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Underway in Ireland
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26 October 2002 |
Irish Immigration Policy Needs Work DUBLIN -- Immigration has lurked below the surface of Irish political debate for years but now politicians have to take charge of the issues if they want to stay in control of the situation. Before coming to Ireland, I knew the country as one of emigrants. I count my great-grandparents among the millions of Irish who emigrated to the United States. Today, the issue has inverted to where Irish fear immigrants. Public concern focuses on the long-term effect of immigration on urban communities and jobs. Getting a work permit is no longer a straight-forward event. I consumed more than five months with the paper chase. A consultative process undertaken by the Department of Justice last April reported
"Immigration policy and practise are significant aspects of the exercise by a country of sovereignty. In general terms, a state has the right to choose which non-nationals to admit and which not to admit to its territory and to decide what they may do while in the territory and when they should leave." I have experienced Irish immigration policy first-hand and believe the government's approach is anyting but sensitive and coherent. The status quo needs revisiting because it is not a system in which the public can have confidence.
Bernie Goldbach: Refused Leave to Land in Ireland
x: 26121
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Facts About Irish ICT Sector 
ICT IRELAND -- The Irish ICT sector remains resilient but much quieter than in the Y2K days.
- The sector employes almost 100,000 people in 980 companies, which is up from 47,000 in 1993
- Seven of the world's largest software companies have a base in Ireland.
- One-third of all PCs sold in Europe are manufactured in Ireland.
- Total exports of ICT products and services amounted to 31bn in 2001, representing 33 percent of all exports.
- ICT exports grew by 23 percent a year over the period 1993-2001, 1.5 times that of non-ICT exports.
- Output of ICT products and services was equivalent to almost 16 percent of Ireland's GDP in 2001. This increased by 18 percent a year over the period 1993-2001, twice the rate of overall GDP growth.
- The indigenous software sector currently employs 18,000 people, compared with 3,000 people in 1992.
- Exports by the indigenous software sector grew by 28 percent in 2001 and amounted to 1.4 billion.
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Accelerating Entrepreneurial Development Paul O'Dea -- According to the MD of International Ventures, ICT Ireland has identified several key areas which have a major impact on the ability for an economy to promote ICT start-ups and help turn them into global players. - research and development
- market access for ICT start-ups
- access to funding and finance
- people skills required for ICT start-ups
- government policy.
In order to sustain Ireland's position as a high tech economy, the viability and strength of the indigenous sector is crucial.
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Restricting Advertisements by Solicitors Will Cost Golden Pages DUBLIN -- New solicitors' regulations due to come into force in November could cost the Irish Golden Pages more than one million euro in lost revenue. The Solicitors' Advertising Regulations 2002 will severely limit the contents of advertisements and will effectively ban personal injuries advertising. The Irish Golden Pages features dozens of pages of classified ads from solicitors, most of which will be outlawed by the new regulations. The Dublin area Golden Pages carries more than 63 pages of large display ads for which solicitors would have paid in excess of 1,087,000.
The Bar Council estimates that 40% of earnings by its members are from personal injuries. Barristers earn a massive chunk of their money through negotiations privately with each other on behalf of their respective clients before the issue ever gets to court.
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Irish Employers Cannot Legally Monitor Employee e-mail Ciaran O'Mara -- If you monitor the external phone calls and Internet e-mail of employees, you may be violating an EU regulation that outlaws surveillance of workers' communications. Surveillance of employees in the workplace is controlled by the 1995 Data Protection Directive and the 1997 Telephone Privacy Directive. Article 5 of the Data Directive says member states must "ensure via national regulations the confidentiality of communications. In particular, they shall prohibit listening, tapping, storage or other kinds of interception or surveillance of communicaitons, by other than users, without the consent of the users concerned." Ireland has not legislated for any exceptions or restrictions to Article 5 since May 2002. O'Mara, managing partner of O'Mara Geraghy McCourt, cannot see how any solicitor could safely advise an employer that he can monitor employee communications.
