Tuesday, April 12, 2005

The Fading Giant: Bygone Train Sights and Sounds. In the late 1950s, photographer O. Winston Link decided to document the end of an era -- steam-powered trains in pictures and sound recordings. Link's assistant recalls some of the scenes they captured in the Virginia mountains. [NPR Programs: All Things Considered] 7:43:49 PM    comment [] Tufts warns 106,000 alums, donors of security breach. Alumni of Tufts University in Boston have been notified that personal information stored on a server used by the university for fund-raising could have been exposed to intruders. [InfoWorld: Top News] 7:35:31 PM    comment [] LexisNexis flap draws outcry from Congress. It took mere hours for LexisNexis' latest embarrassing data leak revelation to spur cries of condemnation from Congress. [CNET News.com] 7:33:15 PM    comment [] EDS system drove staff to frustration, report says. A troubled child-support case management and telephony system used by the U.K.'s Child Support Agency so frustrated the workers who used it that some of them wound up in tears, according to a new report on the implementation. [Computerworld News] The DWP today stressed that improvements have since been made to the system, reducing the impact of the report. "The information in this report is quite old; a number of new software releases have been made, and there has been significant improvement," a spokesman for the DWP said. I always love statements like this.  As if the fact that the information is "old" makes a difference on how people perceive the application or its value in their jobs.  When did we lose the idea that if you can't make it better, then the application is not ready for delivery?  7:30:55 PM    comment []

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