Conventional wisdom about gender roles took a hit in the cyberchops when the Pew Internet & American Life poll took a look at on-line shopping. Go figure this:
While men and women now are equal in Internet usage, Pew found that 80 percent of men have shopped on-line, while only 67 percent of women have done so.
Go figure this, too: 37 percent of women with Net access have played some form of on-line game, while only 32 percent of guys have done so. Pass the pink and blue crayons.
ANY POINT?
BATHTUB NETWORKING
Any room in your house can be the library thanks to ultraslick technology from Intel Corp. that adds wireless receivers to the company’s AnyPoint home networking. You buy a $120 base station to plug into the USB port on your desktop with Internet access.
Next, plug a $130 PC Card receiver into your laptop and you’ll be able to network with the laptop and use its Internet connection anywhere you care to sit down, chill out and log on.
The big deal here, say Intel executives, is that the Windows world finally has something to match the exquisite AirPort radio networking system that is sweeping the Macintosh world.
RIVER BLUES
ROOMS THAT BOOM
The Loews Hotel chain has hitched its worldwide wagon to the star known as the House of Blues, operating the House of Blues Hotel at 333 N. Dearborn St. across from the funky/costly rock ‘n’ roll nightclub at Marina City.
Rent a room for $150 or a suite for $1,500, and the hotel promoters promise high-tech heaven with a bedside printer/fax/copier, VCR, CD player, direct Internet access, two-line telephone and Nintendo.
One wonders if they’ll charge extra to shut this stuff off so a guest can get some sleep.
BARNEY GOOGLE
WATCH YOUR BACK
It’s almost embarrassing to log on to the hottest new search engine on the Internet, www.raging
.com, because it’s a blatant copy of the hottest old search engine on the Internet, www.google.com.
Let Google executives gripe as they should, the rest of us gain big time with a new tool. Raging.com, operated by the creators of the AltaVista.com search portal, matches google.com’s amazing speed and it covers 350 million Web pages that are indexed and checked hourly for dead links.
MAC ATTACK
APPLE TURNOVER
It may be good news or it may be bad news, but either way America Online now will give Macintosh owners the same AOL 5.0 software that was met with love/hate in the Windows world.
All we can do is wait to see if Mac users decide, as so many Windows users have, that 5.0’s Internet settings take over their machines when they install it.
