Capodanno 2006

It has finally come.
The last day of the year.
One year is over, another one pressing to begin.
As all people who count generally do, I HAVE to write something about it.
I cannot just pretend it is a day like all the others, even if it actually IS.

My Blog is changing, first in size.
It is so big it takes hours to publish a new post.
I should delete some, if I could.
But I cannot throw away anything.
My yesterdays walk with me and I hope also my tomorrows will walk, at least for a little while more, with me.
And my blog is my past, my present and my future.
In a communication era, my blog is the way I choosed to communicate.

How effectively I do not know.
To communicate is our passion and our despair.
We just cannot not communicate.
Oterwise we would really just be one big isolated loneliness.

How would I define my blog? In which category?
When requested I have no answer.
I cannot find a category that fits what I write.
The only definition that came into my mind was: life.
Because life is what I write about.
My life, your life, somebody else's life.
I also write of death, but just as something in opposition to life.

If computers are digitalization of life, well my blog is the undigitalization of computers.
I want to see computers, telephones, TV, Internet as a part of our life, as tools to live everyday life, better or worse that is up to us.
They are just that: tools and not ourselves.
Behind every electronic device, every new discovery there is the human being and there will always be the human being.
This world will never be a computers' world.
It will be a men's world in which computers have their place.
I have written about the new slavery of progress, as a warning more than as a report.

I want to write about the freedom of man, about the challenge of living, about the most important questions I have always asked myself.

What is the mistery of life?
Part of the reality of our life is the fact that we do not know it.
We just live.
We live today that is the last day of the year, and we will live tomorrow that will be the first of the new year.
And we hope to live many tomorrows, as many as we can, as many as we will.

The city of Trees

The name Boise comes from the French boisé (meaning "wooded").
The name was given after French-Canadian trappers first explored the area after crossing the arid desert plains.
Finding green trees at the site, primarily cottonwoods along the river, they named it “the city of trees”.
It is the capital and the most populous city of the State of Idaho.
If you look for a nice place to live, this should be included in your list.
And if you plan to invest your money in a nice home Boise mls could be your choice.
The place where you decide to live should guarantee a good quality of life, a nice weather and why not? The chance to buy a house at a good price being sure it will be a good investment since you would be moving to a growing area that is experiencing a housing boom.
The housing demands right now have outpaced the providers. Also, prepare for intense negotiations since this makes it a seller’s market!

In the Boise Homes Guide you can browse and look for the most convenient place to live and the house of your dreams.
You can look by city, by property type and by price.
Well, one thing is for sure, the choice is huge and you just CANNOT not find what you are looking for!

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Saddam

About 40 minutes of the two-hour 20/20 special on small TV was preempted last night by the Saddam execution. Oh, well. But as Rex Hammock suggests, ABC should put the show — especially the preempted parts — up online. (They had a few segments online as a preview at the 20/20 site.) Better yet, for this show of all shows, they should take each segment and put it up on YouTube: turn the big TV about small tv into small tv.

Jeff Jarvis

Don’t worry, somebody will do it…
It follows the same pattern.
Saddam is but an “accidental” content, the “subject” of the day, of the week, of the month, of the year.
Someday he will end in the “Archives” and one day he will be forgotten.
Coming up once in a while on the post of somebody ”like Saddam…”, like the ones before him and the ones after him.
He will disappear eaten by the flow of time that will have more new, more important things to report.
There will be another “subject” of the day, of the month, of the year…

Herr Grupp's company

There is a company in Germany whose manager (and owner) is Herr Grupp.
This company is extremely competitive and successful.
Mr. Grupp said once: I do not fear Chinese’s competition.
And he IS right, if there is someone to fear it’s him.

And what’s the secret? Very simple.
He is ALWAYS in his company, he personally knows any of his employees and they know that he knows.

I wouldn’t be surprise knowing that he uses the services of Snoozester.com.
What does Snoozester.com do?
Very simple: they help your staff get to work on time
Herr Grupp understands that it is psychologically wrong to reprimanding employees for being late to work.
He avoids it just offering them a solution!
Snoozester's Corporate Wake Up Call Service enables the staff to schedule hotel-style one-time and repeating wake up calls online and then receive them on their phones anytime, anywhere; it's that simple. This unique service can help any organization stand out from the crowd as an employer of choice.

Snoozester's Corporate Wake Up Call Service is:

- Affordable

- Tailored to every need

And more than anything it is

- Easy to Use

because Snoozester’s Corporate Wake Up Call Service is built upon the same easy-to-use web-based interface as the popular Snoozester.com consumer wake up call service. They designed this interface to be as intuitive and easy-to-use as possible. The participating employees simply follow the instructions in their invitation email to setup their accounts, add and verify their phone numbers, then can start scheduling wake up calls online and receiving them on their phones.
Besides it is quite cheap.
They charge you on the base of the number of user accounts you need. The minimum is 10 accounts. Each participating employee on your staff will have his/her own account. Generally, each account costs $12.00 / month and they don't set any limit on the number of wake up calls that each user can schedule. They also offer volume discounts for organizations that purchase a larger number of accounts.
And more… you can Request a free trial corporate account for your organization…



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Every Status has its symbol

And what is the symbol for the status of needing money?
In this case we do not have a symbol, we have a word:
loans.
And where to find the best loan?
In this case we have a phrase:
loans from select loans.co.uk.
Either you need personal loans or secured loans or just a loan comparison, the link is the same.
Whether you are looking for cheap unsecured personal loans, secured loans or even a guaranteed car loan they will have a deal that will appeal to you.
With so many loan companies fighting for your business there are many personal loan offers that may be cheaper than what you have been quoted already.
Unsecured loan rates can vary enormously between lenders, also car loans can be an expensive form of personal loans.

We ALL KNOW that the cost of Christmas can be devastating, which is why so many people end up taking out a loan or clocking up debt on their credit cards in order to manage financially over the festive period.
It is utterably silly to loose time regretting, and it is intelligent to spend it trying to solve the problem.
If you run into financial difficulties with your UK unsecured loan you can try to contact your personal loans provider to explain your situation, they will generally be sympathetic to your cause, if you notify them before you default on any loan repayment. In most cases the loan repayment can either be deferred for a set amount of time or the repayment schedule of the personal loan can be increased therefore reducing the payments.
I have a symbol for the status of "needing money", but "knowing where and how to get it":



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The Internet Revolution

A revolution is something that mines the bases of a society, turns it upside down and creates new rules and new visions.
The Internet represents a fundamental and extensive force of change that will leave few areas of our lives unaffected.
The French revolution definitively didn't bring what if was fought for:
Liberte' Egalite' Fraternite'.
France is still far away from being a real free, equalitarian democracy.
What the French revolution undoubtedly brought was a big change of "Players".
The king, the oligarchic noble society lost their heads first and their power consequently.
The new, fresh, smart, progressive, middle class began to rule a new France with different laws and different, what we would call today, business models.
And that is exactly what the Internet revolution is doing, in a peaceful way of course, without the need of the guillotine, but not in a less painful way.
The "Dumb Companies" will leave the way to the "Smart individuals".
"In a world of dumb terminals and telephones, networks had to be smart.
But in a world of smart terminals, networks can be dumb."
"Bits go in one end and come out the other. Data flows – like water in a river".
Because the network is stupid, its providers cannot compete on features.
They have to compete on price, speed, availability and content.
The money is not any more in the Network.
Content is where the "smart people" come in and the "dumb companies" go out.
Today the biggest opportunity in Information Technology hangs on the fact that the capacity of the Internet and of a PC is going to be virtually unlimited.
That the hardware to produce content is getting so cheap that most of the people can have access to it.
Who is going to produce the next best movie?
Maybe an unknown boy, with little means but great brains.
Who is going to produce the best song on the Hit Parade?
May be an unknown group with little means and great ideas.
Even one single person with good software. You can have a full orchestra in your PC and direct it with your keyboard.
Who is going to be the next Bill Gates?
The train is already running, hurry up to jump in.



Patrizia from a World on IP

Letters are signs for sounds

Roman inscriptions were carved in capital letters into stone.
As an early scribe eloquently put it, the beauty of the lapidary letter resides in a principle as simple as it is inspired: a stroke of shade, a flash of light.

Today’s inscriptions are on paper or on a computer screen.
The letters name is :fonts.
There is a story that in 1501 Aldo Manuzio introduced a type that would get more words to the page, to produce cheaper editions. He was Italian, so the style was called italics.
Burmese script is rounded because, written on palm leaves, straight strokes would have cut the fabric.
Chinese ideograms are composed of strokes and flicks as they were rendered by brush.
Western capitals are angular because they were chiseled in stone, lower-case letters fluid as they were written with a quill.
Form follows technology.
The invention of printing imposed its own constraints.
Today the computer is both tool and material.
Frutiger, typeface designer, began inside out by superimposing variations of the same letter in different typefaces.
Today, you can find all the fonts you can fancy at
Urbanfonts.com .

