I keyed in my post code on BT's availability checker page, and it replied with this helpful message: BT has no plans to upgrade your exchange in the near term. BT is working on partnerships with local and national government bodies to evaluate the possibilities of bringing broadband to your area in a cost effective way. We are also investigating alternative technologies, such as, Satellite Services. We will be providing you with more information on this site at the end of June. Alternatively you may be receiving service from another telecomms supplier.
It's clear to me that they have no plans to offer DSL in the small town where I live. Ever. They will just cherry-pick the big cities. Small surprise really, as they are in pretty bad shape financially. Good thing that national highways and railroads weren't built like this...
There might be an excuse for this sort of dribbling geographic coverage in the US or Canada, where the distance between cities is enormous. There is little excuse for it here in the UK.
Re:Civilian Casualties of the Pax Americana
on
Space Wars
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· Score: 2
b.) he double- and triple-counted even a lot of these reports
Really? According to whom?
All of these have been shown to be false...
Shown by whom? Links or references, please?
Civilian Casualties of the Pax Americana
on
Space Wars
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Driven by al Qaeda's atrocities, the US charged into the classic quagmire of Afghanistan, legendary death trap of military ambition. With the customary roll of thunder, out came the full routine of the modern American expeditionary force. First, a cautious, methodical, widely televised suppression of local air defenses. Then, once CNN became accustomed to the violence, some leisurely and terrible precision targeting throughout the theater, around the clock. In Serbia in 1999, US aircraft smashed stationary targets, like buildings and bridges. In Afghanistan, thanks to much faster satellite relays, they demolished rapidly moving tanks, fleeing Toyota trucks, and amazed guerrillas. It took only two weeks to chase Taliban and al Qaeda forces into Pakistan, Iran, and beyond.
"Terrible precision targeting"? Yes, the precision was pretty terrible alright. But the carnage isn't over yet, and won't be for decades: the UN estimates that around 14,000 unexploded cluster bomblets are still on the ground in Afghanistan. They're bright yellow, the same color as the food parcels the US very kindly dropped, while all the aid agencies pleaded with them to stop. So thousands more will die, long after you've had all your parades and pinned on all your medals.
Slow, careful police work was far too unglamourous. Much more sexually satisfying to bomb the shit out of the country harboring the prime suspect. Do you really think that the strikes against the US will stop, simply because the Taliban have been chased into retreat? How many more young suicide bombers are being created daily, thanks to these atrocities and all the others supported and funded around the world by the US? Will they all just give up and go home, awed by superior US satellite technology? Use your brain, for God's sake. You will reap what you sow.
Pay-per-view on finite resources
on
More on MPEG4
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· Score: 2
Furthermore, businesses like the gas company and the phone company that use micropayments offline share one characteristic: They are all monopolies or cartels. In situations where there is real competition, providers are usually forced to drop "pay as you go" schemes in response to user preference, because if they don't, anyone who can offer flat-rate pricing becomes the market leader. (See sidebar: "Simplicity in pricing.")
When gas, electric and water companies began, they were in most cases launched as publicly-owned monopolies. But the continued acceptance of their use of micropayment today is not only because they're monopolies, but also because a lot of politicians (and even some consumers) realise that people will make unlimited use of a finte resource, if it's charged at flat-rate. OTOH, most people will conserve electricity / water / gas if it saves them money to do so.
When phone companies' backbone capacity shot up a few years ago following changes in technology, they began to move (or were pressured/forced by regulators to move) to flat-rate charging for some services, since there was no longer a pressing economic need to moderate usage.
But the finite-resource argument does not apply with micropayment for services like the ones you mentioned above (FirstVirtual, Millicent etc.), and certainly does NOT apply to movies and music from a local CD. It's important to moderate the use of finite physical resources, but not of infinite resources like idea playback or entertainment playback. That's just naked, stupid greed.
Not always. During the WTO demonstrations in London last summer, the response to a very small proportion of violent demonstrators was to box large numbers of (overwhelmingly peaceful) people in and stop them leaving. We're talking all day here, until the demonstraters were cold, hungry and just wanted to go home. Illegal detention, say the detractors; screw the damn hippies, say proponents (when translated from Weaselese).
I was there. In fact, it wasn't just peaceful demonstrators who were wrongly detained: tourists who just happened to be walking through at the time were also detained in the box-in. It was fairly obvious to the casual observer that they were mistakenly detained, and it would have made the policemen's jobs easier to let them out, but they simply couldn't be bothered.
So we have a "sealed agreement", under which Gracenote backs down from their utterly contemptible and indefensible suit. This should not be the end of the matter, folks.
