Bertie Ahern becomes the first Taoiseach to do a live Internet chat tomorrow at 5:45 p.m. at www.fiannafail.ie. He will answer questions on the historic Belfast agreement. Questions can be submitted in advance and transcripts will be available after the chat. Coincidentally, Boris Yeltsin will make his first venture into cyberspace on the same day.
Anti-Trust Latest: The attorneys general of 13 US states are still negotiating among themselves and with the Justice Department with a view to filing a lawsuit against Microsoft this week. The goal will be to give computer makers and consumers greater choice - without necessarily delaying the shipping of Windows 98, scheduled for May 15th.
Apple: Apple has unveiled a new `consumer' computer, the iMac. Available in about 90 days time, the iMac has a 233MHz PowerPC chip, 32 megabytes of memory, a 4-gigabyte hard drive and CD-Rom but no floppy drive. It's an all-in-one machine apart from the keyboard and has been described as the `VW beetle of the computing world'.
Netscape Excites: Netscape and Excite are collaborating on Internet content and search services; The centerpiece of the agreement is a new Netscape search service to be powered by Excite search technology.
Big Blue: IBM announced its fifth generation S/390 mainframe, doubling the performance of last year's G4 models.
mushroom.man: this peculiar email address is the title of Paulo Tullio's novel from the Lilliput Press, launched last week. It's intriguingly described as the story of an email communication between a curmudgeon in the Wicklow hills and a nosey behavioural psychologist in Iowa and as Ireland's `first Internet novel'. How could one resist?
Database Wars: Oracle's database market share is still slightly ahead of Microsoft SQL Server's in the booming Windows NT market, according to Dataquest.
Softworld: Two days (June 30th, July 1st) of seminars, masterclasses and practical demonstrations by leading suppliers of business software. Includes a management briefing which sounds like a must: Achieving a Smooth Systems' Update for EMU Compliance. Hotline 01 2079235.
Sun Shines: Sun Microsystems has lowered prices by up to 27% on its Ultra 5, Ultra 10 and Ultra 60 workstations and the former two are now shipping with Solaris 2.6 pre-installed.
Irish Find: www.searcs-web.com is a new, very useful, index of best Web sites of Irish interest; over 500 sites are indexed. Email queries can be sent free of charge to info@searcs-web.com
Babel Tackled: Digital says its Alta Vista World Index allows Web searching in Chinese, Japanese, Korean (used widely on the Web) and in many other languages.
Wired Sold: Wired magazine is to be sold to Advance Magazine Publishers, publishers of Vogue and Vanity Fair. Wired Digital's HotWired and Wired News and the HotBot search engine attract more than 8 million users each month.
University Of The Web: Sessions, a New-York based online academy of art and design offers media design courses at www.sessions.edu; it thus uses the medium to teach the medium. Courses range from Web site graphics to online game creation. A range of fees is charged.
In Brief...Hewlett-Packard Irl. has announced the new LaserJet 8000 printer family and a new OmniBook family of notebook PCs. . .CA/Digital combine to announce CA's Unicenter TNG enterprise management software for Digital's Alpha platforms. . .The Europages business directory now extends to 500,000 European small and medium-sized firms (www.europages.com). . .Compaq's Carbon Copy 5.0 remote control software now includes support for Windows CE. . .Cisco announce Cisco Networking Services (CNS), to help developers build network-aware applications. . .BridgeCom amd 3Com have completed a new network for Banque Nationale de Paris. . .Haiti, poorest country in western hemisphere is to get a mobile-phone service. . .
Dairy
May 19th: Delivering The Web-based Enterprise seminar hosted by Sun Microsystems. Keynote speaker is Rob Hailstone, Chief Analyst of Bloor Research, an international independent research organisation. Venue - Davenport Hotel, Dublin 2. Free of charge. To register, call 01 819 9000 or send fax to 01 819 9090.
May 21st: Annual conference of the Irish Software Association: over 100 Irish and international venture capital companies have been invited. The idea is to explore ways for Irish software companies to raise the finance necessary to break into the US market. Venue - UCD. Details from 01 605 1582 or email at isa@ibec.ie
Year 2000
Optimism: Digital has announced a FORTRAN capability for its Piercom 2000 Digital Version tool. It can now assess and correct FORTRAN as well as COBOL source code programs running on Vax and Alpha systems under OpenVMS and on Alphas running Digital UNIX.
Pessimism: Edward Yardeni, chief economist and managing director of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell predicts that the Y2K `bug' could cause a major recession, as businesses fail and government agencies become incapable of delivering basic services.
Microfile
Estimated no. of phones in sub-Saharan Africa: 12 million, fewer than in Tokyo No. of these in South Africa. 5 million
Source: Reuters, reporting Nelson Mandela's call at the Africa Telecom '98 conference for better telecommunications infrastructure in Africa.
Modem World
www.france98.beeb.com
The beeb's elaborate World Cup site; the fever is upon us. The beeb's main site (www.beeb.com) claims 12 million audited hits for March last. www.dcd.net Digital Cookie Design: New York-based Irish Web designer Sean O'Dwyer's original, clever site. www.bpg.org/tcd_sf.html The TCD San Francisco Alumni Organization for all you Trinity graduates in that go-ahead city. www.salonmagazine.com Investigative journalism, described by the Washington Post as the Internet equivalent of the NBC slogan "must-see TV." observe.ivv.nasa.gov Deep Impact coming. What happens when asteroids strike Earth? www.ucd.ie/summerschool UCD International Summer School. www.nyu.edu/acf/multilingual/index.html New York University Innovation Center's multilingual Web site links to worldwide multilingual (e.g. Chinese, Hindi) computing resources. www.dfn.org New site displaying the work of dissident authors, banned in their own countries. Material from 17 countries is planned. www.adlib.ie Irish site providing a service if you want to buy, sell or swap goods on the Internet www.europeanmovement.ie Very topical! Lots of info on Amsterdam Treaty. homepage.tinet.ie/italianembassy Italian Embassy's home page for Irish Italophiles.
Textbites
"There are no more browser wars - everything's free now. You want a browser, you take it."
"I have learned one thing: the vast majority of smart people do not work for my company." - Netscape chief, Jim Barksdale speaking about public access to Netscape Navigator code. "I'd be so bold as to say that 10 years from now every personal computer will have seeing, listening and learning" - Bill Gates in a speech to the CA-World 1998 technology conference.
Computimes is edited by Tom Moriarty. Send email only (no attachments, faxes or letters please) to computimes@irish-times.ie (private correspondence should be marked Not For Publication).