The Stoa: a Review for Digital Classics

Via DigitalKoans, a report on new open source OCR software.  Now — someone get busy and train it to read polytonic ancient Greek texts accurately …

I hadn’t seen that word before, but these are videos associated with the Roman art exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, with an RSS feed for keeping up with the newest ones.

This topic has come up before and I imagine the trend will continue:

Colleges Leave E-Mail to Google and Microsoft

Seattle–“Should our university even be in the e-mail business?” Wendy Woodward King found herself asking last year. Her answer, the director of technology support services at Northwestern University told a session at the Educause technology meeting, was no. And that’s why Northwestern students get their e-mail “@u.northwestern.edu” which is hosted, free of charge, by Google Apps Education Edition. Bryant University, in Rhode Island, also decided to outsource, but went with another free service, Microsoft’s Windows Live@edu. And in both cases, a prime driver behind the decision was that students were already using one of these services when they came to campus. At Northwestern, Ms. Woodward King found, “90 percent of our students already had Google’s Gmail. When students forwarded their campus e-mail to a non-campus account, 67 percent of them did it to Gmail. Students told us they wanted Google.” By going with Google, she says, the university avoided costs in maintaining and upgrading an e-mail system, and took advantage of state-of-the-art technology that Northwestern could never supply. Bryant was particularly interested in staying in touch with alumni, and giving them one e-mail address for life, says Art Gloster, vice president for information services. “Many of our students already used Microsoft’s MSN Hotmail services,” he says. Moving to Live@edu, with an “@bryant.edu” address, kept the transition from student to alumni easy and seamless. More than 50 percent of the 2007 graduating class signed up. –Josh Fischman

For some reason I never had a chance to meet Roy Rosenzweig in person, but I appreciated his scholarship, communicated with him by email a couple of times to discuss wikipedia, and heard lots about him from his admirers, of whom there were many. His was a very strong and very important voice in our digital humanities community. I also want to say that his closest friends who supported him to the end can be absolutely certain that their love and concern meant everything to him. I know that for a fact!

Ashlee Vance (by way of Siva Vaidhyanatha) discusses Splashtop from DeviceVM:

… one must suspect that Microsoft is none too pleased to see a plucky start-up trying to gain first touch with customers. It could be very frustrating for Redmond if thousands/millions of users go straight to their Yahoo! or Google e-mail without ever glancing at Windows or if they perform searches via Firefox all day long because that’s where DeviceVM pushed them…

Stretch your mind a bit more, and you could see a company like Google pushing its own desktop plans via something like the Splashtop software. Why even bother encountering Windows when you can have an instant-on machine that leads to search, e-mail, documents, photos, music and all the rest? …

We’ve seen the Splashtop software in action, and it boots as advertised. You hit the power button, and the software fires up right away. You can then opt to head toward Firefox, Skype or whatever a particular OEM decides to bundle on a machine or do nothing and allow the operating system to boot as usual. (Go get your cup of coffee.)