Arabs interested in TransRapid

The glorious wonders of German technology finally get into the world’s focus. After China implemented this Magnetic Levitation Train technology named TransRapid near Shanghai to connect the Pudong International Airport with the inner city Long Yang Road Station for approximately 30 kilometers, the Arabs have claimed their interest in this technology. But instead of creating a similar connection, their goal is to build a TransRapid network with a total length of 800 kilometers to connect the several Arabian countries with this high speed train. An expertise is being prepared for the distance between Katar and Bahrein before Germany’s Chancelor Gerhard Schröder will visit the region in upcoming march (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Katar, Bahrein, Jemen, Oman und in den United Arab Emirates) for some negotiations and pre-contractual agreements.

I personally believe ThyssenKrupp and Siemens will gain an intensive boost by this new contract, as the value is supposed to reach 9 billion US Dollars. But without some experts who proovingly have intercultural awareness specialized in the Arab cultures, the companies‘ negotiations will not meet minds with the Arabs. I’m just glad I spent some time studying Intercultural Communication at James Lovejoy’s course…

Tags: , , , ThyssenKrupp, TransRapid

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Mark Jen’s Resume on Google

Being introduced to your new job at Google on January 17th, 2005 and being fired just nearly two weeks later on January 28th, 2005 brought Google’s policies concerning bloggers to the medial focus. Publishing corporate information on his personal blog and utilizing this blog to openly criticize the company – Mark Jen commented on Google’s financial performance and future products. As he summarized, he expects the idea and concept of blogging to become the future’s new method of interacting, communicating and providing information for a connective community. Within this network, corporations must embrace this technology, allow employees to use them and always keep in mind – blogging is one of the fastest and most cost-effective methods of marketing. It will either create an amazing sympathy for you or destroy your carefully created corporate image in society.

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Your Personal MSN Search

How to fight out a small battle with Microsoft? All you need is basically an invitation from MSN to participate in a promotion event for your own company. MSN offered to provide a personal search assistant accompanied by a laptop, mobile internet card and extra battery packages in order to advertise for its new search service. This person is meant to spend the day in your editorial office and research whatever you want by using MSN Search. But the key is to channelize the input for their search into four simple questions:

1) Which agencies work for Microsoft in the individual EU-countries and in Bruxelles in public affairs?
2) Which former politicians of EU-countries are by now employed at Microsoft’s public affairs / lobbying / public administration?
3) Do numbers exists on how much money is being spent by Microsoft in Europe each year in public affairs?
4) How many people does Microsoft employ in lobbying / public affairs in Bruxelles and Germany and how are the names for them?

What happened in the end – Microsoft opted out and got their promotion students back home. You can read the details at Netzpolitik.org in german.

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Yahoo’s Slurp-Bot: Official Tips

The search-engine company Yahoo released some useful tips and tricks on how to limit the sometimes aggressive behavior of their spider robot „Slurp“. In the previous months, this particular robot became one of the most annoying and invading robots of my Blogspirit account. I already used the suggested method of including the „crawl delay“ option in meta tags, tough the robot penetrates this small line of defense still. Dave Simpson suggests to enable Gzipped Files and Smart Caching to aid the process of restricting the robot’s aggressiveness. As I tested my subdomain with Netcraft, I was informed it’s Apache was using the mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a already. Since most image files for the HTML layout and formatting reside on my own server, the smart caching is little to worry about. Overall, Slurp is already restricted in it’s behavior but still very aggressive. I will try to analyse the whole situation in a near future once I’m done with the final tests.

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Unlawful DVD Ripping

The idea to shoplift a DVD is hardly the usual among lawful citizens in any country. But instead of shoplifting, many people consider it is as legal as it seems to download the same movie for free on the internet. In the end it is nothing else but the same. Since I’m going to write a test on Managers and the Law in about 50 minutes, I feel a certain urge to publish this info concerning the daily habit of almost every manager – downloading illegal music or video files from the internet. Karl Wagenfuehr researched the penalties for a) shoplifting a DVD in comparison to b) downloading one.

Stealing Infringing
Absolute
Minimum		 $0
no jail		 $4,400
Absolute
Maximum		 $100,000
1 year jail		 $3,400,000
1 year jail
lawyer fees and costs
Real World
Example		 Winona Ryder:
$2,700 fine
$6,355 restitution
$1,000 court cost
3 years probation		 An Average RIAA settlement:
$14,875

Reported here and here.

Tags: , , , Penalty,

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Two things I forgot to mention…

… are meant to be summarized by this article in wholeness. Let’s see what I can make of it.

Bloglines
Well yes, rumors hold a significant piece of truth. The search-engine company Ask Jeeves made a deal to take over Bloglines. I honestly don’t understand why half of the blogs I’ve been reading were onto this trip, but it must have been something special for them. History became legend. Legend became myth. Where will Bloglines and Ask Jeeves end?

About.com
The major information portal About.com is apparently on its way to be auctioned off. I suppose the larger companies like AOL or MSN, probably the search-engine portals like Google or Yahoo are sticking their heads together to bull it out who’s going to take About.com over…

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Google goes Local

After GPS, GPRS, UMTS and whichever other network services have proven to be able to find your nearest gasstation or hotel and transmit this data to your mobile phone, Google introduced their own „Google Local“ search tool to browse the web for local informations. And being the Sichelputzer who I am, I immediately wondered where to find my local dealer? After rushing to their site and searching for a Pizza in Flensburg, I was prompted an error as result. I am not listed? Of course, because the new service is limited to the United States only. Disappointing.

Tags: , , , Sichelputzer

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Google as Domain Registrar

We’ve been made for suffering – Google’s power increases since the company announced its own role in the registration process for Domainnames. Google became a proud member of the ICANN’s registrars who may offer the registration for com, .net, .org, .biz., info, .name and .pro domains. Another episode of the continued reign of Google terror made by the Googleopus.

Tags: , Googleopus,

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IT Magazine under DOS

The website of the largest German magazine for Information-Technology and Computer Science has suffered an intensive Denial of Service Attack. Since monday evening, the website has been temporarily unavailable, and especially today Heise.de is unreachable. The publishing house has offered a reward of 10.000 Euros for useful clues about the attackers.

Tags: Heise,

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