Chirac plans French anti-US "counter-offensive" on Internet culture

Yahoo! News - Chirac plans French anti-US "counter-offensive" on Internet culture

French President Jacques Chirac has vowed to launch a new "counter-offensive" against American cultural domination, enlisting the support of the British, German and Spanish governments in a multi-million euro bid to put the whole of European literature on-line.

The president was reacting last week to news that the American search-engine provider Google is to offer access to some 15 million books and documents currently housed in five of the most prestigious libraries in the English-speaking world.

The realisation that the "Anglo-Saxons" were on the verge of a major breakthrough towards the dream of a universal library seriously rattled the cultural establishment in Paris, raising again the fear that French language and ideas will one day be reduced to a quaint regional peculiarity.

"A vast movement of digitalisation of knowledge is underway across the world. With the wealth of their exceptional cultural heritage, France and Europe must play a decisive part. It is a fundamental challenge for the spread of knowledge and the development of cultural diversity."

It was Jeanneney who alerted Chirac to the new challenge. In an article in Le Monde newspaper, France's chief librarian conceded that the Google-Print project, with its 4.5 billion pages of text, will be a boon to researchers and a long-awaited chance for poor nations to get access to global learning.

But he went on: "The real issue is elsewhere. And it is immense. It is confirmation of the risk of a crushing American domination in the definition of how future generations conceive the world.

"The libraries that are taking part in this enterprise are of course themselves generously open to the civilisations and works of other countries ... but still, their criteria for selection will be profoundly marked by the Anglo-Saxon outlook," he said.

Fear of American cultural hegemony has been a constant of French policy since the first sticks of chewing gum arrived during World War II.

The country's instinctive reaction has been protectionist, and today France maintains a complex web of laws and subsidies to defend its film, music and publishing industries. Only a few voices are ever raised to argue that protectionism can lead to introverted mediocrity.

But in the battle over what the French press has dubbed "omnigooglisation," protectionism is not an option. The all-pervasive nature of the Internet makes any attempt to freeze out a competitor impossible. Which leaves no alternative, Jeanneney said, but "counter-attack".

Linux Fan Admits Microsoft More Secure

Enterprise Windows IT: NewsFactor Network - Windows Risk Mgmt. - Linux Fan Admits Microsoft More Secure

In an academic study due to be released next month Dr. Richard Ford -- from the Florida Institute of Technology -- and Dr. Herbert Thompson -- from application security firm Security Innovation -- analyzed vulnerabilities and patching and were forced to conclude that Windows Server 2003 is more secure than Red Hat Linux .

"Vulnerability counts are much higher with Red Hat than with Microsoft," said Dr Ford. "I am a huge Linux fan, and I have a Linux server in my basement. The first time I saw the statistics I thought someone had mucked about with my database."

The pair examined the number of vulnerabilities reported in both systems and the actual and average time it took to issue patches. In all three cases Windows Server 2003 came out ahead, with an average of 30 "days of risk" between a vulnerability being identified and patched compared to 71 from Red Hat.

But the academics acknowledged that some intangibles, including the relative attractiveness of Windows as a target for hackers, could skew the results. Nevertheless, many attacks these days are aimed at Linux servers rather than Windows systems.

Eclipse lights up Java crowd

Eclipse lights up Java crowd | CNET News.com

Tóm tắt
-- Eclipse đã trở thành platform lập trình dominance cho Java chỉ trong vòng 02 năm
-- Eclipse phát triển theo mô hình opensource giữa các vendor
-- Mô hình opensource giữa các vendor và kiến trúc tuyệt vời là nguyên nhân của sự thành công của Eclipse, cụ thể là tốc độ innovation và phát triển của Eclipse vượt xa các đối thủ.

Dominance
"Eclipse is definitely the dominant Java tools platform," said Thomas Murphy, an analyst at the Meta Group. "And increasingly, the Eclipse organization will be pushing this message of a general-purpose platform."

In effect, Eclipse has managed to unify the great majority of Java providers--with the notable exception of Sun Microsystems, and limited participation from Oracle--something that years of industrywide standardization efforts never did.

"It's over," said Bob Bickel, vice president of corporate strategy at open-source Java company JBoss, referring to competition in the Java tools industry.

"Eclipse has just reached that tipping-point critical mass. There's the economic interest among all the vendors to drop their costs of creating new toolsets," he said.

The Platform
The Eclipse Platform, as it's called, lets a programmer use several different tools from the same application. From the same front end,someone can combine tools for writing code with "plug-ins" for modeling databases or testing applications. IBM is using the Eclipse software to provide a common foundation for its suite of development tools, giving a disparate product set a common user interface as well as a mechanism to share information.

Asked why Eclipse has garnered so much interest in the past two years, Raaj Shinde, Borland's vice president of product strategy and architecture, replied: "I'll give you an engineer's answer. The architecture is incredibly elegant."

Vendor Opensource Model

Perhaps the most glaring difference between the Eclipse approach and Microsoft's is that the Eclipse software is open source, which means anyone can download and modify the code. But the Eclipse Foundation is somewhat unique in its structure, reflecting how corporations are increasingly active in open-source projects.

Hardly a grassroots collaborative effort willing to take code donations from volunteers around the world, Eclipse is directed by vendors. Employees from independent software vendors, or ISVs, hold nearly all the board positions and make up the majority of the contributors.

That vendor membership is by design, said Mike Milinkovich, the executive director of Eclipse. Eclipse's software has developed rapidly because of such membership, coupled with the open-source development model, he said. That's as opposed to a model that relies on industry consortia such as standards organizations.

Innovation
"A lot of innovation is happening in open source," said Milinkovich, who said standards should come after new software inventions. "I always thought that innovating while doing the standards is a little confusing."

Indeed, the pace of development in Eclipse is one of the reasons BEA joined the organization, said Alfred Chuang, the company's CEO. The Java standards body, called the Java Community Process, "is just not fast enough," Chuang said.