip into each printhead that tells your
PC when the ink is low. You can even replace ink cartridges in the middle of a
job.
Epson, meanwhile, has introduced a step-up version of its popular Stylus Color
800 printer. The new 850 model ($399) is both faster and more accurate than the
earlier iteration, with a smaller ink-droplet size. Like the HP 2000C, the Epson 850
comes in a network-ready version for offices. Epson has stretched, literally, its Stylus
Photo printer, too. The new six-color Stylus Photo EX ($499) can print panoramas up to
11.7 by 44 inches with banner paper, and it can print a 3- by 5-inch photo in about 90
seconds. The EX also has a separate black ink cartridge, making it a good candidate
for everyday printing. Both Epson models show ink levels onscreen.
At the same time, Canon and Lexmark are taking their impressive inkjet
technologies to new lows - in price. Canon's BJC-4400 ($199) renders color images at
an extremely respectable 7720 by 360 dots per inch, while BJC-5000 ($299) is four
times as fine at 1,440 by 720 dpi. Lexmark's new 5700 Color Jetprinter ($249) is the
latest to incorporate the company's 1,200 - by 1,200-dpi technology, and can print up 8
pages per minute in draft mode. -- Chris O'Malley
Even as PCs get cheaper, the speed of their microprocessors keeps right on
getting faster. And new chips from Intel, AMD, and IBM make it clear that trend will
continue.
By summer, Intel plans to be delivering two new, low-cost versions of its Pentium
II processor to PC makers. The first, code-named Covington, will be a 266MHz version
with no onboard memory, or cache, to help speed things along. It will be used mainly in
PCs costing less than $1,000. The second, code-named Mendocino, will run at
300MHz and will have some onboard cache for slightly faster performance. It's bound
for PCs costing $1,000 to $1,500.
AMD, meanwhile, is shipping a 266MHz version of its Pentium-compatible K6
chip, also intended for low-cost PCs. Its first customers include Compaq and IBM.
Cyrix, another maker of Pentium-class chips, says it has similar plans for faster,
cheaper chips.
The megahertz keep coming for Macintosh fans, too. IBM recently shipped a
275MHz version of its PowerPC 750 chip, and the company says it has prototypes of
the 750 that run at speeds as high as 480MHz, with the capability to push the PowerPC
to 1 gigahertz (about 1,000MHz) or more in the near future.
-- Suzanne Kantra Kirschner
After nearly two years of incompatible modems and tepid support by Internet
service providers, the battle of 56K is over. Well, unofficially.
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU)-a standards-setting group
whose pace has been known to make government agencies look speedy-recently gave
its blessing to a unified standard called V.90 for 56-kilobit-per-second modems. The
new standard, achieved in what the union calls record time (the first 56K modems
appeared in September 1996), marries 3Com's x2 and Rockwell's K56-flex schemes
after the two sides worked out their differences in December. Ever the tortoise, the ITU
will make V.90 official at its September meeting.
But since the technical aspects are now set, most modem vendors are selling
V.90 modems now. With a single standard, more Internet services are expected to offer
56K service, and consumers need not choose sides before buying a 56K modem. Many
x2 and K56flex modems can be upgraded to support V.90.
-- Chris O'Malley
ZDTV, a new 24-hour cable computing channel from Ziff-Davis, a publisher of
magazines and news devoted to computers and the Internet, went into business last
week in San Francisco.
With the launch of its new channel, Ziff-Davis promises to take the convergence
of computing and television places it's never been before. Over their computers via the
Internet, viewers will direct the movement of in-studio cameras, customize the
channel's MTV-style logo and call in to talk shows that will actually air their faces. But
for now, ZDTV is available on only a handful of cable systems.
Cincinnati Bell Telephone Co. says it has become the first U.S. company to offer
a service that helps people manage incoming phone calls while they are using the
same phone line to connect to the Internet.
The company began offering the Internet Call Manager service last week. The
service requires no special equipment and is delivered through software provided to
customers. Cincinnati Bell said it will charge $7 per month for residential customers and
$8 for businesses, with a $6.50 activation fee.
When a user is online and receives a phone call, the caller's name and phone
number appear on the PC screen. The person on the receiving end can either take the
call, transfer it to another phone or let the caller hear a message promising to return the
call later.
Video-on-demand -- that mythical ability to watch what you want when you want
-- is the Holy Grail for the entertainment industry and couch potatoes alike.
Time-crunched TV watchers want to be able to shift programming to their
schedules without the hassle of learning how to fire up the VCR properly. And they
want to be able to cross traditional TV boundaries.
In the future, entertainment fans want to be able to watch the new Janet Jackson
video, followed by the last three episodes of The Drew Carey Show and the highlights
of the Cleveland Indians game, if that suits their mood. If not, they may choose two
episodes of ER, followed by a James Taylor concert to calm them down.
And the entertainment industry? It's more than willing to oblige if you're more
than willing to pay.
For those who can't wait, the first step in video-on-demand is already here.
NBC has launched VideoSeeker (http://www.videoseeker.com), a Web site that
makes video clips from certain TV shows, music videos and entertainment news
programs available whenever visitors want to see them.
The site is also updated daily, so you can see the joke that Jay Leno or Conan
O'Brien made in their monologues that everyone at work is talking about. Or you may
be able to catch one of the big jokes from Friends.
