Aah. The good old days. I used Red Hat Linux on an AST Ascentia J50 laptop for a few years around 1997 while going to university. I think the year of the Linux on Desktop was supposed to b. There must have been a Slashdot article back then about it. Shit. This makes me feel old.
I would reccommend taking a look of Abbyy's offerings. Particulary FormReader 6.5 Family which is intented for OCRing forms and semi-structured documents.
Finland UK Land area (km2) 305 000 241 590 Land boundaries (km) 2 628 360 Population 5 214 512 60 270 708 GDP (USD) 142 billion 1 664 billion Annual military budget (USD) 1.8 billion 43 billion Available manpower 1 200 000 15 000 000
How do you suppose we could create a paid army to protect a bigger country with long border against Russia with a fraction of the budget? A paid army of 40 000 would cost three times more and would be able to defend only part of the country.
You make it sound like we live in the North Korea or something. The conscription is preferred by 79% of Finns according to the polls.
Unlike Americans, I think most Finns don't consider the government to be evil or sinister. The government _does_ serve the people as we live in a well-fare state (at least for the time being) and this is what majority of the Finns want.
P.S. You really did the Right Thing (TM) with Iraq... It really improved the safety around the world.
"He who thinks time is money understands neither time nor money"
How do you save time? How do you set aside 10 minutes a day to save for a summer holiday? Where do you deposit it? How can you make a redrawal?
"Saving time" means usually just how to make more things in same amount of time ie. to be more efficient. But do you have more time? I don't think so. With all the timesaving gadgets and tips people just feel busier than ever and that they don't have enough time. We westerners often consider time to be something that is useful only if it is spent some how productively. In some other culture time is something we create by doing nothing.
I recommend reading Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age by Thomas Hylland Eriksen
"The turn of the millennium is characterized by exponential growth in everything related to communication - from the Internet and email to air travel. "The Tyranny of the Moment" deals with some of the most perplexing paradoxes of this new information age. Who would have expected that apparently timesaving technology results in time being scarcer than ever? And has this seemingly limitless access to information led to confusion rather than enlightenment?
Thomas Eriksen argues that slow time - private periods where we are able to think and correspond coherently without interruption - is now one of the most precious resources we have, and it is becoming a major political issue. Since we are now theoretically "online" 24 hours a day, we must fight for the right to be unavailable - the right to live and think more slowly. It is not only that working hours have become longer - Eriksen also shows how the logic of this new information technology has, in the space of just a few years, permeated every area of our lives. This is equally true for those living in poorer parts of the globe usually depicted as outside the reaches of the information age, as well as those in the West.
Exploring phenomena such as the world wide web, WAP telephones, multi-channel television and email, "Tyranny of the Moment" examines this new, nonlinear and fragmented way of communicating to reveal the effect it has on working conditions in the new economy, changes in family life and, ultimately, personal identity. Eriksen argues that a culture lacking a sense of its past, and therefore of its future, is effectively static. Although solutions are suggested, he demonstrates that there is no easy way out. " - Book description from Amazon
see http://www.ubiq.com/weiser/calmtech/calmtech.htm This seems similar to Calm Technology research done at Xerox PARC. The research was/is about "engaging both the center and the periphery of our attention and moving back and forth between the two. Ordinarily when driving our attention is centered on the road, the radio, our passenger, but not the noise of the engine. But an unusual noise is noticed immediately, showing that we were attuned to the noise in the periphery, and could come quickly to attend to it."
They designed a Dangling String to "visualise" network traffic:
"Bits flowing through the wires of a computer network are ordinarily invisible. But a radically new tool shows those bits through motion, sound, and even touch. It communicates both light and heavy network traffic. Its output is so beautifully integrated with human information processing that one does not even need to be looking at it or near it to take advantage of its peripheral clues. It takes no space on your existing computer screen, and in fact does not use or contain a computer at all. It uses no software, only a few dollars in hardware, and can be shared by many people at the same time. It is called the "Dangling String".
