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Digital Document Quarterly Perspectives on Trustworthy
Information |
Volume 5, Number 4, 4Q2006 |
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HMG Consulting |
©
2006, H.M. Gladney ISSN: 1547-8610 |
Editorial
Comment
DDQ 5(4) offers criticisms of apparently
common scholarly practice—criticisms broader and more tenuous than have
appeared in prior DDQ numbers. These
views suggest aspects that readers might reflect on. To the extent that they seem inappropriate, I
would be most interested in refutations, either as private correspondence or in
the form of short arguments that DDQ could publish in later numbers.
Some of the content, particularly that about
inattention across professional boundaries, is stimulated by missing evidence
that I would expect to be present, as in the case of the dog’s barking in
Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of
Silver Blaze. (What
was significant to Sherlock Holmes was that the dog had not barked.)
It seems to me that C.P. Snow’s Two
Cultures difficulties are still
with us,[1] and have impeded digital preservation
progress. From one side of the divide, I
offer a perspective of differences of approach that have hampered productive
collaboration. My participation in a 1996 panel discussion stimulate
this line of thinking. Readers will see
the adverse influence of The Two Cultures
gap throughout the current DDQ number.
Digital Preservation
On Designated Communities
In December, TechWorld reported that the European Union has funded a multi-country
digital preservation project called PLANETS (Preservation
and Long-term Access through NETworked Services), and that a
participants’ team has assembled itself.[2] The DPE (Digital Preservation Europe) website
reports a November PLANET partners’ meeting.
Among the topics discussed in this meeting,
the importance and role of a collection’s “Designated Community” received
attention that puzzles me. This is not
because anything said is surprising or controversial, but rather that it has
long been normal practice for each library to identify such a community as part
of its mission statement. I would have
been interested in explicit distinctions between traditional library practices
and aspects that are new and challenging for digital collections, but none were
emphasized in the meeting report.
NDIIPP at Mid-Point
“One of the chief tasks of NDIIPP is to
identify and provide for all the barriers to progress in digital preservation.
The most salient are those caused by the rapid changes in technology. Frustrations are shared by industry and
collecting institutions alike over the multiplicity of formats, rapid
technological changes, and hardware and software obsolescence that plague the
new information technologies.” [3]
Recent reports
remind us that the [
“This article draws attention to technical opportunities which, if pursued, would significantly accelerate National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) progress towards objectives called for by the U.S. Congress. It also identifies concerns about apparent content scope limitations of the NDIIPP plan.
“A solution is known in principle for every difficult technical problem of digital preservation, including all those identified in NDIIPP publications. They and other works correctly assert that non-technical preservation challenges are greater than technical ones, but do not discuss using technology to reduce non-technical obstacles. Available technical choices show that some apparent preservation challenges are not obstacles after all.
“If document representations and network protocols are standardized, then each archive can autonomously adapt itself to its own institutional environment. Thinking about what end users will want led my colleagues and me to approach the challenge differently than most other authors. We focus on information contributors and readers instead of on the work of repository employees. We design document representations instead of new repository methodology. We treat each repository as a “black box” whose internals can be adapted to local needs instead of discussing sharable repository.”
Compared to the pace of R&D progress
expected in the private sector, at least in the
Three management shortfalls seem to contribute
to what disappoints me. (1) NDIIPP has
not effectively exploited the skills of
software engineers. (2) NDIIP has not
established productive collaboration with IT enterprises. There is almost no private sector work on
digital preservation. (3) The NDIIPP
digital content scope has not included documents of practical interest such as
public infrastructure engineering records, health care records, legal records,
and many other record classes that citizens value for their daily lives and futures.
East of
A recent report describes a pilot project investigating the issues and costs of potential regional digital repositories. Taking as its starting point the anticipated needs of local authorities, the report looks in detail at the processes and costs involved in preserving and managing digital records of the types routinely dealt with by local authority records managers and archivists, including privately deposited material.
Many of the challenges have to do with ingestion of proffered record collections whose preservation has not been anticipated, whose current formats are problematical, and whose metadata are seriously incomplete. Communication between archive personnel and collection owners unfamiliar with the technology and jargon of digital collections is another difficulty needing attention.
