“…the public should beware of geeks bearing gifts. Windows Me has some significant improvements, but for most users those improvements do not justify the pain and potential dangers they will face with this upgrade. Microsoft can lower the price of Windows Me and give it a few great features, but it can’t
fundamentally make Me a better operating system than Windows 95, because of underlying technical flaws with the whole Windows operating environment.

I know, because I spent more than a week struggling with a Windows Me upgrade before I gave up, reformatted my hard drive, installed a clean version of the operating system on my 550 MHz Pentium III desktop computer and reinstalled all of my applications. Now that my computer is finally operational
once again, I’m quite pleased with the results. But I doubt that other computer users will think that the new features are worth the hassle.”

“Am I the only one who is terrified about Microsoft Passport? It seems to me like a fairly blatant attempt to build the world’s largest, richest consumer database, and then make fabulous profits mining it. It’s a terrifying threat to everyone’s personal privacy and it will make today’s “cookies” seem positively tame by comparison. The scariest thing is that Microsoft is advertising Passport as if it were a benefit to consumers, and people seem to be falling for it! By the time you’ve read this article, I can guarantee that I’ll scare you into turning off your Hotmail account and staying away from MSN web sites.”

“It’s not just you…many of us at MS don’t even begin to understand what .NET is (and I even work on Passport, the shining example of a “web service”). Management spent nearly a year explaining how everyone needed to focus on NGWS and how we could all fit into the vision – without ever describing the goal. It was the proverbial answer in search of a question. All of a sudden it has a new name, seemingly an attempt to hide the fact that it still has no body. And to make things worse, they throw in a brand-new
programming language which is really nothing more but a copy of java which is unfinished, hasn’t been tested for five years, and lacks a large standard library.

I’ve asked around how this new .NET plan differs from everything we’ve been working on the past two years and haven’t been given a decent answer.”

“This path to machine intelligence, incremental, reactive, opportunistic and market-driven, does not require a long-range map, but has one in our own evolution. In the decades following the first universal robots, I expect a second generation with mammallike brainpower and cognitive ability. They will have a
conditioned learning mechanism, and steer among alternative paths in their application programs on the basis of past experience, gradually adapting to their special circumstances. A third generation will think like small primates and maintain physical, cultural and psychological models of their world to mentally rehearse and optimize tasks before physically performing them. A fourth, humanlike, generation will abstract and reason from the world model. I expect the reasoning systems will be adopted from the traditional AI approach maligned earlier in this essay. The puddles will have reached the ripples.”

“My gut tells me that the word ‘push’ is going to be a minor footnote in future histories of the late 20th century boom in telecommunications. A quirky blip, ranking slightly higher than the blink tag, but lower than gopher.” — David Hudson, in the Publishers on Push special ”

“Pronouncing Mozilla dead has been a favored spectator sport since Jamie Zawinski first took a cut at it in March 1999. This is another in a long line of such articles, not the first, not the last, and those
participating in the project are for the most part used to this. Criticism won’t slack off until the project ships a 1.0 release (which IMO is at least 6 months off)”

“The one major “hindsight” decision that could be seriously questioned is the decision in fall 1999 to do a rewrite prior to Mozilla 1.0 as opposed to releasing a 1.0 based on the original code. But then again
the conventional wisdom (put forth by the Web Standards Project and pretty much every other “outside observer”) at the time was that the old code base was unsalvageable, and that the cause of standards compliance demanded a rewrite.”

“Information science operates with a binary logic of reflection which results in multiple paths, but these paths are always circumscribed by laws of combination (Deleuze, & Guattari, 1987). In this manner the fragmented space and time of information flows is reordered and directed toward specific objectives. But the objectives of information processing within the capitalist dynamic are not end points– they are aimed at an accumulation of knowledge that is always an impetus for further accumulation, for multiplying the flow, opening out into every horizon. But this flow is at the same time stored up in a central memory which traces the exact paths of this flow, connecting geographic spaces and matching up the temporal
locations of dispersed market centers. This central memory system functions through command trees, centered systems and hierarchical structures that attempt to fix possible pathways of the network and thus to limit the possible variations immanent in the network. The definitions of information formulated within information science and information economics derive from and serve this modeling of the system. As we have seen, information defined as nonsemantic discrete bits flowing across space and then directed and stored substantiates information as the object of control. Thus, the enemy of the information scientists and economists is heterogeneity, disorganization, noise, chaos. They want an uninterrupted flow, but at the same time a destruction of the unnecessary. This encloses or territorializes information; it becomes a part of capitalism’s mapping of space and time. But what we have found is that information’s function is precisely to disorganize, interrupt, to remain itself and at the same time to disperse. Information may, in fact, be a keyword connecting the phenomenon we have examined, but not as an element, nor as a content, but as a heterogeneous remapping of space and time. If the information
society is to be our society, let it be disorganized. ”

“In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the “bodies” that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans “beamed” Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age.

Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist “subject” in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the “posthuman.”

Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity.”