Water can be carried in buckets too

• File under "water can be carried in buckets too": busses equipped with Wi-fi are bringing the Internet to remote, rural villages. Click here for a BBC article that describes bus service in parts of India, Rwanda, Cambodia and Paraguay that load up on web content in the city, and then drive to the country, serving up content to rural computers. The project (known as the United Villages project) even allows user requests for specific content. So what do Indians request? The cricket scores, new Aishwarya Rai photos and the latest Bollywood tunes, according to the founder of the United Villages initiative (which is delivered for a fee). The busses also deliver and collect emails from the villagers.

Adobe CS3

On Tuesday Adobe announced the release of Creative Suite 3.  Take a deep breath before reading the new prices: "The estimated price for Creative Suite 3 Design Standard is $1,199 and for the Design Premium version, $1,799. The Web-oriented editions cost $999 for Web Standard and $1,599 for Web Premium. "  Creative Suite actually comes in 6, count 'em, six flavors (remind you of any OS we know?).  Click here for the CNet description, here for the Adobe press release.  The web-oriented version sill begin shipping in April, other editions later this summer.  The company spokesman, in a masterpiece of disingenuity, said  "...[Adobe] is not aware of any substantial problems with running Creative Suite 2 on Windows Vista but that the company is not officially recommending that usage because it has not done a full barrage of tests."  What, after 5 years of highly publicized Microsoft development, Vista came as a surprise to Adobe?  Of course they want you to spend another $1,000 to $2,500 on the same products you already own (whose feature sets the average user probably uses small subsets).  Caution before spending may be indicated.  Click here for a set of PDF files from Adobe describing the various CS3 packages, here for the Creative Suite 3 web site.

The Rise of the Citizendium

The Citizendium (first reported in our episode 33), a Wikipedia rival with certain "editorial reforms" made its debut this week.  Citizendium stands for "citizen's compendium."  Anyone can post to it, but posters must first register with their real names and overall content is governed by an editorial board.  The Citizendium was founded by Larry Sanger, ousted "co-founder" of Wikipedia.  "Gentle expert oversight" is what Citizendium is supposed to have and Wikipedia is supposed not to have.  So far it has 1,100 articles (compared with over 1,706,000 articles in the English Wikipedia).

Symantec Internet Security Assessment

Symantec has released it Symantec Internet Security Threat Report Trends for July-December 06 [PDF].  Key findings include:

• "The current threat environment is characterized by an increase in data theft and data leakage, and the creation of malicious code that targets specific organizations for information that can be used for financial gain."
• Government accounted for 25% of all identity theft-related data breaches, and education accounted for another 20%.
• The theft or loss of a computer or other data storage medium accounted for 54% of identity theft-related data breaches.
• The US was the world leader in malicious attacks, accounting for 33% of attack activity.
• The US was the primary target (52%) of all denial of service attacks.
• China has the world's largest percentage of bot-infected computers (26%).
• The US has the world's largest percentage of bot-command and control computers (40%).
• 51% of all underground economy servers known to Symantec reside in the US.
• 86% of credit and debit cards advertised for sale on underground economy servers were issued by banks in the US.

Put it to sleep

On Wednesday Microsoft released "Why PCs Should Get More Sleep," which promotes the idea of using sleep (or hibernate) mode on PCs rather than running a screen saver. "To explain the dramatic difference power management can make...a typical desktop PC and LCD monitor sitting idle for a year (outside of business hours) would consume 632 kilowatt hours of energy — compared to 34 in sleep mode. That’s a savings of 598 kilowatt hours per PC per year." To illustrate it another way, the article indicated that a PC running a screen saver consumed as much power as a 100-watt light bulb, about $80 per year, dumping 1,350 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere, "a major contributor to global warming."

In Windows Vista to enable/configure sleep mode go to the Control Panel > System Maintenance > Power Options. With Windows XP it is Control Panel > Performance and Maintenance > Power Options. On Mac OS X it is System Preferences > Energy Saver.

Meet TED

According to David Pogue of the New York Times  "the most compelling, passionate, informed speakers you've ever heard" are at the TED conference, held annually in Monterey, CA.  It is also the hottest ticket (at $6,000.00 per) on the west coast.  Next year's TED is already sold out.  Fortunately the conference organizers have begun placing videos/audios of the speakers online.  Listen in to hear some of the most interesting people in the world deliver their best ideas in an 18-minute format.

