You are in charge of a large Telco and you burn about a billion dollars ($AUD) of shareholder's money. You can either:
A) Apologise to you shareholders and learn from the experience
B) Gouge your customers for the cash
Guess which option Ziggy took? Not just with Internet, but also with mobile phone services which are soon to become one of the most expensive in the world.
Canberra has a few choices for broadband, there's Teltra ADSL, a pile of other 3rd party DSLs, TransACT ether-to-your-door and the WaveLAN group mentioned. In every case, my problem is that even at their extortionate prices, Telstra are still the cheapest bandwidth at $84 for 3Gb/m. Further down the line, you still have quite a premium to get your packts into/out of Australia.
Either TransACT or wireless would be attractive if linked to a bandwidth coop or something.
Xix.
It could work (and porcine lifeforms may aviate)
on
I Want My MTV... PC?
·
· Score: 2
Though I much doubt it. You could expect reasonable demand for something that would let you grab music from MTV's catalogue or build personalised play-lists which could then be dumped onto a digital walkman or your car. If it's an end-to-end proprietary solution similar to the revocable certificates.NET is talking about, they can placate the music publishers and even get them an income stream. Even I would consider paying for a personalised MTV.
Why it won't work: Rather than an appliance (ala TiVo or an XBox), they are putting in a PC which will be much more expensive to buy and altogether a greater PITA to support. Even for audio only, I'd hate to have this thing hooked up to anything other than a broadband connection; people don't expect to wait 30 minutes for a song to download when they start their radio, and they sure don't want video clips that stop and start. They'll also have to rely on a lot of technology (content control for a start) that is scarcely beyond vapourware.
If it was a hardware manufacturer with a rcord for delivering consumer PCs maybe, but MTV???
Windows NT is not just for Intel chips; with the appropriate HAL, Windows NT 4.0 can also be run on Digital's Alpha processor. At launch, Windows NT 3.51 supported Intel, Alpha, MIPS RISC, and Motorola PPC processors, although by the end of 1996 MIPS RISC and PPC support had been dropped.
Tom Shanks stars as a happy-go-lucky, go-getting armed robber who starts stalking a resident in his apartment block when a poorly configured Judicial mailserver spams pardons to the inhabitants of a maximum security penitentiary...
Yes your honour, the defendant chose to copyright a name and address that coincided with a name and address we had already trademarked in our national ID database. We'd like to restitution by transferring them to our subsidiary which is a radium mine near Vladivostok...
So assuming all these global laws and the tendancy for trademark and IP law to become more rather than less restrictive, do we run the risk of ordinary people being locked out of their language for fear of bringing on a trademark infringement? Will corporations finance thousands of nuisance law suits against smaller competitors with a view to drowning them?
When was the last time you were asked for proof of ID when buying a colour laser? If you are going to print out your own bank notes, just make sure you do not use the same printer to print anything that remains on-site, then junk the printer.
Of course, be sure you can trust your OS:
"No officer, I hve no idea how my MS Passport number ended up on this $100 bill... honest..."
See
http://www.vertic.org/tnv/may00/science.html for a run-down of a story New Scientist ran some time back. For $7,500 USD they managed to DOS GPS over a wide area. I also wonder about the feasibility of attaching one of those explosive EMP generators to a wave guide or something.
Oh, and just a side note...I think all this effective CG stuff is going to really hurt the traditional latex/foam rubber movie monster
special effects industry. In years past, things like the cave troll in LotR would have been done with a guy in a suit, or hydraulics or
such. But, it probably wouldn't have seemed as fluid or expressive, so, eh no loss, right?:)
I wouldn't say that yet, some of the LOTR stuff looked suspiciously close to stuff from Braindead, a truly excellent rubber and latex splatter film. I wouldn't be suprised if it brings on a whole new wave of films that use *more* FX because the director knows anything is possible.
And I still find that CGI spaceship models do not have the same impact or feel as a well done model. I say they will compliment each other's strengths.
Wooo... lucky MS has decide that port 80 is the Internet after all.
p2p stuff may be more difficult to use now, and encrypted traffic may be for geeks only, but all this stuff will be available off the shelf the minute the current alternatives get blocked. No-one seriously used Napster alternatives until Napster was shut down.
What are they going to do? Sit in on all my video conferences in case I show any pink bits? As long as we have genitalia, we will have pR0n.
Most of our oil deposits come from vast monocultures of algae called stromatolites, basically cells that photosynthesise and spend no effort on defending themselves. This worked swimmingly until snails arrived on the scene and ate the algae. You still get stromatolites today, but only in really salty places where snails cannot dwell.
Stromatolites were especially susceptible to predators because they made no effort to defend themselves. With network connectivity becoming more pervasive, more previously isolated Windows boxes spew services to any network they can reach.
After millions of years OTOH, Roaches are still everywhere. This is because the suckers are robust and paranoid and therefore hard to kill. Even if you do kill one roach, it is quickly replaced.
