Here’s an uplifting idea for Christmas – Humanitarian Information for All. Some are intent on putting the world’s literature online (copyright permitting) – “Project Gutenberg”:http://promo.net/pg/ and the “million book project”:http://www.archive.org/texts/texts.php for example. Others like the “International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications”:http://www.inasp.org.uk/, “BioMedCentral”:http://www.biomedcentral.com/ and the “Public Library of Science”:http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/ are attempting in various ways to make the latest in scientific (and particularly medical) research widely available.

The Humanitarian Information for All project has a simpler and more focused goal – ‘to provide all persons involved in development, well-being and basic needs, access to a complete library containing most solutions, know-how and ideas they need to tackle poverty and increase the human potential.’ At the moment because of the cost of Internet access to developing countries they are doing this by producing CD-ROMs. The total budget for the last four years has been around $200,000 – I hope that given the apparent usefulness of the project they get enough funding to complete it.
Thanks to Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka for the link

A local paper claims the Independent Media Centre that started it all in Seattle closed partly because of its decision to have a downtown location costing $3000 a month so that it could be at the heart of the Seattle WTO protest (which was four years ago) and so it could offer its multimedia services to other left-leaning groups.

More controversially the paper’s ‘obit’ suggests classic problems of left splintering were also partly to blame – “the core group running the IMC was cliquish and inaccessible; at one point, nonwhite media activists discussed starting their own competing local IMC” and it also pointed out one of the drawbacks of the open publishing model – readers had “to sort out for themselves the solid, well-researched, well-presented stories from the jargon-laden, factually incorrect anarco-leftist rants”.

Of course Seattle Weekly is part of the alternative press themselves so it may be they had an axe to grind – and the Seattle Indymedia website is still running, with a front-page explanation of their status that is “dismayingly revealing”:http://seattle.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=36723&group=webcast …

I recently learned about “Keith Hampton”:http://web.mit.edu/knh/www/bio.html’s new “weblog”:http://e-neighbors.mit.edu/blog/index2.php and already it has turned up something useful. He just blogged about the release of “preliminary results”:http://www.eurescom.de/e-living/publications/e-living-update-Oct03.pdf from a major study of adoption and usage patterns of Internet use, testing the social and economic benefits of new ICTs.

The best part is that if you are interested in the information for non-commercial/academic reasons you can download the raw survey data and manipulate it yourself (once you have registered yourself at the “UK Social Science Data Archive”:http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/findingData/snDescription.asp?sn=4728).

A new, more computerised television production system being tested at the BBC could help feed the organization’s promised “Creative Archive”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_online_media.html#000861 of publicly-downloadable BBC content. Among the new capabilities on offer:

New footage will be catalogued after it is shot, so different producers can access the same content simultaneously.

“In theory, all newly shot material will be digitised so it can be made available to all BBC programme makers. Think of the advantage: you don’t have to go to an editing suite with four hundred tapes,” Ms Romaine [the BBC’s director of production modernisation] explained.

Computer-based production can allow programmes to be enhanced with additional information (metadata) enabling archiving and content searches based on internet technology.

One might think this sort of thing would already be routine in a large, well-resourced organization like the BBC, but it’s hard to change complex production processes to keep up with the changes that technology makes possible. I hope this experiment proves successful, because it is not until new production techniques like this one become routine that the Creative Archive will really start to take off.

There seems to be a gulf between what the BBC reported its head to have said and what a transcript of the speech revealed. There has been some excited discussion by Danny O’Brien and Alan Connor (and, inevitably, on Slashdot and kuro5hin) that seem based on what they would like this announcement to be rather than what it is.

Matt Jones (who works at the BBC) says the move is, “brave and disruptive – and will have to be executed as such, with no half-measures or compromises to vested interests.”

In fact, while BBC News’ summary suggests Dyke said the Creative Archive would contain “all the corporation’s programme archives”, the speech actually promised to allow “parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download” (emphasis mine). Nothing there about all of the BBC’s archives. And the example he uses – kids downloading, “real moving pictures which would turn their project into an exciting multi-media presentation” make it sound like a collection of digital clip-art.
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The BBC’s director general has announced “plans to give the public full access to all the corporation’s programme archives… everyone would in future be able to download BBC radio and TV programmes from the internet.”

