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Technology The technology section of AfricaResource.com publishes relevant articles focusing on various issues, concerns, and developments on new media and open source technologies.
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Tuesday, 29 January 2008 |
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Last month the US Federal Trade Commission cleared the plan by Google to buy DoubleClick. While expressing concern about the privacy implications of the deal, the US authority said that aspect could not be considered in its review. European antitrust authorities, who hold the same view, are set to rule on the matter later this year after the European Commission in November launched a probe, arguing that the merger "would raise competition concerns." According to Cornelia Kutterer, from the European consumers association BEUC, which is partly funded from EU coffers, many ordinary cybersurfers overestimate the level of privacy they enjoy on-line. |
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Tuesday, 29 January 2008 |
Jobs did not pocket the profit from the 120,000 stock options he exercised in 2007, Apple said in the regulatory documents. The options — granted to Jobs for his service on Apple's board of directors — were set to expire in August 2007 so he exercised them and held on to all of the shares.
Under a reimbursement agreement, the company repays him for the expenses of operating his private plane when it is used for company business, an arrangement that cost Apple $776,000 in 2007, according to the filings. |
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Tuesday, 29 January 2008 |
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The Apache Web server, which powers most active sites on the Web, has 135,916 lines of code, with a defect rate of 0.14 bugs per 1,000 lines. Three have been fixed, seven have been verified, and 12 remain. The PostgreSQL database system contains 909,148 lines of code, with a 0.041 defect rate. A few projects, including the Free Software Foundation's glibc or Gnu C Library, even have gotten the defect count down to zero. |
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Tuesday, 29 January 2008 |
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While much has been made about MySQL's open-source model -- MySQL CEO Marten Mickos said the deal validated open source as a "superior way of building software and developing a business" -- King said Sun's interest in the company was "less about open source than developing a stronger middleware and services organization." Realizing the importance of the database to growing numbers of businesses, Sun opted to buy its own offering rather than partnering with the likes of Oracle, he added. |
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Tuesday, 29 January 2008 |
Yahoo’s collaboration is appalling, and Yahoo is not the only American company helping the Chinese government repress its people. Microsoft shut down a blogger at Beijing’s request. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft censor searches in China. Cisco Systems provided hardware used by Beijing to censor and monitor the Internet.
These companies argue that it is better for the Chinese people to have a censored Internet than no Internet. They say that they must abide by the laws of the countries they operate in. But the Chinese Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, the press, association and assembly. Those guarantees may be purely symbolic, but these companies — which loudly protest Chinese piracy of their intellectual property — have not tried to resist. What they are resisting are efforts in Congress that could help them stand against repressive governments. |
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Tuesday, 29 January 2008 |
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Several of the 77 companies presenting this time have been tackling the problem of taking video quality to the next level. It's quite possible to send high-definition video over the Internet, but the cost of doing it at scale is daunting, because it requires about 40 times the bandwidth of a YouTube-quality video. Asankya's solution deals with a fundamental problem of the Internet, which wasn't designed for transfers of HD-size files. Under regular Internet protocols, all the little parts that make up a file take the same route over the network, even if that path becomes congested during the transfer. Asankya's Hypermesh service, which it is previewing at the show, can send individual parts of a large file over different routes, then reassemble them in the right order. |
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Tuesday, 29 January 2008 |
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A Spanish court had asked the European court to give guidance on the case after Promusicae complained of Telefonica's refusal to hand over details identifying the people who used the computer addresses linked to the illegal downloads. Telefonica claimed Spanish law only allows it to share personal data for criminal prosecutions or matters of public security and national defense. The EU ruling is important because courts across Europe have been moving in different directions. |
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Monday, 07 January 2008 |
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IBM constantly updated its machinery and applications for the Nazis. For example, one series of punch cards was designed to record religion, national origin, and mother tongue, but by creating special columns and rows for Jew, Polish language, Polish nationality, the fur trade as an occupation, and then Berlin, Nazis could quickly cross-tabulate, at the rate of 25,000 cards per hour, exactly how many Berlin furriers were Jews of Polish extraction. Railroad cars, which could take two weeks to locate and route, could be swiftly dispatched in just 48 hours by means of a vast network of punch-card machines. Indeed, IBM services coursed through the entire German infrastructure in Europe. |
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Sunday, 14 October 2007 |
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Considering Skype's rapid growth since the acquisition, it can't be an encouraging sign that its founders and early investors are cashing out well before the clock has run out on the original performance goals. When eBay bought Skype, it agreed to pay Skype shareholders as much as $1.7 billion extra if Skype met certain user growth and financial targets in 2008 and 2009. In accepting $530 million, those investors agreed to forgo any future payments, suggesting that none were likely. eBay plans to record that payment, plus $900 million more, as an impairment charge recorded in the third quarter. |
