DotComGuy is now into the second half of his year locked away in a Dallas town house with nothing but a laptop and an Internet connection. This is a great piece of yellow-journalism -- a word which refers to the sort of self-created promotional event used by newspapers looking to increase circulation.

DotComGuy, who had his name legally changed at the start of the project, wanted to show that someone could live totally off the Internet for a year.

The guy has certainly attracted a lot of attention and advertising for his self-imposed seclusion which ends at noon on January 1.

In fact he's become a business at www.DotComGuy.com where people follow him on live cameras throughout the house. DotComGuy started the project out of some warped desire to show the world that someone could live entirely through e-commerce. On January 1 he moved into an empty house with only a computer and the clothes on his back and a determination not leave for a year. He buys and does all his normal transactions with the outside world online.

You can look in at him and read the amazing mail people send him. It's certainly weird to think that people actually enjoy looking in on this sort of stuff rather than getting a life.

Are there any budding hackers in Bermuda? Well try to crack this nut. Online publication eWeek has launched a contest challenging code breakers to infiltrate a dummy retail site www.openhack.com for a variety of money prizes ranging from $500 to $2,500. The top prize goes to the person who cracks into the site's Oracle database server by sending back the contents of the table ''eweek.secret''.

Word Watch: The latest fashion word is P2P according to the Wall Street Journal. That's peer-to-peer as compared to B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer). The P2P buzzword refers to the sharing of information between participating computer users without going through a middleman server.

The phrase describes the Napster generation who trade songs they've stored on their computers.

Finding and retaining qualified workers is the greatest challenge facing small and mid-sized businesses in the US according to a survey by Arthur Andersen.

About 61 percent of businesses in the survey chose the staffing problem as their number one concern; 35 percent chose regulatory red tape as their greatest concern; 29 percent chose economic uncertainty and 28 percent chose keeping up with technology.

In the query about growth strategies 50 percent said using the Internet for e-commerce is in their plans.

About 88 percent of small and mid-sized business have computers, and of those 39 percent have networks, 15 percent have a system to share data with customers or suppliers, 15 percent can access their network from outside their office, and 14 percent have a full-time computer or network specialist or group.

And a useful indication of the importance of the Internet was the telling statistic that 53 percent now have a web page compared to 32 percent in 1998.

Those business who use the Internet to selling goods and services jumped to 23 percent up from 11 percent last year.

However, 54 percent do not conduct e-commerce and don't have any plans to do so in the next year and 42 percent view e-commerce as having no impact on their businesses. This to me is a sad indication that many businesses have not caught on to the Internet as a means of allowing a smaller sized enterprise to compete with the larger guys on a more level playing field, if only to use the computer network as a means of advertising their products.

How much does your staff know about the world of the Internet? Even the big firms find there are huge knowledge gaps in their workforce. UBS Warburg, Europe's third largest bank, made about 54 percent of its 12,000-strong workforce take a three-hour test about the Internet and found many of them failed. The questions ranged from the very technical, such as the definition of a `WAN`, or wide area network, to the general which included an explanation for why dotcom firms carry such high valuations (the price of opportunity).

Staff have been undergoing a training courses through a series of CD-based lessons before taking the test. Try these three questions from the test. The answers are at the end of the column.

A. The XXXX protocol is the established protocol which allows servers and browsers to communicate over the World Wide Web: 1) TCP/IP.

2) SPX.

3) HTTP.

4) IPX.

B. Which of these LAN technologies uses a hub? 1) Ring.

2) Star.

3) Tree.

4) Bus.

C. What is the basic unit of information on the web? 1) A HTML tag.

2) A paragraph.

3) A web page.

4) A web site.

The answers to the multiple choice questions are A (3). B (2). C (3).

Tech Tattle deals with topics relating to technology. Contact Ahmed at ahmedelamin yhotmail.com or (33) 467901474.