Original Sender : DasaMan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------- Forwarded by DasaMan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ---------------- Original message follows ---------------- From: Dan Rosenbaum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Dimas Sasongko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 17:44:34 -0700 Subject: Win Letter 11-05-99 -- Winmag.com's WIN LETTER November 5, 1999 -- #61 By Dan Rosenbaum Well, dip me in wax and peel it off slow! That was a great welcome you all gave me last week -- even the ones who so quickly mentioned the homonym typo that my poor over-burdened editor inserted at the last minute. Thanks, too, to those who pointed out that the correct price of the Sony Aibo robopooch is $2,500, not the absurdly low figure I mistakenly gave. And *extra special* thanks to everyone who ratted me out to my wife. Now I have to drywall and paint the closet and try to persuade my new best friend Regis to part with some cash. Any bets on how many Aibos wind up on eBay, put up for sale by new owners who are shocked to have won the drawing? My new best friend Regis: http://abc.go.com/primetime/millionaire/mill_home.html Aibos on eBay: http://search.ebay.com/cgi-bin/texis/ebay/results.html?query=aibo&ht=1&maxRecordsReturned=300&maxRecordsPerPage=50&SortProperty=MetaEndSort ----------------------------------------------------------------- THROWING THE BOOK If there is any company that's getting the night sweats from the Internet revolution, it must be the industrial printer R.R. Donnelley. A good chunk of its business is printing things like magazines, books and phone books -- the exact stuff that the Net is so good at putting out of business. So perhaps it was inevitable that Donnelley has allied with Microsoft to, well, it's not quite clear what. All Donnelley said that that it would make "tens of thousands" of book titles available to users of Microsoft Reader software. Never heard of Reader? Oh. Neither had I, actually. Microsoft announced it in August, with press release endorsements from publishers and Len Riggio, chairman of Barnes & Noble. It won't ship until "early next year," (when the company may be busy with a small operating system upgrade you may have heard about). Reader apparently will compete with the well-entrenched Adobe Acrobat. R.R. Donnelley: http://www.rrdonnelley.com R.R. Donnelley allied with Microsoft? http://www.rrdonnelley.com/news/ Barnes & Noble: http://www.bn.com ----------------------------------------------------------------- BLOOD IN THE WATER Remember last week's item about Toshiba's paying a gigabuck to settle a class-action lawsuit about bad microcode in floppy drives? Well, I'm shocked, *shocked*, to report that the same lawyers have filed a similar suit against Compaq, Hewlett- Packard, Packard Bell (which announced coincidentally this week that they are getting out of the PC biz ) and emachines. It's starting to make Steve Jobs, who kept the floppy drive out of the iMac and NeXt boxes, look even smarter... Packard Bell getting out of PC biz: http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/reuters/REU19991103S0001 ----------------------------------------------------------------- THE NEW OLYMPIC MOTTO "Citius, Altius, Fortius" -- "Faster, Higher, Stronger." The words are familiar to all couch potatoes with images of Franz Klammer and Kerri Strug burned into their brainpans. Now comes word that Gateway has agreed to be the "official computer sponsor" of the Salt Lake City Winter Games in 2002. So maybe the new motto will be something closer to the hearts of the PC industry: "Faster, Better, Cheaper, Smaller." Salt Lake City Winter Games: http://www.slc2002.org Figure out the Latin yourself: http://dictionaries.travlang.com/EnglishLatin/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- AND YOU THOUGHT FINDING A RADIO STATION WAS HARD Reader Ed Guenther came up with this one. It's a car stereo that stores and plays MP3s. I haven't tested it, but I love the idea. Empeg claims to be able to save 7,000 tracks of music -- 4 GB -- downloaded from a laptop through either a serial of USB port. The unit, which is removable, is the size of a conventional car stereo and has an FM tuner. It comes with software that lets you organize your music (presumably not while driving, but who knows?). And yes, it's running Linux on a StrongARM processor -- the same as in 3Com's Palm. It costs about $1,000, and it's shipping now. Thanks, Ed! Empeg: http://www2.empeg.com/main.html ----------------------------------------------------------------- LETTER OF THE WEEK I got what may or may not have been a quick note from Bill Bull this week, correcting me about the Aibo's price. The meat of his note was 90 words (9 lines) long. His SIG, however, ran 166 lines long. More than 1,700 words. It consisted of words that were apparently designed to trigger national-security e-mail snoops. Way to save bandwidth, Bill! ----------------------------------------------------------------- ANOTHER SIGN THE INTERNET ECONOMY IS OUT OF CONTROL I recently ordered a headset from the excellent source for all things telephonic, Hello Direct. It was shipped out of a warehouse in San Jose, CA, the heart of Silicon Valley. The street address: Rue Ferrari. Oh, please... Hello-Direct: http://www.hello-direct.com ----------------------------------------------------------------- THE WIN LETTER NUMBERS $1 billion -- The total amount of money Packard Bell lost in the PC business in 1997 and 1998. $1 million -- The amount donated by the Markle Foundation [http://www.markle.org] to improve "Internet governance," including ... $200,000 -- for public outreach by ICANN [http://www.icann.org"], the "governing body" of the Internet. 14 months -- Federal jail time to be served by Robert Guest, of Blue Jay, CA, for cashing about $37,000 in checks from winning eBay bidders but not delivering the goods. ----------------------------------------------------------------- COOL TRIVIA ANSWER Last week, I asked about the company that made the vintage laptop computer called the Workslate, and which built the ill-fated but much beloved Unix PC for AT&T. More than a few people guessed Olivetti, which did have a joint venture with AT&T but only for DOS machines. Dennis Jensen was first in with the correct answer: Convergent Technologies, which I'm told was bought by Unisys in 1988. Some of the responses showed a truly terrifying grasp of computer necrology. Really, people -- try to (get out?) and see the Sun [http://windows.engin.umich.edu/sparc/] every so often, OK? Workslate: http://www.geocities.com/~compcloset/ConvergentTechnologiesWorkSlate.htm Unix PC http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/7533/7300.html ----------------------------------------------------------------- COOL TRIVIA QUESTION You all proved so adept at last week's dead computer question, here's another: Mattel used to make a hand-held programmable computer. One of the more popular apps was a horse-race handicapper. What was the computer called? Let me know: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]! ----------------------------------------------------------------- Having fun yet? Got something you'd like to tell me? Drop me a line -- mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- and see you next week. dan ----------------------------------------------------------------- Check out Back Issues of Win Letter: http://www.winmag.com/people/melgan/winletter/default.htm If you like this newsletter, please share it with friends and co-workers, and encourage them to sign up! It's free. To subscribe to, or unsubscribe from, Win Letter: * Use your browser to visit our Newsletter Subscription Center: http://www.winmag.com/listserv/ * Scroll down to the Win98 Insider section. * Click "Choose an option," and select Subscribe or Unsubscribe. * Click to select the HTML version if your e-mail program supports HTML. * Scroll to the top of the page, and type your e-mail address in the "E-mail" field. * Click the Submit button below your e-mail address. That's it. Or you can simply respond to this message and type Subscribe or Unsubscribe in the subject line. (Note: When you respond to this newsletter in your e-mail program, the message goes to our newsletter distributor, not to me.) To change your e-mail address for an existing subscription, use our fast Newsletter Change of Address form: http://www.winmag.com/listserv/changeaddress If you have comments about this newsletter or suggestions for future issues, tell me about it. mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]. I'd be glad to hear from you. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1999 CMP Media Inc. 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