Of the attachments I receive at work (no, I do not flip burgers):
- About a third are irrelevant to work
- About a third could have been done as text
- About a third already exist on fileservers
Then think about the amount of effort in building an insanely large Exchange server to host all this junk and, and compare it to the *very* modest box we used to use for mail. I used to accumilate maybe 20 Mb of mail a *year*, now I accumilate much more than that per month. On average, each of our users have about 200 Mb of "vital" correspondence in PST files clagging their homes (and the PST files starts to spontaneously combust when they top 70Mb or so). After all this, I think we have gone backwards in terms of investment/utility. We are paying a lot of money so people can use Word as their email editor and ignore good file management practises.
Yes, I'd agree that convincing PHBs they don't want floral pattern wallpaper on their email is a lost struggle, but the 1% of attachments people actually need would be far more effectively sent through other means and our mail infrastructure would be a tenth its current size.
How about implementing a no attachment policy? Seriously, how many attachments are jokes and/or vaguely amusing pictures or multiple copies of Word docs that can be found on a corporate fileserver anyway?
Now that web browsers can handle FTP sites, it's easy to show most people how to upload/download content and it's also easy to set up a low level of security (blind directories etc.) that is comparable to sending stuff over email (if it's confidential, it shouldn't be going out over email anyway).
Hmm.... so you mean the CIA chips in my Amiga *weren't* Complex Interface Adapters? No wonder serial.device was so damn slow, it was sending my cache file to Washington the whole time.
Something like this was mooted a couple of years back. The main annoyance was the extra work in tying the two (somewhat different) methods together, I suspect that the integration isn't as neat as it could have been. I can't help thinking that it would be more productive to have an open standard for positioning information (including things like pseudo satellites) rather than gluing together different stuff.
And spheroids are calculable. Anyone doing surveying will be reading into a PDA or something anyway so they can transform coords into any space they want.:o)
Today, representatives of VivendiUniversal won a victory against the holder of www.gostickyourheadinapig.com because "Vivendi Universal" translated as "Go Stick Your Head in a Pig" in an obscure pidgin dialect used by 12 islanders living on a Melanesian atoll. Vivendi are now pursuing the islanders for inadvertently defaming their organisation, "VivendiUniversal really do care about our porcine customers, and we think their conduct is appalling and in bad taste".
da Vinci, Botticelli, Giotto. All these guys were closer to the graphics artists and designers of today. Most of their great works were commissioned by kings and millionaires. None of them were starving artists living for their artistic principles alone.
Over here, there was some attempt to ban patrons bringing in drinks not supplied by the sponsor of a major sporting event. Things like water.
More recently, I was stripped of my water bottle at a major outdoor music festival ostensibly because it may have been alcohol and was forced to buy water at extortionate rates.
Maybe trying the same thing MS did to Netscape with IE. Give away a development environment rather than let the opposition own the development environment. The open nature of it all will hopefully make it far more adaptable and adoptable than the VisualStudio.NET black-hole.
Slashdot Mirror
A) Apologise to you shareholders and learn from the experience
B) Gouge your customers for the cash
Guess which option Ziggy took? Not just with Internet, but also with mobile phone services which are soon to become one of the most expensive in the world.
The price rises are nothing to do with the pofitability of ADSL operations
Xix.
Canberra has a few choices for broadband, there's Teltra ADSL, a pile of other 3rd party DSLs, TransACT ether-to-your-door and the WaveLAN group mentioned. In every case, my problem is that even at their extortionate prices, Telstra are still the cheapest bandwidth at $84 for 3Gb/m. Further down the line, you still have quite a premium to get your packts into/out of Australia.
Either TransACT or wireless would be attractive if linked to a bandwidth coop or something.
Xix.
Though I much doubt it. You could expect reasonable demand for something that would let you grab music from MTV's catalogue or build personalised play-lists which could then be dumped onto a digital walkman or your car. If it's an end-to-end proprietary solution similar to the revocable certificates .NET is talking about, they can placate the music publishers and even get them an income stream. Even I would consider paying for a personalised MTV.
Why it won't work: Rather than an appliance (ala TiVo or an XBox), they are putting in a PC which will be much more expensive to buy and altogether a greater PITA to support. Even for audio only, I'd hate to have this thing hooked up to anything other than a broadband connection; people don't expect to wait 30 minutes for a song to download when they start their radio, and they sure don't want video clips that stop and start. They'll also have to rely on a lot of technology (content control for a start) that is scarcely beyond vapourware.
If it was a hardware manufacturer with a rcord for delivering consumer PCs maybe, but MTV???
Xix.
http://supportnet.merit.edu/m-winenv/t-intwin/text /features.html
Xix.
Tom Shanks stars as a happy-go-lucky, go-getting armed robber who starts stalking a resident in his apartment block when a poorly configured Judicial mailserver spams pardons to the inhabitants of a maximum security penitentiary...
Xix.
Will be a suit raised by a failed dotcom that has a patent that gives them exclusive rights to the online provision of justice.
Xix.
Yes your honour, the defendant chose to copyright a name and address that coincided with a name and address we had already trademarked in our national ID database. We'd like to restitution by transferring them to our subsidiary which is a radium mine near Vladivostok...
Xix.
