In my previous post I discussed a feature I would like to be implemented by slide-sharing services. I am not going to repeat here all the arguments why slide sharing is useful for scientists. I just want to discuss the present quality of the engines used by these services. I consider here SlideShare, authorSTREAM, SlideBoom and Google Docs from the point of view of scientists. Two years ago I pointed out to you that SlideBoom was by far the best. After two years much could have been changed in a world where nowadays everything on the Internet is about sharing.

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Ten years years ago the major computer company Sun  Microsystems advertised in all media with the slogan: “The network is the computer”. And I must admit they knew where they were talking about. They saw the clouds coming. Sun has been taken over by Oracle in 2009.

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Summary
This post is the ultimate, mobile-site-friendly, migration guide from Outlook to Thunderbird. If you want the short version, go immediately to the section To wrap it all up. The author describes in detail the design flaws in Microsoft’s Outlook and how these shortcomings are avoided in Thunderbird. If you need a Windows program to handle a large number of email messages coming from various accounts the open source and free Thunderbird should be your choice. With this guide Outlook will be history.

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Unique author identification is a longstanding issue in scientific publishing. Currently there are a number of systems under development that promise a variety of functionalities. I am not going to give here an extensive overview of this wide range of systems, an up to date article can be found here. While a universally recognized standard such as the ISO standard International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) system will undoubtedly be useful as a way to categorize any type of authors, artists and scientists, the practical use of an author identifier will be strongly related to the availability of linked information such as lists of publications.

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