Created by artist Natalie Jeremijenko, the "Dangling String" is an 8 foot piece of plastic spaghetti that hangs from a small electric motor mounted in the ceiling. The motor is electrically connected to a nearby Ethernet cable, so that each bit of information that goes past causes a tiny twitch of the motor. A very busy network causes a madly whirling string with a characteristic noise; a quiet network causes only a small twitch every few seconds. Placed in an unused corner of a hallway, the long string is visible and audible from many offices without being obtrusive. It is fun and useful. The Dangling String meets a key challenge in technology design for the next decade: how to create calm technology."
from Designing Calm Technology by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, Xerox PARC, December 21, 1995 http://www.ubiq.com/weiser/calmtech/calmtech .htm
As to my knowledge current B/W microfilms remain in excellent condititon for 500 years, if stored properly and should remain readable for 1000 years.
Color microfilms are expeted to last only 100 years due to more complex chemical structure
Currently there aren't any real long time (500 years for example) preservation solutions for digital information. Best recommendations are to use open and standard file formats, refresh to new media frequently and develop emulations for current computer systems so that not only images, text etc. files but also complete applications like multimedia CD-ROMs can be accessed in the future.
I've read about the matter a bit in work (Helsinki University Library's Centre for Microfilming and Conservation.)
I'we been wondering why none of the library classification systems have emerged on the net? Back in the good old days when I relied on the library for the information Universal Decimal Classification system was extremely handy. Even if you didn't know the name of the book you could browse thru a certain category that interested you.
The idea is that a book can belong to a single class that is marked by a decimal schema. Top categories are: 0 Generalities. Information. Organization. 1 Philosophy. Psychology. 2 Religion. Theology. 3 Social Sciences. Economics. Law.Government. Education. 4 (vacant) 5 Mathematics and Natural Sciences. 6 Applied Sciences. Technology. Medicine. 7 The Arts. Recreation. Entertainment. Sport. 8 Language. Linguistics. Literature. 9 Geography. Biography. History.
The main categories are defined further down: 61 Medical Sciences. Health. 62 Engineering and Technology Generally. 63 Agriculture, Forestry, Stockbreeding,Fisheries. 64 Domestic Science; Household Economics. .....
and further and further: 631 AGRICULTURE 631.1 Farm Management 631.15 Planning
The classification would be used like KEYWORD meta tag in HTML and search engines would index it. This would enable user to specify word as well as the topic they are looking the information on.
To prevent the misuse of the classification, only one or two classes should be allowed per page. Like "Marketing of agricultural products" -> 380.13:631 (38 = Trade. Commerce. Communication. Transport.)
UDC is language independed and it has already been translated to numerous languages. Also most libraries use some kind of numerical classification so many people are familiar with the concept
To help page authors to classify their pages a special website could be created. It should contain at least
Information about UDC and why it should be used
Complete browsable UDC listing in various languages
Easy to use "wizard" that guides you thru the classification and spits out the correct HTML-tag.
UDC aware search engine
Petition list for other search engines to enable UDC classification
How about it? Is it a good idea?
One major problem in the matter is that the UDC classification is copyrighted. I couldn't find more than a skeleton listing from the web! So the first step would be to negotiate the licence for it or to the competing Dewey Decimal Classification. I don't think it would be wise to start building a own scheme without negotiations since both UDC and DDC are in extensive use. But if everything else fails, Gnu Decimal Classification to the rescue!
Copyright protects all original creations that can be considered independed works. Their usage does not matter. The poems written to desktop drawer, webpages etc. are protected just like the newest Hollywood blockbuster if they are creative and independed works. The defenition doesn't have anything to do with artistic merits.
There is actually two types of copyrights: commercial rights and moral rights. The moral rights are not well known in the US. I'm not sure if they are recognised at all there, but in the EU they are as real as the commercial rights.
Commercial rights mean that the author has exclusive rights to
produce copies of the works
make the works available to the public.
