If you look at the history of writing you will see that at different times and in different periods different letter sets were used at different times by different people: consider this rendering of a simple text in a 'roman' hand (400 BC to 400AD ish) and the same one in a carolingian hand (Carolingian referring to Charlemagne, Charles The Great circa the 750 AD onwards).
Well one looks like it is all written in upper case and one in all lower case.
Mixed case (dual alphabet) stuff only took off with the invention of printing. The issue of whether the lower and upper case character sets are different alphabets is simply one of degree, how different are they from each other and from other alphabets (like the greek one. This article makes the point that in ancient greece there were also no "lower case" letters only "upper case" ones - modern greek developed a dual alphabet in emulation of the modern latin one.
Would you consider this to be a different alphabet? - I can barely read it, and certainly not in blocks - and it was used all over Germany until 1941 when it was banned by Hitler.
Cyrillic also only gets dual case in the time of Peter the Great, having been "upper case" only before. Lots of languages only have one case.
Sorry to rain on your parade but English is not a particularly simple written language.
The western tradition uses 2 complementary (but distinct) alphabets - the Latin, Majescule or upper case alphabet and the hunnish, Miniscule or lower case one.
These 2 alphabets have a 100% redundancy between them, and about a 50% overlap and their mixed-usage is context dependant and purely conventional and dates from the rennaisance. Their usages prior to that were in substantially non-overlapping geographical areas (and/or time periods).
In addition to this the English tradition chucks in an ideogram set to represent numbers, except that unlike the latinate or hunnish alphabets, this ideogram set reads right to left like the Arabic from whence it was bodged.
So, let's recapitulate, 2 alphabets with 100% semantic redundancy and 50% overlap of form which read left to right, and an ideogram set that reads right to left. Simple? Or just what you are used to?
First up, I have registered a number of organisations under the UK data protection act, work for a major UK bank, and am a politician manque so I know what I'm talking about.
The data protection regulations affect:
(1) the storing of information about an individual in an electronic format which can be accessed via indexes.
(2) the storing of information about an individual in non-electronic format but with electronic indexes by which it can be searched and collated.
Data Protection regulations require an individual to give informed consent for any use of data that they provide. The customer relationship is protected (ie any organisation can legitimately keep data collected by them about thier clients).
This is a good thing, it protects the customers data - in databases. It does not affect data packets in transfer, or other non-indexed/databased information.
However if I take data from a customer and that customer indicates to me that I may make that information available to other bodies I can only pass that information over to those bodies under the condition that they respect the customer wishes. To this extent Data Protection legislation is viral like open source licenses. I, the customer, make my information available to you for you to do certain things with. If I permit you to distribute it, you may do so provided that my wishes are respected.
The US is not regarded by the EU as having appropriate Data Protection regulations (we think your money laundering regulations are weak as well).
Training users how to use large complex pieces of software (like Microsoft Office) is a good thing. It improves productivity tremendously. I once trained 50 users (out of 250) and their usage jumped so dramatically the network started saturated and we had to move over from hubs to switches.
You get even better productivity improvements if you teach people to type. The number of £1,000 a day techies I have worked with who take an hour over a 5 minute document is unbelievable.
There is actually now forward compatibility between Office 95 and Office 2000 applications. It is possible to Word 2000 native documents in Word 95 (we have the filters installed at work - Office 2000 is the desktop standard under NT and Office 95 is the laptop standard under Windows 95). Cutting between the 2 just does not work...
The major problem that I have with it is that the amination under Powerpoint 95 is keyed off the Z order of the individual images on the screen whereas in Powerpoint 2000 it is a seperate (and much better) order that allows you to build one item behind another (good for overlapping lines or part offset boxes in depth).
Releasing those converters could be on of the biggest mistakes Microsoft ever made...
Who said Euroderf is still living in the 50s? he's living in the 17th century. For the benefit of our American cousins let me render his sig into comprehensible English:
1690 - Never forget.FTP.
1690 is the year 1690
1690 - Never Forget is usual rendered as "Rem 1690" Remember 1690, 1690 being the date of the Battle of the Boyne were the new Dutch (and Protestant) King of England defeated the old Scottish (and Catholic) King Of England in a battle in Ireland.
Sorry, there is an established church in the Irish Republic - the Catholic Church - but for 20 odd years before Ireland seceeded there was no established church - bad editing...
