Buying the network bits of Worldcom at a knockdown price could be a fantastic opportunity for Microsoft to advance its plans of 'Internet 2'... the games playing network that will link X-boxen and PCs.
Bill G could still end up owning the net at this rate.
MS probably does have a secret Linux unit... porting unofficial hush-hush Linux version of Office and IE, and probably also a.Net CLI,.Net server and Exchange Server, maybe even their own desktop environment running on top of X.
Right, okay, that will be the same business unit that is helping the US military reverse engineer the software on that alien spacecraft at Roswell.
Patrick Troughton rocked and the Pertwee Episodes were classics. I was terrified to go shopping with my mum after the Plastic Men episodes. Guns hidden in their flip down hands. Dastardly.
The 'Tom Baker' Dr Who lives on... at least as a voice on the BBC Radio 'Dead Ringers' series (available over the net with Real Playa). He reguarly phones up unwitting shops to get spare parts for his Tardis etc. It is hysterically funny.
> It had a very low budget. In a word: complete bollocks!
It was one of the highest budget programs on BBC TV at the time. I think it cost around $100,000 per 30 minute episode and that was 25 years ago. One of the reasons for pulling it was budget.
A good while ago (1997) a Worldcon founder employee told me that Worldcon was originally funded by Mafia money made on a US garbage cartel. Does anyone know more about this, I've not seen anything on the Internet so am doubtful....
Hah, it is a bit like the old BT/MCI partnership which was largely an excuse for BT execs and management to go skiing. They even kept a ski locker room at the MCI building with 'corporate' skis.
I meet a lot of managers who don't even understand that what they are doing, at the very least, violates tax rules. You can't go on a skiing holiday and claim it as a tax deductable expense!
After the stock market fell in 1929 it took the Dow Jones until 1953 to recover. If you were in your early 40s at that time and your pension plan was in shares your retirement was toast.
Luckily the post-war baby boom bailed out the pensioners.
The BBC reported that Microsoft was losing 100 UKP on each X-Box sale when the X-Box was at 299 UKP. I think it is now at 199 UKP. As sales costs are higher in Europe than in the US I would figure they are losing $200 on each X/Box.
Mickey$oft recently shut an Eastern European (Hungarian) production plant because they are haemoraging so much money on the eX-Box... but according to this week's Economist
they are in this war for the long term and see the PS/3 vs. X-Box II as the mother of all battles in 2005 as make or break for the company. They are building their own Internet (now where have we heard that before?) to facilitate on-line gaming and will tax every bit that travels over it.
So there you have it, geeks, get Linux running on the X/Box and Micro$not are toast. You've got 3 years.
Sorry the funding came from some CIA sources apparently. It was a US overseas aid department that set up the project. Can't tell you more, this is what the MD of the company told me at the time. The motivation, he claimed, was to displace the French as the dominant force in West Africa and the Internet was seen as the tool do achieve this.
In 1996 I spent some time in the West African country of the Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) working for a company installing Internet access at the Banque Africaine de Developpement (BAD. Basically Ghana and the Ivory Coast are neighbours, the former and ex-British colony and the latter ex-French. It is quite interesting to compare the two and the legacy of colonialism.
John Barlow's experiences in Ghana shouldn't be applied to all African countries. Kenya, although slowly being joked to death by corruption and the Ivory Coast had, at the time, relatively good infrastructure.
The BAD was located in the business district of Abidjan, this is basically a separate part of the capital surrounded by lagoons. The district had a fibre optic network although the rest of the country was on copper wire. Indeed they had just bought a new system from France Telecom - which turned out to be old exchanges FT were ripping out in order to roll out ADSL in France. The Ivorians were not too happy about this and wondered whether some money had changed hands between FT and the communications minister, a common way of winning contracts in Africa. There was also some fibre optic up to the capital city.
At the time there were at least two ISPs operating in the Ivory Coast: Africom and Africa On-line. I remember going out to a shanty town in the suburbs to see one of the IT guys. In his house he had a Pentium 100 with Windows NT 4.0 installed, NT 4.0 had only been released a few weeks previously! He also had an account with Africom and I sent some Emails home from his house.
However the local ISPs didn't have enough capacity for the BAD and we ended up installing a VSAT dish on the roof with a 2Mbps capacity, 384 kbps was dedicated to Internet use and the rest for teleconference links and LAN. This work was carried out by an company located in Abidjan and they had other contracts too.
