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Underway in Ireland
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31 July 2002 |
CNET -- Invoking both the controversial 1998 DMCA and computer crime laws, HP has threatened to sue a team of researchers who publicized a vulnerability in the company's Tru64 Unix operating system, says Declan McCullagh.
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30 July 2002 |
NY Times -- Companies can use the Internet to monitor many or all of their key performance indicators daily, or even minute-by-minute. This roseate micropulse occurs with digital dashboards.
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The Observer. The Observer, via Guardian UK: "According to the most recent study of media use ... the internet is now the third source for news, views and entertainment - after TV and radio, beating newspapers and magazines into fourth and fifth place. The most surprising finding of the study was that the sea-change in media habits is not confined to the young or the affluent, or even to men. It applies across all demographic groups." [JD's New Media Musings]
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Too easy to collaborate ?. Michael Helfrich : There is such a chasm between IT's view of collaboration, and the people they serve, and their view of collaboration. Witness an interaction I had a few weeks ago with some folks who suggested that software vendors (and my company specifically) was making it too easy to work with others. [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]
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29 July 2002 |
DUBLIN, Ireland -- While Irish legislators are trying to remove anything like hands-free telephone kits from cars, voice recognition systems are continuing to arrive in cars. Some of these systems are smart enough to show you the way when you're lost.
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OPEN SECRETS.org -- You can find an amazing amount of information about US campaign contributions at OpenSecrets.org. For example, PACs in the Communications/Electronics sector have contributed $8.8 million to Federal candidates so far in the 2001-2002 election cycle. They contributed $14.7 million in the 1999-2000 election cycle. PACs in the entertainment industry (TV-movies-music) have given $1.85 million to Federal candidates so far this cycle. They contributed $3.36 million in the 1999-2000 election cycle. A lot of this miney is spent to wine and dine officeholders and remind them of where the largess comes from and what their clients want to see happen on the floor of the House and the Senate. No wonder why Web radio was killed and that tight constraints are being placed on digital content.
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The case against stealth PDF links
A link on a web page most often brings up a page written in HTML, but it may bring up one of several other kinds of file instead. Very often, particularly on legal sites, the link is to a PDF file, perhaps a judicial opinion or another official government document, and the browser's Acrobat plug-in will then have to go through the time-consuming process of starting either Acrobat or the Acrobat Reader before the document will display. On my relatively quick system, connected via cable modem, it takes about 20-25 seconds for Acrobat to load and display the chosen file. For those with slower processor speed or those who have no better than a dialup connection, the time it takes the system to load the document is often extremely long, particularly if the PDF file is very large. What's worse, after the PDF-within-the-browser is closed, the user has to go through the same process again if another unmarked PDF link is followed.
When I am wandering from link to link, I simply do not want to bother with that process in the majority of cases. Very often, if I wish to peruse it, I will choose to download the PDF file to disk so that I can look at it later.
In order to have that flexibility of choice, we believe that links to PDF files should be clearly marked as such (as we have done on this site) so that the user can choose whether and how to view it.
We call an unmarked link to a PDF file a "stealth PDF link". We encourage all web authors to clearly mark PDF links, and to forever foreswear the use of stealth PDF links. If you agree, send a polite reminder of this preference to webmasters of sites displaying the offending links.
[The LitiGator]
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WIRED -- A ruling by Munich's Upper Court determined that using a search engine to find stories on a newspaper's Web site violates European Union law. The decision is the latest ruling in a two-year court battle between German newspaper Mainpost and German search service NewsClub. Mainpost claims that searching through and linking directly to Mainpost content flouts the EU "Database Directive," which grants copyright protection
to database creators for selecting and arranging the information in a
database even when they do not hold the copyright on the information.The law also protects against unfair extraction of items in a database, specifically downloading or hyperlinking. NewsClub faces more legal hearings, but without any expectation that the Upper Court decision will be reversed.
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28 July 2002 |
Dave Winer --  Dave remembers "what it was like being a teen, looking for role models, trying on other people's lives as one might try on a shirt, hat, or pair of sunglasses. It's really interesting to watch that process, in real-time, on young Aaron Swartz's weblog. He's self-aware as he tries on Richard Stallman's life."