It brings you the most amazing collection of free fonts and free dingbats on the web, with over 8,000 freeware.
They even tell you how to make your own fonts.
Google is the best known, even if not the best looking, logo in the world.
Do you want to know the font in which it is written?
Click the link and you will.

Acquisition

With blog advertising Payperpost will add a little piece to the already blooming business of Pay per Blog.

Some could find less "lowering" to publish ads on their blogs instead of writing about a brand or a product. As if the latter could diminish the value of what they write.

I'll report a comment about this matter:

"The insidious effort to buy bloggers’ voice and credibility in the name of buzz just won’t stop. So I want to make my own blogger’s pledge to you:
1. No one can buy my editorial voice or opinion.
2. No one can buy my editorial space; if it’s an ad it will clearly be an ad.
3. No one should be confused about the source of anything on my pages.
4. I will disclose my business relationships whenever it is relevant and possible.
Jeff Jarvis"

As if a good actor would stop being a good actor when he performs in a commercial.
There is a schizophrenic aspect in being an actor or a writer which makes him greater the bigger is his "performing schizophrenia".
The power of an actor is in actually "being" the character he performs, as much as the power of a writer is in "being" the character playing in his writing.
In other words, it doesn't matter what you perform or you write, it matters "how".
The subject is but the "accidental" content, while acting or writing is "presenting" or "living" that particular subject.

In my opinion writing about is much more than writing around, about something else and showing an ad on the top of the page.
Besides being different is also newer and much more effective.
One hundred people seing an ad is less than ten people reading a post about that ad.
Nothing new about that, but it could more easily catch the "PR over.."blogs.

This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

Progress

As for new media, Lagadère said that “Our adaptation will not consist of making a systematic and mechanic transfer of our press to the Internet. That would be a mistake. Our advantage will remain in the richness of our content. We will not submit to the mutation of modes of consumption; on the other hand we will play a part in their evolution.”


They will.
Because there is one thing which is called progress and it happens either you want it or not.

It isn't as slow as some people would like and not enough fast as some other would.
But it always comes.

They will make portable screens that will look just like a newspaper or a book, where the written content will be there as long as the reader wants and needs it.
Everything is going to get virtual, because virtual means less space and less space is what we need in this overcrowded world.
Everything is going to be consumed and is going to disappear in a tiny memory somewhere where you can find it when you need it.
At least everything that can be virtual.

We better get used to the idea and like it if we want to survive...

PayPerPost Postie Patrol 3

PayPerPost Postie Patrol 3


The Internet continues to evolve, integrating video and podcasts as well as the inexorable increases in broadband access and processor speed.
Browser enhancements proceed and the Web is now the largest recipient of advertising dollars.
Blogs have achieved a critical mass and online magazines are more central to the intellectual debate than printed materials as more people get their news online than from any other source.
Entertainment for most of young people IS the NET and no TV anymore.
TV is "the best of this and that" posted on YOUTUBE by this or that.

Soon the news will be explained not by a journalist, but by an actor who knows how to make them hilarious and entertaining.

All the world is moving towards the Net.

Forces are coalescing that will produce a shift comparable at least to the spread of broadband. This change will have enormous financial, cultural and political repercussions, and the most interesting aspect of the coming transformation is that it will not be some new and unexpected thing.

In this contest this movie and this very special holiday season Postie Patrol assumes the aspect of contemporary and widespread way of commercializing a brand more than a special product.

What makes it new and following the actual trend is the breath of "reality show" where the actors are people on the road and the landscape is the road of a city.
Payperpost is that, commercials made not by professionals, but normal people in their blogs.
People who write what "they think" and about what "they like" or "they personally know" and NOT what they are told to.
This is the spirit of the "new advertisement" and HP can rightly have a place in all this with its Digital Photo Printing.
Because unprofessional, but good pictures are an essential part of the new type of advertisement and a good camera at an affordable price is the right tool for the blogger.
So, I think I have answered: what I like is the "reality into the reality" and would I like to be in the next postie patrol?
Why not?

This is a post sponsored by HP, please read disclosure policy.

Internet: the land of the copywrongs

The other day somebody wrote to me:
"I like what you write, and found some nice statements I am going to copy, because I like them..."
"Go ahead" I said, and I meant it, I didn't care.
Also because it was something I in turn had copied from Eric Fromm.
Yes the Internet could be called as the "e-learning" Network.
I guess that guy never had and never would have read Eric Fromm.
I gave him a great chance...

Sometimes I read thinks I have the impression I read somewhere else.
Sometimes I have the impression the Internet is the place where ideas are exchanged and downloaded like movies or music.
No copyrights, just exchanging of culture.
Yes, the copywrongs can produce a much bigger revenue for the society than the classic copyrights.
With the second you made rich a few, with the first ideas create new ideas, and many new ideas create progress and progress is what man was born for...

The world is getting smaller

In Italy once we said "Donne e buoi dei paesi tuoi"

Also because buying meat from another country was not so difficult, but finding a wife from abroad was unthinkable.
It is not so anymore.
On the contrary, if you are an "old style man" who is looking for the traditional type of woman, it is more likely that you will find the perfect match in an eastern country that in your own.
And meeting her is no problem any more.
With the Internet and the right Dating site nothing could be easier.
Russian brides prefer to get to know a person before creating a more serious bond or marriage. Furthermore, Russian and Moscow brides are different from brides of other countries because marriage is their key priority irrespective of age.
St.Petersburg brides are marriage-minded and strive to create a family in the future because that is what they are being taught by their mothers. They even have a song for little girls in Russia which translates as: “I am a little girl, I’m not going to school, buy me little sandals, and I’m getting married”.
So, if you are tired of career women and want to have a traditional family, you can go to Lovers planet websiteRussian brides.
There are thousands of Russian brides seeking men for marriage. Loversplanet.com is a specialized dating service, offering a huge database of beautiful, intelligent, caring women that will certainly be the right match you are looking for.


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Europe

The Europeans are as hearting an example of the amalgamation of many cultures as I have ever seen; a glorious feat of uniting the worst of many worlds.
Europe has turned away from aggressive military chauvinism and has embraced substitute nationalism: economic glory.
And this would be good, if it didn't mean: economic Italian glory, economic French glory, economic German glory and so on.
It is still a war, fought without military weapons.

Old fashioned nationalism still survives in every nation, but a general common nationalism lives mostly in one issue: the AntiAmericanism.
The left, Socialists and Communists alike, want the Americans out and want to harm American interests.
But the extreme right too, wants the Americans out.
The post war era is over, Europe has now become an important economical power and an equal and trusted partner, and that is what Europe wants to be.

Tomorrow's Networks

Robert Cringely writes:

"what network technology will be dominant, say, five to seven years from now? I can say with some assurance that it will be IP-based and that it will have the capability to appear to legacy devices just like the analog network being replaced. But on the network level, will it be DSL, digital cable, WiMax, Broadband-over Power Line (BPL), Ultra-Wide Band (UWB), WiFi, or something behind Door Number Three? On the application level will it be unicast, multicast, edge-caching, peer-to-peer, or yet something else from behind Door Number Three? The answers are "yes" and "yes," but the details vary depending on who is your ISP."

It is always a challenge making previews about the near future.
Certainly tomorrow's network will still be a mixture of the actual one, unless something else proves to be better and cheaper.
Wimax and BPL have looked for some time like a good perspective, but it is very silent now, and for what I saw they promised much more than what they could fulfil.
DSL looks to me the network with the best chances, providing that we go on, on the road of shrinking video and music files and using in a more rational way the banwidth.
I guess the Future of the Netwok is more a matter of content than a matter of bandwidth.
Without an alluring content all the bandwidth of this world is for nothing.
The request for broadband came from the Mass Market with the widespreading of P2P and exchanging of files (Music and Video).
When there was an alluring content there was also the request for more and more banwidth.

It will also be a matter of new habits and new lifestyle.

We will watch movies on the big screen, downloaded on our computer.
We will mostly call VoIP.
We will be able to connect to our home, when we'll go on holidays.
We will do a million other things. Whatever the Network will be, it will need to be: Cheap, Reliable, Available, Open.

And most of all YOU will need to be ready to run a network, being it your personal one (connecting more devices in your home) or your office's.
Because a Network needs somebody who knows how it works and how it must be handled.
From this the importance to know everything about networks.
How?
Network+ Training will help you, teching online ALL what you need to know.
And in an easy way.
You can learn Computer Networking by Watching it Configured on an Actual Network.
Learn How to Administer Your Very Own Network, go on the website and try the Demo Video.





