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Digital Document Quarterly |
Volume 7, Number 1, 1Q2008 |
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HMG Consulting |
©
2007, H.M. Gladney ISSN: 1547-8610 |
An extrapolation of its present rate of growth reveals that in the not too distant future Physical Review[1] will fill bookshelves at a speed exceeding that of light. This is not forbidden by relativity, since no information is being conveyed. Attributed to Rudolf Peierls, 1961
In case DDQ readers have not noticed, I mention that the newsletter exploits links to other people’s Web contributions much more heavily now than it did in its early years. Hopefully each reader will find a few of the linked web pages particularly interesting.
Open Access
Scanning to Create On-Line Books
Microsoft® has announced a massive book digitization initiative. Amazon® and Google® projects had been announced earlier.
· Perhaps the earliest massive book digitization project was the Carnegie-Mellon Million Book Project. It now provides on-line access to 1.5 million titles.
· In December 2004, Google announced digitization partnerships with the Libraries of Harvard, Stanford, U. Michigan, and Oxford, as well as with the New York Public Library. “Users searching with Google will see links in their search results page … Clicking on a title delivers a page where users can browse the full text of public domain works and brief excerpts and/or bibliographic data of copyrighted material.” A concise description is available for Google’s enhanced catalog of the world's books.
·
In June 2007, Amazon announced its project to capture and
distribute hard-to-find books. Its partners will provide rare and inaccessible
books in return for a revenue share. The
partners are the libraries of
· Some research libraries have rebuffed commercial offers to scan their books. These libraries have instead joined the Open Content Alliance, a not-for-profit effort aimed at making works broadly available.
· Microsoft has released Live Search Books and a position statement on copyright. Not everybody is pleased with a related Microsoft/Library of Congress deal.
At the same time, public libraries are adapting to the Internet. For balanced commentary, see Paul Courant, Scholarship and Academic Libraries (and their kin) in the World of Google, First Monday 11(8), 2006.
For managing my personal collection and also bibliographic records from collections such as those just described, I have found the CollectorZ Book Collector utility ($40) convenient.
The Oxford Internet Institute will use the Oxford
Research Archive to make available
university research output. Its
announcement stated, “By having our outputs permanently and securely archived
by the University, we are confident that it will significantly increase the
visibility and dissemination of our work.”
The Just Free Books website identifies hundreds of websites providing free content access.
In
2007, the IEEE Xplore®
collection added over 90,000 documents including all of Proceedings of the IEEE and IEEE Computer Magazine, historical content from over 40 IEEE titles,
and selected engineering publications dating back to 1913.[2]
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has long made its course materials widely available. More recently an MIT physics professor's lectures have become a Web hit.
Carl Malamud is making available free online copies of every U.S. Supreme Court decision and Court of Appeals ruling since 1950, 1.8 million rulings in all.[3]
Marginalization of Research Librarians
The details are difficult to predict, but surely all information access actions that can be automated will be. This and digital preservation literature drew my attention to potential marginalization of research librarians.
Twenty years ago my first tool for finding information was research library catalogs; today it is a Google search of on-line resources. Although online search tools do index library catalogs, most useful “hits” seem to come from other sources. Within limits dictated by copyright law, the online collections just described will replace my visiting nearby libraries. Of course, a few research librarians are helping achieve this convenience. However, it will reduce our future need for help from their colleagues. Simultaneously, work on search semantics will reduce how long it takes me to find the material I want.
These changes, and others that I cannot
anticipate, are inevitable. The economic
circumstances have eliminated entire professions, such as stenography. The only at-risk professions that will survive
are those whose members invent replacement services for which they are uniquely
qualified.
Digital
Preservation
Subject-based and institutional digital repositories are increasingly
being hailed as the preferred means for safeguarding the future accessibility
of digital information. Nestor
Newsletter[4]
Who is doing the hailing? Anybody other than institutional repository staffs?
Papers questioning digital preservation aspects, particularly the “Trusted Digital Repository” approach, have begun to appear, together with what may be beginning attention to a viable alternative—helping information creators prepare digital documents to be suitable for a long future. See:
· M. Seadle and E. Greifeneder, In archiving we trust: Results from a workshop at Humboldt University in Berlin, First Monday 13(1), January 2008.