However all this contrasts badly with what was available in Ghana and I believe this has something to do with the more hands-on paternalistic attitude the French take to their former colonies. There is also a great game being played out in French speaking Africa where America is attempting to extend its sphere of influence with costs and benefits to the people... genocide in Rwanda, technical aid to the Ivory Coast. The project I worked on was indirectly funded by a US government department attached to the CIA!
I travelled extensively in the country... by bus as car hire was too expensive and one either had to pay bribes to the frequent army road blocks or could be hijacked close to the porous Liberian border. Nearly all businesses and bars had telephones and it was never a problem to make a call within the country or from Abidjan to the world at large.
Like John Perry Barlow I went to West Africa with a bit of the white colonialist bwana attitude but was humbled by the experience. The locals were well educated and extremely interested in technology and were surprisingly well informed about the Internet and its possibilities. They would hold their own in Western companies. Again this is somewhat the fault of the French who imposed their good educational system on the locals in the hope of turning them into good French citizens. There were a lot of Ghanaians at the BAD who said that this was a major benefit compared to English colonialism. In contrast the Ghanaians I met were well educated but often at great expense, either taking English 'A' levels in private school or by correspondance.
If anyone on this group gets the chance to work in Africa I recommend it, it is a great experience and can only help understanding of this rich but troubled continent.
According to Hobbes Internet Timeline (the semi-official history of the net) QEII sent her first Arpanet email in 1976 from the Royal Signals Establishment at Malvern.
WarGames was quite well researched. So much so that searching for modems by brute forcing the exchange-space is now known as 'wargaming' But then we were back in the dayz when most folkz hadn't seen a terminal and still thought spinning reel-to-reels were the only visible signs a computer was doing anything.
Is it worth bothering to broadcast widescreen on execrable NTSC 525 line systems? Much about US consumer goods is so retro-third world. A dogdy cell-phone network, cookers that my mum would have thrown in the 50s and those weird upright washing machines with separate spin system that take up most of a small condo and need their own reservoir to fill, light switches made of Bakelite!!! America is so protectionist and isolationist that it is probably not worth Europeans exporting decent stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Bill G could still end up owning the net at this rate.
Right, okay, that will be the same business unit that is helping the US military reverse engineer the software on that alien spacecraft at Roswell.
David
> Admittedly, each Doctor has his own style.
Patrick Troughton rocked and the Pertwee Episodes were classics. I was terrified to go shopping with my mum after the Plastic Men episodes. Guns hidden in their flip down hands. Dastardly.
The 'Tom Baker' Dr Who lives on... at least as a voice on the BBC Radio 'Dead Ringers' series (available over the net with Real Playa). He reguarly phones up unwitting shops to get spare parts for his Tardis etc. It is hysterically funny.
> It had a very low budget.
In a word: complete bollocks!
It was one of the highest budget programs on BBC TV at the time. I think it cost around $100,000 per 30 minute episode and that was 25 years ago. One of the
reasons for pulling it was budget.
I vote for a Bill Gates look alike to take the role of Davros
I remember seeing the Doctor Who outtakes (a video made by the BBC VT dept and not for public consumption).
Doctor Who (Tom Baker) is in the Tardis and asked K9 a question.
"insufficient data, master" replies the tin pooch
To which Tom Baker quips: "you never do know the fucking answer do you K9?"
They should have left it in the episode!
If they like I can print them a copy on my ink jet printer, it will look just like the original.
I'm glad the people of Chalon have something to be pleased about, it is a drab, grey town of little other note.
You'd better hope that quantam computing advancings I think.
A good while ago (1997) a Worldcon founder employee told me that Worldcon was originally funded by Mafia money made on a US garbage cartel. Does anyone know more about this, I've not seen anything on the Internet so am doubtful....
Hah, it is a bit like the old BT/MCI partnership which was largely an excuse for BT execs and management to go skiing. They even kept a ski locker room at the MCI building with 'corporate' skis.
I meet a lot of managers who don't even understand that what they are doing, at the very least, violates tax rules. You can't go on a skiing holiday and claim it as a tax deductable expense!
After the stock market fell in 1929 it took the Dow Jones until 1953 to recover. If you were in your early 40s at that time and your pension plan was in shares your retirement was toast.
