Of Course I Need a 60 Gigabyte Hard Drive

I always liked MaximumPC because, unlike a lot of computer magazines, it was
not into this touchy-feely dumbed down “home computer” nonsense — this was
power desktop computing. Now they seem to be whimping out on me. In a recent
review
of IBM’s 75 gig hard drive and Maxtor’s 60 gig hard drive, reviewer Sean Cleveland
actually dares to ponder that the size of hard drives might be reaching “ludicrous
proportions.”

Is he serious? Sixty gigabytes is a drop in the bucket. I want to get four
of these Maxtor drives, and put them in a RAID array using a Promise controller
to have 240 gigabytes of storage. I can already hear the John Dvorak’s of the
world chiming “what would any home user possibly do with that much space.” I
wonder sometimes if these folks actually use their computers rather than
just writing about them.

At the moment, for example, I have about 60 gigabytes of MP3s stored on CD-Rs
that I would much prefer to store locally. I have another 20-30 gigabytes of
scanned pictures that are scattered across many CDs, not to mention the hours
and hours of digitized Hi-8 videotapes.

Forget 60 gigabytes being ludicrous. I am hoping that 1 terabyte hard drive
comes out soon so I can get four of those and put them on a RAID controller.
Don’t think I can fill up 4 terabytes? I would not bet against it (besides by
the time they get that big, Diablo III will probably ship on 8 DVDs and take
up 800 gig — just running games will eat up half the drive space).

dtSearch Slices and Dices Text — For A Price

In the 20 or so years I have been using computers to write, I have accumulated
a ton of files. From school essays to love letters to freelance writing, not
to mention the 70,000+ e-mail messages accumulated just in the past three or
four years, the personal data files on my hard drive consume about 5 gigabytes
and are growing at an alarming rate. With that much information, finding a specific
part of it can be difficult. I know somewhere on my hard drive I have a paper
I wrote in college about Ingmar Bergman, but finding it is another matter entirely.

For the past couple years, I have been looking for a way to tame this mess
and have tried probably half a dozen different programs that claimed they would
help bring my data under control. The main problem with most of these applications
is they were not really designed for the sheer volume of data I have. I evaluated
quite a few products that would have worked great if I had maybe a couple hundred
megabytes of data — but they simply choked at what I was throwing at them.

A couple months ago, though, I found the Holy Grail I had been looking for
in a program called dtSearch. The product literature for dtSearch claimed it could quickly index and search many gigabytes of information. Not
only did it promise to handle a plethora of file formats (I am a bit behind
on migrating all of my data to current file formats), but that it would also
be able to index all 70,000 of my Eudora e-mail messages as well. Since a 30-day
trial version was available on the dtSearch web site, I downloaded the program
and set it to indexing my data.

I was extremely impressed. No program is going to be able to instantaneously
index several gigabytes of text, but dtSearch was extremely fast. It indexed
all of the data I threw at it in just a couple hours. More importantly, after
the initial indexing was finished, dtSearch intelligently handled re-indexing
of new or changed files. For example, I periodically go through my main e-mail
folder and move e-mail messages into archive folders by month and year. After
doing a thorough reorganization of my e-mail one night, and then asking dtSearch
to update its index, the program figured out I had moved about 13,000 messages
and updated only those e-mail messages, not wasting time to re-index the other
60,000 or so that I had not touched. Very smart.

On the searching end of things, dtSearch was fast and accurate. The speed was
pretty close to instant on most searches I did. Asking dtSearch to find e-mail
messages containing a particular phrase that were from a specific group of users,
for example, popped up on the screen as quickly as I could submit the search.
Something I really liked about dtSearch was its ability to highlight the hit
words and phrases in the text of most files. For example, if I performed a search
on “Ingmar Bergman,” not only does dtSearch find all of the files
that contain that phrase, but it highlights all of the instances of Ingmar Bergman
in its document window and lets me quickly jump through the document to all
the places where the director is mentioned.

The feature set of dtSearch is amazing. It lets the user adjust search “fuzziness”
which made it possible to search for terms that might be misspelled, so if I
accidentally typed “typogrpgal,” that document would be marked as a hit on a
search for “typographical.” That is extraordinarily useful for someone like
me who has a lot of OCRed documents that I have never had time to clean up.

There are only two real downsides to dtSearch. First, because it builds an
index of all the searchable documents, it eats up a lot of disk space for its
indexes. The promotional literature for the program says index size will be
about 25% of the size of the documents being searched, and that was pretty accurate
in my experience. That’s probably not as much of an issue today, with large,
cheap hard drives being commonplace, but it might be for people with older systems
and smaller hard drives.

The other issue is the price. At $199 for the single user version, this program
is definitely not for the casual user who only does occasional searching of
her documents. On the other hand, for somebody who does need to do find particular
documents or e-mail quickly, dtSearch is a godsend and more than worth $199.

