With perfectly good portable CD music players moving at well under $100, a recent study by the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association made the puzzling discovery that a whopping 71 percent of multimedia PC owners now use the built-in CD-ROM drives designed to run software to play their music CDs instead.
We are, in essence, replacing our $100 music boxes with $2,000 computers. Is technology great or what?
OLD WINE, NEW BOTTLE
YOU’VE GOT TRIPE
It’s the best of ideas and the worst of ideas. Check it out at www.idea-bank.com, a huge Web site dedicated to every cliche, every hackneyed quote, every stale joke, every lame factoid that a rubber chicken circuit orator could ever want to fill out a speech.
Tom Peters wannabes get access to no fewer than 1,500 books of quotations, a compendium of tens of thousands of clean jokes and other Toastmaster trivia along with advice about speech writing, delivery and the rest. While the full site requires a steep $250 annual fee there is a fat file of free samples well worth a look.
NEW INK, OLD BOTTLE
A PRINTING HEAD CASE?
File it under reinventing the wheel. America’s premier computer printer maker, Hewlett-Packard Co., is rushing to market with a printer called the 2000C which, the company boasts “is HP’s first desktop printer to use separate print heads and ink supplies!” Sound familiar?
How about a typewriter key hitting a ribbon?
BINARY BOOGIE NIGHTS
HAND ME SOME PORN, NORM
A classic good news/bad news tale:
Good news: Sony says it now is shipping DV Video Walkman, an insanely great hand-held device with a 5 1/2-inch pop-up color screen that will play full-length Digital Video Disc movies as you go about the daily rounds of commuting and heel-cooling.
Bad news: Suggested retail price is $2,000.
Worse News: New Line Home Video has released its first movies suitable for viewing on devices such as the Sony led by Boogie Nights, the hard core big screen look at porno movie makers.
DANIEL WEBSTER DIGITAL DEVIL
YOU’VE GOT WORDS
World Wide Word shovelers are crowing about the arrival of something Milton Friedman always said wasn’t possible, the proverbial free lunch. In this case a really good and fast free dictionary at www.m-w.com/dictionary. Merriam-Webster Inc. touts the site as a gem because it offers a first glimpse of words entering the language via Internet culture such as Web browser, chat room, netiquette and geek space. But the real gem is the huge reference work that Daniel Webster brought to the Gutenberg era.
