Yes the "bounceback" clearly has different meanings for different people.
As for the "Google" share price, this just reflects the doubling of _expectation_ of the profitability (or growth) of Google.
One thing I certainly don't want to see is the reemergence of the "I can code HTML == I'm a qualified web designer" and the "I can code a for loop in JavaScript == I'm a programmer" types. I hope that managers have learned from their past mistakes and see the difference between qualified people and morons. They were just dragging down all the qualified and hard working coders.
I think few of the people here wish the return of the late 90's heyday, because that just gave the industry a bad name.
I think there is another important issue: safety. If your device short circuits the airport power network and then it takes 20 minutes before someone finds the circuit breaker then people are not going to be happy. And what if your device screws up someones laptop? (I know this is _really_ unlikely) The UK solution is that all electrical devices plugged in any sort of public socket (e.g. libraries) should be tested for safety, whenever they're more than one year old.
I'd imagine that airports have two or three different level of electricity grid one for the "totally essential" and one for all the shops adverts and Christmas trees.
As for the electricity bill: if I'm at the airport and everything is running on time then batteries in my laptop last long enough. If my flight gets delayed by 7 hours like it did the last time then I feel I have the right to use some electricity, for all the airport taxes I have paid. Even if that means unplugging some Christmas tree.
And if any employee of the airport wants to come and argue about this then he's welcome: I have 7 hours to spare and I'm pretty annoyed to begin with.
That's what I thought when I saw iPod for the first time. And because of that I bought an MP3 CD player (well it was a lot cheaper too).
I've not heard of people complaining about the hard drive in their iPods. Battery, yes I know people have problems with batteries, but never hard drives. Makes me feel, like I've made the wrong choice... even though MP3 cd player is still fine 99% of the time.
I think a standart in small HDD interfaces is good, not only for iPod imitators (well the makers of), but also for people making mini-itx based computers.
And please, try to use your own words. Excuse me? Are you trying to suggest that I didn't write the above myself, that someone is speaking for me? I'm offended.
Anyway, have I said that anything presented in F 9/11 is not true? I was just saying that by presenting only one side of the argument, it falls into the "propaganda" category, not "documentary" category. I didn't say the film does not have strong and good points, I didn't say that it shouldn't be aired and I certainly want to see Bush out of the White House ASAP.
Perhaps my point was that F 9/11 could have been stronger if the aim was to make an _objective_ documentary, because as it is, many people would dismiss it as propaganda and won't bother watching it at all, which would be a shame.
And I don't think there can be much question as to whether F 9/11 is a propaganda or not.
If a movie (book, article) presents strictly one side of the view, tries to piece together facts into tenuous conspiracy theoris (yes, Mr Moore, everyone know everyone else in the big bussiness world, if not personaly then they certainly have a common acquintance) then it is, by definition, propaganda.
And propaganda is always bad, even if it's trying to be for a good cause.
It's not bloody funny! The parent, in a true Slashdot style, didn't even get what the subject of the paper was!
The question pondered is whether _experienced_ reader reads by, in the first place, recognising the word shape, or by recognising the letters.
P.S. yes I know that psychologists are great for stating the obvious, but not here... P.P.S. to parent: read the article properly, I'm sure you'll find a nice funny case of stating the obvious.
Read the parent please! SSH tunneling means that the even "HTTP GET" will come accros as something totally garbled. Whether they'll come after you, just because of encrypted connection, or whether they found a way of cracking SSH on the fly is another question (unlikely thought).
BUT! They're not bothered. If a few geeks read forbidden stuff, that won't change much. I'm sure there's already dissident minority. What they don't want is some critical mass of people getting the wrong idea. Which won't happen for a while, because most Chineese haven't seen a PC. On the other the peasants never really mattered in China, so maybe they (Chineese government) have a good reason to be paranoid.
On the other hand, it could be argued, that many people benefit enormously from the BBC, despite not paying the TV license. Me, for one, I don't have a telly and so I don't pay, despite listening to BBC radio, reading the website etc.
My point is that by developing this code, _eventually_ and _slowly_ less and less people are going to have a television in the house and hence less and less people will pay the license.
Which means that the UK government will have to figure out how to finance the BBC. I would hate to see them deciding to sell it. It would be really unfortunate if this project marked the beginning of the end of BBC as we know it.