If we users allow corporate parasites like Gracenote to operate this kind of hit-and-run prospecting on OUR data, we will all lose in the end. With deep enough pockets, one of them is bound to succeed eventually.
The financial pressure against this kind of opportunistic horseshit must not end with a quiet "sealed agreement", and the lawyers all shaking hands and walking away. Don't use Gracenote's products, via Roxio products, sub-licensed technology on Windows, or any other vendor. Vote with your wallet. Use and help build free alternatives like freedb. The business case for Gracenote to try it again will be much tougher to build, next time they're tempted.
Does this mean they'll have red ibm logos or blue redhat logos' on them?
IBM actually did fret about this when they first started reselling NetWare in the 80s, which comes boxed all in bright red. Some suggested purple as a compromise. In the end they shipped it in a box with the art laid out exactly the same and the stripey Novell "N", except it was done in bright Smucker's-Blueberry-Syrup blue.
I never did work out whether this was meant to be ironic humour or not.
I see a lot of arguments put forward here for the right of corporations to sell software in this way, because corporations exist solely to make money. That's true, and the logical arguments that follow are mostly pretty sound.
But what no-one seems to be questioning the underlying assumption that it's in our best interest for corporations to exist in this form, with no voluntary let alone legal definitions of social responsibility in place.
It's true that the US maintains some regulations to stop corporations from abusing human rights, commiting acts of environmental vandalism, etc. though sometimes only for US nationals and on US soil. Even these laws are increasingly being rolled back nowadays, but that's beside the point.
Nobody seems to be asking why corporations have rights which sometimes clash with the rights of citizens, when the US Constitution only explicitly talks about individual citizens. Why should we allow a corporate pseudo-person to exist, with rights, but with fewer responsibilities than we ourselves have? It might be perfectly legal, but is it really what we want?
No, you're comparing apples and oranges: there was never a chance of a small-scale startup providing the phone infrastructure. There still is none, and never will be. All the Co-op do is resell phone time on other people's lines. But by going with them, I save the markup that BT would have handed to their shareholders and incompetent, overpaid bosses.
So I stand by my post: BT has indeed opted out of your supposedly inevitable "evolution", and will shortly be eaten by a larger dinosaur.
Give it time? How much? BT were privatised 17 years ago. They were handed a complete stranglehold on the market, via the infrastructure ownership regulations.
There was never the slightest chance of small-scale startups having a go. And because Britain is not geographically immense like the US, there was no sensible way to divide BT up into "Baby Bells".
The Milton Friedman thing sounds great on paper, but in practice the "level playing field" seldom materialises, and you simply get the most deep-pocketed competitor crushing its rivals, leading to cartels and oligopolies.
Your list works up 'til point 3b and 4: these were never meant to happen, so not surprisingly they didn't. BT is about to feel step 5. The "real company" will be some global monster, turning BT into its local UK operation.
So I declined to participate: I switched to the Phone Cooperative: I save big money off my BT bill, and all the profits go back into the co-op to make it better for us, the members.
This is not an anomaly: British Rail got far, far worse after Thatcher privatised it. People died in rail crashes because the sub-contractors neglected the maintenance. The track provider has now gone bust, and the train service operators are getting fat while we have the worst train commute-times and road congestion in Europe. Another privatisation success story.
Blair is now privatising NHS hospitals under his Private Finance Initiative, and just like most of the consultants told him, it's now costing the taxpayer loads more money for loads less service.
Need any more evidence? Privatisation is a scam, run for the benefit of the corporate contributors to the main political parties. It seldom delivers significantly better value that couldn't have been achieved by fixing what was wrong with the publicly-owned service, and often delivers a lot worse.
Do you know of any examples of how privatisation has worked out well in the US?
Earlier/. discussions on this endearing little scam can be found here and here.
BT are that desperate for a bit of reliable revenue, as what passes for their management have slammed a company deep into the ground that looked so promising just 10 years ago.
They are still many billions of pounds in the red, despite issuing the biggest cash call in British history (5.9 billion pounds), some frantic sales of overseas assets, leasing back property, and more recently spinning off their mobile business. There have been angry scenes at emergency shareholder meetings, senior brass quitting in disgrace, etc. So right now they will grab at any readies they can lay their sticky little claws on.
I wish had enough space to tell you all the times I have been let down by BT on network projects: "sleepy ISDN" syndrome, installation "engineers" who couldn't find the right spot to put in a line despite my drawing big black boxes on the wall in magic-marker labelled "BT install here", etc. So much for the magic wand of privatisation, curing all those horrible nationalised industries.