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9TH CIRCUIT -- Both clients should just chill out, so says the court. The ruling contains concise definitions of trademarks, dilution, branding, and more.
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SLATE -- Bill Barnes says, "Until recently, it's been difficult for a computer to ask a Web site for information." Companies like Zenark in Dublin are making web services like LEGOs, snapping together in almost limitless combinations. Barnes believes, "As the big sites bring their Web services on board it's easy to imagine your home page summarizing the items you have for sale on eBay, displaying whether you're available to chat via AOL or Yahoo!, and mapping the current location of the airplane you're on via Expedia."
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Jonathon Delacour -- Ego and arrogance often run hand in hand with blogging. Delacour cites the advice of Mike Sanders for all bloggers. (1) Introspection must ultimately be done in private. (2) A blogroll, link or complement on a blog are at the lower end of the giving spectrum. (3) Share your experiences, but be aware of self- centeredness.
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DAVE WINER -- David Watson wrote that he was having trouble editing the templates for his Radio weblog using the browser form. Perhaps he didn't know that you can edit the templates in any text editor. Open the www sub-folder of the Radio folder, and look for #template.txt. Open it in your favorite editor, make a change, save, refresh your desktop website home page in the browser. If you don't like what you see, bring the editor to the front, choose Undo, save, refresh. The browser interface is there for newbies and for light tweaks. For serious template work, use a real text editor, you won't be sorry. Screen shot.
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ERNIE THE ATTORNEY -- "The copyright owner has to notify the Department of Justice 7 days in advance of taking action." Perhaps this advance notice is to be used to advise ministers of justice in other countries how Americans are going to trespass on cyber properties. If an American starts to hack into a foreign web site, they could face trespass charges or cases of wrongful use. For example, the Aussies have section 9a of the Victorian Summary Offences Act (1966), under which "a person must not gain access to, or enter, a computer system or part of a computer system without lawful authority to do so". The penalty if convicted is up to six months' jail.
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CLONMEL, Ireland -- Even on the small college campus in Clonmel, it's possible to conclude that cheap access to the Internet as well as to compact discs and DVDs have become a huge draw for libraries. On top of that, computers also have made using the library itself significantly easier.
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SAN ANTONIO, Texas -- SIGGRAPH opened with roaming jackals filming attendees alongside rubber chicken look-alikes responding to conflict by inflating and digitally enhanced laundry. [Michael Stroud at Wired.]
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SAN DIEGO, California -- O'Reilly's Open Source Convention is always a worthwhile occasion. This year, Open-source guru Bruce Perens is convinced by his Hewlett-Packard boss not to reveal secrets of DVD hacking to conventioneers. [Randy Dotinga reports.]
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27 July 2002 |
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26 July 2002 |
Talking to Signs: Intellisign Works! First test in 8 High Street, Christchurch, Dublin 8. It works!
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WiFi Aggregator Relationships ARCChart analyses Wi-Fi aggregator relationships: ARCChart offers a visual set of connections between the various firms funding and operating wireless aggregation services. A picture is worth a million bytes. Their accompanying analysis has an excellent summary: Hotspots are expensive and complicated to operate if access is paid for - authentication and billing require back-end infrastructure - but if the service is provided for free, it is very cheap, requiring a basic broadband connection and a $100 access point. Add onto that the zero-dollar cost of a NoCat authentication system or a Sputnik node to ensure that users conform to good net usage. [80211b News]
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25 July 2002 |
What if Wood Blocks Mobile Phone Signals? SANTRY, Ireland -- Some county planning officials express concern over the inexpensive and easily installed Japanese technology that blocks mobile phone signals as the components could also block radio communications that police, fire and other emergency services use. Japanese scientists are developing wood paneling containing magnetic metal particles that absorb radio signals. Rescuers responding to emergencies in buildings where the paneling is installed would not be able to communicate using their radios. The ODTR does not regulate such passive radio blocking devices.
