The history of tabs (card, folder, & UI)

business, commonplace book, history / /

From Technology Review‘s “Keeping Tabs“:

Starting in the late 14th century, scribes began to leave pieces of leather at the edges of manuscripts for ready reference. But with the introduction of page numbering in the Renaissance, they went out of fashion.

The modern tab was an improvement on a momentous 19th-century innovation, the index card. Libraries had previously listed their books in bound ledgers. During the French Revolution, authorities divided the nationalized collections of monasteries and aristocrats among public institutions, using the backs of playing cards to record data about each volume. …

It took decades to add tabs to cards. In 1876, Melvil Dewey, inventor of decimal classification, helped organize a company called the Library Bureau, which sold both cards and wooden cases. An aca­demic entrepreneur, Dewey was a perfectionist supplier. His cards were made to last, made from linen recycled from the shirt factories of Troy, NY. His card cabi­nets were so sturdy that I have found at least one set still in use, in excellent order. Dewey also standardized the dimension of the catalogue card, at three inches by five inches, or rather 75 millimeters by 125 millimeters. (He was a tireless advocate of the metric system.) …

The tab was the idea of a young man named James Newton Gunn (1867–1927), who started using file cards to achieve savings in cost accounting while working for a manufacturer of portable forges. After further experience as a railroad cashier, Gunn developed a new way to access the contents of a set of index cards, separating them with other cards distinguished by projections marked with letters of the alphabet, dates, or other information.

Gunn’s background in bookkeeping filled what Ronald S. Burt, the University of Chicago sociologist, has called a structural hole, a need best met by insights from unconnected disciplines. In 1896 he applied for a U.S. patent, which was granted as number 583,227 on May 25, 1897. By then, Gunn was working for the Library Bureau, to which he had sold the patent. …

The Library Bureau also produced some of the first modern filing cabinets, proudly exhibiting them at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Files had once been stored horizontally on shelves. Now they could be organized with file folders for better visibility and quicker access. …

But the tab is [Gunn’s] lasting legacy. And it is ubiquitous: in the dialogue boxes of Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, at the bottom of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, at the side of Adobe Acrobat documents, across the top of the Opera and Firefox Web browsers, and—even now—on manila file folders. We’ve kept tabs.

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Why businesses want RFID for inventory

business, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s “Tracking Privacy“:

Technology Review: How would RFID work to track products?

Sandra Hughes [Global privacy executive, Procter and Gamble]: It’s a technology that involves a silicon chip and an antenna, which together we call a tag. The tags emit radio signals to devices that we call readers. One of the things that is important to know about is EPC. Some people use RFID and EPC interchangeably, but they are different. EPC stands for electronic product code; it’s really like an electronic bar code.

TR: So manufacturers and distributors would use EPCs encoded in RFID tags to mark and track products? Why’s that any better than using regular bar codes?

Hughes: Bar codes require a line of sight, so somebody with a bar code reader has to get right up on the bar code and scan it. When you’re thinking about the supply chain, somebody in the warehouse is having to look at every single case. With RFID, a reader should be able to pick up just by one swipe all of the cases on the pallet, even the ones stacked up in the middle that can’t be seen. So it’s much, much faster and more efficient and accurate.

TR: Why is that speed important?

Hughes: We want our product to be on the shelf for consumers when they want it. A recent study of retailers showed that the top 2,000 items in stores had a 12 percent out-of-stock rate on Saturday afternoons, the busiest shopping day. I think the industry average for inventory levels is 65 days, which means products sitting around, taking up space for that time, and that costs about $3 billion annually. Often a retail clerk can’t quickly find products in the crowded back room of a store to make sure that the shelves are filled for the consumer, or doesn’t know that a shelf is sitting empty because she hasn’t walked by lately. With RFID, the shelf can signal to the back room that it is empty, and the clerk can quickly find the product.

