Is it racist to criticise Berlusconi?

Posted by Tim Colbourne at 12:11 PM

Peter Popham, writing in the Independent last week, provided a good run-down on the latest scandals here, together with a forthright attack on everything which he sees as wrong with the bel paese:

Italy today is devouring its own entrails. Private affluence and public squalor; constantly shrinking budgets which inflict vicious blows on schools and universities and hospitals and museums while the entrenched gerontocracies which preside over them are untouched; talented and vigorous youth who flee abroad to find study and work opportunities in ever-greater numbers, while their less-enterprising contemporaries struggle to make ends meet in jobs with miserable pay and no security; organised crime which constantly extends its reach; fear and hatred of immigrants, cynically encouraged by politicians in the government: this is Berlusconi's dismal legacy.

Doing the Microsoft Shuffle: Algorithm Fail in Browser Ballot

February 27, 2010

in Microsoft

Introduction

The story first hit in last week on the Slovakian tech site DSL.sk.  Since I am not linguistically equipped to follow the Slovakian tech scene, I didn’t hear about the story until it was brought up in English on TechCrunch.  The gist of these reports is this: DSL.sk did a test of the “ballot” screen at www.browserchoice.eu, used in Microsoft Windows 7 to prompt the user to install a browser.  It was a Microsoft concession to the EU, to provide a randomized ballot screen for users to select a browser.  However, the DSL.sk test suggested that the ordering of the browsers was far from random.

But this wasn’t a simple case of Internet Explorer showing up more in the first position.  The non-randomness was pronounced, but more complicated.  For example, Chrome was more likely to show up in one of the first 3 positions.  And Internet Explorer showed up 50% of the time in the last position.  This has lead to various theories, made on the likely mistaken theory that this is an intentional non-randomness.  Does Microsoft have secret research showing that the 5th position is actually chosen more often?  Is the Internet Explorer random number generator not random?  There were also comments asserting that the tests proved nothing, and the results were just chance, and others saying that the results are expected to be non-random because computers can only make pseudo-random numbers, not genuinely random numbers.

Maybe there was cogent technical analysis of this issue posted someplace, but if there was, I could not find it.  So I’m providing my own analysis here, a little statistics and a little algorithms 101.  I’ll tell you what went wrong, and how Microsoft can fix it.  In the end it is a rookie mistake in the code, but it is an interesting mistake that we can learn from, so I’ll examine it in some depth.

Are the results random?

Dalai Lama to 'Tweet' on Tibet

February 23rd 2010

Washington, DC, USA, 23 February 2010 (AFP) - The Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama has joined micro-blogging service Twitter, attracting over 55,000 followers in just two days.

The Dalai Lama's Twitter feed -- @DalaiLama -- was launched on Monday, a day after he met in Los Angeles with Evan Williams, one of Twitter's founders.

"Met the Dalai Lama today in LA. Pitched him on using Twitter. He laughed," Williams "tweeted" following the meeting.

The next day, however, the Tibetan spiritual leader had an account and received a "Welcome @DalaiLama" message from Twitter's new spokesman, Sean Garrett.

The Dalai Lama's account has sent seven messages so far although they are not pearls of wisdom from His Holiness but rather links to articles and photos of his activities during his current US visit.

The creation of a Twitter account by the Dalai Lama comes a year after Twitter suspended an account set up by an imposter which attracted tens of thousands of followers.

Following the incident with the fake Dalai Lama account and other impersonations Twitter began a system of "verified accounts" for public figures. The new Dalai Lama account is a "verified account."

The Dalai Lama visited the developer of Twitter team in SF last week !
But they didn't get any pix of the event,
bad guys

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A new MIT project called Sikuli allows people to program using screenshots in lieu of written code. Basically, it lets you reference user interface elements like a Microsoft Word icon, Trash Can or search bar with pictures of the button or icon instead of script. (If you look at the picture to the right, you’ll see functions referencing icons and screenshots of buttons instead of text. It’s best explained in the video below.)

The idea is to make it dead-simple for casual computer users to write their own programs without having to know a programming language. Let’s say you’re building a location-based app that uses real-time bus locations to tell you when the next one is going to arrive. If the city transportation Web site keeps a map of where buses are at all times, you could take a screenshot of the map and instruct the program to send a notification when the marker pin reaches a certain point on the map, instead of entering latitude and longitude coordinates.

Sikuli catalogues user interface elements from online tutorials, computer books and documentation. It analyzes the text surrounding the icons in documentation, performs optical character recognition and uses cutting-edge computer vision techniques to figure out what different visual elements are responsible for.

The team behind Sikuli, which means ‘God’s Eye’ in the language of Mexico’s Huichol Indians, have also found other uses for their technology. You could use it as a visual search engine when you’re lost and don’t know what to do in specific application. If you’re clueless about what a certain button does, you could just take a screenshot of it and use it to search for help. Google’s Goggles mobile app has similar functionality but for landmarks, logos and business cards.

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Amazon, Scared of the Apple Tablet, Tweaks Its Kindle Publisher's Cut

BY Kit EatonToday

Though everybody believes next week Apple will be revealing an exciting tablet PC, complete with reputed e-reader powers, the event has clearly got Amazon running scared: It's just improved its deal for Kindle publishers, significantly.

In a press release to announce the news, Amazon comes directly and efficiently to the point (a slightly unusual step for press releases!) with the words "Amazon.com [announces] a new program that will enable authors and publishers who use the Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP) to earn a larger share of revenue from each Kindle book they sell." The company is preserving some of its existing DTP royalty share options, but is adding in a new 70% option--giving 70% of list price (net of delivery costs) to authors or publishers.

Incredible, they failed by themselves producing a horrible product !!!
How did they thought to survive on the market with a fake product, they sell books... and probably they will sell soon the Apple tablet too,

Nice Try