www.ncstelecom.net

80 GB 4200 RPM disk. This I’m a bit less thrilled with. I upgraded my Fujitsu’s drive to a 5400 RPM model a couple of years ago. Nor is 80 GB a huge capacity even for a traveling notebook (especially if you want to carry a lot of video around with you). The good news is that I expect we’ll see higher capacities coming down the road. The 64 GB solid state disk upgrade is pretty useless for most purposes today; it adds something like $1,000 to the price.

No built in optical. This one seems to have a lot of people up in arms. I rarely travel with the optical drive for my Fujitsu. (I put a second battery in the bay.) I rather like the sound of the whole Remote Disc system. I don’t personally have any issue with the lack of an integrated optical drive.

Non-Upgradable 2GB memory. Even by today’s standards, this is a pretty healthy complement for most purposes.

No card reader. I sometimes use this to transfer photos but I suppose I could always just connect the camera to the computer.

So, let’s go through some of the MacBook Air’s features and see how they would fit in with my specific usage scenario. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Price.Yes, it’s on the pricey side but that isn’t a major consideration for me (within reason) if it’s the right tool.

One USB. Again, not thrilled. I tend to use my laptop to charge a lot of my mobile devices. This probably means carrying a small USB hub with me.

Full size keyboard. Also nice. That’s one of the things I just don’t care for on my Fujitsu which has an approximately 90 percent-sized keyboard.

Integrated (non-removable) battery. This one concerns me. I do travel with a spare of my Fujitsu’s main battery. (So I actually travel with three batteries: two main batteries and a drive bay battery.) It’s often hard to find power at conferences and it’s nice to be able to go a full day without plugging in. That said, for all those batteries the Fujitsu still only gets maybe 7 hours or so with WiFi on. (It’s a pre-Centrino laptop and the WiFi seems to be a considerable power hog.) So if the MacBook Air truly gets an honest 5.5 hours of battery life, that’s not too bad–but not great either.

No ExpressCard or other expansion capabilities. After consideration, this is what might concern me the most. It means that you can’t plug in a card for either cellular broadband or for WiMAX. In practice, you may be able to get to cellular service by plugging a telephone into the USB. And perhaps WiMAX could be added at some future date through a USB-connected device as well. But about the best you can say is that the lack of expansion means that you won’t be able to add new networking options to the MacBook Air as easily you would with chubbier laptops.

Form factor. Very thin. Very sleek. Lightweight. 13.3-inch widescreen display is nice. (That’s a bit larger than my Fujitsu’s 10.6-inch screen. I used to think I preferred the smaller screen so that I could work in planes but I find this hard to do anyway and I’ve come to think it’s just a bit too small.)

Now we get to some of the compromises.

I was going to stay out of the MacBook Air discussion given the vast volume of discussion already online. However, I was more than a bit surprised by the negativity of so many posters and commenters. As an often "road warrior," I thought it pretty interesting–even if it does skirt the edge of excessive compromise in service of thinness.

CPU. The MacBook Air uses Intel’s Core 2 Duo (1.6 or 1.8 GHz) in some special packaging. This is no speed demon but it seems that this would be quite adequate for my purposes. I don’t do things like heavy-duty photo editing on the road although, truth be told, I would guess that this processor is probably at least as speedy as the AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor that I do use for photo editing at home.

If I were to replace my Fujitsu with a Mac, I would certainly consider a MacBook Air. Albeit not without some qualms. It does push the envelope hard and makes some design tradeoffs that not even all its target users are likely to be comfortable with. For myself, I would have to consider some of those tradeoffs carefully. But they hardly seem irrational.

No Ethernet. Increasingly not a big deal but I’d still need to travel with an Ethernet adapter to connect to the USB. The WiFi sometimes gets overwhelmed at conferences when there’s still Ethernet in the Press Room. And you still need to use wired Ethernet in some hotel rooms. (Apple will also sell a USB modem but I can’t remember the last time I used a dialup connection when traveling.)

First, by way of background, I like small notebooks. My current model is a Fujitsu LifeBook P5020D. Although I don’t use my notebook only when traveling, it’s definitely a supplement to my regular desktop. In fact, when working at home, I often just use the laptop through an RDP session from my main desktop system. As you may gather, I’m not a
Mac user but the MacBook Air feature discussion isn’t really about anything particular to Macs.

