Life

Today I listened on radio that Italy is last country in Europe for Internet and Broadband penetration: it was a journalistic interpretation of an Eurostat report.
I work for a "Very Big" Media company in Internet & Multimedia division so I thought "dark clouds in my future!!"
I talked with my colleagues and... we were all sad!
So what I did? I went on the Internet to search more information... I surfed till Eurostat Report site.
I opened the PDF and tried to understand the document...
Well! Big surprise! Italy is not so bad!

Use of the Internet by Individuals and Enterprises– EU 25*, 2004 (%)

Italy is perfectly in average with EU25! What I understand is that italians surf the Internet at work and Italians surf the Internet when they need to interact with government for example: of course not much for amusing themselves. We can say we use Internet for its original purpose: documentation!

Internet usage in 2004 by individuals and enterprises

Maybe there are social reasons, as a colleague of mine says, maybe italians when are at home prefer to do sports or to enjoy themselves going out and meeting other people. I don't think he is so wrong!! Actually I think that another reason is that broadband is not so diffused and is still too much expensive in contrary of other EU country like France, Germany or UK. I don't think we have to compare ourselves with Sweden or Denmark but on the other hand with Spain or France which are more close to us!
Maybe we must know deeper what the Internet can offer to us.
Italians always think bad about themselves! We are not so bad!
Marco.

P.S.: Another think that is strange: why RIAA says that piracy on the Internet in Italy is expanding? Maybe italians use the Internet but they don't say they do it!

The Chord system is an efficient distributed lookup service based on the Chord protocol.
The Chord protocol supports just one operation: given a key, it will determine the node responsible for storing the key’s value. The Chord protocol uses a variant of consistent hashing to assign keys to Chord server nodes.
Conceptually the Chord system functions analogously to the DNS system. Both systems map names to values. Chord’s algorithms have no special servers, however, in contrast to DNS which relies on a set of special root servers. In addition, Chord doesn’t put restrictions on the format and meaning of names; Chord names are just the keys of key/value pairs. Chord doesn’t attempt to solve the administrative problems of DNS.
The Chord protocol is a distributed data location protocol very close to the one used in OceanStore.
The Chord protocol has essentially one operation: given a key, it will determine the node responsible for the key. Chord does not itself store keys and values, but provides primitives that allow higher-layer software to build a wide variety of storage system.
Each machine acting as a Chord server has a unique 160-bit Chord node identifier, produced by a SHA hash of the node’s IP address.

Chord views the IDs as occupying a circular identifier space.

Chord defines the node responsible for a key to be that key’s "successor".

The successor of a key or node identifier j is the node with the smallest ID that is greater than or equal to j.

Chord’s primary task is to find these successors.