hmarcy.com » Random

The FAZ cares about its readers

Hervé — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:50:00 +0000

I really like the FAZ, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (“Frankfurt general newspaper”). As its name says, it is based in Frankfurt and has a national audience in Germany. It is quite conservative and has a strong focus on the economy, which is why I prefer it to, for instance, the Süddeutsche Zeitung (South German newspaper, based in Munich).

As I was browsing the website faz.net, I read an article about Nicolas Sarkozy called “Sarkozy’s truths” published on October 28th. The article mistakenly mentioned that the work time reduction to 35 hours a week in France had been voted when Francois Mitterand was president, although this had been done in 1997 when Jacques Chirac was the head of state.

I took the freedom to send them an email to correct that online and heard nothing from them… Until someone (thanks Cécile and Mom !) noticed that the paper had published an erratum signed under my name on November 11th in its paper version and told me. I was really surprised because I never thought it would be published. I thought they would correct the online version and move on, but I officially published something in the FAZ now

The conclusion of that is that the FAZ is accurate in its content, but should reward the attentive readers by telling them that they were published !

webOS open-source !

Hervé — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 19:09:41 +0000

HP’s CEO Meg Whitman has just announced that the webOS code will be open-sourced ! This is great news for the open-source community after the Odyssey announcement. This means two things : either HP takes open-source seriously and hopes to revive webOS through that move, or it prefers to drop the development entirely to the open-source community. I would tend to the first solution for two reasons : first, HP controls the update servers for all devices and hence a majority of webOS devices will remain updated through HP channels. Second, if HP wanted to drop webOS entirely, they would have sold it to another company (such as Amazon, who is eager to sell tablets).

WebOS was already based on Linux and on open-source software stack (with, for example, a standard Linux kernel, LVM, etc.). This change will benefit the community with a great component for UI development, as well as webOS users, who will benefit from more applications and a broader ecosystem in the future.

Literature

Hervé — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 19:59:05 +0000

Internet is a great place where you can learn things and enjoy culture. Here are some sites, where you can find the greatest literature works.

Google Books (English)
Gutenberg (German)
Ebooks gratuits (French)

The copyrights for these books are over, only where the sites are located, but it may not be the case in the country you are living in, so be careful and have fun !