Get off the internet you one-worlders

You want the intenet to be passed to government control by the same authority responsible for the oil for food scandal?

You one-worlders somehow think that a corrupt and unwealdy organization can somehow run the assignment of names and numbers better than a private, non-profit organization?

Um, nope.

Tim Horacek

Indian outsources infuriated by American bad manners

I bet that the majority of calls with users who are ticked off, are the result of language problems and not racism. Also, talking to someone on the phone that just took your job, most people aren't going to be in a spirit of cooperation.

I work at a IBM call center in Edmonton doing corporate support. I'm on a team that supports a large company with operations in 40 countries including India and USA. Most people we talk to are very polite even if the callers get someone who hails from India. I can understand the level of frustration at talking to people from India or Pakistan.

For instance I called the American Express main line about a year ago to cancel my service. Sure enough the calls get forwarded to the middle east. After the usual introduction, the agents (yes, I called back 4 times) would ask you for your name and address, then ask why you want to cancel the service. Finally they would repeat at infinitum that "our" service is the best and I would be best to stay with AMEX. After repeating several times that I wanted to cancel 3 of the 4 agents I spoke with hung up the phone on me. By the fourth call and waiting over 2 hours on hold my temper was very short and I was ready to start clawing the backs of everyone just to cancel the card.

At another time, called Dell for some support on a hardware problem with a new computer. So like all times when calling the helpdesk, you always get different agents, and the level of assistance that each gives is quite varied. Much of the frustration proves to be more a language barrier than anything. Often times the agent can barely speak English (may be able to write it fine) and both parties end up repeating themselves over and over again, adding time and frustration.

Finally I know almost everyone here in Canada has received calls from MBNA Canada trying to JAM their Platinum Mastercard down your throats. Most telemarketers if you just keep saying no, after about the 10th time, they will hang up. However when they come from India, the agents will keep on talking despite any/everything you say. Finally you have to hang up on them, which doesn't stop them, they'll just call at another time because it obviously wasn't a good time for me.

So at the end of the day, and spending numerous minutes on the phone with limited English speaking people, I'd much rather pay a few extra dollars for the services I use if it means talking to someone I can clearly understand. I think most people feel likewise.

Name supplied

AMD's top 10 list

1. It is run by stinking communist sympathisers, the reds should be sent to live in f**** China

2. All of their processors used to be f**** pants.

3. They have wanky marketing campaigns

4. They're no good at global dominance

Wintel or WAMD... Wamd sounds like wank 5. Did I mention they're communist lovers??

Name supplied

The US does own the Internet

Sorry if you don't like it but the US owns the internet. The American Taxpayer has funded this from day 1 and still is funding research on this. It belongs to us so get over it.

L Turner

Sony BMG continued

The statement "If open source is used, the entire app is supposed to be open to the community" in the story "Developers discover open source code in Sony BMG" is factually incorrect. Open source software is licensed under a number of different licenses most of which are not covered by a General Public License (GPL) style 'copyleft' which you describe. For example the X11 Window system and the BSD operating systems are distributed under their own licenses (X11 and BSD license resp.) which are not 'copyleft.'

The story is correct in that the program distributed by Sony BMG apparently contains code licensed under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL). While all code licensed under the GPL (a specific open source license) is open source (a general catgory of software license), not all open source code is licensed under the GPL and 'copyleft' (a license specific requirement to remain open source).

Steve 499

Israeli system

Hello Nick: The interesting part is that 12% of the test subjects showed stress even when they "had nothing to hide." Which I guess is a case of if you look hard enough you'll find something, anything.

If your average jet has 100 people onboard, 12 are going to be taken aside for more in-depth questioning. Multiply that by the number of passengers in your average airport every day, and we'll soon see enormous parking lots where people are waiting to be interrogated.

Since I imagine the questions will be standardized, a lot of people will figure that out and just say "yes, yes, no, no, yes" or whatever pattern, until the authorities wise up and start mixing the questions around. And you just know that someone, whether from stress, not hearing things right, or just not thinking, will answer yes when they should have said no, or vice versa. That should earn them a quick ticket to the clink.

