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To: mistermj who wrote (261)	12/19/2002 12:07:24 AM
From: ~digs	Respond to of 603

The Tablet PC's Implications For Newspapers --'LA Times' Prepares Pilot Electronic Edition DECEMBER 17, 2002 ; By Jim Rosenberg NEW YORK -- Neither ink on paper nor HTML on the Web, an edition designed for Tablet PCs combines the convenience and familiarity of a newspaper with the storage, searching, and communications of computer files. Years of parallel development in platform technology and publication design have yielded a practical, versatile device and an attractive, navigable news document well suited to the Tablet PC. Building on earlier concepts, both date from 1991, when Roger Fidler, formerly of Knight Ridder, devised a prototype newspaper for an electronic pad, and Fujitsu produced the first of what it calls its 18 generations of tablet computers. The device had to put laptop-PC capabilities into a three-pound, letter-size case less than an inch thick. It needed a high-resolution screen that responds to the touch and stroke of a stylus, a suitable operating system, acceptable handwriting recognition, and easy docking to download, recharge, and sync with a desktop PC. A keyboard could be built in or attachable. After 10 years, the technology is now affordable and powerful, with faster processors, slimmer, longer-lasting batteries, better handwriting recognition, and more-pervasive wireless local- and wide-area networks, the Fujitsu PC Corp.'s Kyle Thornton said at the Open eBook Forum's Tablet PC Digital Publishing Conference in New York Dec. 5. Launched a month earlier, the tablets will require continued improvement in those areas, as well as physical durability and voice recognition, if they are to succeed in a laptop-saturated market, said Thornton, Fujitsu's senior product-marketing manager. Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates has suggested solid-state discs may be incorporated into a future generation of tablets. Adobe Systems Inc. technologies are helping propel publishing onto tablets, where automating page assembly consists of creating templates and tags, said James Alexander, Adobe's cross-media-publishing product management director. Using extensible markup language (XML) for placing, displaying, and linking content components, "You want to do tagging as close to the content creation as possible," he said, noting that Adobe InDesign software "has XML under the hood." Adobe Acrobat will generate and read the portable-document-format output and Adobe Content Server can handle digital-rights management. Software and hardware suppliers hope a $2,000 tablet can replace a stack of documents and a laptop, making it seem like a money saver rather than a money waster. Positioning tablets as successors to notebook PCs (which some now resemble) also may overcome objections to the notion of a two-computer desk, which Gates showed at the November launch of Tablet PCs running his firm's Windows XP Tablet PC Edition operating system. Still, it is portable computing where Gates last left most of his fingerprints, in 1981. And probably nowhere was it more appreciated than at newspapers. At the launch, he remarked, "The last Microsoft product where I wrote the majority of the code" was for the Tandy TRS 100. Whatever appeal a Tablet PC holds for readers in general, subscribers to a digital daily may need that value in versatility, for it remains to be seen if an electronic edition is more desirable and convenient than a paper edition for most newspaper readers. No print publication needs more help than the complex, oversize newspaper. The challenge is squeezing a 12-by-21-inch page onto a 6-by-9-inch screen. A Los Angeles Times pilot edition proposed for early next year (subscription or single copy) will use Fidler's "Kent" format (for Kent State University, where he directs the Institute for CyberInformation): three types of hyperlinked, near-magazine-size pages, because "scrolling is something people find annoying. [It's] very difficult to find where you are on the page." Along the right are navigation tabs denoting sections. Looking like section fronts, summary pages preserve the experience of browsing a newspaper. Headlines and summaries link to full-text content pages with a consistent three-column format and the latest type technology, ensuring "no difficulty in reading the full story," said Fidler. Creating the third page type, a table of contents and advertiser index, is semiautomated. Clicking on unobtrusive ads or images can either link to full-page ads and larger images or launch video clips -- news footage or ad content such as movie trailers. Until compression improves, video remains minimal to keep download time short. *Full text of the L.A. Times* national edition occupies 10 to 12 megabytes, Fidler said. With sound and video, the edition may not exceed 25 MB. As important as format or function, offline availability means reading anytime, anywhere, without use being recorded. Fidler said studies show all age groups like the format, and that "pages with advertising turned out to be more appealing." In development are digital news books that collect information a newspaper has published on certain subjects.** editorandpublisher.com

To: mistermj who wrote (261)	12/20/2002 3:13:30 PM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 603

Upside to Radical Islam, The nytimes.com [ You may or may not find this one amusing. Fukuyama used to be sort of a darling of the conservative in crowd, but perhaps he somewhat miscalculated that "end of history" thing. ] By KEVIN BAKER Good news! Radical, militant Islam may be a force of ''creative destruction'' in the Arab world -- one that is positioned to clear the way for a new, democratic order in the Middle East. That, at least, is the surprising premise put forward by Francis Fukuyama, writing with Nadav Samin, in the September issue of Commentary. Fukuyama, who first came to public attention in 1989 with his contention that the rise of the liberal democratic state marked the effective ''end of history,'' sees the Islamic world today as roughly where Europe was during its industrial age. Following the great rural exodus of the 18th and 19th centuries, millions of dislocated, miserable European peasants began to turn to radical mass movements like Fascism and Communism. For all the damage they did, Fukuyama and Samin contend, these movements at least ''cleared away some of the premodern underbrush that had obstructed the growth of liberal democracy,'' like the sclerotic rule of the Junkers in Germany and the Romanovs in Russia. Today's Muslim societies, the authors write, have seen their own rural masses move ''to the vast urban slums of Cairo, Algiers and Amman, leaving behind the variegated, often preliterate Islam of the countryside.'' This dislocation has left thousands of men and women angry and alienated, and those individuals -- including the Sept. 11 hijackers -- have turned to the Communist/Fascist equivalents in their own societies: the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and other radical Islamist organizations. It would be a mistake, Fukuyama and Samin assert, to view this as a revival of traditional Islam. Radical Islam is a real departure -- a reformist movement that challenges almost every aspect of traditional authority in Islamic societies, from social services to jurisprudence to the exclusion of women from public life. Osama bin Laden, in issuing his 1998 fatwa against the United States, defied ''the fundamental sources of authority and legitimacy in the Islamic world,'' the authors write. It was ''a bit like Hitler issuing a papal encyclical, or Lenin a decree in the name of the Russian Orthodox Church.'' Skeptics might argue that Nazism and Communism were more catastrophic than any alternative would have been and that Europe's ''premodern underbrush'' was actually cleared away by the carnage of World War I. Fukuyama himself concedes that the totalitarian tendencies of Islamic militants may well lead to ''disaster'' and advocates that they be confronted and contained with a ''determined application of military power.'' But he also says that ''one has to deal with what one has,'' and he is encouraged by democratic stirrings, particularly in Iran. Revolutions have a way of going where nobody expects them to, not even their instigators, he writes, and ''a line crossed in the name of waging all-out war against the West may yet be crossed in the name of healthier purposes."