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Wednesday, 22 August 2007 |
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The Wikipedia Scanner, which trawls the backwaters of the popular online encyclopaedia, has unearthed a catalogue of organisations massaging entries, including the CIA and the Labour party. Workers operating on CIA computers have been spotted editing entries including the biography of former presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, while unnamed individuals inside the Vatican have worked on entries about Catholic saints - and Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams. |
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Saturday, 18 August 2007 |
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Now he has been unmasked as Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old who had created an entirely false identity, claiming to be a tenured professor at a private university, but who relied on books such as Catholicism for Dummies when correcting articles on dogma. |
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Saturday, 18 August 2007 |
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He specifically rejects licensing FairPlay because he says its secrets will leak out if it's spread around, and it will be hard to patch when many companies use it. But he may be exaggerating. Microsoft's proprietary but openly licensed DRM has been cracked less often than FairPlay, even though it's licensed to dozens of companies. Is Jobs saying Microsoft can do this but Apple can't? |
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Friday, 17 August 2007 |
Communications Minister Ramiro Valdes, an old comrade-in-arms of President Fidel Castro, raised suspicions about Microsoft's cooperation with U.S. military and intelligence agencies as he opened a technology conference this week. He called the world's information systems a "battlefield" where Cuba is fighting against imperialism.
He also noted that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates once described copyright reformers _ including people who want to do away with proprietary software _ as "some new modern-day sort of communists" _ which is a badge of honor from the Cuban perspective.
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Friday, 17 August 2007 |
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Even if you abolished these old formats in favor of media locked up with technologies like FairPlay or PlaysForSure, you'd still have no bar to music file sharing. Both Apple and Microsoft's systems allow buyers of a song to burn it to an audio CD that can then be copied back to a computer in an unrestricted format. The side effect: It only took a few minutes with a file-sharing program to find MP3 copies of songs sold only on iTunes. And even without the audio-CD workaround, hackers have repeatedly dismantled the defenses of FairPlay and PlaysForSure. |
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Friday, 17 August 2007 |
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Google Inc. saw its share price slip Friday after the company's second-quarter earnings came in slightly below Wall Street's estimates, thanks to higher expenses. However, Google's massive hiring caused a jump in expenses related to payroll and bonuses beyond what the company had budgeted. That caused earnings per share to come in below analysts predictions, even though revenue exceeded estimates. Bottom line narrowly misses estimates; analysts see buying opportunity. |
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Tuesday, 24 July 2007 |
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Mr. Wyler, an executive based in Boston who made his fortune during the tech boom, said he would lace Rwanda with fiber optic cables, connecting schools, government institutions and homes with low-cost, high-speed Internet service. Until that point, Mr. Wyler, 37, had never set foot in Africa — he was invited by a Rwandan government official he had met at a wedding. Mr. Wyler never expected to start a business there; he simply wanted to try to help the war-torn country. But after nearly four years, most of the benefits hailed by him and his company have failed to materialize, Rwandan officials say. “The bottom line is that he promised many things and didn’t deliver,” said Albert Butare, the country’s telecommunications minister. |
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Friday, 11 May 2007 |
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A look at the role women play in open-source community and development, as well as an in-depth overview of new media, online communities (myspace and youtube) and video games. The interview was done by Andrew Eiche for Introduction to Women Studies on May 8 2007 at Binghamton University. |
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Sunday, 29 April 2007 |
This is a technical design document detailing the specification of a future conversion tool for academic publishing, including the workflow of a subscription based e-commerce website. This specification was designed and written by Azuka Nzegwu in 2005, who is now a doctoral candidate in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture at Binghamton university. This specification was sent to the Open Journal System (OJS) development team during the major re-write of their program, and posted on various websites such as Get A Freelancer, PHP Freelancers, Freelancers Direct, ScriptLance, Codelance, Programming Bids, Freelance Web Programming, Project Spring, and others.
You are free to use, edit and modify this technical design document for your own needs as long as you attribute to its creator and developer, Azuka Nzegwu. |
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Sunday, 29 April 2007 |
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This Rwanda is a world away from the Rwanda of 13 years ago. The 1994 civil war razed its infrastructure and decimated its population. Around 1m people were murdered, and twice that many fled the country. The small, land-locked country, in which nine out of 10 people subsist through agriculture, started its long, painful journey into the 21st century with a huge handicap. |
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Sunday, 01 April 2007 |
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An abstract on open source and academic journal publishing. |
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Sunday, 01 April 2007 |
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An abstract on copyright and fair use in academic institutions. |
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Technology 
