PLUGGED IN\NEWS BYTES.

CACHE-ING OUT: Netscape Communications Corp.'s chief executive and co-founder each sold nearly one-fifth of their stakes last month as the Internet software maker's shares were in a midst of a 50 percent plunge, Bloomberg Business News reports. President and CEO Jim Barksdale sold 17 percent of his holdings, or 1.28 million shares, for about $81 million. He sold the stock for between $51 and $71 a share from Feb. 5 to Feb. 29, according to the Washington Service, which tracks insider filings. Barksdale now owns 6.46 million shares. Vice President Marc Andreessen, the company's 24-year-old co-founder, sold 360,000 shares, or about 18 percent of his stake, for about $21.9 million. Andreessen now owns 1.6 million shares. Five other executives sold a total of about 1 million shares for $65 million over the same 25-day period.

MUPPET MADNESS: You click on an icon. The CD-ROM indicator lights up and the hard drive clacks away, reassuring you that the software is loading. The multimedia program displays its copyright notice, bursts into an upbeat song-and-dance video and . . . huh? . . . The music stutters. The video quits. You are back where you were before you started. Just another rotten day in the callow world of entertainment multimedia. Except this time, reviewer Stephen Manes of The New York Times writes, you hear Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear muttering in the background. Soon they elbow their way into the middle of the Windows Desktop or whatever else happened to be on the screen before you began. With the aid of characters like Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his fright-wigged assistant, Beaker, they frantically try to fix the problem. In the ensuing chaos, they blow holes in the picture. "The Muppet CD-ROM: Muppets Inside" (from Starwave Corp., about $35, Windows 95 only) takes its premise from the computer user's worst nightmares. Somehow, if Kermit and his crew are to be believed, fragments of the CD-ROM have been scattered throughout the innards of your machine, clogging its data paths, impeding information flow and leaving a bunch of Muppets inside. The only way out is to board the data bus and help fix the mess. The humor runs the usual Muppet gamut from clever to sophomoric, the sophomoric is usually punctuated with groans, and much of it makes fun of computers, which richly deserve all the ridicule they can get.

VOICE RECOGNITION

"When you get a desktop computer you're getting only a third of a computer. You can only use it eight hours a day, whereas when you have a laptop you can carry that with you all the time and they're always available. With portable computers, you can do your homework while watching TV. You can't do that on a desktop."

Rich Malloy

editor in chief, Mobile Computing magazine