Brrr! not just another frosty January in Cambridge, not just a new year, but 010101: the real dawn of the new millennium. But it feels like a digital winter in more ways than that. The Internet bubble deflated, leaving not only pissy investors and a chill on Wall Street but a generation of hackers frozen like mastodons in the Microsoft ice age, and a lot of decent people wondering: What good is this computer stuff anyway? Sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic, but is it really making life more worth living? Where's the beef?

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