Their mgt dug their heels in on ISDN roll-out to protect old business; they are finally being dragged by the regulator out of the same old racket on DSL. They are one of the worst-run businesses I've ever had the misfortune to work with. Starting out as a privatised monopoly with all the assets, skills and R&D firepower of the British govt's old monopoly telecoms service, they have successfully sucked all the value out of what might have made a good private competitor, and I don't expect them to be around in a year's time, at least not under the name BT.
So go for it lads, hoover it up while you can, and maybe you can cheer the shareholders up enough in the short term to allow you a cushy trip out the door when the buyout happens.
The point has been made many times here before, but bears repeating once again: Free Software and Open Source are two different things, regardless of what you might read on ZDnet.
"Moving to a proprietary system also can spur ill will. Because of the freedoms afforded by the open-source movement, older versions of software may live on as competition. The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1984, continues to work to ensure open-source versions of programs live on as long as possible."
Not true. The Free Software Foundation was established to promote and support Free Software. They have nothing whatever to do with Open Source, and are careful to say so.
The term "Open Source" is much abused, because it lacks sufficient precision. Everyone from authors that really want to encourage software freedom but do not always want to use the GPL, for entirely honest reasons (e.g. the BSD folks, Eric Raymond etc.), right down to parasites who care only about a quick buck (e.g. most of the shiny-suited salesmen who leaped briefly onto the Open Source bandwagon), call themselves part of the "Open Source movement". It's a conveniently huge umbrella under which even Microsoft might have fit, had they needed to. It was started by well-meaning people for the right reasons, but with a flawed charter, which may or may not be fixable at this point.
It's not necessary to agree with everything the FSF and Stallman have ever said to see that they are right about several things. One of these is that a genuinely Free Software license can be an effective way of reducing your risks, if someone decides to close part or all of the source of software that you or your business depend on.
Perhaps this is a necessary and inevitable shakeout, where we'll see a clarification of what the world wants from software freedom. It comes at a time when many different freedoms we take for granted are under attack, from many sides. In the case of software freedom, we will need to look hard at what we want, and what we're willing to do to defend it.
To critics of the sale of content filters, software company executives say that they are only providing politically neutral tools. "Once we sell them the product, we can't enforce how they use it," said Matthew Holt, a sales executive for Secure Computing (news/quote), of San Jose, Calif., that currently provides Internet-filtering software to the Saudi government under a contract that expires in 2003.
What a fine way to salve the conscience: "Once we sell them the product, we can't enforce how they use it." They're happy enough to take the money, just as IBM was happy to take the money from the Nazis for Jew-tracking systems, since no IBMers were actually involved in killing anyone.
US corporate and government support for this brutal dicatorship is a disgrace. Both GOP and Dem administrations are happy to allow trade with this vile regime to thrive as long as it pays, just as they were happy to arm and support Iraq as long as it paid, and just as they continue to profit handsomely from deals with China.
It still amazes me how Bush and pals can talk without a trace of irony about how they are fighting one gov't or another in defense of Freedom and Justice, then turn around and support the Saudis. Will Laura Bush be arguing passionately for the rights of Saudi women anytime soon? Of course she will, as soon as the pro-Western govt gets thrown out, and they transform overnight into America's Eternal Foe.
I tend to get sidetracked in these discussions.
You are right in one respect, but wrong in another.
To whose post are you referring?
(snip)
The list goes on and on. Your nation has an attitude problem almost as big as mine. Maybe it's about time you started doing things right?
The US is not my nation. When I wrote "we", I meant the West. Many countries are responsible for this mess, since they are too enthralled with US money to question their relationship with it in the wider sense. This includes Norway IMHO, as well as my own country.
What Bin Laden said
on
Globalization
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Bin Laden actually doesn't care about the Palestinians or Iraq or any of that. He wants the world remade in his view--he points to the Taliban as the ultimate form of society. In an interview a few years ago, he said his ultimate goals were not to get the US out of the mideast, but to have a jihad in Egypt, a jihad in Israel, a jihad in Bosnia--basically a Jihad everywhere that will replace all governments with a fundamentalist Muslim one such as the Taliban. It's a different kind of globalization, really.
That's not globalization. He doesn't want to remake the world in his view, and he doesn't want to take over the world. He wants Muslims to retake the Muslim world, which he sees as having been colonized by the West. He really doesn't care what happens to us in the West, so long as we leave Muslims alone.
Again, no amount of understanding the root of the problem will make that go away. The only thing that these people (the terrorists) understand is having a bomb dropped on them so they can't do anything anymore.
But you're saying this on the basis of your own understanding of the problem. If that understanding was proven incorrect, then I presume you would revise it. So crack open a book, and maybe you'll learn that your CNN black-hats-white-hats view of the world doesn't stand up to critical scrutiny.
