Mobile firm to fight demand to cut charges.  Vodafone vows to fight the competition watchdog's demands for lower mobile phone charges. [Guardian Unlimited] ALTO, the operator's alliance in Ireland, has called for a price cap in Ireland (warning: press release extract ahead):

Some maintain that mobile charges in Ireland are among the cheapest in Europe, however ALTO argues that there remains the potential for significant consumer savings.   It says that access charges, the cost charged by a mobile operator to a fixed line operator for a call from a land line to a mobile phone, represent a cost of over Euro 300 million per annum on the Irish telecomms industry. ALTO estimates that if these access charges were based on the actual cost of providing this service the total cost per annum would be in the region of Euro 55 million.  The potential savings to consumers would be in the region of Euro 245 million each year, according to ALTO.

Iarla Flynn, Chairman of ALTO said;  “The lack of competition in the mobile marketplace means that there is no incentive for O2 or Vodafone to introduce competitive pricing structures for fixed line operators buying airtime from these companies. Under EU law these access charges are required to be cost-based but it is clear within the industry that these requirements have not been implemented in Ireland”.

3:44:31 PM  #   your two cents []

Senate proposes significant cut in NASA budget. The US Senate has proposed reducing NASA's 2003 budget by nearly $450 million. [spacetoday.net]
3:39:40 PM  #   your two cents []

From Roland Piquepaille's blog: Sailors on the Oracle racing yacht tested out sunglasses that beam real-time data about the boat's performance onto the lenses, before their eyes but not blocking their view. Boy, could I adapt this to some personal uses!
10:44:10 AM  #   your two cents []

From the wires:

British mobile phone users will see a reduction in charges after the communications regulator confirmed today that operators must cut its charges by up to 30 per cent. Oftel has imposed a one-off 15 per cent cut in the price of calls to mobile phones, followed by further inflation-linked annual price reductions of up to 15 per cent.

10:34:03 AM  #   your two cents []

Check out the new Dublin Spire!
10:03:35 AM  #   your two cents []

Start-ups back Linux for data centers. OpsWare and CoroSoft, two companies that sell software designed to ease the operation of "data centers" packed with computers, are expanding their support for Linux. [CNET News.com]
8:48:43 AM  #   your two cents []

Motorola Posts 2nd Consecutive Profit. Motorola's long-awaited rebound appeared to gather momentum in the last three months of 2002 as the company achieved its second straight quarter of profitability.  [New York Times: Technology]
8:47:25 AM  #   your two cents []

This is such a great headline that I'd post this item for the headline alone: Mitnick will browse Web, e-mail Lieberman.  [InfoWorld: Top News]
12:28:42 AM  #   your two cents []

Is there hope for Java?. A judge has ordered Microsoft to make it easy for Sun's popular programming language to work with Windows. But the remedy may be too little, too late. [Salon.com]
12:24:24 AM  #   your two cents []

News.Com: RIAA wins battle to ID Kazaa user. This case represents the entertainment industry's latest legal assault on peer-to-peer piracy. If its invocation of the DMCA is upheld on appeal, music industry investigators would have the power to identify hundreds or thousands of music pirates at a time without going to court first. [Tomalak's Realm]
12:23:20 AM  #   your two cents []

From 80211b News: Europe get hot spot jones: Interestingly, some real market numbers in this article. 16K European Wi-Fi hot spot payers with 4K regular subscribers. US: 65K paying users, Asia 20K (no subscriber numbers, though). The source of these figures? Unknown. InStat and Yankee are quoted on units shipped later in the same paragraph. The article quotes my favorite Swede, Carlo Cassisa, on Telia's 500 hot spot operation, and notes that European operators are waking up. [via Alan Reiter, of course -- read his commentary, too.]

12:22:58 AM  #   your two cents []

I have plenty of deadlines and meetings over the next day or two but wanted to post at least a brief summary of some of the tech points about the Young Scientist competition browser, having just spent about three hours at the Osmani household talking to Adnan. Mainly I wanted to take on a few of the details from the post below and some elsewhere. I'll write this up in more detail, formally as stories, and post the stories when they run later this week.

The browser itself is based on the IE plug-in that developers would use. But Adnan then used reference libraries so that he could program using Borland C++, which he likes ( he says some people like things to be visual and some like programming and he likes programming rather than using Visual Basic, code rather than clicks. Just his own preference).

He started with the search functions -- mainly because he thought it would be cool to create some CGI interfaces to a browser for his own use. The project took off from there. The DVD player is not simply the Windows Media Player and is resizable from a miniature docked at the side of the browser to a scaled-down widescreen version that fits within the fixed size of the browser to a full screen mode. He demo'd this with a DVD disk of a film which ran with no problems and without the distortion you get when you enlarge a media player window.

He explained the speed features in much the same way as others have who spoke to him then posted their summaries -- and he needed to be pretty general for me. However he said this process does *not* prioritise one web user over another. Also he said the speed feature requires the use of some specific server used already to handle data on the web but would not need specialised servers at an ISP. He will not go into more detail as that is the segment of the process he is looking at patenting (I know the legal people in discussion so this is not a bluff). But as I've noted before, investigating whether a process 1) could work in a commercial environment  and 2) is appropriate for patenting takes time. There's no indication at the moment that this is a viable process but equally there are no indications that it is not.

He won't offer the browser as a download -- he has to go through the patent process to see what comes next and if it is something he should patent, then he'd obviously be looking at commercial possibilities for the browser or aspects of it. He's not interested in releasing it as an open source project but then, he couldn't anyway -- it uses chunks of programs already that *aren't* open source.

A smart guy, fun to talk to, passionate about computing and programming. Excited at the prospect of going to university next year. Still can't believe he won the the overall competition. Likes reading classics and Gibson and Stephenson; admires Jobs and Woz (not for Apple but because he likes that they were hackers and hands-on) and Mitnick.

Much more but it will have to wait (sorry! I still have to write a newspaper column this evening and it's midnight).

12:12:35 AM  #   your two cents []