An article in the Financial Times quotes leadership from those three companies saying that Google is getting a “free ride” pushing YouTube traffic to their respective customers “because they do not pay anything”.

This is not a new argument of course – SBC has claimed the same thing in the US way back in 2005. Other than generate a general disgust for SBC, not much has come from that claim.

Statements like these show these CEOs do not understand the basic principles of internet peering. Worse, they also indicate a basic dishonesty – they must realize that *their own customers* already pay for that bandwidth.

It’s time the big telcos realize that the world has changed. Their companies are not phone companies anymore, they are telecommunications companies trending towards pure data companies. They are in the business of providing internet access. That means ‘dumb pipes’.

If they do not like that, they should go find something else to do. Of course their government granted monopolies should then be taken away. And the lavish subsidies they received for network buildouts should be paid back and given to other organizations who *do* understand how the internet works.

Maybe then we wouldn’t see such ignorant and dishonest statements in the press.

I received a couple Facebook notifications today in French, from people who live in Flanders. Facebook, this is the 21st century. It’s really not that hard to see that Belgium has, in fact, three official languages, and that French is only spoken by about 40% of the population. So if your software is really so poorly designed that it can only associate one language with a country, it would have been logical to choose Dutch, native language of almost 60% of the population.

I’m starting to think it’s time for a poll. How much longer until Facebook fixes this trio of language-related bugs?

... hat dich als FreundIn auf Facebook bestätigt.

Facebook – you are supposed to know everything. You most definitely know that I am, in fact, *not* female…

That is of couse silly. This evening I got a notification in Croatian… Facebook, please fix this.

In 2009. While almost all music is available for digital download without DRM, legally, from the likes of Amazon or iTunes.

There are some baffling quotes in this article. It’s an interview with Hugh Griffiths, Head of Mobile at Microsoft UK. Here are some of my favorites:

“At the moment, to be honest with you, we don’t have the functionality in-house to provide a mechanism for transferring between mobile phones and PC. We don’t have that functionality available.”

So, Microsoft does not have the technology available to copy files. It’s really hard you know, what with all those zeros and ones you have to keep track of.

“Q: Can you really expect people to buy music that’s locked to a device they upgrade every 12 to 18 months? A: I didn’t realise phones were churning that quickly in the marketplace these days.”

This is Hugh Griffiths talking, the Head of Mobile at Microsoft UK. You’d expect him to perhaps know a few basic facts about the customers he’s targetting?

If this guy is representative for the average Microsoft employee, I’m not surprised that they are laying off thousands.

So, you can buy music from Amazon or iTunes that you can copy to any device, without limits. Or you can buy music from MSN Mobile music service that can only be played on the phone you download it to, and that you loose when you upgrade your phone. Oh, and it’s about twice as expensive as the uncrippled version of the music.

I’m going to hazard a guess that this service is not going to be a huge success.

This is of course a fantastic, forward-thinking idea. It’s not like these warships could then become infected with viruses or anything…

I’m sure the producers are happy that all those people who speak Dutch and don’t live in Europe will now have to wait until the DVD comes out for their region, which will happen in approximately a million years, three days and 15 seconds. In other words, never.

There are probably fewer than a few hundred thousand Dutch speakers that don’t live in Europe (barring similar languages like Afrikaans). Given the limited usefulness of the DVD to folks who do not understand Dutch, what exactly is that region encoding for?

$ telnet mx1.hotmail.com 25
Trying 65.54.245.8...
Connected to mx1.hotmail.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 bay0-mc9-f11.bay0.hotmail.com Sending unsolicited
commercial or bulk e-mail to Microsoft's computer network 
is prohibited. Other restrictions are found at 
http://privacy.msn.com/Anti-spam/. Violations will result 
in use of equipment located in California and other states. 
Sat, 25 Oct 2008 09:26:41 -0700 

(newlines added to improve readability) No wonder there is so much spam on the internet. If you violate Microsoft’s antispam policy, that will result in the use of equipment located in California and other states. Oh dear. They are going to use equipment! In California! And in other states! The spammers must be really frightened now.

I’m thinking someone at the Metro needs a crash course in elementary math.

So I ran it through pdf2ps, after which it printed fine. Nice error message, no?

$ pdf2ps SAMSUNG13MIRsApr01Apr3008cd12.pdf

   **** Warning: Fonts with Subtype = /TrueType should be embedded.
                 The following fonts were not embedded:
                        Arial-Black
                        Arial-BoldMT
                        ArialNarrow-Bold
                        ArialNarrow-BoldItalic
                        TimesNewRomanPSMT

   **** This file had errors that were repaired or ignored.
   **** The file was produced by: 
   **** >>>> Acrobat Distiller 7.0.5 (Windows) < <<<
   **** Please notify the author of the software that produced this
   **** file that it does not conform to Adobe's published PDF
   **** specification.