It's a sad commentary on humans, but its the truth--do you think enough understanding would have prevented Hitler from attempting world domination? I doubt it--ask Neville Chamberlain.
You're talking about "understanding" after the fact, but you're neglecting the understanding of bad situations before they turn into wars. A better understanding of Germany after WWI would have meant a less onerous Treaty of Versailles being imposed, preventing the perfect conditions for an extremist nationalist rising like the Nazis.
Similarly, better understanding of what a pile of shit the US has made of its foreign policy in the Muslim world will prevent future Bin Ladens from rising. It's called "fixing the roof while the sun is shining". No-one is asking you to understand the rain in your living room better, only to understand that if you had fixed the roof last week when the hole was pointed out to you, it wouldn't be there now.
Of course Bin Laden would still exist, even if we had understood the problem better. But he would not have had the army of supporters, both passive and active, that he now commands. Further use of your "bombs are the only language these people understand" analysis will lead to an unending stream of them, more than you and your gov't will ever be able to find, let alone bomb.
Good thing our old pal Larry's offering to give the DB away for free. Oracle is fine for general purpose DBs, but really sucks at high-end data warehouse apps like this. Hm... maybe we should all lobby the govt to run it on big Windows server farms too! Nothing to worry about then, it'll be going up and down faster than a bridegroom's bum!
Anyone know if there are plans to pull the InnoDB code directly into MySQL, since both are GPL and since InnoDB is now part of the MySQL source distribution? That would clear up the tech-marketing confusion over transactions etc., and would have justified the 4.0 version++.
I'd hazard a guess that there'd also be opportunities for performance optimisation if they concentrated on just one table handler, though they might also thereby lose some flexibility along the way.
Why do some many people think StarOffice is written in Java? Is it just because its from Sun?
It's because Sun announced back in 1999 that it was going to release a server-side-Java version of StarOffice, called "StarPortal". They never got it off the ground, and StarPortal eventually got folded into Sun WebTop in March of this year.
Clueless "technical" journalists (such as can be found in abundance writing for ZDnet) are frequently unable to distinguish between Java in its two main forms: slow, crappy client-side Java apps/applets and fast, scalable server-side JSP and servlets. The single marketing moniker for all of Sun's J-products is a double-edged sword. Perhaps they should fix this.
In a related development, Microsoft has announced the immediate availability, in Q2 2002, of their new.Net hybrid of Visual C++ and Visual Basic, to be known as Visual Seasick.
Visual Seasick will offer all the elegance and ease-of-use of C++, fused with the raw power and scalability of Visual Basic.
Analyst Larry Bribewell of the respected IT Research firm Rentrag Group, predicts big things for this de facto industry-standard language: "the first release, version 3.1, looks rock solid. We predict [0.8] it will overtake Parrot in quarterly revenue by Q1 2002."
(c) 2001, ZDnot.
NASDAQ is a Windows shop, mainly in order to keep MS from deserting for the NYSE: reportedly the NYSE has the symbol "M" reserved for Microsoft, should they ever get itchy feet.
MS in turn uses Nasdaq (and Dell, and several other captive "friends") as examples of "large enterprises that chose Windows as their strategic OS". It makes you almost feel sorry for Nasdaq. Well... for their sysadmins, anyway.
There are ways to help competitors out, but telling MS that their own desktop is off limits is like telling McDonalds to sell their Big Macs and McNuggets... somewhere other than at a McDonalds.
MS are fond of using the "burger and fries" metaphor to defend their control of the UI, and of deciding what to call "part of the OS". It suits MS marketing well, but is disingenuous IMHO.
A burger is an impulse purchase: a one-shot consumable. Your burger does not serve as anything other than your next meal: it is not the gateway to your bank, your mail, other people's products, etc. It is instantly usable with all its competitors' products, since its "platform" is your mouth, not a PC. And perhaps most importantly, burgers are always sold directly from the manufacturer to the consumer through retail outlets: there is no reseller channel for McDonalds.
A car is a better metaphor for this. Buy a Ford car, and paint it any color you like. Stick badges all over it. Pull the badge off the grille. Put big bull horns on the front, and 'roo bars. Add fluffy seat covers. Just leave the internals alone, or Ford can justifiably refuse to service it for you. Similarly, MS has no business dictating the UI to a reseller, so long as they're not changing anything internally.
So, shifting my head around temporarily to Closed Source Business Mode, I can understand them objecting to something that changes or adds DLLs and EXEs to render Windows UI components differently, but they have no business objecting to altered icons or wallpaper.
