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Technology

But, wait! (More on SSDs and e-discovery)

March 1, 2011 0 Comments
But, wait! (More on SSDs and e-discovery)

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 […]

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“The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood ” — a review by Freeman Dyson

February 27, 2011 0 Comments
“The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood ” — a review by Freeman Dyson

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 […]

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E-discovery and solid-state drives (SSDs)

February 24, 2011 1 Comment
E-discovery and solid-state drives (SSDs)

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 […]

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Buy vs. Build — the eternal dilemma

August 29, 2008 0 Comments
Buy vs. Build — the eternal dilemma

If it’s Friday, it must be another Baseline column. This one talks about the issues surrounding whether to build or buy software: The other day, an IT colleague of mine mentioned a conflict at a corporation where he’s working. The corporation has a mission-critical application deployed across a large number of workstations. The set of […]

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Pitfall: Allowing new features to creep (or pour) in

June 3, 2008 0 Comments
Pitfall: Allowing new features to creep (or pour) in

[From Pitfalls of Modern Software Engineering by Bruce F. Webster (forthcoming)] Categories: managerial The impulse to constantly add new and incremental features to a software program certainly isn’t unique to modern software develoment, or to a particular technology or methodology. It derives largely from three sources. Upper management and marketing want, and sometimes need, those […]

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