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REUTERS -- Televisions are going floppy . Roll-up, flexible televisions, have become possible thanks to a glowing plastic compound perfected in the laboratories of Britain's Cambridge Display Technology (CDT). They can be printed onto thin plastic almost like paper.
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Roland Piquepaille -- There is a message in the subtext of Bill Gates email to millions of Internet users last week. Piquepaille coined the phrase TCP/MS and his interpretation of trust differs from Microsoft.
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Jonathan Zittrain -- Can the Internet survive filtering? The digital chain connecting one's laptop to a Web site thousands of miles away can be traversed by a single click--so long as no link within the chain refuses to carry the signal. Like Zittrain, I'm noticing how organisations are trying to block links. We have to remember how the Internet was built on principles of "end-to-end neutrality," an engineering rule of thumb calling for smarts at edges of the network rather than in the middle. There is good value (and grat reasons) to let the periphery of the Internet do its thing. It's also important to know where filtering is happening within the network cloud, and who is doing it.
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23 July 2002 |
SCRIPTING.com --  Dave Winer calls it a "self-induced fall."The bubble of the 90s was due to misdirected enthusiasm over technology. AOL, a leader, hasn't kept pace. Microsoft will overtake them if they don't refocus on giving new features and performance to users. The music industry, of which AOL is a major player, holds some if not all of the keys. They refuse to use them to give the users what they want. AOL should also be investing heavily in writable-web technology. When we look back five years from now, after MS forecloses on the music industry for pennies on the dollar, we'll realize that AOL, like Netscape, actually had the lead when it capitulated.
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INFOWORLD.com -- Steve Gillmor writes in his column of a recent discussion with Ballmer: "I was in a hotel in Sun Valley last week that was not wired," Ballmer recalls. "So I turned on my PC, and XP tells me there is a wireless network available. So I connect to something called Mountaineer. "Well, I don't know what that is. But I VPN into Microsoft. It worked! I don't know whose broadband I used," he chuckles. "I didn't see it in Bill's room. I called him up and said, 'Hey, come over to my room.' So soon everyone is there and connecting to the Internet through my room."
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HYPERORG.com -- David Weinberger has an interesting take on the two hermeneutics. "Hermeneutics, usually explained as the study of interpretation, is actually the study of how we make sense of things, where things includes texts and the world. Integral hermeneutics thinks that to understand X is to see the simple, unambiguous, single meaning behind X; it is fundamentalism and literalism applied beyond the realm of scripture. Differential hermeneutics not only notices that there are many ways of understanding X but thinks that the best way to proceed is to pay attention to the differences among those interpretations.
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TEMPLE BAR, Ireland -- There's a lot of discussion about Dave Winer (the blogging community's factotum and the history of weblog tools. In 1998, we used a Web browser to write a Web page when using Composer in Netscape Navigator. Dave Winer wrote about his idea for Edit This Page in late 1998. In June 1999, he implemented posting via bookmarks.
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Adobe updates Premiere with new Adobe Title Designer, MPEG-2 export, DVD authoring, and some tweaks to its suite of audio tools.
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22 July 2002 |
KILKENNY, Ireland -- Just finished paging through the lunch menu at Cafe Sol, equivocated over the soups, and couldn't decide so had both a lovely mushroom soup (kinda spicy where the back of your tongue stays hot even after a large Coke) and the vegetable soup (much the same, suggesting too many shakes of the cayenne pepper).
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ORiNOCO Hot Spots KILKENNY, Ireland -- We're toying with some ORiNOCO systems from Lucent, trying to create public wireless hotspots. Lucent, Agere Systems, HP, iPass, ipUnplugged and Sierra Wireless are jointly developing Lucent's Secure Mobile Data Solutions.
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NEW YORK TIMES -- My Real One Player casually updated itself today. Now it can play Microsoft's own proprietary Windows Media formats. RealNetworks are targeting large media companies and other corporations that need to send audio and video data to customers and employees in a variety of different formats. RealNetworks could face legal action from Microsoft. RealNetworks released a bunch of technology under their "community license" and it included RTSP/RTP/RTCP/SDP network playback, UDP support, local file playback, data type interfaces, file format interfaces and some AV code support. This means developers get some network protocols that go on top of IP and UDP. RealNetworks' technology gives quality continuous playback on my desktop, despite the fact that the Internet doesn't guarantee the kind of latency needed to smoothly play back large files.
