Ken Clark - Webtour 98 - 5th February 1996
Transport seem to be a growth area, especially vehicle manufacturers. BMW UK have launched their site and has all the razamatataz that you would expect from a prestigious manufacturer, or rather the UK distributor of a prestigious manufacturer. Their link does seem awfully slow though, but if your modem doesn’t give up the ghost and you can stay awake you can download a special BMW screensaver to impress your mates (My other PC’s a Skoda).
Check it out on http://www.bmw.co.uk, Danke.
Ford have also joined the throng and come up with a polished affair called Worldwide Connection (http://www.ford.com/). It would appear however that the world ends at the boundaries of continental USA, no mentions of fiestas here and even cars called the Escort look strikingly different. There is one bright point though, the Ford server includes information on Jaguar, including the Jaguar history page at http://www.jaguarvehicles.com/jhistory.html) with lovely shots of Jags gone by.
For those who prefer their transport to be out of this world the US based General Space Corporation markets the Russian Proton rocket and has now established a store front for the Russian Space Program on the Internet.
World Wide Web: http://www.ghgcorp.com/gsc
On a similar tack, though perhaps more tacky, a new Web source of information for satellite TV viewers has opened. SATCO DX has placed a directory of the world's television satellites and the television channels they carry with full technical details. Currently US and European satellites are covered very well with the rest of the world and satellite radio channels planned to be included.
Web: http://www.sat-city.com/. 20,000 channels and nothing on?
More paper publications have transferred sideways to the Internet. For the grads amongst us, Private Eye can now be reached at http://www.intervid.co.uk/eye/gatway.html with all the lack of respect that you would expect. For the non-PC hedonists out there Page 3 has now become a virtual reality with daily updates of topless beauties, but not much else at http://www.page3.com/. Look at the stipples on that!
For those fed up with slow access to web pages help could be at hand. A UK educational web cache has been created at the University of Kent where the Higher Education National Software Archive (HENSA) has its Unix and Parallel Computing archives. The cache is held on a set of Silicon Graphics WebFORCE CHALLENGE servers. Half of these servers are based at Canterbury with the other half at Leeds University. Each of the Silicon Graphics WebFORCE servers holds 200,000 Web pages, with a total of one million sitting on the cache. 60% of all requests to the system are for pages already held in the Web cache and so can be called up immediately. The system aims to improve speed of access to WWW pages for education institutions in the UK by holding an evolving store of the most frequently accessed Web pages.
The only problem seems to be that it is very busy, try for yourself on http://www.hensa.ac.uk/wwwcache/
For those would be netsurfers who are hampered by English not being their first language, the Multilingual Internet Glossary might be for you. Already published online in a number of languages, including German, Spanish, French, Croatian, and Norwegian, Netglos is a multilingual glossary of Internet terminology compiled and maintained by a team of volunteer translators. A free home page is available to anyone volunteering to offer translation to a language not already provided.
Web: http://wwli.com/translation/netglos/netglos.html
And finally a bit of culture, Hitachi America has opened the Hitachi Viewseum on its Web site. The Viewseum serves up high-quality images presented in collaboration with national museums and photographers. The Viewseum currently provides art from such institutions as the National Museum of American Art and the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution, the Hudson River Museum and Quantum Leap Technologies.
Web: http://www.hitachi.com/