· R. Harvey, So where’s the black hole in our collective memory? Digital Preservation Europe, 2007, for which comments are solicited.
· J.A. Smith and M.L. Nelson, Creating Preservation-Ready Web Resources, D-Lib Magazine 14(1/2), 2008.
· G. Shankaranarayanan and A. Even, The Metadata Enigma, Comm. ACM 49(2), 88-94, 2006.
Carlos Oliveira’s 2007 presentation, Digital Curation and Preservation: Funders’
Perspectives, shows current European Commission bias towards
repository-based solutions, somewhat mitigated by its call for “Redefinition of roles … of institutions (libraries,
museums, archives, universities) in charge of creating, collecting, organising, preserving and providing access to knowledge-bearing
objects.”
However, achieving long term preservation of sensitive content by improved repository procedures is almost surely infeasible. Straining to transform cultural repositories to be “Trusted Digital Repositories” cannot be a complete preservation solution because it cannot guarantee that stored documents have not been feloniously modified. (At least, no-one has shown how a public access digital repository can be reliably secured for periods of many years, much less for a century or longer.) What’s more, its objectives are not even the best objectives available.[5]
When a sculptor wants to please future generations, he crafts in stone or pours molten bronze into short-lived molds. In ancient custom, statues were mounted in open spaces accessible to many people. But custodians long ago learned that longevity was favored by moving artifacts into churches, museums, and palaces. To provide access, they mounted replicas on outdoor pedestals, and sometimes poured additional copies for sharing with a far-flung public.[6]
A lesson is evident. Almost everybody, including this author, was gulled by the objective "digital preservation." History teaches that the most effective objective might be to make objects (material and digital) durable when they are first created or, more precisely, when they are first shared, and to exploit many-fold replication in already-available repositories, even if these repositories are not hardened against mischief.
A Software Engineering Contribution
ACM periodicals have published few articles addressing digital preservation. Since I believe that software engineers are not as aware or engaged in preservation as would be socially valuable, I was encouraged by the recent appearance of The Provenance of Electronic Data,[7] which argues that “Users must know whether they have confidence in their applications' electronic data; it must therefore be accompanied by its provenance that describes the process that led to its production.”
Unfortunately, the laudable purpose of the article is not matched by its content, which is less about provenance as I understand it than about tools for recording measurement circumstances. Our undergraduate science tutors emphasized that our laboratory notebooks needed to document every circumstance important to indicating precisely what was being measured. Where computers are used as scientific or clinical tools, part of this process can be automated. Tools for this are what the article describes.
DDQ readers are likely to be misled as I was misled, by the article’s unusual use of the word “provenance”, and the close relationship claimed for this work with conventional usage of "provenance", as summarized in the article’s final sentence. “In the same way scholars can appreciate works of art by studying their documented history, users would be able to gain confidence in electronic data thanks to provenance queries.” I prefer to stay with the traditional meaning of “provenance” and its connection with notions of authenticity.
What most interests me in The Provenance of Electronic Data is its reference implementation for tools to record clinical measurements. One of the previewers of DDQ emphasized that “the article doesn't do justice to the amount of work that has been done” and recommended attention to an EU Provenance Project architecture web page.
For “provenance”, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary has “1. the place or origin or earliest known history of something. 2. a record of ownership of a work of art or antique.” The Online Free Dictionary definition is similar. A current Wikipedia entry starts with “Provenance is the origin or source from which something comes, and the history of subsequent owners (also known in some fields as chain of custody). The term is often used in the sense of place and time of manufacture, production or discovery.”
The preceding paragraphs might be seen as mere pedantic quibble over the meaning of a common word. Some of my friends who regularly preview DDQ and sometimes recommend changes had valid criticisms of drafts and still have concerns with what appears above. Indeed, one recommends avoiding controversy by simply withdrawing all DDQ mention of The Provenance of Electronic Data. However, other current conversations emphasize that rapid progress towards practical digital preservation requires more effective collaboration between archivists/librarians and scientists/engineers than we have achieved so far. Such collaboration would be enhanced by as much common vocabulary as is feasible without inhibiting thinking about subtle topics. Shared meanings for critical words such as “provenance” are critical.
