Word: ncs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...alternative, Ellison has been pushing hard--not that he could do it any other way--for a new generation of inexpensive, easy-to-use network computers, the so-called NCs. The idea is simple enough: build an inexpensive box (under $500) that combines the best of a PC (some processing smarts, a screen, a modem) with the best of the Net (tons of information, most of it free). Behind the scenes, database software (Oracle's, of course) will make all this goodness transparently simple to navigate. On the front end, in Ellison's vision, might be Apple's famously friendly...
...NCs have started to arrive--Sun's JavaStation last week, Oracle's NC this week--and a few things have changed. The machines have grown a bit, at least in memory capacity. The price, in some cases, has nearly doubled. The target audience has turned out to be corporate rather than home users. And Microsoft, which was studiously ignoring the NC threat, has suddenly awakened and started making promises...
...introduce the first NC with the promised under-$500 price tag. "The PC is too expensive and too complex to ever be popular," Oracle's Ellison insists. "We need devices that are cheaper and easier to use." To that end, he is planning a whole family of Oracle NCs--all designed to draw effortlessly from Oracle's databases--including a bare-bones desktop NC for as little as $300, an NC executive phone and an NC set-top box that will plug into a standard TV, letting home viewers surf the Web and send E-mail from the comfort...
...Look for NCs from several vendors to hit the market around Christmas 1996. But if you want to plug a computer into your television set, don't waste your money on one. I'd recommend you drag out your old Commodore 64 instead...
...abiding citizens use firearms to stop or deter between 300,000 and one million violent crimes every year (depends on whose statistics one believes). NCS figures (U.S. Department of Justice) show that law-abiding citizens who resist attack using a firearm have a lower chance of being injured and a greater chance of preventing completion of the crime than those who don't resist at all or those who resist with all other weapons (knives, fists, Mace, umbrellas...