The commercial rights can be transfered/sold to some one else.
Moral Rights mean are divided in to
Parenthoodright: the creator has a right have his/her name mentioned when copies are made or the work is made available to the public.
Respectright: The creator has a right to deny the owner of the commercial rights to alter or publish the works in a way that insults his/her artistic value or uniqnes.
The moral rights can not be sold or transfered
I'm not a lawyer.. I'm just attending a course about Copyright in information technology
At least in the EC the copyright for original works is the life time of the creator plus 70 years. After that time the work enters the public domain. There is no way to extend copyright beyond that time.
In countries outside the EC the copyright usually lasts 50 years after the creator's death. This is in accordance with the Bern convention.
The name has changed since: HG is now known as Hyperwave Information Server and it is a commercial product. More info at http://www.hyperwave.de
I have tinkered with HWIS 4.0 and think it is really nice system to implement intra/extranets and it runs on several architectures including Linux. If you don't want to customize the interface it is fast to get up and running.
Some of the features include
documents are stored to database (native or oracle
links are separated from text/html and their integrity is automatically maintaned
dynamic navigation structures
rights management
integrated verity search engine
ODMA support (save from apps to server directly)
Windows Explorer extensions (HWIS looks like a network neighborhood)
SSL
NT / Unix authentication gateway
Multilangage support
Saveable searchobjects that notify changes by email
Server clustering
Annotation for any object
Workflow
New 5.0 version includes messageboards and mail.Haven't tested it yet though
FBI nor CIA nor NSA have _any_ kind of jurisdiction outside the US borders. FBI operates domestically and CIA operates abroad. The thing is i guess most of the CIA operations are illegal by the laws of the country they are operating and by international conventions. To me CIA is no different from the "evil" KGB. Both are propably spying on Finnish high-tech industry to gain trade secrets for domestic industry.
The thing is that currently there is no counter-force to the US. It's rather unfortunate since they no can do pretty much what they please and there is no one that can do anything about it. EU should do something about it. Echelon for example which is operating on European soil.
I don't think it's illegal to post someone's mail unless they have *specifically* noted that the message is copyright.
You don't have to use the Copyright statement to retain Your copyrights. There is a international treaty about this (sorry, forgot the name) and US has finally signed this treaty so this applies to the States as well.
This means that all original works You produce are protected automatically. No (c) plah-plahs needed.
One thing to remember is that copyright covers only the specific outlook of the work, not ideas or content. In the case of written works this means that you can use the exact same plot in a novel as long as you don't copy word-by-word. Same thing with programming, exact same functionality can be used, but not by copy-paste -method (unless there are some patent issues...)
Has anyone figured out is the code reuse possible with all these different licences? Can one mix code from Mozilla, Jikes, Darwin and BSD maybe? I asume GPL is out of the question...
While the details and performance numbers are unknown I wouldn't dismiss the news as a lie. Russians (Soviets) do have some top minds working for them. For how long is a different matter. They seem to be leaders in many military related areas like
aerodynamics: I've read that MiG-29 behaves like a FBW-plane with conventional hydraulics. Su-27 and it's variants are extremely maneuvrable.
Air-to-Air missiles: At the moment they have superior close range infrared missiles. There are no western missiles with similar capabilities. Noteworthy are also optical targeting systems used in MiG and Su and backwards fireing IR-missile. The latter might be a nasty surprise for the pursuing pilot;)
manned space-flights: While soviets never went to moon they have more experience about living in space than US. Mir might be technologically an ancient piece but it has exceeded every expectation. The problems have accumulated hands-on experience how to do repairs in space.
Since the Register's article seemed to be a bit light on the facts I dug up the full accepted proposal from the European Parliament's www-server. Check out the HTML-version at (no spaces):
Sorry about not linking directly, but slashdot seems to enter spaces to long URLs:(
It is also available in WordPerfect and PDF formats and in several languages, suomi mukaanluettuna:).
