Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [72]
15 If you want to confirm whether an e-mail is a hoax, check the “Urban Legends Reference Pages” at www.snopes.com.
16 When clipping nytimes.com articles, an invaluable site is the “New York Times link generator,” at http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink, which reveals special article URLs that do not expire or go behind a pay wall.
17 For younger readers who are wondering, negatives were a kind of template from which one could order copies of a photo. Negatives showed reversed colors—white showed up as black, and so on—hence the name.
18 Tags in particular have received a lot of media hype, so it’s worth a reality check. Tags can be genuinely valuable, but only if users use them consistently and accurately across a bitstream. For example, on the “social bookmarking” site del.icio.us, the mostly techie users consistently assign tags to Web pages they bookmark. In large quantities, such user-generated categorization can be very accurate. For example, searching del.icio.us on the tags “san francisco” and “food” yields more useful sites than from a similar search in most search engines. But this works only because del.icio.us has so many dedicated techie users who don’t mind spending time adding tags to their bookmarks. In contrast, it’s unlikely that an average user would expend such energy on their photo collection.
19 Mac users can Google “iPhoto Library Manager” to find and buy the program. It’s unfortunate that iPhoto is designed for one-level storage.
20 Personal letters are one exception. Often, for letters from close relatives or traveling friends, “the longer, the better.”
21 PNG and GIF are nearly interchangeable formats. In the late 1990s GIF was used widely on the Internet until Unisys, a technology company, began to enforce its software patent on the GIF format. PNG, a similar format with no patent protection, then became very popular. When the Unisys patent expired in 2003, GIFs became freely available again. Today the only major difference between the formats is that a GIF file can contain an animated graphic.
22 For more details on AAC, see the Wikipedia entry for “Advanced Audio Coding.”
23 Test conducted on Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac, version 11.0.
24 This was the first time many computer users had ever encountered fonts. The term “ransom note” took on a new meaning around this time as many Word users created Christmas letters, neighborhood newsletters, and other documents with every other sentence printed in a different font, size, and style.
25 A particularly irritating reminder of paper arrived in the late 1990s when Microsoft added “Clippy,” an animated paper clip, to Word and the other applications in Microsoft Office. It would pop up, unannounced and uninvited, and “helpfully” suggest what the user might like to do next. The gratuitous intrusion on users’ productivity was so universally loathed by users worldwide that Microsoft removed Clippy, or at least silenced it by default, within a few years.
26 “Bold Redesign Improves Office 2007,” by Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2007: http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20070104.html
27 The movie The Matrix gives a nod to ASCII, as the protagonists’ computers show a constant stream of green-on-black characters—a familiar sight to anyone who used computers before the mid-1980s.
28 In the Un*x world, emacs is the one true text editor. (No letters, please! Just tweaking vi users.) Ahh, geek humor.
29 “The hidden dangers of documents,” by Mark Ward, published by the BBC, August 18, 2003. Google the title and you’ll find the whole article online, for free. Great piece.
30 On Macs, the Print window of most applications—even Word—has an option to save the document as a PDF. It’s more difficult to create PDFs in Windows. Windows users should use one of the many websites that can convert Microsoft documents to PDF, like pdfonline.com or primopdf.com.
31 This was anthropologist