Forum Overview :: Tansin A. Darcos's Alter Ego

Interim report on yesterday's FOSE 2013 by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 05/15/2013, 7:15am PDT As I said, I got a free ticket to go to FOSE 2013 so I said I would go. It's on from Tuesday through Thursday (I thought it was yesterday and today, but it runs for three days). Contrary to previous practice, I am going back! I got about 1/2 way through the exhibit before I ran out of time at the 4PM closing. The event is held in exhibit area B in the basement of the center (the same place it's been held before). This space is huge, I'd estimate it to be the equivalent space of about two city blocks. You the convention center reach from the Mt. Vernon Square Metro Station which is directly below the convention center by taking the dedicated elevators to the convention center (as opposed to the regular elevators, so you don't even have to cross the street, the elevator to the metro runs into the top floor of the metro). This leads to the outside of the convention center, behind the escalators to the Metro, and 30 feet in front of the Metro entrance to the center. The regular doors there have a short staircase, about 4 or 5 steps, the handicapped door has a activation bollard (a wooden post with a handicapped door open button) that opens the door, to the left is the stairs down, to the right is the elevator down about 8' to the 1st floor of the center. Go forward about 50 feet and they have the registration booths. The e-mail they send you with your admission ticket has your reservation number and a bar code; you print it out and bring it with you. They have optical scanners similar to the wand type that stores have for stuff that can't be read by their regular flat scanner. When it sees the bar code on your print out, it automatically prints your admission badge as well as any tickets you have either for free or paid seminars. Takes about 30 seconds to issue your badge and seminar tickets. They issue you a badge holder, it's a plastic sleeve with a lanyard sponsored by one of the companies there (in 2010 it was a black lanyard, this year it's white) and has two clips so you could clip it on your shirt, or just slip your head through the lanyard and wear it; that's what I did. This was much faster and much more efficient than the problems they had in 2010 when they used self-guided admission and it didn't always work. So I asked the guy where the event was, and he pointed and said to go that way and take the escalators down to the lower level and exhibit hall "B". I asked him to look at me and say that again. At that point he realized he hadn't been thinking about the fact that a guy in a wheelchair - who isn't batshit insane, that is - does not use an escallator! The elevator is in the other direction. Then, when you get to the lower level, you go around the corner past the guard who checks that you have an admission badge, where there is a balcony overlooking the entire exhibit hall and another pair of escalators to the left coming up and going down next to the elevator down to the exhibit hall. Take that, and you're in front, where aisles and aisles of amazing crap they sell are being shown. I was pleasantly surprised by the breadth and depth of things available for managing data and storage. (Storage is where you put the data; data is the information collected or generated.) There were many things I saw, including: * A touch-screen large HDTV. A company takes the bezel (frame around the outside) off a high-definition TV/monitor, like the one I saw which I think was like a 45", place a transparent film over it which is connected to a USB port, put the bezel back on and you have a 45" touch screen over a standard 45" flat-screen monitor or TV set and thus you can turn a website into a touch-screen kiosk if you wanted to. Price, $2500. * A lot of companies selling secure printers, now, you can do a print job to a particular printer, and it only releases your job when you show up and insert your card in the reader. Has its own attached computer that is the spooler system, and talks back and forth with that machine. You just print to it like any other networked printer. I think some of them even support encrypted transmissions. * I remembered one I was thinking about, and then, when I went to write it here, I couldn't remember what is was. I hate that. Was really interesting. Oh. now I remember. A company that specializes in compliance technology had a client who was heavily regulated, like by the FDA, and has to store basically everything, including that they must retain all telephone messages; you can't simply erase voice mails, they must be retained, all of them, to check for compliance, except that the regulations do not require storage of messages of 15 seconds or less. So, they recommended the company reconfigure all voice systems, message systems and all telephone equipment so that you cannot leave a message longer than 15 seconds with them. So they did. At first, people groused and bitched, but after a while, they got used to it, and they got a benefit: when you can only leave a 15-second message, you get to the point right away! So now, someone leaves a message, name, phone number and very brief message. The company eventually has a compliance visit from the FDA, and the inspector says, "That's impossible, you can't have absolutely no stored voice messages!" The company's response. "Nope, not a one. Our systems will not allow any message to run longer than 15 seconds under any circumstances. Doesn't matter why, they cannot do it. Here's the regulation, it says we don't have to retain voice messages of 15 seconds or less." And they were exactly in compliance without the headaches of unnecessary record retention. * Microfilm and microfiche scanners, you can now take those old newspaper film rolls, scan them and load them into a computer for OCR or image storage at 300 DPI. I was watching the thing scanning pages faster than one page a second. Imagine being able to scan standard newspapers faster than one page a second, it shocked me. I saw it was fast, basically the reel was moving through the machine at about an inch a second as the images showed up on the screen; I originally thought it was a page a second, but he told me it was faster than that, it can scan a whole roll of microfilm - which, if you've never had to use a microfilm of older newspapers for research, is hundreds of pages - in about 5 minutes. I believe he said their machine is about 150 or 200 pages a minute. I thought of places with huge newspaper archives on film (and other places with huge microfiche collections) who can move stuff to electronic storage. I immediately thought of the Library of Congress, and he mentioned that they have one of their systems. They also have a faster machine that can do about 1,000 pages a minute. He mentioned how one customer that stores newspaper images simply microfilms them first, then scans the microfilm image at 400 dpi for really good OCR because it was easier than trying to scan newspaper pages. I got it right away; microfilming newspapers is a mature technology and easy to do, people have been microfilming newspapers since the 1960s if not earlier just because of the storage savings and reduced fire risk over keeping tens or hundreds of thousands of pages of newsprint stacked up in shelves depending on how many issues of a newspaper and how many newspapers you collect. I mentioned how you could archive a hundred years of newspapers for a 7-day-a-week local paper in a set of microfilm filing cabinets about the size of the booth his company was using. Then he pointed out that you could put the scans of 500 rolls of microfilm on two 4TB hard drives which uses about 1 cubic foot of space! As I said, I ran out of time and probably only saw about 1/2 of the place. As I expected, food there is expensive; the snack bar charges $3.50 for a bottle of soda, $10 for a burger. When the place closed, I went across the street to a Subway (Restaurant, not the Metro!) and bought a 12" crab sub, bag of chips and large fountain soda for $9.20 including tax. I did, however, indulge in something special; at a booth on the other side of the convention floor the woman was selling fruit smoothies; I love strawberry but didn't care for the strawberry-banana so she said she could make a special of strawberry only. So I decided to do so; she asked which size I wanted. Since the small was $7 and the large was $8, I decided if I'm going to pay that much I might as well buy the $8 one; my only extravagance. And as I saw, there were no credit card badges, so as I was getting out a $10, I asked her if she got people who asked if she took credit cards, she said, "Yeah, for a $3.50 soda." I later realized I didn't tell her about Dwolla, the new payment system that allows free credit card processing for transactions of $10 or less and 25c for transactions of $10.01 and higher. Anyway, as I said, since I only got to see ½ of the exhibit, I'm going back again. There's at least one I saw in the distance, one company's customizable van, the one was decked out like the kind a swat team would order, but it was like 3 aisles over. I think I saw one at FOSE 2011 so I want to see how things have changed in two years and what I remember. Hey, the place opened at 10, it's ¼ past 10, time for me cut this short, go catch the bus and go!

Interim report on yesterday's FOSE 2013 by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 05/15/2013, 7:15am PDT