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WOODSTER.com -- I like bookmarklets. They look like <A href="javascript:void(s=document.body.style);void(z=s.getAttribute('zoom'));if(z){s.setAttribute('zoom',(parseInt(z)+50)+'%');}else s.setAttribute('zoom','150%');">this one (click <A href="javascript:void(s=document.body.style);void(z=s.getAttribute('zoom'));if(z){s.setAttribute('zoom',(parseInt(z)-50)+'%');}else s.setAttribute('zoom','50%');">here to return to normal size). You can see more of these things in my Weblog Neighborhood.
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21 July 2002 |
No Mobiles Zones DUBLIN, Ireland -- First class carriages in Irish Rail feature small decals on windows that remind people to use their mobile phones with consideration for others. Figures from researchers at Taylor Nelson Sofres show non-mobile users are more likely to favour a ban on the use of mobiles (62 per cent) than those with mobiles (45 per cent). And comparative research on the continent shows that in countries with high mobile penetration such as Italy and Finland over 70 per cent of the population want restrictions.
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First to Arrive at the Blogs Jason Levine's Q Daily News has sparked an ongoing fracas about the subjects of early weblog history, Rebecca Blood's The Weblog Handbook, and Dave Winer. In my opinion, Winer is the person who did the most in 1997-98 to demonstrate and popularize weblogging. Blood's online history of the medium strongly disagrees; he isn't mentioned until the launch of EditThisPage in late 1999 after three other weblog publishing tools have become available. It makes him sound like a latecomer to the party, even though two years earlier his company was producing a weblog publishing tool before anyone else.
Though this may seem like a transparent attempt to butter up Dave, I'm interested in this because I'm intrigued by Blood's quixotic efforts to tell the history of weblogs. Even Winer's most outspoken critics ought to acknowledge that he's one of the people responsible for the weblog, the loud-mouthed bastard child of a link list and an online diary. [Workbench]
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Commercial Break: Why wait? Use WS-Routing & Reliable Messaging now with .... MSMQ 3.0 ?!? [Clemens Vasters] Cool, I knew that it did SOAP over HTTP, but didn't know it included WS-Routing support. Added to the todo list, so many toys, so little time ! [Simon Fell]
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 Papa Doc: "What KPIG deserves from the RIAA is a fucking award, not a knife in the heart." Doc, this is why the stock market is tanking. Common sense is not part of how our businesses work. Clearly KPIG was pushing the envelope, honorably, into a new channel for distribution of music. The music industry, run by a bunch of people who probably understand music about as well as Steve Case and his little buddy do, stuff a cork up the ass of the distribution channel, and then complain about all the shit that's splattered all over the place. That there's demand for music delivered over the Internet is totally obvious. For the 18th time in eight years, we're waiting for the idiots to get out of the way and let the goddam business develop. [Scripting News]
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BRAY, Co Wicklow -- Last summer, the Microcomputer Technology Center relinquished its accreditation by the Distance Education and Training Council (DETC). I used to work for MTC and know the study programme I developed will go to good use in other distance education programmes.
Wayback to MTC
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20 July 2002 |
TOM FREEBURG is a futurist from Motorola. He helped bring the Canopy system to market. According to Motorola, the Canopy system has been field-proven since 2001 with more than 3,000 units currently deployed in nearly 40 commercial customer sites across North America. It provides an excellent point-to-multipoint solution.
Canopy virtually eliminates today's interference problems found in other fixed wireless solutions.
