Category: NewsFeed

t was the last part of the advertising sector to fall and may be the first to recover, but online advertising is now in a recession. With the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL) having reported March quarter financials, we can get a pretty good sense of how the sector did as a whole. If you add up the online advertising revenues of these four online advertising bellwethers, the total online advertising revenues for the quarter came to $7.9 billion, a 2 percent decline from a year ago and a 7 percent decline from the fourth quarter.

The Online Ad Recession Is Officially Here: First Quarterly Decline In Revenues

In case anyone was wondering whether or not advertising was on some sort of never ending growth cycle.  Money is disappearing from the ad market, it isn’t moving from newspapers and TV to websites.  And just as newspapers and TV are getting squashed, so will websites that rely strictly on advertising for revenue.

Oracle to Buy Sun – MarketWatch

There are substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris. Java is one of the computer industry’s best-known brands and most widely deployed technologies, and it is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired. Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s fastest growing business, is built on top of Sun’s Java language and software. Oracle can now ensure continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community.
The Sun Solaris operating system is the leading platform for the Oracle database, Oracle’s largest business, and has been for a long time. With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle can optimize the Oracle database for some of the unique, high-end features of Solaris. Oracle is as committed as ever to Linux and other open platforms and will continue to support and enhance our strong industry partnerships. “Oracle and Sun have been industry pioneers and close partners for more than 20 years,” said Sun Chairman Scott McNealy. “This combination is a natural evolution of our relationship and will be an industry-defining event.”

In most ways this combination makes a lot more sense than the IBM Sun deal that was floated at earlier this year. Oracle will now be in the position to have total control over it’s stack.  I think IBM should be very concerned about this.

Sometimes you can identify trends in technology simply by looking around. And if it seems like every freshman on your campus owns a laptop and has a Facebook account, you might not be hallucinating—at least not at Amherst College, where 432 out of 438 freshmen had joined the “Amherst College Class of 2012” Facebook group by the end of August.

Wired Campus: Amherst Administrator’s ‘IT Index’ Highlights Trends in Student Technology Use – Chronicle.com

So, that means the Class of 2015 for law schools.  Just what will they be expecting when they hit legal academia in the fall of 2012?  And what will we give them?  More Socratic method?  No laptops in the classroom?  Throttled wireless?  100 pounds of printed casebooks?  Handouts from the copy center?  I don’t think so.  We need to be working on this now.  How do we bring technology into legal education in a way that educates and trains lawyers and legal thinkers and makes the best use of the best traditions and practices legal educators have developed over the past 120 years?  This is the question that should be the central focus of law schools as they struggle with the changes  and challenges being presented by new generations of students  and technologies.

References to information at Wikipedia have shown up in various inappropriate places, from homework assignments to college term papers. But there’s one place that it seems everyone can agree that it doesn’t belong: the US court system. The US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, ruling in an immigration case, has agreed with the Board of Immigration Appeals in finding that a reliance on information in Wikipedia is insufficient grounds for a ruling. Nevertheless, it sent the case back to the Board, requesting that it clarify its decision.

Appeals court smacks down judge for relying on Wikipedia

Well, this is certain to warm the hearts of law librarians and teachers of legal research everywhere.  Of course, somewhere along the line someone forgot to let some law student how to distinguish a reliable, authoritative source from one not so reliable or authoritative.  Sure, Wikipedia is great for finding the rules to Arena League Football, or getting up to speed on the Evil Dead movies, but not so much for stuff that really matters like answering legal questions.  Lawyers have a multitude of reliable and authoritative resources at their disposal, both free and paid, so it is pretty much inexcusable to cite Wikipedia in a legal document.

Tags: wikipedia, law