i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Foolishness reigns in the Old World.

Interesting post about how India’s days of vertical growth in outsourcing are coming to an end.  Why?  As Andrew McAfee noted in his talk “The Revolution Will Be Digitized” yesterday, IT systems are getting smarter and more powerful, allowing customers to interact directly with systems, and increasingly, systems interacting directly with other systems.

Every bleeping bean, indeed.

Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, just decided to allow top-level domains to be written in Unicode rather than ASCII, which will for the first time enable a full URL to be constructed out of non-Latin characters, which should improve accessibility for users in Asia, the Middle East and Russia.  It will also open up a new trove of domains to register; some Icann officials claim there are so many .com Web addresses that it has become next to impossible to find an English word or an intelligible combination of two English words not already in use.

Came across this article today that talks about the recent efforts of the Industry group Consumer Electronics Association and the California Energy Commisson from to prevent the passage of the nation's first energy-consumption standards for big LCD and Plasma Televisions.  Interesting that some TV makers aren't actually against the standards, which they say won't make much of a cost difference for consumers.

A friend and colleague of mine, Andrew Rens, who led the efforts against the adoption of OOXML as an ISO standard in South Africa has a lovely piece on his blog about how the fight went down. It was quite a victory at the time!

 The Indian National Spatial Data Infrastructure under the Department of Science & Technology has released its Metadata standards ver 2.0 The National Natural Resources Management defines the schema and design for the metadata standards. The metadata itself standardizes layer, geographical and access metadata for geographic information systems.

The metadata serves two major purposes; for the spatial data generator and for the spatial data user.