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All the technical points folks are making here are very important.

But the most important thing is the people managing the datacenter.

At least in Paris, about 4/5 of the catastrophic failures experienced in the last several years have been due to:

- the management being a bunch of slimy cheapos and not doing maintenance on time or cutting corners when they do get around to doing maintenance

- some cro-magnon "technician" from a maintenance contracting company doing something stupid because he was completely unsupervised

In all cases, these datacenters had everything that folks above have described: dual theoretically diverse utility power feeds, dual generators with big fuel tanks, big battery systems, dual theoretically diverse chiller circuits, etc etc etc.

The only thing you can do to protect yourself against this sort of thing is to treat the datacenter selection process, especially the salesbeasts, as a job interview. If you say something like "I don't care how big your generators are; show me proof that they've had an oil change sometime in the last two years, that you test them regulary, and that your emergency fuel delivery contract is paid up" and they bullshit you, it's time to look elsewhere.

The single most important thing for me is to find out what procedures they follow when a 3rd party contractor is on-site doing maintenance on their critical equipment, especially the power transfer systems. Power control master switches seem to have some sort of special attraction for morons. Outages experienced recently (all the fault of the unsupervised 3rd party maintenance technician):

- removing both utility feeds from the master control switch along with both of its own internal battery backups at the same time, so that it defaults into the fail-safe mode of "off"

- needing to transfer a PDU feed from one source to another and being alone, so he shuts off the primary feed before he walks over to the backup to enable it

- doing some kind of "test" of the redundancy settings and screwing things up enough that the datacenter power is running off house batteries, the generators do not kick on as they detect that the utility power is working, and the batteries are disconnected from utility power. 15 minutes later, all the batteries are flat and the datafloor power is dead. The house lights still work as they run off "dirty" power direct from the utility, and the cleaning people are running the vacuum.

- during a cooling system purge, leaving the drain valve for the cooling system open, with the fill valve for the reserve water tank shut, and the reservoir level alarm disabled, broken, or ignored. It took almost 24 hours to get the datafloor temp back to normal as the entire cooling system circuit was dry.

- some construction jackass lucky to still be alive drilling directly into the master B-feed power riser cables and getting God knows how many amps directly into his concrete drill. Every single individual breaker in all the B-feed PDUs on every floor popped. The worst bit was that the jackasses that run the place didn't have a master record of the breakers in each PDU (the data was just kept in the individual client records), so they started digging through all the client records one by one (also note the lack of someone that knows about SELECT FROM) to figure out who to turn back on until about 10 people ran into the DC manager's office screaming at them to turn everything on and sort out which ones they should turn back off later.

- a maintenance by a utility power technician causing the datacenter power system and the utility power system to have a somewhat different idea of what constitutes neutral voltage on a ground, again leading to the generator system thinking that the utility power was just fine but the battery system detecting a ground fault and refusing to us

Copyright on things like the Mona Lisa, or Eiffel Tower are "perpetually" held, even though they were created and "discovered" during "modern" copyright terms.

Not quite true.

In French law, which applies to the Eiffel Tower, the architect of a building owns the rights to the commercial reproduction of images of that building for a set period of time (being 70 years after the death of the architect IIRR).

The case of the Eiffel Tower is particularly illuminating, in that the tower can be photographed during the day and that the image can be used for commercial purposes, yet a similar photograph taken at night may not be used so freely...

The problem is that the lights on the tower are protected by the same laws as the tower itself.

This question is posed quite frequently in French photography magazines (e.g. Chasseur d'Images) and there are plenty of references on the web. Below is an very good article. http://www.journaldunet.com/ebusiness/temoignage/temoignage/24557/ai-je-le-droit-d-utiliser-l-image-d-un-batiment-public-tel-que-la-tour-eiffel-par-exemple-pour-l-integrer-dans-le-graphisme-d-un-site-internet/

K.

Really? The Journal Du Net has a webpage where you can check to see whether you can get broadband through cable TV or ADSL.

Funny thing is, rural locations don't seem to get either - which is much of the land for an agrarian economy.

In France, the ISP Free telecom offers the possibility [fr] to migrate to IP V6 already.

Here in France most of broadband is DSL oriented. For 29.99 you get on a DSL : 25Mb/s, digital TV (more than 100 chans), unlimited call to european land line (and most majour countries), on-demand video, PVR-like features, ... nothing surprising anymore.