If the meaning adopted by Moreau et al. were used for works of art, the provenance of a painter’s work might include chemical description of the paints used and other technical factors. If such topics are dealt with it all, it is in descriptive and critical articles or books about the painter,[8] not in the provenance information of any painting.
On the other hand, a philosopher of language might remind us of the fuzzy boundary between identifying an artifact’s source and describing this source. Even so, a modern author should stay as close as possible to traditional meanings, or describe and justify his divergences when he cannot conform.
All this has immediate, practical consequences. Librarians and archivists have worked for many years to define shared and extensible schema for metadata that include provenance information, such as the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS). A recent step is appearance of a practical prescription. The authors of The Provenance of Electronic Data should consider how to bridge from their work to such archivists’ more mature work.
More generally, the authors and other members of the technical community should consider how they might contribute to cross-disciplinary collaboration to achieve broadly-based, convenient long-term digital preservation.
A Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, with collaboration of the Library of Congress, JISC, CLIR, and NARA. Its two-year mission is “to develop a viable economic sustainability strategy to ensure that today’s data will be available for further use, analysis and study.” Task force members have been named.
Funding for sustainable storage development is available by way of an NSF Cyberinfrastructure RFP.
DDQ readers might be interested in pertinent commercial initiatives. An answer to new laws and regulations for long-term data storage is provided by network attached storage servers.
Segmented, parallel architectures are improving capacity, performance, management and cost of file storage. Significant improvements in data delivery to computing elements and scaling capacity can be achieved by digital repositories. Many white papers are available. Readers might also be interested in replication software such as the HiT DBMoto offering.
The PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata, version 2.0 (a revision of the 2005 Final report of the PREMIS Working Group) has just been released. This document specifies metadata for implementation in multifarious repositories, supported by guidelines for its creation, management and use, and oriented toward automated workflows. Enhancements include expanded rights metadata, more significant properties level, and extensibility mechanisms for several metadata units. XML schema for implementation have been drafted..
A recent step is appearance of a practical prescription, Guidance for using PREMIS with METS.[9]
Other Preservation Initiatives
Readers might take interest
in the
Microsoft is currently
investigating MS Word® enhancements
for managing embedded metadata, doing so along lines suggested in DDQ long
ago. These are intended to make it easy
for authors to embed metadata. They will
also enable commentators to access and edit journal and article metadata with
XML using the NLM format.
Microsoft is also
considering infrastructure for journal templates that can encapsulate
semantics, help authors to annotate with metadata, and enhance structure and
content validation prior to publication submission. According to Lee
Dirks of Microsoft, a Blue Ribbon TF member, they believe that
enabling the capture of metadata early in the authoring cycle will lead to a improved
content search.
The Training for Audiovisual Preservation in
Europe (TAPE) Project has just published an excellent Audio Tape Digitisation Workflow document.[10]
See
also the latest number of the DPC
What's New in Digital Preservation
bulletin.
Epistemology
Tension between
ontological and epistemological philosophy is similar to the tension between
truth and formal provability.
You can assess any
position in philosophy by the relationship it proposes between being and
knowing. Some traditions, like the Greek
one of Plato and Aristotle, place ontology in the center, while others, like
the modern period inaugurated by Descartes, put the emphasis on epistemology. Clearly, however, a complete philosophy will
have to do justice to both. Unfortunately,
there is a deep and irreducible tension between the two perspectives that makes
a reconciliation difficult to achieve. The
ontological perspective, "the view from nowhere," seems to leave no
room for "the world as I found it". Yourgrau, p.112 [11]
Whence and Whither Ontologies
Deep down I'm a very shallow person. Charles Haughey quip
Readers have surely noticed an Internet crescendo about ontologies and semantic webs. I cannot help but wonder why the topic is receiving so much attention,[12] having been unaware that there was much to be said about it. Although I have not yet had time to read many of the articles and e-mails addressing the topic, I’ll venture a summary of what needs saying.
