Jan 1, 1999 12:00 PM

Hype List

| Ranking| Tendency| Life Expectancy

| 1| | Computing Fabrics| 36 months

The quest for One Big Computer – a seamless architecture uniting PCs, servers, and peripherals – has a new contender: computing fabrics. Once microprocessors are packaged as tightly grouped "cells," boosters argue, distributed Unix software like SGI's Cellular Irix or hypernetworking tech such as Sun's Jini can transform a LAN into a massively parallel multiprocessor capable of tapping every cell's last clock cycle. But the major impetus behind this everyware dream scheme – cheap hardware – is also the major stumbling block: Given the escalating lines of code in software, it's cheaper and easier to throw hardware at bottlenecks than it is to rearchitect networks. For at least the foreseeable future, the promise of a transparent computing fabric might look more like a bulky suit of chain mail.

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makes television the coolest cool medium, according to McLuhan, is not the visual appeal, but the aural. Well, the Webheads behind VoxML can already hear the cybercash registers ringing. Among the self-interested backers of browsing by voice, Motorola hopes to spur wireless phone calls, Nuance plans to propagate speech-recognition software, and Visa envisions a new kind of impulse buying. Using URLs to supplant 800 numbers – call it v-commerce – could certainly make the Web safe for computerphobes. But turning sites into bit-based call centers requires a flat Web architecture at odds with today's breed of clickthrough banner advertising. Give us a call when ScratchNSniffXML lets us sample Eternity.

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er the EFFers broke DES, Ultimate Privacy and TriStrata started touting "unbreakable" one-time pad encryption based on the Vernam cipher, an ultrasecure crypto approach favored by military intelligence. Each character of a message gets assigned a random character from the key; the one-time keypad is physically delivered to the receiver and then, true to its name, destroyed. There's the rub: Sending a megabyte email requires that you first courier a megabyte key to your "messaging partner." One-time pad might be unbreakable, but it's a commercial crack-pipe dream bound to turn code crackers into cat burglars. <p

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s-on economy turns desk jockeying into an extreme sport on a par with skyboarding, a new class of metabolism-boosting "energy drinks" has emerged to combat mental and physical fatigue. At the head of the charge of these coffee-meets-Clif Bar beverages is Red Bull, a chalky Austrian treat that combines caffeine, vitamins, and an amino acid known as taurine. That the secret ingredient was first discovered in the male organ of a bull has engendered wild speculation about the exact nature of the stimulation. Don't expect anything more than a jolt: Taurine appears naturally in the gall and is now harvested synthetically. Still, the promise of bull-like stamina should sound mighty appealing to geeks trapped in veal-fattening pens. <em

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