Category — Software and Culture

Cost of Cyberliving: “Internet surfers in many countries have to spend as much as a day’s earning for an hour in a cybercafe. This page provides a map and table of Internet surfing rates at Internet cafes and the percentage of people living on $1 per day in 26 nations. Dated July/August 2004, published by Foreign Policy.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=2594“

(Via Information Policy.)

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wow, this is somewhat amazing. i wonder how the profit works out….

Hypertext 3.0: “

I just heard the good news that Johns Hopkins Press will be publishing George Landow’s Hypertext 3.0 next year. V

“

(Via Mark Bernstein.)

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cool

Bureaucracy: ”

This is the geek story of the day. At work, we are going to have a giant videoconference (think nationwide) and we need a registration form for all the sites. Simple enough. Well, we axed most of our programmers because the big IT guys for agriculture didn’t like a department having their own programmers. That’s why I was asked to do it.

Problem: The Ag IT guys are in love with Microsoft and only accept ASP code and I tried to plead that I could do it in ten minutes using Rails. They don’t seem interested in that. Long story short, they are doing some time consuming task to get a simple registration form online and ready to go. Just to prove my point, I made my registration form in Rails. It took ten minutes.

I love Rails. I hate bureaucracy.

“

(Via Carpe Aqua.)

rails looks cool….

Universal Free Dictionary: “Zdenek Broz writes “The all free dictionaries project focuses on maintaining free dictionaries (now more than 90 with more than 3,300,000 translations). We are designing a new system which will unite them all into one universal dictionary for all languages. The universal dictionary will be soon available for free under GPL.”"

(Via Slashdot.)

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heh, dictionaries only seem simple enough to do this with… this is a bit of a techno-optimist project…..

Netcraft: SCO “own all your code”: “”

(Via .)

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it would be better, of course, if this wasn’t their position…..

Linus, Monty, Rasmus: No Software Patents: “Jan Wildeboer writes “The three most famous European authors of open-source software have issued an appeal against software patents on NoSoftwarePatents.com. Linus Torvalds (Linux), Michael “Monty” Widenius (MySQL) and Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP) urge the EU Council, which will convene later in the week, not to adopt a draft directive on software patents that they consider “deceptive, dangerous, and democratically illegitimate”. They also call on the Internet community to express solidarity by placing NoSoftwarePatents.com links and banners on many Web sites.”"

(Via Slashdot.)

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This is one of those core political decisions that will transform the power structure of europe, not the big P political power structure but the small p political power which actually has more power than big P, it just is not as visible.

I am pleased to announce that the first issue of Fast Capitalism is now available at www.fastcapitalism.com.  We are already planning for FC 1.2, for which the (flexible) deadline is May 1st, 2005.  The focus of the second issue will be the future of the American left, although we will certainly welcome articles on other topics.  Please let people know about this new publishing opportunity and have them direct their work to aggerfastcap@uta.edu.

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I worked for a while on this, but there apparently was some miscommunication, and here it is. it looks good.

How programming languages have warped my writing: “How programming languages have warped my writing: “Because of HyperTalk, I am never sure how to spell highlight. I always want to spell it ‘hilite’.Because of AppleScript, I always want to write ‘thru’ instead of ‘through’.Because of Java, I’m inclined to write ‘Cristina+Liberty’ instead of ‘Cristina and Liberty’.Because of perl,…”

(Via Inspirational Technology.)

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this is a perfect example of so many affects of programming skills. just the social governance implicit in this little bit more or less shows, if it is true, that my dissertations thesis is correct….. of course, i have other evidence.

EA Faces Class-Action Overtime Suit News Story From 1UP.com: “”

(Via .)

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sometimes….. you have to sue for economic justic.

Grace Hopper Celebration Coming up soon: The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, October 6-9 in Chicago Illinois. The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2004 is the fifth in a series of conferences designed to bring the research and career…