Kazaa, Morpheus, etc. — all have the potential to do the same kind of thing for the music world, because they put artists in direct contact with their fans. Get enough fans, and you might be able to build a market for CDs, concert tickets, special goodies, etc. However, the emergence of this market is being thwarted by the legal attacks on P2P as a whole. The record labels are scared of P2P, and they have good reason to be. It's not just that fans can violate copyright and get free music — it's that P2P networks could change the entire economic system of music production and distribution.

The dynamics are different in the software, writing, and music worlds, but in each case it seems like there's a powerful sort of "mass amateurization" happening.

You may want to compare these experiences with my review of Matlab 6.5.

I also tested the new version by retrieving a Mathematica package for hyperbolic geometry I wrote about five years ago. Everything seemed to work, so here is a screenshot of hyperbolic geometry in the unit disk. This package was a pain to write, because there was a serious bug in Mathematica when drawing arcs of a circle. Fortunately the package still works.

The installation was easy: just copy a directory from the cd to the hard disk. Registration was also easy, although the long password was tedious to type in.

Mathematica behaves quite nicely on my 450 MHz G4 Macintosh. The user interface seems to be fitted into the Mac OS X environment. Here is a first screenshot of testing the software:

The report on my iBook (using currently a public WLAN network) told the following:

All attempts to get any information from your computer have FAILED. (This is very uncommon for a Windows networking-based PC.) Relative to vulnerabilities from Windows networking, this computer appears to be VERY SECURE since it is NOT exposing ANY of its internal NetBIOS networking protocol over the Internet.

I browsed through the mathematics and biology categories and was impressed. This is good work! Now I have a link to Wikipedia on my favorites toolbar in OmniWeb.

What is available in Wikipedia? For example, the entry on optimization is a bit unfinished, but the basics are there, and the structure of the entry is quite competent. A few more topics to include, and this part of the encyclopedia will be a fine reference.

The central part of Wikipedia is the editing system, which lists the changes and the authors. A sort of honor list of contributors.

A device attached to a PDA can send and receive weak electrical signals through people, with human bodies as communications circuits, the paper said, citing sources close to the companies.

Apparel and handbags have their own conductivity, allowing an electrical connection to a PDA that can remain in one's pocket, the paper said.

In this way, people can exchange e-mail addresses, names and phone numbers while shaking hands, with the data automatically written into both their PDAs, the paper said.