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Arguments against the Web’s ungovernability

politics, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s “Taming the Web“:

Nonetheless, the claim that the Internet is ungovernable by its nature is more of a hope than a fact. It rests on three widely accepted beliefs, each of which has become dogma to webheads. First, the Net is said to be too international to oversee: there will always be some place where people can set up a server and distribute whatever they want. Second, the Net is too interconnected to fence in: if a single person has something, he or she can instantly make it available to millions of others. Third, the Net is too full of hackers: any effort at control will invariably be circumvented by the world’s army of amateur tinkerers, who will then spread the workaround everywhere.

Unfortunately, current evidence suggests that two of the three arguments for the Net’s uncontrollability are simply wrong; the third, though likely to be correct, is likely to be irrelevant. In consequence, the world may well be on the path to a more orderly electronic future-one in which the Internet can and will be controlled. If so, the important question is not whether the Net can be regulated and monitored, but how and by whom. …

As Swaptor shows, the Net can be accessed from anywhere in theory, but as a practical matter, most out-of-the-way places don’t have the requisite equipment. And even if people do actually locate their services in a remote land, they can be easily discovered. …

Rather than being composed of an uncontrollable, shapeless mass of individual rebels, Gnutella-type networks have identifiable, centralized targets that can easily be challenged, shut down or sued. Obvious targets are the large backbone machines, which, according to peer-to-peer developers, can be identified by sending out multiple searches and requests. By tracking the answers and the number of hops they take between computers, it is possible not only to identify the Internet addresses of important sites but also to pinpoint their locations within the network.

Once central machines have been identified, companies and governments have a potent legal weapon against them: their Internet service providers. …

In other words, those who claim that the Net cannot be controlled because the world’s hackers will inevitably break any protection scheme are not taking into account that the Internet runs on hardware – and that this hardware is, in large part, the product of marketing decisions, not technological givens.

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Security will retard innovation

commonplace book, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s “Terror’s Server“:

Zittrain [Jonathan Zittrain, codirector of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School] concurs with Neumann [Peter Neumann, a computer scientist at SRI International, a nonprofit research institute in Menlo Park, CA] but also predicts an impending overreaction. Terrorism or no terrorism, he sees a convergence of security, legal, and business trends that will force the Internet to change, and not necessarily for the better. “Collectively speaking, there are going to be technological changes to how the Internet functions — driven either by the law or by collective action. If you look at what they are doing about spam, it has this shape to it,” Zittrain says. And while technologi­cal change might improve online security, he says, “it will make the Internet less flexible. If it’s no longer possible for two guys in a garage to write and distribute killer-app code without clearing it first with entrenched interests, we stand to lose the very processes that gave us the Web browser, instant messaging, Linux, and e-mail.”

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Terrorist social networks

social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s “Terror’s Server“:

For example, research suggests that people with nefarious intent tend to exhibit distinct patterns in their use of e-mails or online forums like chat rooms. Whereas most people establish a wide variety of contacts over time, those engaged in plotting a crime tend to keep in touch only with a very tight circle of people, says William Wallace, an operations researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

This phenomenon is quite predictable. “Very few groups of people communicate repeatedly only among themselves,” says Wallace. “It’s very rare; they don’t trust people outside the group to communicate. When 80 percent of communications is within a regular group, this is where we think we will find the groups who are planning activities that are malicious.” Of course, not all such groups will prove to be malicious; the odd high-school reunion will crop up. But Wallace’s group is developing an algorithm that will narrow down the field of so-called social networks to those that warrant the scrutiny of intelligence officials. The algorithm is scheduled for completion and delivery to intelligence agencies this summer. …

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How terrorists use the Web

politics, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s “Terror’s Server“:

According to [Gabriel] Weimann [professor of communications at University of Haifa], the number of [terror-related] websites has leapt from only 12 in 1997 to around 4,300 today. …

These sites serve as a means to recruit members, solicit funds, and promote and spread ideology. …

The September 11 hijackers used conventional tools like chat rooms and e-mail to communicate and used the Web to gather basic information on targets, says Philip Zelikow, a historian at the University of Virginia and the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission. …

Finally, terrorists are learning that they can distribute images of atrocities with the help of the Web. … “The Internet allows a small group to publicize such horrific and gruesome acts in seconds, for very little or no cost, worldwide, to huge audiences, in the most powerful way,” says Weimann. …