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Of Pharmas and Telcos

“Of Pharmas and Telcos
A truism circulating in the halls of Bell Labs in the 1980s and 1990s was that the pharmas and the telcos had higher operating profits than other business sectors because they both had huge upfront costs driven by research and development and long times between risk and reward.
What would we think of a Scrooge who could cure diseases that blighted thousands of people's lives but did not do so? Clearly, we would be horrified. But this has increasingly been happening in the name of economics, under the innocent sounding guise of "intellectual property rights."
Stiglitz outlines the fact that generic drugs (e.g., for AIDS) can cost 100 times less than the same drugs that are protected by intellectual property rights, and many die as a result. He attacks Big Pharma's claim that such monopolization spurs big research spending by noting that drugcos spend more on advertising and marketing than they do on research, and they're far more likely to fund research on "lifestyle drugs" than on killer diseases that afflict poor countries.
The antidote Stiglitz proposes is a medical prize fund to reward the development of public-domain cures for low-profit-potential diseases like malaria. This, he says, could be one of several ways to promote innovation where it is needed.”

David Isenberg

Our economy IS run by profit.
Our society IS run by profit.
Every company HAS to make profits.
And every year BIGGER profits.
Of course the pharmas research and produce what sells best.
And that is what can slightly change OUR life style.
The lifestyle of the people who can afford to pay.
That makes huge profits.
Viagra makes huge profits, while a NEW drug against Malaria WOULDN’T.
Either we change the way we think and we live or things will go on this way, as long as the rich will rule and consume most of the resources of the planet where we live.

Letter to Santa Claus

The best of 2006 was the one written by the son of my friend Ludovica.
He wrote:

Dear Santa,

thank you very much for sending me as a Christmas present a brand new sister.
To be honest I would have preferred a new computer. I badly needed one, since mine was quite old and slow.
I understand that close to Christmas they got expensive, but, if you want, I can give you the address of a website where they give HP Coupon and you can have a good discount.
If you have a little bit of spare money, you could still add something for me.
In principle this year you just had one present for my family, while the next you will have two children to please (me AND Rossella).
You could eventually save next year also on hers (she will still be a little baby, AND little babies are happy with little).

Thank you very much, Best Regards

Yours truly

Antonio

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The real end of Monopolies.

The real end of the World's monopolies will not come with a LAW.
It will come with a WAR.
The war of the many against the few.

The Internet is the Revolution.

There are two major problems for the broadcasting of entertainment (TV, Movies, Videogames) on IP

1) Bandwidth.
Now the TV is already broacasted via Cable or on the Fiber optic Networks.
Because there the bandwidth IS NOT a major problem.
When we want to download on the normal DSL, in a P2P way, we can easily see the limits.
The speed of downloads depends on the bandwidth that we HAVE and also on the bandwidth the one which gives us the content HAS.
And we are always on a queue. and the more alluring the content, the more it takes to get it.
Because we are talking about UNICAST.

The normal TV, Cable, satellite broadcasting is done in MULTICASTING.
If you consume 4 Megabits to stream a content, you consume it for one as well as for 1 million or more.

Multicasting is not possible FOR NOW on the Intenet, but will be in a very near future.
We already are able to compress from 4 Megabits to 256 Kilobits and still have a very good quality.

2) Content and Copyright.

Entertainment on IP will not only change the way the content is broadcasted, but the content itself.
First it will be "more global".
In Europe we will be able to watch at the same programs than in Japan.
But not only.
If you reduce the cost of producing content and broadcasting it, you also increase the number of producers and broacasters.
That means that the few that are ruling the market nowaday WILL loose the control of it. That means the REAL END OF THEIR MONOPOLIES.

Long live the Internet.

Can't catch it? A virus can still hurt you.

I thought I was safe.
My mail machine is a Microsoft Outlook 2003 based on a Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. Listening to its creator you can't have anything better than that as it is safe and secure.

You will find out that it does a good job sending your mails from the sender to the receiver and viceversa.
But what you also may find out is that it will let all the unwanted stuff pass with your mails even though I thought no virus could ever and possibly pose a threat to my mail.

And so, you will have to install many other programs to avoid all those things like Firewalls and Virus protection, which in principle should be included in your operating system.
You are never finished with it, because it will become an every day job as all those guys creating those malicious stuff go on and on doing so.

Some time ago I wrote a post about Norton 2007 download, I also tried it and since then I can say I am quite satisfied.
They also have a Help and Support forum that I find quite useful, and a FAQ Section
I didn't get any virus, but I am always on alert...I do not open suspicious emails and also unsuspicious emails...I just read the ones I am sure about.

This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

Mobile Computing

Ned Porting offers a view on the future:

# Desktop computers at home will become obsolete
# Online services will be widely used for storing and processing personal data (like calendars & appointments, notepads, investments & paying bills, photo albums, sound & video collections, etc)
# Mobile devices capable of performing such tasks will become the new cell phones
# Only tasks that really need large storage or high processing speed will be carried on at regular computers
# And yet another step later, even accomodating computers onsite for such specific tasks will become unfeasible, and those tasks will be out-sourced to CPU-farms, dedicated servers/processors run by IT companies


My first monitor was a 15 inches, my second 17, now I am happy with a 21.
But I am far behind.
Many have huge screens which they use to look at movies and so.

Nobody would ever prefer a small cell phone screen to a big one.
It is like going back to a tape recorder when you own a HiFi.

The cell phone is very good for the purpose it was invented for: telephoning. Providing that it is not too expensive.
In fact, SMS are far more popular than telephone calls, for the only reason that they cost much less.

You can take pictures or movies with your cell phone, but if you want to have a good picture or a good movie you use the appropriate tool.
The future IS NOT a cell phone for Everything, even if that is what the Telcos would very much like.
I still believe that MOST of the people are not TOO STUPID...

Nobody versus "Somebody"

"As the online video world explodes with everything from amateur snippets to full-length features, new search engines are crawling, tagging and organizing the visual data.
The goal: To find the most relevant video, and not just any video.
Clearly, we're at a point when watching video online has become an intriguing, amusing and entertaining experience. When the first videos were streamed on the Web, it was painful to watch the 15 frames per second and the endless buffering. Today, it's less painful and certainly bearable.
By 2007, consumers won't just want bearable video, however. They'll want organized video. Heretofore, it's been about making video available and easy to watch. Tomorrow, it'll be about making it easy for people to find what they want amid the explosion of video content going online."

The Search engines will certainly be ready in a shorter time then the amateurish "producers".
One has to learn to cope with the lack of tools, the lack of actors, the lack of experience, the lack of hardware, the lack of all the basics that you need to produce a video.
The challenge is huge and people are not ready.
But sometimes enthusiasm and inventive can play a good role.
One hand, two false eyes and the appropriate speech can help to show what you want: that the unknown man on the road, the everyday guy can compete with the "bigs" and who knows? He can risk to win...

And payperpost can help.

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Written with the heart

This, for me, is the TOP POST 2006.
Written by Rajesh Jain

He talks about his son and every letter, every word, every sentence is the mirror of his love and his wonderful view of life.
Love is in the beholder's eyes.

"Of all the Tech Talks I have written this year, the one that is closest to my heart is the letter I wrote to Abhishek when he turned one in April.
An excerpt: "Sometimes, I wonder what you understand and know. Or how you learn. Or what you are thinking.
If only I could get a little peek into your little mind.
But then that's the charm, I guess. Every so often, you'll surprise me with what you can do. I look forward to coming home every evening and seeing a little different, a little unpredictable kid.
And, you never let me down!...It is probably an understatement to say that you've changed my life. When you are away (or I am travelling), I miss you a lot.
The mobile has become a photo album. I have seen your photos since birth innumerable times.
And I cannot get enough of you. You came to us with great difficulty and after a long time.
That is why perhaps I now treasure the moments with you so much more."
I ended thus: "There are times when I think you are as old as the New India that we are seeing! Your spirit and exuberance reminds me so much of our country. As you both grow up, I hope that same positive energy stays and infects the world around."

I am sure he will have the same positive energy his father has...

Antivirus Program

"Phishing is just spam being used to trick people into revealing some information to the phisher, and relies very heavily on social engineering to succeed. By blocking spam effectively, the bait never reaches its target, and the opportunity for deception is crushed.
Phishers are now sending more targeted emails to businesses and these e-mails are designed to appear as though they were sent by another member of staff at the same organization, typically from the IT or HR departments. It seems that people will share their passwords fairly willingly via e-mail if they trust the source. It doesn’t hurt that this new breed of phisher promises treats to those who cooperate or threatens the employment of those who don’t."

