These are a few thoughts from the point of view of a hobby economist and friend of old cars. (I have a 1970 Jaguar E. :-)

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I just received an email bounce with an error message saying:

Error 554 – Message could not be sent due to inappropriate content

It was an important email. I had worked into the night to prepare some source code from a programmer in Nigeria for somebody else to work on. I was not amused to be told that my email was "inappropriate".

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ACM Turing Lecture 1972

The Humble Programmer
by Edsger W. Dijkstra

Excerpts:

As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952 and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country. In retrospect the most amazing thing was the slowness with which, at least in my part of the world, the programming profession emerged, a slowness which is now hard to believe. ...

Blogger Robert Scoble, former Microsoft MVP, then Microsoft employee, ran a screen-scraping script to lift 5,000 names, email addresses, and birthdates off Facebook. They noticed and banned him for breach of their terms of use. Read his blog.

After an outcry of many bloggers, Facebook reinstated his account.

A web site converts bitmap images to vector art – it's an online auto-tracer. Just upload your image and we will vectorize it for you.

Vector art is useful because it allows you to scale an image without making it blurry or pixelated.

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The German company G DATA dove into the cybercrime scene and uncovered a few interesting tidbits.

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Einführung

Dieser Artikel stellt interaktive Websites und ihre Technologie vor, die von manchen Marketing-Aktivisten auch "Web 2.0" genannt wird.

Die neue Fähigkeit ist, dass sowohl Sie als auch Web-Besucher sofort durch den Web-Browser in die Website hineinschreiben können, ohne dass sie besondere Web-Editor-Software verwenden müssen.

Das Schreiben unterliegt Berechtigungen, die für jede Person, Gruppe, Webseite oder Art des Beitrags verschieden sein können. Z.B. können Sie manchen Besuchern erlauben, neue Artikel in bestimmte Bereiche der Website zu schreiben, während andere nur das Recht erhalten, einen Kommentar an bestimmte, schon existierende Artikel anzuhängen, oder überhaupt kein Schreibrecht bekommen.

Der alte Weg

Sie sind Unternehmer? Sie brauchen eine Website!

Der klassische Weg, dazu zu kommen, ist, einen HTML-Editor wie Microsofts Expression Web zu nehmen und die Seiten zu schreiben. Dann verlinken Sie sie miteinander und mit einem gemeinsamen Inhaltsverzeichnis.

Wenn Ihnen nicht danach ist, das alles zu machen, weil Sie es selbst nicht können oder weil Sie annehmen, dass ein Spezialist ein besseres grafisches und technisches Design erstellen kann, dann heuern Sie einen Webdesigner an, der alles für Sie erledigt.

Dieses Vorgehen hat eine Reihe von Nachteilen.

[Zur deutschen Version dieses Artikels]

Introduction

This article introduces interactive web sites and their technology, also sometimes called "Web 2.0" by marketing people.

The new capability is that both you and the web site visitors can instantly write into the web site through the web browser, without having to use special web editing software.

Writing is subject to permissions that can differ for each person, group, web page, and kind of contribution. For example, you can allow some users to write new articles in certain areas on the web site, while others may only be given the right to add a comment to certain existing articles or no right to write at all.

The old way

You run a business? You need a web site!

The classic way to get one is to take an HTML editor, like Microsoft's Expression Web, and write the pages. Then you want them linked to each other and to a common table of contents, so you do that too.

If you don't feel like creating the web site yourself, because you're not up to the task or you feel that specialists can make a better graphical and technical design, you'll hire a web designer, who does it for you.

This procedure has a number of disadvantages.