If everything was made by Microsoft

Link: http://www.cracked.com/article_17323_if-everything-was-made-by-microsoft.html

Title: "If Everything Was Made by Microsoft"

Heh. I love this. Had to share it. My favorite is the kitchen safety graphic.

I like posting something about Microsoft on here. I'm not normally one of those anti-M$ Mac users, though sometimes I do show my Mac colors, times like this. I still think Google is the company M$ needs to watch out for, but I do heart Google, despite its potential for evil.

I've resigned myself to the likelihood that I'd also gleefully relish the order imposed by Emperor Palpatine.


Second Link: http://www.thewrap.com/ind-column/2679

Apparently, Google is striving to be on the cutting (bleeding?) edge of Web 3.0. To quote the article, "Under this latest iteration of advanced search, users will be automatically served the kind of news that interests them just by calling up Google’s page. The latest algorithms apply ever more sophisticated filtering – based on search words, user choices, purchases, a whole host of cues – to determine what the reader is looking for without knowing they’re looking for it." Hmm...so Google is using the AP's challenge as an excuse for attempting Web 3.0. Because, clearly, if I do a search on news concerning Oracle, that means I'm always going to want that and only that...And of course, what bothers ME the most is: Two people cannot perform the same search and get the same results.

This will be a research hell.

Are good phone manners important?

As I pretended to watch television about a month ago, I overheard my brother and niece get into a fight about phone manners. She, at eleven years old, is certain that she'll never have to use "please" and "thank you" when speaking on the telephone. She made her assertion by screaming at him at the top of her lungs, screaming in a manner that is often accompanied by an eye roll.

Anyway, the more I thought about, the more I considered how we're sending a generation of kids out into the world with no knowledge of how to even conduct the simplest functions necessary for a telephone call: asking to speak to someone, hearing a polite response back, leaving a good message, or even answering the telephone itself.

I decided, for a class project on Captivate, to make a phone manners tutorial. This is fairly basic, intended for kids eleven to twelve years old. When I spoke with parents of my niece's friends, a lot of them expressed interest in using the phone manners tutorial on their own kids, so I got the impression that there is a need for this type of thing.

Just click on the linked title here. It's a Flash video, so your browser might need to download a plugin. Otherwise, it should work fine.

Software Review: Google Chrome

Have you been wondering about this crazy new web browser all the kids are talking about? Are you feeling 'net listlessness because you're bored with the old web browsers? The linked software review might help you decided if Google Chrome will answer these questions for you.

I decided to write a software review on Google Chrome because a lot of people have asked me why Google would come out with a web browser when there is a plethora of useful browsers out there. (Heck, I wondered the same thing.) After using Chrome for a week straight (without letting myself touch Firefox, which was hell to me!), I came up with a few answers, more questions, and a fair bit of information.

Enjoy!

Thursday is Talk Like Shakespeare Day

Linketh thee here: http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/04/21/talk.like.shakespeare/index.html
Title: "Unleash thy inner bard on 'Talk Like Shakespeare Day'"

From Cnn: Mayor Daley of Chicago hath proclaimed Thursday, April 23rd, "Talk Like Shakespeare Day," in celebration of the great bard's 445th whelping day.

Methinks this day will be secondarily proclaimed the Day of Meritorious Locution.

Oracle and Sun Microsystems: A Reality that will Benefit DSpace and Archivists' Toolkit

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/technology/companies/21sun.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Article title: "Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems"


Okay, it's now a reality that one of the best database companies in the industry is acquiring a company that yes, sells rocking servers, and yes, offers its Java developers kits to adoring open-source masses; but, much more important to archivists and IT manager who run open source digital access products, the company that makes one of the supported backend database systems (Oracle) for DSpace is now acquiring the company that makes the backend database system (MySQL) for Archivists' Toolkit. WOO-HOO.

This should be huge news to the open source community that uses, programs, and installs archiving software. If you're involved in any sort of digitization project for archives, you can't walk down a sidewalk without tripping and face-planting onto DSpace in the first elevated crack in the concrete and then, two-feet later, skinning your knees as you fall over Archivists' Toolkit.

The biggest roadblock to DSpace's success has historically been that no one could figure out an easy way to move metadata from record-creation software into DSpace. Archivists' Toolkit, an record-creation software that builds information about acquired items from initial accession into a collection through to who has edited and accessed the digital item throughout its digital life, can build metadata records for archival items. It runs on MySQL, while DSpace is on Oracle or Postgresql. If someone could find an _easy_ way (because there are ways, but none is simple) to move information between the two programs, digitization would be a thousand times easier for everyone.

I suppose this is down the road, but this is great news for archives interested in digitization.

