Network

Three of the nation's largest companies have announced that they expect to form a joint venture by early 1993 to provide an array of communications services to more than 1,000 shopping malls.JCPenney, GTE Spacenet Corp. and Capital Cities/ABC plan to launch Advanced Retail Communications in the 1,150 malls that have JCPenney outlets, said Jean Davis, a GTE spokeswoman.That includes JCPenney stores at five Maryland locations, including Security Square Mall in Woodlawn, Lake Forest Mall in Gaithersburg and Valley Mall in Hagerstown.

Wireless networks are so flexible and easy to set up that they have become the de facto standard for home users who want to share files, printers or an Internet connection among two or more computers. Still, they're not perfect. Many consumers have trouble making them operate in various parts of the house. The worst connections seem to occur when the wireless router is in the basement, near the cable or DSL modem, and someone tries to log in with a laptop computer on the third floor. But sometimes it's hard to make a wireless network operate from one room to the next, thanks to steel beams, fluorescent lights and other network-hostile infrastructure.

When I started this column 20 years ago, my kids would get excited whenever a new gadget came in for review. As they grew older, they also grew more blase about technology. Today, as adults, they're rarely impressed by anything less than a 50-inch HDTV. So my eldest son surprised me this summer when he stopped by for a visit one day, spotted a box from Netgear and asked if he could try it out. He has a more adventurous network setup than I do, so I told him to go ahead - with one condition.

There's nothing like Bart Simpson grinning at you from a billboard on the side of a bus to make you realize that summer's almost over and the fall TV season is about to come crashing in. Ready or not, tonight's the night that strange new faces start showing up on that box in your living room.Meet "Kirk," a new sitcom starring "Growing Pains" actor Kirk Cameron. (Airs at 8:30 p.m. on Channel 50, although it may move to a Sunday time slot beginning Sept. 10.)Because it airs on Warner Bros.'wannabe network, whose weekly schedule embraces Sunday and Wednesday nights only , you may not have noticed that "Kirk" has arrived, harbinger of the fall lineup.

The Sistahs' Business Network of Maryland, an organization that "seeks to enrich the lives of African-American business women," will hold an inaugural dinner meeting from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday at the Hawthorne Center in Columbia. Founding director Nellie Maletta, who opened AM-N-PM Computer Services in Columbia in 1993, hopes to attract aspiring or established entrepreneurs to provide "opportunities for education, fellowship and entrepreneurship." Although the organization is geared primarily to support minority participants, Maletta stressed that the group welcomes anyone regardless of race or gender.

One of the most unforgettable moments in the past decade of TV crime drama was the dismemberment by gangster Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) of Ralph Cifaretto (Joe Pantoliano), one of his mob soldiers, in season four of HBO's The Sopranos. (Remember the bowling ball bag Tony used to carry Cifaretto's head?) Well, there is a sequence every bit as intense, gruesome and darkly comic in the highly anticipated NBC series The Black Donnellys, from Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco, the Academy Award-winning writers of the film Crash.

Our home network of a Windows 98 machine and a Windows XP machine linked by a cable/DSL router box has stopped working. The computers can share the Internet connection, but they no longer can be used to exchange files. The file sharing worked at first but no longer. The Windows 98 computer was set up on the network using a set-up disk created by the XP computer. I have done all the XP upgrades recommended, but nothing helps. I've also tried resetting the network once, and that worked for a short time and then stopped working for file sharing.

Simply put, I am going to link several computers in my home and home office to share the high-speed cable Internet access that we have. My main computer and two of the other three have Windows 98 installed. The fourth has Windows ME installed. I have heard people say that ME is the preferable OS for networking several computers - less problems. True or false? True, and then some. Windows ME previewed the improved automated small-networking wizards ultimately built into Windows XP. It makes such a difference that I sometimes marvel that any of us ever got a small network running saddled with the Windows 95/98/NT system, in which one needed to move from command panel to command panel setting things like network protocols, binding order, primary and secondary addresses and other steps.

WASHINGTON -- The Department of Justice turned off the United States' only satellite pornography network yesterday, obtaining an agreement from its owners to plead guilty to felony obscenity charges and to cease operations.The American Exxxstasy station was pioneering a potential new market by broadcasting hard-core adult movies daily to 30,000 nationwide subscribers equipped with their own satellite dishes. The service cost $300 a year.Department of Justice officials said that the proliferation of cable and satellite dish technology had made it necessary to strike quickly at the "pollution" of public airwaves before such enterprises spread.

The show itself certainly does not seem like earth-shaking material.There's a stage with a podium made to look like a Shaker-style desk for a questioner to sit behind and two doors for contestants and questioner to walk through as they come before the #F cameras. Outside of a high stool behind the podium, that's mainly it -- nothing if not understated.But the man who will sit behind the desk, mugging and cracking wise, could make this show-in-the-making one of the most lucrative in TV history -- and drive another spike into the coffin of network television, at least the system we've known for some 40 years.