Unions for Temporary Workers? No Thanks

    A recent report in the Wall Street Journal suggests that the National Labor Relations Board might be about to strike down a rule forbidding temporary workers from joining the union at a unionized company. As someone who has worked for years in temporary jobs, thanks, but not thanks. The unions are no friends of temporary workers — most unions would prefer to shut down the temporary job market entirely seeing relatively cheap temp labor as a big threat to expensive (and often inefficient) union labor.

    But it’s more than just the economics that make me hope the NLRB doesn’t go this route. I learned at a very young age to despise unions.

    The typical interpretation of unions is that they are in conflict with the corporation, but this is inaccurate. Unions are actually in conflict with other workers, specifically those outside of the union as well as disfavored workers within the union. My grandfather, who was a loyal union supporter, got a taste of this first hand. In the early 1970s my grandfather had one of his legs amputated. All he wanted to do was keep working until he could get his retirement benefits, which he did.

    One day while I was waiting for my grandfather to come home, instead I heard my grandmother get a phone call which caused her to start crying and we were whisked off to a hospital. One of my grandfather’s co-workers told another co-worker who apparently spent more time in a local bar than on the job site that my grandfather had reported him to the boss. This turned out to be false, but the shiftless person believed it, and cowardly ambushed my grandfather at the work site, pushing him down and then hitting him several times.

    The company, obviously, wanted to fire the guy, but not the union — they actually leaped to this guy’s defense and, in fact, he kept his job thanks to their intervention. My grandfather never pressed charges not wanting to cause even more problems considering he was so close to retirement.

    I never understood that episode until I was out of college and working as a systems manager for a small unionized laundry. The laundry had create a mini-hierarchy among the workers with a team leader assigned to about 6 to 8 employees. The team leader made about $1/hour more than the regular employees. In each team there was also a designated backup person who would act as the team leader in his or her absence and made the $1 or so more during that period, but for a variety of reasons there weren’t a lot of people lining up to act as the backup.

    So the management thought of an incentive plan. They’d designate one person an assistant team leader and pay that person $.60 more per hour during the regular shift and then they’d get the full $1 per hour more when they actually acted as the sole team leader.

    The union, however, in no uncertain terms rejected that move. Why? Because the union was effectively run by two women who had more than enough influence with a majority of the workers to get their way. They were upset that once this system was in place the management was clearly going to simply make the current team leader backups into assistant team leaders. The two women who controlled the union personally despised one of the women who would have been promoted and scuttled the entire plan almost entirely on their own personal animosity toward her (the whole thing was largely racial — most of the workers, including the two women, were black, while the woman they despised was Hispanic).

    If you follow a big strike in the news, almost always unions reserve the most hatred and bile (not to mention physical assaults) not toward the owners they are fighting but rather to workers who dare go their own way (the Screen Actors Guild is actually going to put Tiger Woods on trial in their kangaroo court for filming a Nike ad in Canada in violation of an ongoing strike by that union). Unions demand, and legally have, the right to the sort of control over workers that corporations can only dream of. Thanks, NLRB, but no thanks.

Hypocrisy on the “Inaccessible” Web

CNN is running a piece from PCWorld.Com complaining that Web
sites are locking out the disabled. For example, the article notes that
many web designers leave out image ALT tags, which makes it difficult for web
browsers designed for the blind to read the site. The article claims it is very
easy to make a site compatible for these browsers and that it’s actually a good
business move.

I might take that argument a bit more seriously except that a) CNN does not
bother to include ALT tags for most of its images, including several included
in this story and b) PCWorld.Com uses ALT tags only occasionally and often they
would not be of much help to blind users. On many of their stories, for example,
they have ALT tags included with images but rather than describing what the
images are the ALT tags say something like “Click here for enlarged image.”
Oh yeah, that is going to be a real big boon to blind users.

The bottom line is that contrary to the PCWorld article, making a site both
visually appealing and completely compatible with these special browsers
significantly raises the cost of producing a web site. Legally requiring web
sites to comply with the sort of standards PCWorld mentions (and yes, the U.S.
government is moving toward interpreting the Americans with Disabilities Act
to cover web sites) will significantly raise the cost of entry to getting on
the web. Maybe CNN can afford to hire someone to close caption all of its streamed
video content, for example, but I know I would not have the time or money to
do this if I wanted to add multimedia content on my site.

And why should I have to? If I published a magazine I wouldn’t have to put
braille captions on all the pictures to be considered useable. If I make a straight-to-video
movie there is no requirement for me to close caption the video. PCWorld and
others are talking about placing a lot of extra burdens on web publishing that
are simply not there in other forms of publishing.

Certainly on the web making your site accessible to as many people as possible
makes good business sense, but sometimes the extra cost in both money and time
is too high. Just ask CNN and PCWorld.Com.

Source:

Analysis:
Web sites are locking out the disabled. PCWorld.Com, August 7, 2000.

