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After Umberto Eco, even Franco Debenedetti gets ebooks wrong

In August 2010 Umberto Eco, a great Italian intellectual and novelist wrote something very true about traditional paper books: don’t you dare to hope to get rid of all paper books just because e-books are now available. Unfortunately, Eco gave a really dumb proof for his assertion:

Nine questions for a Linux Day (or any other moment)

The organizers of the first Linux presentation in an Italian shopping center asked me to prepare a short list of questions to hand out to all the visitors of that shopping center. They specifically asked for

Why Has Digital Gone Bad So Often?

(this page is a part of the essay I wrote for the Open Government Book. For copyright info, see the introduction) Index Why Open Digital Standards Matter in Government: Introduction The Digital Age Explained Standards and the Problems with Digital Technology Why Has Digital Gone Bad So Often? The Huge Positive Potential of Digital Technologies Free and Open Standards and Software: The Digital Basis of Open Government Conclusions Why Has Digital Gone Bad So Often?

File formats, alphabets and public money: did you know that...

File formats are the rules that define the meaning of all the sequences of bits that you can find inside a computer file.

A little known but very powerful tool for homeschooling: Free Software

Free Software is widely used in education due to its lower cost and huge flexibility. Homeschooling is relatively popular in the USA and other countries. One would expect Free Software to be very popular among homeschoolers, due to their own philosophy: how could an homeschooling advocate not love software that is all about being “free as in freedom” and doing things by yourself? Reality, however is quite different: compared to Windows and Mac, Free Software is still almost unknown in the homeschooling community.