Phishing is not just Spam, it is a try to cheat to get information's in order to get money.
And it is getting more and more dangerous.
It is treathening to harm the life we are used to.
How could we live without the online Banking?
Without being able to buy online, to book a plane, a holiday?
It is not necessary, it is unavoidable to use an antivirus program.
But how to choose the right one?
Norton AntiVirus 2007 download is where you can look and find the one that suits you best.
There you can find the Norton Software Comparison.

This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

Our society....

"If I was a kid now, I'd find a lot more to rebel against than what we faced in the 1960s: the draft and the insipid program of Levittown.I'd utterly reject the false commoditized reality and set out to discover the world. I'd get busy building a society with a plausible future (and be real excited about it)."

Then you would wake up and find out that nobody wants what you want: most of the people want just a cheap oil replacement.
And that is what you HAVE to promise if you want to be elected.
People want to believe in miracles. People want to have their own car, they want to consume as much oil or whatever available as they need.
People do not want to SAVE, people want to CONSUME.
Because that is what they have done all their life, that is what they have been taught to do, and that is what they want to do for the rest of it. And if you want to be liked YOU have to deliver or at least promise that.
WE are, MOST of us, addicted to this kind of life.
We created a consuming society and MOST IMPORTANT,our society is created on the base of consuming.
The more we consume, the healtier is our economy, the richer are the people who rule it.
And you do not want a REVOLUTION, do you?

What is a digital camera for?

To fill your life with colors.

"Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet"

Describing a color in terms of something else has a long story.
Homer wrote of "wine dark” seas, Romans called a particular blue from overseas, "ultramarine", and a dye produced by a whelk "purple".
Take a herd of cows, feed them mango leaves, make a puree of the earth on which they have urinated day after day for months.
Dry, refine, and you have got "Indian yellow".
"Puce”’s named after the supposed hue of a flea's belly (Latin pulex)and the "blue" of jeans (bleu de Genes)after a shade once associated with the city of Genova.
The dye "magenta" was invented in 1859 and named to commemorate the battle of Magenta which occurred the same year.
In the computer language colors are numbers.
How do you fancy a tie in Pantone 537?
For me colors are brilliant, gorgeous, vivid, flaunting,glaring,loud, mellow,matching,pastel,kaleidoskopic,and a digital camera is good if it can paint my life with colors.
That is what digital photography is for.
Capturing the light which changes the world we see.
Revealing the harmony of colors.

Why would I like to win a HP digital camera?
I tell you a little story.
Once I met the mother of a friend of mine.
She was walking with her granddaughter.
"How nice she is!!! She looks so much like her mother, bla, bla, bla"...

"Wait to see her pictures!..."

I guess this explains WHY I would like a new digital camera...
We have our little virtual world where we can keep the image of ourselves we like to look at, or the pictures of the loved ones as we like to see them...(or to show them, which is almost the same)and a good digital camera IS the perfect tool for that.

This post is sponsored by HP , please read disclosure policy.

Blogging-journalism

" Then he challenged me to sum up why reporters should blog. I said it is to bring back the humanity of journalism; to restore the credibility we thought we protected but in fact lost when we insisted that we could and should be objective; to break down the wall we built separating ourselves as journalists from the members of the public we serve; and to join the conversation that is happening without us."

There are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they like nor quite grown to like what they get.
They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise.
That in my opinion is where blogging comes into the picture..
The blogging-journalist is partly in the entertainment business and partly in the advertisement business.
Advertising either goods or a cause, or a government.
He just has to make up his mind whom he wants to entertain and what he wants to advertise.
The hypocrisy of the Press begins when newspapers pretend to be "impartial" or "servants of the public".
This only becomes dangerous as well as laughable when the public is fool enough to believe it, which is very often the case.
Blogging spares the journalist the need to be a slave of hypocrisy, since it spares him the need to make money out of it.

With supreme control of TV in the power either of multi-billionaires or a State Corporation, and the control of fewer and fewer newspapers being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the brain-washing of the public has increased, is going to go on increasing forever, and cannot be diminished.
But it seems to me probable that the ingenious part of the human race still has some surprising cards up its sleeves.

Those who find it hard to imagine that the big are not going to go on and on getting bigger, and the small smaller, and more helpless, that we are condemned, infact, to the "dull calamity" of a continous increasing uniformity, understimate the technical capacities of man.
In terms of "real money" of comparative purchasing power as distinct from the nominal cost in inflated or depreciated currency, a good car today is dirt cheap.

Similarly it is certain that in the near future technicians will find the way to produce cheaper and cheaper hardware.
The "revolutionary change" which may be nearer than most people suppose, consists simply in the technical possibility of a reversal of past trends in the control of the "mass media", the opening of opportunities for minorities to express their opinions, to show their capabilities.

America's cornucopia

Americans' lifestyle will have to change and it will have to do so not for a self decision, but because it is overtimely right that it does so.
"the American cornucopia is becoming an emptier basket, with fewer fruits, less energy, and not many gold nuggets left in it."
The American cornucopia was full of fruits which didn't belong to it, energy that didn't belong to America and gold nuggets that have to be shared.
It is overtimely right that a little percentage of the world population stops consuming the highest percentage of energy, resources, richness of the world.
The rich have to get less rich and the poor less poor.
That is the meaning of the word Globalisation.
That is also the meaning of the word Justice and the meaning of the word Peace.

There is no peace without justice and peace comes only in one flavour: distribution of resources.
That is why the Americans ( and many Europeans) have to rethink their life.

Credit Cards

Could we survive without a Credit Card?

I do not think we could, at least I COULDN'T.
It is a part of my life as the telephone or the car or the Internet.
I couldn't buy online, I couldn't do my shopping, I couldn't travel, I couldn't do any of the things I like best.

But, of course, you need a certain discipline in using them.
Because that little piece of paper looks magic, can open the doors to all your dreams, but can also open the doors to the worst nightmare if you overuse it.
And that is so easy...
You just give it and all your burdens are finished.
You do not have to count how much it is, the Bank will think of it...

Besides many of us overlook the cost of using them.
We all suppose they are free, but then we find out that MOST OF THEM ARE NOT.
They cost dearly, so dearly that sometimes it would be better to pay cash...

How to walk in the "credit cards jungle"?

There is a place where you can compare the pros and against and choose what best suits your needs.
You could even find something with 0% balance transfers
Go to
credit card news or credit card advice and you will find the best deals on UK credit cards.
Creditcards-gb is a one-stop-shop for credit card information. They provide up to the minute financial advice and a guide to the best deals on the UK market.
Whether it’s about how to use your credit card to reduce debt, save or even make money, take the 3 step search and let Creditcards-gb put you onto a winner.

This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

Working Italian style

Many may wonder how the Italians acquired their reputation of not working as hard as most Europeans.
I am able to solve this mystery. They acquired this reputation by not working as hard.
When they work they rest, when they rest they work hard.
On the rare occasions when two groups of Italians are competing with one another as to who should perform a certain job, the result is most surprising.
You would naively assume that both groups are keen to do the job.
Not at all.
Whenever the Boilermakers Union starts a quarrel with the Ship Union as to who should drive wooden nails into metal or metal nails into wood, they call a strike for two or three months.
In other words ( and this is the basic law of Italian Left)if two Italian men are equally eager to do a job, the job is sure to be left undone.
Normally, in the factory, workshop or office, they use their working day to build up energy for those fatiguing hours of leisure when they watch TV, play football, redecorate the spare bedroom, etc...
It is little wonder that when at last they go to bed they are inclined to believe that the time for rest has arrived.

Being a pharmacist

I am a pharmacist and owned my own pharmacy for more than twenty years in a small town in Italy.
Unlikely many could think, it was a very rewarding job, at least for me.
Most of my affectionate customers were old people, people who needed more talking, communicating than drugs.
And they were welcome in my store, because I knew how to explain them everything about illnesses and drugs and life.
They wanted to know and to understand how and why, but the usual medical jargon was something completely abstruse for them and so I used very plain explanations.

The most spread disease was having a "high pressure" and in my pharmacy they could test it and talk about what was happening in their body.
The heart is like the pump in your heating system, I explained, if it works too much it is true, the system works perfectly, but you can expect it won't have a long life...
So is your body, if you want to get older (and everybody wants it) you have to keep your pressure under control and your heart not under stress.
But what I found out was that very often the side effects of the drugs, they were taking for lowering the blood pressure, were more noxious than the high pressure itself.
First, their effect didn't last for long, after a while they had to upgrade the doses, second, they had other symptoms that were worse than the ones caused by the high pressure.