Not mentioned, but worth thinking about, is the extent to which these challenges are transitory effects of the novelty of digital records—effects that will vanish when our children take over in 20 years or so.[8]
A Misleading Analogy: Paper and Digital Preservation
“[A]s we approach the end of the twentieth
century, we find ourselves confronting … a vast void of knowledge filled by
myth and speculation. Information in
digital form—the evidence of the world we live in—is more fragile than the
fragments of papyrus found buried with the Pharaohs. … [T]o
achieve the kind of information density that is common today, we must depend on
machines that rapidly reach obsolescence to create information and then make it
readable and intelligible.” [9]
“[D]igital objects such as electronic
journals are not only mutable but can also be modified or transformed without
generating any evidence of change. It is
the mutable nature of digital information objects that represents one of the
principal obstacles to the creation of archives for their long-term storage and
preservation.” [10]
Pessimism about digital preservation is
sometimes accompanied by comparison of the durability of paper to that of digital
information. That printed works are
inherently immutable is a professional myth.
The myth is repeated by James Billington,
the Librarian of Congress, in a September 2006 Atlantic Monthly article.[11] This is surprising, since earlier in the year Deanna
Marcum, an Assoc. Librarian of Congress, emphasized that “Only a fraction of what the ancient world
committed to papyrus has come down to us.”[12] Even
though nobody seriously proposes saving heritage materials forever on today’s digital
media, the comparison has been made often enough to warrant cautioning readers
that the analogy is misleading.
Paper is mutable—easily burned, easily torn,
easily cut, and easily overwritten. However,
four facts about information on paper are reliable guides to a digital
preservation solution. (1) We are
usually more interested in inscribed content patterns than in paper artifacts
for themselves. (2) We protect printed
information with immense infrastructure that includes widely dispersed libraries
with redundant holdings. (3) It took us
many years to learn how to preserve reliably on paper. And, (4) changes to information on paper can
be detected, often easily.
Digital data has an advantage over most
other artifacts: bit-string patterns do not decay. We know how to make any bit-string as useful
perpetually as it is today.[13] Even if better methods were to be invented, if
we save original bit-strings together with convenient transformed versions, we
could create replacement versions of today’s OAIS AIPs (Archival
Information Packages).
What we expect today for saved information
is much more demanding than ever before, including at least ease of reading, ease
of finding and very rapid access to portions of a vast information corpus,
extremely high quality and fidelity that sometimes should include evidence of
authenticity, and quality of references/linking. Why these and other factors make the
papyrus-to-digital information misleading is analyzed in a forthcoming
publication.[14]
Digital Preservation of a Different
Sort
Ray Kurzweil,
author of The Singularity is Near, suggests that computers will enable people to live forever. He predicts that non-biological
intelligence will allow humans to overcome illness and aging in just 25 years,
and that scientists will develop machines surpassing human intelligence. He says, "We won't experience 100 years
of technological advance in the 21st century; we will witness … about 1,000
times greater than what was accomplished in the 20th century."
Inattention
across the Boundaries of Professional Disciplines
“The bed-rock of research in this area is to understand in more detail the sociology of preserving and sharing information. This will include understanding better disciplinary differences, and in particular those requirements that are fundamental versus those that are primarily historical. For a cultural change to take place, it is important to involve key stakeholders and resource providers and for them to drive this process.”[15]
The digital preservation
literature contains repeated calls for cross-disciplinary cooperation. However, inattention across the professional boundaries
is a sad tradition, sadly evident once again.
Each academic community behaves as if what is not represented in its own
literature does not exist.
The most amazing twentieth-century
development is the unprecedented success of science and technology. This has been fostered by scientific methodology
that includes lively constructive criticism and problem partitioning, with each
contributor being confident that aspects he does not address will be handled by
others. Such partitioning is rooted in
philosophical analysis starting with Leibniz and Descartes and represented by
today’s analytical philosophy. Getting
partitioning right is not easy; false starts are resolved by self-evident
utility of successful partitioning. A
great merit is that work, once done, need not be repeated (except sometimes to
validate experimental results and applied logic). I believe that this scientific methodology
should be used more extensively by information scientists than seems to be the
case.
For my writings on
digital libraries and digital preservation, I have inspected over 600 articles written by librarians, archivists, and
university information scientists[16]—an informal group sometimes called the
cultural heritage community.[17] This
literature has surprisingly few citations to ACM and IEEE articles by software
engineers. This is unfortunate, because
the ignored literature contains solutions to technical issues grappled with in the
articles alluded to. Such inattention
has permitted, and continues to permit, wastage of public funds.[18]
The literature from
the digital heritage community rarely considers the business climate that
influences the tools available to it.[19] The
technology that creates today’s excellent access to information for more people
than ever before is mostly created by private enterprise, whose rules of
engagement emphasize responsiveness to markets.[20] Unfortunately,
industry is unlikely to see cultural heritage repositories as promising customers. They are simply too few and small, with digital
collections smaller than business collections for the foreseeable future.
