Lots of new technology is slamming down the infobahn at us. Windows 9x is hardly supported by Microsoft any longer, though it is still the most-used OS in existence. (Don't believe me? Get out of your cube farm and take a look at what the rest of the world is using.) Win XP is the "standard" right now, but like everything else, that won't last. These pages take a crack at keeping up with some of the newer technologies that are being bandied around. (Much of the following is based on articles in recent issues of PC Magazine and PC World, along with e-mail updates from a number of sources as well as some older material from defunct mags such as Windows, Windows Sources, PC Computing and Byte; neither they nor I claim to be able to predict the future.) Why include this stuff? Hopefully it will help you in your next buying decision. Besides, it makes me sound smart.

I tend to agree with some of the less extreme visionaries that we are still witnessing the real birth of the Information Age. Venture capitalist John Doerr predicts that the Internet will metamorphosize into the "Evernet" before too much longer; in his words, an "always-on, high-speed, ubiquitous, multiformat Web." Both Doerr and Intel's Andy Grove predict that Web technology will be paced, and possibly outstripped by, advances in the life sciences and biotechnology fields. "The impact on drug development, health care, and human life," says Grove, "is difficult to imagine." In other words, while today's Internet and PC/computing technology seems to many as more of a luxury than a necessity, in the very near future both will become as necessary for civilization to continue as the internal combustion engine and transistor are today. The backlash may be equally as profound and disturbing; if you think people are up in arms about such things as cloning, genetically modified foods, and stem cell research today, give it a few years. The impact of biotechnology on culture and religion, and the deadly uses of advances in artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, are all hard to measure -- one futurist, Peter Schwartz, bluntly predicts that "within the next few decades...people will kill each other in large numbers as a direct result of the advancement of science." Not a comforting thought by any means, but all the more reason for us to stay abreast of developments as best we can. This isn't just about what neato toys are going to hit the market; this is about profound, life-changing technological, cultural, and social advances.

Or not. A LangaList reader gave an interesting take on the summer 2002 news that Microsoft would disclose 385 bits of computer code and internal operating rules, previously kept secret, that outside software developers can use to write programs to run on Windows.
Here are the 385 bits, according to the reader:


1010100001100010101010101010000
1010100001010111100011110111000
1110000111000111000011101010101
0001010101110001010101000101010
1000010101010000101010100010101
0100010101010000010101010100001
0101010001010101000010101101010
0001100010101010101010000101010
0001010111100011110111000111000
0111000111000011101010101000101
0101010000110001010101010101000
0101010000101011110001111011100
0111000011100011100001110101010
10001010