I'm amazed! The first comment I expected see on/. was that this is all due to outsourcing to India!
I have to agree with the parent. Lot of people who were never qualified to do tech jobs aren't doing them anymore because the companies realised that they aren't value for money.
I wouldn't expect great demand for MSc./PhD. qualifications, just because I think that 3 years of CS theory is more than enough for any IT job. What you then need is experience. This not to say that PhD. is not useful for R&D people, but such jobs are few and far apart.
Also how many people don't call themselves IT professionals because it's no longer "chic"?
I see your point, even though since I use the same programs (emacs, kmail, latex, gcc, gnuplot, web browser) on both, and they're the only thing I use often enough, and of course they use the same config files. I don't even get any conflicts using them concurently. The reason why I wouldn't ditch OS X is because of Mathematica, which AFAIK does not run on PowerPC Linux of any flavour Yellow Dog included.
I would have thought that Linux on Apple hardware makes most sense on the server side, in which case the fact that it's not all full 64-bit defeats the point.
On the desktop side, I see no advantage of running Linux rather than OS X. Don't get me wrong, I use Linux on my IBM laptop all the time, but on OS X I can run the same programs and also all the nice Mac OS X only things like iTunes.
Just in case any of you were still in doubt about how outrageous the software patents are, here are a few examples from the German PDF:
- "One click ordering" I'm sure there's no one here who has not heard of this one, even though I'm unable to figure out how Munich could be in trouble for this one...
- Spam challenging (in Mozilla mail) and Spam Caller ID, held by Microsoft
- Some 60 firewall patents, apparently iptables is in trouble
- "Auswahl von Kompressionverfahren", choice of compression methods (Gimp)
- USB telephone, method and graphical interface for operating....... I guess there's no need to go on. There seems to be a common theme amongst software patents and that is: they do not patent anything clever, they're just very clever in figuring out trivial things that can be patented!
EU commissioners are unelected and don't exactly have a reputation for honesty
You're right, they're not elected, but they're appointed by their respective national governments, which arise as a result of democratic election. I know it' debateable whether this is good enough or not, but then again, there are countries that don't have directly elected presidents.
I think a lot greater problem with software patents is that the issue is well understood only by a few people. Knowing enough about programming AND law is a rare combination.
It is very easy to confuse (and bribe) anyone into supporting the patents. Hopefully the case of Munich will actually be a good thing, because it will make politicians realize, that yes, software patents do matter to them!
I have IBM R40 and the only thing that I don't have working properly is suspend-to-disk, but I don't mind, the time it takes is about the same as turning the computer off and on again.
Suspend to RAM works (using APM) with 3d acceleration, USB mouse, scanner, IEEE1394, another PCMCIA network card.... the volume, brightness, lamp buttons all work, I can't really complain. CPU throttling works, the only thing I can't do without ACPI is temperature readings. Oh yes, lm_sensors don't work.
_But_ I still had to pay MS tax, when I bought the computer. Guess what IBM told me: "If you don't want Windows, don't buy our laptop! Yes you could get it without any OS, but you'd have to buy more that 100 identical units."
iTunes is not an X windows app. That's why porting it to Linux won't be much easier than porting to Windows.
Oh and the parent is moderated interesting! No it's not it's rubbish. Repeat after me Aqua is not X! CoreAudio is not ALSA (or OSS)!!!
Yes Mac OS X has got BSD kernel, but 95% of things above that level (exlcluding OpenGL) are proprietary Apple stuff and so a nearly full blown port is requeried from Mac OS X to Linux! Nowadays programs like iTunes use more then fopen(...); and printf(...).
Indeed I can't believe that they still haven't figured out that since GNU/Linux is GPL based, owning SuSe does not mean that IBM can't start supporting other Linux distributor and give it enterprise level abilities. Heck, even YaST is now GPL, which means that Sun would essentially only get the SuSe brand, nothing else.
There's an interesting (one month old) article in the Economist about how Segway isn't doing as well as the makers expect.
I'm not one bit surprised. For me the thing is an amazing solution to a non-existent problem. Can someone explain to me how is this better from a bike?
I mean for the price of Segway I can buy the same bike Lance Armstrong rides, or nearly any mountain bike. (actually I just checked the price and Trek 5.9 is slightly more pricey then the Segway). Anyway, I do easily average 20mph when I cycle around London. The Segawy has a top speed of 12mph.