There is a
mismatch—a semantic dissonance—between the language and expectations of
cultural heritage community spokespersons and technology vendors. The current
emphasis for technology products seems to be on system components, whereas
cultural repositories want customizable “solutions”.
Technology vendors’ work on “solutions” is mostly in the custom contract
business, which they call “services” and which is an immense business
sector. Insights and design successes in
this area are not published, but rather treated as marketplace advantages that
companies nurture, hone, and propagate internally. This phenomenon contributes to another
cultural mismatch: academic librarians seem emotionally and practically unprepared
to use outside services. Their
institutions are not financially prepared for outsourcing work, even though
they do not seem to have sufficient internal skills to build the middleware
components of repository services.[21]
A Two Cultures Model: Stylistic Differences in R&D
My analysis of NDIIPP technical progress brought
the Two Cultures rift to my attention
more strongly than ever before. The
misunderstandings and intolerance which C.P. Snow described continue to be
widespread, and to hamper progress for efficient and effective digital
preservation.
The tension is evidenced by differences in
writing style between what I have read addressing digital repositories, most of
which comes from authors with liberal arts backgrounds, and the physical
science and engineering literature with which I have worked from my
undergraduate days. I find the information
science literature difficult in that its articles rarely differentiate their novel
elements from ideas already published. In
the most influential technical periodicals this difficulty is precluded by
expert referees’ demands for clear identification of what is new and for
thorough citation of prior literature.
A likely contributing factor is the last 50
years’ increase in the number of university faculty members and “publish or
perish” expectations. The number of new
ideas does not seem to have matched the rush of publications. Critics of scientific literature have pointed
to “slice and dice” behavior in which each piece of research is parceled into
as many small articles as possible.[22] I have the impression that information
scientists meet the economic imperative by inattention to prior work, repeating
what can be found elsewhere. A
consequence has been a large increase in the number of periodicals (and financial
pressure on academic libraries). At
least in the sciences and engineering, I believe that most of the new
periodicals can be ignored with little risk.[23]
In Wm. Lefurgy’s 2005 NDIIPP presentation, he reminded an ARL audience that there was
“still no ‘silver bullet’ solution to digital preservation.” This repeats earlier authors’ assertions that
there would be no single digital preservation solution—a “straw man” assertion.[24] No good engineer would ever talk about a
potential “single solution,” because the phrase has no objective meaning. (The distinction between simple and compound
is entirely subjective, having to do with a speaker’s choice of the level of detail
for discussion.)
These impressions from the literature and
from personal interactions with members of the cultural heritage community are
summarized in the following table of stylistic differences.
|
Aspect |
Cultural Heritage Community |
Content Management: Scientific, Engineering, and Medical Communities |
|
Collegial |
Values consensus more highly than
criticism and debate |
Values criticism and debate as methodology
for progress |
|
Working relationships |
Emphasizes collegial and institutional
collaboration and synergy |
Emphasizes independent thought and competition |
|
Breadth and depth |
Emphasizes global discussions of topic at
hand |
Emphasizes “in depth” investigation of key
topical aspects |
|
Didactic |
Combines research reporting with advice
for newcomers to the topic |
Separates research articles from textbooks
and teaching materials |
|
Subjective / Objective divide |
Happy to confront subjective matters of
opinion squarely |
Focuses on objective topics that can be
empirically tested[25] |
|
Philosophical basis |
Continental philosophy |
Analytical philosophy |
|
|
Cassirer’s “expressive perception”[26] |
Carnap’s “purely structural descriptions”[27] |
|
Problem attack |
Emphasizes relationships among distinct
components |
Emphasizes partitioning and approximation,
with later corrections |
|
Typical reaction to a practical challenge |
Recommends organizational or personal
behavior; often normative |
Builds tools and makes them available for
user criticism; iteratively refines these. |
|
Mathematical models |
Rarely employs mathematics except for
elementary statistics |
Uses mathematical models to articulate
physical laws and engineering designs |
|
Key standards and conventions |
OAIS, METS, MARC, … |
ODF, MPEG-21, various XML, Unicode, various
Java, JSR 170, … |
Readers might reasonably believe that this table is biased towards
opinions of a scientist, that it is unrefined and incomplete, and that the
information samples from which it is drawn are too small and narrow. I wonder myself whether or not refinement and
base broadening would suggest it to be an appropriate description of widely
seen differences between information scientists and physical scientists. If so, a next question would be, “What do
these differences suggest about the likely evolution of information science?”
