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614-1: Feedback, notes and comments - Black swans A couple of readers pointed out that Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote about black swans before his 2007 book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. He had previously introduced the idea in his work of 2001, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life. As a result, there are some references to the idea before 2007, among them Maggie Mahar’s book of 2003, Bull!: A History of the Boom, 1982–1999. Jeremy Ardley e-mailed from the home of actual black swans: Perth, Western Australia. He says that they’re are just as unpredictable as their figurative counterparts. “Their most significant feature is their desire to walk — slowly — to some other location. If this requires them to cross a four-lane highway they will do so. Usually this results in the entire highway stopping while the swan walks to its next dining stop. This happens at ran...

614-2: Turns of Phrase: Spoken Web - Though the Web has evolved to provide audio, pictures and video, for most of us our primary interaction with the online world is via the written word, typed text in particular. This is a high barrier for many, especially in developing countries. Imagine, for example, how an illiterate person could use it, or somebody with no access to a computer or any understanding of one. A new project from IBM India Research Laboratory called the Spoken Web is trying to resolve this problem. In essence, it creates Web sites based on the spoken word, VoiceSites, accessed by the spoken word using mobile phones. Computers are not widely available in India, but more than 200 million people have cellphones, albeit low-end ones without the sophisticated browsing or data-transfer facilities now common in developed countries. The key to adoption of the new system is the ease of creating the VoiceSites, which are then given telephone numbers equivalent to the URLs of Web sites. Callers navi...

614-3: Recently noted - Neologism alert We’ve had staycation, a holiday spent at home to reduce expense during these financially straitened times. A related term appeared in the New York Times last weekend, Americation, a vacation that’s spent within the United States by Americans looking to reduce their carbon footprint. WOTY again Once again the Oxford American Dictionary is first past the post in the race to announce the Word of the Year. Last year, you may recall, it chose locavore. This year, its word is another you’ve read about in these columns, hypermiling. The finalists included frugalista, a person who leads a frugal lifestyle, but who stays fashionable and healthy by swapping clothes and buying second-hand; moofer, a mobile out-of-office worker, who works away from base...

614-4: Weird Words: Tripudiate - To dance with excitement; to trample on an opponent in triumph. The Oxford English Dictionary marks this as “rare and affected”, a reasonable conclusion. It had its time before the public, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but as writers came to eschew rhetoric and to prefer straightforward prose, it fell out of use and had pretty much vanished by the end of the nineteenth century. A typical instance of the type of high-flown language in which it flourished is Thomas Carlyle’s History of Friedrich II of Prussia, in which he recounts the occasion in 1730 when the Emperor let slip some premature news about the marriage of his daughter Wilhelmina: “Upon which the whole Palace of Charlottenburg now bursts into tripudiation; the very valets cutting capers, making somersets, — and rushing off with the news to Berlin.” [Somerset is an old form of somersault, to turn head over heels.]...

614-5: Elsewhere - Punctuated Last week, the Daily Telegraph and other British papers noted the result of a survey showing that on average nearly half of the 2000 people tested couldn’t use the apostrophe properly. You may feel that there’s little surprising in that, but interestingly, older people used it wrongly more often than young ones. See the story: http://wwwords.org?APOS. My thanks to Janusz Lukasiak for the reference. Aaargh! If I ever thought of running a competition for the worse designed language Web site in the world, I would be dissuaded by the fact that it would take a lot of effort to beat the current front runner, the Australian Word Map. Take a look and tell me I’m wrong. But it might be worth donning your sunglasses to discover expressions like pack of poo tickets. Yes we can! The US elections m...

614-6: Sic! - • Rachael Weiss found an item on a menu in Turkey: “Aubergine Kebap. Ground veal patties with aborigine arranged on a layer of sauteed pita bread, topped with tomatoes and spices.” She observed, “We white Australians haven’t treated the original owners of our land very well, but this seems to go too far.” • A recent report on the BBC News Web site about the actor Angelina Jolie was headlined “Jolie ‘could give up acting for babies’”. It was found by Len Blomstrand who commented, “Presumably they have difficulty following the plot, but don’t we all sometimes.”...

614-7: Copyright and contact details - World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion 2008. All rights reserved. You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include this note and the copyright notice above. Reproduction in printed publications or on Web sites or blogs requires prior permission, for which you should contact the editor. Comments on anything in this newsletter are more than welcome. To send them in, please visit the feedback page on our Web site. If you have enjoyed this newsletter and would like to contribute to its costs and those of the linked Web site, please visit our support page....

Review: Sanyo R227 Internet Radio - Consumer electronics giant Sanyo's new stereo Internet radio--available in the U.S. in January--looks good and sounds good, but is a challenge to set up. ...

EMC Retools Backup for Virtualization, Dedupe - EMC has overhauled its backup product line to better protect virtual server environments and to capitalize on the fast-growing market for data de-duplication....

Meraki Announces New Offerings - Meraki this week announced a new router/repeater that can plug into any wall socket to expand network coverage, along with new packages designed to get residential complexes or whole towns lit up simply and affordably. Also coming soon: Meraki Solar....

Review: Lenovo ThinkPad SL300 - If the price tag on the iconic ThinkPad notebook makes you think twice, you'll love the small-biz focused SL series. These models have the attributes of a ThinkPad, without the high price....

Secunia Helps You Keep Up With Your Patches - By scanning the applications found on your network's Windows systems for known vulnerabilities, Secunia's Network Software Inspector gives you one less thing to keep up with....

Gridbus Goes Commercial - Grid computing has a new startup, courtesy of Australia's Gridbus project....

Clustered Storage Without the Price Tag - IBRIX's clustered storage software helps users save on both hardware and software costs....

Yuuguu Readies Enterprise Web Conferencing - Yuuguu provides real-time Web conferencing that's simple to set up and IM network agnostic. Look for enterprise-ready versions in 2009....

Review: PC Fixer 2.6 - PC Fixer is a free (but ad-supported) utility that goes spelunking in the Registry to find and fix PC problems....

Symantec Turns Data Center Automation Up a Notch - Symantec has unveiled new services that let users know when changes to their data center environment could put them at risk for unwanted downtime....

Proxim Intros New 802.11n Access Points - Proxim's AP-800 and AP-8000 are designed to make it easy (and attractive) for an enterprise to upgrade to 11n....

Windows 7: Where's the Beef? - Sure, some things are unfinished and a few things are broken, but given that we're not even in the beta stage yet, Windows 7 is well rounded and offers quite a good experience. ...

Microsoft Rolls Out New Small Business Server Options - The company says it designed Windows Small Business Server 2008 and Windows Essential Business Server 2008 to help SMBs with limited IT resources to save time and money....

OpenOffice vs. Google Apps - Not only does OpenOffice.org match Google Apps in convenience and availability, but feature for feature it leaves Google Apps writhing helplessly on its back and choking on FOSS dust....

Cisco Makes SANs VM-Aware - The switch maker has partnered with VMware to create what Cisco calls the first 'end-to-end virtualized SAN.'...