__ Dinaverse __
Poor Anne. In the new game Trespasser, she finds herself marooned on a familiar Lost World, forced to traverse jungles and mountains to escape hungry dinosaurs. Featuring AI that was developed to determine each animal's traits - including proclivity for fight or flight, sensitivity to pain, and curiosity - the title appears to be the most promising Jurassic Park spin-off to date.
__ The Floppy Lives __
Ever since SyJets and Zips started pumping megabytes of data to removable disks, the floppy's market position has seemed a little precarious. No longer. Sony and Fujifilm have developed the HiFD floppy system, which reads and writes to a new breed of 200-Mbyte, 3.5-inch disks and is backward-compatible with current-generation floppies.
__ Mini Capture __
As any Comdex attendee can attest, swapping business cards can be a wallet-busting annoyance. DynaFirm thinks it has the answer. The company's new product, CardJet, is a portable business-card reader that scans up to 200 cards at a time and dumps the data directly into a PalmPilot.
__ Radical Management __
The computer industry as a whole, Peter Drucker once told Wired, has never made a dime. In the new book The World According to Peter Drucker, Jack Beatty profiles the intellectual contrarian who invented management theory, chronicled the birth of the knowledge worker, and once advised Yogi Berra on the baseball manager's problem with "whores."
__ Cookie Crumbler __
When you register at a Web site, you often cough up a lot more than your username and password. Cookies suck information from your hard drive. And lists of email addresses are often bought and sold, exposing site members to spam purveyors.
These intrusions have gotten so bad that Net-savvy surfers make up fake identities every time they log on to a new site. Now, Lucent's Personalized Web Assistant (lpwa.com:8000/) does the deception for you. When a site asks for username, password, or email address, enter Backslash-U, Backslash-P, or Backslash-@, and an LPWA proxy submits aliases for all of your personal data. The software stores neither your real nor your computed identities, and it erases all of the personal information your browser sends to a Web site by default. Because Lucent's product automatically generates the fake identities, you need remember only one universal password.
What's more, the software conceals aliases with cryptography, so snoopers can't learn information about you. And email sent to an LPWA-generated address is forwarded by a remailer to your real account. Thus, if spammers snag one of your alias addresses, you can terminate it on the fly.
__ Beyond Monochrome __
When Atari débuted Battlezone back in 1980, its now kitschy wireframe interface introduced consumers to a revolutionary gaming advance: 3-D graphics. Today, Activision is set to release a PC update of the Atari arcade classic.
The story line flirts with hokey contrivances: a meteor with alien technology in tow lands in the Bering Strait, which sparks a universe-wide arms race, culminating in intergalactic battles. But with fully customizable tanks and nicely rendered terrain, the game looks awesome. It combines the best of first-person simulation - think MechWarrior - with real-time strategy, as found in titles like Command and Conquer. An onscreen radar lets you stare down enemy robots at the same time you control troops, and this synthesis of genres is a feature destined to be copied by other developers.
Although old-timers may feel nostalgia for the vector-drawn, black-and-green games of yore, the new Battlezone shows just how far videogame art and technology have progressed since the days when monochrome was all the rage.
