google gets scholarly

Google Scholar
http://scholar.google.com
...and this is both exciting and scary. it's finally the time. for quite a while, "deep search" is THE weapon that the academia used to defend against commercial search engines. now the power of this weapon is diminishing. copyright may be the last defense academia got in hand now.

"Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research."

ny times: walmart's storage

"By its own count, Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, made by NCR, at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts."

I don't know what "experts" the author was using as a source, but Google
alone has pedabytes "on the internet."

460 TB is a lot, but I would guess that most large companies have that much data (though typically not available to one set of systems).

can you still retrieve it?

i gotta write this in english, cuz i can't let my mother read this: i lost all the pictures of her visiting me in may this year. they were all digital pictures.

it all happened very simple: i was re-installing my two-year-old laptop. i migrated all my data files on cd. then for some reason, the folder on that cd which held my mother's pictures could not be opened. i migrated the data back to the hd of my laptop and of a desktop, and the folder was empty.

then i read this story (to read this story you need to register to nytimes) about digital memories would sooner be lost than be destroyed. digital preservation has been a problem haunting us ever since we merrily entered the digital age. people keep files in all formats, a lot of which are already or will soon be unreadable: zip disks and 3½-inch diskettes, the larger 5-inch floppy disks, or even hd for obsolete computers.

although we may have a new industry of providing all kinds of old machines for people to access their oldy-format document, we still suffer from hard accessibility before any revolutionary idea of preservation uniformity emerges.

here is some comforting data: new photographic papers can last up to 200 years. and we all know that paper lasts even longer. yeah, i have this cultural arrogance again: our ancestor still beats bill gates and the whole empire and age that he introduced. the invention of paper and printing mechanism still maintains this silent elegance in front of the spinning technology.

think, think twice, and think three times before you store your data.

还看“香港制造”

青春过了一大半，再看陈果的“香港制造”，还是被感动得一塌糊涂，才发现自己的心情心境与n年前比并没什么变化，看来这些年还是没什么长进，又白过了。
陈果有陈果的关怀与温暖，从“香港制造”，“细路祥”，到“去年烟花特别多”，“榴莲飘飘”（先不提“香港有个好莱坞”了），与其说他关怀边缘人，不如说他关怀的是人的边缘状态，因为在无法避免的动荡面前，我们都会不安，疑问，焦虑，逃避。好吧，我们原谅放弃家和女儿的妈妈们，原谅背叛和逃跑的爸爸们，我们甚至原谅撕掉遗书的老师，残害阿龙的老大，和企图暗杀中秋的胖子，因为我们都只是一颗棋子而已。
是福是祸，反正我不再是早晨8，9点钟的太阳了。

古古跌了

才发觉，涨不好，让人云里雾里好贪心；跌好，可以又做回自己了。