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Fed up with wanton copyrights, an Aussie musical duo set out to see just how far they could push the system. How far did they get? They now have copyrights on 100 million telephone push-button sequences. As we all discovered as kids, push-button phones produce some peculiar, and sometimes not so bad, melodies. Now every time you dial up your boss or Aunt Martha, you'll be infringing on a copyright.

It is hard to tell just how serious the two down underers, Jon Drummond and Nigel Helyer, are about pushing the issue, but just in case, their Web site (magnus-opus.com) includes a handy licensing contract. Maybe we'll all have to go back to rotaries. Upon doing further research, I discovered Australian copyrights are not that difficult to obtain. Earlier this year, John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, was granted an Australian patent for the wheel. Cavemen everywhere are ticked.

A Down Market Nails Nearly Everyone

For a while, Sun was on top of the world. It had a rock solid Solaris, a bunch of rippin' servers and Java. Now the company has something that many of its competitors have had -- a huge round of layoffs. Look for some 9% of Sun workers to get shown the door, along with a rather whopping revenue loss -- in the range of $2.7 billion to $2.9 billion below estimates. Wonder if Scott McNealy will blame this on Microsoft, too.

That's One Hot Laptop

If you have a laptop from Compaq, you best check your A/C adapter. If it isn't already on fire, it soon could be. More than half a million adapters have been recalled after The Consumer Product Safety Commission received reports of five fires.

Java Java Everywhere

Readers of my columns probably already know that I'm a big fan of game consoles. I don't even play the stinkin' things, but I am deeply in love with the technology -- the sheer graphics power and the ultra simple interfaces (my five-year-old Nick still can't read, but he can play any game you throw at him).

I'm dying to see how game-console technology will finally support personal computing. One way may be Java. The nearly defunct Sega Dreamcast (I'm out $200 for the hardware alone) now includes a Java-compatible browser, so all those fancy Web sites are now accessible. And if anyone took Scott McNealy's advice and wrote productivity apps that work off the Web, you could run those, too. Of course the big question is whether Microsoft's Xbox will support Java. I doubt it.

Now for Some Good News

We've been besieged with bad economic news, everything from massive Nortel layoffs, to huge losses from networking's biggest concerns. Now two of today's high-tech thought leaders are trying to make us feel better. First Steve Case, chairman of AOL Time Warner, told Goldman Sachs that he was pretty sure high tech had hit bottom and would at some point climb back up. Then Cisco's John Chambers gave a rosy outlook, predicting his company would beat estimates for next quarter. Let's hope Steve and John are right.

DSL's New Reason for Being

I'm plumb irritated that I can't get DSL to my home. As with any broadband technology, the providers need to sell multiple services to make installation worthwhile. One hope was voice, but most of us are moderately satisfied with our local voice service and don't want to change.