As I was browsing the Backbone magazine that came with my Globe and Mail last week, I came across an article listing 10 tech-related pre-New Year resolutions (yes, it’s almost that time of year again…).

One of those resolutions (scroll down to #8) is to try running the open-source Linux operating system on your desktop PC. And before you ask, “Why would I ever want to do that”, they add that Whitelaw Twining, a medium-sized Vancouver law firm, has managed to reduce their hardware costs by 20% and their software maintenance costs by 30% after switching to Linux.

I have . . . [more]

For anyone who hasn’t yet ordered their XO laptop, here’s another option if you need to drop $400 on a cute little computer: the Asus eeePC.

This is a very portable little machine, about the size of a paperback. Its 7″ screen is apparently large enough to use with comfort while ensuring it can truly be carried around easily (it weighs less than 2 pounds).

But where it gets interesting is inside. It has only flash memory, which decreases its size and weight significantly. It has a relatively slow 900 MHz processer and only 512 MB of RAM, . . . [more]

Text to speech continues to improve and is probably at the point now where one could listen to a computer read a text without feeling any serious irritation. In Apple’s new operating system, Leopard, the voice of “Alex” is particularly successful, I think.

Have a listen to Michel-Adrien Sheppard’s most recent post to hear what I mean. Let me know what you think. . . . [more]

We’ve discussed e-book readers and electronic paper several times on this blog. Amazon.com announced today the release of Kindle, its own e-book reader, or wireless portable reading device, as it calls it. It retails for US $399 and thus far ships only in the US and is not available on amazon.ca or amazon.co.uk. It is a standalone product, in that content does not need to be loaded via a computer or other external device; a purchased book is delivered wirelessly to the reader in about a minute, according to Amazon. It is said to hold 200 titles and weigh about . . . [more]

Lately there’s been a lot of talk on the internet (a circulating “meme,” as some would have it) that email is doomed if not already dead. As Mark Twain said after reading his own obituary, the report of this death has been greatly exaggerated. Ask any lawyer or librarian contemplating the Outlook inbox. A gentle exploration of the issue in Slate (“The death of e-mail” by Chad Lore) points to some important facts that we have raised many times here on Slaw, though never with the narrow conclusion that email is fatally ill.

Essentially, the article looks . . . [more]

I came across a story, “London’s most wanted” by Ed Gottsman, posted yesterday on ZDNet‘s Between the Lines, one of the blogs I follow. It had to do with a report detailing the ineffectiveness of London’s 10,000 official CCTV cameras in solving crimes. I thought that this might interest some Slaw readers, but that it wasn’t so squarely up our alley (can that be right?) that it merited an entry, so I was simply going to post a link in the Slaw Linkblog to the report that gave rise to this article .

The ZDNet piece . . . [more]

Manitoba lawyer Donna Seale has been blogging since the end of August but somehow we missed that fact. But now we’re on it: her blog is Human Rights in the Workplace. Says Seale, a former Manager of Investigation & Mediation at the Manitoba Human Rights Commission who now has her own consulting business:

My intention in starting this blog is to use my knowledge and experience to help employers, employees, managers, supervisors, human resource specialists and union representatives understand the ins and outs of Canadian human rights law as it relates to the workplace.

Of course, there is an . . . [more]

An article today in the Times Online provides quite a library friendly overview of many book digitisation projects underway. It also makes me realise I’ve been here too long, because I can understand why we have such a reader un-friendly non- lending rule here – only at the Bodleian libraries, not the majority of Oxford libraries, I hasten to add. The idea was/is that you can come from anywhere at any time, and the book you want should be available for consultation somehwere on the premises. It’s possibly a result of not allowing books to be borrowed that there is . . . [more]

HRCP Blog, the blog of the independent NGO Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, has been documenting the repression of members of that country’s legal, human rights and academic communities since President Musharraf imposed a state of emergency earlier this month.

One of the major targets of what has been described as a coup has been the increasingly independent-minded judiciary of the South Asian country.

The blog has been trying to make sure that the names of people arrested remain in the public eye.

Cross-posted to Library Boy. . . . [more]

I saw an in-person demo today by RBRO Solutions on the new Interwoven Universal Search. Nice product.

Pros:

– it can crawl and search pretty much any type of data or document management system (i.e., it is not limited to Interwoven for DMS searching)

– the “universal” element means you can choose to search, for example, on “motion to compel” on your internal document management system, on Lexis or Westlaw, the World Wide Web and your internal library catalog, all in one search (the product comes “out of the box” with a fairly large number of “connectors” to allow . . . [more]

I don’t think we’ve mentioned the Yale / Stanford PORTIA Project before on Slaw:

The PORTIA goals are (1) to design and develop a next generation of technology for handling sensitive information that is qualitatively better than the current generation’s and (2) to create an effective conceptual framework for policy making and philosophical inquiry into the rights and responsibilities of data subjects, data owners, and data users.

Much of the material is inaccessible to the average reader because of a high degree of technical material (e.g. On the Implementation of Pairing-Based Cryptosystems or Private Multiparty Sampling and Approximation of Vector . . . [more]

SLAW has been following the progress of the One Laptop program (formerly the $100 laptop program) since 2005. This program is finally kicking off with a 15 day “Give One Get One” (G1G1) campaign. It started yesterday. For a donation of $399 (not including taxes and shipping) you will receive one of these specially designed computers. One computer will also be given to a child in a develping country. $200 of your donation will be tax deductible (less the approximate value of the computer you will receive).

The computer is designed especially for children and is intended to . . . [more]