Oh yes and my bike does not need recharging.
There are some problems that lend themselves to be easily divided between thousands of processing nodes and then combined in a final answer / solution. (easily meant in the way mathematicians use the word, i.e easy means it known to be possible, anyone who's ever written a program using more that 2 threads knows what a nightmare it can be)
Then there are problems where such approach is not possible and you just need a very fast pipeline, or a big data troughput or whatever. ...as long as the government is spending my moneyI guess they considered other options before awarding the contract.
Sure, I'd love to have one of those things in my house,... I certainly won't my P4 system is making enough noise already and it's more than fast enough for all the simulation I've run on it in the last three years. ...another 1 ton monster that'll be obsolete in two years... Shame really, I must agree. But obsolete sounds a tad too harsh, perhaps not amongst the top 10 most powerfull but still usefull. And in 10 years time, they can incorporate it into the firewall and use it to run spam detection programs. (if the spam traffic keeps increasing at the current pace, it might be sufficient to service say, 5 mailboxes?)
I will actually respond, even though I have mod points at the moment. I was tempted to just mod you down and I'll explain why:
- Your post doesn't actually say anything but an opion that you don't support with anything.
- One can't really argue with a statement that contains nothing to dispute. That's why it's so tempting just to mod it down.
- I'll try to argue this time. Next time I'll just mod rubbish posts down when I can, it's the moderators job.
I guess you're trying to imply that Apple is evil because they're trying to make as much money as they possibly can. What _exactly_ is wrong with that? In fact they're obliged to try to make money by their shareholders. They're not killing childern / whales / trees in the process as far as I know. In fact the least ethical thing they're doing, as far as I'm aware is playing along with RIAA in helping to protect their copyrighted material. I don't think there's anything wrong with trying lo limit the number of devices a music file can be played on. It may not be convenient, but it's not exactly the same ballpark as RIAA trying to stop me playing DVDs I own on a Linux computer.
Have you noticed how every high street shop actually cooperates with RIAA as well by selling their CDs?
It is a well known fact that the authors don't get much (financially) for publishing a textbook. On the other hand I wouldn't go as far as saying that publishers don't add any value, but I'd say that the value they add is not proportional to the final price.
The trouble, of course, is that with (especially graduate) textbooks, there are very few people who'd possibly buy it, making publishing them an expensive task.
By the way, if you're intrested in mathematical analysis but you aren't prepared to spend an entire years budget on those nice yellow Springer books, check out Modern analysis online for not so much books as lecture notes; still a good source.
As a side note: The papers on "Modern Analysis Online" are still copyrighted by their respective authors. I'm sure you can download them, print them, but certainly not publish them. The website has all the boring details.
The bottom line is, "No software can ever be better than a human in defining Spam".
That is true if the human is looking at a single email. Now give the same human a mailbox with 2000 messages, 1000 of which are spam (by his standards). He won't be thinking twice about calling the message spam and getting rid of it, so he's bound to makea couple of mistakes (happend to me a while ago, one of my friends has her email @ladymail.com and the Subject was in Latin - random to me. I called it spam befere even reading Hello,...).
The claim that is being made is that if this poor man overlooks 10 spam emails, dspam will only overlook one. Whether that's true or not is another thing, and would again depend on the circumstances, but I believe it would apply to me.
I doubt if this will replace iPod, but I'm definitely looking forward to checking this little toy out. I was eligible for a free phone upgrade almost a year ago, but back then none of the devices really caught my attention and my old Sony CMD-J6 is still working just fine.
According to this article www.mobil.cz it should be on sale in the Czech Republic (sorry article in Czech, but this is the only intresting piece of info). So this makes me believe it should be available in Europe as well.
For me the ultimate issues will be battery life and the ability to synchronise with kde-pim tools. We'll see how it works out. The fact that it's running Linux is definitely a good start. The question is how "open" will it be, e.g. whether it'll be possible to use, say perl, to read the internal database, add the length of calls and do an accurate analysis of how much money I'm spending etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes the "bounceback" clearly has different meanings for different people.
As for the "Google" share price, this just reflects the doubling of _expectation_ of the profitability (or growth) of Google.