Luckily there are drugs that are effective without side effects and those should be the first choice.
Because high pressure, once there, will never heal.
Once you have high pressure it will only go worse, unless you cure yourself.
That means you have to take drugs daily and for a long time.
Time enough to have side effects if you use the wrong drug.
Hyperestol reducing high blood pressure naturally.
that should be the choice.
Hyperestol has been clinically proven to be 99% effective in reducing the high blood pressure without any pharmaceutical drugs and avoid their harsh side-effects.

A pharmaceutical-grade product, Hyperestol was formulated using the latest nanotechnology to ensure effectiveness. Published clinical studies show remarkable results...complete Blood Pressure reduction after prolonged use.

What could I say more?
Follow your pharmacist suggestions...

This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

What is PR?

I see it as a stair, or better, as a ladder, where if you are PR1 you are on the first step (or the last if you prefer) and if you are PR 10 you are on the last (or first, depending where you look from).
That is, if your blog or website is very important, people have to pay to be with you, while if you are on the bottom you have to pay the people to be with you.
A small detail that makes a huge difference...

Writing about a Dot Com Mogul

How to make money online.

Interesting blog.
I found a lot of explanations I always wanted to know and never had the chance to read.
It is well structured and helps the reader to find what he is looking for without any hassle.
You can begin with the Top Posts that, as John says, "These posts received the most views, reactions or comments. They are also generally just plain good. Rather than having you surf through the entire blog to pick out the best bits of information, Top Posts make my best posts available on this page. I will be adding to it as more posts qualify for top posts status."
That means you can go back and find something new soon.

Who is John Chow?
I do not know him.
He lives in Vancouver and I live in Italy.
I have no chance to meet him, but I can have an idea how he is by what he writes and I bet he is willing to read what I think of him.

When bloggers talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about ourselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one could shut them up, when they become wearisome, as easily as one can shut up a book of which one has grown wearied, they would be perfect absolutely.

Well, here is what I have to say.
First I have the impression he is a very nice guy.
Coming from a printing company and realizing the world was bigger than the place where he worked.
Life is what you make out of it or at least what you try to make out of it.
And he was good because he was able to fulfill his goals.
"On April 1999, I started a little technology site call The TechZone. That site has risen to become one of the largest hardware tech sites on the net. Currently the site has over 10,000 pages and gets over 200,000 page views per day. "

But what I like best:

"Besides taking care of the day to day business at The Tech Zone, I can be seen riding my bike around Vancouver, working out at Fitness World or climbing Grouse Mountain. I am best known for his famous quote “My World! My Rules!” and “Oh well.”
That tells me he still has his feet on the ground and life for him comes first than profit.

So, this was a paid comment John, but something I liked to write.
I think I will go often to your blog.



This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

On Sex

Our society has become a copulating country, but not an erotic one.
The race is mantained and sex, from healthy animal sex down to pornography and, more recently, to video nasties, has become more fashionable, more of a pastime than it was some years ago.
But the alluring, sex-charged, electric atmosphere is still light years away.
A few girls do not regard a party as a success if they have to return home after it to sleep in their own bed.
It does not really matter whose bed it is, as long as it is not theirs.
This is all very straighforward and honest, even if it is not very romantic.
Another change in the social climate of sex has been that such antiquated ideas as jelousy and fidelity are allegedly going out of fashion.
To regard a woman as your own property (that is how jelousy and fidelity have been interpreted) is an insult which offends against all feminist principles.
A man's right to philander has never been seriously questioned throuhout the ages.
Female infidelity was always regarded as an outrage, in some societies punishable by death.
At the same time, all over the world, while they were stoning women to death for their infidelity, male philandering was regarded as a bit of fun.
There have been several attempts at solutions.
One was to grant complete sexual licence to both parties.
On a lower social level wife-swapping was in vogue for a while, but this never really worked.
As a rule, one party enjoyed his or her sexual freedom and the other party did not dare to confess that he or she hated every minute of it and suffered like hell, least he or she be regarded as a fossil.

A fresh start for life

We are suffering from an outrageous number of preventable diseases caused in part by eating too much of the wrong kind of food and in part by lack of exercise.
A comfortable life (no stairs, no walking, no hard work) has bad side effects too.
The less we exercise, the lazier we become, the more tired we get.
And this condition affects also our moods and ways to see life.
Everything gets difficult when you lack the strength to do it.
Choosing a biblical lifestyle that emphasizes fibers, natural fruits, vegetables and whole grains as well as healthy habits and exercise will help you feel better, but sometimes, that is not enough.
And if that is the case there is something you can try.
Revivol is the best all-natural chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia remedy on the market today and works fast, within 5 to 7 days, to quickly stop CFS without any negative side effects. This means a happier you! Used over 3 to 6 months, CFS and fibromyalgia can be completely reversed.
Revivol has been clinically tested and proved to be 99% effective in soothing the symptoms of CFS and Fibromyalgia without any pharmaceutical drugs and avoid their harsh side-effects.
It is a pharmaceutical-grade product, and was formulated using the latest nanotechnology to ensure effectiveness. Published clinical studies show remarkable results...complete CFS reversal after prolonged use.
So, if you are looking for a fresh start for life you could try to change your lifestyle with the help of Revivol.
Revivol can stop chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and help you to find the strength you lack.


This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

About Americans (and Europeans)

"The day will come when the spending will stop, and the easy credit gravy train will derail taking down with it Mr. and Mrs. American consumer. It’s going to be painful, but isn’t any bad habit painful to kick. The problem is that this bad habit supports the life of our economy, our comfort levels coupled with standards of living. It’s going to be ugly. The savings rate level in this country is below 1%, its actually negative when you consider all the credit Americans have leveraged, scary stuff huh… but is does not matter they say, all is well the federal town crier is yelling. Keep spending; keep consuming, for your lives depend on it."

There is an erroneous European view of the Americans as people who are unduly-in the vulgar sense of the word-"materialistic".

If today's attitude of the Americans proves something, it proves the opposite.

It shows that they believe in miracles, and this belief in miracles is simply an expression of the notion that if you try hard enough you can make wonderful things happen.
The chief trouble with the Americans of today is that they have their expectations on the wrong miracle.

Gout, Goutinol

In my grandfather's time suffering from gout was a sign of distinction.
If you suffered from it you certainly belonged to the "Upper Classes".
Because it meant that you could afford eating a lot of proteins (meat), while the mass lived on corn and rice...

Now a days it only means terrible pains, the ball of the big toe being the commonest site.
Gout is one of the most common forms of arthritis (joint inflammation). It appears as an acute attack often coming on overnight.
Without treatment the attack subsides in a week or so and when patients first develop gout there may be intervals of many months or even years between attacks. As time goes by, these tend to become more frequent and more severe and eventually many joints may be involved, sometimes all at the same time. At this stage a state of chronic or continuous joint disease may develop with progressive joint damage, disability and crippling (chronic gout).
At my grandfather's time there was not much to do, but staying in bed and praying it could pass...
But today, among the huge number of chemicals, it is possible to cure gout with natural remedies that work fast, within 2 to 3 days, to quickly stop Gout without any negative side effects. This means less pain and the chance to be active again soon... Used over 3 to 6 months, Gout can be completely reversed.

Goutinol has been clinically proven to be 99% effective in soothing the symptoms of Gout without any pharmaceutical drugs and avoid their harsh side-effects.
It was formulated using the latest nanotechnology to ensure effectiveness.
Published clinical studies show remarkable results...complete Gout reversal after prolonged use.
You may find further details looking for Goutinol

This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

America's decay

After the Second World War the Americans thought:
"Let's be fair. We have been Top Nation for long.
We have done splendidly well once again.
Now we must give others a chance: let's decline."
But it is not so easy to decline.
After a few centuries other nations just will not believe that you are as inefficient and couldn't care less as you are.
They will insist on thinking of you as succesful, reliable and rich, however unsuccesful, unreliable and poor you may have become.
It needs the unfailing effort of rich and poor, old and young, intellectual and illiterate, skilled and unskilled.
It is an arduous, almost herculean task, but nothing will deter the
Americans, once they have made up their minds.
They played a great part in destroying Nazi Germany; the destruction of democratic America seems child's play compared with that.
The general strategy is grandiose: let us give away our Empire as fast as possible or a little faster; let us ruin the dollar by pretending that we did not give away our Empire and can still be a reserve currency; let us distribute overseas aid in a grand manner, at the same time, let us go around begging for oil.
Made in USA used to be synonymous with quality, so let us not rest until it means "shoddy goods, delivered late (how could it be different, it comes from China).
All this needs great determination, skill and the united effort of a great nation.
But the Americans aren't the Americans for nothing.
To their eternal glory, they are on the way to complete success.