I always wanted a dolphin called Sushi
Doesn't matter where you tread, unless it's a nonsense word, there's probably a trademark on it somewhere in the world. Sigh...
Xix.
Xix.
When was the last time you were asked for proof of ID when buying a colour laser? If you are going to print out your own bank notes, just make sure you do not use the same printer to print anything that remains on-site, then junk the printer.
Of course, be sure you can trust your OS:
"No officer, I hve no idea how my MS Passport number ended up on this $100 bill... honest..."
Xix.
Xix.
I wouldn't say that yet, some of the LOTR stuff looked suspiciously close to stuff from Braindead, a truly excellent rubber and latex splatter film. I wouldn't be suprised if it brings on a whole new wave of films that use *more* FX because the director knows anything is possible.
And I still find that CGI spaceship models do not have the same impact or feel as a well done model. I say they will compliment each other's strengths.
Xix.
Wooo... lucky MS has decide that port 80 is the Internet after all.
p2p stuff may be more difficult to use now, and encrypted traffic may be for geeks only, but all this stuff will be available off the shelf the minute the current alternatives get blocked. No-one seriously used Napster alternatives until Napster was shut down.
What are they going to do? Sit in on all my video conferences in case I show any pink bits? As long as we have genitalia, we will have pR0n.
Xix.
Plus who is going to pay for their domain name from some squatter when you can get your lawyer to kick their head in for a fraction of the price?
Xix.
Most of our oil deposits come from vast monocultures of algae called stromatolites, basically cells that photosynthesise and spend no effort on defending themselves. This worked swimmingly until snails arrived on the scene and ate the algae. You still get stromatolites today, but only in really salty places where snails cannot dwell.
Stromatolites were especially susceptible to predators because they made no effort to defend themselves. With network connectivity becoming more pervasive, more previously isolated Windows boxes spew services to any network they can reach.
After millions of years OTOH, Roaches are still everywhere. This is because the suckers are robust and paranoid and therefore hard to kill. Even if you do kill one roach, it is quickly replaced.
Monoculture is only a part of the ecology.
Xix.
Of the attachments I receive at work (no, I do not flip burgers):
- About a third are irrelevant to work
- About a third could have been done as text
- About a third already exist on fileservers
Then think about the amount of effort in building an insanely large Exchange server to host all this junk and, and compare it to the *very* modest box we used to use for mail. I used to accumilate maybe 20 Mb of mail a *year*, now I accumilate much more than that per month. On average, each of our users have about 200 Mb of "vital" correspondence in PST files clagging their homes (and the PST files starts to spontaneously combust when they top 70Mb or so). After all this, I think we have gone backwards in terms of investment/utility. We are paying a lot of money so people can use Word as their email editor and ignore good file management practises.
Yes, I'd agree that convincing PHBs they don't want floral pattern wallpaper on their email is a lost struggle, but the 1% of attachments people actually need would be far more effectively sent through other means and our mail infrastructure would be a tenth its current size.
Attachments are a PITA.
Xix.
How about implementing a no attachment policy? Seriously, how many attachments are jokes and/or vaguely amusing pictures or multiple copies of Word docs that can be found on a corporate fileserver anyway?
Now that web browsers can handle FTP sites, it's easy to show most people how to upload/download content and it's also easy to set up a low level of security (blind directories etc.) that is comparable to sending stuff over email (if it's confidential, it shouldn't be going out over email anyway).
Xix.
Hmm.... so you mean the CIA chips in my Amiga *weren't* Complex Interface Adapters? No wonder serial.device was so damn slow, it was sending my cache file to Washington the whole time.
Antti
Something like this was mooted a couple of years back. The main annoyance was the extra work in tying the two (somewhat different) methods together, I suspect that the integration isn't as neat as it could have been. I can't help thinking that it would be more productive to have an open standard for positioning information (including things like pseudo satellites) rather than gluing together different stuff.
:o)
And spheroids are calculable. Anyone doing surveying will be reading into a PDA or something anyway so they can transform coords into any space they want.
Xix.
Today, representatives of VivendiUniversal won a victory against the holder of www.gostickyourheadinapig.com because "Vivendi Universal" translated as "Go Stick Your Head in a Pig" in an obscure pidgin dialect used by 12 islanders living on a Melanesian atoll. Vivendi are now pursuing the islanders for inadvertently defaming their organisation, "VivendiUniversal really do care about our porcine customers, and we think their conduct is appalling and in bad taste".
Xix.
Xix.
da Vinci, Botticelli, Giotto. All these guys were closer to the graphics artists and designers of today. Most of their great works were commissioned by kings and millionaires. None of them were starving artists living for their artistic principles alone.
Xix.
Over here, there was some attempt to ban patrons bringing in drinks not supplied by the sponsor of a major sporting event. Things like water.
More recently, I was stripped of my water bottle at a major outdoor music festival ostensibly because it may have been alcohol and was forced to buy water at extortionate rates.
Xix.
Maybe trying the same thing MS did to Netscape with IE. Give away a development environment rather than let the opposition own the development environment. The open nature of it all will hopefully make it far more adaptable and adoptable than the VisualStudio.NET black-hole.
Xix.