Luckily the post-war baby boom bailed out the pensioners.
I think they are supposed to be geeks trying to look 'hip' and 'cool' in their regulation Microsoft GAP clothing.
Mickey$oft recently shut an Eastern European (Hungarian) production plant because they are haemoraging so much money on the eX-Box... but according to this week's Economist they are in this war for the long term and see the PS/3 vs. X-Box II as the mother of all battles in 2005 as make or break for the company. They are building their own Internet (now where have we heard that before?) to facilitate on-line gaming and will tax every bit that travels over it.
So there you have it, geeks, get Linux running on the X/Box and Micro$not are toast. You've got 3 years.
Death to the Demon, Bill Gates!
David
Sorry the funding came from some CIA sources apparently. It was a US overseas aid department that set up the project. Can't tell you more, this is what the MD of the company told me at the time. The motivation, he claimed, was to displace the French as the dominant force in West Africa and the Internet was seen as the tool do achieve this.
John Barlow's experiences in Ghana shouldn't be applied to all African countries. Kenya, although slowly being joked to death by corruption and the Ivory Coast had, at the time, relatively good infrastructure.
The BAD was located in the business district of Abidjan, this is basically a separate part of the capital surrounded by lagoons. The district had a fibre optic network although the rest of the country was on copper wire. Indeed they had just bought a new system from France Telecom - which turned out to be old exchanges FT were ripping out in order to roll out ADSL in France. The Ivorians were not too happy about this and wondered whether some money had changed hands between FT and the communications minister, a common way of winning contracts in Africa. There was also some fibre optic up to the capital city.
At the time there were at least two ISPs operating in the Ivory Coast: Africom and Africa On-line. I remember going out to a shanty town in the suburbs to see one of the IT guys. In his house he had a Pentium 100 with Windows NT 4.0 installed, NT 4.0 had only been released a few weeks previously! He also had an account with Africom and I sent some Emails home from his house.
However the local ISPs didn't have enough capacity for the BAD and we ended up installing a VSAT dish on the roof with a 2Mbps capacity, 384 kbps was dedicated to Internet use and the rest for teleconference links and LAN. This work was carried out by an company located in Abidjan and they had other contracts too.
However all this contrasts badly with what was available in Ghana and I believe this has something to do with the more hands-on paternalistic attitude the French take to their former colonies. There is also a great game being played out in French speaking Africa where America is attempting to extend its sphere of influence with costs and benefits to the people... genocide in Rwanda, technical aid to the Ivory Coast. The project I worked on was indirectly funded by a US government department attached to the CIA!
I travelled extensively in the country... by bus as car hire was too expensive and one either had to pay bribes to the frequent army road blocks or could be hijacked close to the porous Liberian border. Nearly all businesses and bars had telephones and it was never a problem to make a call within the country or from Abidjan to the world at large.
Like John Perry Barlow I went to West Africa with a bit of the white colonialist bwana attitude but was humbled by the experience. The locals were well educated and extremely interested in technology and were surprisingly well informed about the Internet and its possibilities. They would hold their own in Western companies. Again this is somewhat the fault of the French who imposed their good educational system on the locals in the hope of turning them into good French citizens. There were a lot of Ghanaians at the BAD who said that this was a major benefit compared to English colonialism. In contrast the Ghanaians I met were well educated but often at great expense, either taking English 'A' levels in private school or by correspondance.
If anyone on this group gets the chance to work in Africa I recommend it, it is a great experience and can only help understanding of this rich but troubled continent.
David
Guess most /.'ers are newbies in comparison
David Off
WarGames was quite well researched. So much so that searching for modems by brute forcing the exchange-space is now known as 'wargaming' But then we were back in the dayz when most folkz hadn't seen a terminal and still thought spinning reel-to-reels were the only visible signs a computer was doing anything.
Is it worth bothering to broadcast widescreen on execrable NTSC 525 line systems? Much about US consumer goods is so retro-third world. A dogdy cell-phone network, cookers that my mum would have thrown in the 50s and those weird upright washing machines with separate spin system that take up most of a small condo and need their own reservoir to fill, light switches made of Bakelite!!! America is so protectionist and isolationist that it is probably not worth Europeans exporting decent stuff.
I wonder if Gates will stomp out too?