"We oversold and can't cope with the costs. Subsidise us."
Well, fuck you BT. You made your bed; Lie in it.
I think a better response would be: you made a couple of _billion_ £UKP profit each of the last few years, you can afford it. When you're making a loss on selling backbone bandwidth (and your directors are getting paid less than 150K pa) then come and sob, til then we poor schmuck taxpayers of Britain will keep our hard earned money from your wealthy directors and shareholders at almost any cost.
But I'm guessing the MPs will step in a write BT a big check and reap the rewards in dividend payments and retirement jobs.
What? There are only, like 100 of the damned things.
This isn't like the US where the ISPs have carved out local monopolies.
BT operates at several different levels. They sell bandwidth to the 100 odd ISPs that operate in your exchanges because they control the actual physical infrastructure. If BT can get away with it (probably) then they can increase the charge to the ISPs for their customers accessing iPlayer. Whereas what they should be doing is charging a cost for bandwidth regardless of its use.
Nice idea, but the BBC is a public service and would probably be violating parts of its charter by doing this.
The BBC is a quasi-governmental public service. Which is exactly why they shouldn't be bowing to pressure from commercial enterprises that think they'd like more profits and see the BBC as a cash cow. BBC need to tell BT they can take their peering agreement and shove it; they could also give them a lesson in ethical business - like charge the customers for the service you give them and then use that money to ensure your business stays viable, rather than removing it all as profit.
BT's profit in 2008 was over £2 billion UKP... now tell me the tale again about how they can't afford to improve their infrastructure?
Presumably the BT management and shareholders have been pocketing the profits whilst they still maintain[ed] a near monopoly on infrastructure level service rather than investing in future-proofing. Why should one care if you can run off with all the profits and leave the company unable to properly contend in the future? Capitalism sucks. This is why, IMO, basic infrastructure (roads, utilities, communications) are jobs for a properly regulated government.
I think that more worrying is the idea that a computer tech could be trawling drives searching for nude images of juveniles to sell on.
Any access of files outside that required to complete the job should not be allowed by the company fixing the computer. This should be considered as cracking (unauthorised access to a computer) and punishable under law. If the tech has a suspicion based on what they've seen [doing their job] then they should report it to the police (who in the UK I suspect would do nothing).
If someone looks at pictures of your kids naked on your computer when they're supposed to be installing MS Office or whatever, shouldn't the police [strictly speaking under the current legislation] be prosecuting them for invasion of privacy, viewing child pornography, etc..
Seriously, your problem reduces down to "it's not fair that the law favours police officers catching criminals". You basically think that we should make it harder for the police to catch people attempting to engage in illegal activity and make it easier for perps to evade the police.
Don't commit the crime (eg drug dealing) and the chances of being prosecuted for it are far less than the chance you'll be hit by a bus today.
And where is the incentive to create new medications?
To sell them.
You know there are no patents protecting farmer Blake from growing carrots simply because farmer Adams grows them already yet somehow they both manage to grow crops and profit. They call it capitalism. What stops anyone from growing carrots in their yard, nothing, except the farmers skill (versus your own) and economies of scale.
The barrier of entry for pharma is a lot higher and so potential profits are too.
"Last year, a colleague looked at annual reports of six of the biggest drug makers, and found that just 11 percent of revenues went for R&D in those firms. [...] Thatâ(TM)s far below the 18.5-20.0 percent levels that the industry says it devotes to R&D."
Elsewhere "31 percent [of revenue] went for marketing and administration." and it's noted that a 1950s senate study reported 4 times the revenue spent on marketing as on R&D.
I don't actually promote negation of drug patents. The 5 years or so of drug trials are the major hurdle. I think a term of license + 5 years (or so) or for compatibility a fixed patent term across all technologies of 10 years from registration is plenty.
Pharma's don't spend a lot on R&D compared to the gain they get in profit (about equal to the R&D figures) the patent deal is too cheap for them IMO.
He would toss $400-500 to the state and average about $300 in winnings. Every once in a while, he would win big but I think he still broke even in the long run.