Las Vegas

I have been in Las Vegas in 1967.
That's a long time ago.
I bet many of the people who write on the Internet today weren't even born at that time.
I came from a small town in Italy, I was 15 and I was simply astonished.
Italy was so small and dark and traditional.
All those lights and the Casinos and those huge buildings.
All those Slot machines and the huge amount of people playing and spending a river of dollars every night.

I have been there many times, and every time it looked better and bigger and shiner.
You are in Las Vegas and in Venice, in Paris, in Rome at the same time...

Well, if I had money to invest THAT would be the place I would buy an apartment or a villa.
First because of the business opportunity.
There is no other place in the world where you can be sure your investment will prove so highly profitable.
When all the other places in USA will suffer for lack of jobs, Las Vegas, in my opinion, will still be the place where you can sell or rent your property.
And when is it the best time to invest?
Probably when everybody thinks and writes it is NOT.
Because that IS the moment when you can get the best bargain.
And if you also can invest other people's money, well...you do not risk that much don't you?
And Where to go?
Las Vegas new homes
Browse don't search! Click on the links for communities and cities in the left column of the web page. You will find descriptions of areas and current homes available for sale. You can even browse by using different features. For example Las Vegas Homes with golf view.
See what is available for sale in Las Vegas real estate without giving out your information.
Talk to the agent once you are ready. This is online version of MLS database used by agents. It is updated daily with Las Vegas new homes entering market. You can set up daily automatic notifications.
Buy a brand new home with zero money down and get paid all closing costs, free appliances, free granite counter tops, free oversized lots, free oversized garages... Call Las Vegas homes to get the best incentives.

And if you are the lucky one who buys a house there, well it would be highly appreciated inviting me to see it...
It would be the best excuse to go back there...

This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

A comment that comments itself

Dangerbird said...
What a vacuous little thing you are.

That is exactly the point.

We start in life with the best perspectives, I should say we started, because now a days the young people are brought up to be less idealistic and more realistic.
To us they presented life and the world as it was not, they made us believe in democracy, justice, well doing.
They should have shown the world as it was.
A place where the strongs rule and the mass has to shut up.
Where money comes before everything, where if you are honest you are destined to lose.
They should have taught us to be "smarter" and less believers.
Do you know what I regret?
1) That I am not big enough to be corrupted
2) That I lost the chance to do what I would have liked to, in the name of honesty and right.
3) That I am too old to begin again.
You should live your life backward.
May be it would be exactly the same, but at least you would get more satisfaction out of life...
We HAVE NOT come a long way, we are as we started.

We have come a long way

I read that many years ago, when my English was at its beginnings and I had a few problems to understand the meaning.
Because I attempted a literal translation of it and in Italian it meant nothing.
Since then, since I understood the meaning, it has become one of my favorite expression, almost like for an American (of my time) is "che sera', sera'".

The problem is that now a days I have few chances to use it.
Every time I think "how far have we come?" my pessimistic view of the world tells me to think of something else.
Not only we are NOT going forward, sometimes it looks to me we are going backward.
And I am far from being proud of myself and my generation.
I think we could have done much more and much better.
I think we could still do much more and much better.

"It's a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra's 1946 Christmas card to America, is full of strange and bitter lessons about who we were and who we have become. It also illustrates the perversity of history -- the fact that things sometimes end up the opposite of the way we expect."
"It's a splendid, heartwarming movie in many ways (and I am not being facetious). It was released a year after the awful ordeal of World War Two ended -- which itself had followed the decade-long tribulation of the Great Depression. America was weary but victorious. Democracy and decency had triumphed over manifest evil -- but the memory of all that hardship lingered on. In 1946, we were a chastened, earnest, prudent, generous, and quietly confident nation of heroes who had managed to lick hard times and Hitler.The Jimmy Stewart portrayal of George Bailey was supposed to embody all the home front virtues in our national character that made victory possible."

I think that the misunderstanding is in that "we were..."
Mr. JK. you were not, you just looked like, and behaved like and wore the mask of...

In reality man was, is and will be always the same.
What changes is the mask he wears and the one he shows.
And how good he is in making the others believe he is the way he is not.

The Time person of the year

"So the Time person of the year is you. Otherwise known as us."
“It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.”

It is nice to read that.
I, who am a pragmatist and far away from being an idealist, always thought that they suddenly realized that the customers' made content was so cheap to be like nothing and it paid much more than the professionals' made.
Because people like to know what your cat eats for dinner instead of knowing how many Iraqis died in a few hours.
I thought in a way it was regress instead of progress, because the blogs which really were successful and got many visitors were the ones that the mass liked most.
I thought that 90% of what we see on TV, we hear on the Radio, we read on the Internet was not worth listening or looking at.
But I am glad to know that “It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.”

Two-tiered Internet

"AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. are lobbying Capitol Hill for the right to create a two-tiered Internet, where the telecom carriers' own Internet services would be transmitted faster and more efficiently than those of their competitors.
The proposal is certain to provoke a major fight with Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Time Warner Inc., and Microsoft Corp., the powerful owners of popular Internet sites. The companies fear such a move would give telecommunications companies too much control over a fast-growing part of the Internet.

The battle is largely over video services. Several major telecom companies are working on ways to deliver broadcast-quality television over the Internet. Currently, online video can be slow to download and choppy to watch, even with higher-speed Internet services.

The proposal supported by AT&T and BellSouth would allow telecommunications carriers to offer their own advanced Internet video services to their customers, while rival firms' online video offerings would be transmitted at lower speed and with poorer image quality."





What if they could (and they will) find such a good compression to be able to deliver quality video with lower bandwidth?
This happened for the voice busines, where with a few kbits on the date line (VoIP) you can compete with the Telecoms offering a better service for much less.
Let the Telecoms get the Monopoly of the Video part, then they will find themselves in the position of offering the same (may be even less) at a much higher price...
I really believe that the big monopolistic companies have to die, for a moral reason and for an economic reason as well..
As countries like US and Europe (I am european) have to realize that the cake HAS to be divided among all, including India, China and Africa...

Everybody has the right to share the richness of the world depending on his own skill and not on where he is born.
The French Revolution changed the world of that time because it meant the dawn of a new economic world where also the lower classes had their share.
And a new revolution, the Internet, will change the economic world of today.
The dinosaurus didn't extinct, they became birds, smaller animals who needed less to survive.
The same has to happen with big corporations...

Sandro Botticelli

The first time I was in the "Uffizi" I was ten.
It was then that I fell in love for Botticelli.
Since then to me Spring is Botticelli's painting.
Beauty is the symbol of symbols.
"Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it
shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world."

And this is the way I would define his work.
Millions of beautiful flowers coming alive from a dark background.
Life that comes back after the darkness of Winter, flowers which spring from the brown earth.
In Winter, when Nature sleeps, it is hard to believe Spring will come again, and IT ACTUALLY does, a miracle which reniews every year, and it looks greater and greater.
The hardest the Winter, the sweeter the Spring.
And Winters were hard in Botticelli's time...
Great painters make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it beauty and meaning.
Botticelli's most famous paintings are the Primavera (c1478) and the Birth of Venus (c1483), both in the Uffizi. They embody the moral and metaphysical Neoplatonic ideas that were then fashionable in the Medici circles. Pure visual poetry, they are stylistically the quintessence of Botticelli: there is a deliberate denial of rational spatial construction and no attempt to model solid-looking figures; instead the figures float and lightly dance on a soft ground, at the music of Spring's wind.

They are able to capture all your senses: the eyes which see beauty at its best expression, the soft colours of the flowers in the Primavera and the blue of the sea in the Birth of Venus, the smell which you feel thinking of Spring and Sea, the ears which listen to the sound of the wind.
If you want more detailed explanations and pictures, you can have them at Alessandro Botticelli, where you can also read about the details of his life and career.
Birth of Venus
Primavera

And if you want to have a glimpse of beauty at its best, you HAVE to visit the "Uffizi".
I honestly never understood why the "Monnalisa" of Leonardo is so much more famous than Botticelli's Primavera.

This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

Mobile TV

Tech Review writes:



Mobile TV is exciting. But for me, the daily thrill of playing around with phones that serve as teeny TVs began to fade just around the moment I crossed the threshold to my apartment after work. That's because at home, I have absolute control over what I see and how I see it. I have a Hewlett-Packard Media Center PC, a buggy but powerful machine that, in addition to serving as an ordinary computer, utterly blurs the distinction between streaming Web video and broadcast television. It allows me to watch, record, and organize video content from any source -- the Web, broadcast TV, or DVDs. And because I also use the Windows Media Center Extender, I can have all that content streamed directly to my television.
Simply put, mobile television is, for the moment, the exact opposite of that experience. While Comcast may own the pipeline into my home, it doesn't control the information that goes through those pipes. With mobile television, the only way to get content on phones is through the gatekeepers. That means that Sprint, Verizon, and Cingular can potentially dictate what you see and how you see it.