Trapper Awarded $150,000 In Lawsuit Against Friends of Animals

    An Alaskan trapper recent won a $150,000 judgment against Friends of Animals researcher Gordon Haber for freeing an injured wolf out of a snare.

    In 1997, biologist Haber discovered the wolf caught in a trap set by Alaskan Eugene Johnson. Haber called Alaska state wildlife officials to free the wolf arguing it had been trapped illegally since there were dead caribou carcasses in the vicinity which violates an anti-baiting statute. Officials said they’d free the animal but when they didn’t show up, Haber released the animal himself all the while creating a videotape of his actions which he later released to highlight what he believes is an “abusive type of snaring.”

    Under Alaskan law, however, the wolf was the property of Johnson the moment it came into the trap. Since prosecutor’s decided there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Johnson with illegally baiting a trap, Johnson turned around and sued Haber for compensation for the lost wolf. Haber claimed he had the permission of state wildlife officials to free the wolf, but they testified that they told him as soon as he called that the wolf was the property of the trapper under Alaskan law.

    In addition to economic damage, Johnson argued that Haber was acting along with Friends of Animals to create a sensationalized videotape and damage his reputation for fund-raising purposes.

    Although both Haber and Friends of Animals maintain that Haber is an independent research biologist who happens to receive funding from the animal rights group, the jury decided that Haber was in fact acting as an employee of Friends of Animals when he released the wolf from the trap.

    After the verdict, Haber was defiant saying, “If they think I’m going to go away licking my wounds, they’re wrong. It just makes me more determined to get out there.”

    Friends of Animals, who paid all of the legal fees for their non-employee Haber has not yet decided whether it will appeal the jury verdict.

Sources:

Trapper awarded damages. Tim Mowry, Fairbanks Daily News, July 24, 2000.

Biologist undeterred by verdict in trapping case. The Associated Press, July 26, 2000.

Why Are Men More Likely than Women to Support Abortion Rights?

Chris Weinkopf, in an article (Leaving No Child Behind)originally written for the Los Angeles Daily News and reprinted at FrontpageMag.Com, thinks George W. Bush is making a mistake by not emphasizing abortion as a campaign issue. Bush might be afraid of alienating the women’s vote, Wienkopf posits, but that calculus might be erroneous. Weinkopf writes:

They can begin by realizing that, contrary to popular mythology, women are more likely than men to agree with them on the abortion issue. A July 23 ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that while 56 percent of men favor some degree of legalized abortion, that number drops to 50 percent for women.

That’s probably because women, many of whom have experienced the miracle of a child growing and developing within them, can more readily recognize that child’s humanity. Men not only lack that biological connection, but often think of abortion as an insurance policy against the unintended consequences of casual sex.. After the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973, many men decided that their offspring — now the woman’s choice — were no longer their responsibility. A sharp increase in the numbers of single mothers and deadbeat dads followed.

Weinkopf doesn’t give the margin of error for the study, so the difference could be just a statistical fluke, but even if that’s the case it is surprising that about half of women say they don’t favor some degree of legalized abortion, especially since most feminists have made abortion rights a lynchpin of their fight for women’s rights.

Weinkopf’s explanation of the difference in attitudes is, unfortunatley, jsut a rehashing of stereotypes that today are promoted by tboth traditionalist anti-feminists as well as mainstream and radical feminists. I suspect a lot of feminists would find Weinkopf’s description of women somewhat pandering, but he is solidly in the mainstream of contemporary feminist thought when he ascribes to women a wholly different thought process than men. The real explanation, I suspect, is far simpler.

First, the abortion rights movement has really hurt itself with an ineffective response to the “partial birth” abortion issue. To their credit, anti-abortion foes have done a very good job of transforming the issue of abortion away from women’s rights and more toward a debate over when personhood begins. Surprisingly many feminists and abortion supporters don’t seem to have a clue how to handle abortion once it becomes an issue of personhood rather than an issue of women’s rights.

Second, by being so closely identified as a feminist issue for so long, the abortion rights movement is carrying a lot of the baggage of the feminist movement. This is similar to the problem with another worthy cause — the movement to abolish capital punishment which is also bogged down largely by the poor choices made by organizations and individuals within that movement.

The abortion rights movement would likely have more success if it were grounded in a general theory of individual rights that was consistently applied, but most feminists and feminist organizations are notoriously picky about women’s choice — it usually begins and ends with abortion. Many of the feminist who run around shouting “pro-choice, pro-choice” whither and disappear whenever women start wanting to make choices that the feminists disagree with (such as write books that Andrea Dworkin or Catharine MacKinnon don’t like).

Instead although they have won many battles, the abortion rights movement is on the verge of losing the war with an extremely high likelihood that the next president of the United States will be solidly anti-abortion and likely end up with a solidly anti-abortion Supreme Court within a decade.

If feminists can’t even convince more than half of women to support abortion rights, they’re in a world of hurt.