The UK consists of 4 jurisdictions:
England
Scotland
Wales
Northern Ireland
The Anglican Church (Church Of England) is the established church (ie 'state religion') in England
The Church Of Scotland (Presbyterian) is the established church in Scotland
In both Ireland (as it then was before the secession of the Irish Free State - now the Irish Republic) and Wales there are no established churches. The local episcopalian churches (sisters of the Church of England) were disestablished (late 1800s in Ireland, early 1900s in Wales) due to the fact that the majority of the local populations were not members of the established churches.
There are a number of serious issues, particularly those arising from emergency legislation pertaining to the Troubles in Northern Ireland and our lack of a constitution.
The Troubles led to the development of a large number of advanced security techniques being deployed, initially in Northern Ireland, but increasingly across the UK, such as:
1 camera recognition of number plates and the creation of a tracking network of cameras on major roads that can follow a car.
2 camera recognition of faces
3 advance intelligence collation techniques and the building of considerable files of information on individuals and groups of people.
Now it can be argued that emergency measures are required to deal with an emergency, but the problem that arises is when there are no constitutional checks and that emergency regulation leaks out. Many of the techniques developed in Northern Ireland have now been deployed in the UK - spread by IRA bombing campaings in particular.
The IRA's bombing campaign against the City of London (the City is the Financial District, London's Wall Street) led to a Ring Of Steel (based on the successful Belfast Ring Of Steel) being thrown around the City with all the kit and kaboodle and vehicle check points etc, etc. Now lo and behold 40% of the people stopped at the Ring Of Steel aren't white. There are reports that the UDA (the largest of the paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland and the sworn enemy of the IRA) used to have a black member (out of 100,000) in the 1970s...
Essentially without proper constitutional oversight this stuff can get out of hand. The Data Protection Act doesn't cover the security forces and the information they hold. UK governmental organisations have traditionally been able to claim Crown immunity - the law doesn't apply to the Royal Family and their instruments. So for instance, between its foundation in 1948 (1949 in Northern Ireland) the and the late 1980s/early 1990s, the National Health Service wasn't subject to Hygeine Regulations - hospital canteens could be overrun with rats and cockroaches and the local authorities couldn't close them down. Customs and Excise can break into your house, and arrest you without a warrant and search for whatever because they are crown servants. (The police can't). The Security Services were only put on a Statutory footing recently - before that they didn't exist - despite having prominent buildings in London and spending hundreds of millions a year.
Another example of leakage is the new Prevention Of Terrorism Bill. When we had a civil war running with 3,500 dead over 30 years we were subject to a temporary PTA which was renewed every year (made permanent after 20 years). Now there is peace we have a new, more draconian, Terrorism Act that criminalises supports for organisations both at home and abroad in a way that the previous one didn't.
The Gung-ho attitude towards civil rights spills over into the electronic world with the RIP Act making it illegal for ISPs not to keep and reveal encryption keys, etc, etc
One the other hand we have put the European Human Rights Act into law as a Foundational Act (ie other statues can be struck down if they don't conform to it) so this might not all last that long, but I'm quite pessimistic about things...
Disclaimer - I am a Labour Party member, used to work in Northern Irish politics, and am 'effectively' a 'Unionist' on NI politics
I believe in paper ballots for one simple reason, it makes it possible for any citizen to participate in and verify the count. Electronic voting disenfranchises the citizen from scrutinising the election.
I speak from experience as a Labour Party candidate for the Scottish Parliament. In our elections a scrutineer for every party is expected to manually examine every single spoiled paper about which there is any doubt. Even with my 4,000 votes running short of the eventual winners 12,000 my agent and I had to sit there and go through the reject pile.
The problem with the US election is not that it is taking a long time to count and recount but that the procedures for deciding to do the recounts are straight out of the 19th century. If every district was electronic (and different) and all still had different and unagreed rules about how and when to conduct a recount there would still be chaos at the moment. This is not a machine fixable problem.
There are long established conventions in the UK, as well as a considerable corpus of electoral law and precedent for judicial review which deal with this. There was a seat in the Westminster Parliament in '97 that was tied and 2 weeks for recounts and legal action which ended up in a rerun.
PS for any smug Brits out there - I wish we were like the Yanks with a proper constitution. Do you know, fact fans, that we do not have a secret ballot in the UK? When you are issued with a ballot paper it has a number both on it and the stub. Because we don't have a constitution the teller writes your poll number on the stub and your vote can be reconcilled with the tally. The ostensible purpose of this is to address issues of voter fraud, but in practice it has been used to monitor 'anti-social' political activity - ie communists or fascists which kind of negates the principle of the secret ballot.
