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In this Issue |
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From the editor: The truth about white papers |
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Featured topic from SearchSecurity: Virus update: Bugbear worm
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Reader Feedback: Making zero add up |
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From the editor: The truth about white papers |
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by Margaret Rouse, Associate Editor
This week we're going to start off with a little quiz.
Which of the following statements about IT white papers is true?
a) White papers are unbiased documents that contain factual information about a technical topic.
b) White papers are marketing tools aimed at IT decision-makers who have purchasing power.
c) White papers are a great way for an ordinary person to get free information about a specific IT topic.
If you said that all of the above statements are true, you're right. You're also smarter than I am.
I used to think that white papers were either boring technical papers whose subject matter would probably be over my head -- or else they were glorified vendor advertisements, kind of PDF infomercials for the Web. I probably would have picked answer choices "a" and "b" and left off "c" on my own quiz, and I would have been wrong.
What made me change my mind? Our sister sites. They've gathered the best white papers out there on the Web, summarized them, and organized them into categories. By reading through quite a few of the papers they've gathered, I've learned that a good white paper is written to educate and inform readers of all skill levels. I've also learned that a good vendor white paper has a balance between technical content and any marketing message. You can take advantage of the research that's gone into the technical content, even if you have no intention of buying anything.
A good white paper is a gold mine of information.
To share our new wealth, we've put together a Fast Guide to all the white papers in the TechTarget database. Just reading through the titles can give you a good clue about what topics are hot in a specific area of IT!
Learn More:
white paper
http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid26_gci213361,00.html
Fast Guide to white papers
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci854295,00.html
This week we'd like to know: According to eMarketer.com, white papers are the second-most consulted source of information that corporate decision makers use. What are the top three sources of information you use to research IT topics?
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Featured Site: SearchSecurity.com |
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FEATURED TOPIC: Virus update: Bugbear worm
Bugbear unseated Klez as the most virulent worm this week. Do you know how to handle this nasty worm? SearchSecurity.com can help. They've got all the articles and resources you'll need to stay on top of Bugbear.
Learn more
Managing Viruses in the Enterprise
Will your network withstand the next major virus assault that will be hurled against it? To help you answer with a solid "YES", the editors at SearchSecurity.com have created an all-new problem-solving guide, "Managing Viruses in the Enterprise". This one-volume guide will provide you with immediate access to dozens of proven, powerful anti-virus strategies, along with surefire tips, currently in use today by Fortune 500 enterprise security professionals.
Preview pages from the guide
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Reader Feedback: Making zero add up |
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by Lowell Thing, Editor
Last week, we left you with several questions and here are the answers:
What is zero divided by zero? The answer is that you can’t really divide by zero. Although early mathematicians tried to wrestle some sort of result out of this operation, later ones have decided that this problem just won’t bear any fruit. This is viewed as another case where language allows us to ask a question that really doesn’t make sense to ask.
What is zero to the zeroeth exponent (that is, zero to the zeroeth power)? According to our research, the surprising answer is, for some apparently useful reasons, 1 (one). Yes, 1. But in other contexts, the answer can be either “indeterminate” (not capable of being calculated) or “undefined/nonexistent.” To elaborate on our answer would require writing a paper we’re not capable of writing so in our new definition of “zero,” we link you to the paper that summarizes the answer to this question.
How would we refer to digital bits in a computer if zero hadn’t been discovered and given a symbol (that is, what would we call “0s and 1s” if we didn’t know about “0s”)? The answer is that since those little bits in our computer are really just differentiated electrical charges, we could just call them “positives and negatives” or “yeses and nos” or even (since this is just a convention) “3s and 4s” and make up some interesting story about why we chose to call them “3s and 4s.”
Nareej Sharma noted that we failed to identify the two people, both from India, often credited with really inventing the zero as we know it today. Around 500 A.D., the mathematician Aryabhata devised a position system that contained a word, “kha,” for the idea of a placeholder in his decimal number system. By 876, the kha had become the symbol “0” (based on a known tablet inscription). Meanwhile, somewhat after Aryabhata, another Indian, Brahmagupta, developed the concept of the zero as an actual independent number, not just a place-holder, and wrote rules for adding and subtracting zero from other numbers. The Indian writings were passed on to al-Khwarizmi (see our definition of “algorithm”) and thence to Leonardo Fibonacci and others who continued to develop the concept and the number. (Thank you, Nareej, and we include links to your sources in our definition of “zero.”)
And aren’t we being a little careless interchanging “nothing” and “zero”? Harvey Wachtel writes: “I wish you wouldn't add to a common confusion by referring to zero as "nothing", as you did in the opening sentence of your interesting article. I've had some frustrating experiences trying to convince non-mathematicians of the difference between these two concepts. There are important mathematical theorems that prove, say, that some esoterically-defined function exists at some point and has a value of 0 rather than being undefined at that point and having no value at all. A case I remember clearly occurred back in the '60's, when the New York Mets had yet to finish a season in anything but last place. One year their first several games were postponed because of rain, yet there they were in the New York Times, listed in their usual place at the bottom of the standings with their record showing 0 wins, 0 losses, percentage .000. I wrote to the sports editor in moderate dudgeon that the poor Muttsies were having a hard enough time without this undeserved ill treatment: since division by zero is undefined, they had no playing percentage, and the column should have been left blank or filled with a dash.”
Finally, Herzl Regev notes that before the zero was a circle, it was a dot in Indian and other notation systems. We asked Herzl for permission to quote and he agreed and added an even better quote from the Talmud: “…he who brings things in the name of their sayer (that is, quotes and credits the author correctly) is like one who is bringing salvation to the world.”
Our new definition of zero is at…
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci856016,00.html
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