I haven't read it thru yet (It will take some time... 68 pages in PDF file). My first impression was that MEPs are actually trying to earn their salaries... they have made quite a lot changes and amendments to the Commisions proposed text.
If I have energy left after reading the report, I'll write to my MEP and try to get his opinion about matter and why he voted for/against it. I urge other Europeans do the same even it may seem pointles, but that's just the way how representational government works.. Naturally one should not send the usual flamemail to MEPs.
Slashdot Mirror
The year of the Linux on desktop was supposed to be 1998. How embarrasing posting error...
Aah. The good old days. I used Red Hat Linux on an AST Ascentia J50 laptop for a few years around 1997 while going to university. I think the year of the Linux on Desktop was supposed to b. There must have been a Slashdot article back then about it.
Shit. This makes me feel old.
I would reccommend taking a look of Abbyy's offerings. Particulary FormReader 6.5 Family which is intented for OCRing forms and semi-structured documents.
http://www.abbyy.com/formreader/
Finland UK
Land area (km2) 305 000 241 590
Land boundaries (km) 2 628 360
Population 5 214 512 60 270 708
GDP (USD) 142 billion 1 664 billion
Annual military budget (USD) 1.8 billion 43 billion
Available manpower 1 200 000 15 000 000
How do you suppose we could create a paid army to protect a bigger country with long border against Russia with a fraction of the budget? A paid army of 40 000 would cost three times more and would be able to defend only part of the country.
You make it sound like we live in the North Korea or something. The conscription is preferred by 79% of Finns according to the polls.
Unlike Americans, I think most Finns don't consider the government to be evil or sinister. The government _does_ serve the people as we live in a well-fare state (at least for the time being) and this is what majority of the Finns want.
P.S. You really did the Right Thing (TM) with Iraq... It really improved the safety around the world.
"He who thinks time is money understands neither time nor money"
How do you save time? How do you set aside 10 minutes a day to save for a summer holiday? Where do you deposit it? How can you make a redrawal?
"Saving time" means usually just how to make more things in same amount of time ie. to be more efficient. But do you have more time? I don't think so. With all the timesaving gadgets and tips people just feel busier than ever and that they don't have enough time. We westerners often consider time to be something that is useful only if it is spent some how productively. In some other culture time is something we create by doing nothing.
I recommend reading Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age by Thomas Hylland Eriksen
"The turn of the millennium is characterized by exponential growth in everything related to communication - from the Internet and email to air travel. "The Tyranny of the Moment" deals with some of the most perplexing paradoxes of this new information age. Who would have expected that apparently timesaving technology results in time being scarcer than ever? And has this seemingly limitless access to information led to confusion rather than enlightenment?
Thomas Eriksen argues that slow time - private periods where we are able to think and correspond coherently without interruption - is now one of the most precious resources we have, and it is becoming a major political issue. Since we are now theoretically "online" 24 hours a day, we must fight for the right to be unavailable - the right to live and think more slowly. It is not only that working hours have become longer - Eriksen also shows how the logic of this new information technology has, in the space of just a few years, permeated every area of our lives. This is equally true for those living in poorer parts of the globe usually depicted as outside the reaches of the information age, as well as those in the West.
Exploring phenomena such as the world wide web, WAP telephones, multi-channel television and email, "Tyranny of the Moment" examines this new, nonlinear and fragmented way of communicating to reveal the effect it has on working conditions in the new economy, changes in family life and, ultimately, personal identity. Eriksen argues that a culture lacking a sense of its past, and therefore of its future, is effectively static. Although solutions are suggested, he demonstrates that there is no easy way out. " - Book description from Amazon
see http://www.ubiq.com/weiser/calmtech/calmtech.htm
h .htm
This seems similar to Calm Technology research done at Xerox PARC. The research was/is about "engaging both the center and the periphery of our attention and moving back and forth between the two. Ordinarily when driving our attention is centered on the road, the radio, our passenger, but not the noise of the engine. But an unusual noise is noticed immediately, showing that we were attuned to the noise in the periphery, and could come quickly to attend to it."