One thing I certainly don't want to see is the reemergence of the "I can code HTML == I'm a qualified web designer" and the "I can code a for loop in JavaScript == I'm a programmer" types. I hope that managers have learned from their past mistakes and see the difference between qualified people and morons. They were just dragging down all the qualified and hard working coders.
I think few of the people here wish the return of the late 90's heyday, because that just gave the industry a bad name.
I think there is another important issue: safety. If your device short circuits the airport power network and then it takes 20 minutes before someone finds the circuit breaker then people are not going to be happy. And what if your device screws up someones laptop? (I know this is _really_ unlikely) The UK solution is that all electrical devices plugged in any sort of public socket (e.g. libraries) should be tested for safety, whenever they're more than one year old.
I'd imagine that airports have two or three different level of electricity grid one for the "totally essential" and one for all the shops adverts and Christmas trees.
As for the electricity bill: if I'm at the airport and everything is running on time then batteries in my laptop last long enough. If my flight gets delayed by 7 hours like it did the last time then I feel I have the right to use some electricity, for all the airport taxes I have paid. Even if that means unplugging some Christmas tree.
And if any employee of the airport wants to come and argue about this then he's welcome: I have 7 hours to spare and I'm pretty annoyed to begin with.
I generally agree, but just to play devil's advocate:
Say a lot of people who wanted to buy a lot of eMacs won't do so now and wait for the cheaper "cheapMacs"?
No sorry it does not make any sense to me either. You must be right.
Or maybe it's just that Steve Jobs is an exhibitionist and wants the crowd to oooh and aaah even louder when he unveils the new products?
Indeed and "without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion."
Go on Slashdot crowd, none of you have the data, but I'm sure you all have an opinion.
That's what I thought when I saw iPod for the first time. And because of that I bought an MP3 CD player (well it was a lot cheaper too).
I've not heard of people complaining about the hard drive in their iPods. Battery, yes I know people have problems with batteries, but never hard drives. Makes me feel, like I've made the wrong choice... even though MP3 cd player is still fine 99% of the time.
I think a standart in small HDD interfaces is good, not only for iPod imitators (well the makers of), but also for people making mini-itx based computers.
And please, try to use your own words.
Excuse me? Are you trying to suggest that I didn't write the above myself, that someone is speaking for me? I'm offended.
Anyway, have I said that anything presented in F 9/11 is not true? I was just saying that by presenting only one side of the argument, it falls into the "propaganda" category, not "documentary" category. I didn't say the film does not have strong and good points, I didn't say that it shouldn't be aired and I certainly want to see Bush out of the White House ASAP.
Perhaps my point was that F 9/11 could have been stronger if the aim was to make an _objective_ documentary, because as it is, many people would dismiss it as propaganda and won't bother watching it at all, which would be a shame.
And I don't think there can be much question as to whether F 9/11 is a propaganda or not.
If a movie (book, article) presents strictly one side of the view, tries to piece together facts into tenuous conspiracy theoris (yes, Mr Moore, everyone know everyone else in the big bussiness world, if not personaly then they certainly have a common acquintance) then it is, by definition, propaganda.
And propaganda is always bad, even if it's trying to be for a good cause.
It's not bloody funny! The parent, in a true Slashdot style, didn't even get what the subject of the paper was!
The question pondered is whether _experienced_ reader reads by, in the first place, recognising the word shape, or by recognising the letters.
P.S. yes I know that psychologists are great for stating the obvious, but not here...
P.P.S. to parent: read the article properly, I'm sure you'll find a nice funny case of stating the obvious.
Read the parent please! SSH tunneling means that the even "HTTP GET" will come accros as something totally garbled. Whether they'll come after you, just because of encrypted connection, or whether they found a way of cracking SSH on the fly is another question (unlikely thought).
BUT! They're not bothered. If a few geeks read forbidden stuff, that won't change much. I'm sure there's already dissident minority. What they don't want is some critical mass of people getting the wrong idea. Which won't happen for a while, because most Chineese haven't seen a PC. On the other the peasants never really mattered in China, so maybe they (Chineese government) have a good reason to be paranoid.
On the other hand, it could be argued, that many people benefit enormously from the BBC, despite not paying the TV license. Me, for one, I don't have a telly and so I don't pay, despite listening to BBC radio, reading the website etc.
My point is that by developing this code, _eventually_ and _slowly_ less and less people are going to have a television in the house and hence less and less people will pay the license.
