French servers
A new Web map takes a French perspective – Business – International Herald Tribune — “If the traffic you can’t handle, go back to working by candle” — Anonymous expert.
These guys should get out of the kitchen if they can’t take the heat. And the Europeans want to compete with Google and its millions of servers? Har.
PARIS A Web site sponsored by the French government that features a detailed aerial map of France went live Friday, rivaling a similar service offered by Google, owner of the world’s largest Internet search engine.
Geoportail.fr was created by the French National Geographic Institute and features aerial maps of mainland France and of all the country’s overseas territories. It is competing with Google Earth, the virtual globe program that carries images obtained from satellite and aerial photography.
“With Geoportail, France is the first European country to set up a common access portal for public geographical information,” the National Geographic Institute, which is known as IGN, said in an e-mailed statement.
The Geoportail site was overwhelmed with traffic Friday, and attempts to reach it failed. The Web site of the National Geographic Institute, www.ign.fr, also failed to load early Friday evening.
If anyone gets on, let me know. It was not working when I tried.
There’s one thing that we Europeans have worse than US:
State. And Uberstate. The EC. exponentially more red tape and “experts” on pushing progress.
It was not the US gov. that made Google. It’s a private company. It grew on the business opportunities and creativity leveraged by the internet. US state had something to do with it, but accidentally: The net was fathered by the military and scientific/educational sectors. Without these foundations I doubt that free entreprise and liberalism by itself could produce The Internet.
Europeans have more central planning and governmetalised institutions. Europe would have never create the internet either.
But there are some up sides to this approach to, as you know John, since you’re always touting quality and speed of the internet in europe. While in the States there is looming the perspective of communications being seized by monopolies…
Well, you know what they say… Win some, loose some…
It seems to be working. when using the link make sure not to forget the www, it doesn’t work without it (french…:) )
To “Joäo PT” : before asserting “Europe would have never create the internet either.” Have you never heard about an english guy called Tim Berners Lee, who worked at the CERN when he invented the WWW ?
You should have a look at it …
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/Content/Chapters/AboutCERN/Achievements/WorldWideWeb/WWW-en.html
Or it : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
do not mistake internet with www.
These are much different things.
I’m talking about the infrasctructure of the thing. The pipes man…
Berners Lee invented the concept of hypertext markup, that is to embed documents with references to other documents on a network.
And networks existed before the intenet.
The stuff i’m talking about is the (then) gigantic tast to connect several geographical spread locations on a network. Check Darpa net please….
Uhm, missed target
Its definately a good thing that such an institute makes their maps accessable. Compete?? They are not quite in the same business, as the institutes maps are the ones used to settle land ownership disputes etc.
there are many imporvements of “geoportail” for one year (3D buildings…). What about these new items?