Schaumburg-based Motorola Inc. joined MTV last week to offer Chicago-area teens brightly colored plastic MTV pagers that work like other pagers except they also beep occasionally after school with an 800 number for the latest MTV programming notes.
While the media giants were urging kids to buy the candy-colored nag boxes, Chicago schools chief Paul Vallas was ordering a sweep of Foreman High School on the Northwest side where 70 students were arrested (not expelled, arrested) because it is against Chicago city law to take a pager onto public school property.
Forget my MTV, I want my attorney.
YOU’VE GOT E-MAUL
INFOGLUT.COM
“Send me a FedEx and page me when you do so I can fax back my e-mail address because my cell-phone died.” That kind of lifestyle, says a new study by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, is typical for the average Illinoisan with an e-mail account.
The study had 60 community leaders in Champaign County tote about an electronic diary for a week and record every communication they encountered–Fax, FedEx, phone call etc. E-mail users clicked a dismaying 392 times per week while non-wired folk registered a busy but sane 247.
Both groups got about the same amount of work done for the week, leading the study’s director, Alaina Kanfer, to conclude, “We may begin to feel that we are doing more work without actually getting more done.”
WAR GAMES
SLAY BELLS
If you’re adding a killer multimedia PC this holiday and want to see your new box at its romping, stomping, heavy metal screeching ultimate, grab Activision’s hot new Quake II, the stunning $50 sequel to America’s all-time shoot’em up time-waster.
Run on a PC with the new 3D accelerator cards, Quake II is a stunner in stereo virtual reality chaos even if you are dismayed–as you should be–by the horrid violence and unforgiving ruthlessness demanded of players.
WAR GAMES II
SIMULATE THIS!
America may be beating its thermonuclear swords into plutonium plowshares, but old urges die hard as became sadly obvious last week when NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory distributed results of a computer game the Pentagon’s propeller heads had conducted Nov. 20 in San Jose, Calif., that turned out to be the largest military simulation in history.
Hundreds of computer screens in the cavernous San Jose Convention Center simulated no fewer than 66,249 tanks, trucks and vehicles in desert warfare on terrain modeled on Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
The Blue forces creamed the Red forces, but NASA didn’t say whether the Blue were me and you or Saddam’s bad guys.
