ziomal.biz

The larger the business or government agency is, the bigger the volume of data it deals with. That translates into massive efforts to manage that data to meet ever-increasing compliance regulations for adequately maintaining electronic records. Any software company that can figure out how to manage this process better than its competition can become king of the vendor hill. Humans created 161 exabytes of data in 2006 alone. This was about 3 million times the information in all the books ever written, according to research firm IDC.

Microsoft has just brought out the physical representation of its fifth major evolutionary change, and this one may turn out to be the most dramatic. The technology, Live Mesh, may actually both help Microsoft's customer satisfaction issues and help move Apple and Linux onto desktops everyplace. Speaking of Apple, it bought P.A. Semi, a processor technology company -- which may address a critical problem Apple has and allow the MacBook Air to eventually replace the MacBook as a more acceptably priced general-use product.

Microsoft unveiled a new service Tuesday that will take the software maker into the realm of cloud computing. Currently available as an invite-only beta, Live Mesh will initially enable users to share files and synchronize folders across multiple PCs. Support for Windows Mobile and Mac OS X is coming later in the year, the company said. "Live Mesh enables your devices to work together and allows you to add and sync files and folders across your mesh of devices," said Amit Mital, general manager of Live Mesh, on the service's blog.

Computer technology in the workplace is all about hardware speed and connection bandwidth. To help IT managers augment their systems in both regards, vendors have been developing tweaking strategies to boost application speed beyond design limits. This process is called "application acceleration." However, this race has changed quite a bit over the past few months. Some vendors jumped ship while others changed strategy entirely. By and large, customers are screaming for more simplicity across the board when it comes to application acceleration.

Lawmakers are questioning why the government waited almost a month to warn 2,500 patients enrolled in a National Institutes of Health study that some of their medical records were in a stolen laptop computer. The laptop was stolen from the locked trunk of a researcher's car on Feb. 23, but the NIH didn't send letters notifying the patients until March 20. "The stunning failure to act ... raises troubling questions," said Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich. Dingell chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which began an investigation Monday.

It can stop you from voting, destroy your dental appointments, make it difficult to rent a car or book a flight, even interfere with your college exams. More than 50 years into the Information Age, computers are still getting confused by the apostrophe. It's a problem familiar to O'Connors, D'Angelos, N'Dours and D'Artagnans across America. When Niall O'Dowd tried to book a flight to Atlanta earlier this year, the computer system refused to recognize his name. The editor of the Irish Voice newspaper could book the flight only by giving up his national identity.

NASA grudgingly released some results Monday from an $11.3 million federal air safety study it previously withheld from the public over concerns it would upset travelers and hurt airline profits. The data reflects hundreds of cases where pilots flew too close to other planes, plunged from altitude or landed at airports without clearance. NASA published the findings -- contained in 16,208 pages -- but did not provide a roadmap to understand them, making it cumbersome for any thorough analysis by outsiders.

NASA grudgingly released some results Monday from an $11.3 million federal air safety study it previously withheld from the public over concerns it would upset travelers and hurt airline profits. The data reflects hundreds of cases where pilots flew too close to other planes, plunged from altitude or landed at airports without clearance. NASA published the findings -- contained in 16,208 pages -- but did not provide a roadmap to understand them, making it cumbersome for any thorough analysis by outsiders.

As you read a sentence, its meaning may be clear even before you reach its end. This illustrates our topic. Our minds process text sequentially. As we read, the context presented to us by an author develops in our minds. What precedes clarifies what follows, and vice-versa. This phenomenon is a result of efficiency. It's how language works. Reducing the number of symbols we use simplifies communication in one sense; but it also forces us to adopt complications like words and grammar. Few of us write with hieroglyphs anymore.