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Last updated: Monday, August 11, 1997, 8:30 a.m.
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Compaq is cutting prices on its Armada 1500 and Armada 4100 notebook personal computer models by as much as 25 percent.
Digital Equipment Corp. may be trying to sell its computer network equipment division, the Wall Street Journal reports this morning. Apparently no buyer is in sight, but annual revenues for the division are at $600 million. DEC, which is in a trimming down mode, is also selling its printer business.
Hacker ambition: We're not just talking about the upwardly mobile DefCon, but there have been ambitious attempts to crack the New York Transit Authority system. Hackers are trying to bust the "irritatingly secure Metrocard" which pays the fare on the Big Apple's buses and subways.
A sucker's born every second: Especially when it comes to spoof e-mail. Those of us who throw away junk mail without opening it are still susceptible to malicious spoofing, however, and e-mail programs make it all too easy. A related question is: Can you trust the web?
How to keep up: General Motors and the Army National Guard are experimenting with a wearable, multimedia, voice-controlled computer that offers on-the-spot training for mechanics.
How long a believer? Steve Jobs sold $22 million in Apple stock in June, the enigmatic guy admitted to Time magazine. ``Yes, I pretty much had given up hope that the Apple board was going to do anything,'' Jobs said in the magazine's Aug. 18 issue. ``I didn't think the stock was going up.'' That pessimism cost him about $16 million.
Despite recent setbacks, Netscape knows who's number one in the browser market and it isn't that ambitious giant up north.
But if you use Internet Explorer, you might want to turn off Java. That's because a developer in Colorado has discovered a bug that lets a Java applet open a network connection to a server other than the one it came from. It doesn't affect MS IE users who are on the Mac platform, and it may affect only images, although the bug-discoverer says that's not true.
AMD's Cyrix chip scored big as IBM agrees to adopt the 6x86 chip in its Aptiva E40 desktop.
And more hacker news: Dutch hackers set up what they say is the world's largest outdoor non-military Ethernet. Why? They did it because they could. (New York Times story: Registration required.)
A few months ago we had a running item dubbed "search engine wars." Time to revive it; Microsoft is about to challenge AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos and all the rest, a columnist over at ZDNet predicts.
Browsing with DOS: The web lives on little handhelds, on tiny screens on phones, so what's left? Surfing with DOS, believe it or not.
Tracking clicks: America Online plans to track user clicks in order to compile mailing lists for third-parties, privacy advocates say. "This is potentially a far more serious privacy violation than the sale of phone numbers," said David Sobel, counsel to the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Have you had it with fat browser files? You're not alone.
UNIX is still strong, despite the hoopla about Windows NT. Revenue in the Unix application server market could actually double by 2000, a study surmises.
Do you like your Java straight? Support is waning for Microsoft's Java class libraries, another report has it.
Where's your name? The top 25 Silicon Valley power brokers are named by Business Week; the magazine also concludes that despite all the mini-Silicon Valleys springing up around the world, the geographic Valley's dominance is not likely to be eclipsed any time soon, where even secretaries are millionaires. Right. Just try to cadge a fiver for lunch...
By Patricia Sullivan, online editor
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The Internet is only a small part of what I think is a much bigger revolution. That revolution is the end of mass media as an inherently broken concept that has terrorized the planet for 39 to 40 years.
-- Rop Gonggrjp, co-founder of Hacking in Progress
In Mercury Center today:
Stock holding and venture capital
Fighting it out, robot to robot
Alternative office designs
Dan Gillmor: Tax breaks
Chris Nolan: It's who you know
Upwardly mobile DefCon
Costa Rica as high-tech paradise
The two faces of Steve Jobs
The nerd factor in education
Mike Cassidy: Handhelds are everywhere
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