Monthly Archives: October 2003

Info deluge

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

The worldwide production of information has increased by 30 per cent each year between 1999 and 2002, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

The team started measurements with terabytes, but quickly found that insufficient; they also measured information by exabytes, each equal to a million terabytes.

In 2002, we produced about five exabytes of information on paper, film, optical and magnetic media, equal to about half a million new libraries, each containing a digitized version of the print collection of the U.S. Library of Congress. This was twice the volume produced in 1999.

The telephone accounts for the largest percentage of information flow, with e-mail (including spam) placing second.

Links: Globe & Mail; San Jose Mercury News; cNet; 2003 Study, 2000 Study

Court rules on digital TV

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

A federal appeals court has sided with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), upholding a ruling that all television tuners larger than 13″ must have digital tuners by July 2007. The court noted the catch-22 — consumers aren’t buying digital TVs because of the paucity of digital programming; programmers cite lack of receivers as a reason for not creating content.

Links: Washington Post; CNN; FCC press release (PDF).

Sony pulls game featuring terrorists

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

The Globe & Mail reports that Sony Entertainment will pull a scene featuring terrorists attacking a Toronto shopping mall from the final version of its latest installment in the best-selling Playstation 2 series Syphon Filter 4. Game players were instructed to “mow down” the terrorists, who were identified as being from Quebec.

Opponents of the game said that the theme was close to hate propoganda. The overall mission for the series is to stop a global terrorist consortium from unleashing a fictional a biological weapon that could kill millions.

Search inside a book

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

Imaging being able to find obscure citations by searching the entire contents of a library (all those books!) … from a computer terminal.

Now imagine doing it from your home, when the library is “online” at Amazon.com. That’s the idea behind Amazon’s latest project, launched last week.

This tool allows you to search 33 million pages of 120,000 books — and this is just the beginning. These are not eBooks — what is returned from the search are “pictures” of the pages, not unlike Amazon’s “look inside” feature. There are limits to how many pages a customer can search, both on a per book and calendar year basis.

Links: Authors Guild; Search Engine Watch; Seattle P-I; San Jose Mercury News; Reuters; Amazon press release, letter from Bezos, and FAQ.