Hype List
Deflating this month's overblown memes.
LMDS
Meme on the rise
Like lemmings that keep discovering a new cliff from which to throw themselves, wireless companies continue their relentless pursuit of new spectrum. The next frequency band up for auction by the FCC has been reserved for local multipoint distribution services, aka LMDS. You'll hear a lot of bragging about how LMDS, which can handle 50 Mbps of wireless data with an antenna the size of a mini pizza, is going to be the ADSL slayer and cable-modem killer. But watch for the inevitable hangover when successful bidders realize that the only customers who can afford 50-Mbps Net connections already have fiber and don't need the headache of wireless.
Online-Gambling Prohibition
Meme on the rise
Washington bureaucrats may have finally hit upon an Internet activity they can successfully regulate. While attempts to ban online pornography and tax electronic commerce have withered in the face of opposition from Silicon Valley lobbyists, Congress appears to strongly support a bill by Senator Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) that would prohibit online gambling. After all, casino owners and slot-machine manufacturers - unlike the entrepreneurs behind offshore gaming sites - are both taxpayers and voters. Most netizens, meanwhile, are too busy watching their online stock tickers and hedging their bets on the market to oppose the proposed restrictions.
Butoh
Meme on the rise
The US may be the leader in exporting lowbrow culture, but Americans are also the biggest suckers when it comes to importing the avant-garde. Whether we're talking deconstructionism or 12-tone symphonies, the self-styled cultural élite will embrace any foreign artistic movement, no matter how marginal. Take the growing stateside popularity of Butoh. This dance genre, created in postwar Japan, involves a lot of grimacing and slow, portentous movements. Sure, Baywatch and McDonald's are bad, but this is taking vengeance to an extreme.
NUMA
Meme on the rise
The quest for a massively parallel processing computer that scales is the high tech equivalent of the hunt for a perpetual-motion machine: both seem possible at first blush, but every proposed solution ends up failing. The current MPP contender goes by the sobriquet Non-Uniform Memory Access. This software technology tricks multiple processors into thinking they all share the same memory bank, when actually each has its own local memory. A clever illusion - unfortunately, the computer's performance is based on the reality of distributed memory, not illusion.
Newsstand Gender Swap
Meme in decline
A gender swap seems to be sweeping US newsstands. Steeped in sassy pop feminism, a slew of glossy young women's magazines have begun to shove aside traditional competitors like Mademoiselle. The kickoff issue of Jane, for example, asks a neurosurgeon for her read on a typical fashion show. Then there's Sports Illustrated Women/Sport et alia, aimed at athletic-minded females. Meanwhile, established men's journals such as Esquire have started sprouting cover lines like "7 ways to better abs" and "12 great dates." Though this superficial reversal might seem to be an encouraging sign of flexible gender roles in the '90s, the real driver isn't dissolving stereotypes but desperate editors willing to try anything to pump up their shrinking circulations.