But since year 2000, some small ISP have lanched FTTH in Paris 15th district (Citéfibre http://www.citefibre.com/ 59/month for 30Mb/s symetrical, unlimited call to any france landline , digital TV) or other cities (like Pau see http://eco.agglo-pau.fr/Initiatives/PBC/presentati on/presentation1.htm) or even FTTB (on Paris area, see Erenis http://www.erenis.fr/ )...

Obviously some would says that Japan, Korea or Taiwan are still leading on FTTH ;-) Right, ...

But this september, Free (Iliad Group registered on Euronext as ILD) the #2 on broadband market (#1 is FranceTelecom/Orange) has announed they will migrate their DSL customer to FTTH offer. Same price (29.99) for 100Mb/s symetrical bandwidth on a point to point full fiber infrastructure, services anticipated are : multi-tv-set full HD service (full HD sports show Rolland Garros or Tour de France will be hits next year !) and WiFi based mobile VoIP (your modem will become a public hotspot for any other subscriber roaming) ...

This means a 1G$ (1 billion euro) of investment on 6 years (mostly using cashmoney they got). The migration of DSL customer will start begin of next year by Paris and some other big surrounding cities and will then follow on any other disctrict where Free got more thant 15% of the DSL market.

For more details, please see :
http://www.journaldunet.com/0609/060911-free.shtml
(In French, so babelfish can be your friend)

You wrote: "L'amendement "VU / SACEM / BSA / FT Division Contenus" au projet de loi DADVSI cherche à assimiler à un délit de contrefaçon l'édition, la diffusion et la promotion de tout logiciel susceptible d'être utilisé pour mettre à disposition des informations protégées par le droit d'auteur et n'intégrant pas un dispositif de contrôle et de traçage de l'usage privé." (source)

my translation:

The amendment "VU/SACEM/BSA/FT Division Contenus" for the DADVSI bill seeks to include into copyright infrigement the creation, dissemination, and promotion of all software that can be used to read IP-protected media and that does not integrate a method to control and trace this use by private individuals.

***This post licensed under CC-BY***

My French is really rusty (but better than Babelfish?), but a bit of digging online found another source saying this: "L'amendement "VU / SACEM / BSA / FT Division Contenus" au projet de loi DADVSI cherche à assimiler à un délit de contrefaçon l'édition, la diffusion et la promotion de tout logiciel susceptible d'être utilisé pour mettre à disposition des informations protégées par le droit d'auteur et n'intégrant pas un dispositif de contrôle et de traçage de l'usage privé."

Which I translate vaguely as: "The "VU / SACEM / BSA / FT Division Contenus" of the DADVSI legal project hopes to gather under the offense of counterfeiting the spread or promotion of all software susceptible to being used to disseminate information protected by copyright, and which does not incorporate DRM." source

I could be wrong, though...rusty, as I said. In any case, it doesn't seem that different from other laws passed elsewhere, and the firefox/OpenOffice people could relax? Someone else can confirm/refute.

Interesting survey conducted by Microsoft - Lionel - 14:53:10

Source : Journal du Net
http://solutions.journaldunet.com/0409/040915_etud e_postedetravail.shtml

Acadys and Microsoft, have installed in more than 1 million corporate PCs a software analyzing the way the computer is used. Some results are really interesting...and might change some legends: ...The average crash frequency requiring the system to reboot is around 8% ...per session! This results varies a lot with Windows version. Indeed, with Windows 2000, it is around 4%, 3% with NT4 and...close to 12% with XP.

I know this is off-topic but I heard on the radio that Patrick Devedjian, the french minister in charge of the industry was OK with people sharing mp3s with their friends, can anyone confirm this? He even accused the disk industry for the very high prices. Journal du net (in french ;)

By the way Spamgourmet is the ultimate weapon for giving a self-destructing address to websites that require one for registration without getting spammed in the process. It's tested and approved by yours truly.

There is an interesting transcript of a chat with Jacques Le Marois, head of Mandrakesoft. Most of his 44 answers are predictable but I didn't expect that he would predict a 99% market share for linux on the PC in the next years !(with 20% or 30% for mandrake)

Yes 99 percent !

The text is in french but I used this excellent translation engine and mirrored the original translation.