Large trackpad. My preference is for trackpoints a la Lenovo, but I’ve come to accept that trackpads are more common. I can live with either approach.

commentary

(Credit:
U.S. PTO)

Systems may have multiple input means. However, each input means is typically operated independently…in a nonseamless way. There is no synergy between them. They do not work together or cooperate for a common goal such as improving the input experience.

The idea behind the latest patent application is to combine input from different sources, whether that’s the now-familiar iPhone multitouch concept, voice recognition, or facial expressions.

A new Apple patent application could provide ways to control a computer with a combination of input technologies.

Apple may be thinking about adding new ways to improve the multitouch interface work that is central to the company’s plan for the future.

Patent applications, as a rule, are designed to cover as wide an array of possible applications for the technology as the author can think of, so don’t expect to see a
Mac or iPhone with all of that stuff just yet. Still, it does seem that Apple is putting an awful lot of time into user interface design these days.

That’s what Apple hopes to do with the system it’s trying to patent–combine multiple forms of input in order to more efficiently control a computer. For example, you could select an object with a finger gesture, order the computer with a voice command to change that object’s color to blue, and then tell the computer where you want to place the object by staring at the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

Unwired View unearthed a patent application filed by Apple (thanks, Gizmodo) containing ideas for a user interface system that builds on the multitouch input used on the
iPhone by adding technology for voice recognition and even facial recognition.

Wayne Westerman and John Elias, the brains behind a multitouch interface company called Fingerworks, acquired by Apple in 2005, are listed as inventors on the patent application, as they have been for several other multitouch patents coming out of Apple.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates appeared on the NBC Nightly News Wednesday speaking with Tom Brokaw about the current economic crisis. Gates wasn’t concerned about the state of the U.S. economy in the long run. Historical data would support his longer-term view, but that won’t make the current disarray and uncertainty about the economy any less scary for investors riding the daily, nausea-inducing roller coaster.

As for continued technology innovation in light of the economic upheaval, Gates said, “In terms of inventing new medicines or improving software, or new ways of doing things, the level of investment will stay very high.” That said, conservation of capital will be in the minds of VCs and start-ups until the economy rights itself.

Earlier in the day, Gates told Bloomberg that problems with the U.S. economy would likely reduce government support for combating the world’s problems, such as poverty and disease. “There are the rich-world economies and the developing-world economies and, while the degree to which they are linked is not well understood, when one suffers it can’t be good for the other. Rich-world budgets may not have room for increased generosity.”

Brokaw observed that Gates seemed to be cool, or not terribly worried, about the U.S. financial crisis. “The U.S. economy in the long run is going to do very, very well. There are some interesting and meaningful decisions to be made in the next weeks,” Gates said. He didn’t get into the details about those decisions facing Congress, but legislators and the business community are likely seeking his advice. His good friend Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway is investing around $5 billion in Goldman Sachs, providing a confidence boost to the market.

The first integrated circuit built by Jack Kilby

Kilby Labs will be located on TI’s Dallas North Campus, where Kilby first designed the chip. The new facility will bring together university researchers and leading TI engineers to discover new ways to use the IC–”from creating new ways to make health care more mobile to harnessing new power sources to enabling more fuel-efficient vehicles,” TI said.

Robert Noyce, who co-founded Intel, also created an integrated circuit, about six months after Kilby. At that time, Noyce was at Fairchild Semiconductor (which he also co-founded). Noyce’s chip, made of silicon, overcame some practical problems that Kilby’s germanium-based device did not.

(Credit:
Texas Instruments)

The first IC was crude: a sliver of germanium with protruding wires glued to a glass slide (see image below). When Kilby applied electricity to the circuit, “an unending sine wave undulated across his oscilloscope screen. In that instant…he had successfully integrated all of the parts of an electronic circuit onto a single device made from the same semiconductor material,” according to TI’s Web site.

Kilby won the inventor’s “Triple Crown”: the Nobel Prize in physics; the National Medal of Science; and the National Medal of Technology. He held more than 60 patents including one for the portable electronic calculator, which TI invented in 1967. He died in 2005 at the age of 81 after a battle with cancer.