(1) At
the beginning of the twentieth century, “ontology” denoted “the branch of
metaphysics concerned with the nature of being.” (
(2) An ontology in the latter sense can be represented by a directed graph with labeled arcs and nodes. There are many equivalent representations. Among the most useful are those using relational databases, because powerful software is available to exploit them.
(3) Ontologies are generalizations of thesauri (and dictionaries)—generalizations that attempt to escape inherent difficulties with language.[14] However, any ontology suffers from the difficulties of ungroundedness and ambiguity inherent in the language of its labels.
(4) Philosophers have discussed these topics for over a century because relationships between things and concepts are basic to describing the world and ideas. Particularly prominent are Charles Sanders Peirce and Rudolf Carnap.[15]
(5) Graphs are interesting because even an unlabeled graph of part of the world is likely to be unique (if it describes a relatively large complex), thereby providing identification that does not depend on the vagaries of natural language. Unfortunately, this utility is much hampered by the fact that comparing two graphs to establish that they are identical is computationally infeasible.[16]
(6) Any ontology is likely to be full of subjective choices that different people make differently, even people who are well informed about a shared topic. A shared ontology can nevertheless be extremely useful by reducing the number of misunderstandings within topical discussions![17]
(7) …
Between now and year-end, I hope to read
enough to validate my opinions, or to expose key aspects missed. Perhaps the deficiencies of the above summary
will outrage a few DDQ readers. If so,
hopefully they will be sufficiently annoyed to identify critical aspects
outlooked.[18]
In the meantime, DDQ offers some citations
and Web links that I find interesting:
·
John Sowa, Knowledge Representation: Logical,
Philosophical, and Computational Foundations, Brooks/Cole, 2000, ISBN 0-534-94965-7.
·
Umberto Eco, Kant
and the Platypus, Vintage, 2000, ISBN 0-099-27695-X, §4.5.
·
Chaim Zins, Knowledge Map of Information
Science.
·
Chris Harrison’s information depictions.
·
Visualizations that help people understand dense data
collections are classified in a Periodic Table of
Visualization Methods.[19]
·
“Web
3.0” is hyperbole for anticipated semantic web technologies. A free executive summary
introduces a pricey business evaluation.[20]
A call for papers is open for the
forthcoming 3rd
Conference on Concept Mapping.
News
Microsoft's accusation that IBM sabotaged its attempts to have the Office OpenXML format approved by the ISO drew a heated response from IBM.
‘IBM believes that there is a revolution occurring in the IT industry, and that smart people around the world are demanding truly open standards developed in a collaborative, democratic way for the betterment of all,’ IBM VP of standards and OSS Bob Sutor [said]. 'If "business as usual" means trying to foist a rushed, technically inferior and product-specific piece of work like OO-XML on the IT industry, we're proud to … fight against such bad behavior.’ Ars Technica, Feb. 2008
An unrelated announcement is that Microsoft will cooperate with the open source Eclipse group. (Eclipse is an open source community originated by IBM. Its projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software.)
Microsoft also announced that Windows XP sale will end on June 30. In a related announcement, Microsoft also said that “it will keep selling a version of Windows XP for use on a new breed of low-cost computers for at least two years longer than the system will be available for mainstream PCs.”
Industrial IT Research Evolution
At the beginning of the year, business magazines summarize trends and expectations so eloquently that citation is more appropriate than repetition. The following reports caught my attention.
· IBM's R&D head is shifting the giant's focus and making a few large bets. See BusinessWeek March 10, 2008, pp.63-65.
·
A second annual IBM estimate lists innovations that might change the way people
work, live and play
over the next five years. The list is
based on market and social trends and emerging technologies in IBM
laboratories. A related article is
eWeek’s 10 New Technologies
IBM Is Cooking in Its Innovation Labs.
·
Hewlett-Packard research
seems to be making similar changes to those of IBM.
·
Investigation into the hafnium to replace
silicon in transistors is growing. Although semiconductor components cannot
shrink for many more years, experts do not believe this limit to be imminent.
