Working Together
Tuesday, December 4th, 2001Reinventing the Wheel
(TIME.COM)
“Come to me!” On a quiet Sunday morning in Silicon Valley, I am standing atop a machine code-named Ginger–a machine that may be the most eagerly awaited and wildly, if inadvertently, hyped high-tech product since the Apple Macintosh. Fifty feet away, Ginger’s diminutive inventor, Dean Kamen, is offering instruction on how to use it, which in this case means waving his hands and barking out orders.
“Just lean forward,” Kamen commands, so I do, and instantly I start rolling across the concrete right at him.
“Now, stop,” Kamen says. How? This thing has no brakes. “Just think about stopping.” Staring into the middle distance, I conjure an image of a red stop sign–and just like that, Ginger and I come to a halt.
“Now think about backing up.” Once again, I follow instructions, and soon I glide in reverse to where I started. With a twist of the wrist, I pirouette in place, and no matter which way I lean or how hard, Ginger refuses to let me fall over. What’s going on here is all perfectly explicable–the machine is sensing and reacting to subtle shifts in my balance–but for the moment I am slack-jawed, baffled. It was Arthur C. Clarke who famously observed that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” By that standard, Ginger is advanced indeed.
Since last January it has also been the tech world’s most-speculated-about secret. That was when a book proposal about Ginger, a.k.a. “IT,” got leaked to the website Inside.com. Kamen had been working on Ginger for more than a decade, and although the author (with whom the inventor is no longer collaborating) never revealed what Ginger was, his precis included over-the-top assessments from some of Silicon Valley’s mightiest kingpins. As big a deal as the PC, said Steve Jobs; maybe bigger than the Internet, said John Doerr, the venture capitalist behind Netscape, Amazon.com and now Ginger.
Argentina Close to Collapse after Run on Banks
03 December 2001 (Independent Digital UK) — Argentina edged close to bankruptcy yesterday as people queued at cashpoint machines and bank tellers’ windows to withdraw money after a government decree restricting bank withdrawals and overseas transfers.
Passengers on planes and ships were frisked for illegal dollar stashes before leaving the country. The decree sparked fears of an imminent devaluation of the peso, wiping out savings overnight.
It was reported that savers withdrew at least $400 million on Friday. Local banks have lost 17 per cent of their deposits worth $14.5 billion this year.
Enron Files Largest-Ever Chapter 11 Case
New York, Dec. 2 (Bloomberg) — Enron Corp. filed the largest- ever Chapter 11 bankruptcy case and sued Dynegy Inc., seeking $10 billion from the rival energy trader for canceling the takeover that was supposed to rescue Enron.
Enron and 13 of its units listed total assets of $49.8 billion and debts of $31.2 billion, dwarfing Texaco Inc.’s 1987 Chapter 11 filing of $35 billion in assets. Citigroup Inc.’s Citibank unit, with two loans totaling $3 billion, is listed in court papers as Enron’s largest unsecured creditor. Bank of New York represents bond claims totaling $2.4 billion, Enron said.
“By every measure, this is the largest Chapter 11 case in history,” said Peter Chapman, president of Bankruptcy Creditors Service Inc. “If Enron were a sovereign nation, it would be the 30th-largest in the world between Egypt and Malaysia.”