How should law enforcement be trained in technology?

Article Title: "Computer Science Student Targeted for Criminal Investigation for Allegedly Sending Email"
Link is: http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/04/13

To quote from this article: "Boston - A Boston College computer science student has asked a Massachusetts court to quash an invalid search warrant for his dorm room that resulted in campus police illegally seizing several computers, an iPod, a cell phone, and other technology."

This brings up an important question and hammers home a point I'm repeatedly encountering: How should law enforcement officials be trained to deal with technology? In a past job, I had to call in a specially-trained police officer to look at the computer of a user who had been charged with a very serious crime; this officer was clearly a geek who had been hired onto the police force to do this specific job specialization--computer crime investigation. I live in a medium-sized city, and I have to wonder if there are more officers than that one available now, or if there were more back then.

But either way: if law enforcement is called to investigate a technological crime, the real people you want available to determine if a crime is committed are white hat hackers or well-learned open source programmers. These are the people who can track the footprints of cyber-criminals. And it's pathetic, in my opinion, that campus, city, and state law enforcement doesn't get better training. I realize that this one incident doesn't speak for the technological representation in all police departments, but I'm guessing that, with a legal system unable to create laws that really touch Internet transactions and transgressions, there isn't a really active police force, either, that can recognize these.

UK Looks to Mobile Broadband toward Achieving Goal

This is a follow-up of an article I'd posted in February or March about the 2Mbps initiative in Great Britain. Interestingly (not surprisingly), they're looking toward mobile broadband to help bridge the gap:

"Similarly the 2Mbps pledge wouldn't strictly have to come from land-line services, with wireless (Wi-F) and Mobile Broadband solutions being touted too."

"Google warns newspapers not to anger readers"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7988561.stm

We are in the foothills of a burgeoning mountain of a conflict. This is quite fun. I suspect it's time for us to see some laws change toward intellectual property, copyright, advertising--just general information ownership. The legal system has been unwilling to touch the Internet with a ten-foot-pole, but the capitalist system can no longer survive under this kind of laissez faire attitude. I'm wondering how much the new presidential administration in the U.S. has affected this.

Hm.

I must admit: I'm having a _lot_ of fun with all of this fighting between giants--who wouldn't? It's Rupert Murdoch; it's Google! Two of my favorite multi-billion dollar entities...(well, maybe not in this economy). I commented about that to a friend, who replied, "That's not my idea of fun." It's a fun time to be a geek.

Sigh--pearls to swine, folks.

Is Web 2.0 Fraying at the Edges?

Man, between the article I posted yesterday and this one today, I'm really excited to see what legal precedents get set this year:

To quote from the article, ironically, "Neither Mr. Singleton nor a statement released by The A.P. mentioned any adversary by name. But many news executives, including some at The A.P., have voiced concern that their work has become a source of revenue for Google and other sites that can sell search terms or ads on pages that turn up articles."

The article, titled, "Associated Press Seeks More Control of Content on Web," discusses how smaller websites are profiting from using large portions of AP articles (or entire articles), while advertising money drawn from views of those articles is going to sources other than the AP. Now, I don't think they have a prayer in court of saying that people aren't allowed to quote online from their articles, but maybe they do. Sites that use articles wholesale and reap profit from views, however, will probably have to pay.

And the irony is perpetually in my head that I'm posting these things on a Google-run website.

I _love_ Google. Don't get me wrong. I totally subscribe to the Death Star, daycare and all, but Google is the John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan of this age, and laws need to be adjusted to deal with this behemoth, just as they were changed to deal with the industrialists and bankers of yesteryear.

Uh-oh, Google is being an evil empire again. Villagers, get your pitchforks to beat them back!

Article title, "Google’s Plan for Out-of-Print Books Is Challenged," http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/technology/internet/04books.html?_r=1 , to quote:

"The settlement, 'takes the vast bulk of books that are in research libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of Google,' said Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system. 'Google will be a monopoly.'"

As far as digitization is concerned, it’s amazing how many things one must consider when managing digitization projects in an archive. For instance, who owns this? Google, now, is trying to gain possession to digital rights of as many orphaned items it can. As the digital initiatives coordinator in an archive, I’m a little worried about what impact this will have on institutions that technically have donor agreements for their items (prior to digitization) but that never _actually_ looked into the ownership of rights issue: If we are sloppy about our rights ownership, and if Google looks into it and catches this sloppiness, I must question whether or not they could just steal a digitized (or heck, even non-digitized) item from under our noses. (Hence the anxiety revealed by speakers quoted in the article, as well.)

I might have to list, "Talk to an attorney" at the top of my digitization checklist soon.