They designed a Dangling String to "visualise" network traffic:
"Bits flowing through the wires of a computer network are ordinarily invisible. But a radically new tool shows those bits through motion, sound, and even touch. It communicates both light and heavy network traffic. Its output is so beautifully integrated with human information processing that one does not even need to be looking at it or near it to take advantage of its peripheral clues. It takes no space on your existing computer screen, and in fact does not use or contain a computer at all. It uses no software, only a few dollars in hardware, and can be shared by many people at the same time. It is called the "Dangling String".
Created by artist Natalie Jeremijenko, the "Dangling String" is an 8 foot piece of plastic spaghetti that hangs from a small electric motor mounted in the ceiling. The motor is electrically connected to a nearby Ethernet cable, so that each bit of information that goes past causes a tiny twitch of the motor. A very busy network causes a madly whirling string with a characteristic noise; a quiet network causes only a small twitch every few seconds. Placed in an unused corner of a hallway, the long string is visible and audible from many offices without being obtrusive. It is fun and useful. The Dangling String meets a key challenge in technology design for the next decade: how to create calm technology."
from Designing Calm Technology by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, Xerox PARC, December 21, 1995
http://www.ubiq.com/weiser/calmtech/calmtec
As to my knowledge current B/W microfilms remain in excellent condititon for 500 years, if stored properly and should remain readable for 1000 years.
Color microfilms are expeted to last only 100 years due to more complex chemical structure
Currently there aren't any real long time (500 years for example) preservation solutions for digital information. Best recommendations are to use open and standard file formats, refresh to new media frequently and develop emulations for current computer systems so that not only images, text etc. files but also complete applications like multimedia CD-ROMs can be accessed in the future.
I've read about the matter a bit in work (Helsinki University Library's Centre for Microfilming and Conservation.)
I'we been wondering why none of the library classification systems have emerged on the net? Back in the good old days when I relied on the library for the information Universal Decimal Classification system was extremely handy. Even if you didn't know the name of the book you could browse thru a certain category that interested you.
The idea is that a book can belong to a single class that is marked by a decimal schema. Top categories are:
0 Generalities. Information. Organization.
1 Philosophy. Psychology.
2 Religion. Theology.
3 Social Sciences. Economics. Law.Government. Education.
4 (vacant)
5 Mathematics and Natural Sciences.
6 Applied Sciences. Technology. Medicine.
7 The Arts. Recreation. Entertainment. Sport.
8 Language. Linguistics. Literature.
9 Geography. Biography. History.
The main categories are defined further down:
.....
61 Medical Sciences. Health.
62 Engineering and Technology Generally.
63 Agriculture, Forestry, Stockbreeding,Fisheries.
64 Domestic Science; Household Economics.
and further and further:
631 AGRICULTURE
631.1 Farm Management
631.15 Planning
The classification would be used like KEYWORD meta tag in HTML and search engines would index it. This would enable user to specify word as well as the topic they are looking the information on.
To prevent the misuse of the classification, only one or two classes should be allowed per page. Like
"Marketing of agricultural products" -> 380.13:631
(38 = Trade. Commerce. Communication. Transport.)
UDC is language independed and it has already been translated to numerous languages. Also most libraries use some kind of numerical classification so many people are familiar with the concept
To help page authors to classify their pages a special website could be created. It should contain at least
How about it? Is it a good idea?
One major problem in the matter is that the UDC classification is copyrighted. I couldn't find more than a skeleton listing from the web! So the first step would be to negotiate the licence for it or to the competing Dewey Decimal Classification. I don't think it would be wise to start building a own scheme without negotiations since both UDC and DDC are in extensive use. But if everything else fails, Gnu Decimal Classification to the rescue!