Sincerely,
Scott Peterson

Lame excuse
http://lame.sourceforge.net/ "LAME is an LGPL MP3 encoder."

LGPL means exactly that programs linked to the code are not to be released as opensource but the code should *stay* free (as in, any modification to the code itself should be published as free).

GPL means that programs linked to the code are to be released as GPL too.

BSD licensing means that programs linked to the code, or using the code, should retain the copyright mention (usually something like "copyright the regents of the university of california, copyright the freebsd project") but are not supposed to stay opensource (the code itself can be closed).

What to make of all that ? Well, if SONY actually used functions from LAME source code (and linked to them, as opposed of copy/paste them into a bigger source file), depending on how their program is built, they should only have mentioned (but where ? this is spyware, after all) that some code was borrowed unmodified from the LAME project and the source code was available at lame.sf.net .

On the other hand, if SONY actually modified the functions, or included those in a bigger source file, the modifications, or the source file, should be released as LGPL.

As attached as I may be to free software, I think the furor should first be diriged at SONY for releasing and distributing a rootkit in the first place (and saying users do not know what a rookit is, so why should they care), and then about the LAME code. But in this case, if there really was a LGPL violation, they should be forced to release the whole code to the public. It should be pretty easy to do that. After that, someone will have to explain to non-technical people (SONY customers) what the code is supposed to do. The aftermath of this should be interesting.

François

The Powers@Apple.com

Mike -- Could you pass on this branding suggestion to the powers at Apple?

Existing PowerPC Edition Product Name: "Mac OS X (with version numbers 10.x)"

Forthcoming x64 Edition Product Name Suggestion: Mac OS 11.x, 12.x, 13.x, etc.

This way there is no confusion over which hardware platform. 11 or higher is the x64 platform. Also makes Mac OS X users on the PowerPC platform believe they will get more if they transition over to the new hardware.

P.S. Too bad Apple didn't go with the AMD64 processors. Then Apple could actually live up to it's bogus claim of 3 years ago about being the fastest 64-bit computer on earth. ;-)

Tom King, Industry Analyst

Intel terminates Via

Hello Esther,

Judging from what I see around me, people do like VIA embedded products, some even use then as their primary computers (because of the lack of noise and extremely low energy consumption), and just fire up the Athlon/P3/P4/Athlon64 whenever they need more power (as in, compilation, or gaming).

Considering the price of a Centrino platform, this is not surprising. The included cryto acceleration engine is also put to good use in VPN access points - and so far neither AMD nor Intel have something to match VIA's 50MB/s AES capability (a P4 3.0GHz never reaches 5MB/s). (benchmarks published last year by Theo De Raadt from OpenBSD).

So here is a case of VIA having a good product (I thought a few years ago that I never would say that !) that has no competition at all, is many times as powerful as embedded ARM or MIPS boards in PC-104 format, nearly the same price, and supports modern graphics and IDE drives.

VIA has effectively driven an edge between the true embedded market (rugged boards, compact-flash memory, no video output) and the traditional PC market which is now all about performance, energy consumption (and not as much about quality as I would like it to be).

Kudos to them for that, especially when I see the high reliability of their boards. Some companies I know are also interested of replacing aging PC desktops with high-end VIA boxes to cut the energy bill and improve worker efficiency with no-noise boxes, that are a lot better than the old dumb TXs.

The reason why I do not own one is that my not-so-old P3 is good enough and last time I looked, I found VIA mainboards too limited for my tastes - I would like to see an AGP port and at least 3 PCI slots on the dual CPU model, not only embedded slow (not to mention DVI-less) graphics, sound, and network.

I see the same (edge) phenomenon appearing next year with the PS3 and XBOX 360 : the traditional PC market may become more and more obsolete for gaming as these console are not nearly as limited as were the original XBOX and PS2. Cell workstations or servers from IBM may also change the tune.

I wonder what happens next to the original PC market. On the other hand, it was a bit bland (as in, not much innovation, except dual-core and AMD64) during the last few years.

Best regards
François