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Archives for January 2005

SBC Trying to Buy AT&T?

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  • NY Times: SBC Said to Be in Talks to Buy AT&T. A deal, if reached, would be the final chapter in the 120-year history of AT&T, the first technological giant of the modern age and the original model for telecommunications companies worldwide. A deal would be a reunion of sorts, putting back together some of the largest pieces of the Ma Bell telephone monopoly, which was broken up in 1984.

    • The AT&T of today is a weak shadow of its former self. SBC is one of the powerhouses among the regional monopolies.

    lf, wouldn’t do much to disrupt the marketplace immediately. But it’s a harbinger of trouble.

    The worry is on the data side. Voice is already moving into the data sphere as VoIP, and will someday be seen as a small add-on to data.

    SBC is one of the most arrogant of the “Baby” (!) Bells. But all of them, assisted by an FCC that has been determined to let the phone and cable duopoly control data access, are moving to throttle the most important competitive market of the future — broadband — by insisting on absolute control over the wires they’ve installed based on government-granted monopolies. This local duopoly makes other kinds of consolidation look tame.

    Someday, wireless broadband could help. But competing wireless systems have to connect to backbones and their local nodes. If the Bells can take over the c

    …excerpt from: dangillmor.typepad.com…

    Things to say when you are losing a tech argument

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    Excerpt from:
    Things to say when you are losing a tech argument
    1 That won’t scale.
    2 That’s been proven to be O(N^2) and we need a solution that’s O(NlogN).
    3 There are, of course, various export limitations on that technology.
    4 The syntax is idiosyncratic.
    5 Trying to build a team behind that technology would be a staffing nightmare.
    6 That can’t be generalized to a cross-platform build.
    7 Unfortunately, the license would contaminate our product.
    8 If we go with that idea, we’re going to have Don Marti camped out in the front lobby with 300 angry software jihad supporters.
    9 Our support infrastructure simply can’t handle the volume that change would involve.
    10 I had one of the interns try that approach for another project, and it scrambled the CEO’s hard drive. So I think it’s going to be a hard sell.

    Fixed broken comment spam filter

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    I hope, anyway.

    To all those who in the last couple of months may have legitimately attempted to post comments and got rather brashly denied, I profusely apologize for not properly testing and configuring the comment-spam filter software I installed and stupidly assumed would “just work” with little modification. I should know better.

    Argh.

    I’ve now tested the filter system more thoroughly and figured out which part isn’t working, then disabled that part; comment posting then worked again. I don’t have any way to test the system from far-and-wide places though so there might still be something lurking, and the real-time blacklist part of the system is still enabled; if you’re on that list, there’s not much I can do to help.

    If you find that you still can’t post non-spammy comments, please send me a note at stillbroken at jimbala.net…. If you can include your IP address used at the time of the comment it would be very helpful.

    For self important Techies

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    I’m having George Carlin flashbacks, what with ‘fuck’ or some derivative thereof being every other word. Besides that, the guy makes some good points. “Caustic” is definitely apropos.

    Found this via Scoble — CausticTech has a rant that every techie should read and take to heart. Reading it is cathartic — I am sure writing it was as well. His rant is an equal opportunity attack – something for everyone – bloggers, open source zealots, Microsoft in general, evangelists, Microsoft MVPs (at least peripherally).

    …excerpt from: radio.weblogs.com…

    Another Blogger Fired

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    Another one bites the dust. Could we get more paranoid? Don’t answer that.

    Jeremy C. Wright of Ensight was just fired from his job for blogging:

    But, they fired me.

    My Posts About Work

    What did they fire me for? This post:

    Getting to surf the web for 3 hours while being paid: Priceless.
    Getting to blog for 3 hours while being paid: Priceless.
    Sitting around doing nothing for 3 hours while being paid: Priceless.
    Installing Windows 2000 Server on a P2 300: Bloody Freaking Priceless.

    Again, the reason wasn’t that I was insulting (though I guess it could be interpreted that way. It certainly wasn’t in the best taste when viewed from my employer’s perspective). It was that I was “divulging company secrets”.

    I don’t talk about my work very often on this blog. Of course I would never divulge any sensitive data on this public blog, but why risk it when something as innocuous as that post can get someone fired?

    The upshot is that I now know who Jeremy is and I have subscribed to his feed (I am sure he isn’t that excited about that though).
    %0

    …excerpt from: blankbaby.typepad.com…