Some readers might
protest that the differences merely reflect that information science is a new
discipline—one that will achieve similar rigor to the physical sciences in a
decade or two. I’m skeptical about this
because the style of technical literature seems to have been rigorous from its
earliest days, or at least since science and engineering emerged as distinct
disciplines over a century ago.
My opinion is
influenced by the history of philosophy, which was the history of most
scholarship until the nineteenth century.
A relatively modern influence is the rift between Continental philosophy and analytic philosophy, which
happened of its own accord, but was sharpened by events in the run-up to World
War II.[28] An
older influence is Immanuel Kant’s attempt to make his philosophy “scientific”—an
effort emulated as later thinkers created what today is called analytic
philosophy.[29]
I need to emphasize
that nothing written above is intended to be an unqualified recommendation of
scientific methodology or scientific style.
In fact, the twentieth-century success of science and engineering
depends on careful limitation of scientific methods to focused technical
challenges. It would much improve the
quality of digital preservation literature if its authors used scientific
methodology for its technical components.
A New
British research
funding agencies have for some time selected “grand challenge” research topics
that are (presumably) favored for funding.
In 2006, “Memories for Life” was identified as such a topic. What is intended by this, and some citations
of key articles, are described by a Royal Society paper: Kieron O’Hara et al., Memories for life: a review of the science and technology. Its abstract includes:
“Recent
developments in our understanding of memory processes and mechanisms, and their
digital implementation, have placed the encoding, storage, management and
retrieval of information at the forefront of several fields of research. At the same time, the divisions between the
biological, physical and the digital worlds seem to be dissolving. Hence, opportunities for interdisciplinary
research into memory are being created, between the life sciences, social
sciences and physical sciences. Such
research may benefit from immediate application into information management
technology as a testbed.”
The value of
transcending disciplinary boundaries is exemplified by the “Memories for Life”
initiative.
Coping with an Uncertain Future
“The
digital realm is one of change and uncertainty, and it is likely to remain so
for the foreseeable future. Even the most astute businesspeople cannot forecast
anything comfortably because change is so rapid that it is too difficult to
develop viable business models.” [30]
“There
is no way to predict how the future will unfold. The Library recognizes the need to track the
evolving circumstances … that can have decisive yet unanticipated effects on
the preservation mission.” [31]
Curators engaged in
preservation need to learn to live with not knowing for sure that they have succeeded. They will surely see much information
disappear, perhaps including some that they believe they have made permanently
durable. Preservation failures can make
themselves known, but successes cannot!
Presuming that curators have diligently and correctly applied the best
known methodology, how can they achieve peace of mind?[32]
As posed, the
question is unlikely to bother scientists or engineers. “Not knowing for sure” is unavoidable, but
worrying about it is neither warranted nor healthy. In science, we do not claim apodictic truth
for any law or deduction, but instead hold that any assertion is conditional on
no counter-examples being found. In engineering
we never claim perfect reliability, but instead design for “good
enough” to meet requirements in view of the cost of
improvements.
Scientific practice
includes experiments and reasoning that test extreme cases of any proposition
and vigorous peer criticism. We gradually become more confident of a
scientific truth as time passes, provided that it has been subjected to
responsible testing and critical examination.
Engineering practice includes estimating failure probabilities. Over time, we become confident that artifacts
are sufficiently reliable if their component failure probabilities are known to
be small, provided that all likely hazards have been evaluated. Neither in science nor in engineering do we
ever assert that the last critical question has been asked and completely
answered.
Every citizen of
the technologically advanced nations is familiar with this, even taking it for
granted with familiar technologies. For
instance, you surely use your automobile with confidence that it will perform
satisfactorily for approximately 15 years. Similarly, we are confident
that the
For preservation of any document collection, as for automobiles and for bridges, engineers can design for
whatever small probabilities of loss those who will pay the bills
specify. Engineers also know
how to describe such designs so that independent auditors can vet reliability
estimates. Such
considerations lead to simple prescriptions for preservation repositories. Their managers might consider:
(1) Managing
preservation as an increment over providing today's digital library services to
clients, doing budgeting accordingly. The only essential digital
preservation activity is to save bit-strings reliably.