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World Class Needed for World Stage Barry Maloney -- "The boom days are gone now. Technology leverage in a world market, with world-class management, is what is going to make the difference."
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What Is Enterprise Ireland Doing to Spur Start-ups? TORNADER INSIDER -- Listening to the chatter at an investment conference in Media Lab Europe, it's easily to discern that Enterprise Ireland has allocated 95m for Irish companies and expects this to leverage 400m in further cash. You can get money easier if you're running a company in the border, midlands and western region. Ernst & Young's European survey says VC investment in Ireland increased from €15m in 1Q02 to 88m in the second quarter.
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Irish VC Depression DUBLIN -- Venture capitalists invested EUR 208m in Irish companies in 2001 but just EUR 124m in 2002. This is a depression. It has led to the Sunday Business Post rewarming CNET stories in its technology section because there aren't Irish success stories at the moment. Since 2000, venture capitalist investment has dropped spectacularly. About EUR 2.4bn in venture capital was invested in Erope in the first half of 2002. That is down 46% on the amount for the second half of last year, according to a survey by Ernst & Young and VentureOne. This is a killer for start-ups. A venture capitalist usually looks for at least 25% return on investment and needs to see results within a year. Irish technology no longer performs at this level.
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Sebastian Fielder -- Good stuff on weblogs in education including nice group weblog using RSS to incorporate guest columnists.
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Glenn Fleishman -- I wrote my weekly technology column in The Irish Examiner on the same topic of powerbook convergence that Glenn Flieshman filed for The Seattle Times. In Ireland, there are several PowerBooks with single or multiple boots into flavors of Linux and (mostly) BSD Unix.
[GlennLog, Mac Net Journal and dws.]
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Locals in Lanesborough LANESBOROUGH, County Longford -- Justine McCarthy visited this quintessential Irish town and reported on the trip for readers in The Irish Independent. Some readers want to know how 50 new arrivals from Turkey have influenced the local landscape. Tractors trundle down the main street, past the smattering of pubs and over the Shannon into Connaught. It is especially pretty in the summer when cruiser ply the Shannon but, in winter, it is a quiet place. In the Lough Ree Area Development C-op, the chairman Ciaran Mulloly, is cogitating on the number and variety of non-Irish born people who have recently moved to the town. In addition to the Turkish men, there are Finns, Latvians, Chinese, Filipinos, English and French. "It's the sort of multi-cultural mix this community has never experienced before and will find it difficult to deal with," he says. Diversity is always a difficult challenge for a homogenous society.
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25 October 2002 |
AUSTIN, Texas -- Jennifer Lee writes in the NYT that the data contained in a hand-held says a lot about its owner, whether that person is a corporate tycoon or a petty thief. "It's an alter ego," said Larry Leibrock, who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and has been a consultant in many forensic cases involving hand-helds. "It represents their aspirations, who their contacts are, where they spend their time, their tasks and objectives, and how they completed those."
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DUBLIN -- Vodafone Ireland launched their MMS services yesterday and although I can see compelling reasons to upgrade to a first generation camera phone, I can't say a wide variety of my friends have the money or inclination to do the same. Research by J.D. Power and Associates shows that renewal periods for handsets are gradually creeping upwards to 18 months, meaning any wholesale change to MMS capable phones is going to take time to reach a mass market. However, I also believe friends who bought a phone to avail of WAP may feel inclined to buy up now. I would bet on the Christmas 2002 mobile phone market generating more revenue than last year.
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Adam Curry -- We know Dave Winer is working on making his outliner better. Many of us want to blog in the outliner. Adam Curry is especially enthusaistic. It's how I think about my weblog, especially the homepage will be so much more fun to maintain when I'm able to promote or demote posts at will, without breaking comments, permalinks and other assorted CMS stuff. It will forever change the way I post to my weblog and it wouldn't surprise me if this type of tool catches on with bloggers and online publishers.
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ANTI PIXEL -- Using these buttons means you're on the road to cross-publishable content grounded in validated RSS code.
