They will take a variety of forms: television set-top boxes, fixed-screen telephones, smart mobile phones, handheld computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and network computers (NCs).From almost nothing, IDC predicts that the sale of such appliances will nearly match that of PCs in 2002 and thereafter greatly exceed them.
Yet he maintains that, when customers see the reduced costs and improved efficiency of NCA, "this time they'll get it—I have never been more confident that this time we have caught the inflection point".Sun Microsystems, another booster of network computing, makes a similar point, saying: "NCs are not meant to be sold as boxes, but as an enabling component in a network".
Oracle's hardware partners will soon start selling them a $5,000 "Network in a box", including a central server, two NCs and all the necessary software and cabling.
But the companies that declared war on the software giant by introducing the notion of network computers (NCs) are learning that a bear hug from Bill Gates is hardly a warm and fuzzy experience.
(To help seed this market, Oracle is donating $100m to schools to buy NCs).
So when the NCs do go on sale, most will be made by consumer-electronics companies.
If Oracle8 really is the best software to run these NCs, then Mr Ellison will also have created a massive new market for his database wares.Yet Microsoft is as prepared as anyone for the rise of such a market.
Priced like (and connected to) a TV, home NCs are more consumer-electronic devices than computers.Oracle's latest product is part of an attempt to reach schools and other small users, who might well find that Microsoft's Windows NT operating system is too complicated for them.
Oracle's NCs need some Oracle software running on the server to make the most of their more exciting features, such as allowing a user with a smart card to configure automatically the NC in his hotel room to his own preferences.
Having questioned 1,000 teenagers, the National Citizen Service's (NCS) results showed how 88 per cent of 12 to 18-year-olds have experienced stress over the past 12 months, with top reasons being stress over looking good on social media, being popular in school, and finding a boyfriend/girlfriend.
The speed of conduction of impulses along sensory and motor fibres can be measured with nerve conduction studies (NCS).
