In this issue, and issues to come, Off the Cuff will offer glimpses of the dialogue occurring on the Digital Frontier. Keep your ears and eyes open—we'd love to add your observations to the evolving conversation.

PHONES PHONIES

Following a recent survey showing that drivers talking on cellular phones are more likely to be involved in accidents than those who aren't, we've heard about how attached people are to their phones.

A friend described sitting in a café in Buenos Aires and watching four friends take a table. They each immediately took out their cell phones and talked on them for the next half-hour, never saying a word to each other.

A colleague recently interviewed a job candidate. On their way to lunch, the candidate pulled out his cell phone and talked all the way to the restaurant—ignoring his interviewer.

In travels in Mexico City, Hong Kong, Japan, and New York City we've seen restaurants cell-phone-carrying diners. Any time a phone rings, everyone in earshot seems to be patting a pocket or grabbing a purse, afraid to miss a call. It's as if a new nervous condition has descended upon the dining public: the cell phone twitch. Let's hope it's not contagious.

Miss Manners, the high priestess of correct behavior, wrote, "Perhaps there was a two-minute lag between the purchase of the first cell phone and the establishment of etiquette rules against using the device at the dinner table, taking calls while attending a concert, or making calls from a pew during religious services. But that was only because it was hard to believe that anyone would try.

Nobody doubts this any longer. Yet these situations are already covered by the broader mandates of manners that have always applied. Annoying people by making disruptive noises has been on that list since the human body first learned to make nasty sounds on purpose."

Of course, not all is negative about the wholesale adoption of these new modes of communication. Consider how a colleague extricates himself from long-winded conversations. He pulls his pager from his belt and lies that he must get to a phone because his boss just paged him. We've been told this also works well in dull meetings, on awkward dates, and during unwelcomed sales call.

HOP, HOP, HOORAY

When Intel started running television ads a few years back, it wasn't clear at the time—at least to outsiders—that high technology components like processors could be marketed directly to consumers. But the "Intel Inside" campaign was a huge success. Intel recently went hip, with ads featuring actors dancing in colored "bunny suits," the futuristic garb worn by semiconductor workers. Those, too, were big. Now, Intel is at it again, selling its cutting-edge electronics through point-of-sale promotions. Building off its ads and of beanie babies, the latest fad in kids' toys, Intel is giving away tens of thousands of "beanie bunnies." "Who'd have ever thought we'd come to this?" an Intel spokesperson said. Indeed.

DOUBLE, DOUBLE, TOIL AND TROUBLE

Businesses have a hard enough time keeping up with the pace of technological change. And anyone buying a computer can't help but be frustrated seeing it rendered obsolete in a year or two. Now comes a Sept. 17 front-page article in the New York Times saying that computing power may double every nine months at no increase in cost. That would be twice as fast as the 18-month cycle prescribed by the venerable Moore's Law. How to cope?

The answer is simple: Ignore the article. The reporter got carried away.

The problem is that the Intel technique described in this article—which allows two bits if information to be stored in a single transistor, rather than just one—only applies to flash memory. Flash memory is plenty useful stuff, appearing in abundance in cellular phones and other consumer electronics, but it doesn't show up in computers. And the Intel technique doesn't apply to processors or DRAMs, which do. It's also not clear how fast the capacity of the transistors can keep doubling. It took a decade to move from lab to production with the first doubling. The funny thing is that publications, including the Times, were wondering last year whether the doublings called for by Moore's Law were going to start happening less frequently.

Every 18 months is plenty fast for us. We'll stick with that for a while.

OOPS. NEVER MIND.

"I predict the Internet...will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse." —Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com and currently publisher of InfoWorld Magazine, wrote in 1995.

WHO COMES UP WITH THESE THINGS?

Utilities with old plants that are being rendered obsolete by deregulation have started referring to them as "standard assets." In our system of accounting, those "assets" —which will be extremely expensive to shut and will cost the utilities money for years—look an awful lot like liabilities. Meanwhile, airline officials tried an acronym following an airplane crash in Guam that killed more than 200 people. They said that when a pilot crashes a plane for no apparent reason, the accident is classified as a CDIT—that's Controlled Descent into Terrain. We think it'd be more honest to use the acronym APMUBTALOPD, for A Pilot Messed Up Big-Time And Lots Of People Died.

PUSH LOSES PULL

The idea of "push" technology was so hot as recently as six months ago that Time magazine put Kim Polese on its cover as one of the 25 most influential people in the U.S. Ms. Polese is the chief executive of Marimba, a startup that is one of the leaders in producing software that will let companies narrowcast, or push, individualized information to users of the Internet. Some said that she might be the next Bill Gates, and she has become part of an elite technology group that is advising Vice President Al Gore.

How quickly things change. The Wall Street Journal, among others, recently reported that push technology is being adopted slowly and may turn out to have very limited uses.

The moral: Don't fall for fads.