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ECONOMIST -- From some work done in the Xi Skunk Works, I know that people like sending text messages to their television screens. They like it even more when they can text to everyone's television screen. Gartner's figures show that 20% of teenagers in France, 11% in Britain and 9% in Germany have sent messages in response to TV shows [...] This has much to do with the boom in reality TV shows, such as Big Brother, in which viewers' votes decide the outcome. Most reality shows now allow text-message voting, and in some cases, such as the most recent series of Big Brother in Norway, the majority of votes are cast in this way.
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NASA and UIOWA -- Sounds converted from plasma waves in outer space will form the basis of a musical performance in the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium tomorrow. A physicist at the University of Iowa has been recording the waveforms for over 40 years with instruments on NASA's Voyagers, Galileo, Cassini, and over 24 additional spacecraft. Data was captured near Jupiter, Venus, and other planets, then transformed into sound patterns. The resulting tones became the conceptual basis of a musical composition called "Sun Rings," which the Kronos Quartet will debut October 26 at the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City. You can hear plasma wave instruments, Galileo in Ganymede's magnetosphere, and Voyager's passage through the bow shock of the solar wind against Jupiter's magnetosphere.
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INFORMATION WEEK -- Joan Soat reports that PanIP LLC has sued more than 50 companies in the last seven months, claiming that their E-commerce Web sites infringe its two U.S. patents. The patents, No. 5,576,951 and No. 6,289,319, cover, respectively, an "automated sales and services system," and an "automatic business and financial transaction-processing system."
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TIME MACHINE GO -- Among the hundreds of sites sits dubberley.com, written in Dublin (or is it Dubberlyn) this week.
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MOTION COMPUTING -- I have a computer that looks and feels like a leather-bound diary. It's a TransNote from IBM. It's an older version of a Tablet PC and unlike the tablets, it has a touch screen. Motion Computing offers a Tablet PC and it features
- full Windows computing power with pen and audio input
- does not need a keyboard
- is portable, non-instrusive and wireless
Like Tom Krazit at Infoworld and Russell Beattie, I think the Tablet PC is part of a natural evolution in personal computing, towards corridor workers. This is niche kit, targeted at health care and large sales organizations, that need usability above all else. But analysts interviewed by BBC Technology News don't agree. And Walt Mossberg cautions readers to wait a generation before buying this kind of product. Slashdotters are just about evenly divided between the detractors and the potential advocates.
I would be wary of the Tablet PC supplanted the Gemstar or Hiebook e-book readers. Pesonally, I believe people buy dedicated readers, instead of paying out for all-in-one devices.
I have written on the Compaq TC1000 and it felt just like paper. This is the best tablet computer on the market. It's the size of an American page (8.5 inches wide by 11 inches deep), 0.8 inches thick and lightweight. A base configuration including a 30G-byte hard drive, 256M bytes of RAM, USB 2.0 ports, and the GeForce2 Go 100 graphics card from Nvidia Corp. costs $1,699, and it is available directly through HP at its Web site. A version with a built-in 802.11b card also sells for $1,799.
Slablet Pictures from Win Supersite.
"Tablet PCs Seek Developers" by Ephraim Schwartz in Infoworld.
"Gateway Takes to Tablets" by Michael Kanellos 18 Nov 02.
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24 October 2002 |
DUBLIN -- Today marks the Irish launch of Vodafone Live! Ireland is probably the most text-happy mobile phone population. Will that communicative population send photos as often as they send text messages? The networks are off to a good start because you will be able to send MMS messages across Ireland and through the two major networks. This is the beginning of a framework on top of which new applications will sit.
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DUBLIN -- I've got 22 pages from MLE's e-Sense Conference in an A5 notebook that deserve distilling online. I started by blogging the conference live, assisted in a great way by Tim Kirby at Xi Creative. The nicest touch about the technology is it worked effortlessly. I would write a short comment in a draft e-mail on the Nokia 9210i, scan it for correctness, then send it to an address where it published automaticaly to the blog. This is simple knowledge management and the kind of service that most agencies should ensure is offered to conference participants.