A different kind of report, IBM’s 2008 Annual Report and
especially the letter from Sam Palmisano, the IBM Chairman, might be
interesting reading even for people who are not IBM stockholders. This is because, as it has done continuously
throughout its history, IBM has been re-inventing itself—dropping entire
business lines, such as personal computers and replacing them with better
current opportunities, such as provisioning less-developed parts of the
world. The financial results suggest the
changes are very successful. The
interest for the general reader is that the IBM report describes its changes
succinctly and articulately, and that the technical, market, and world
conditions that stimulate these changes affect the entire IT industry. If you are trying to anticipate your own
future information environment, this report will help inform you as well as do
the writings of professional forecasters (e.g., Gartner Group).
Reading Recommendations
I usually
avoid using DDQ to comment on current political issues. However, since information trustworthiness is a key DDQ
theme, I make an exception in referring readers
to a Newsweek critique, The Tales Hillary Tells.
Stan Kelly-Bootle Aphorisme du Jour
[In the title,] "Use It or Lose It,"
we see [a] danger in clever, apparent paradoxes posing as assumed truisms. Some contexts for those damned elusive “its”
can give us falsisms. If we take
"it" as a nonrenewable fossil fuel, our aphorism is downright
dangerous. "Use coal or lose it"
makes sense only as a Chinese slogan where "losing it" means losing
the race to Americanize the Chinese economy.
Other variants may or may not appeal, depending on your cynicism.
"Use IT or lose it," sneaking in the abbreviation for information
technology, is plausible unless you are trying to unify the
E. Brian Davies, Science in the Looking Glass: What
Do Scientists Really Know?
How do scientific conjectures become laws? Why does proof mean different things in different sciences? Do numbers exist, or were they invented? Why do some laws turn out to be wrong? In this wide-ranging book, Brian Davies discusses the basis for scientists' claims to knowledge about the world. He looks at science historically, emphasizing not only the achievements of scientists from Galileo onwards, but also their mistakes.
By the start of the nineteenth century
Laplace and others were to claim that the application of mathematical laws
would enable one to obtain the solution of any problem involving the motion of
bodies, provided one had complete knowledge of their dispositions at some
initial time. With the benefit of
hindsight we can now see that basing a deterministic philosophy on the exact
truth of
This is enjoyable book is written for scientific laymen.
Walter Isaacson: Einstein: His Life and Universe
A 2007 New York Times review is apt:
[T]o protect the rights of
the individual—was Einstein's
most fundamental political tenet. Individualism and freedom were
necessary for creative art and science to flourish. Personally, politically, and professionally,
he was repulsed by any restraints.
That is why he remained outspoken about racial discrimination in
As a Jew who bad grown up in
Although he rarely accepted in
person the many honorary degrees offered to him, Einstein made an exception
when he was invited to
Jews are not the only people to have suffered a police state. Wired Magazine has published Dark Legacy of East Germany’s Secret Police. I feel that this, or something equivalent, should be required reading for secondary school students.
Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship[22]
This book led me to a remarkable speech.[23] Recall that a surprising number of prominent Bolsheviks were Jewish and also that Winston Churchill was a member of the British Government that supported Zionism with the Balfour Declaration. The speech begins,
Some people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.
And it may well be that this same astounding race [is] producing another system of morals and philosophy as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which, if not arrested would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible. It would almost seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of Antichrist were destined to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical. Winston Churchill
Few people know that Churchill was a life-long supporter of moderate Zionism. Gilbert’s book fills in forgotten history, starting from the Palestine Mandate and describing British Government tensions that peaked with the creation of the State of Israel. Because the tensions continue today in Arab/Israeli conflict, I recommend it as an apparently unbiased account of mid-East history.
Notes about Muslim Contributions
I cannot read books like those just mentioned and like Lewis’ What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response[24] without thinking of the immense disparity of Muslim and Jewish intellectual contributions in the 19th and 20th centuries. For instance,
No representative
of the Muslim world has ever won a Nobel Prize in physics or in chemistry.
Abdus Salam was one of the winners of
the Prize in physics in 1979, and another man who had a Muslim name, Ahmed H.