Your point is a good one, thanks. But Phil Dawes, until recently a driving force behind this project, is extremely busy with his day job at the moment. I'll ask him to comment here. If there is sufficient support for getting this up and ready soon, then I can at least help with the documentation.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.darryl.com/vi.shtml
I keyed in my post code on BT's availability checker page, and it replied with this helpful message:
BT has no plans to upgrade your exchange in the near term.
BT is working on partnerships with local and national government bodies to evaluate the possibilities of bringing broadband to your area in a cost effective way.
We are also investigating alternative technologies, such as, Satellite Services. We will be providing you with more information on this site at the end of June.
Alternatively you may be receiving service from another telecomms supplier.
It's clear to me that they have no plans to offer DSL in the small town where I live. Ever. They will just cherry-pick the big cities. Small surprise really, as they are in pretty bad shape financially. Good thing that national highways and railroads weren't built like this...
There might be an excuse for this sort of dribbling geographic coverage in the US or Canada, where the distance between cities is enormous. There is little excuse for it here in the UK.
b.) he double- and triple-counted even a lot of these reports
Really? According to whom?
All of these have been shown to be false...
Shown by whom? Links or references, please?
Driven by al Qaeda's atrocities, the US charged into the classic quagmire of Afghanistan, legendary death trap of military ambition. With the customary roll of thunder, out came the full routine of the modern American expeditionary force. First, a cautious, methodical, widely televised suppression of local air defenses. Then, once CNN became accustomed to the violence, some leisurely and terrible precision targeting throughout the theater, around the clock. In Serbia in 1999, US aircraft smashed stationary targets, like buildings and bridges. In Afghanistan, thanks to much faster satellite relays, they demolished rapidly moving tanks, fleeing Toyota trucks, and amazed guerrillas. It took only two weeks to chase Taliban and al Qaeda forces into Pakistan, Iran, and beyond.
"Driven by al Qaeda's atrocities", they decided to go create a few atrocities of their own. Seen any estimates of civilian casualties on your TV news lately? A few dozen? Hundreds even? No, thousands. Professor Marc Herold has put together the only methodical public attempt to date on casualty estimates, and his figure is between 3,000 and 3,400.
"Terrible precision targeting"? Yes, the precision was pretty terrible alright. But the carnage isn't over yet, and won't be for decades: the UN estimates that around 14,000 unexploded cluster bomblets are still on the ground in Afghanistan. They're bright yellow, the same color as the food parcels the US very kindly dropped, while all the aid agencies pleaded with them to stop. So thousands more will die, long after you've had all your parades and pinned on all your medals.
Slow, careful police work was far too unglamourous. Much more sexually satisfying to bomb the shit out of the country harboring the prime suspect. Do you really think that the strikes against the US will stop, simply because the Taliban have been chased into retreat? How many more young suicide bombers are being created daily, thanks to these atrocities and all the others supported and funded around the world by the US? Will they all just give up and go home, awed by superior US satellite technology? Use your brain, for God's sake. You will reap what you sow.
Furthermore, businesses like the gas company and the phone company that use micropayments offline share one characteristic: They are all monopolies or cartels. In situations where there is real competition, providers are usually forced to drop "pay as you go" schemes in response to user preference, because if they don't, anyone who can offer flat-rate pricing becomes the market leader. (See sidebar: "Simplicity in pricing.")
When gas, electric and water companies began, they were in most cases launched as publicly-owned monopolies. But the continued acceptance of their use of micropayment today is not only because they're monopolies, but also because a lot of politicians (and even some consumers) realise that people will make unlimited use of a finte resource, if it's charged at flat-rate. OTOH, most people will conserve electricity / water / gas if it saves them money to do so.
When phone companies' backbone capacity shot up a few years ago following changes in technology, they began to move (or were pressured/forced by regulators to move) to flat-rate charging for some services, since there was no longer a pressing economic need to moderate usage.
But the finite-resource argument does not apply with micropayment for services like the ones you mentioned above (FirstVirtual, Millicent etc.), and certainly does NOT apply to movies and music from a local CD. It's important to moderate the use of finite physical resources, but not of infinite resources like idea playback or entertainment playback. That's just naked, stupid greed.
Not always. During the WTO demonstrations in London last summer, the response to a very small proportion of violent demonstrators was to box large numbers of (overwhelmingly peaceful) people in and stop them leaving. We're talking all day here, until the demonstraters were cold, hungry and just wanted to go home. Illegal detention, say the detractors; screw the damn hippies, say proponents (when translated from Weaselese).
I was there. In fact, it wasn't just peaceful demonstrators who were wrongly detained: tourists who just happened to be walking through at the time were also detained in the box-in. It was fairly obvious to the casual observer that they were mistakenly detained, and it would have made the policemen's jobs easier to let them out, but they simply couldn't be bothered.
