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Re: SO and all that
>>>>> "Al" == Al Hudson <eah106 [at] york.ac.uk> writes:
Al> only thing you gain is not having to install the software,
Al> which for some users is a huge bonus, but I'm sure it's not
Al> beyond the wit of man to design a system to do this without
Al> having to dot-com it :)
Write-once, run-anywhere is the Holy Grail.
Half-wits like me you can get for free, but the full-wits that produce
useful products generally demand to be paid enough to eat....[1]
As for ISDN, the Japanese government made it an official goal to
implement "fiber to the home" nationwide as a "basic minimum" by 2005,
and did this in 1996 IIRC. The point is not that it's going to happen
(it's not---the main effect was to help convince people that it was OK
to break up the telephone monopoly without actually breaking it up),
the point is that if even those numbskulls can recognize that
bandwidth matters, it does, and even under a Labor government I bet
you'll get it with all the rest of us.
We'll have to pay for it, of course, but I don't think it will be a
deal we can refuse....
I think that local hardware plus open source is the way to go, myself,
but commercially it's going to be an interesting race between better
telecomms and dot-com, and better hardware and open source.
Footnotes:
[1] I'm a parasite on the taxpayers of the great nation of Japan,
that's why I come for free.
--
University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
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