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Technology Stocks : COMS & the Ghost of USRX w/ other STUFF -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scrapps who wrote (17988)	12/21/1998 11:21:00 AM
From: Moonray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 22053

Scrapps, I think you asked one time if the iMac price was coming down: Best Buy Drops Price On Apple's iMac Reuters - 09:52 a.m. Dec 21, 1998 Eastern SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Best Buy Computer Inc. said it dropped the price of Apple Computer Inc.'s iMac computer to $1,099, from its original price of $1,299. #reply-6917967. o~~~ O

To: Scrapps who wrote (17988)	12/21/1998 6:18:00 PM
From: David Lawrence	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 22053

>> What prey tell was worth reading about...some "Other Stuff" I'm sure... Indeed. Here are a couple of excerpts: M.I.T. Scientists Turn Simple Idea Into 'Perfect Mirror' A team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has recently announced what may be the most significant advance in mirror technology since Narcissus became entranced by his image reflected on the surface of a still pool of water. Their invention, which they are calling the "perfect mirror" combines the best features of the two previously known types of mirrors by reflecting light at any angle with virtually no loss of energy. It promises to have significant applications in many fields, including fiber optics, cellular telephones, energy conservation, medicine, spectroscopy and even, perhaps, cake decoration. . . John D. Joannopoulos, a leader of the team that invented the mirrors, had even published a "proof" of their impossibility in his widely read textbook on the field. "Goes to show how much I know," Dr. Joannopoulos, an M.I.T. physics professor, said with a grin, conceding his mistake. But the basic idea behind the mirrors is so simple, depending on no new physical insight or mathematical theory, physicists say, that anyone who reads the M.I.T. paper is quickly convinced of its correctness. Writing about the discovery in Science magazine, Jon Dowling, a physicist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, at the California Institute of Technology said, "Every once in a while someone comes along with a great idea that in hindsight seems so trivial you could kick yourself for not having thought of it first." . [Technical stuff omitted] . For months the researchers lived in fear that something so obvious had to be well-known. [I'll bet!] "How could something about mirrors not be known?" asked Dr. Edwin L. Thomas, the other leader of the team and an M.I.T. professor of physical science and engineering. "We had this feeling that sooner or later somebody's going to walk up to us, tap us on the shoulder and say, 'Yeah, we knew this a hundred years ago.' But apparently not." "I think there's going to be a lot of activity, with people saying, 'This is simple! It's not hard to make,'" Dr. Thomas said. In one early application the M.I.T. group has rolled the mirrors into spaghetti-thin tubes called "omniguides." A beam of laser light can be guided by such tubes far more efficiently than by fiber optics because glass fibers absorb light. And, unlike fiber optics, the omniguides can guide light around corners. In the operating room such omniguides could precisely guide the light of the powerful lasers surgeons use. Even more promising is the possibility of replacing conventional fiber optics used in communications with omniguides. The absorption of light by conventional glass fibers means that the signal must be boosted every 20 kilometers or so. This requires amplifiers, which only work in a narrow band of frequencies. Omniguides would carry light with far less loss of energy, meaning they could stretch for thousands of miles without amplifiers. Engineers would not be limited to a small band of wavelengths by the abilities of amplifiers. "You could have a thousand times the bandwidth. That's a very big deal," Dr. Fan said.