Which means that the UK government will have to figure out how to finance the BBC. I would hate to see them deciding to sell it. It would be really unfortunate if this project marked the beginning of the end of BBC as we know it.
I'm amazed! The first comment I expected see on /. was that this is all due to outsourcing to India!
I have to agree with the parent. Lot of people who were never qualified to do tech jobs aren't doing them anymore because the companies realised that they aren't value for money.
I wouldn't expect great demand for MSc./PhD. qualifications, just because I think that 3 years of CS theory is more than enough for any IT job. What you then need is experience. This not to say that PhD. is not useful for R&D people, but such jobs are few and far apart.
Also how many people don't call themselves IT professionals because it's no longer "chic"?
I see your point, even though since I use the same programs (emacs, kmail, latex, gcc, gnuplot, web browser) on both, and they're the only thing I use often enough, and of course they use the same config files. I don't even get any conflicts using them concurently. The reason why I wouldn't ditch OS X is because of Mathematica, which AFAIK does not run on PowerPC Linux of any flavour Yellow Dog included.
I would have thought that Linux on Apple hardware makes most sense on the server side, in which case the fact that it's not all full 64-bit defeats the point.
On the desktop side, I see no advantage of running Linux rather than OS X. Don't get me wrong, I use Linux on my IBM laptop all the time, but on OS X I can run the same programs and also all the nice Mac OS X only things like iTunes.
Just in case any of you were still in doubt about how outrageous the software patents are, here are a few examples from the German PDF:
.... ... I guess there's no need to go on. There seems to be a common theme amongst software patents and that is: they do not patent anything clever, they're just very clever in figuring out trivial things that can be patented!
- "One click ordering" I'm sure there's no one here who has not heard of this one, even though I'm unable to figure out how Munich could be in trouble for this one...
- Spam challenging (in Mozilla mail) and Spam Caller ID, held by Microsoft
- Some 60 firewall patents, apparently iptables is in trouble
- "Auswahl von Kompressionverfahren", choice of compression methods (Gimp)
- USB telephone, method and graphical interface for operating
EU commissioners are unelected and don't exactly have a reputation for honesty
You're right, they're not elected, but they're appointed by their respective national governments, which arise as a result of democratic election. I know it' debateable whether this is good enough or not, but then again, there are countries that don't have directly elected presidents.
I think a lot greater problem with software patents is that the issue is well understood only by a few people. Knowing enough about programming AND law is a rare combination.
It is very easy to confuse (and bribe) anyone into supporting the patents. Hopefully the case of Munich will actually be a good thing, because it will make politicians realize, that yes, software patents do matter to them!
I have IBM R40 and the only thing that I don't have working properly is suspend-to-disk, but I don't mind, the time it takes is about the same as turning the computer off and on again.
Suspend to RAM works (using APM) with 3d acceleration, USB mouse, scanner, IEEE1394, another PCMCIA network card.... the volume, brightness, lamp buttons all work, I can't really complain. CPU throttling works, the only thing I can't do without ACPI is temperature readings. Oh yes, lm_sensors don't work.
_But_ I still had to pay MS tax, when I bought the computer. Guess what IBM told me: "If you don't want Windows, don't buy our laptop! Yes you could get it without any OS, but you'd have to buy more that 100 identical units."
iTunes is not an X windows app. That's why porting it to Linux won't be much easier than porting to Windows.
Oh and the parent is moderated interesting! No it's not it's rubbish. Repeat after me Aqua is not X! CoreAudio is not ALSA (or OSS)!!!
Yes Mac OS X has got BSD kernel, but 95% of things above that level (exlcluding OpenGL) are proprietary Apple stuff and so a nearly full blown port is requeried from Mac OS X to Linux! Nowadays programs like iTunes use more then fopen(...); and printf(...).
Indeed I can't believe that they still haven't figured out that since GNU/Linux is GPL based, owning SuSe does not mean that IBM can't start supporting other Linux distributor and give it enterprise level abilities. Heck, even YaST is now GPL, which means that Sun would essentially only get the SuSe brand, nothing else.
There's an interesting (one month old) article in the Economist about how Segway isn't doing as well as the makers expect.
I'm not one bit surprised. For me the thing is an amazing solution to a non-existent problem. Can someone explain to me how is this better from a bike?