If he broke even then, after a while assuming no change in conditions, he wasn't gambling. He would have stood to lose nothing ("broke even") but potentially gain whatever the top prize was.
Fortunately, the effect only extends a few wavelengths from the antenna at most (the so-called near field region) and has absolutely no impact on receivers outside that space.
You just made free power: set up a transmitter and receivers spaced a distance apart, the receivers all get power no matter how many of them I have (according to you) without affecting any more distant receivers. So I set up one receiver and get a few milliwatts from my 500mW transmitter; then add another 1000 receivers... and get a few 1000 mW back [extrapolating what it seems you're saying]. I feed back the power to the transmitter using conventional means (wires) and tap off the excess couple of W. Add extra receivers to increase your output.
If you can get this to work be sure to let me know!
When I was working as a patent examiner I had this same idea [as Nokia] of harvesting radio waves for power - I thought for the first day that I was going to make it rich - harvesting "free" energy from the aether, what could go wrong?!
Then I realised, it's not free, it won't scale and I imagined it would probably be illegal (it's illegal to commercially harvest water from your roof without a license in the UK, this seems legally a near analog).
A 1cm receiver at 1km from a transmitter is getting about 1x10^-11 of the power impacting the receiver.
I think you should start thinking about it. You're going to have to move at some stage unless you fancy scavenging old hardware to patch up your systems.
And can we please club that idea that a browser, JavaScript and a bit of fairy-dust can fully replace any local application regardless of specific implications out of people's heads?
I'd be interested in your counter-examples. Since Adobe made their online version of Photoshop, Google (et al.) made online office apps (that appear to work better than the off-line analogues), etc., I'm of the opinion that pretty much anything in userspace _can_ be converted to a browser based app.
Now the wisdom of such a move is a different question. But you were just talking about possibility. So?
Independance [sic] from a specific operating system or browser has NEVER EVER come up.
Then maybe you should have raised it?
Something like: "You do realise that you're entirely beholden to Microsoft in order to run this MSIE(*) based application? If you keep up to date with security releases then the application I've made for you could be completely broken as it relies on MSIE version X.XXXXX. If you don't keep up to date with security releases for MSIE then you will almost certainly be hacked. No MS don't support 2 MS browser versions to be installed concurrently, yes - that would largely fix the issue."
"Suppose MS quadruple your licensing fee next year?"
* incidentally a web app runs on a web browser, any standards compliant browser that can read the markup used. You appear to be talking about MSIE wrappers, they are not web apps. ActiveX is not a web technology - it is [or at least was] the anti-web.
lack of support (you already pay MS for support so thats 'free'),
You make some valid points on resistance to change, etc., but really when was the last time MS fixed an IE rendering bug for you?
IEtab I imagine just wraps the MSIE DLL into firefox. I bet it's open source too.
Why are you paying "serious $$$" for an app that requires a specific browser to run? Why not include in the NSR that the web front-end must validate against the testing requirements on (say) any 2 of the top 5 browser programs.
Do you also insist that your electrical chords are all moulded proprietary shapes that only fit a specific companies socket? Haven't MS got you over a barrel?
IMO, IEtab for Linux is actually a great idea. Currently people use IEs4linux or just plain WINE or a virtualisation environment - having an IEtab for linux that can seamlessly hook into a virtualised / WINE version of IE could be useful for those migrating from a Microsoft OS to a Linux distro or those doing testing with IE.
Bonus marks if it virtualises IE6/IE7/IE8 and allows compatibility modes too and only shows as a tab in FF none of the virtualisation env being revealed.
Currently I use dual-boot and virtualbox (for web design compat. testing), which I'd need to keep on with but an IEtab4linux could aid brief testing.
12" is pretty borderline. But in any case, they were making laptops with touchscreens 8 years ago. And many since. Quite a number, in fact, were made so that you could turn the screen around and fold it down over the keyboard to make it into a tablet PC. How could you possibly have missed them all?