The Canopy portfolio includes an independent community-sized Access Point with integrated antennas. Each Access Point has approximately a two-mile reach, although the range can be extended up to 10 miles with the Canopy reflector kit. The Canopy components are small, unobtrusive, easy to install and can serve a wide-range of network purposes. The Canopy solution can be deployed as a stand-alone system, or it can be used to extend the reach of wired IP distribution systems such as cable and DSL. It can also serve as a redundant IP backhaul for enterprises and service providers further reducing investment costs.
x: Cascade Networks
Tom Freeburg, director of engineering for Canopy Wireless Broadband Products
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MOTOROLA -- I'm looking at Motorola Canopy. Its developers overcame some impressive obstacles, including the corporate equivalent of being disowned before being adopted by Motorola’s Technology Center. Canopy is a wireless Internet access system that operates in the license-exempt 5 GHz bands. The Canopy radio, which includes an integral 60° sectorized antenna, is diminutive, measuring only 12” high, 3 ½” wide, and 1” deep.
Canopy radios can be used in several configurations:
- Omnidirectional: 6 Canopy radios can be mounted to provide 360° coverage (2 mile range)
- Point to Multipoint: 1 Canopy “hub” radio can provide service to a number of Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) Canopy radios (2 mile range)
- Point to Point: a pair of Canopy radios can be configured as a Point to Point link (2 mile range with integral antenna, 20 miles with “high band / high power” version mated to a parabolic dish).
Canopy’s interface is 10/100baseT Ethernet, and is only offered with TCP/IP. This is not a product that carriers will like, lacking support for telecommunications standards such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), Synchronous Optical Network (SONET), and E1/T1 interfaces.) Other notable features of Canopy are that the data rate is 10 Mbps throughput, and that Canopy is surprisingly simple (as such devices go), assembled on a single circuit board to which the antenna is mounted.
The board/antenna/connector assembly is then simply slid into and “snapped” into the enclosure. Despite its appearance, Canopy is intended to be used outdoors.
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OPEN -- We're experiencing a lot of go-slow with the Open Working Group. In many ways, it's a manifestation of Stop Energy in action.
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SCRIPTING.com -- Dave Winer gave another interview about weblogs yesterday. "I said again that the difference between weblogs and mailing lists is that anyone can have the last word any day on a weblog. Five hundred people can have the last word. The stop energy is much lower."
But Dave is pained by "the greed and intellectual dishonesty in the weblog world." He wonders if he is going to return to coding for the weblog world after he recovers from his surgery.
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DOC SEARLS -- Part of the joy of the Internet is how the worldwide Web community enjoyed Web radio. Because of its spotty quality, I liken it to busking online. Right now, I am pissed off about the winding down of quality Web radio stations. It is not right that the RIAA shuts down community radio. I will really miss the CyberSty, now that KPIG's owners have decided that they have no choice but to suspend KPIG's live webcast in the face of the fees that would be due under the most recent Copyright Office ruling.
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SEARCH ENGINE WATCH -- Danny Sullivan explains the steps the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is taking to ensure online search results display items that are actually paid placement instead of content achieving high results based on their information quality.
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WASHINGTON POST -- The New York Times was a very harsh critic of Enron's accounting manipulations, and yet the Times company itself had no qualms about
striking a "newsprint swap agreement" with Enron that involved absolutely
no exchange of physical assets and was disclosed only in the small print of
SEC filings. The Washington Post editorial pages came out swinging against rules that "made a mockery of corporate accounting" by allowing companies to grant employee stock options "without recording a dime of expenses" -- yet The Post Co. was doing exactly the same thing at the same time.
Asked about these double standards, the Times takes the high-minded position that its reporters were completely clueless about the Times company's dealings with Enron: "It might not have hurt to mention the relationship more -- had our journalists even been conscious of it -- but it's inconceivable that anyone will think our journalism was influenced by such a development."
At the
Post, chairman and chief executive Donald Graham has taken a more nuanced position, essentially maintaining that readers and corporations should do-as-we-say-and-not-as-we-do: "As everyone knows, the editorial page writes what it thinks is good policy, and if it varies with newspaper policy or corporate policy, that's fine." (Washington
Post 18 Jul 2002)
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Vodafone is suing the Daily Telegraph for libel. There's nothing on the Daily Telegraph's web site to explain more about the case. The cached Google page has been scrubbed for the 27 June 2002 opinion column in the Telegraph entitled "The robber barons must be made to pay for their greed". That's libelous? You cannot take pot shots at Chris Gent's remuneration package without facing the heat? The offending column warned that the greed of company executives who enrich themselves while damaging their own shareholders' interests is a disservice to capitalism, a disincentive to investors and an invitation to government interference.
