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Last updated: Monday, August 25, 1997, 8:30 a.m.
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Shop 'til you drop: Have you tried shopping for a vehicle on the web? Here's your chance; auto dealers are figuring out how to put their inventories online while providing those handy "configurators" so you can custom-design your own dream vehicle.
Just call 'em high-tech Frisbees: A crackdown on illegal DVD production in China's Guangdong province ended when 2.5 million pirated audio and video products were seized.
Another reason to visit your public library: About 12 percent of the Net users in the U.S. and Canada sign on from public places like libraries, community centers, churches, stores, cafes, museums, hospitals, hotels or airports, new research shows. That's up five percent in a year.
We don't know, and you won't either: C|Net has a set of stories looking at the Justice Department investigation into Microsoft. Here's the nut of it: "What emerges is a case shrouded in political pressures, complex legal questions, and perplexing technologies. Where the Justice Department goes from here is equally unclear." (Thanks; glad you cleared that up for us.)
Hello, Justice? Why is it so easy for Microsoft to attract development partners? Take a look at the Net's tilted playing field.
Yahoo's stock price has taken off, but what about profits? It's getting closer, as ad sales and visitations are up.
VISA is trying out a smart card built with public-key encryption chips from Philips Semiconductors. It will be the first high-volume test ever, to be conducted in the U.K. and Japan.
Open standards, open doors: It's always bad practice for journalists to refuse to be as open as we demand of others. Barring the press from the Internet Content Coalition meeting this week, where content providers talk about a plan to "rate" news on the web, sounds like the kind of response the press usually does not tolerate.
Rent or buy: Businesses that want fast Net access, but don't want to pay for unused bandwidth have an option: metered pricing for dedicated access. The up front cost is $3,000, then it's $100 per month plus 2 cents per megabit of transferred data. There is a monthly cap of $1,895.
Crunch those numbers, Big Blue: IBM rolls out a new database, its most significant new release in 15 years, the company says. The DB2 Universal Database effectively merges the code of DB2 Common Server and DB2 Parallel Edition, and has a data capacity of up to 64 terabytes.
Dummy chips on smart boards: Unscrupulous vendors are popping fake memory modules into boards, taking the cash and leaving unwary customers none the wiser. Caveat emptor.
Little crashes lead to big crashes: So says a story featuring the author of "Trapped in the Net." He means there's less wiggle room for error. So cut each other a bit of slack, today, OK?
By Patricia Sullivan, online editor
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The faster you can communicate, the more rapidly
you can get a response, but the more rapid the expectation for turnaround time becomes. So in the end, in some funny way, you haven't
bought yourself more time but less time.
-- Author Gene Rochlin
In Mercury Center today:
The House of Frys
In pursuit of the monster chip
Dan Gillmor: We control eroding privacy standards
Q&A with Netscape's CEO
New Peninsula area code leaves some out of synch
Mike Cassidy: Don't call it junk
Communicator 4.02; Not your father's web browser
Mike Langberg: Forget push at home
David Plotnikoff: When to use FedEx instead of e-mail
The murder at NEC
The latest stock and market information in Mercury Center's stock page.