The reason the UK's tld is uk is because the formal title of the state is "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" - gb is only part of the uk.
Usability guru Jacob Nielson makes the point is his new book on Web Usability that the Macintosh desktop metaphor is completely outdated. The Mac designers produced folders and files as icons in the understanding that everyone would have a cognitively finite number of files. They were also designing for ultra-limited real-estate (128 pixels squared) and had no room for other context... Nowadays the number of files/items we use is cognitively infinite, particulalry on large shared drives. (I tried for find files of a certain type at work and discovered that search on Windows Explorer wigs out at 10,000 found items.) What we need is a 'file manager' like a search engine that finds groups of things. Looking for an executable? - find the binaries, documentation, copyright docs, etc, etc, display them in a coherent way based on rules. Store the user decisions based on the head-up and exchange them with an anonymous server so that my file manager's learns from everyone's usage exactly what things mean and how contexts should be constructed (ie learn the display rules and use the internet to create a massively parallel learnging engine). That would be a new UI...
If a dos programme running in the NT VDM tries to break the Hardware Abstraction Layer by making a hardware call NT wigs out and the programme terminates. Windows 9x allows the single shared VDM (as opposed to multiple VDMs on NT) to call the hardware which is why 9x is flaky pastry and NT isn't.
Fess up time, as a true pinko Brit (well Scot actually) and genuine politician, I have even proposed a 'modem tax' myself, said he calling down the hounds of hell on himself...
There are a number of fundamental issues here which need to be addressed in a sensible manner.
Firstly the provision of, and development of, the internet was not done in America by the free market. Some of us are old enough to remember when the connection between Janet and Bitnet was over the military satellites via the receiving station at the Lizard in Cornwall. My former PhD supervisor (genuine pinko Yugoslavian-Russian Brit) knew in advance there was trouble brewing at the time of the Falklands due to all transatlantic traffic being cut off for a fortnight...
The internet was built with tax-dollars via state-run institutions, with the salaries of all of us nerdenheimers in academia payed for by someone else... It was essentially a 'socialised' activity as opposed to a 'market' activity, and had a strong military flavour. And if you don't think the US 'military-industrial complex' (a quote from Eisenhower, a well known former US President, before you flame-on! thrillseekers) is a 'socialised' activity then I advise you to seek out Michael Moore's TV Nation clip where he marches through Newt Gingrichts constituency (?)/congressional district (?) whatever demanding that the Coastguard Station (in landlocked rural Georgia) is closed down for tax cuts.
There are a number of different issues in developing the UK as a major internet player and politicians need to balance them. How do you raise money to plough into cabling? Should you go for the regulated cable market like we do, or enable dark fibre provision like Paolo Alto? How can Glasgow or Edinburgh compete with Helsinki and drive up our connectivity.
Now there is a consensus emerging that the key to getting on in the internet world is old-fashioned Keynesian demand management (which I tend to agree with) ie use taxes raised from VAT, income tax, yada-yada to reduce the cost of internet access and subsidise, as a state-led initiative, access to the internet to stimulate demand and hence supply of internet goods and services in the UK. Now this looks to me like good old pinko social democracy.
The problem I was facing, as a putative candidate for the new Scottish Parliament, was how to propose to raise money to put in internet infrastructure for Scotland, subject to the intricacies of the financial relationship between the Scottish Parliament and the UK Parliament (If we talk about the financial and taxation structure of the new, reformed UK, I will get excited and you will get bored). The Scottish Executive has limited recourse to income tax and none to VAT (like the American sales tax), there are even constitutional issues that say it might not be possible for Holyrood to levy a modem tax - let alone do the infrastructure work (Telecomms is a reserved issue, like Federal area of responsibility).
I think Scotland needs to improve it's infrastructure and if that means, in the short term, an increase in taxation to do it (wether by modem tax, or...) then it will lead to greater prosperity later...
Lowering cost is one way of stimulating demand, increasing bandwidth is another. If a modem tax made internet connectivity a bit more expensive but we had the bandwidth of Helsinki, ie 50% plus equivalent ISDN penetration, then the case for a modem tax could be made...