Here is a copy of the JBuilder 6 license: little has changed from the JB5 license that I can see.
So we have a "sealed agreement", under which Gracenote backs down from their utterly contemptible and indefensible suit. This should not be the end of the matter, folks.
If we users allow corporate parasites like Gracenote to operate this kind of hit-and-run prospecting on OUR data, we will all lose in the end. With deep enough pockets, one of them is bound to succeed eventually.
The financial pressure against this kind of opportunistic horseshit must not end with a quiet "sealed agreement", and the lawyers all shaking hands and walking away. Don't use Gracenote's products, via Roxio products, sub-licensed technology on Windows, or any other vendor. Vote with your wallet. Use and help build free alternatives like freedb. The business case for Gracenote to try it again will be much tougher to build, next time they're tempted.
Does this mean they'll have red ibm logos or blue redhat logos' on them?
IBM actually did fret about this when they first started reselling NetWare in the 80s, which comes boxed all in bright red. Some suggested purple as a compromise. In the end they shipped it in a box with the art laid out exactly the same and the stripey Novell "N", except it was done in bright Smucker's-Blueberry-Syrup blue.
I never did work out whether this was meant to be ironic humour or not.
I see a lot of arguments put forward here for the right of corporations to sell software in this way, because corporations exist solely to make money. That's true, and the logical arguments that follow are mostly pretty sound.
But what no-one seems to be questioning the underlying assumption that it's in our best interest for corporations to exist in this form, with no voluntary let alone legal definitions of social responsibility in place.
It's true that the US maintains some regulations to stop corporations from abusing human rights, commiting acts of environmental vandalism, etc. though sometimes only for US nationals and on US soil. Even these laws are increasingly being rolled back nowadays, but that's beside the point.
Nobody seems to be asking why corporations have rights which sometimes clash with the rights of citizens, when the US Constitution only explicitly talks about individual citizens. Why should we allow a corporate pseudo-person to exist, with rights, but with fewer responsibilities than we ourselves have? It might be perfectly legal, but is it really what we want?
No, you're comparing apples and oranges: there was never a chance of a small-scale startup providing the phone infrastructure. There still is none, and never will be. All the Co-op do is resell phone time on other people's lines. But by going with them, I save the markup that BT would have handed to their shareholders and incompetent, overpaid bosses.
So I stand by my post: BT has indeed opted out of your supposedly inevitable "evolution", and will shortly be eaten by a larger dinosaur.
Give it time? How much? BT were privatised 17 years ago. They were handed a complete stranglehold on the market, via the infrastructure ownership regulations.
There was never the slightest chance of small-scale startups having a go. And because Britain is not geographically immense like the US, there was no sensible way to divide BT up into "Baby Bells".
The Milton Friedman thing sounds great on paper, but in practice the "level playing field" seldom materialises, and you simply get the most deep-pocketed competitor crushing its rivals, leading to cartels and oligopolies.
Your list works up 'til point 3b and 4: these were never meant to happen, so not surprisingly they didn't. BT is about to feel step 5. The "real company" will be some global monster, turning BT into its local UK operation.
So I declined to participate: I switched to the Phone Cooperative: I save big money off my BT bill, and all the profits go back into the co-op to make it better for us, the members.
This is not an anomaly: British Rail got far, far worse after Thatcher privatised it. People died in rail crashes because the sub-contractors neglected the maintenance. The track provider has now gone bust, and the train service operators are getting fat while we have the worst train commute-times and road congestion in Europe. Another privatisation success story.
Blair is now privatising NHS hospitals under his Private Finance Initiative, and just like most of the consultants told him, it's now costing the taxpayer loads more money for loads less service.
Need any more evidence? Privatisation is a scam, run for the benefit of the corporate contributors to the main political parties. It seldom delivers significantly better value that couldn't have been achieved by fixing what was wrong with the publicly-owned service, and often delivers a lot worse.
Do you know of any examples of how privatisation has worked out well in the US?
Earlier /. discussions on this endearing little scam can be found here and here.
BT are that desperate for a bit of reliable revenue, as what passes for their management have slammed a company deep into the ground that looked so promising just 10 years ago.
They are still many billions of pounds in the red, despite issuing the biggest cash call in British history (5.9 billion pounds), some frantic sales of overseas assets, leasing back property, and more recently spinning off their mobile business. There have been angry scenes at emergency shareholder meetings, senior brass quitting in disgrace, etc. So right now they will grab at any readies they can lay their sticky little claws on.