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DUBLIN -- As Emily Dubberley writes, there needs to be more open wireless hotspots in Dublin. After all, Ireland's capital claims to be on the mainline of the Information Superhighway. That would mean WiFi hotspots should be near the major train stations and accessible in the lobbies of the bus terminals as well. Isn't that what one would expect of a truly connected Information Society? WiFi hotspots are in Heuston Station, The Westbury, The Burlington Hotel, The Towers JurysDoyle Hotel, Bewley's Hotel Ballsbridge, Bewley's Hotel Newlands Cross, The Shelbourne, and the Hilton Dublin. Emily appears on Newstalk 106 with Daire O'Brien tomorrow. The radio station is holding its share of 3 percent of Dublin listeners, according to the latest MRBI/JNLR figures.
MRBI/JNLR audience share figures, regarded as a more accurate assessment of radio listenership, are included in the biannual report due in early 2003. A total of 3680 people were interviewed in the latest measure of the "reach" of the stations.
x: 1013
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23 October 2002 |
Meg Hourihan -- When people talk about making money through their blogs, their discussions focus on blog content and explore donations, advertising, or some type of sponsorship model as the means to compensate bloggers. Very little progress has been made towards finding viable economic models because people still think of Weblogs as personal sites. Most people don't blog full-time. They learn to blog to supplement genre-specific content that complements an existing marketing message. That new content attracts customers, increases revenues, and makes the blogging employee more productive. That's making money through blogging.
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Mark Hurst -- Tim Kirby pointed out Marissa Mayer's insights on Google's lean, unintimidating and highly successful interface design.
"When you see a knife with all 681 functions opened up, you're terrified. That's how other sites are. You're scared to use them. Google has that same level of complexity, but we have a simple and functional interface on it, like the Swiss Army knife closed."
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Dave Winer -- Work is underway that rewrites Dave's weblog outliner so it works with Movable Type.
I have the outliner saving, although the formatting is really sucky. Adam Curry emails to remind me that he wants this to work with Radio and Manila. But first I want to make it work with Movable Type. Everyone will expect that it will work with our own blogging stuff. The chance to blow people's minds is to show it working through the open interface of a competitor's product. This is how we show web services working, as they were always supposed to, eliminating lock-in, allowing us to enhance each others' products, and to take the fear out of serving our customers. The BigCo's don't get this, they patent stuff and have powwow's among execs who have no idea what the software is used for. Heh. In the meantime us little folk are building a market. This is a big deal. Tim Kirby is watching it. So is Emily Dubberley.
"Mena Trott Talks Movable Type" to South-by-Southwest Interactive, 22 Oct 02.
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SMART MOBS -- Mitch Kapor: "Up Periscope!".
The few key words there are "securely" and "without... expensive server computers." This sounds like real, secure Peer-to-Peer groupware, and -- as Gillmor observes -- it is potentially a big deal. Think of having a good and inexpensive alternative to Microsoft's bloated, insecure, and costly Outlook and Exchange products and attendant infrastructure. Then realize that Microsoft's email and calendaring software have many firms and organizations locked into Microsoft's software upgrade extortion. Kapor, founder of the software company that sold the influential and hugely successful Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program in the 1980s, is funding the initial work through a non-profit foundation.
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DUBLIN -- Emily Dubberley visits Dublin to finish her novel. Plus, she is on Newstalk 106 on Friday (25 Oct 02) with Daire O'Brien. But you have to question her true motivation as she also has a short list that requires her to inspect all Dublin pubs frequented by journos and as she sets up her cantenna array to sniff open WiFi hotspots. Actually, I think I'd like to do those things as well. Hope she blogs her observations as a kind of WiFi Pub Crawl.
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22 October 2002 |
Reive -- If you're thinking about going to New York City, you should read about NYC before you go.
