Monthly archives: March 2004

Posted By Prostoalex on Slashdot [PeopleAggregator - An Open Source Social Network ] about PeopleAggregator

prostoalex writes “When Orkut, LinkedIn, Friendster, Zaibatsu and Tribe.net just don’t cut it, meet PeopleAggregator, an open-source, PHP-written, FOAF-based social network. There’s the site and there’s the source in case you decide to launch your own. I found out about PeopleAggregator reading this interview with Mark Canter on Read/Write Web today.” I wish such sites would provide profile-conversion tools to encourage jumping ship from one to another.

Nicholas Petreley is uspet about the developers who are violating the spirit of GPL license and creating their own versions of licensing. According to him the spirit of opensource is “share and share alike” and as Free Software Foundation puts it, it is free as in “free speech” and not free as in “free beer”. The article further describes how developers have invented some license compromises.

Here’s the crux of the matter: It’s illegal to create and sell a proprietary application based on GPL code. Given the reality that people are always going to create proprietary applications, developers invented some license compromises that make it possible to build proprietary applications on open-source foundations.

Dwight Silverman praises Firefox Browser and claims it to be Easy, Fun, Fast, Safe & Free. You can make out his love for FireFox by this comment :

I’ve been using Firefox for several months, beginning with earlier releases under the name Firebird. Here’s how good it is: If it weren’t for incompatibilities with some Web pages designed only for Internet Explorer, I’d probably use this as my only Web browser.

Via Slashdot : David Lazarus writes a special report on Sfgate.com : How one offshore worker sent tremor through medical system ? . The reports traces how a transcription work was sub sub sub sub contracted and landed up in Pakistan without the knowledge of the client. They were able to discover only when they recieved a threatening e-mail from Pakistan when the sub sub sub contractor didn’t pay the dues of the end contractor. Even though it hits the idea of outsourcing and offshoring to other countried – its a genuine concern.

Bob Davis from the Associated Press writes in WSJ sited on mlive.com how we can learn the lessons of outsourcing from 4 historical tales that help illuminate today’s debate.

(1) Even high-skilled, good-paying jobs are vulnerable.

(2) Trade liberalization often works with technology to undermine powerful interests.

(3) Domestic workers are always vulnerable to competition from foreigners willing to work for less.

(4) Politics can slow down the transforming effects of new technology.

CIOL carries an article why India urged to embrace 4G ? According to the experts advise India must move forward in setting up a 4G forum that can provide insights into the country’s needs and capabilities in the area of 4G telecom networks.

Expressing the importance of having a 4G forum for the country, Jorge M Pereira, European Commission, Information Society Directorate General said that India should move forward in having a 4G forum that can provide insights into the country’s needs and capabilities in the area of fourth generation telecom networks.

“This forum when formed, can address issues like R&D in 4G technologies, educating the industry about 4G, expanding wireless with an increase in demand, seamless mobility and utilizing technologies of higher frequency spectrum,” Pereira added.

India as a country has got a big talent pool in terms of educational institutions and research organizations and this can help the country in early adoption of technologies like 4G. “India is very good in terms of talent, so the country can provide the talent manpower needed in the areas of computing infrastructure, signal processing, backbone networks, multiple access technologies, channel coding and VLSI,” informed, Prof Shankar Lall Maskara from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

Creation of such forum will boost the chances of India moving towards cutting edge technologies like 3G and 4G. “Establishment of 4G forum is essential for the country now. In fact I am going to meet up with the government of India representatives and very soon we will have this forum functioning as a body,” said, Ramjee Prasad, Director, Center for TeleInFrastruktur (CTIF), Aalborg University, Denmark.

Google has launched two more services currently in preview state at labs.google.com The two services are (1) Personalized Web Search : personalized search results based on user’s interests & (2) Web Alerts : get alerts about new web pages on a topic of interest.

More at Sfgate.com & Forbes.com

via IndianExpresPharma major Lupin Ltd would set up the first of about the 100-odd rural convergence centres (RCCs) -planned by the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) across India to foster public private partnerships to accelerate rural development.

Saritha Rai writes in New York Times how Tiny Loans Make a Big Difference in Lives of Poor. The article traces Mr. Khosla when he was Shamsabad and was listening to the women in rural areas who received tiny loans from a microfinance program run by SHARE Microfin and how it helped them start homegrown businesses, transformed their poverty-stricken lives and made better education possible for their children.

I was completely blown as I listened to the stories of these tenacious women,” Mr. Khosla said. “I started crying.” In his view, the microfinance initiatives he visited in India and Bangladesh last month ran more efficiently than most Silicon Valley organizations. “They have sophisticated credit algorithms,” he said. “Does the woman own a buffalo? Some chickens? Does she have a toilet in her home? What kind of roofing material does her home have? Does she bring a shawl to the village meeting?”

Via LinuxWorld : Internet whizz Marc Andreessen at the 3rd annual “Open Source in Government” conference came up with his personal top twelve reasons for why open source will boom over the next 5-10 years.

(1) “The Internet is powered by open source.”

(2) “The Internet is the carrier for open source.”

(3) “The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed.”

(4) “It’s simply going to be more secure than proprietary software.”

(5) “Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments.”

(6) “Incentives around open source include the respect of one’s peers.”

(7) “Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants.”

(8) “Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel.”

(9) “Embedded devices are making greater use of open source.”

(10) “There are an increasing number of companies developing software that aren’t software companies.”

(11) “Companies are increasingly supporting Linux.”

(12) “It’s free.”