Here is the readers digest quote from an interoperability specialist’s rant about the French paper:
- the document is of poor quality. By this I mean that you do not expect this kind of document stemming from a french central administration: a few spellchecking errors, low level of technical discourse matched with european jargon.
…
- an attention to details that is simply ridiculous: it describes the SMTP and TCP/IP protocols in details and then set as a Rule that they should be used. (Thanks to the document we can now feel safe and righteous when we use TCP/IP to surf the Internet).
…
- Lots of factual errors and inaccuracies: times new roman is not a font that can be used free of any right.
- comparing apples and bananas: The only difference between REST architectures and SOAs is not that the SOAs are not REST (although we understand they’re trying to describe two kinds of “web services” it is wildly inaccurate and creates a senseless chatter).
… and so forth. The simple question to ask is, like it or not, what does the Sarkozy government want to achieve with its French interoperability framework RGI? What is the practical purpose of their RGI? I have no answer for this question prepared. It only makes much sense to me to enact it while Malmö quarrels over the European Interoperability Framework 2.0 and the degrees of openness needed for interoperability. If administration hasn’t made up its mind about its national interests in the matter it is no surprise that the contents of the document becomes coton.
Ghostwhite is a very useful colour for web spplications. When you consult the colour dictionary you will find out the hex code. For CSS files it is better to use the hex codes, otherwise the W3C validator would complain.
Eine Antriebstechnik, die vor etwa 35 Jahren bei der amerikanischen Firma Mecanum entwickelt wurde, erlaubt sehr beeindruckende Anwendungsmöglichkeiten in der Robotik. Weiterentwickelt wurde diese Antriebsform vor allem für die Militärlogistik.
The General Secretariat has weighed my “interest in being informed of progress in this area against the general interest that progress be made in an area that is still the subject of negotiations”… “As there is no evidence suggesting an overriding public interest to warrant disclosure of the document in question, the General Secretariat has concluded that protection of the decision-making process outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”
I wonder if I should write a confirmatory application. In particular it seems that the person who wrote the letter was not very experienced with EC/1049/2001 applications.
The Commission today moved to the second phase of an infringement proceeding over the UK to provide its citizens with the full protection of EU rules on privacy and personal data protection when using electronic communications. European laws state that EU countries must ensure the confidentiality of people’s electronic communications like email or internet browsing by prohibiting their unlawful interception and surveillance without the user’s consent. As these rules have not been fully put in place in the national law of the UK, the Commission today said that it will send the UK a reasoned opinion.
Found this rant about the social network service Facebook at harmsen.net.
Facebook is worse than useless to you because facebook.com is Facebook’s website, not yours. It is not ‘your’ profile, it is Facebook’s profile about you. Those aren’t your friends, they are a Facebook sanitized version of your friends. It took centuries of political evolution to reduce this kind of manipulative abuse and insult from the state – why go backwards to a medieval social structure and expose ourselves to this kind of abuse on Facebook and the like?
A business colleague of mine started a project called TioLibre with our German association FFII e.V. which researches the risk management of cloudsourcing. I don’t know if he thought of the term Tiro libre. Social networks at least require a better management of personal social identity data but who does?
When I entered university there were still Volkszählung’s boycott stickers in the toilet. The data attempted to be gathered by the government was riddiculous, but the Volkszählung followed from the symbolic 1984.
For the SkyDrive Explorer, a kind of Dropbox clone, a new definition of cross-platform has been developed:
Cross-platform
32/64 bit OS support
SkyDrive Explorer works both in 32- and 64-bit Microsoft® Windows OS. Minimal required OS is Windows XP, and SkyDrive Explorer will successfully work in Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, and Windows 7.
But anyway, tools like Skydrive are killer applications. File servers are nothing new in the business environment but setting these external virtual hard discs up has never been so simple.
Now that is fun! When you look at the KDE4 trunk statistics the Germanic minority language Low Saxon is more complete than the German translation/localisation of KDE. Back in 2004 I attended the Linux Information Days in my home town Wilhelmshaven as a speaker, where Heiko Evermann presented his project to translate KDE into low saxon. I thought it was a great idea but they would never catch up. Low Saxon reads as follows:
“Updating boot sector for NTFS file system on partition %1.”
msgstr “”
“Bootsektor för NTFS-Dateisysteem op Partitschoon %1 “”warrt opfrischt.”
The teams have to translate at present 163711 strings. Lox Saxon (5) is at 92%, German (11) at 87%. There is a reason why Lower Saxony won’t make KDE4 in Low Saxon its National Desktop Environment for the public sector. Hardly anyone speaks it in the capital Hanover where according to certain legends the reference dialect of German (Standard German) is spoken, a city which ironically had been under English rule for quite some time.
Die Informationstechnik des Bundes bedarf der Konzentration, Standardisierung und Effizienzsteigerung sowie Bündelung vorhandener Ressourcen. Wir werden hierzu den Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Informationstechnik stärken. Wir prüfen, wie die IT des Bundes sich zukünftig an offenen Standards orientieren und dabei auch Open-Source-Lösungen berücksichtigen kann.
A Spanish colleague sent me this “net neutrality” definition from a Spanish law:
Citizens have the right to not suffer in their digital sent or received data any kind of manipulation, distortion, prevention, diversion, priorization or delay. The exercise of this right must be independent from the source or target of the communication, from the protocol or application used, from the type of data content, or from any other consideration external to the wish of the citizen. This data traffic will be treated as a private communication and it will only be possible to spy, trace or analyse its content under a judicial order (exactly like in the case of any other current private mail).