I wish had enough space to tell you all the times I have been let down by BT on network projects: "sleepy ISDN" syndrome, installation "engineers" who couldn't find the right spot to put in a line despite my drawing big black boxes on the wall in magic-marker labelled "BT install here", etc. So much for the magic wand of privatisation, curing all those horrible nationalised industries.
Their mgt dug their heels in on ISDN roll-out to protect old business; they are finally being dragged by the regulator out of the same old racket on DSL. They are one of the worst-run businesses I've ever had the misfortune to work with. Starting out as a privatised monopoly with all the assets, skills and R&D firepower of the British govt's old monopoly telecoms service, they have successfully sucked all the value out of what might have made a good private competitor, and I don't expect them to be around in a year's time, at least not under the name BT.
So go for it lads, hoover it up while you can, and maybe you can cheer the shareholders up enough in the short term to allow you a cushy trip out the door when the buyout happens.
Am I coming across as bitter here? Sorry.
The point has been made many times here before, but bears repeating once again: Free Software and Open Source are two different things, regardless of what you might read on ZDnet.
- fr eedom.html
"Moving to a proprietary system also can spur ill will. Because of the freedoms afforded by the open-source movement, older versions of software may live on as competition. The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1984, continues to work to ensure open-source versions of programs live on as long as possible."
Not true. The Free Software Foundation was established to promote and support Free Software. They have nothing whatever to do with Open Source, and are careful to say so.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for
The term "Open Source" is much abused, because it lacks sufficient precision. Everyone from authors that really want to encourage software freedom but do not always want to use the GPL, for entirely honest reasons (e.g. the BSD folks, Eric Raymond etc.), right down to parasites who care only about a quick buck (e.g. most of the shiny-suited salesmen who leaped briefly onto the Open Source bandwagon), call themselves part of the "Open Source movement". It's a conveniently huge umbrella under which even Microsoft might have fit, had they needed to. It was started by well-meaning people for the right reasons, but with a flawed charter, which may or may not be fixable at this point.
It's not necessary to agree with everything the FSF and Stallman have ever said to see that they are right about several things. One of these is that a genuinely Free Software license can be an effective way of reducing your risks, if someone decides to close part or all of the source of software that you or your business depend on.
Perhaps this is a necessary and inevitable shakeout, where we'll see a clarification of what the world wants from software freedom. It comes at a time when many different freedoms we take for granted are under attack, from many sides. In the case of software freedom, we will need to look hard at what we want, and what we're willing to do to defend it.
To critics of the sale of content filters, software company executives say that they are only providing politically neutral tools. "Once we sell them the product, we can't enforce how they use it," said Matthew Holt, a sales executive for Secure Computing (news/quote), of San Jose, Calif., that currently provides Internet-filtering software to the Saudi government under a contract that expires in 2003.
What a fine way to salve the conscience: "Once we sell them the product, we can't enforce how they use it." They're happy enough to take the money, just as IBM was happy to take the money from the Nazis for Jew-tracking systems, since no IBMers were actually involved in killing anyone.
US corporate and government support for this brutal dicatorship is a disgrace. Both GOP and Dem administrations are happy to allow trade with this vile regime to thrive as long as it pays, just as they were happy to arm and support Iraq as long as it paid, and just as they continue to profit handsomely from deals with China.
It still amazes me how Bush and pals can talk without a trace of irony about how they are fighting one gov't or another in defense of Freedom and Justice, then turn around and support the Saudis. Will Laura Bush be arguing passionately for the rights of Saudi women anytime soon? Of course she will, as soon as the pro-Western govt gets thrown out, and they transform overnight into America's Eternal Foe.
I tend to get sidetracked in these discussions.
You are right in one respect, but wrong in another.
To whose post are you referring?
(snip)
The list goes on and on. Your nation has an attitude problem almost as big as mine. Maybe it's about time you started doing things right?
The US is not my nation. When I wrote "we", I meant the West. Many countries are responsible for this mess, since they are too enthralled with US money to question their relationship with it in the wider sense. This includes Norway IMHO, as well as my own country.
Bin Laden actually doesn't care about the Palestinians or Iraq or any of that. He wants the world remade in his view--he points to the Taliban as the ultimate form of society. In an interview a few years ago, he said his ultimate goals were not to get the US out of the mideast, but to have a jihad in Egypt, a jihad in Israel, a jihad in Bosnia--basically a Jihad everywhere that will replace all governments with a fundamentalist Muslim one such as the Taliban. It's a different kind of globalization, really.
That's not globalization. He doesn't want to remake the world in his view, and he doesn't want to take over the world. He wants Muslims to retake the Muslim world, which he sees as having been colonized by the West. He really doesn't care what happens to us in the West, so long as we leave Muslims alone.