As a new TI employee in 1958, Kilby was forced to work during the traditional company summer vacation. During that time, he built the first integrated circuit, now the basic building block of everything from 3G cell phones to supercomputers.

Texas Instruments commemorated the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit with the opening Friday of Kilby Labs, honoring Jack Kilby, the Nobel-prize-winning inventor of the seminal electronic device.

Kilby was one of the co-inventors of the electronic calculator

TI has named Ajith Amerasekera as director of the labs. Amerasekera, who is a TI fellow, joined the company in 1991 and holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and physics.

(Credit:
Texas Instruments)

Jack Kilby

At TI’s headquarters, the original lab where Kilby worked and made his discovery of the first integrated circuit has been re-created on-site. TI has also made a donation toward Jack Kilby’s memorial statue in his hometown of Great Bend, Kan.

Individuals’ Matchmine “keys” are stored on Matchmine’s servers, not in a local file that requires an executable to access, as in the last, wacky version. This is good. It means that sites that want to participate in the Matchmine system simply have to strike a deal with the company to be able to offer up the cross-site recommender to their users. They don’t have to get the users themselves to install anything.

Because of the strategic change Matchmine needs to effect in its potential customers, it will be a difficult company to grow. But difficult is good–it means it won’t have dozens of me-too companies hustling for the same business.

We last covered Matchmine in September 2007, noting that the product, a preferences and recommendation engine, was on to something very interesting. They were just going about it the wrong way. I’m glad to report that company has seen the error of its ways and, while keeping true to its mission, now has a product that makes sense.

Here’s how it works–or at least how it should work once Troiano gets the business fully up to speed: You tell your media site what you like, just as you do right now, and then the super-duper Matchmine algorithm calculates the “distance” between your items and other items in its data model to find new things for you that you’ll like. Troiano says that even a small improvement in the preferences engine can have a dramatic impact on sales at a media site, and that Netflix, even with a prize offered for the solution, has not been able to improve its engine 10 percent in one year of trying. Matchmine does better, he says.

You can try Matchmine on the music site Fuzz and the film site FilmCrave.

Inside the Matchmine database: The key to getting you to rent more movies is knowing your specific tastes.

To recap: Matchmine will tell you what media you will like (it covers blogs, music, video, and movies) based on what you tell it you already like. It’s the same idea that you see every day in Netflix, except the Matchmine technology is more robust and accurate, according to CEO Mike Troiano. And, more importantly, the preferences data are portable.

It will be hard to get market-leading commerce sites (Amazon, Netflix, Last.fm, etc.) to adopt this product, since they no doubt see their users’ preferences as strategic assets. However, if Matchmine can actually improve their recommendation success metrics, it may become more strategic for them to adopt the technology than to shun it.

The company is also hoping that consumers will continue to demand personal data portability. People don’t want their preference data locked into commerce sites, Troiano maintains, even if the sites don’t want to let it go. This system might just satisfy both sides of the market: It would give users a way to take their likes and dislikes with them, while at the same time making them less inclined to do so, since the sites that use Matchmine would offer a better experience because of their deeper understanding of customers’ preferences.

The Garmin Nuvifone also features a 3.5-inch touch screen, a Web browser, and e-mail capabilities. It’s multimedia-friendly with MP3/ACC/MPEG4 support and a built-in camera/camcorder. It also has access to Google’s Panoramio picture sharing site, where can search through geo-located photos. The Nuvifone will be available some time in the third-quarter, but no specifics on dates or pricing. We’re still getting details on this smartphone and will report them to you as they come in but any initial thoughts?

Garmin Nuvifone

Garmin makes GPS devices. Garmin makes navigation software and accessories for cell phones and smartphones. Garmin makes cell phones…wait, what? Yep, you read right. Today, the GPS manufacturer took the wraps off its first smartphone at a press event in New York: the Garmin Nuvifhone. It’s a GSM/HSDPA mobile that runs on Garmin’s own operating system and focuses on, no surprise, navigation. The device will come preloaded with maps of North America (or Eastern or Western Europe for all our international readers) and points of interest. In addition, it offers turn-by-turn voice directions, Google Local Search integration, and Garmin’s “Where I am?” safety feature, which displays your coordinates, closest address and intersection, and nearby emergency services.

(Credit:
Gizmodo)

One man's prostitution scandal, apparently, is another man's marketing angle.