Zewail, took the Prize in chemistry in 1999, but both of these
men had pursued their scientific work in the West, not in the lands of Islam. Bennetta[25]
See articles about Muslim and Jewish Nobel Prize winners.[26]
There are a mere 12 Million Jews in the
entire world yet they have received 178 Nobel Prizes. … Muslims
number 1.4 Billion (117 times
the number of Jews) … [but account for only nine Nobel Prizes] Masada 2000 website
The frequently deplorable Islamic
attitude towards learning and freedom of speech is illustrated by 2006
treatment of
Naguib Mahfouz … is seeking permission from the country's highest Islamic authorities to publish one of his most controversial novels, a move which has staggered friends and colleagues who see it as a capitulation to the power of conservative Islam.
The 94-year-old writer said his
publisher had asked for the approval of
A friend and fellow author … said: "This creates a dangerous precedent because it gives power of censorship to al- Azhar, which goes against the principles upheld by Egyptian intellectuals." …
Another Egyptian author, Ezzat
al-Qamhawi, said Mahfouz had "betrayed his writing". He called his decision a stain on a glorious
career. Hardaker
in London’s The Independent
See also Pervez Hoodbhoy, Science and the Islamic world--The quest for rapprochement, Physics Today, August 2007, pp 49-55.
Amusing and Informative Web Sites
The annual Darwin Awards honor the human gene pool by identifying those who contribute most to its improvement by accidentally removing themselves from it. See the 2007 Darwin Awards.
The New Scientist has reviewed repairs and new instruments that astronauts will bring to the Hubble Space Telescope. The instrument will become 90 times as powerful as it was designed to be when launched—able to photograph galaxies back to 400 million years after the Big Bang.
Browse Mark Schumacher’s Buddhist and Shinto images in Japanese Art. This library of Gods, Goddesses, Demons, and Creatures is a virtual photo dictionary of iconography. It includes a timeline back to the 8th Century and notes on Shintoism, Constellations and Star Deities, and the Bodhisattva. For foreign tourists, there is a listing of temple lodgings.
David Rumsey's antique maps feature in an innovative build in the virtual world. Access is via the Second Life virtual world service.
See also Brunelleschi's Peepshow & The Origins Of Perspective.
Practical Matters
Here’s some free advice: Go to Google, enter any of your [own] company’s brands followed by the word “sucks,” and you will see the true consumers’ reports. BusinessWeek[27]
For instance, “Nuance sucks” yielded 108,000 hits on February 24. Why do I mention this? Because when I installed its excellent
OmniPage OCR (optical character recognition application), Nuance also installed
a useless (for me at least) ScanSoft PDF Create application which pops up most
times when I want to use Windows Explorer® or PowerDesk Pro® to delete or rename a file. It takes about six clicks and 15 seconds to
stop this rogue application and open the desired copy or rename action. Two years’ sporadic attempts to uninstall
ScanSoft PDF Create have been unsuccessful.
Sending bug information to Nuance (the OmniPage vendor) generates a Web
screen containing “We will review all reported bugs for possible resolution in
a future release. Issues submitted on this form will not
receive a response. To
send a technical question to Technical Support, please use our Product
Support Center.” The
latter demands $10 for advice how to bypass its bugs, a violation of common merchandisability
law as I understand it!
A Reader’s Digest article, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The guerrilla guide to getting what you paid for (without getting arrested), has plausible tips for effective complaints to vendors.[28]
In Google Yourself—and Enjoy It, Newsweek reports that new companies are offering to polish and shine reputations online.
Google's Knol project aims to make online information easier to find and more authoritative.
Google will offer to store patients’ health records similarly to Microsoft’s Health Vault® service. Using such services is problematical; I won’t risk it with my personal information. Newsweek’s Levy reminds us that patients’ records held by doctors and hospitals are protected against third-party disclosure, such as might be exercised under subpoena. However, such protection is not enjoyed by information stored by Google or Microsoft.
If missing legal protection does not dissuade you from on-line storage of your most private information, consider miscreant hacking progress. Even the white hats pursue the black arts (just as WW II Allied governments researched poison gas). An elegant method for critical data theft has been revealed.
Summer is coming! The most practical advice for that is that Listerine is an effective mosquito repellant!