Again, no amount of understanding the root of the problem will make that go away. The only thing that these people (the terrorists) understand is having a bomb dropped on them so they can't do anything anymore.
But you're saying this on the basis of your own understanding of the problem. If that understanding was proven incorrect, then I presume you would revise it. So crack open a book, and maybe you'll learn that your CNN black-hats-white-hats view of the world doesn't stand up to critical scrutiny.
It's a sad commentary on humans, but its the truth--do you think enough understanding would have prevented Hitler from attempting world domination? I doubt it--ask Neville Chamberlain.
You're talking about "understanding" after the fact, but you're neglecting the understanding of bad situations before they turn into wars. A better understanding of Germany after WWI would have meant a less onerous Treaty of Versailles being imposed, preventing the perfect conditions for an extremist nationalist rising like the Nazis.
Similarly, better understanding of what a pile of shit the US has made of its foreign policy in the Muslim world will prevent future Bin Ladens from rising. It's called "fixing the roof while the sun is shining". No-one is asking you to understand the rain in your living room better, only to understand that if you had fixed the roof last week when the hole was pointed out to you, it wouldn't be there now.
Of course Bin Laden would still exist, even if we had understood the problem better. But he would not have had the army of supporters, both passive and active, that he now commands. Further use of your "bombs are the only language these people understand" analysis will lead to an unending stream of them, more than you and your gov't will ever be able to find, let alone bomb.
What you need is some SAX. And drugs.
Good thing our old pal Larry's offering to give the DB away for free. Oracle is fine for general purpose DBs, but really sucks at high-end data warehouse apps like this. Hm... maybe we should all lobby the govt to run it on big Windows server farms too! Nothing to worry about then, it'll be going up and down faster than a bridegroom's bum!
I'd hazard a guess that there'd also be opportunities for performance optimisation if they concentrated on just one table handler, though they might also thereby lose some flexibility along the way.
Why do some many people think StarOffice is written in Java? Is it just because its from Sun?
It's because Sun announced back in 1999 that it was going to release a server-side-Java version of StarOffice, called "StarPortal". They never got it off the ground, and StarPortal eventually got folded into Sun WebTop in March of this year.
Clueless "technical" journalists (such as can be found in abundance writing for ZDnet) are frequently unable to distinguish between Java in its two main forms: slow, crappy client-side Java apps/applets and fast, scalable server-side JSP and servlets. The single marketing moniker for all of Sun's J-products is a double-edged sword. Perhaps they should fix this.
Visual Seasick will offer all the elegance and ease-of-use of C++, fused with the raw power and scalability of Visual Basic.
Analyst Larry Bribewell of the respected IT Research firm Rentrag Group, predicts big things for this de facto industry-standard language: "the first release, version 3.1, looks rock solid. We predict [0.8] it will overtake Parrot in quarterly revenue by Q1 2002."
(c) 2001, ZDnot.
MS in turn uses Nasdaq (and Dell, and several other captive "friends") as examples of "large enterprises that chose Windows as their strategic OS". It makes you almost feel sorry for Nasdaq. Well... for their sysadmins, anyway.
There are ways to help competitors out, but telling MS that their own desktop is off limits is like telling McDonalds to sell their Big Macs and McNuggets... somewhere other than at a McDonalds.
MS are fond of using the "burger and fries" metaphor to defend their control of the UI, and of deciding what to call "part of the OS". It suits MS marketing well, but is disingenuous IMHO.
A burger is an impulse purchase: a one-shot consumable. Your burger does not serve as anything other than your next meal: it is not the gateway to your bank, your mail, other people's products, etc. It is instantly usable with all its competitors' products, since its "platform" is your mouth, not a PC. And perhaps most importantly, burgers are always sold directly from the manufacturer to the consumer through retail outlets: there is no reseller channel for McDonalds.
A car is a better metaphor for this. Buy a Ford car, and paint it any color you like. Stick badges all over it. Pull the badge off the grille. Put big bull horns on the front, and 'roo bars. Add fluffy seat covers. Just leave the internals alone, or Ford can justifiably refuse to service it for you. Similarly, MS has no business dictating the UI to a reseller, so long as they're not changing anything internally.
So, shifting my head around temporarily to Closed Source Business Mode, I can understand them objecting to something that changes or adds DLLs and EXEs to render Windows UI components differently, but they have no business objecting to altered icons or wallpaper.
I assume you're referring to ORBit-C++ .
Your point is a good one, thanks. But Phil Dawes, until recently a driving force behind this project, is extremely busy with his day job at the moment. I'll ask him to comment here. If there is sufficient support for getting this up and ready soon, then I can at least help with the documentation.