Before the couch potato there was the lounge lizard, and the ruling reptile was Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, now 72. A visibly slowed-down Hefner says he’ll conduct his 1997 New Years’ Eve party on the Web.
The sultan of smut, whose mag dates back to 1953, hasn’t lost his capitalist touch. He’s charging $7 to join the magazine’s site at cyber.playboy.com for the pleasure of watching Hef and his guests cavort to the ho hum harmony of Ray Anthony’s orchestra via tinny Real Audio/Video Net cast and gawk at postage-stamp-sized playmates and movie stars.
CUBE SPACE
BOSS BUSTER
From the unlikely birthplace of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, comes a brilliant idea they never thought of in Silicon Valley. Cyber Eyes is a small plastic wide-angle mirror that you paste to the side of your monitor screen like the ones stuck onto automobile rearview mirrors.
Once installed, a user can click away at solitaire, Quake or even some real work, content in the knowledge that nobody will sneak up from behind.
The literature boasts that this $4.99 piece of hardware is compatible with PCs, Macs and motorcycles alike.
It fails to add one important warning though. “Bosses in mirror are closer than they appear.”
SOFTWARE
INFORMATION AGE?
So Christmas came and went and we bought the software we’re going to be looking at for the next several months. So what does the latest PC Data survey of all business/education/reference/entertainment software purchases show we’re buying to run on the hugely powerful, multimedia Web-surfing machines designed to empower us all?
No. 1: Riven: The Sequel to Myst, a shoot-’em-up that uses swords instead of guns. No. 2: Microsoft Flight Simulator, which starts you out flying a 737 away from Meigs without landing instructions. No. 3: Barbie Magic Hair Styler, which says it all.
MAINFRAMES
CYBERSCARE
The breathless press release from Cap Gemini, a $3.4 billion-per-year computer consulting company, warns that the firm’s latest survey of corporate computer bigwigs found that only one of five major companies has invested major amounts of money to “fix the Millennium Bug,” the well-known problem looming when the calendar turns from 1999 to 2000, creating huge potential for error in computers that note years with just two digits.
The survey of Information Technology pros shows that American computer experts are “disturbingly behind schedule in dealing with the Year 2000,” warned Cap Gemini, a major seller of Millennium Bug solutions
Maybe. And maybe the experts are starting to smell a bit of self-serving hype from outfits like Cap Gemini.