I mean for the price of Segway I can buy the same bike Lance Armstrong rides, or nearly any mountain bike. (actually I just checked the price and Trek 5.9 is slightly more pricey then the Segway). Anyway, I do easily average 20mph when I cycle around London. The Segawy has a top speed of 12mph. Oh yes and my bike does not need recharging.
There are some problems that lend themselves to be easily divided between thousands of processing nodes and then combined in a final answer / solution. (easily meant in the way mathematicians use the word, i.e easy means it known to be possible, anyone who's ever written a program using more that 2 threads knows what a nightmare it can be)
...as long as the government is spending my moneyI guess they considered other options before awarding the contract.
...another 1 ton monster that'll be obsolete in two years... Shame really, I must agree. But obsolete sounds a tad too harsh, perhaps not amongst the top 10 most powerfull but still usefull. And in 10 years time, they can incorporate it into the firewall and use it to run spam detection programs. (if the spam traffic keeps increasing at the current pace, it might be sufficient to service say, 5 mailboxes?)
Then there are problems where such approach is not possible and you just need a very fast pipeline, or a big data troughput or whatever.
Sure, I'd love to have one of those things in my house,... I certainly won't my P4 system is making enough noise already and it's more than fast enough for all the simulation I've run on it in the last three years.
I will actually respond, even though I have mod points at the moment. I was tempted to just mod you down and I'll explain why:
- Your post doesn't actually say anything but an opion that you don't support with anything.
- One can't really argue with a statement that contains nothing to dispute. That's why it's so tempting just to mod it down.
- I'll try to argue this time. Next time I'll just mod rubbish posts down when I can, it's the moderators job.
I guess you're trying to imply that Apple is evil because they're trying to make as much money as they possibly can. What _exactly_ is wrong with that? In fact they're obliged to try to make money by their shareholders. They're not killing childern / whales / trees in the process as far as I know. In fact the least ethical thing they're doing, as far as I'm aware is playing along with RIAA in helping to protect their copyrighted material. I don't think there's anything wrong with trying lo limit the number of devices a music file can be played on. It may not be convenient, but it's not exactly the same ballpark as RIAA trying to stop me playing DVDs I own on a Linux computer.
Have you noticed how every high street shop actually cooperates with RIAA as well by selling their CDs?
It is a well known fact that the authors don't get much (financially) for publishing a textbook. On the other hand I wouldn't go as far as saying that publishers don't add any value, but I'd say that the value they add is not proportional to the final price.
The trouble, of course, is that with (especially graduate) textbooks, there are very few people who'd possibly buy it, making publishing them an expensive task.
By the way, if you're intrested in mathematical analysis but you aren't prepared to spend an entire years budget on those nice yellow Springer books, check out Modern analysis online for not so much books as lecture notes; still a good source.
As a side note: The papers on "Modern Analysis Online" are still copyrighted by their respective authors. I'm sure you can download them, print them, but certainly not publish them. The website has all the boring details.
The bottom line is, "No software can ever be better than a human in defining Spam".
That is true if the human is looking at a single email. Now give the same human a mailbox with 2000 messages, 1000 of which are spam (by his standards). He won't be thinking twice about calling the message spam and getting rid of it, so he's bound to makea couple of mistakes (happend to me a while ago, one of my friends has her email @ladymail.com and the Subject was in Latin - random to me. I called it spam befere even reading Hello,...).
The claim that is being made is that if this poor man overlooks 10 spam emails, dspam will only overlook one. Whether that's true or not is another thing, and would again depend on the circumstances, but I believe it would apply to me.
Yes, I guess I should get rid of the link. The reason that it's not active is simply because I've finished at Warwick 2 years ago. Time flies, really.
I doubt if this will replace iPod, but I'm definitely looking forward to checking this little toy out. I was eligible for a free phone upgrade almost a year ago, but back then none of the devices really caught my attention and my old Sony CMD-J6 is still working just fine.
According to this article www.mobil.cz it should be on sale in the Czech Republic (sorry article in Czech, but this is the only intresting piece of info). So this makes me believe it should be available in Europe as well.
For me the ultimate issues will be battery life and the ability to synchronise with kde-pim tools. We'll see how it works out. The fact that it's running Linux is definitely a good start. The question is how "open" will it be, e.g. whether it'll be possible to use, say perl, to read the internal database, add the length of calls and do an accurate analysis of how much money I'm spending etc.