The campaign is also featuring Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. What, Canada doesn’t have any joke-worthy targets of its own?

Virgin Mobile Canada knows how frustrated people can get with the lack of personalized service these days. Faster than Eliot Spitzer could say, “Um, oops,” the company came out with a print ad that features the newly former New York governor, aka Client #9, musing as follows under a thought bubble: “I’m tired of being treated like a number…”

(Credit:
Virgin Mobile Canada)

“At Virgin Mobile,” the ad goes on to say, “you’re more than just a number. When you call us we’ll treat you like a person, not a client. Whether you’re #9 or #900, you’ll get hooked up with somebody who’ll finally treat you just how you want to be treated.”

According to Nathan Rosenberg, chief marketing officer at Virgin Mobile, the ad will run in two Toronto daily newspapers this week as part of the company’s “You call the shots” campaign. “We weren’t planning on an ad featuring Governor Spitzer, but he caught our attention this week,” said Rosenberg.

Making it pay
One of the last pieces to fall into place was the advertising. Initially, NBC and Microsoft were hoping to be able to insert full video ads into the live streams, but doing so is tough work.

At this point, it’s come down to a triage of the few remaining known bugs. Each day, the bar is being raised in terms of what is a big enough deal to warrant such a late change. Suess, meanwhile, sent his wife and kids to visit family in New York so he could work 18-hour days.

There, NBC actually adds a one-minute delay, allowing its cadre of live bloggers in Stamford, Conn., and elsewhere to write their text and have the video and commentary synchronized. Once ready, it goes from NBC to Limelight Networks, a content delivery network, which has 1,000 servers just for the live events sending the content to various Internet service providers, who then shuttle the content directly to their customers. (See chart below)

By early May, NBC made the basic player available on the Internet, using a variety of prerecorded Olympic video, and by early June the enhanced Silverlight player was made public as well. The Olympic Trials, at the end of June, offered the companies and the public a chance for a test drive.

(Credit:
Susan Dove/CNET News)

Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.

As of mid-April, they were still struggling with what to do and began considering that perhaps they would have to just rely on companion advertising around the video stream. Then they came up with an idea. Rather than insert full videos into the live streams, what if they stuck a display ad into the video, particularly during dead times in the action.

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET News)

“Can we actually pull this off?” Senior Technical Evangelist Jason Suess recalled thinking. “Is the user’s machine going to be able to maintain four connections at one time?”

Even within Microsoft’s team, though, there was some apprehension of whether it was doable.

Mike Gordon, chief strategy officer, Limelight Networks

The key, Suess said in an interview at Microsoft headquarters last week, is using an approach known as adaptive streaming in which the player has the ability to customize the bit rate of the video stream based on a computer’s connection and processing power.

Initially, they expected to use Adobe’s Flash, given that is the standard for video delivered over the Internet these days. But, as they began to hash things out with Microsoft during a series of all-day meetings at NBC’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza headquarters, Microsoft was able to show NBC some ways it could do more using its homegrown Silverlight technology.

Suess said he hopes things will be enough under control that he can actually watch some of the games, particularly sailing, of which he is a big fan. “I sure hope so,” he said. “When I got involved in this project, that was one of the reasons.”

“NBC has always taken risks and is always trying to do more than it has in the past,” said Perkins Miller, the NBC senior vice president in charge of the Internet push. “It does keep me up at night when I think about streaming 2,200 hours (of live coverage).”

Jason Suess, senior technical evangelist, Microsoft

Making it play
Limelight Chief Strategy Officer Mike Gordon said his company is prepared for this to be the biggest live event the Internet has ever seen. “I would not be surprised at all to get 1 million viewers,” he said. “We’re certainly prepared for whatever the audience turns out to be.”

“If I am not online and pushing things along, then I am introducing delay,” Suess said.

That said, there is clearly an element of risk in all this, considering NBC’s history of live Olympic streaming has been limited to broadcasting a single game, the gold medal ice hockey match in Torino, Italy, two years ago.

That, approach, which is ultimately what’s being done, solved several issues. It was less bandwidth-intensive than video ads, but still got the advertiser directly in front of the viewer, all without interrupting any of the coverage. The amount of advertising will vary, Suess said; “It depends what is happening in the sports. We just wait for a dead space.”

