Rough Drafts

According to Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, “the world produces 1-2 exabytes (i.e. 1-2 billion gigabytes) of unique information per year, of which only 0.003 per cent is in printed form.” This article talks about efforts (by DSpace and other initiatives) to store up some of

Kazaa and Altnet are creating a secure P2P network [http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-1011827.html] that will operate in parallel with the public Kazaa network — and will pay users to host files on the new network.

The Internet is like a huge library with all the books dumped on the floor. What’s the origin of this once-useful phrase? This page [http://info.org.il/english/books_on_the_floor.html] has an interesting discussion.

Technology companies are waking up to the opportunities opened by the music industry’s steadfast refusal to embrace online distribution of music files.

Here’s a nontechnical introduction to RSS [http://www.faganfinder.com/search/rss.shtml] from Michael Fagan. For a more technical introduction to RSS, see Mark Pilgrim’s explanation [http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html].

On a whim, I decided to pit MSN’s online version of the Encarta “encyclopedia” (part of MSN Learning and Research) against the Concise Columbia Encyclopedia available through Bartleby. The differences couldn’t be more stark.

Jonathan Rentzsch wrote a little JavaScript utility to help recover from 404:Page Not Found errors. It takes the current URL in your browser, and uses it to retrieve the archived version of that page from Google’s cache. Here’s Rentzsch’s discussion on Google cache hacking. Another blogger, Fuse, de

A press release by Unix publisher SCO Group claims that “Linux is an unauthorized derivative of UNIX and that legal liability for the use of Linux may extend to commercial users. SCO issued this alert based on its findings of illegal inclusions of SCO UNIX intellectual property in Linux.” Apparently

A survey by Microdoc News shows that the most successful (and prolific) users of Google take an “experimental” approach to searching, first trying simple one-word or multi-word queries, then trying other, more complicated queries until they find what they’re looking for.

I edited the Spring 2003 issue of RLG News, which was recently published.

Rep. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) has introduced a “Freedom to Read” bill [http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:H.R.1157:] that would restore privacy to the patrons of bookstores and libraries. The ACLU supports it [http://www.aclu.org/NationalSecurity/NationalSecurity.cfm?ID=12607&c=110], and you sh