The ones that flip-rotate I grouped under tablet PC. I genuinely have never seen a laptop with a touchscreen advertised or in real life. Perhaps they were high ticket, which I have to dismiss as I don't have much money.
Still where are the tablet PCs for $300, I'll get one... a link (eg amazon, affiliate if you like) would be lovely, thanks.
Wow that came across a bit like marketing spiel, I swear I have not connections with the crunchpad, it's got my inner gadgeteer really excited though:
I've never seen a netbook with a 12" touchscreen.
12" is laptop territory. I've never seen a laptop with a touchscreen.
So we're talking tablets from about $700 USD (a lot more for thin form factor). If all I need it for is to access a webpage and I can do that and save $400 USD I don't see that as being a flat argument (especially as dollar costs are usually the same numbers as the cost in UKP).
Nah. Like I told the domain-er, all the "What you need, when you need it" garbage in.com is eventually going to devalue it.
I don't actually have a clue what, specifically, you mean when you refer to the '"What you need, when you need it" garbage' so, as a heavy web user I don't think that issue is going to get browser makers to flip the ctrl-enter (default) TLD extension from.com any time soon. Nor do I think.com is going to suffer in it's mindshare - people assuming that madcrush is at madcrush.com.
Google, who might have 80%+ of the search market where you are, use domain keywords as a strong indicator so the domain-er could potentially beat you in the SERPs without getting a better PR than you. FWIW.
If you really took off they might attempt to snatch the trademark; that (in the UK) wouldn't stop your current use of the mark but they could preempt your move into other fields of commerce, clothing say.
Fault is essentially irrelevant to anyone who has already purchased this firewall.
Unless they want to get the fault fixed and so need to know who to contact?
Contact Fortigate and tell them their firewall is broken as it prevents Opera from working. If you contact Opera they'll probably say their browser works fine and tell you the way to fix it is to use a different firewall - mind you Fortigate may say something similar!
Let's see, I have a $300 Kindle for e-books, a $300 CrunchPad for Web pages...
This may come as a suprise to you but you can read books via the www.
You can also do photoshop, do banking, listen to music, make phone calls, read your email, watch videos, watch TV... in fact just about anything you'd need a screen for. Crunchpad has a USB input too so you can use it to power your mobile rocket launcher. Not enough on board power? Just use it as a slim client using VNC over 'net.
And in the end, the promised price point of 200 dollars was necessary; for 300 dollars, I can get a fully-featured netbook or iPod touch.
Can you get a 12" / 30cm touch screen for that price? I've tried and been unsuccessful, £300 is the price in the UK, that's not a portable device that's just the screen.
Granted this probably means $300 for a touchscreen in the US, but getting a wifi / 3g enabled portable net device with a touchscreen for that price seems pretty awesome to me. If they were available in the UK for $300 I'd have one now and use it as a POS terminal and / or demoing websites to clients.
Be careful of trademark issues. If the domain holder has any type of business dealings using a domain then that is a trademark for that business. It could invalidate your registration of a mark; IANA TradeMark Lawyer.
Also as your business grows and becomes established then their domain name becomes more valuable. They have an established right to use it (YMMV as might theirs) and could do well skimming off any type-in-traffic (assuming your gamble of getting top of the SERP listings works). Also if they then SEO the domain they're likely to beat you (at the moment domain name keywords are very strong), they have the prior right to use the name as their trademark... you market their business for them and they take [some of] the profit.
If you have a choice I don't think it's worth the risk.
Slashdot Mirror
"We oversold and can't cope with the costs. Subsidise us."
Well, fuck you BT. You made your bed; Lie in it.
I think a better response would be: you made a couple of _billion_ £UKP profit each of the last few years, you can afford it. When you're making a loss on selling backbone bandwidth (and your directors are getting paid less than 150K pa) then come and sob, til then we poor schmuck taxpayers of Britain will keep our hard earned money from your wealthy directors and shareholders at almost any cost.
But I'm guessing the MPs will step in a write BT a big check and reap the rewards in dividend payments and retirement jobs.