(2) Assessing
today's most plausible methodologies against the claims made for them, choosing
pieces that constitute an end-to-end solution, and asking solution advocates the
most searching questions possible.
(3) Wasting neither
time nor nervous energy worrying about perfect or permanent preservation,
instead thinking in terms of acceptable losses over a normal enterprise
planning horizon.
(4) Seeking every
opportunity for replacing human clerical procedures with automated machine
procedures, because the largest preservation costs and greatest quality risks will be
associated with human failings.
(5) Commissioning
software to implement the methodology chosen, paying the software engineers
whatever is needed to make the tools convenient and fail-safe.
News
Abstracts for the 2006 International Conference on Formal Ontology in
Information Systems are available.
A new website provides access to 50,000 text pages and 40,000
images of Charles Darwin's publications and manuscripts. The site currently has 50% of his works
online. Its authors hope to finish by
2009.
More Elbow Room on the Internet
BusinessWeek reports the status of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), the initiative to relieve the impending shortage of internet addresses. For an introduction and background, see the IPv6 Wiki.
Identifying Forgeries among Digital Images
A Dartmouth College doctoral thesis, Lighting and Optical Tools for Digital Image Forensics, describes tools for detecting tampering in digital images—tools that do not depend on watermarks or specialized hardware.[33] M.K. Johnson uses illumination direction to analyze light sources in a photograph, detecting inconsistencies among shadows. He uses a specularity tool to seek inconsistent reflective highlights, such as differences in reflections from human eyes. Finally, he is preparing a chromatic aberration tool to examine the natural distortion of a picture caused by a camera lens. If this distortion is not consistent throughout, then the image is probably forged. While none of these tools will be 100% effective, in concert they will contribute much to image forgery investigation.
DPubS Software for University Publishing
The Cornell and
DPubS is written in Perl, runs on Solaris and Linux systems, and conforms to common open-source conventions. The system has a flexible XML user interface and is OAI-PMH 2.0 compatible. It can use Fedora as a digital repository, and DSpace support is under consideration. DPubS is available without fees.
News in Depth
from the Lyon (
DDQ readers who are dissatisfied with “sound
byte” news reports and who read French might be interested in a service from
the Bibliothèque Municipale (BM) de Lyon.
BM Lyon librarians have begun to provide news
breadth and depth on the library website. "Points d'actu!" / "The News, In
Depth" is an illustrated magazine which augments daily
news with additional resources, context, and links for inquiry beyond the headlines.
New Data-Archiving Rules for Businesses
New U.S. rules that compel companies to produce electronically stored information for civil litigation could drive improved tracking and archiving of electronic documents, digital images and spreadsheets.
Reading
Recommendations
Big Brother Is Preparing to Watch You!
Ian Angell and Jan
Kietzmann present a chilling projection of government, commercial, and criminal
surveillance that radio-frequency identifier (RFID) technology will make easy.[34] They
focus on addition of RFID circuits to large-denomination currency notes, and extend
this to other marking opportunities. It
is particularly worrisome because RFID surveillance does not depend on
line-of-sight and will not be noticed by its victims.
I already am
concerned about surveillance by global position sensing circuits in cell
phones. The article amplifies these
concerns. Of course, these issues will
affect our children more than those of us more than 50 years old.
Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World
Sophie's
World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy, a New
York Times recommendation about 10 years ago, is a whimsical, easy-to-read
introduction to the questions and history of philosophy. Its style is intended to appeal to young
girls, but it is also informative to anyone interested in deep questions about
what it means to be human.
Since the book reports only one topic for each selected philosopher, it
might strike some readers as presenting philosophic caricatures rather than a
balanced view. For instance, its chapter
on Immanuel Kant pays more attention to ideas from the Critique of Practical
Reason than the seminal Critique of Pure Reason. This does fit with the book’s second-half
emphasis on ethics, rather than on epistemology. I most enjoyed the first half, because it teaches
about early Greek philosophic insights that re-emerged only about 150 years
ago.
David Hilbert’s On the Infinite
This 1925 lecture in
honor of Karl Weierstrass is a masterful synopsis of the logical problems
associated with infinity. It teaches the
essential connections between mathematical arcana, such as the epsilon-delta
method that grounded mathematical analysis (calculus) soundly for the first
time, and better known problem resolutions, such as those that address Russell’s Paradox.