More information about classification on internet see:The role of classification schemes in Internet resource description and discovery
My personal computer is called TOTORO after the character in Hayao Miyazaki cartoon "My Neighbor Totoro"
More info about the film is at http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/totoro/
Copyright protects all original creations that can be considered independed works. Their usage does not matter. The poems written to desktop drawer, webpages etc. are protected just like the newest Hollywood blockbuster if they are creative and independed works. The defenition doesn't have anything to do with artistic merits.
There is actually two types of copyrights: commercial rights and moral rights. The moral rights are not well known in the US. I'm not sure if they are recognised at all there, but in the EU they are as real as the commercial rights.
Commercial rights mean that the author has exclusive rights to
The commercial rights can be transfered/sold to some one else.
Moral Rights mean are divided in to
The moral rights can not be sold or transfered
I'm not a lawyer.. I'm just attending a course about Copyright in information technologyAt least in the EC the copyright for original works is the life time of the creator plus 70 years. After that time the work enters the public domain. There is no way to extend copyright beyond that time.
In countries outside the EC the copyright usually lasts 50 years after the creator's death. This is in accordance with the Bern convention.
http://www.hyperwave.com
The name has changed since: HG is now known as Hyperwave Information Server and it is a commercial product. More info at http://www.hyperwave.de
I have tinkered with HWIS 4.0 and think it is really nice system to implement intra/extranets and it runs on several architectures including Linux. If you don't want to customize the interface it is fast to get up and running.
Some of the features include
New 5.0 version includes messageboards and mail.Haven't tested it yet though
FBI nor CIA nor NSA have _any_ kind of jurisdiction outside the US borders. FBI operates domestically and CIA operates abroad. The thing is i guess most of the CIA operations are illegal by the laws of the country they are operating and by international conventions. To me CIA is no different from the "evil" KGB. Both are propably spying on Finnish high-tech industry to gain trade secrets for domestic industry.
The thing is that currently there is no counter-force to the US. It's rather unfortunate since they no can do pretty much what they please and there is no one that can do anything about it. EU should do something about it. Echelon for example which is operating on European soil.
You don't have to use the Copyright statement to retain Your copyrights. There is a international treaty about this (sorry, forgot the name) and US has finally signed this treaty so this applies to the States as well.
This means that all original works You produce are protected automatically. No (c) plah-plahs needed.
One thing to remember is that copyright covers only the specific outlook of the work, not ideas or content. In the case of written works this means that you can use the exact same plot in a novel as long as you don't copy word-by-word. Same thing with programming, exact same functionality can be used, but not by copy-paste -method (unless there are some patent issues...)
One famous quote comes to my mind...
or something along those lines. I don't have a copy of ANH handy right now...
Has anyone figured out is the code reuse possible with all these different licences? Can one mix code from Mozilla, Jikes, Darwin and BSD maybe? I asume GPL is out of the question...
While the details and performance numbers are unknown I wouldn't dismiss the news as a lie. Russians (Soviets) do have some top minds working for them. For how long is a different matter. They seem to be leaders in many military related areas like
I guess every country has their strong points.
Since the Register's article seemed to be a bit light on the facts I dug up the full accepted proposal from the European Parliament's www-server. Check out the HTML-version at (no spaces):
http://www2.europarl.eu.int/dg7-bin/seid.pl?PRG= DOCRAPPORT+APP=RAPPORT+FILE=PE-RAPPORT- A4-0026-99-EN+LANGUE=EN
Sorry about not linking directly, but slashdot seems to enter spaces to long URLs :(
It is also available in WordPerfect and PDF formats and in several languages, suomi mukaanluettuna :).
I haven't read it thru yet (It will take some time... 68 pages in PDF file). My first impression was that MEPs are actually trying to earn their salaries... they have made quite a lot changes and amendments to the Commisions proposed text.
If I have energy left after reading the report, I'll write to my MEP and try to get his opinion about matter and why he voted for/against it. I urge other Europeans do the same even it may seem pointles, but that's just the way how representational government works.. Naturally one should not send the usual flamemail to MEPs.