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Surfing Silicon Valley
By San Francisco Bureau Chief Greg Lefevre
February 26, 1998
Web posted at: 11:25 AM EST (1125 GMT)
We'll start with a rave:
Computer prices are falling away faster than a California beachfront during El Nino. If you're looking for a real Mac or a genuine PC, you can get either for under a grand. Great news unless you're trading your old machine in. If you've got an old 486 or 68040, keep it. Don't risk the heartache of being offered nil or nearly nil in trade. Make it your spare unit (the Mac will probably still work). Don't even think about giving it to your kid. If it's not G3 or P2, forget it, pop.
Mini-rave:
A program called Surf Express will speed up your Internet travel. For those of us stuck behind the 28.8-ball at home, it's a cool convenience. It caches the pages you frequently visit, and when you go back it compares the new stuff with old. Anything that's not new gets loaded from your hard drive and only the new stuff has to come down the pipe. Connectix advertises a huge speed up. My experience has been modest to good. It's a bargain at 30 bucks and a breeze to install.
Wave of the future:
Maybe you want to network your home computers. Yes, that's plural. Intel's now in the home networking game. About 14 million of us have more than one computer at home, Intel says, and the "inside" folks want to sell us the networking hardware. "For the family that has everything, a means to network it." Remember Christmas past when kids were nuts about Tickle Me Elmo? Next: "Dear Santa, please send me a server like the Vila family down the street."
E-mail:
We get e-mail, we get lots and lots of e-mail. Following up on our network story on the eternal life of e-mail, we left you with the two commandments passed to us by e-mail experts.
* Don't believe e-mail is private. * Don't believe the delete key really deletes e-mail.
New commandments are pouring in over the transom. Bob Moore from California writes to "Beware the reply-all button." Moore calls this feature "the work of the devil." Left active, the feature will send your remarks to everyone on the list. If your notes are critical or confidential you might be in trouble. But in any case your note clogs an already busy system with needless traffic.
Another comment warned us that e-mail "deleted" from the system really only has its "label" removed; that the text is still in the system and can be retrieved by programs like Norton Utilities. Good news or bad depending on whether you wanted that e-traffic recovered.
Mr. Gates goes to Washington:
He's been invited to share his vision of the future with Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch. Gates maintains he's just another competitor in a very competitive industry. In one corner of the market he's right. While it is true that it's virtually impossible to fire up a computer without at least a few of Mr. Bill's code lines, his software grip is not airtight.
Associated Press reports that in one software segment Intuit pummels Microsoft with 82 percent of the $225 million personal finance market. Gates may have seized control of your computer, but your money may still be your own. AP says Microsoft financial software accounts for less than 3 percent of the market.
Surf on....
Watch Science & Technology Week on CNN for more sci-tech stories.
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