In an interview last week, Suess said he had been at work until 1 a.m. the night before and gets in every morning by 8 a.m., so he can chat with the folks in Beijing before they sign off for the night.

(Credit:
NBC)

“That was the first time the player came to life,” Suess said. “Obviously the player was extremely crude.”

NBC had a pretty good idea what they wanted to do and had built some mock-ups of the player prior to deciding to partner with Microsoft.

“You don’t have any way to pause a live stream,” Suess said. “Trying to deliver a video ad on top of that, you hit the limits of a user’s bandwidth.”

By Valentine’s Day, they were ready for a test. It was pretty important that the test work out, given that NBC was getting ready to crate up the gear to ship it off to Beijing.

Instead of the usual crop of comedians, NBC will have dozens of people watching every hour of the games, looking for highlights that it can chop up and make available on-demand. It’s just one piece of an elaborate arrangement that shuttles the events in Beijing back to the U.S.

An admitted type-A personality, Suess is a stickler for organization–the kind of guy whose desk is always clean. (His wife would probably use the word “compulsive,” Suess said.)

Silverlight, Microsoft said, would be key to enabling NBC’s vision of a “control room” in which a viewer could watch multiple live streams at once.

The massive effort has come together in a remarkably short amount of time. Microsoft’s deal to power NBCOlympics.com dates back only to January.

Perkins Miller, senior vice president, NBC Universal

From each of the dozens of Olympic venues, a high-definition video feed is delivered over fiber-optic cables to the International Broadcast Center that has been set up in Beijing. A bunch of encoders and Windows Media servers get the video into an Internet-ready format. From there, it travels via satellite to NBC’s headquarters in New York.

(Credit:
Limelight Networks)

Stage 8H is best known as the place where Saturday Night Live is filmed. This week, though, it’s been turned into an ad-hoc data center as part of NBC’s efforts to stream thousands of hours of live Olympic coverage over the Internet.

It’s probably healthy for the industry to be shaken up this dramatically every now and again and for executives and programmers to be faced with the possibility that their sacred cows could be sacrificed. But how realistic are all the ideas? Here’s a closer look.

“It’s much more likely that the Yahoo-Google alliance would raise very serious antitrust questions” than the Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo would, Lande said. If regulators agree that there is such thing as a market for online search ads, “then Yahoo Google together would have…alarming market share. Whereas Microsoft and Yahoo together–their market share isn’t nearly as much so it isn’t nearly as much of a concern for antitrust regulators.”

Yahoo is a massive Internet site, but it’s important to bear in mind that a Google outsourcing deal need not mean Yahoo is scrapping its entire ad infrastructure, either its Panama system for delivering search ads or its AMP system for display ads. There’s a broad spectrum of possibilities between the current limited search ad test and going whole hog.

Clearly, all the new moves show how much room there is for maneuvering as all the companies try to get the upper hand. Just be sure to bear in mind that a lot of the maneuvers are only feints.

First, view the machinations within context: Microsoft wants to acquire Yahoo and doesn’t want to increase its price. Yahoo wants to fend off Microsoft unless it can settle on a price that “fully values” the company. And both sides want to curry favor with the large shareholders who hold much of Yahoo’s fate in their hands.

In 24 hours, we’ve gone from plain old Microhoo to Yahoogle and Microspace. What’s next–Yahoobay?

Microsoft also was quick to point out antitrust implications of Yahoo relying on Google for delivering ads, and that’s indeed likely to get antitrust regulators’ attention, said Robert Lande, professor and antitrust expert at the University of Baltimore School of Law.

Through the flurry of activity, Google’s competitive threat has remained constant. If anything, it looks like a stronger, more stable option than before.

“A joint bid could make sense if Microsoft is looking for a financing partner, which we do not believe it needs,” the UBS analysts said. “A tie-up (with Microsoft) could make sense, but we think it would increase the integration risk and may not outweigh the decrease in financial risk.”

A survey of some Wall Street analysts reveals a general belief that the Google ad partnership is a serious business possibility but more skepticism about the News Corp. and Time Warner deals.

“We view Google as a winner,” said Stanford Group analysts Clayton Moran and Frederick Moran in a report. They believe the new options have the potential to slow Microsoft’s acquisition attempt, complicate already formidable integration challenges by Google rivals, and increase Google’s share of the search market if Yahoo relies on it.

