Not since Bill Gates set dating back a decade by posing bare-chested for the June 1996 Wired magazine cover has there been a high-tech coverboy to match Linus Torvalds, the 29-year-old aging Finn wunderkind and Linux inventor who will star at Chicago Comdex on Monday.
VarBusiness, the trade journal for computer executives, has a pouty Linus dozing on its latest cover with a headline that does much to explain Linux’s huge popularity among young gearheads: Generation linuX.
CD-MOM
GIMME SHELL-TER
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M is for the modem she gave me
O means only that she’s going on-line
T is for the tears she shed to save me …
Yup, another Mother’s Day is on the horizon (May 9) and if your mom is technical enough now is the time to use technology to head off the guilt trip by arranging a digital Mother’s day card at www.screengreetings.com. Best of the lot: a bird sitting on an egg that cracks open to say, “Thanks for bringing me out of my shell.”
TROU DATA DROP
MICROSOFTIE MACS
Ah, the irony of it all. Chicagoland’s notoriously Microsoft-phobic organization, the Macintosh users group known as TROU (The Rest of Us), marks Comdex by releasing a poll of what its partisans do with their Macs.
The single most popular use, TROU says, is wordprocessing and the most heavily used piece of software by the membership is Microsoft Word.
COUCH POTATOS WANTED
COOKIES EXTRA
It sounds too good, but maybe it’s true. PowerChannel Inc., a New York marketing outfit, says it is handing out Internet TV boxes similar to WebTV for free to consumers who agree to bare their souls and then let Big Brother watch as they surf the Web using their television sets as a screen. The first 50,000 FreePCTV boxes will begin shipping in May to those who apply at www.powerchannel.com.
KIND OF LIVE
KIND OF KINKY
At 100 selected Kinkos stores you can shell out $225 an hour for a videoconference with colleagues gathered at another Kinko’s in some other town, thus saving downsizers the cost of air fare and bringing other economies to business meetings.
This “enhanced” service promises full screen video, voice-activated cameras that focus in on whoever is talking and Internet links that let each group swap lies using PowerPoint slides.
Y2KORNER
Why don’t we just declare a holiday after New Years’ weekend and avoid the whole Y2K hassle?
Terrible idea, Federal Reserve governor Edward Kelley told Congress. A Y2KDay would just take time away from fixing whatever goes wrong and besides, he said, declaring one now would probably create a panic.