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CNET -- The US Direct Marketing Association thinks it's necessary to advocate a federal anti-spam law because unsolicited e-mail has become so noxious. Until now, the DMA has opposed the majority of anti-spam bills in Congress or offered only lukewarm support. But the ever-rising tide of junk e-mail has made the influential trade association rethink its stand. "Even legitimate business' messages are not being looked at because of the get-rich-quick schemes and pornography and so forth," Jerry Cerasale, the DMA's vice president for government affairs, told Declan McCullagh.
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CHRONICLE -- A report from the U.S. Department of Education confirms the notion that
distance education appeals to working parents, especially women, more than to other groups. The report is based on a study of distance education during the 1999-2000 academic year. The study data show that of women who took college courses, 8.5 percent did so through distance education, versus 6.5 percent of men. Nine percent of college students over 24 years old took distance courses, compared to 6 percent of those under 24. The results confirm what many have noted: distance education offers those with work and family responsibilities the flexibility to advance their education when they are able.
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Open: Chatroom Software OPEN -- Recommendations for chatroom software: - Build-a-chat" from Themechat uses Perl and HTML with a little bit of javascript. The javascript is only there to minimise flicker on the refresh. It costs $69.95 and is recommended by Brian Walsh.
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21 October 2002 |
KIRBYCOM -- Although I have coffee and exchange development notes with Tim Kirby several times a week, his blog often takes our mutual paths into even higher orbits, like posting Movable Type from Radio. We've discovered we don't have to tell each other what we're doing because our RSS Explorers keep us abreast what we need to know about each other. Some might think that's freaky, especially in Ireland where everyone chats about everything. But for me, I like the economy of time I get in trusting Radio to tune into noise I need to hear. You cannot always depend on human memory to produce the same clarity of expression.
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Gerry Sighting -- Gerry McGovern discovers mailing lists. "Subscription allows you to regularly communicate with your target readers. It allows you to establish an ongoing relationship. It is a highly efficient and cost-effective way of making sure that your message is reaching its target."
[OLDaily]
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LAW MEME -- SearchKing, a company that charges money for artificially inflating its customers' Google rankings, is suing Google for having fixed its algorithm such that SearchKing's googlebombing doesn't work anymore. SearchKing claims that Google purposefully reduced "SearchKing and its related web sites' rankings has damaged the company's reputation and diminished its value." For a company in the business of artifically boosting PageRank scores and selling ads whose price is based on the boosted PageRank, this takes a lot of nerve. SearchKing is asking for a preliminary injunction (this marks the first time LawMeme has seen a legal document with a "your ad here" banner attached). The King does have a point: when your "business" consists of shoplifting and the corner store installs a security camera, you're going to go out of business quickly enough that an injunction is your only hope. On a similar note, Nigerian 419 scammers are planning a class-action suit against the FTC for telling people how their scam works.
[LawMeme]
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Dave Winer -- There's support for HEAD requests in Radio's aggregator but it hasn't been released yet. Dave is thinking seriously of not releasing it at all and instead going with ETag support. Simon Fell has an excellent and brief Busy Developer's Guide to ETags. They're etter than the HEAD-based protocol, because they only require one call to the server. This gives servers who are getting pounded by aggregators a really clean way to respond.
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WIRED -- Blogheads are discussing who is the sniper? says blogbytesman. Noah Shachtman writes in Wired that "conspiracy theories have long been an Internet staple. But a dearth of evidence about the sniper -- and the phenomenal explosion of blogs -- have brought (4860 pages of) online speculation to a screeching crescendo."
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XI BLUE -- When Apple's Ireland team visited Xi Blue, there was some coffee chat about the iStudent programme running at Apple UK. As Tim Kirby explains, it's a flexible lease rental programme that offers an opportunity to lease an iBook and PowerBook computers for a one, two or three years with an option to buy the equipment for a nominal fee of just £50, after the term expires. Students are offered the option to purchase an AirPort card and/or an AirPort Base Station; the AppleCare Protection Plan, which gives you up to three years of Apple-certified service and support, is also included.