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When to use XML

tech help, technology / /

From W3C’s “Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One“:

XML defines textual data formats that are naturally suited to describing data objects which are hierarchical and processed in a chosen sequence. It is widely, but not universally, applicable for data formats; an audio or video format, for example, is unlikely to be well suited to expression in XML. Design constraints that would suggest the use of XML include:

1. Requirement for a hierarchical structure.
2. Need for a wide range of tools on a variety of platforms.
3. Need for data that can outlive the applications that currently process it.
4. Ability to support internationalization in a self-describing way that makes confusion over coding options unlikely.
5. Early detection of encoding errors with no requirement to “work around” such errors.
6. A high proportion of human-readable textual content.
7. Potential composition of the data format with other XML-encoded formats.
8. Desire for data easily parsed by both humans and machines.
9. Desire for vocabularies that can be invented in a distributed manner and combined flexibly.

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The growth in data & the problem of storage

politics, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s “The Fading Memory of the State“:

Tom Hawk, general manager for enterprise storage at IBM, says that in the next three years, humanity will generate more data–from websites to digital photos and video–than it generated in the previous 1,000 years. … In 1996, companies spent 11 percent of their IT budgets on storage, but that figure will likely double to 22 percent in 2007, according to International Technology Group of Los Altos, CA.

… the Pentagon generates tens of millions of images from personnel files each year; the Clinton White House generated 38 million e-mail messages (and the current Bush White House is expected to generate triple that number); and the 2000 census returns were converted into more than 600 million TIFF-format image files, some 40 terabytes of data. A single patent application can contain a million pages, plus complex files like 3-D models of proteins or CAD drawings of aircraft parts. All told, NARA expects to receive 347 petabytes … of electronic records by 2022.

Currently, the Archives holds only a trivial number of electronic records. Stored on steel racks in NARA’s [National Archives and Records Administration] 11-year-old facility in College Park, the digital collection adds up to just five terabytes. Most of it consists of magnetic tapes of varying ages, many of them holding a mere 200 megabytes apiece–about the size of 10 high-resolution digital photographs.

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Better in command of the enemy than a prisoner

history, language & literature / /

From “Fort Henry and Fort Donelson“:

Shortly after the surrender of Fort Sumter, Confederates built two forts just south of the border of Tennessee and Kentucky. … Fort Henry guarded the Tennessee River while Fort Donelson guarded the Cumberland. … The key to rolling up the Confederate defense of the Mississippi River was the capture of Fort Henry and Donelson. That job fell to General Ulysses S. Grant and Commodore Andrew Foote. …

Fort Henry was easy prey for the Union gunboats … When Fort Henry surrendered, Grant turned his attention to Fort Donalson. … Inside Fort Donelson, General John Floyd commanded, with Gideon Pillow and Simon Bolivar Buckner under him. …

Gideon Pillow launched an assault against the Union right (McClernand), demolished 5 brigades in the federal line, forcing them into full retreat and grabbed a road that led to Nashville. Pillow had a number of good choices he could have made: turn left or right to battle the exposed flanks of Grant’s army, or use the road he had captured to evacuate to Nashville. Pillow, generally regarded as the worst general on either side during the Civil War, decided to withdraw back into the fort because his men seemed exhausted.

… That evening, Floyd, Pillow and Buckner considered surrender. Buckner, lowest ranking of the three generals, was the one left to do the task. Buckner and Pillow slipped out by boat and Nathan Bedford Forrest, his cavalry and a few foot soldiers found a partially flooded land route out minutes before it was closed off by Union infantry.

According to General Grant’s memoirs, one of Grant’s first questions to Buckner was: “Where is Pillow? Why didn’t he stay to surrender his command?”

Buckner: “He thought you were too anxious to capture him personally.”

Grant: “Why if I had captured him I would have turned him loose. I would rather have him in command of you fellows than as a prisoner.”