Jaded, moi?!
"Remind me, which other UK ISPs don't use BT's backbone? "
Remind us where it matters?
Its a numbers game, if people go to someone else they pay someone else - that that money may end up with BT is not really relevant.
There's another internet backbone of cables buried in the UK? That must be from the other previous state controlled telecoms organisation??
What? There are only, like 100 of the damned things.
This isn't like the US where the ISPs have carved out local monopolies.
BT operates at several different levels. They sell bandwidth to the 100 odd ISPs that operate in your exchanges because they control the actual physical infrastructure. If BT can get away with it (probably) then they can increase the charge to the ISPs for their customers accessing iPlayer. Whereas what they should be doing is charging a cost for bandwidth regardless of its use.
Nice idea, but the BBC is a public service and would probably be violating parts of its charter by doing this.
The BBC is a quasi-governmental public service. Which is exactly why they shouldn't be bowing to pressure from commercial enterprises that think they'd like more profits and see the BBC as a cash cow. BBC need to tell BT they can take their peering agreement and shove it; they could also give them a lesson in ethical business - like charge the customers for the service you give them and then use that money to ensure your business stays viable, rather than removing it all as profit.
BT's profit in 2008 was over £2 billion UKP ... now tell me the tale again about how they can't afford to improve their infrastructure?
Presumably the BT management and shareholders have been pocketing the profits whilst they still maintain[ed] a near monopoly on infrastructure level service rather than investing in future-proofing. Why should one care if you can run off with all the profits and leave the company unable to properly contend in the future? Capitalism sucks. This is why, IMO, basic infrastructure (roads, utilities, communications) are jobs for a properly regulated government.
I think that more worrying is the idea that a computer tech could be trawling drives searching for nude images of juveniles to sell on.
Any access of files outside that required to complete the job should not be allowed by the company fixing the computer. This should be considered as cracking (unauthorised access to a computer) and punishable under law. If the tech has a suspicion based on what they've seen [doing their job] then they should report it to the police (who in the UK I suspect would do nothing).
If someone looks at pictures of your kids naked on your computer when they're supposed to be installing MS Office or whatever, shouldn't the police [strictly speaking under the current legislation] be prosecuting them for invasion of privacy, viewing child pornography, etc..
So, are you going to tell us now what you did?
Seriously, your problem reduces down to "it's not fair that the law favours police officers catching criminals". You basically think that we should make it harder for the police to catch people attempting to engage in illegal activity and make it easier for perps to evade the police.
Don't commit the crime (eg drug dealing) and the chances of being prosecuted for it are far less than the chance you'll be hit by a bus today.
And where is the incentive to create new medications?
To sell them.
You know there are no patents protecting farmer Blake from growing carrots simply because farmer Adams grows them already yet somehow they both manage to grow crops and profit. They call it capitalism. What stops anyone from growing carrots in their yard, nothing, except the farmers skill (versus your own) and economies of scale.
The barrier of entry for pharma is a lot higher and so potential profits are too.
From a 2001 study (I'm sure things haven't changed that much here), http://dcc2.bumc.bu.edu/hs/sager/pdfs/020402/Pharmaceutical%20Marketing%20and%20Research%20Spending%20APHA%2021%20Oct%2001.pdf :
"Last year, a colleague looked at annual reports of six of the biggest drug makers,
and found that just 11 percent of revenues went for R&D in those firms. [...]
Thatâ(TM)s far below the 18.5-20.0 percent levels that the industry says it devotes to
R&D."
Elsewhere "31 percent [of revenue] went for marketing and administration." and it's noted that a 1950s senate study reported 4 times the revenue spent on marketing as on R&D.
I don't actually promote negation of drug patents. The 5 years or so of drug trials are the major hurdle. I think a term of license + 5 years (or so) or for compatibility a fixed patent term across all technologies of 10 years from registration is plenty.
Pharma's don't spend a lot on R&D compared to the gain they get in profit (about equal to the R&D figures) the patent deal is too cheap for them IMO.