Right now I am of the opinion that potentially they could do a lot, but being TV what it is and the means to broadcast it on a cell phone what they are and especially the video size what it is, their potential has narrow limits...

This year FREE and FUNNY greetings

We are almost there...I bet many of you still haven't thought to send Christmas greetings.
No worry, with the electronic mail there is no hurry.
You can send them at the last minute...
There are millions of websites offering free greetings cards, but if you are looking for something different, something funny, something that will make you remembered, you can find the top ten funny free Christmas cards.
Have a look a them and it is quite easy to write a small message, or just your signature, if you are too lazy...
Besides, Egreetings customers can receive a free 30-day trial to send unlimited eCards and a yearly eCards; most of the other cards on the site have the same type of funny, off-color, risqué humor.
Of course it's a much cheaper alternative to sending paper cards to everyone on your Christmas list and they are great for last-minute Christmas wishes.
Membership also allows users to schedule eCards to arrive on a specific date, so you can personalize a Christmas eCard now and schedule it to be sent out instantly or on Christmas Day.
Better, on the first days of the year, you should find a few minutes and schedule all you greetings for 2007 and then JUST FORGET about them...
You will be remembered and it will cost you just a few minutes, the few minutes you do not know how to spend...
Isn't that what they call : Being Organized?

This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

What is the right price of content?

"People have come to believe that "you get what you pay for".
If you lowered the price of a movie, people would immediately infer from the low price that it's a crappy movie and they wouldn't go see it.
If you had different prices for movies, the $4 movies would have a lot less customers than they get anyway. The entertainment industry has to maintain a straight face and tell you that Gigli or Battlefield Earth are every bit as valuable as Wedding Crashers or Star Wars or nobody will go see them.

Now, the reason the music recording industry wants different prices has nothing to do with making a premium on the best songs. What they really want is a system they can manipulate to send signals about what songs are worth, and thus what songs you should buy. I assure you that when really bad songs come out, as long as they're new and the recording industry wants to promote those songs, they'll charge the full $2.49 or whatever it is to send a fake signal that the songs are better than they really are. It's the same reason we've had to put up with crappy radio for the last few decades: the music industry promotes what they want to promote, whether it's good or bad, and the main reason they want to promote something is because that's a bargaining chip they can use in their negotiations with artists."

But then, if you want to reach a big audience YOU HAVE to have low prices.

That is what P2P taught us.
The widest you want to reach an audience, the lower must be the price.
It doesn't really matter how low,it matters that IT IS LOWER than what the custumer expect it to be.

That is the secret of special offers, of replica goods and so on.
You give the same FOR LESS.
And sometimes MUCH LESS.

And if you cannot play on the price of the Item, you can play on the price of delivery.

That is why the Intenet is going to play a major role on the market, expecially on Virtual Products market not only as a delivery mean, but as a promotion tool.
It's the place where the customer has his place to rate this or that.


"After all, Content ultimately seeks Attention, and Attention ultimately prices Content. "

Merchants, merchants, merchantOS

Being small is great, because you have everything under control, competing with the bigs is not so great, because sometimes you lack the tools to be competitive.
MerchantOS with its point of sale software can help a lot.
Why?
Because you can save a lot letting them handle all the tasks you would need more employers to fulfill.
How can they help you?
All what can be done by computers and more.
How much would that cost?
I see companies like this as not only necessary, but essential to our future economical structure.
Small is the future, but communities are the secret of success.
Together means being stronger, and being stronger means being the winners.
It's cutting all the burdens that have little to do with your product, but a lot to do with your revenues.
The important is not only making a good product, but being able to sell it.
Act small but think big. And delegates. To the ones who are able to do the same job better.



This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

IP will eat all: World on IP

Top Ten Technology Trends

10. Ethernet everywhere. Home LANs proliferate. Bandwidth is the killer app. Just about everything will have Ethernet connectivity.

9. Knowledge mining will transform the way we do business — moving from information managing. [So long as I don't have to ever hear the phrase "wisdom mining"?]

Vendor dependency > Open networks, architecture and API

8. Wireless and wired lines will converge. Accelerating virtualization. Wire line communication will be history by 2020. Already, the number of wireless lines exceeds the number of wire lines.

7. Broadband will be the death of locality. When you get an IP-based infrastructure, geography means nothing. Martha Stewart's 212 number rang in her cell in Virginia.

6. e-Collaboration will dominate the workplace, enabled by speech recognition.

5. Sensor networks everywhere. We need lots more addresses. We need IPv6 which gives enough for every millimeter of the planet. E.g., cars will have IP addresses so you can have them tuned as you drive. (Hence, lots of sensors.)

4. "Wireless internet will be big." Moore's Law says that in 2010 we'll have 40mb/second. In 2020 we get 1gb/sec. [That seems unoptimistic. Do we really have to wait that long? LATER: David Isenberg has explained to me that Dr. E was referring to average broadband speeds, not maximums. Sorry!] We'll need quantum computing for this.

3. Convergence of communications and apps will be real: The network will be the computer. Most of the work will be done on the edges.

2. Security is critical. We need a better infrastructure [= not end-to-end?] or we'll have a virus hitting our computer every 5 seconds.

1. IP will eat everything. In 15-20 years, it will be application-based routing. [I don't understand that. Damn smart people!]

In 2010, we'll have self-healing networks. They'll have cognitive intelligence. [Smart networks.] We'll have cognitive radio, eliminating the need for FCC to regulate spectrum. [Yay!] Speech-to-speech translation.

2015: Network moves from hardware based to software based: on-demand, reconfigurable.

202: Last phone number will be retired because we'll all be wireless. Holographic storage. Tele-immersion. Holographic teleconferencing.

Future network direction

Now, we have pipes and ports. Once it's all IP, we'll have application-centric services.

Now we have individual networks > Then we'll have "converged collaborative network."

Users buy fixed capacites now > Buy it as an on-demand utility.

IPv4 > IPv6, multicast, unilink, VPLS [Over my head.]

Heterogeneity required > Heterogeneous by choice

Frame relay, ATM, IP > Converged IP-MPLS

Wired > Wireless, free space, wired

P2P > ebonding, network of things - Think about all the communities of interest you could pull together just looking at the attempts to place calls. [A little scary.]

"IP has eaten everything." [Yup.]

Dr. E gives an example of converged services over IP that sounds like a Semantic Web app, but I think he sees this happening by making the ntework itself smarter, rather than adding layers of metadata.

He says we need to handle different types of data differently via packet routing, e.g., to avoid jitter in VOIP. [Wouldn't increased bandwidth remove the need for this "optimization"?]

He likes Wimax as an alternative to T1/DSL/cable wireline access. It works up to 75mb/sec over 75 miles. By packing more bits per herz, we can get to 100mb/sec at home over the next 5-10 years. [I want 10 gigabits! Don't bogart that bandwidth, Dr. E!]

Dr. E says: The "end to end bigots" missed that it's impossible to scale that architeture when it comes to security. We need to build intelligence into the core of the network. Woiuld you rather have your firewall in one place or in billions of places? The center of the network has a global view. [Actually, I definitely don't want a centralized firewall. Very very dangerous politically and, I'm guessing, actually less secure because there's a single point of infection.]

He ends by saying he's been fighting the forces of control and fighting for the forces of freedom.

From passive recipients to active participation

From newscasts to blogcasts and personal studios.

Proprietary solutions > Standards bodies

Proprietary sw > Open Source for greater reliability

Closed control > Open control [Say more!]

Licensed spectrum > Unlicensed spectrum. either more unlicensed and/or cognitive radios

Regulated access > open access [Say more!]

Ending joke. Some say, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." At AT&T Labs we say, "If it ain't broke, it ain't got enough features."

Q&A

Q: What about RBOCs and VOIP?
A: The future is IP. But Skype is like a toy. About 6.25% of traffic will be voip to voip [assuming - if I got this right - we assume that 25% of calls start with voip and 25% end with voip, leaving 50% going over the plain old phone network].

Q: How about the weaknessdes and vulnerabilities of non-end-to-end architectures? What will that do to innovation?
A: We need both. E.g., intruder detection systems are only 95% accurate. Firewalls at the edge of the network haven't worked sufficiently and hackers will target your particular weaknesses. So you have to catch this stuff in the network. You need a lot of sensors to be able to catch it, and that has to be done in the center. We have 150 terabytes of traffic (a day?) and we can scan it in 15 seconds. Yes, this may impede SSL handshakes. That's why we need to rethink the network. We could collaborate with Harvard to redesign it.

