The case initiated by SCO against IBM, making claims to the effect that they own Linux and the world, and in particular IBM, is infringing SCO's copyright took a solid step forward with IBM issuing a "Summary Judgement" in their counter claim. A full and readable precis can be read at http://www.ip-wars.net/story/2006/10/14/233634/06 but this seems like a pretty unequivocal bodyblow to SCO and its ludicrous, and Microsoft funded, claims.
EMDA's"connected" broadband forum has some interesting advice, especially if you're looking for some R-rated information: http://www.emidlands.co.uk/forum/start.asp?forumid=3
GTC want to make it very clear that we are not a satified customer of Team Discovery or of Gaskin Associates and their many incarnations as their website proclaims. Nor would we, under any circumstances, recommend them to anyone. They had no hand in the development of our web presence and have used us as a reference site without our permission.
2006-08-05: The BBC ran an item celebrating the 25th birthday of the personal computer. While it may be true that IBM's trademark on the two letters "PC" may be 25 years old, the personal computer pre-dates IBM's attempts by quite a few years. Even a certain Mr Gates got hits mits on the Altair before making that call to IBM. But lets not forget the true pioneers in the Valley - Wozniac and Jobs. The Apple II was launched in 1977 with mainstream, useable software like Bricklin's and Frankston's Visicalc openly available in 1979 - all of this was happening before IBM entered the fray. While its dangerous to state unquivocally that Apple absolutely created the first personal computer, they certainly made the first machine to capture the imagination of the business and education worlds with a mass-market desktop computer. Cheers to Wozniac and Jobs! True pioneers.
Apparently, T-Mobile customers **don't** want to use VoIP so badly that they have asked their mobile operator to ban it!! In fact, just so they feel sufficiently cared for, the kindly phone company will disconnect them should they ever be tempted over to the darkside. T-Mobile may apparently launch their own service soon, akin to Vodafone's own walled-garden of services. Seems the mobile operators haven't heard about AOL; they too were forced to either rebrand as a private walled garden, or open up and join the Internet. By the way, my new Nokia E61 is great; it has vpn software built-in, allowing me to do as I please unless they fancy a privacy suit!
GTC has joined the throng on Yellowikis , the opensource business listing, not because its a great way to promote your business, although that may come too, but because Yell thinks its damaging their profile and may confuse potential customers and users. If you want to know more about Yellowikis see the Wikipedia entry and the BBC news item about the threat from Yell .
Smart phones: an example of great technology? Apparently not according to this (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/13/no_fault_found/) article on The Register. Some 63% of "smart phones" returned to operators as faulty are in fact working perfectly. Are the punters to blame - of course not. As the article asserts, poor advice from shop staff, with just 20% being able to properly explain the benefits of a Blackberry, is the core reason.
We're now on our third Freeview set-top-box in a little over a year at home, each from different vendors and different price brackets - the only common factor was their demise. One even started to transmit, disrupting our DSL service.During the time each of these was functional, the software in each was, shall we say, "feature rich". When I spoke to my local friendly TV aerial installer, he was quite unequivocal - he is being called out to people who are having problems which are increasingly the fault of their STB. Several friends have also commented similarly. While this isn't a representative sample of all vendors, geographies, etc, it has certainly cast some doubt in my mind about the readiness of digital tv for the mainstream. While I may be happy to put up with these niggles, I would think long and hard before inflicting it on my mother.
It seems that in some quarters of US, broadband is considered an essential tool in the armoury for the economic recovery after a bird-flu pandemic. Should (or is it when?) it comes, extensive travel restrictions will be enforced - in other words compulsory tele-working. If the commuter belts around the major cities don't have extensive, reliable, and fast broadband services then it is felt the US economy could take a big hit. The South-East of England contributes more than £6bn to London's economy, and is the second biggest economy in the UK in its own right. Are the same concerns being considered here I wonder?
It was interesting to read the BBCi article about "broadband gluttons". BT has, apparently, written to some 3000 of its broadband customers because they have been consuming more than 100 Gb worth of traffic per month. A collegue of mine, Brian Condon , coincidentally showed me a paper written on Japanese broadband behaviour, where 100 Gb per month is average - and where they create as much as they consume. Has BT got this wrong, or is the entire Japanese population gluttonous? Perhaps the answer was in the BBC article - they sought Web User magazine to support their arguments. The web is so last century when you can stream, and peer, and talk, watch, and create with out ever seeing an HTML page.
There are something like 1000 exchanges being unbundled by companies wanting to compete against BT at an infrastructure level. And in today's Ofcom "Communications Market" report, the say that 250,000 lines have now been unbundled - but that just 250 lines per exchange, and these exchanges typically have 15-40,000 lines. At the optimistic end thats just 1.5% of the local market but probably much less.
I recently bought a new Dell laptop with Windows XP pre-installed. My old laptop ran Linux, but I was determined to give Windows one last try. The laptop came with a trial version of McAfee software, which ran largely uneventfully but is due to end very soon. So, since it appeared to be pretty trouble free, I thought I'd buy the full version. But their ecommerce site, shop-window to the world, only supports newer versions of Internet Explorer - no Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, Konqueror, Opera, or Netscape. In fact they would only allow 22% of visitors to this site to buy from them. They lost my order, and I guess 78% of you reading this won't be buying either.
Community-based fibre projects are a real alternative to the traditional wireless models - except delivering Gbit performance in the local loop is a reality, not a dream. Mixing interesting new technologies, like SharedBand, with "stupid" technology (in the Isenberg sense), like that from Allied Telesyn, can make for a "boring" but affordable community network, capable of withstanding any competition. One of the real benefits of SharedBand is that its the judo of broadband - it uses the weight of the big carriers against them. No matter what they come along with, SharedBand will happily bond it together and share it out. Allied Telesyn, on the other hand, seem to have taken to heart Isenberg's stupid network concept. At a time when ATM is finally showing its age, and the MetroEthernet guys are trying to push good ol' Ethernet into an ATM pot, Allied Telesyn seem to have recognised the beauty of Ethernet's simplicity. When they want to build bigger networks, they just put a brighter laser in it - no more, no less. Anyone can build a next generation network with SharedBand and Allied Telesyn.
Its been interesting to note that since GTC relaunched our website, 70% of all visitors have done it using Firefox. While not a vast sample so far, it is nonetheless suprising. Is Firefox really beginning to take a hold, or does GTC attract an unusal clique?
Thought Log 
