Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Thursday, March 13, 2003

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Opening and closing the feedback loop: "I receive great email from the people that read my site. Lots of links to interesting sites, books, music, articles, etc. People connecting what I write about with what they are thinking or reading. Thoughtful questions from enthusiastic beginners about setting up weblogs, getting into design, or making their own font. Contributions that add the depth and breadth of experience..." [kottke.org]

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Lessig Blog writes about The past is: 'Orin Kerr is a careful and powerful critic (in the good sense of that term) of much in the law of cyberspace. He has posted a careful and powerful criticism of my post yesterday. So too have others. But the line I agree with most strongly in Orin's post is: "the public domain will be best served if Eldred is treated as a launching point for legislative reform, not an example of judicial foul play." Agreed. And as I'm the least qualified person to comment on the matter (as I'm the most biased person who has a view on the matter), my efforts are devoted to the future, not this past. [...] But when two federal judges frame their dissent on the basis of a principle that also frames the petition upon which cert was granted, a certain decency would suggest something more than silence.But I leave it to others to resolve the ethics of judicial principle as they apply to this case. There is lots of work to do that will matter much more.'

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MySQL: A Threat To Bigwigs? "Open-source database has dazzling opportunities ahead." (Fortune via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

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Trusted Blog Search: "Micah has simplified his microblogosphere search tool, which he calls Trusted Blog Search. It's really simple. You feed it the URLs for your blog and for your subscriptions file, and it gives you a piece of Javascript that you can copy into your home page template. Afterwards you can search spheres centered around your blog with radius 0 (my blog), 1 (blogs I read), and infinity (the Web). [...] If you try it, be sure to put in the slash following your blog's URL in the customization box." [Seb's Open Research]

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Hubble Spies Evaporating Planet: "Scientists have determined that a planet orbiting a sun-like star 150 light-years from Earth is evaporating. According to a report published today in the journal Nature, much of the hot gas giant may eventually disappear, leaving a dense core behind." [Scientific American > t e c h n o c u l t u r e]

Ending Microsoft's abuse of a dominant position -- Comment()
Microsoft violated EU antitrust rules: "European Commission experts have concluded that U.S. software giant Microsoft violated EU antitrust rules, but their proposed remedies need refining to withstand court scrutiny, sources familiar with the case said. The experts have proposed two major requirements--making Microsoft share more proprietary information with its rivals and uncoupling its Media Player audiovisual software from the ubiquitous Windows operating system, sources told Reuters. Both suggested remedies would go beyond changes agreed with the U.S. Justice Department last year after courts found Microsoft had abused its Windows monopoly."

Lecturing to the Gray Panthers of Finnish IT -- Comment()
Yesterday I made a half-hour lecture to the so-called Gray Panthers of the Finnish Information Processing Association. The audience consisted of ten retired gentlemen (no women, which was not a surpise) with high-profile careers in the Finnish IT sector: ex-CEOs of big IT companies, or otherwise influential figures in Finnish IT.

This Gray Panther group has been active for about three years. The group regularly visits interesting IT sites to find out what currently happens in Finland. This time the meeting started with a quiet moment, because one member of the group had recently passed away.

My lecture was in Finnish and titled "Computational Science Today: Supercomputers and Databases". It was nice to lecture to this group, because there were a lot of questions (to the point!) and comments. Perhaps my rate of lecturing was a bit fast, but I think I managed to give a relatively clear picture of current developments in computational science in Finland, especially in biosciences, chemistry, and drug discovery.

What is a weblog in Finnish? -- Comment()
The English-Finnish IT glossary gives the following translation:
weblog omaloki

This translation is controversial. There are other terms in use, in addition to the English-based words 'weblogi' or 'blogi': 'nettipäiväkirja', 'verkkopäiväkirja' and 'verkkoloki'. (A comment in Finnish: Mutta ei tuo 'omaloki' mielestäni ihan mahdoton sekään ole.)