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Mar. 27th, 2008
Synching Just Became a Cinch
By DAVID POGUE
By DAVID POGUE
If you’ve ever lost important computer files, then you already know about the five stages of grieving: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Moving to the Amish Country.
Even so, only a tiny fraction of today’s computer owners have automatic backup systems in place. The obstacles are known as Cost, Technical Setup and Being Kinda Busy.
The mental and technical obstacles get especially hairy if you have more than one computer, like a laptop, a home machine and a PC at the office. And it’s almost hopeless if these machines are of different types — a Mac here, a PC there — because you may not be able to use the same backup software or service for all of them.
Last week, a company called Sharpcast introduced SugarSync, a new automated Internet backup and synchronization service. It claims to solve these problems and many more.
Now, the truth is, I wasn’t particularly interested at first. For one thing, Internet backup services are a dime a dozen — and this one is $500 a year. That’s for the maximum storage, 250 gigabytes. Less expensive plans are available for smaller amounts of data, like $10 a month for 30 gigabytes — still costly, although all plans are half price for the first year if you sign up before April 15. More
Imagined Snipers, Real Challenges
By ROGER COHEN
By ROGER COHEN
Here’s some news for Hillary Clinton: the Bosnian war was over in 1996.
Those of us, like myself, who first went to Bosnia at the start of the war in 1992 and then, in 1994 and 1995, endured President Bill Clinton’s circumlocutions as we sat in an encircled Sarajevo watching pregnant women getting blown away by shelling from Serbian gunners, know that.
We know that as President Clinton mumbled about “enmities that go back 500 years, some would say almost a thousand years,” Bosnia burned. We know what that talk of intractable grievances dating back to 995 was meant to communicate: no western intervention could achieve anything in the Balkan pit.
Only after the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, three years after the initial Serbian genocide of 1992 against that population (and one year after a genocide on his watch in Rwanda), did the gelatinous Clinton develop some backbone. NATO bombed, Richard Holbrooke did his brilliant work at Dayton in November 1995, and the guns fell silent in Bosnia.
So, yes, the war was well and truly over when Hillary Clinton arrived in the northeastern Bosnian town of Tuzla on March 25, 1996. It was over, although she recently recalled “landing under sniper fire.” It was over when “we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
Oh, please. Researching a book, I also visited that base in 1996 to talk to Maj. Gen. William Nash, then the commander of U.S. troops in Bosnia. If you’d lived the war, the base was a small miracle of American order and security. More
Tune Recorded Before Edison
Mar. 27th, 2008 05:57 amResearchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison
By JODY ROSEN
By JODY ROSEN
For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words “Mary had a little lamb” on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.
The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. More