Well, the announcement certainly sounds huge, but as Danny O’Brien reflects, “Sorting out the contractual issues with anything but completely internally produced content will be difficult ” – a huge understatement! And who will pay the cost to digitise and index all that content? Who will decide when enough has been digitised? Will it be seen as a waste of license fee payments to “super-serve” the broadband-using public? Will the BBC actually encourage the use of file sharing applications in order to reduce its bandwidth charges? The list of questions goes on and on…

But even if a fraction of what is possible is achieved, this is a great step forward and it will open a number of important debates.movies blonde free sexfree throat deep moviemovies pussy eating freefacial movies gay freeporn gay movies men freefree samples movie gaymovies free gay postporn movies free granny Map

ChefMoz is a clever idea but a little under-cooked at present. Looking at the London section it has 172 restaurants listed and categorised (out of c. 10,000 available restaurants) and just 24 reviews linked – the Paris entry has 226 entries and 31 reviews. The search engine is pretty limited in its ability to use the categories that have been input. Nonetheless, it is an idea that deserves to go far and I hope it gets developed a little more. If you want to know where to eat in, say, Afghanistan (where conventional restaurant guides may fail to cover you) dmoz may have the answer one day – right now it just has one review.

The main existing London restaurant guides I used to rely on online – Zagats, the Evening Standard and Time Out – all now charge to use them.

Thanks to Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka for the link

The impressive state of Mozilla (the browser I prefer at present) is a little less impressive when you think 1) of the length of time it took to produce a good enough release (time enough for Microsoft to grab 96% of the market) and 2) when you realise that Netscape and later AOL were giving the open source software substantial support by employing programmers to work on it as well as on Netscape its commercial cousin.

Recently AOL announced it is ceasing development of Netscape and is giving the Mozilla Foundation a $2m severance package. So will Mozilla be able to keep forging ahead as an unfunded open source project or will it gradually wither and die? I certainly hope it will continue to go from strength to strength but this will be a pretty interesting test of the open source model.lesbo movies freefree lolita porn moviesredhead free movies pornclips gangbang moviessex samples movie gaygirls in gagged bound moviessex clips hardcore moviestars hot moviemovies kung fumovie lesbian strapon

I downloaded the SuSe 8.2 “experience” CD and it installed without any problem at all. But I didn’t want to be stuck booting from a CD ROM every time I wanted to mess about with Linux (and I don’t know what they left off the “experience”). So I downloaded every file in SuSe’s 8.2 download directory onto my hard disc, created a boot CD from the boot.iso image in the /boot directory and tried to install from the HD with the files onto a new blank HD. And hit a brick wall.

Soon I was on IRC in the #suse channel trying to sort it out and though they were very helpful there (thanks localhorst and cz^thc!) they couldn’t figure out my problem either. And I quickly descended into the hell of trial and error and typing things like “mount -t vfat /dev/hdb1 /mnt” (!)

So I’m giving up again – unless someone who lives relatively nearby would care to have a try at sorting me out either using the stuff I have downloaded or (chance would be a fine thing!) using the pukka 8.2 install CDs.

Failing that, I will have to drag my desktop into town for the next meeting of the Greater London Linux Users Group.

Admittedly my installation is just a tiny bit outside the usual (not having the CDs) but if SuSe is going to make its new Linux downloadable why not do so by just providing the .iso files for all the install CDs instead of providing every last file and expecting the poor user to figure out how to do an installation for themselves?

Anyway, this agony has dulled some of my early enthusiasm for Linux for the desktop I can tell you!

I particularly discussed the threat of Linux to Microsoft and its usefulness in the developing world. The RealAudio stream is here (you have to download it all at once and listen to it – I don’t have a realaudio streamer running).

You may note I have warmed significantly to the OS and its usefulness abroad since I last wrote about this subject in 2001. This is largely due to the ease with which I found SuSe 8.2 installed recently and because I have been impressed with the power of desktop Linux apps like OpenOffice.

I am still not totally convinced it is suitable for the least developed countries but I couldn’t get every nuance of my view in in the few minutes allotted.

The news “hook” for the broadcast was the revelation of a special Microsoft “anti-Linux” fund aimed to make sure gov’ts and large institutions don’t choose Linux by offering cheap or free Microsoft software.

If you want the gist of what was actually broadcast I started by discussing how Linux has been more successful as a desktop than a server application but could have a brighter future in places where people haven’t touched computers before (so they won’t have to unlearn Microsoft habits and the cost savings in software are significant relative to the cost of labour). I went on to suggest that Microsoft may pressure developing countries not to use Linux and when the interviewer suggested this could get MS into trouble I remarked that they have plenty of experience putting private pressure and dodging criticism.

And yes, I admit I may not be everyone’s idea of an expert but they chose me and I hope you’ll agree when my contribution is available that it was at least somewhat helpful, whatever the limits of my knowledge.commercial loans 100 and financecash loan 50020 mobile loan 100 home20 african loans 20to loans uk accessinterest loans 31 onlyaccess college loanspayday credit loan bad advancebad credit 2000 personal loanpayday 2nd loan