He would toss $400-500 to the state and average about $300 in winnings. Every once in a while, he would win big but I think he still broke even in the long run.
If he broke even then, after a while assuming no change in conditions, he wasn't gambling. He would have stood to lose nothing ("broke even") but potentially gain whatever the top prize was.
Fortunately, the effect only extends a few wavelengths from the antenna at most (the so-called near field region) and has absolutely no impact on receivers outside that space.
You just made free power: set up a transmitter and receivers spaced a distance apart, the receivers all get power no matter how many of them I have (according to you) without affecting any more distant receivers. So I set up one receiver and get a few milliwatts from my 500mW transmitter; then add another 1000 receivers ... and get a few 1000 mW back [extrapolating what it seems you're saying]. I feed back the power to the transmitter using conventional means (wires) and tap off the excess couple of W. Add extra receivers to increase your output.
If you can get this to work be sure to let me know!
When I was working as a patent examiner I had this same idea [as Nokia] of harvesting radio waves for power - I thought for the first day that I was going to make it rich - harvesting "free" energy from the aether, what could go wrong?!
Then I realised, it's not free, it won't scale and I imagined it would probably be illegal (it's illegal to commercially harvest water from your roof without a license in the UK, this seems legally a near analog).
A 1cm receiver at 1km from a transmitter is getting about 1x10^-11 of the power impacting the receiver.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1261543&cid=28261931
I think you should start thinking about it. You're going to have to move at some stage unless you fancy scavenging old hardware to patch up your systems.
And can we please club that idea that a browser, JavaScript and a bit of fairy-dust can fully replace any local application regardless of specific implications out of people's heads?
I'd be interested in your counter-examples. Since Adobe made their online version of Photoshop, Google (et al.) made online office apps (that appear to work better than the off-line analogues), etc., I'm of the opinion that pretty much anything in userspace _can_ be converted to a browser based app.
Now the wisdom of such a move is a different question. But you were just talking about possibility. So?
Independance [sic] from a specific operating system or browser has NEVER EVER come up.
Then maybe you should have raised it?
Something like: "You do realise that you're entirely beholden to Microsoft in order to run this MSIE(*) based application? If you keep up to date with security releases then the application I've made for you could be completely broken as it relies on MSIE version X.XXXXX. If you don't keep up to date with security releases for MSIE then you will almost certainly be hacked. No MS don't support 2 MS browser versions to be installed concurrently, yes - that would largely fix the issue."
"Suppose MS quadruple your licensing fee next year?"
* incidentally a web app runs on a web browser, any standards compliant browser that can read the markup used. You appear to be talking about MSIE wrappers, they are not web apps. ActiveX is not a web technology - it is [or at least was] the anti-web.
lack of support (you already pay MS for support so thats 'free'),
You make some valid points on resistance to change, etc., but really when was the last time MS fixed an IE rendering bug for you?
IEtab I imagine just wraps the MSIE DLL into firefox. I bet it's open source too.
Why are you paying "serious $$$" for an app that requires a specific browser to run? Why not include in the NSR that the web front-end must validate against the testing requirements on (say) any 2 of the top 5 browser programs.
Do you also insist that your electrical chords are all moulded proprietary shapes that only fit a specific companies socket? Haven't MS got you over a barrel?
IMO, IEtab for Linux is actually a great idea. Currently people use IEs4linux or just plain WINE or a virtualisation environment - having an IEtab for linux that can seamlessly hook into a virtualised / WINE version of IE could be useful for those migrating from a Microsoft OS to a Linux distro or those doing testing with IE.
Bonus marks if it virtualises IE6/IE7/IE8 and allows compatibility modes too and only shows as a tab in FF none of the virtualisation env being revealed.
Currently I use dual-boot and virtualbox (for web design compat. testing), which I'd need to keep on with but an IEtab4linux could aid brief testing.
So, the first number was off by a factor of ten, not counting the silly estimate of 25 Pounds when even 2.5 Pounds was doubtless too much
In the UK top music tracks from Tesco, et al., are 80p-£1 IIRC?