I'm not pretending that I have an ideal political blueprint for internet development in Scotland - I'm not even sure that a modem tax is the/an answer, but someone has to pay for this stuff and it will be you Johnny tax-payer...
Politics is the art of the possible. Face up to it...
I am resigned to my fate, swarm over death... but some intelligent comments would be nice as well...
The thing that is coming is the ubiquitous computer. The way to make a business out of it is not to think, ooh 9 computers in the house - each with a monitor, a keyboard, yada-yada, but to embrace the fact that we have too much processing power. If you use a PC you only get 100% loading for a fraction of the time. Stick a linux PC on your central heating system, your oven, your video, etc, etc. Make it accessible to a structured e-mail, your home page, SMS messages and then you can set the video from work, from the back room etc. Pile on the processing, have a box in every room playing music web-casted from your livingroom to your home domain. Mix your interfaces - why would you need a monitor, mouse and keyboard for your central heating, access it's web page from one of your 9 linux systems with a keyboard and screen... The man that fixes your computers should be a plumber! The appeal of Linux is not paying hundreds of licences for one household full of computers, the down side is that all PCs should be as easy to use as a Mac. Users use, plumbers plumb. The next computing paradigm will be ubiquity, computers everywhere, and the cost structure (ie free please) will drive the OS market for the ubiquitous chip. Your main machine will be a state of the art chip, good graphics, blah-blah, but the ubiquitous ones will be so-called 'obsolete' technology... (so-called cos anyone that minds BBC Micros and ZX81s can never think of a 386 as useless...). What I am saying really is that producing cheap machines for use as computers is not the answer, thinking of what these cheap computers are going to do for users (normal people, slashen dotten niene danke...) is the problem. How to use them without peripherals, how to access them remotely, how to boot them off your local network, how to keep the cost down, down, down and how to make them plumber-friendly and user-invisible are the tasks... That's my tuppence... I gotta getta new job and my mind turns to these things a lot too....
Slashdot Mirror
Tektronix 4010 - that's a real old timers terminal... not this new fangled VT nonsense...
If you look at the history of writing you will see that at different times and in different periods different letter sets were used at different times by different people: consider this rendering of a simple text in a 'roman' hand (400 BC to 400AD ish) and the same one in a carolingian hand (Carolingian referring to Charlemagne, Charles The Great circa the 750 AD onwards).
Well one looks like it is all written in upper case and one in all lower case.
A general overview can be found here.
Mixed case (dual alphabet) stuff only took off with the invention of printing. The issue of whether the lower and upper case character sets are different alphabets is simply one of degree, how different are they from each other and from other alphabets (like the greek one. This article makes the point that in ancient greece there were also no "lower case" letters only "upper case" ones - modern greek developed a dual alphabet in emulation of the modern latin one.
Would you consider this to be a different alphabet? - I can barely read it, and certainly not in blocks - and it was used all over Germany until 1941 when it was banned by Hitler.
Cyrillic also only gets dual case in the time of Peter the Great, having been "upper case" only before. Lots of languages only have one case.
Sorry to rain on your parade but English is not a particularly simple written language.
The western tradition uses 2 complementary (but distinct) alphabets - the Latin, Majescule or upper case alphabet and the hunnish, Miniscule or lower case one.
These 2 alphabets have a 100% redundancy between them, and about a 50% overlap and their mixed-usage is context dependant and purely conventional and dates from the rennaisance. Their usages prior to that were in substantially non-overlapping geographical areas (and/or time periods).
In addition to this the English tradition chucks in an ideogram set to represent numbers, except that unlike the latinate or hunnish alphabets, this ideogram set reads right to left like the Arabic from whence it was bodged.
So, let's recapitulate, 2 alphabets with 100% semantic redundancy and 50% overlap of form which read left to right, and an ideogram set that reads right to left. Simple? Or just what you are used to?
For the benefit of people who didn't read Monday's posts on this subject here is a link to the key post in that discussion.
Or you can cut out the middleman and go to Darren Reed's comment that that post links to.
First up, I have registered a number of organisations under the UK data protection act, work for a major UK bank, and am a politician manque so I know what I'm talking about.
The data protection regulations affect:
(1) the storing of information about an individual in an electronic format which can be accessed via indexes.
(2) the storing of information about an individual in non-electronic format but with electronic indexes by which it can be searched and collated.
Data Protection regulations require an individual to give informed consent for any use of data that they provide. The customer relationship is protected (ie any organisation can legitimately keep data collected by them about thier clients).
