By bfwebster on Oct 5, 2011 in Books, Intellectual property, Main, Technology | 0 Comments
The second personal computer I ever owned[1] was an Apple II, with no floppy drive. I bought it, along with a small color TV, from my close friend Robert Trammel while we were both living in Houston sometime around 1980.We had already spent hours together programming on it, then carefully (though not always successfully) saving [...]
By bfwebster on Mar 5, 2011 in Lawsuits, Main, Management, Technology | 0 Comments
John Markoff in the New York Times has a detailed article on the emergence of software tools to help in the analysis of electronic documents (and, one could easily presume, scanned and OCR’d physical documents) in litigation: Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time [...]
By bfwebster on Mar 1, 2011 in Lawsuits, Main, Risk management, Technology | 0 Comments
OK, just last week I wrote a post on a report out of UCSD regarding difficulties in erasing data from solid-state disks (SSDs). But now out of Australia comes a somewhat contradictory report that some SSDs actually erase ‘slack’ (unused) space themselves without any user or system intervention — and, furthermore, that they can do [...]
By bfwebster on Feb 27, 2011 in Main, Surviving Complexity, Technology | 0 Comments
Freeman Dyson and James Gleick are both authors always worth reading. In this case, Dyson has reviewed Gleick’s newest book in an essay titled “How We Know”. An excerpt: According to Gleick, the impact of information on human affairs came in three installments: first the history, the thousands of years during which people created and [...]
By bfwebster on Feb 24, 2011 in Lawsuits, Main, Risk management, Technology | 1 Comment
E-discovery — the recovery, analysis, and production of evidence stored in digital form on various media — has become a major issue in litigation because of how much data simple devices can hold and the resulting duplication and multiplication of documents, files, and other digital types of evidence. Because of the risks and costs of [...]