Clearly, Microsoft’s attempt to acquire Yahoo has prompted some serious outside-the-box thinking. But now is a good time to think carefully about what’s a thought experiment with tactical value and what’s a real business possibility.

(Credit:
Susan Dove/CNET News.com)

There would be difficulties with a Google ad deal. Even if it did keep Microsoft at bay, Yahoo would have to share ad revenue with its biggest rival. And Yahoo could have a hard time reversing its current in-house strategy.

On the other hand, the smaller Yahoo’s reliance on Google is, the more Yahoo must invest in its own systems, the less it would benefit from any higher per-search revenue, and the less bold it would appear to shareholders wondering whether Yahoo might be better off as part of Microsoft.

News Corp and AOL deals?
What about Microsoft and News Corp.? As with AOL, it likely doesn’t want to be left on the fringes as Internet operations consolidate. But Heather Bellini and analyst colleagues at UBS Securities expressed skepticism in a report.

Later Wednesday came two unconfirmed reports: Yahoo is considering absorbing AOL in exchange for a big investment from AOL parent Time Warner, and Microsoft might get some help from News Corp. to acquire Yahoo, a move that could provide acquisition funding and add News Corp.’s MySpace into the mix.

First, to recap: Everybody knows that Microsoft wants to acquire Yahoo and has threatened a proxy fight and lower price if Yahoo doesn’t sign up within three weeks. Another definite move is a limited Yahoo trial of search advertisements from Google, Yahoo’s largest rival and Microsoft’s, too, when it comes to online aspirations.

The UBS analysts concurred. “We continue to believe reaching a mutual agreement with Microsoft would be the best way for Yahoo to potentially extract a higher Microsoft bid,” they said, expecting Microsoft’s offer to arrive between $32 and $35 per share.

The Google ad option
So how about Yahoo using Google for ads? “We believe that a full search outsource decision could generate well over $1 billion in incremental cash flow to Yahoo,” said Citigroup analysts Mark Mahaney, James Samford, and Brent Thill in a report Wednesday. That’s because Google makes more money off its search ads than Yahoo does–the Citigroup analysts estimated 9 cents per search for Google and 4 cents per search for Yahoo in a February report–and even sharing a significant amount of the revenue with Google, Yahoo could still come out ahead.

“We continue to believe a Microsoft-Yahoo deal is the most likely outcome and continue to believe that it will happen at a higher price than the initial $31 bid,” they said.

That deal, along with the possibility of an AOL deal that involves Yahoo repurchasing stock at more than $31, both could have the same result, though, the Citigroup analysts said: forcing Microsoft to raise its bid.

Merely testing the service can bring some value to Yahoo. “Assuming Yahoo comes back with positive data…, we believe the company will be in a more favorable position than it was before,” said American Technology Research analyst Rob Sanderson. “Rather than the lower bid that Microsoft threatened over the weekend, Microsoft could end up raising the offer price by a nominal amount.”

Confused by all the companies trying buy or partner with Yahoo? Don't worry. Click to see our handy guide.

At this sensitive time of move and countermove, news of alternative business deals can have tactical value, even if the deal itself never comes to pass. Even if none of the new possibilities ever amount to anything, they all send messages to shareholders that the companies are marshaling resources, exploring options, countering strategic threats, and generally paying close attention to the stock price.

Once of Google’s 10th birthday gifts to the world is its re-release of a 2001 version of the search index. (The FAQ says there are “various technical reasons” for not displaying results back to Google birth year of 1998.) On it you can see what the service knew about any topic back then. Like you. Go ahead.

Pages that are not still live (which is a depressingly large proportion of them) may be served by the Internet Archive, but many old pages are offline for good. Google also notes that this index is not actually a perfect reproduction of the real 2001 index; some index entries have been removed for various reasons over time.

See also: Google launches 10th anniversary site, help-the-world project.

I found the index entertaining, but the lack of historical access to the early Web is distressing. And I fear that even with the Internet Archive up and running, we’ll be in the same spot 10 years from now, due to a general lack of archiving procedures among site publishers, the predictable failures of businesses that hold online data (see Stallman: Cloud computing is ‘stupidity’), and the inability of archive engines to pick up the content that’s not on the open Web.

You know you want to.