Last week's Ms Internet pageant hosted by Webgrrls bore little resemblance to a beauty contest, where scantily clad, beautiful women flashing million-dollar smiles strut the catwalk. Suggesting that a swimsuit parade be included probably would not have gone over very well. In fact, the mostly male judges were sequestered in a corner and told to judge the women strictly on their resumes and not their curves. So imagine Backspace's surprise at some of the things said that night by Ms Internet 1998. 'You know, I don't have tits and I don't have a butt, but I have brains,' last year's winner Christine Choy said as she embraced this year's elated winner, Tracy Yue. 'But Ms Internet 1999, she has tits and a butt - sexy and brainy!' she said. 'Putting her other arm around Ms Interactive's stand-in, Sylvia Douvlakeris, Ms Choy then declared, 'These women are single and also interactive!' It seems on-line retail shop adMart is as resourceful as its proprietor, Jimmy Lai. If you go to the shop's Web site or check out the adMart advertisements, you will notice that besides IBM and Legend computers, the semi-cybershop is also selling Compaq PCs and Taiwanese computer-maker Mitac's systems. A quick check with Compaq revealed that adMart is not an authorised Compaq reseller. According to a source, adMart is buying the Compaq PCs from local electronics retailer Fortress and then selling them because it wants to increase its range of PC offerings. The source said: 'Compaq said they don't want to cheapen its image by being associated with adMart. That's why I know adMart isn't an official reseller.' Backspace is going to get preachy about that bit of technology even MIS managers cannot get excited about - storage. According to a report, genealogists have named the 1921 fire that wiped out 98 per cent of the 1890 United States federal census, a priceless snapshot of the US population at the end of the 19th century, the country's worst tragedy. All that recorded history disappeared in the fire. That is why a lot of the data is archived on more durable CD-Roms these days. But even CD-Roms do not offer enough protection. Vast amounts of data being stored today - financial records, photographs, video and e-mail - are facing a different type of threat: changes in the hardware and software used to read it. Technology changes so rapidly that experts are worried that there will not be a drive available to read the archived data 50 years after it is stored. The bottom line is that data must be nomadic - it has to move as soon as storage technology changes.