This is a good thing, it protects the customers data - in databases. It does not affect data packets in transfer, or other non-indexed/databased information.
However if I take data from a customer and that customer indicates to me that I may make that information available to other bodies I can only pass that information over to those bodies under the condition that they respect the customer wishes. To this extent Data Protection legislation is viral like open source licenses. I, the customer, make my information available to you for you to do certain things with. If I permit you to distribute it, you may do so provided that my wishes are respected.
The US is not regarded by the EU as having appropriate Data Protection regulations (we think your money laundering regulations are weak as well).
Training users how to use large complex pieces of software (like Microsoft Office) is a good thing. It improves productivity tremendously. I once trained 50 users (out of 250) and their usage jumped so dramatically the network started saturated and we had to move over from hubs to switches.
You get even better productivity improvements if you teach people to type. The number of £1,000 a day techies I have worked with who take an hour over a 5 minute document is unbelievable.
There is actually now forward compatibility between Office 95 and Office 2000 applications. It is possible to Word 2000 native documents in Word 95 (we have the filters installed at work - Office 2000 is the desktop standard under NT and Office 95 is the laptop standard under Windows 95). Cutting between the 2 just does not work... The major problem that I have with it is that the amination under Powerpoint 95 is keyed off the Z order of the individual images on the screen whereas in Powerpoint 2000 it is a seperate (and much better) order that allows you to build one item behind another (good for overlapping lines or part offset boxes in depth).
Releasing those converters could be on of the biggest mistakes Microsoft ever made...
Who said Euroderf is still living in the 50s? he's living in the 17th century. For the benefit of our American cousins let me render his sig into comprehensible English:
1690 - Never forget.FTP.
1690 is the year 1690
1690 - Never Forget is usual rendered as "Rem 1690" Remember 1690, 1690 being the date of the Battle of the Boyne were the new Dutch (and Protestant) King of England defeated the old Scottish (and Catholic) King Of England in a battle in Ireland.
Links here: google listing for 1690
FTP does not stand for File Transfer Protocol but the more pointed Fuck The Pope.
Links here: google listing for Fuck The Pope
He may be a North Briton (ie Scottish) - he certainly supports a Scottish football team, but he may also be a Protestant from Northern Ireland.
Count me in buddy... automate those morons away from this site...
Sorry, there is an established church in the Irish Republic - the Catholic Church - but for 20 odd years before Ireland seceeded there was no established church - bad editing...
The UK consists of 4 jurisdictions:
England
Scotland
Wales
Northern Ireland
The Anglican Church (Church Of England) is the established church (ie 'state religion') in England
The Church Of Scotland (Presbyterian) is the established church in Scotland
In both Ireland (as it then was before the secession of the Irish Free State - now the Irish Republic) and Wales there are no established churches. The local episcopalian churches (sisters of the Church of England) were disestablished (late 1800s in Ireland, early 1900s in Wales) due to the fact that the majority of the local populations were not members of the established churches.
There are a number of serious issues, particularly those arising from emergency legislation pertaining to the Troubles in Northern Ireland and our lack of a constitution.
The Troubles led to the development of a large number of advanced security techniques being deployed, initially in Northern Ireland, but increasingly across the UK, such as:
1 camera recognition of number plates and the creation of a tracking network of cameras on major roads that can follow a car.
2 camera recognition of faces
3 advance intelligence collation techniques and the building of considerable files of information on individuals and groups of people.
Now it can be argued that emergency measures are required to deal with an emergency, but the problem that arises is when there are no constitutional checks and that emergency regulation leaks out. Many of the techniques developed in Northern Ireland have now been deployed in the UK - spread by IRA bombing campaings in particular.
The IRA's bombing campaign against the City of London (the City is the Financial District, London's Wall Street) led to a Ring Of Steel (based on the successful Belfast Ring Of Steel) being thrown around the City with all the kit and kaboodle and vehicle check points etc, etc. Now lo and behold 40% of the people stopped at the Ring Of Steel aren't white. There are reports that the UDA (the largest of the paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland and the sworn enemy of the IRA) used to have a black member (out of 100,000) in the 1970s...