Amazon Classical Music Blowout

Amazon has opened a new Classical Music Blowout store. Amazon's large classical collection (over 100,000 titles) has been in place for years, but now, to promote the growth of sales (and appreciation) of classical music the Blowout Store offers over 2000 deeply discounted titles. In addition to record sales, the store also offers tutorials from Naxos on classical music appreciation in its "Discover Music Corner." (Current tutorials are on Handel, Lute Music, Nashville Symphony, Violin: Julia Fischer, and Vivaldi). The store is likely to attract new fans of classical music, who, it is guessed, are much more likely to buy than steal their music, but who may not want to make significant investments in a field where they do not yet know a great deal.

Does IT drive productivity growth?

• According to a study published by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, titled Digital Prosperity: Understanding the Economic Benefits of the Information Technology Revolution, "The diffusion of information technology and telecommunications hardware, software and services turns out to be a powerful driver of growth, having an impact on worker productivity three to five times that of non-IT capital...in the United States IT was responsible for two-thirds of the total factor growth in productivity between 1995 and 2002 and virtually all of the growth in labor productivity."  Click here to download (69 pages - 4.07MB) the report in PDF.  Click here for a NY Times story on the report.

Source: Digital Prosperity itif.org, p. 17

Convinced a job in IT is the future?  Think again.  According to the report, IT jobs "...are not growing faster than the overall economy.  Moreover, going forward, it is unlikely that the IT industry will be producing job gains out of line with its size."  In other words, the IT industry itself has realized the same sorts of productivity gains as other industry, creating lower demand for new IT jobs.

Digitization? What digitization?

According to Edward L. Ayhers, historian and dean of the graduate school of arts and sciences at the U of Virginia, "There's an illusion being created that all the world's knowledge is on the Web, but we haven't begun to glimpse what is out there in local archives and libraries." (NY Times).  The Times article goes on to say "At the Library of Congress, for example, despite continuing and ambitious digitization efforts, perhaps only 10 percent of the 132 million objects held will be digitized in the foreseeable future."  Why?  Cost.  Given economic reality, huge swaths of national, not to mention local history, will be neglected and lost.  A possible solution: crowdsourcing, similar to the remarkable digitization of genealogical records done by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Java JDK Daylight Savings Time Embroglio

With respect to daylight savings time, the systems domain time we work with in Blackboard updated just fine, but we had a very obscure problem with Sun Microsystems Java JDK, on which Blackboard depends.  It seems Sun uses its own time zone database, apart from the domain database on which all other times depend, to determine time zone time of day.  We made the Sun java patch as soon as we became aware of it (Thursday) and all was well.  Only a single student seems to have been affected, and he not adversly.  To learn more, click the following link to listen to an interview with David Gray on this problem.

 David Gray on Daylight Savings Time in the Sun JDK and Blackboard [3:03]

Mick Jagger and FDR enshrined together?

What do Franklin D. Roosevelt, Allen Ginsberg, The Lone Ranger, and Lou Reed have in common?  A flair for fashion?  Hardly.  They are all included in this year's National Recording Registry.  Each year the Librarian of Congress a number of sound recordings to include in the registry based on nominations by the public and by a panel of experts known as the National Recording Preservation Board.  Click here to view the 2006 registry, here to view the entire registry to date (it began in 2002).  You must act now to nominate a recording for the 2007 registry.  The deadline is July 1, 2007.  Not all recordings in the registry are held by the Library of Congress.  The Preservation Board provides links to the various libraries holding the original copies.

New versions of iTunes and QuickTime released

Version 7.1 of iTunes with version 7.1.5 of QuickTime is now available for download.  The update addresses certain compatibility issues with Windows Vista (though it is still billed as a download for Windows 2000 or XP) and adds full-screen Cover Flow and new sort options.  Additionally, this version plugs 8 QuickTime security vulnerabilities and bundles in the upgrade is support for Apple TV media hub, in anticipation of the soon to be released Apple TV device which will make it possible to stream video content from your computer to TV set.  Click here for an AppleInsider report.  Re the notorious Windows Vista issues, the Apple web site says "iTunes 7.1 is recommended for use with most editions of Windows Vista, however, Apple is actively working with Microsoft to resolve a few remaining known issues."