"Now that we know the site is working and people are interested, we'll be adding
more and more material to it all the time,'' said NBC spokesman Robert
Silverman.
VideoSeeker also has archives of classic NBC material, like the first monologue
from Saturday Night Live or clips from last season's Frasier.
The site has already partnered with Launch, the CD-ROM magazine, to provide
music video clips and interviews, and with the syndicated TV show Access Hollywood
to provide entertainment news.
And through a partnership with Guthy-Renker, there are even clips from various
infomercials if you just can't get enough of the Cross Climber or the Rapid White tooth
enamel whitening system.
"We know that the use of video is mushrooming on the Internet,'' said Silverman.
``It just makes sense for us to get in on the ground floor."
Thanks to ever-increasing band width and faster Internet connections, sites like
Streamland (http://www.streamland.com), which concentrates on music video, and
Movies.com (http://www.movies.com), which focuses on movie trailers, are gaining a
following.
But VideoServe is the first site on the Internet to offer such a wide range of
regularly changing popular programming and will likely be monitored closely by its
competitors.
"We are aiming at the masses, not at the technophiles,'' said Silverman.
`In the coming months, the site will likely expand its programming -- perhaps to
news, with the help of MSNBC -- and begin selling more advertising on the site as its
traffic builds.
VideoSeeker will also try to establish itself as the first stop for finding video on
the Internet with its ``V-List,'' a growing list of other sites that provide clips to viewers.
Offering such outside links is a practice that many other media companies frown upon,
believing that it drives traffic away from their products.
However, NBC officials feel differently.
"This is not just a promotional vehicle for NBC," said Silverman. "If that's what
we intended, we would not have launched as a separate site. We would have put it on
NBC.com. Our goal is to be bigger than just NBC."
This bloodletting is a tonic for most companies, improving productivity, focus,
and efficiency. It shaves a company down what it does best - its core
competency.
But as more companies and industries reengineer themselves -- so far
manufacturing, retail, and distribution have shrunk the most -- there will be a lot fewer
people working and earning money, according to Rifkin.
Suddenly, businesses will find they have no market to sell to because almost
everyone's out of work. So an economy cheerfully ridding itself of workers is also
ridding itself of customers.
The world that this reengineering will create is one in which be a tiny portion of
fulfilled, but nervous Haves -- knowledge workers who cling to the remaining jobs in the
diminished marketplace -- will live and work in communities gated off from the billions
of miserable masses of Have-Nots poised on the brink of criminal violence.
Say with me: Way to go, computers.
But Rifkin says we can avert this fate if we switch our industrial system to a
30-hour work week. With a shorter week, more people can be employed, thus
remaining consumers. And with our new spare time, we can all contribute to the civil
sector that is society's best hope.The civil sector is all the unpaid work people do to
strengthen the communities they live in -- volunteering, mentoring, tutoring,
neighborhood cleanup, fraternal organizations, playing ball, playing the oboe.
Jeremy Rifkin believes that his vision of a civil society, in which people lend one
another a helping hand, powered by the human skills that no computer will ever
duplicate -- listening, caring, encouraging, teaching -- is our best hope against the
anarchic forces of unfettered capitalism and social disintegration.
Unfortunately, his plan requires paying workers who do 30 hoursof work at the
40-hour rate. Rifkin says this won't matter - most of us are only doing 30 hours of real
work anyway. If he's wrong, and the value of our work falls, while the price of it remains
high. It constitutes an effective 25% tax increase for all businesses, not just the obvious
handful we will enjoy soaking.
Rifkin's assumes that businesses facing this charge won't simply relocate
outside the U.S. -- or that Rifkin, or someone, will be able to talk Mexico and Iran and
Malaysia to likewise raise business taxes, and enforce payment.
That'll be hard. It will require a social power that does not now exist, and which,
if you squint, could be construed as mega-tyrranical.
The other flaw that I see is that there is a place that is already experimenting
with shorter work weeks -- the industrial nations of Europe. Workers in France and
Germany have long enjoyed exceptional benefits and paid time off. These systems
were implemented in the spirit of humane treatment and workers' rights. But far from
narrowing the gap between Haves and Have-Nots, the European approach has
widened it, creating a generation of unemployed young people in thosecountries.
By contrast, the U.S., though it often seems hard-hearted compared to France
and Germany, what with all its downsizing and layoffs, enjoys unprecedented levels of
employment. If downsizing causes global unemployment, why is our society
experiencing such high levels of employment? Rifkin says it's because statistics lie.
Another possibility is that he is wrong.
On the other hand, he is right on when he says that computers are altering the
concept of work, and that we will have to rethink our system. If you have the talent and
interest, a PC can be your ticket to participation in today's information economy. I think
it would be great if the world caught a break, and found more time to smell the roses,
and bounce our own babies on our knees.
But looking at the world right now, and not with Jeremy Rifkin's high-powered
binoculars on the future, computers and the Net appear to be making us work harder,
and longer.But keep talking, Mr. Rifkin. Except for the taxes and steel boot, it sounds
great.
Michael Finley, co-author of Transcompetition: Moving BeyondCompetition and
Collaboration, has a free gift for visitors tohttp://www.skypoint.com/~mfinley.