Word: dial
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...interior of the ministry is still outfitted partly with rotary-dial phones. And typewriters. Bells chime every workday at 3 p.m. to remind employees to do their calisthenics. Small things, of course, but they are signs that while the U.S. zipped along a new technological path in the 1990s, Japan was stuck in a slow-motion devolution from economic miracle to financial debacle, doing things the old way by subsidizing money-losing industries. "I used to be asked quite a lot to give advice to Americans, to explain our success," says Ryozo Hayashi, a vice minister. "But it's been...
Emily Blue, 25, was driving home from dinner with friends several weeks ago when she decided to call a friend on her Sprint PCS portable cell phone. She was still dialing as she went through an intersection and plowed into a parked Ford Explorer, totaling her own Acura Integra. While suffering only a burnt lip after the air bag exploded in her face, Blue admits to being plenty embarrassed. "I know better than to dial and drive," she insists...
What Virtual Advisor adds is wireless, voice-prompted phone service and Internet access to a customized menu of news, sports and stock portfolios. Just say the word stocks, news or weather--or the word dial when you want to place a call--and the onboard computer fetches. Access is limited (you can't get AOL, for example), and there's a lag in news and sports scores, because they are first read into the system by real people. E-mail, on the other hand, is instantly "verbalized" using text-to-speech software that recites your mail in that eerie, intonation...
...example, a dial-up modem that connects to the Net over copper has a typical download speed of 56 kilobits--or 56,000 bits--per second, at which rate it would take nearly 10 minutes to download a three-minute song. By contrast, a modem connected to a TV cable that feeds into a fiber-optic loop could claim that tune in under a minute. Yet even today only about 6% of U.S. households have cable modems or digital subscriber lines, which carry compressed data over copper wires at broadband speed. But that hasn't stopped carriers from blanketing...
Nothing in Allegra Goodman's previous fiction--two volumes of short stories and the highly praised novel Kaaterskill Falls (1998)--has quite prepared readers for the sustained comic exuberance of Paradise Park (Dial; 360 pages; $24.95). Her earlier work certainly wasn't grim, but it tended toward the polished and well mannered and resonant, a la 19th century British fiction. Not this time. Like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth before her, Goodman has achieved a breakthrough book by discovering and recording a thoroughly uninhibited narrative voice. Bellow found Augie March, and Roth hit upon Alexander Portnoy. Goodman gives the world...