| On the Rise/ In Decline| Ranking| Life Expectancy (Months)
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The hot new way to attract venture capital is to develop LANs for the home. Currently Tut Systems and Epigram lead the pack with proprietary schemes to run Ethernet over existing telephone wire, and competitors are chomping at their heels. Analysts say the 11 million US homes with multiple PCs are proof of a burgeoning market, but home LANs are really driven by the desire of electronics manufacturers to get televisions and DVD players onto the Net. While the technology may be sound, does my TV really have anything to say to my PC?
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say breathless advocates of Extensible Markup Language, will let us organize the Web. Any sentence involving the Web and organization should give you pause: the two concepts are incompatible. XML shows why. This standard allows subject-specific tags so that, for example, music reviews can be labeled . To find a review, search the Web for the tag. The problem, of course, is that everyone must agree to use the same tags, which is like saying all netizens must speak Esperanto – and about as likely to happen.</p>
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g the race between telcos and cable companies to deliver high-bandwidth connections to the home is like watching a horse race between two lazy nags. Who wins is less surprising than that they even move. The most recent stumble of progress was made by the cable companies, who managed to arrive at a cable modem standard. That feat, according to the press, has catapulted cable operators into the lead. Don't believe it. The existence of a standard modem card doesn't make me any more inclined to let the cable guy open up my PC.</p> <p
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ecause everyone loves an underdog. Or maybe it's just what happens when a firm is led by a former sales and marketing executive. In any case, Juniper Networks, an Internet router start-up, has taken the vaporware prize of the year: It has been showered with US$55 million from investors like Nortel and UUNet, it's the toast of the industry press, and marketingwise it has Cisco on the run. Yet Juniper hasn't publicly shown a half-working box. Of course, if the company's smart, it will keep it that way. By now, Juniper can only disappoint.</p> <p> |
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, this seems to have started as a joke. Trepanation – aka drilling a hole in your head – was the province of conspiracy-theory satirists, who melded talk of the Illuminati's third eye with the virtues of brain aeration. But as Umberto Eco so astutely comments, fringe fiction has a way of reinforcing fact. In the case of trepanation, accounts are growing of actual people drilling actual holes in their skulls. Subjects report a feeling of well-being, if not higher consciousness. Perhaps this comes from the sheer relief of surviving acts of idiocy.</p> <p> <a hr
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