Slashdot Mirror
How SBC (AT&T) Pillaged South Africa's Economy
Kifoth writes "For 8 years, SBC and Telekom Malaysia controlled South Africa's only telecommunications company, Telkom. Telkom had a government granted monopoly in order for it to connect the large parts of South Africa that had been neglected under apartheid. Instead of helping, SBC abused their position and raised Telkom's prices to be among the highest in the world. The billions they made here ultimately went to fund their AT&T merger. From the article: 'SBC, described as "congenitally litigious", is said to have played a major role in the failure of South Africa's telecoms policy to develop a competitive telephone service. Under SBC's control Telkom not only failed to meet its roll-out obligations but behaved "as a tax on industry and a drag on economic growth."'"
fellacious (GNAP) Intercourse, PA - Windows Vista appears to finally
be taking off, at least within one Fortune 100 company. The GNAA had for the
past 13 years been using Red Hat Linux and it's successor, Fedora Core, but
growing discontent with the free software operating system forced CTO Jmax to
declare on Wednesday that the company was to be switching its entire
infrastructure to the new version of Windows, effective immediately. "I'm not
going to theatrically claim that I wasn't expecting to have to do this," Jmax
said. "This has been coming for quite some time." The GNAA's troubles with Red
Hat's Linux system included chronic governance problems, a persistent failure
to maintain key repositories, a complex and undocumented submission process
which has kept the GNAA's free trolling utilities off the Red Hat-based
desktops of thousands of would-be trolls, inability to keep RPM up to date, and
a failure to address the problem of Firefox not crashing a entire computer when
the user loads Last Measure. "The deal-breaker, though, was when a key Last
Measure server remained down for four hours while our entire Intercourse
development team tried desperately to bring it up despite not having
statically-linked package manager binaries." What had happened was Dikky,
visiting from Norway, wanted to play the child pornography mod of Doom 3 on
that server- which had to drag several libraries with it. "In addition," said
Jmax, "several key software applications used in the GNAA's corporate workflow
are proprietary software- which means that they had to be run in an Ubuntu
compatibility environment anyway." However, being as those unnamed
applications were written in C#.NET, "We expect that our transition to Windows
Vista will come off without a hitch."
is the same thing. That's how Carlos Slim, the company's owner, became richer than Bill Gates. The guy owns the 8% of mexican economy; we pay montly US$50 for a crappy 2Mb-download/128k upload "broadband" connection. The bastard owns the president, the Congress and the worthless mexican Supreme Court.
But America sould not worry. George W. Bush is the first mexican president of USA, so I'm sure that USA will become like Mexico in 20 years if the neocons get their way.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
This is the same company that couldn't transfer my phone number across the street from one apartment to another. When it was time for them to switch my service they managed to cut off my old number, forward it to the wrong new number, and not even connect my new number at my new apartment. I guess to their credit I later found out that they couldn't connect my new number because the previous tennants had never disconnected their old number, but those same people had also not paid their bill for nearly 6 months according to the rep I had talked to (which it was probably illegal to disclose to me, but whatever). 2 weeks later when 6 months had elapsed they did then finally disconnect their number and hook mine up.