At CNet, lawyer Eric J. Sinrod is astounded by the things that people still write in emails.

Despite several high-profile cases, many continue to commit things to email—a lasting, storable medium—that would make a more prudent person flinch.

He recalls the antitrust case against Microsoft in the late 1990s in which “Attorneys for the Department of Justice skillfully used Gates’ own e-mails against him to paint Microsoft’s co-founder as a predatory monopolist.”

In more current affairs, US public service employee David Safavian will be proved guilty on the basis of his own emails alone, according to the Department of Justice.

He has a theory about why unguarded practices continue:

E-mail has become ubiquitous. Very busy people often send and receive e-mail messages more than they actually talk to others. E-mail thus becomes a substitute for conversation. Writers of e-mail messages become very comfortable and chatty, forgetting or not appreciating that the e-mail messages live on.

Most of us don’t play for the same stakes as Bill Gates or David Safavian.

If we followed Sinrod’s advice only to write emails that could happily appear on the front page of a newspaper we would die of boredom by a thousand cuts before ever ending up in trouble, but some caution never goes astray.

And, really, the rules are pretty simple. Don’t send an email or operate heavy machinery of any kind when you are angry. Keep slanderous gossip about workmates out of your email. Restrict it to the water-cooler where it belongs. Leave your feelings about your boss with your therapist and not in your Sent Mail folder. That kind of thing.

Of course, you are already doing that, aren’t you?email, bill gates, safavian, prudence, keeping it nice, evidence, self-incrimination

Are you a geek or a nerd?

If you are reading this post on Hawk Wings, you are one or the other.

A blog about a niche email client within a niche OS within the niche market of computing (a niche of a niche of a niche) pretty well meets the criteria of obsession and narrow focus that has defined these two words.

A post on progressive: what the blog? explores the semantics of geeks and nerds.

After pointing out that dictionary definitions confuse the two, the writer attempts a distinction:

A geek has a narrower interest span than a nerd. A geek is extremely good at one thing and also knows a bit more than average about many other interests he or she might have. A geek is also more outgoing and more social than nerds. A geek is more ’self oriented’ while a nerd is ‘interest oriented’. A geek may give up or switch to some other interest if thre are benifits in it, but a nerd will not – if he did he would fall under the geek definition.

Australia must follow the UK on this, I think, where the usage differs. As a commentator on the progressive post points out, people in the UK ‘tend to use “geek” to mean “one who has keen interest in computers, telephony, science fiction etc” and “nerd” to mean “a geek too far”‘.

That seems to fit. Geeks can at least see normality in the middle distance, whilst for nerds it is already lost over the horizon.

It’s a better distinction than my first thought: Steve Jobs is a geek, but Bill Gates is a nerd. And than my second: Geeks are GUI (Mail.app, Thunderbird) and nerds are command line (mutt, pine). Life is more complicated than that.

[Via the excellent Daring Fireball Linked List ]nerds, geeks, stigma, tribalism, semantics, obsession, niche interests, computers, Steve jobs, bill gates

According to Microsoft Watch, Microsoft is getting ready to launch a “Live Drive”, a virtual hard drive that will allow users to store personal data online.

It would be a direct competitor to Google’s planned GDrive , which will offer users unlimited online storage. Both options leave .Mac’s iDisk looking like the 360KB floppy disk of the Internet age.

You can already make a limited storage space for yourself using your Gmail account and a tool like gDrive but it has nothing like the rumoured size of Google’s own GDrive.

Ray Ozzie, CTO at Microsoft, let slip (strategically leaked?) Microsoft’s verison in an interview with Fortune Magazine.

The article is interesting. It describes how Bill Gates is looking to Ozzie to revive Microsoft’s fortunes and reputation by jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon. In part it says,

Gates and Ballmer … want to put Microsoft back out in front of the industry, where it has been for most of its history. Gates says he is fed up with Google being seen as the “thought leader” of the Internet Age.

Ballmer says, “We have the birthright to lead the pack. We’ve got more technology. We’ve got more experience.”

Put simply, Ozzie’s assignment is to Webify everything: To intertwine Microsoft’s entire product line – software for consumers, software for businesses, Xboxes, all of it – with the vast and ever-growing power of the Net.

“Everything we do should have a presence on the Web,” Ozzie says.

[Via Slashdot ]Microsoft, .mac, dotmac, idisk, live drive, gmail, gdrive, Google, web 2.0, bill gates

CNN Money carries a report on how Bill Gates organises his office, his email and his workflow.

In front of this three LCD screens, each with its own function, he reads only 100 emails a day. An assistant reads the rest and provides him with summaries. (Wouldn’t that be nice!).

He says,

We’re at the point now where the challenge isn’t how to communicate effectively with e-mail, it’s ensuring that you spend your time on the e-mail that matters most. I use tools like “in-box rules” and search folders to mark and group messages based on their content and importance.

To Do lists are out. Email and his calendar are enough to keep him on track. And paper in general “is no longer a big part of my day”.

The main trick, he says, is maintaining your focus, although he also makes an interesting point about “information underload”—not becoming totally reactive and critically assessing the information to hand:

Staying focused is one issue; that’s the problem of information overload. The other problem is information underload. Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people.

It’s an interesting article.Bill Gates, email, productivity, workflow

You will remember that a few years ago Bill Gates promised that the spam problem would be solved in two years’ time.

That’s now. And Microsoft claims that Bill was right.

Ryan Hamlin, the General Manager of Microsoft’s Anti-spam Division argues:

“If you are a consumer that’s taking advantage of the technologies that exist … then the spam problem for you is solved. Bill didn’t say that there would be no spam. But he said the problem would be solved, and I think that is what we actually have accomplished.”

The premiss here is that what you don’t see, doesn’t exist.

Server-side and client spam filters are now so effective that users no longer see spam. What you don’t see doesn’t exist, so the problem’s solved.

Oh, happy day!

Now that the spam battle is over, you can spend your time reading more on this in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer or joining in the fun on Slashdot .