Q: What data can you keep? You seem to be equating traffic with data...
A: Look at just the voice traffic. About 400M call attempts/day. We don't record the voice data, just who you called. From this we build community of interests. Now, take that model to an IP basis. If you 2.6 petabytes per day, it's too much. So we have a unique sampling algorithm that looks at the header. (We can't look at the content for privacy reasons.) We save the voice data as long as 6 months; I won't go through the detail because of security. Some data we store as much as 7 years.

[Fascinating talk. He's laid out the vision of what a smart network could do, and he's aiming at openness more than we could have imagined AT&T might have even just a few years ago. But who owns and controls the smart network? What do we give up if we compromise the end-to-end principle?]

Posted by D. Weinberger at September 14, 2005

Christmas cards

Once people had to go to the store and buy expensive Christmas cards, go back home, write them,and go out again to the Post Office to send them.
And in the end, in places like Italy the receiver was happy to get them for Easter...
But now you go to Christmas online games where you can have fun, play games and in the meanwhile send your greetings cards...
Not only saving a lot of time, but having fun doing it and in countries like Italy being sure that they reach the receiver in a few seconds (much sooner than Easter).
And they are all Flash-based, pretty interactive and are very entertaining.
Blue Mountain now has a variety of Christmas online games that also double as eCards that you can send to other people during the holidays.

They also have Birthday eCards,Free eCards,Funny eCards,Holiday eCards,Christmas eCards,Halloween eCards,Hanukkah eCards,Kwanzaa eCards,Thanksgiving eCards,Political eCards,Religious eCards,Romantic eCards,Talking eCards...

In addition to playing the games for free, BlueMountain.com customers can receive a free 30-day trial to send unlimited eCards and a yearly eCards subscription is only $13.99. It's a much cheaper alternative to sending paper cards to everyone on your Christmas list and they are great for last-minute Christmas wishes. Membership allows users to schedule eCards to arrive on a specific date, so you can personalize a Christmas eCard now and schedule it to be sent out instantly or on Christmas Day.

Well, you really cannot find ANY excuse for not sending greeting...

This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

The average politician in Italy

Intelligence makes us self-conscious.
We think about thinking, we know about knowing.
So far no other animal, vegetable or mineral has this ability.

That is why the average politician in Italy is usually "non human".

Loans

I lived three years in London and I lived in a very nice zone and very nice house.
Because I didn't have to rent it, I ACTUALLY bought it.
Yes, in UK it is easier to get a loan than opening a bank account.
And in the end my choice proved to be a very smart one.
Because when I left London I sold the house at a very good price (since the new owner got a loan) and I didn't only save on the rent (because the amount of the monthly loan rate was cheaper than what I would have had to pay for the same house) but I even earned in reselling it...

The only expense I had was paying (500 pounds) somebody to look for the best loan opportunity.
But today I saw that there is a website where you can find all the opportunities and loan offers and can compare them.
For example you click on Home loans and you see all the available offers.
But if you do not want to buy a house, or you just need some cash, you can also go on personal loans and find also there all the information’s you need.
You can also have information’s about:
Debt consolidation loans
Mortgages, remortgages.
Car Loans
Business Loans
Student Loans

Well, the choice is just UP to YOU!

Phishing

"Phishing is just spam being used to trick people into revealing some information to the phisher, and relies very heavily on social engineering to succeed. By blocking spam effectively, the bait never reaches its target, and the opportunity for deception is crushed.
Phishers are now sending more targeted emails to businesses and these e-mails are designed to appear as though they were sent by another member of staff at the same organization, typically from the IT or HR departments. It seems that people will share their passwords fairly willingly via e-mail if the trust the source. It doesn’t hurt that this new breed of phisher promises treats to those who cooperate or threatens the employment of those who don’t."

Phishing is not just Spam, it is a try to cheat to get informations in order to get money.

They wanted to give it a "halo" of sophistication using PH Latin style.
In reality I would call it simply "Fishing" which is nothing else then trying to find a "fish" to hook and that willingly will give his informations.

I must admit that fishers have gone better and better and one day they will be succesful, unless somebody can do something which doesn't look.

I wrote a million times to eBay and PayPal, but I was not honoured an answer.
Which I think it is outrageous.

Welcome the followers of eBay and PayPal, if they are a little bit more serious and more concerned with the security of their customers.

I guess those big corporations, Banks included, underevaluate the power of competition.
One day(and that will be a nice day) they will wake up to find they have lost ALL their customers...

UK Residents

If you live in the UK you are a lucky person.
First because you live in a very nice region (and I can say it, because I lived three years in London) and second because you can pay less for insuring your car or house or your husband ( or wife ) if you want.
And if you are over 50, at least you can have something to be happy for, and that is the saving on your insurances.
For doing so, of course, you have to choose the one that most suits you.
As a matter of fact, not always the cheapest is the best.
If you need an insurance for your car you can compare all the best offers if you go to Car Insurance.
You can see, besides the cost, also how good and fast they are in paying the claims.
Which is very important.
How many times we PAY to find out later that there was that SMALL print we didn't bother to read and that says exactly that: you are not insured for this and that, and this and that is exactly what we would need to be insured for?
I would really like to know how most insurances know before, exactly what your claims will be, in order to exclude them in the contract you subscribe...

Another feature I like in an insurance is the fact that they do not ACTUALLY require tons of paperwork.
They ask you:” what happened?" and then :"here is the check".
That is what I call being friendly and helpful.

Virtual Reality

I am a multi millionaire.
Every day I am awarded a winning ticket for some new lottery.
Of course it is in the Virtual World.
I also find out everyday that I have a new bank account, I just have to fill in my details, password, username and so on.
I still haven't found out what my user name and password and so on are, but nevertheless you feel good knowing you have bank accounts all over the world.
Of course in the Virtual World.
I also have the chance to enlarge the penis I do not have (I'm a woman), but who knows?
This is the Virtual World and I could wake up some day and find out I need it...

What I really do not need is a Rolex Replica watch or a Microsoft cheap software.
I am so rich...
But, may be, someday, I could wake up and find out I am suddenly poor.
You never know, we are in the Virtual World...

This Christmas Ping Pingo

Are your loved ones far away?
Are you far away from your loved ones?
Make your season's greetings with a low cost telephone service, a service that will make you saving up to 90% with your cell phone for international calls.
They say Pingo will be the last calling card you’ll ever need.
It's enough to use Pingo's prepaid calling card service
Because prices are so low, you won't find anything cheaper.
For example click Canada calling card rates and you will be surprised how low it is calling Canada.
With a Pingo prepaid calling card, your calls to Colombia are easy to make and even easier to pay for.
Pingo's Colombia calling cards feature the low, low rates of discount prepaid calling cards, with the convenience of automatic recharging of your calling card account, plus the reliable quality of a Top-Tier international carrier.

With Pingo calling cards, you'll save on every call, from any phone—fixed or mobile, home or office. The savings begin immediately when you sign up for a $20, CAD 20, £10 or €20 Pingo international calling card they will give you $5.00 USD worth of free calling time just for signing up. Plus, you can get another $5.00 USD worth of calls every time a friend you refer joins Pingo.

Pingo is a service of iBasis, one of the largest carriers of international phone calls in the world. For three years in a row, other phone companies have named iBasis the #1 international wholesale carrier. With Pingo calling cards, you can put that quality and convenience to work for you.

Perceptions....

Perceptions are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the Universe.

"We have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and our progress to create the ticket to unreality which stands between us and the facts of life...experiences of our own contriving begin to hide reality from us...transforming us from travellers into turists."

DDoS

On the Internet, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one in which a multitude of compromised systems attack a single target, thereby causing denial of service for users of the targeted system.
The flood of incoming messages to the target system essentially forces it to shut down, thereby denying service to the system to legitimate users.
A hacker (or, if you prefer, cracker) begins a DDoS attack by exploiting a vulnerability in one computer system and making it the DDoS "master."
It is from the master system that the intruder identifies and communicates with other systems that can be compromised.
The intruder loads cracking tools available on the Internet on multiple -- sometimes thousands of -- compromised systems. With a single command, the intruder instructs the controlled machines to launch one of many flood attacks against a specified target. The inundation of packets to the target causes a denial of service.

While the press tends to focus on the target of DDoS attacks as the victim, in reality there are many victims in a DDoS attack -- the final target and as well the systems controlled by the intruder.

ProxyShield DDoS Protection is a service that protects websites from DDoS (denial of service) attacks. The good of it is that it does not require you to buy any equipment, or change your hosting provider.
You can simply point your DNS to the Proxyshield network, and the traffic is scrubbed before passing clean visitors to your website.
Proxyshield was able to get back online famous milliondollarhomepage.com that was attacked during its peak by extortionists.
Considering how much it could cost an attack of this kind, it could be a very cheap insurance for many companies.