The English translation of the lecture appears in P. Benacerraf and H. Putnam’s Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings,1983, which I recommend also for its other chapters. The latter might appeal more to sophisticated readers than to beginners in reading epistemology. In contrast, I believe that Hilbert’s lecture will be enjoyed by almost all DDQ readers.
Electronic Health Records: "IEEE Spectrum"
A long-standing dream within the medical
profession is “the longitudinal patient record”―a birth-to-death collection
of all medical reports on an individual.
The October 2006 number of IEEE Spectrum (v. 43, no. 10) proposes a comprehensive system of
electronic health records,
linking hospitals, general practitioners, specialists, and insurance offices
and replacing paper-based files with accessible digital records. It promotes benefits such as the ability to
monitor for pandemics and enabling doctors to focus on preventative care.
This particular silver lining comes with its
own cloud. A January 2007 BusinessWeek article, Diagnosis: Identity Theft suggests
that “for $60, a thief can buy your health records—and use them to get costly
care.” The impact on such identity theft
victims apparently does not end with their clearing up incorrect bills.
Practical Matters
Unusually Interesting Web Sites
FILExt, the file extension source, is a good starting point for learning about unfamiliar file types.
FlightStats provides a wealth of information about
flights, airlines, airports, and much more related to commercial aviation.
Sun’s Java Web Start provides a
platform-independent, secure, and robust deployment technology. It helps developers deploy applications
to end users by making the applications available on a standard Web server.
WebNote is a note-taking Web application. You type something, save your workspace, and then can revisit it from any computer. Backpack is a similar application that includes calendaring, reminders sent to your telephone, and the ability to share pages online.
Rollyo is a personalized search engine service that allows you to customize which groups of sites you search at one time. Based on Yahoo! Search, Rollyo also lets you share your searches with friends.
PC Magazine lists 99 interesting “undiscovered” Web sites and its choice of 101 top classic Web sites.
Price Watch
|
Laptop computer |
No brand named, AMD Sempron 3000+,
256Mb, 15” screen, 40Gb HDD, CD-RW/DVD ROM, Win/XP Home |
$490. |
each |
|
Compact PC |
HP Slimline S7500N, AMD Sempron
3300+, 512Mb, 200Gb HDD, Double Layer DVD RW, Win/XP Home |
$425. |
each |
|
Desktop PC |
Compaq Presario SR1900NX, Intel
Celeron 3.2 GHz, 512Mb, 533MHz FSB, 120Gb HDD, CD-RW/DVD-ROM, 17” CRT |
$325. |
each |
|
PC main memory |
OCZ PC3200 DDR 1 Gb |
$86. |
$86/Gbyte |
|
HDD portable |
Wolverine 2.5” w/enclosure, 120 Gb |
$98. |
$0.82/Gbyte |
|
HDD portable |
Soyo 1.5” w/enclosure, 20Gb |
$58. |
$2.90/Gbyte |
|
HDD external |
ACOM 250 Gb, 7200 rpm w/backup SW |
$75. |
$0.30/Gbyte |
|
HDD NAS |
Anthology 1 Tb, Raid, USB 2.0 and
Firewire, w/backup SW |
$600. |
$0.60/Gbyte |
|
HDD NAS |
Buffalo 2 Tb, Raid, Gigabit Ethernet
and USB 2.0, w/printer attachment support |
$970. |
$0.48/Gbyte |
|
HDD for laptop |
Fujitsu 120 Gb, 2.5”, 5400rpm, 8Mb
buffer |
$130. |
$1.08/Gbyte |
|
DVD Writer |
Hi-Val 16x +R/-R, 8x Double Layer
+R |
$33. |
each |
|
Flat panel display |
Emprex 17” |
$119. |
each |
|
Color laser printer |
Samsung CLP-510, 1200 DPI, 64Mb,
25ppm B/W, 6ppm color |
$380. |
each |
|
Color laser printer |
Minolta 2400W, 400 DPI, 20ppm B/W,
5ppm color |
$192. |
each |
|
Digi-cam memory |
SD or CF, 2Gb |
$28. |
$14./Gbyte |
|
Telephone |
Uniden 2.4GHz, with answering
machine, 3 handsets, caller ID, call waiting, 3-way intercom |
$43. |
each |
|
Antivirus program |
ZoneAlarm |
$3. |
each |
These prices include