PPV movies (Sky, Virgin, etc.) are £2-£4 according to Which? consumer magazine.
So there's probably at least another factor of 10 right there.
12" is pretty borderline. But in any case, they were making laptops with touchscreens 8 years ago. And many since. Quite a number, in fact, were made so that you could turn the screen around and fold it down over the keyboard to make it into a tablet PC. How could you possibly have missed them all?
The ones that flip-rotate I grouped under tablet PC. I genuinely have never seen a laptop with a touchscreen advertised or in real life. Perhaps they were high ticket, which I have to dismiss as I don't have much money.
Still where are the tablet PCs for $300, I'll get one ... a link (eg amazon, affiliate if you like) would be lovely, thanks.
Wow that came across a bit like marketing spiel, I swear I have not connections with the crunchpad, it's got my inner gadgeteer really excited though:
I've never seen a netbook with a 12" touchscreen.
12" is laptop territory. I've never seen a laptop with a touchscreen.
So we're talking tablets from about $700 USD (a lot more for thin form factor). If all I need it for is to access a webpage and I can do that and save $400 USD I don't see that as being a flat argument (especially as dollar costs are usually the same numbers as the cost in UKP).
Nah. Like I told the domain-er, all the "What you need, when you need it" garbage in .com is eventually going to devalue it.
I don't actually have a clue what, specifically, you mean when you refer to the '"What you need, when you need it" garbage' so, as a heavy web user I don't think that issue is going to get browser makers to flip the ctrl-enter (default) TLD extension from .com any time soon. Nor do I think .com is going to suffer in it's mindshare - people assuming that madcrush is at madcrush.com.
Google, who might have 80%+ of the search market where you are, use domain keywords as a strong indicator so the domain-er could potentially beat you in the SERPs without getting a better PR than you. FWIW.
If you really took off they might attempt to snatch the trademark; that (in the UK) wouldn't stop your current use of the mark but they could preempt your move into other fields of commerce, clothing say.
Fault is essentially irrelevant to anyone who has already purchased this firewall.
Unless they want to get the fault fixed and so need to know who to contact?
Contact Fortigate and tell them their firewall is broken as it prevents Opera from working. If you contact Opera they'll probably say their browser works fine and tell you the way to fix it is to use a different firewall - mind you Fortigate may say something similar!
Let's see, I have a $300 Kindle for e-books, a $300 CrunchPad for Web pages...
This may come as a suprise to you but you can read books via the www.
You can also do photoshop, do banking, listen to music, make phone calls, read your email, watch videos, watch TV ... in fact just about anything you'd need a screen for. Crunchpad has a USB input too so you can use it to power your mobile rocket launcher. Not enough on board power? Just use it as a slim client using VNC over 'net.
And in the end, the promised price point of 200 dollars was necessary; for 300 dollars, I can get a fully-featured netbook or iPod touch.
Can you get a 12" / 30cm touch screen for that price? I've tried and been unsuccessful, £300 is the price in the UK, that's not a portable device that's just the screen.
Granted this probably means $300 for a touchscreen in the US, but getting a wifi / 3g enabled portable net device with a touchscreen for that price seems pretty awesome to me. If they were available in the UK for $300 I'd have one now and use it as a POS terminal and / or demoing websites to clients.
If you ever get to the point where you're selling music/merchandising online then I think that domain-er is going to be very happy.
Be careful of trademark issues. If the domain holder has any type of business dealings using a domain then that is a trademark for that business. It could invalidate your registration of a mark; IANA TradeMark Lawyer.
Also as your business grows and becomes established then their domain name becomes more valuable. They have an established right to use it (YMMV as might theirs) and could do well skimming off any type-in-traffic (assuming your gamble of getting top of the SERP listings works). Also if they then SEO the domain they're likely to beat you (at the moment domain name keywords are very strong), they have the prior right to use the name as their trademark ... you market their business for them and they take [some of] the profit.
If you have a choice I don't think it's worth the risk.