on Ricci Green, the public square on Ricci Street

Number 3
November 7, 1999

ripples and quakes
Read It in Bed | New Systems Won't Read Old Data

feature
Pearl Diving

departments
What's New? | Editor's Choice | Tips and Tricks | Tutorials
Traffic Report | Look Who's Talking | Endquote
subscribe | unsubscribe
archives
1 | 2

Ripples and Quakes

Driving Forces

You Could Read It in Bed

IBM's new flexible transistors combine organic and inorganic materials. The displays made from the transistors self-assemble by solidifying from a liquid at low temperatures. The combination of materials lowers production costs and increases performance. The material can then be embedded in or even sprayed on curved surfaces or flexible materials, creating the potential for foldable electronic newspapers.

Restraining Forces

New Systems Won't Read Old Data

It's bad enough that most books we own are made with acidic paper that is literally (but very slowly) burning up and won't last much beyond our lifetimes. Now it turns out that digitized data in proprietary formats, for instance that first novel you wrote on an ancient word processor, may not be readable in the very near future.

Feature

Pearl Diving

Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;
He who would search for pearls must dive below.
John Dryden

The Internet is the world's biggest library. The Web has more than 800 million static pages. Great, but how do you find anything? After you find it, how do you tell whether it's any good?

First, you have to find it. Popular search engines are a good place to start. Unfortunately, they try to be all things to all people and end up covering well less than a third of the Web. After you've tried them, you may have to develop more strategies.

Many people turn to specialized search engines and commercial directories like Yahoo. Or they find hubs where others have done the searching already and annotated their links. Finally the Usenet newsgroup archives and FAQs are searchable repositories of information and experts' email addresses. You'll find details in Ricci Street's CyberSea neighborhood.

learn more

Danny Sullivan runs Search Engine Watch, the best hub for information on search engines. Or maybe you just need a good tutorial on searching the Internet.

what do you think?

What are your Web searching experiences like? Frustrating because you can't find something? Overwhelming because you find too much? TALK to others about it on the Search Tips forum.

Departments

What's New?

MBA 600 projects

During the last week of October, the five MBA 600 teams reported on their research into enterprise resource planning as well as the retail, travel, and music industries making the transition from bricks to click. View their PowerPoint slides and web pages.

Editor's Choice

The future of searching

Plumb Design has made a tool called Thinkmap to animate data, creating stunning interactive displays. For example, they have a thesaurus that will let you explore sense relationships within the English language. By clicking on a floating word, you can follow a thread of meaning, creating a spatial map of linguistic associations. Can you imagine Yahoo's directory coming to you in this animated form?

Tips and Tricks

The skeleton (key) is out of the closet

Some Norwegian computer programmers recently developed DeCSS, the latest rage in a long line of software that can break the Content Scrambling System (CSS) encryption used to protect DVD-formatted movies. Using DeCSS, downloadable for free on the Internet, you can copy a DVD movie onto your computer's hard drive. Is this piracy?

Tutorials

Everything you always wanted to know about ...

E-commerce, by Kevin Hakman. How to generate a realistic e-business plan, create a site design, deal with things like credit cards, tax, shipping, and security, and decide whether you should build, buy, or rent.

Traffic Report

October 1999

October use of RicciStreet.net, its parent site toLearn.net, and its affiliate sites ClearLightStudio.com and Little-Lavatelli.com rose strongly compared to September. As you can see on the table and graphs available on Ricci Green, page hits increased by more than ten percent. Visitors increased by fifty percent.

Four countries appeared for the first time in the October server logs: Oman, Peru, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria

Look Who's Talking

Shadow

... in the MAT114 Questions forum's Follow-up question thread. Shadow writes:

"I don't understand how logical procedures can prove a mathematical theory when logic and math are two different things."

John Donovan has a provocative reply. Join the conversation.

Endquote

How bad is it for Microsoft?

According to Declan McCullagh in Wired (my emphasis),

It's not surprising that [Judge Thomas Penfield] Jackson sides with the government's nefarious view of Gates as online robber baron, rather than Microsoft's characterization of him as an executive involved in normal hard-nosed business relationships.

After all, on every point that matters, Jackson has agreed with the Justice Department and the state attorneys general. His factual findings in this case are so anti-Microsoft that it's difficult to overemphasize how badly the company has lost the first round.

Administrivia

The Ricci Street Gazette is also available in an email version delivered right to your mailbox but only with your permission. To subscribe, send an email to

RicciStreetGazette-subscribe@topica.com

to unsubscribe, send an email to

RicciStreetGazette-unsubscribe@topica.com

or visit the Gazette's registration page at Topica, its terrific host.

Archives, such as they are after only one issue.

Questions, comments, story tips? Write to the editor.