In the original article, George Trefgarne, city editor of the Daily Telegraph, said that in our post-Enron era, we need integrity more than ever before:
In the Noughties, many people suspect those in power tell porkies. Teenagers are especially cynical. You might think it rich coming from a generation that is itself pretty untrustworthy, stealing mobile phones etc, but according to a new survey in the latest issue of The Face magazine, around 80 per cent of 16- to 29-year-olds reckon you can't believe corporations or the media.
The Daily Telegraph's poll by YouGov last week found more than half of all voters don't trust the Government.
You could be forgiven for thinking the world is run by gangsters. Well, would that it was, some might say. At least they have standards, which is more than can be said for an executive selling shares in his company even as he knows the whole thing is about to go down the pan; or a dodgy accountant; or a spin doctor trying to stitch up Black Rod; or advertisers making wildly exaggerated claims; or the ex-directors of Equitable Life, who disgracefully tried to wriggle out of a promise of guaranteed annuities.
[...]
But government failure is as much to blame as market failure for this phenomenon. Leaving aside the issue of spin, our poor education system is not much help in the development of "social capital" - the human values and skills on which a market-oriented economy rests.
But, generally speaking, the last thing we want is the Government sticking its nose in and interfering. Far better for individuals to take responsibility for their own conduct and dust down the values on which the market is, once again, putting a premium: honesty, self-restraint and personal integrity.
Is your word really your bond? It had better be.
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THE REGISTER.co.uk -- During a week when eircom, the leading Irish ISP, continues turning a blind eye to spam, a Dutch judge tore up that country's bulk mail ban.
"The Judge reckons that in general, spam isn't too bad a nuisance and that it's straightforward to change email ID if it becomes an issue."
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19 July 2002 |
WIRED.com -- Julia Scheeres writes about Abortioniscybersquatting.com. It's a story about one man with a history of trying to make companies pay to get their good names back. Another man is an anti-abortion activist. Together, they are making people very unhappy. We have a similar story brewing in Ireland, with the Treasury Holdings website.
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FEEDROOM.com -- The FeedRoom has surpassed CNN.com and MSNBC as the top online destination for streaming news.
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You own your biography until you become famous.
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ITAA.org -- Surveys indicate that a large number of employees like the idea of telecommuting, and Internet broadband supporters say it could help the industry as well as workers. Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America in Arlington, Va., said telework "will cause a major bump" in the number of people signing up for broadband. "E-work is widely seen to have it all: career, life and family." This philosophy resonates importunately in comments made by techies in Ireland.
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The Register -- JPEGs are not free. A video conferencing company based in Austin, Texas says it's going to pursue royalties on the transmission of JPEG images. And it's already found a licensee: Sony Corporation. Formerly known as VTEL, Forgent Networks acquired Compression Labs in 1997, acquiring this patent into the bargain.
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FIRST MONDAY -- Marcia J. Bates recalls the dot-com rush of the 1990's when many Web sites were developed that provided information retrieval capabilities poorly or sub-optimally. She reviews suggestions for improvements in the design of Web information retrieval in seven areas. She discusses classifications, ontologies, indexing vocabularies, statistical properties of databases (including the Bradford Distribution), and staff indexing support systems.
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18 July 2002 |
WIRED.com -- Leander Kahney asks, With IPod, Who Needs a Turntable?. DJs are discovering the wonders of spinning with an iPod at a trendy New York nightclub. True, it's hard to scratch, but not impossible.
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POLITECHBOT -- Declan McCullaghhas a writeup on the protest at the Commerce Department hearing Wednesday on digital rights management and Hollywood's call for a clampdown on peer-to-peer file sharing. He also took these photos of the geektivists protesting the proceedings.
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AUDIBLE.com -- Now offering spoken audio service available on Apple's iTunes and iPod, Audible.com also features audio editions of books, newspapers, magazines, radio programs and original shows. Users can download audio for desktop playback, CD burning, or transfer to their iPod.