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Ulysses Grant & the torpedo

history / /

From Greg Goebel’s “Februrary 1862: Unconditional And Immediate Surrender” (interpolation from Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville [187]):

On the afternoon of 5 February, during a conference between Grant, Foote, and the two division commanders, the captain of a gunboat sent a message to Grant that he had actually pulled a torpedo out of the river, had it on the gunboat’s deck, and would anyone care to see it? As the Second Division was still being shuttled in to the landing and the attack could not go forward until they had arrived, leaving Grant and the other senior officers with little to do for the moment, they went over in a group to investigate. The officers gathered around the torpedo, which was a five foot (1.5 meter) long cylinder with a pronged rod extending from its head. Grant was intrigued by the evil-looking thing, had the ship’s armorer come up to try to dismantle it, and watched as the man tinkered with the device. Suddenly, as the armorer loosened a nut, the torpedo emitted a loud hissing sound that appeared to be building to an explosion.

[Foote sprang for the ship’s ladder, and Grant, perhaps reasoning that in naval matters the commodore knew best, was right behind him. If he lacked the seamans’s agility in climbing a rope ladder, he made up for it with what one witness called “commendable enthusasm.” At the top, the commodore looked back over his shoulder and found Grant closing rapidly upon him.]

The hissing died out, leaving the two men hanging on the ladder. Foote looked down to see Grant beneath and, smiling, asked: “General, why this haste?” Grant replied: “That the Navy may not get ahead of us.”

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Slavery & whiskey; Foote & Grant

history, language & literature / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (184):

Commodore Andrew H. Foote was a Connecticut Yankee, a small man with burning eyes, a jutting gray chin-beard, and a long, naked upper lip. … he was deeply, puritanically religious, and conducted a Bible school for his crew every Sunday, afloat or ashore. Twenty years before, he had had the first temperance ship in the US Navy, and before the present year was out he would realize a lifelong ambition by seeing the alcohol ration abolished throughout the service. At fifty-six he had spent forty years as a career officer fighting the two things he hated most, slavery and whiskey. It was perhaps a quirk of fate to have placed him thus alongside Grant, who could scarecely be said to have shown an aversion for either.

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How he liked being tarred & feathered

history, language & literature, politics / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (166):

Asked how he enjoyed his office [of President], [Lincoln] told of a tarred and feathered man out West, who, as he was being ridden out of town on a rail, heard one among the crowd call to him, asking how he liked it, high up there on his uncomfortable perch. “If it wasn’t for the honor of the thing,” the man replied, “I’d sooner walk.”

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The conspirer

history, language & literature / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (138):

[John Slidell] was aptly named, being noted for his slyness. At the outbreak of hostilities, back in the spring, an English journalist called him, “a man of iron will and strong passions, who loves the excitement of combinations and who, in his dungeon, or whatever else it may be, would conspire with the mice against the cat rather than not conspire at all.”

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Good will to everyone … with a few exceptions

history, language & literature / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (132-133):

Two days after the first-Wednesday election an insurrection exploded in the loyalist mountain region of East Tennessee. Bridges were burned and armed men assembled to assist the expected advanced of a Union army through Cumberland Gap. … Resistance was quashed and a considereable number of Unionists arrested. … Five were so hanged, and others were held, including that William G. Brownlow who earlier had said that he would fight seccession on the ice in hell. … An honest, fearless, vociferous man who neither smoked nor drank nor swore, he had courted only one girl in his life “and her I married.” Though he was mysteriously absent from home on the night of the burnings, his actual complicity could not be established. He was held in arrest – for a time, at least, until his presence proved embarassing … Davis directed that the parson-editor be released to enter the Union lines. Though he was thus denied the chance to recite the speech he had memorized for delivery on the gallows, Brownlow went rejoicing. “Glory to God in the highest,” he exclaimed as he crossed over, “and on earth peace, good will toward all men, except a few hell-born and hell-bound rebels in Knoxville.”

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Jefferson Davis, seeker after discord

history / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (127):

Men interpreted [Jefferson Davis] as they saw him, and for the most part they considered him argumentative in the extreme, irascible, and a seeker after discord. A Richmond editor later wrote, for all to read, that Davis was “ready for any quarrel with any and everybody, at any time and all times; and the suspicion goes that rather than not have a row on hand with the enemy, he would make one with the best friend he had on earth.”

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