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 BALLYBLOG -- Just around the time that O'Reilly and Associates were holding the first Mac OS X Conference in early October, I started getting a couple people a day visiting this blog to see Gianni Jacklone. (In fairness, half of the people visiting my stuff about Gianni have come to read about Britney's Lesbian Lust.) I linked to Gianni's OS X "it's the bomb" because his tall chiseled frame is there for the ladies. Jacklone has tech cred, but credit Apple for silently winning substantial converts from the Unix and Linux world on the back of OS X capabilities.
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BLOGSPACE -- I really want to see an RSS feed from Glenn Fleishman, but like in other cases, I cannot get my news aggregator to pull info from Blogspace. Maybe it's a UserLand-Blogspace thing. Maybe Blogspace is slow. Maybe I'm not fast enough. Anyway, Glenn has an excellent piece in The Seattle Times about why programmers use Powerbooks and it's more persuasive than the Switch ads.
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20 October 2002 |
I Want Broadband for Christmas  KILKENNY, Ireland -- I want an always-on Internet connection for Christmas. I wish Santa would come to my doorstep and promise me DSL. I know I'm different from a lot of other local residents because when researchers asked Irish whether they wanted broadband, only 14% said they would be "very likely" to sign up for the service. A full 25% of the Irish population said they were "not at all" likely to become broadband customers. That means more bandwidth for me!
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TEXTISM -- Dean Allen will release Refer 1.0 pretty soon. His Refer Tools is a module of the Textism CMS. They offer up-to-the-minute tracking of incoming referrers to a web site.
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Kevin Werbach -- Web services continue spreading. Service Grids: The Missing Link in Web Services is one of a series of working papers by John Hagel and John Seely Brown. Hagel and Brown point out the need for management and monitoring infrastructure to make Web services function in real enterprise environments. Where a year ago all the Web services companies were building development tools and basic SOAP wrappers, now the emphasis has shifted to ensuring performance, reliability, security, and cross-organizational integration. This is nuts-and-bolts stuff, as it will create the software architecture of the next 20 years. Kevin Werbach thinks it will be distributed infrastructure and he describes it for the panel at Supernova! The good ideas emerging around P2P, grid computing, and the semantic Web will all play a role.
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Squeezing More Music and Playing It to Suit You REAL -- Although the music industry flatly refuses to admit as much, MP3 tracks recorded by people like me have prompted sales of CDs more than any of the industry's own stuttering marketing schemes. I started buying CDs for my collection after downloading tasters of new tracks. Thanks to my personal MP3 player, I carry around more than twice the music that my car's CD can play. With my Real burner, I can go up to 128k and rip surround sound. It's simply stunning. I need to shift how and when I play my music. I cannot be tied down to dedicated music players at home. That's one big reason why I will never buy a copy-protected CD. Why limit yourself to one format?
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XI CREATIVE -- An underdeveloped market for corporate video exists in Ireland. Corporate videos are much more powerful for conveying info that long,written documents. If a medium-sized business needs to develop a video -- for a produc tlaunch, corporate profile, trade show or taining -- Xi Creative should be the first port of call.
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SKILLNETS -- The second 3-year programme is open to employers in Ireland, with submissions due by 25 Nov. Companies can recover between 50% and 75% of their training costs by applying through the programme. Skillnets showed dozens of companies how to access national certification and third level education services.
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LEXONOMY -- Amy Warner's "Taxonomy Primer" would help those building thesauri or a Table of Synonyms needed to populate meta data on a Web site.
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Ireland Votes for the United States Federal Model ALL OVER IRELAND -- The citizens voted for the Treaty of Nice. An analysis of the voting patterns could suggest that Irish want a European government model similar to that of the United States, where a Senate of sorts sits with two votes from every member nation, regardless of the size of the nations sitting. Karlin Lillington offers a wide-ranging and accurate view of the core issues.
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REGISTER -- "Microsoft has yanked another of its fraudulent user testimonials, in this case a fictitious twelve-year-old boy raving about a fictional homework assignment and the indispensable insights he received from MS Encarta Reference Library in preparing it."
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EPICURIOUS -- How about