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HBS.edu -- Savvy firms like Procter & Gamble and General Motors, are moving away from traditional focus groups and toward tactics more focused on behavioral measures, like a person's physical reaction time to sights and sounds.
x: 109
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ECOMMERCETIMES.com -- What did dotcombustion leave behind? We endured many bumptious self-promoters from pre-Y2K to the middle of 2001, but it's fair to say the remnants left behind include some useful tidbits.
- The assumption of integrated products and services
- The importance of adding depth to applications rather than simply offering cliché-ridden value propositions.
- Investors have developed a permanent level of pragmatism, focused on results.
- XML is now the standard
- Search engines have matured.
- Users found many productive users for home computers.
x: f15
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E-BUSINESS HANDBOOK -- Lynda M. Applegate writes that Industrial Age markets -- and even early shared information technologies like American Airlines' Sabre reservation system -- depended on proprietary infrastructures. But 21st century Information Age markets operate on more open shared digital business infrastructures that allow new and established firms to create and exploit network economies of scale and scope. New e-business models are emerging with more sweeping roles; they are grouped into digital businesses that are launched on the Internet or those that provide platforms upon which digital businesses operate. But the distinction between the two is blurring, as adoption of Internet-based business models penetrates to the very core of how firms do business. Large companies like IBM and Microsoft no longer just sell technology products; such enterprises are now "content aggregators," portals and media companies. "At the same time, non-high-tech businesses, such as Charles Schwab, are becoming technology infrastructure providers," says Applegate. If companies expect to be successful, technology must be part of their DNA.
[Discuss]
x: f15
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MY PAPER -- We need to be able to carry around a fold-over electronic paper that integrates content like RSS Feeds, XML data, SOAP and personalised services. Mikel Maron is working on myRadio, a Radio Userland tool similar to My Yahoo! that can aggregate content for this personal technology.
x: 109
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17 July 2002 |
JIM McGEE -- One of the distinct pleasures of the blogging world is that even if you miss something, somebody that you trust will catch it eventually and call it to your attention.
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DIGITAL PAPER WIRELESS -- Wirelessly View Complex Docs and Drawings. DigitalPaper Wireless 5.1 enables workforce viewing and collaboration of complex documents and drawings - without client software, plug-ins, or applets.
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PASS ONE -- This non-profit group plans to create a "service mark" or logo -- similar to the Visa logo in a restaurant window -- that indicates a particular hot-spot location will allow a subscriber access, no matter who provides the Wi-Fi service.Pass One. Mark One.
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PEER STREAMING -- Adam Curry in Belgium listens to Dennis in Holland over peercast and that means he gets a stream of MixFreaks mp3s. Totally 80's kickass stuff. Neither of them are communicating with a central server. Curry gets his signal from another listener in the chain. Big stuff here. Expect entertainment to come in network form, where you are a part of the physical network.
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16 July 2002 |
Wired: "Seniors in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, with mild to moderate memory loss, are writing weblogs to help them make sense of their daily lives. And the activity, they say, is slowing the onset of their symptoms."
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KILKENNY, Ireland -- One of the best features of weblogs is that they help move thought processes to the edge of the network. This decentralisation enhances collaboration by allowing knowledge worker cars to cluster in their own herds. You cannot herd cats any other way.
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ONTOPIA.net -- Steve Pepper has written a succinct introduction to topic maps, titled The TAO of Topic Maps. Topic maps are an ISO standard for describing knowledge structures and associating them with information resources. As such they constitute an enabling technology for knowledge management. Dubbed "the GPS of the information universe", topic maps are also destined to provide powerful new ways of navigating large and interconnected corpora.
x: Column Two: KM/CM blog
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ADOBE.com -- There's great value for the $99 you spend for Adobe Photoshop Elements version 2. I haven't needed the extra Photoshop muscle for my digital imagery during the past year.
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JOHN MARKOFF (NYT) -- Several leading computer and telecommunications companies are discussing the joint creation of a wireless data network that would make it possible for users of hand-held and portable computers to have access to the Internet at high speeds nationwide. Intel has been a leading force in the project, according to several industry executives. The company, which established a communications division 18 months ago, has said publicly that it plans to make 802.11 a standard capability of all of its microprocessors offered for mobile computing beginning next January.
