Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music files.

For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for access. But now three of the country’s largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online activity.

One of them, Time Warner Cable, began a trial of “Internet metering” in one Texas city early this month, asking customers to select a monthly plan and pay surcharges when they exceed their bandwidth limit. The idea is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.

Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, walked away from a Yahoo deal on Saturday still looking for an answer to his company’s fundamental problem: its time-tested recipe for success isn’t working against Google, the leader in the current wave of Internet computing.

interesting article but i'm rather dubious about the assertion

as the center of gravity in computing continues to move away from the personal computer, Microsoft’s stronghold, and to the Internet.

i think it's more valid to assert that computing has more than one center of gravity and i would certainly argue that it is of benefit not to have one company dominate all the spheres but rather to continue the metaphor a series of solar systems

Microsoft’s Failed Yahoo Bid Risks Online Growth - New York Times

We all thought it was time to party, that the enemy was finally vanquished, that it was time for Champagne and cigars. We learned our lesson yesterday afternoon, though, when SCO smacked us all in the face with a hundred million dollars.

That's right, SCO suddenly has deep pockets, courtesy of their friend Stephen Norris, the uber-finance geek. Norris and his private equity firm — Stephen Norris Capital Partners, LLC — have decided to buy a stake in SCO, though the exact amount won't be clear until the Utah courts decide how much SCO has to pay IBM and Novell. What is clear is that they suddenly have a $95 million line-of-credit to pursue all the litigation their cold, black hearts desire. Others have pointed out that these guys are the biggest, baddest, beat-the-crap-out-of-anyone-in-their-way-ist, and won't have a moment's pause about coming after everyone in the Linux world, from IBM and Novell right down to us, the everyday users.

As the ever-vigilant White Knights over at Groklaw point out, there's still some hope — the all-powerful Bankruptcy court can quash them with the stroke of a pen, and the European Commission not to mention the SEC may well have a thing or two to say — but the outlook certainly isn't as rosy as it was on Wednesday.

Lord have mercy..

I think i am going to vomit...

SCO is Back, and This Time It's Personal | Linux Journal

Jello wrote:

SierraNightTide wrote:
As children, we live boldly, seldom afraid or embarrassed to seek out what we want or to speak our minds. As we grow older, we tend to fold our inquisitive and creative minds and place them into a secret drawer while we chase career opportunities. Most times, or at least for most people we leave the drawer untouched, afraid that it might obstruct us in our career success as we conform to society’s acceptance of living.

Are you kidding? As a child I was terrified to be different. As an adult I came into my weirdness.

my bouts of psychosis have taught me the value of being normal (something often much underrated [people scoff and laugh at "the straight world" without understanding that they're often the median and core of our civilisation and usually they're honest, decent and tolerant]). I have also learnt that if i want to be tolerated i must tolerate in return.
Although it has to be said that different cultures have different attitudes towards conformity. I am lucky enough to be English and in my culture the eccentric is often valued.

RE: The Difficulty of Being Different

A brilliant idea is neither necessary nor sufficient for a successful business, although all else being equal it can't hurt. Microsoft is probably the canonical example of a successful business, and it has never had a single brilliant idea in its entire history.

Rondam Ramblings: Top ten geek business myths

Why isn't MemeStreams stickier? What will it take to get every registered user to visit the site daily and generate 20 page views? There ought to be a plan!

* Communication Function: MySpace replaces email; Memestream messaging does not.
* Demographics: Memestreams users, on average, seem to have lives and professions.
* Content: I read the RSS feed... through livejournal... with the exception of the links I follow through, most of my reading is likely untrackable. If I couldn't, I would read Memestreams less.
* Content navigation: Banging on the folksonomy drum again -- I read the front page. I read my recommendation page. But outside the cover articles, I have little inclination to "dive deeper". Except when entries link to other entries, or when I remember an article that I wish to recall, I don't go through the bulk of the site. If there were tags or other automatically generated clustering content links, I probably would.

RE: Panic on 43rd Street | Vanity Fair

The phrase “The customer is always right” was originally coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge’s department store in London in 1909, and is typically used by businesses to:

1. Convince customers that they will get good service at this company
2. Convince employees to give customers good service

Fortunately more and more businesses are abandoning this maxim - ironically because it leads to bad customer service.

Here are the top five reasons why “The customer is always right” is wrong.

Positive Sharing » Top 5 reasons why “The Customer Is Always Right” is wrong

i was very interested to read your post on outsourcing in general and regarding call centres in particular. Due to mental health problems triggered by stress principally i need to work in a relatively stress free environment so i work in a call centre on the phones i ignore the targets by and large and my managers all know i'm very good on the phone but my job is being outsourced to India.
I think I do a good job because i can mostly handle the range of accents, i can handle the problems and usually diffuse the complainers. I believe in free markets and I like the idea of wealth creation going to the developing world through outsourcing. I suspect a lot of the outsourced call centres will return to locations staffed by people more linguistically in tune with the target audience. It is sometimes a challenge to catch the gist of a 70 year old Tynesider who is beginning show signs of Alzheimer's. I sometimes have to listen very carefully and i'm English with an English degree.

Call centers in India are for companies that don't give a shit about customer service.

the problem is that the people who make these outsourcing decisions are completly cut off from the day to day customer service level
they're quite happy to let customers wait on the phone for 20 minutes minimum in a queue ( i speak to people all day long who've been trying to get through to someone all day long and they phone the line i work on because it has short queues but i just have to explain that there's nothing i can do and that i have no shortcuts)
these managers see that it is a low paid job and consider it unskilled and don't understand that one of the skills in this case is having an intuititive understanding of the language, and the culture, from being raised in it ( a point which therefore includes my British-Asian colleages, born in Leicester, a city which according to Wikipedia is due shortly to have a population where the majority is not ethnically white European.)
the bean counters will learn by market forces that there is more to customer service than just having a warm body on the other end of a telephone; and that's once the customers have negiotiated the automated call menu system which customers generally hate (they can be a useful tool but there are so many badly designed ones that won't just let you speak to a person or are just plain badly designed)

RE: India: Why Apple Walked Away

The News Corp.'s purchase of MySpace is looking like that rarest of rarities in the media world -- a much-ballyhooed acquisition where it turns out that the buyer underpaid.

Interesting perspective.

News Corp. (hearts) MySpace | FORTUNE

If you followed the threads, Who really gets hurt by 'prioritization' of the Internet, and Postage Is Due for Companies Sending E-Mail, you may want to see this follow-up.

In a major blow to Internet firms such as Amazon.com and Google, the House Energy and Commerce Committee expects to scrap plans for "network neutrality" safeguards in forthcoming telecommunications legislation, congressional and industry sources said. Instead, the panel would move a streamlined video franchising bill sought by AT&T and Verizon Communications, which are deploying video services that will compete with cable companies.

House Panel To Nix 'Network Neutrality' Safeguards