Spam E-Mail Flood
It seems to me that the spam e-mail flood is growing. During a 14-day vacation, 2500 spam instances and about 60 suspected instances were received by my widely known address (hgladney@pacbell.net). I usually access this stream using Microsoft Outlook, and am pleased with how well its Bayesian filtering works.
That my experience is indicative of a widespread problem is suggested by an InformationWeek article:
Ever-increasing loads of spam-estimated at up to 98% of all e-mail-is drowning out the messages business users need to see. Highly targeted phishing attacks are making news and leaving customers and employees jumpy. And for IT, concerns about sensitive data traveling the Internet unencrypted mean valuable e-mail business uses aren't even being considered.
PC Magazine recently reviewed office suites. Its annual Best Free Software article is as useful as it was in prior years. A 2007 roundup of its most popular articles provides access to much useful information. And if you are looking for free software, remember that SourceForge.net lists many, many free downloads.
“Top Ten” Lists, Including Technical Notes and Shopping Advice
January is the month for annual “top ten” lists. Some that might interest DDQ readers are:
Futurist Magazine’s Top 10 Forecasts for 2008 and Beyond
10
Things You Should Know About Quad-Core Processors
10 Things You Should Know about 802.11N
10 Things You Should Know about Open Source
13 Photographs That Changed the World
Gartner Group lists 10 trends that will transform IT over the
next five years
IEEE Spectrum’s list of Top 10 Tech Cars shows that “green is in,” at least in auto industry rhetoric
MIT Technology Review identified 10 exciting technologies
Least Intelligent Criminals of 2007
The GetHuman website tells how to obtain the attention of a customer service representative.
… in the thick of the latest rage in the networked world: the economy of
free labor. Eager volunteers have
created massive wealth online. They
write and edit entries in Wikipedia, hone the Linux operating system, and
populate sites such as Facebook and MySpace with the details of their lives—all
for free. Successful businesses, increasingly,
are those that figure out how to engage large groups—employees, customers, even
passersby—to pitch in their energy, ideas, and knowhow. And companies from IBM to a
Wired Magazine has an excellent article describing the business model of free computing services at the core of billion $ companies.[30]
Price Watch
PC World forecasts that HDTV price decrease of 15% during 2008.
New PC memory geometries such as PC4200, PC5300, and PC6400 are much less expensive than earlier ones such as PC2700 and PC3200. Even the latter have become much cheaper lately. Best prices noticed lately include:
|
PC main
memory |
TwinX PC2700
DDR 1 Gb |
$38. |
$38./Gbyte |
|
PC main
memory |
Crucial
PC3200 DDR 1 Gb |
$38. |
$38./Gbyte |
|
PC main
memory |
|
$44. |
$22./Gbyte |
|
PC main
memory |
K-Data
PC5300 DDR DIMM 2x 1 Gb |
$22. |
$11./Gbyte |
|
PC main
memory |
OCZ PC6400
DDR DIMM 2x 1 Gb |
$22. |
$11./Gbyte |
|
HDD |
Maxtor
500Gb SATA or Ultra DMA/100 |
$98. |
$0.20/Gbyte |
|
HDD
external |
|
$120. |
$0.24/Gbyte |
|
HDD
external |
WD USB
2.0/ESATA/FireWire 400 & 800 1Tb |
$99. |
$0.10/Gbyte |
|
HDD NAS |
Buffalo 2
Tb, Raid, Gigabit Ethernet and USB 2.0, printer attachment support |
$870. |
$0.43/Gbyte |
|
Camera
storage |
SD or CF,
2Gb |
$28. |
$14./Gbyte |
|
Wireless-G
router |
Airlink |
$20. |
each |
|
Wireless-G
adapter |
Airlink
PC or PCI |
$11. |
each |
|
Color
printer |
HP
Photosmart C7280 All-in-One duplex color |
$260. |
each |
|
Flat
panel display |
Envision
19” |
$150. |
each |
|
Flat
panel display |
Envision
20” |
$195. |
each |
|
Flat panel
display |
No brand
named 22” |
$218. |
each |
These prices include
The HP printer listed is by
far the least expensive duplex color printer that I have noticed. However, keep in mind that HP printer profit
is mostly in ink cartridges, and estimate the cost per page before you take the
plunge.