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STEVE PILGRIM -- He thinks telcos are dinosaurs and that they need some taming. They need to know to respect the citizens who pay their rates.
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PEERCAST.org -- It's been running since April 2002 as a non-commercial site, providing free peer-to-peer broadcasting software. The aim of the project is to create an easy to use, simple and reliable software client that enables anyone to broadcast streaming media, instead of being immured in a Microsoft or Real Networks solution.
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DAN GILLMOR -- Looks like Salon, the still-excellent online magazine, is going into the Weblog business in a big way. This URL, which will give you a login dialog box, is one of the clues Adam Curry has uncovered. It also looks like Userland is going to supply the software. Dave posted this additional hint but didn't say which publication it was.
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15 July 2002 |
KILKENNY, Ireland -- I think people have forgotten how Ireland began climbing up the mountain in the early 90s. Even with the current low levels of stock valuations, we're still above 1996. Today's rebound is just a hiccup.
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SOURCEFORGE -- Peekabooty is a peer-to-peer application which can route web page requests around firewalls. This is done by asking hosts in the network that are not censored to fetch censored web pages.
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SONY -- Check out the Sony CMT-L7HD> It's a bookshelf stereo system. Every time you play a CD, the machine automatically copies its tracks onto its built-in 20-gigabyte hard drive. Then you can play back those songs without having to insert the original CD. The hard drive holds 300 CD's worth of music, turning this handsome unit into a self-contained jukebox.
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14 July 2002 |
Other Blog Books.
Of all the books in process, I hold the most hope for the BlogRoots book: written by ex-Pyrites Meg Hourihan, Matt Haughey, and Paul Bausch. They put enough time into it (the O'Reilly book was a rush job) and they (appear to) have the right premise. It would have been possible for a philosophical book to have lasting value, but to do so, they should have gotten a social butterfly to edit it, one who crosses all the lines with ease, someone who likes everyone and who everyone likes, but somehow doesn't have to kiss ass to do it. (Note: I am not that person, as you can see I don't suffer fools, I don't write to make friends, and I know it.)
One of the things that kills books about blogs is the shelf-time they spend between the time they were written and the time they go to press. This is a fast-moving area. That really is visible in the Blood books, and I suspect will also be evident in the O'Reilly and BlogRoots books.
Another problem with books about blogs (blooks?) is that as I read them I want to comment, more than any other kind of book (I've been reading a lot lately). Well, how do you do that? Will these books be on the Web? Will they have paragraph-level permalinks? That's a naive question, I don't have an opinion, and I don't really understand books about blogs. [Scripting News]
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Blood's Blog Books.
There was no doubt that it's the time for blog books, lots of em, coming soon; and what a strange idea that is. Take a medium that's even more ephemeral than news and freeze it in print, let it sit on a publisher's shelf for a year, and hope that the writing remains relevant as anything more than a time capsule of a particular point of view that didn't end up dominating (with the benefit of hindsight, that every reader has, but the author(s) don't).
Yesterday I got two books in the mail, for free, thanks, they were worth a skim, maybe more to find out what Rebecca Blood thinks about blogs, which hasn't changed much. I found little that I agree with. Her original history was all wrong, and while she's made some corrections, she still doesn't understand the medium, or even tell the story of how weblogs came to be with any accuracy. This is why her friends didn't dominate, and why her books are both so anachronistic. Lack of respect for the story. Yuck.
I could give lots of examples, but you can get the book yourself and imagine you were the editor, and get out the blue pencil and start marking up. Or skip the whole exercise, realizing that there are lots of computer books vying for your attention and lots of free opinions on the Web, like this one, which is worth about what you pay for it. ";->"
The second book, which is a collection of essays from the Web about weblogs, didn't appear to have an editor (or none claimed credit). I'd be interested in knowing the process by which essays were selected. I had read most of them. Once again, just a slice through the story and community, an arbitrary starting point, and some cute stuff, some interesting stuff, but mostly they miss what's going on now. [Scripting News]
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