Ok, you want 10mbs uncontended.

Fine.

From where to where?

From here to everywhere?

Ok, what if the google gateway is contended inthe IP-X, or thier cache is dry if your ISP has one? What then?

What if your ISP's backbone is flooded? Will you pay for them to have enough capacity to manage the peak for everyone on their backbone? Can you? Doubt it.

And if the ISP's backbone is clear, what about the CDN or the T1 network? You can't pay them directly because of the market and technical structure at the moment. Google can, Amazon can, and check it. The big content providers run their own CDNs.

And neutral to what? Voip? Filetransfer, Video? What bits of the video? The structural packets or the detail? If we are neutral we kill voip and video for what? Why should we have poor video so that someone can share toretzzz ? Ok - why should we have slow torrents so that someone can watch a video... the point is that it is a decision.

And; why IP? What about common carriage?

To get proper neutrality we need to rebuild from the bottom up. A total network rearchitecture world wide. Never, never, never going to happen again.

What this comes down to is the access network. The access network is either an mechanism of community extortion or it's a utility, like the water network or the roads.

The answer is for the access network to be run as a utility at a national level. Until we go back to that in a very large part of the world wide consumer market (so I mean the USA and Europe) we are going to go round and round with this. The mobile network is going to have the same thing in 5 years for sure.

Or - tollroads.

Now, let's be fair, some parts of every system are going to need tolls. International shipping has tolls, railways have tolls... hell roads have tolls on bridges and so on; to get the strategic links done in hard places this is what is going to be needed, but you can manage day to day without going accross the toll bridge if you want, and that has to become the case or continue to be the case with the internet.

IBM are very cunning in supporting and developing open source systems with an eye to making sure that no one else is able to make any cash in a particular market. Where the barrier to entry is high IBM will be there investing and charging many dollars. Where it is low you can be sure they will push open source so that there is no market for anyone and minimal investment required from them.

I've read all of Proust, all of Dickens and everything Alistair McClean ever wrote.

HA HA HA

I WIN

I am best reader

yus.

Lots of good points above, I won't repeat the things that I agree with - but there are a few things that I would like to pick up.

You said that there were dozens of R&D labs that studied software. I disagree.

I think that people studied programming languages, and they studied compilers and interpreters, and they studied methodologies. Very few studies of software as it is and as it runs. We had FEAST from Murray Lehman (I vaguely think) but there have been very few serious investigations about actual systems in operation and evolution.

Why : because it is hard and there are very few people competent to do it.

Why is there very little funding about for CS research - because of this; serious proposals to attack this *kind * of issue would get funded. But they just aren't being written.

Ok - the US spends $663B a year on military forces.

China spends (possibly) as much as $140B a year (in equivalent purchasing power).

You are trolling, but for the sake of accuracy here is what is generally acknowledged to be the case.

- after the war he struggled to get the kind of role and financial support he should have been given without a quibble or a bat of the eye - he eventually got a very good job at the University of Manchester, which is a great place, but it is amazing that he wasn't treated as a national treasure (was it 2 of Hilberts challenges he solved? Even allowing for the secrecy around the work during the war someone in the know should have pushed it on that basis)
- he was targeted for blackmail due to being gay when it was illegal
- the police arrested him and he was prosecuted and punished with hormone therapy
- the depression caused by the therapy and the awful behavior of society towards him, and his own personal isolation caused him to take his life
- he did it in such a way to allow his mother to go on believing that it was an accident

In 1956 the UK government had no reason to kill him, in fact it never did - quite the opposite. Instead they treated a great man with indifference and contempt because of his sexuality. I can't say that I can think of a more pathetic story in all senses of the word.

If you want to feel worse about it (as a human) then think what might have been if he had lived 25 more years and had enjoyed the appropriate support

TBH. COBOL is very easy to learn, it's jsut a pain in the arse to build anything substantial in it because it's very primitive in comparison to a modern language.

COBOL experience is rare because the details of the kit that underpins it (DB2, forms for terminal input) and the interfaces to that kit are difficult to access; you can't spend 3 months doing an open source project on COBOL and then talk about that in your interview.

Java is everywhere - and will continue to be accessible as a technology, just much less desirable in corporate architecture if it is vendor owned in the way that this announcement predicts. So I can see a move away from Java for new projects and a need to support the old stuff falling to a less skilled and poorly paid workforce.

1000's of big companies (telcos, utilities, retailers, gov, defence) use java in their back office, and... well everywhere.

This may cause them to change their policy for new software development, and it may also squeeze the java developer market badly, but for sure there will be strong arguements for splashing £50k here, £90k there, £20k somewhere else, on getting the new JVM to pick up the performance of application x, y, z which are long in the tooth and a pain in the arse.

The alternative is to rebuild, which carries risk - although would be a good move in the long run. In the meetings someone will say "yeah, but we are all dead in the long run" and that's that basically. As a CIO you just pay over £50k, get your users back on side, keep your job for another year, collect your bonus, put another years pension contrib into the pot.

So, Oracle will make money, lots of money, off this. You guys can squeak, MS will cheer, the Python community will see a boost (perhaps), but Larry and co will be richer.

Mysql (in the future) = Oracle feather light (down load it and run it and you are up and going in less than 1hr - oracle normal = 6hrs to setup?) But, if you are an enterprise DBA then you want the management and recovery features that Oracle gives you (as well as the scaling - even though it gets so mind bendingly expensive).

Open office - who cares?

Oracle bought Sun to be IBM mark 2. Expect them to buy Accenture next.

There is a lot of poor research that is done, which will go no where, which is published in extremely good journals.

This work is funded now because the research councils do not have to differentiate between it and the rest of the "excellent" work that is funded.

It will not get funded in the future. The councils will pick projects that are done by groups that have track records of real, rather than paper, success.

The UK science budget has been overly generous. There is a very large entitlement culture in the universities. The capacity of our S&T culture and infrastructure has not kept pace with the funding that has been given to it, this is a huge mistake by the academic establishment who have spent money on glamour projects and recruiting superstars rather than developing the base that could turn funding into real results.

People ride fixies because the chain doesn't come off.

If you are depending on your bike for a living - for example because you are a messenger - then this is a positive thing.

However, for everyone else, it is not.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/8044599/Jerome-Kerviel-will-need-177000-years-to-repay-5-billion.html

Well - he'll have had 3000 years to enjoy his income at that point!

First, there is a concentration of low earning people in hard circumstances in big cities. Look at the buses - the people who are sleeping on them at 6am on the way back from their shift are in the survey. The 2 hours on the bus, the fact of being on shift from 11pm to 6am, and the fact of having to work up to your elbows in sh*t do not appear in the survey.

I know that many people who do have a degree experience these conditions (vets, doctors...) and many who do not, do not. But I think that the fact is that the people on the bus mostly don't have a degree and that they mostly don't want to be on the bus.

It is also clear that people who have strong vocational educations often have similar earnings to people with degrees, and often have fulfilling and pleasant roles that bring them respect in their communities. This is an excellent route for anyone who doesn't feel that a university education suits them.

Final point; the last 40 years and the next 40 years are not the same thing. No one knows what the future will bring, it might be the case that the rewards of a degree will be much greater in the future, and it might not. But I had my perspective sharply altered by this truth when I was in my mid thirties and two close friends with educations died. Now, their earnings were sharply curtailed, so their investment looks bad from the point of view of this table. But on the other hand they had done something, gained a degree, had a great time at college. They had lived - just as someone who had climbed mountains, joined the army and had a fun surfing career could say that they had lived.

But be clear. People who work in chicken factories until they get cancer do not feel that life has treated them kindly.