Essentially without proper constitutional oversight this stuff can get out of hand. The Data Protection Act doesn't cover the security forces and the information they hold. UK governmental organisations have traditionally been able to claim Crown immunity - the law doesn't apply to the Royal Family and their instruments. So for instance, between its foundation in 1948 (1949 in Northern Ireland) the and the late 1980s/early 1990s, the National Health Service wasn't subject to Hygeine Regulations - hospital canteens could be overrun with rats and cockroaches and the local authorities couldn't close them down. Customs and Excise can break into your house, and arrest you without a warrant and search for whatever because they are crown servants. (The police can't). The Security Services were only put on a Statutory footing recently - before that they didn't exist - despite having prominent buildings in London and spending hundreds of millions a year.
Another example of leakage is the new Prevention Of Terrorism Bill. When we had a civil war running with 3,500 dead over 30 years we were subject to a temporary PTA which was renewed every year (made permanent after 20 years). Now there is peace we have a new, more draconian, Terrorism Act that criminalises supports for organisations both at home and abroad in a way that the previous one didn't.
The Gung-ho attitude towards civil rights spills over into the electronic world with the RIP Act making it illegal for ISPs not to keep and reveal encryption keys, etc, etc
One the other hand we have put the European Human Rights Act into law as a Foundational Act (ie other statues can be struck down if they don't conform to it) so this might not all last that long, but I'm quite pessimistic about things...
Disclaimer - I am a Labour Party member, used to work in Northern Irish politics, and am 'effectively' a 'Unionist' on NI politics
I believe in paper ballots for one simple reason, it makes it possible for any citizen to participate in and verify the count. Electronic voting disenfranchises the citizen from scrutinising the election.
I speak from experience as a Labour Party candidate for the Scottish Parliament. In our elections a scrutineer for every party is expected to manually examine every single spoiled paper about which there is any doubt. Even with my 4,000 votes running short of the eventual winners 12,000 my agent and I had to sit there and go through the reject pile.
The problem with the US election is not that it is taking a long time to count and recount but that the procedures for deciding to do the recounts are straight out of the 19th century. If every district was electronic (and different) and all still had different and unagreed rules about how and when to conduct a recount there would still be chaos at the moment. This is not a machine fixable problem.
There are long established conventions in the UK, as well as a considerable corpus of electoral law and precedent for judicial review which deal with this. There was a seat in the Westminster Parliament in '97 that was tied and 2 weeks for recounts and legal action which ended up in a rerun.
PS for any smug Brits out there - I wish we were like the Yanks with a proper constitution. Do you know, fact fans, that we do not have a secret ballot in the UK? When you are issued with a ballot paper it has a number both on it and the stub. Because we don't have a constitution the teller writes your poll number on the stub and your vote can be reconcilled with the tally. The ostensible purpose of this is to address issues of voter fraud, but in practice it has been used to monitor 'anti-social' political activity - ie communists or fascists which kind of negates the principle of the secret ballot.
The reason the UK's tld is uk is because the formal title of the state is "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" - gb is only part of the uk.
Usability guru Jacob Nielson makes the point is his new book on Web Usability that the Macintosh desktop metaphor is completely outdated. The Mac designers produced folders and files as icons in the understanding that everyone would have a cognitively finite number of files. They were also designing for ultra-limited real-estate (128 pixels squared) and had no room for other context... Nowadays the number of files/items we use is cognitively infinite, particulalry on large shared drives. (I tried for find files of a certain type at work and discovered that search on Windows Explorer wigs out at 10,000 found items.) What we need is a 'file manager' like a search engine that finds groups of things. Looking for an executable? - find the binaries, documentation, copyright docs, etc, etc, display them in a coherent way based on rules. Store the user decisions based on the head-up and exchange them with an anonymous server so that my file manager's learns from everyone's usage exactly what things mean and how contexts should be constructed (ie learn the display rules and use the internet to create a massively parallel learnging engine). That would be a new UI...
If a dos programme running in the NT VDM tries to break the Hardware Abstraction Layer by making a hardware call NT wigs out and the programme terminates. Windows 9x allows the single shared VDM (as opposed to multiple VDMs on NT) to call the hardware which is why 9x is flaky pastry and NT isn't.
Fess up time, as a true pinko Brit (well Scot actually) and genuine politician, I have even proposed a 'modem tax' myself, said he calling down the hounds of hell on himself...
There are a number of fundamental issues here which need to be addressed in a sensible manner.
