ReadWriteWeb

In 2008, a UK-based Adobe Acrobat engineer remarked, "I believe in striving to minimize the use of paper, but I do believe that we will probably never reach a position where paper is eliminated from our workplaces." This morning, his predictions were clearly confirmed by a study published by the information professionals organization AIIM.

The study shows that while the exchange of PDF files as e-mail attachments has reduced the volume of paperwork traded between IT professionals, that reduction is not only minimal, but quite possibly made up for. Over three-quarters of IT professionals surveyed say one of the first things they do with a PDF-based invoice... is print it out.

Adobe has launched an application for iOS that lets you create PDF files from an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. CreatePDF is not the first app to offer this functionality, but it is Adobe's first official crack at enabling PDF creation on iOS devices.

The app lets you turn common document files like Microsoft Office, Open Office, Adobe Illustrator or InDesign and a variety of images into Adobe's propriety PDF format. The company promises document quality comparable to that produced by Acrobat for dekstops.

One of the most insidious ways that malware scammers infect users' computers is through fake anti-virus programs. For years Internet denizens have seen pop-ups in their browsers claiming that "your computer is infected, click here to get rid of this virus." If users clicked, they would download a virus that the scammers would offer to eradicate, for a fee. This was a favorite practice of "Spam King" Sanford Wallace in the early 2000s. In recent months, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has raided the "scareware" spammers and as such, fake anti-virus malware on the Web has decreased by 60% in the last several months.

You may recognize the programs. They go by names like "Vista Security 2012," "XP Antispyware 2012" and "Mac Defender." Yet, according to Enigma Software, these scareware programs are on the decline. In June, the FBI raided malicious programmers 12 countries including the U.S. and arrested ChronoPay's CEO Pavel Vrublevsky, whose Russian payments company was believed to be behind many of the applications.

That streaming videos makes up a huge percentage of the Internet's traffic is by now well-known. Netflix alone makes up nearly 30% of all downstream traffic and we're now accustomed to hearing about the extraordinary amount of bandwidth eaten up by videos streaming during major news events.

For example, during President Obama's inauguration, content delivery network Akamai delivered 7 million simultaneous streams of video, with traffic surpassing two terabytes per second (Tbps), which broke records. The next year, Akamai's network traffic peaked at about 3.45 Tbps.

The rate at which data, or content, is being produced for the Web and being generated for businesses has outpaced the rate at which conventional databases are evolving to better manage it all. It's a fact of life that we perceive on a gradual basis every day, but that we haven't yet acknowledged to be as significant or dangerous a trend as it is: Data is getting slower. Networks are getting bigger as the cloud is getting broader, and data that was already difficult to manage is becoming impossible. Content management systems today continue to be based on the types of structured database systems about one or two steps more evolved than dBASE. We've known they would be insufficient for the task, but we've put off the problem of composing a new architecture.

It's already too late for major IT companies to start that new architecture from square one; if a company has any hope of addressing this colossal, underappreciated problem, it will need to acquire the architectural project in progress. This is what Hewlett-Packard announced yesterday that it intends to do: acquire a software firm whose core product aims to supplant everything we know about databases, both the SQL kind and the Google kind. In its place would come a clustered approach whose goal is no less than to be the central repository for meaning in the world.

And in exchange for this, HP is willing to let go of the promise of Palm.

Linux is turning 20 years old this year, and we wondered how that makes you feel?

You answered, and we culled your responses from Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook, and used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

Big ideas aren't prevalent anymore, posited academic and author Neal Gabler in a New York Times op-ed. "We are living in an increasingly post-idea world," he wrote, "a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can't instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding."

While this could be seen as just another variation of the "Internet makes you dumb" argument, a favorite of academics and contrarian technology writers, Gabler's article touched a nerve for me. As I look around at my own industry, tech news, there is certainly no shortage of content. But ideas... those we're bereft of. Tech media today is driven by deals and speculation. There are plenty of ideas-driven people, too, but you generally won't find them at the top of Techmeme anymore.

Mozilla is working on technology that will allow PDF documents to be rendered within the browser, rather than utilizing a browser plug-in or an external app to open them. On his blog, Mozilla researcher Andreas Gal has described the project to build a PDF reader in HTML5 and JavaScript.

Typically, PDFs are rendered in a browser with a plugin - either with Adobe's own PDF reader or with another provider's renderer. These plugins often cannot take full advantage of PDF features. Furthermore, as Gal points out, there is quite a large trusted code base, something that's forced the Google Chrome browser to have sandbox the PDF renderer in order to avoid code injection attacks. An HTML5 version would be make this more secure, as would the open source nature of the project.

Joliprint is a Web service that lets users convert pages into PDFs with a simple bookmarklet. It also has a RESTful API that third party developers can use to convert HTML into PDF. No API key is required, and it can be used in both commercial and non-commercial projects.

Acknowledging a "major shift" in the way the working world operates, Adobe announced today the release of two cloud-based tools designed to help people collaborate and manage files across multiple devices.

Adobe SendNow is a service that allows coworkers to share large files with each other and keep track of them via a centralized dashboard.