Firstly the provision of, and development of, the internet was not done in America by the free market. Some of us are old enough to remember when the connection between Janet and Bitnet was over the military satellites via the receiving station at the Lizard in Cornwall. My former PhD supervisor (genuine pinko Yugoslavian-Russian Brit) knew in advance there was trouble brewing at the time of the Falklands due to all transatlantic traffic being cut off for a fortnight...
The internet was built with tax-dollars via state-run institutions, with the salaries of all of us nerdenheimers in academia payed for by someone else... It was essentially a 'socialised' activity as opposed to a 'market' activity, and had a strong military flavour. And if you don't think the US 'military-industrial complex' (a quote from Eisenhower, a well known former US President, before you flame-on! thrillseekers) is a 'socialised' activity then I advise you to seek out Michael Moore's TV Nation clip where he marches through Newt Gingrichts constituency (?)/congressional district (?) whatever demanding that the Coastguard Station (in landlocked rural Georgia) is closed down for tax cuts.
There are a number of different issues in developing the UK as a major internet player and politicians need to balance them. How do you raise money to plough into cabling? Should you go for the regulated cable market like we do, or enable dark fibre provision like Paolo Alto? How can Glasgow or Edinburgh compete with Helsinki and drive up our connectivity.
Now there is a consensus emerging that the key to getting on in the internet world is old-fashioned Keynesian demand management (which I tend to agree with) ie use taxes raised from VAT, income tax, yada-yada to reduce the cost of internet access and subsidise, as a state-led initiative, access to the internet to stimulate demand and hence supply of internet goods and services in the UK. Now this looks to me like good old pinko social democracy.
The problem I was facing, as a putative candidate for the new Scottish Parliament, was how to propose to raise money to put in internet infrastructure for Scotland, subject to the intricacies of the financial relationship between the Scottish Parliament and the UK Parliament (If we talk about the financial and taxation structure of the new, reformed UK, I will get excited and you will get bored). The Scottish Executive has limited recourse to income tax and none to VAT (like the American sales tax), there are even constitutional issues that say it might not be possible for Holyrood to levy a modem tax - let alone do the infrastructure work (Telecomms is a reserved issue, like Federal area of responsibility).
I think Scotland needs to improve it's infrastructure and if that means, in the short term, an increase in taxation to do it (wether by modem tax, or...) then it will lead to greater prosperity later...
Lowering cost is one way of stimulating demand, increasing bandwidth is another. If a modem tax made internet connectivity a bit more expensive but we had the bandwidth of Helsinki, ie 50% plus equivalent ISDN penetration, then the case for a modem tax could be made...
I'm not pretending that I have an ideal political blueprint for internet development in Scotland - I'm not even sure that a modem tax is the/an answer, but someone has to pay for this stuff and it will be you Johnny tax-payer...
Politics is the art of the possible. Face up to it...
I am resigned to my fate, swarm over death... but some intelligent comments would be nice as well...
The thing that is coming is the ubiquitous computer. The way to make a business out of it is not to think, ooh 9 computers in the house - each with a monitor, a keyboard, yada-yada, but to embrace the fact that we have too much processing power. If you use a PC you only get 100% loading for a fraction of the time. Stick a linux PC on your central heating system, your oven, your video, etc, etc. Make it accessible to a structured e-mail, your home page, SMS messages and then you can set the video from work, from the back room etc. Pile on the processing, have a box in every room playing music web-casted from your livingroom to your home domain. Mix your interfaces - why would you need a monitor, mouse and keyboard for your central heating, access it's web page from one of your 9 linux systems with a keyboard and screen... The man that fixes your computers should be a plumber! The appeal of Linux is not paying hundreds of licences for one household full of computers, the down side is that all PCs should be as easy to use as a Mac. Users use, plumbers plumb. The next computing paradigm will be ubiquity, computers everywhere, and the cost structure (ie free please) will drive the OS market for the ubiquitous chip. Your main machine will be a state of the art chip, good graphics, blah-blah, but the ubiquitous ones will be so-called 'obsolete' technology... (so-called cos anyone that minds BBC Micros and ZX81s can never think of a 386 as useless...). What I am saying really is that producing cheap machines for use as computers is not the answer, thinking of what these cheap computers are going to do for users (normal people, slashen dotten niene danke...) is the problem. How to use them without peripherals, how to access them remotely, how to boot them off your local network, how to keep the cost down, down, down and how to make them plumber-friendly and user-invisible are the tasks... That's my tuppence... I gotta getta new job and my mind turns to these things a lot too....