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Sjon
 
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2000-05-30

 


 

A dry but grey day with temperatures going from a cool 6°C to a blistering ... 14°C. Well dry until about four o clock, when it begins to rain.

Most Americans were serious about their Remembrance day yesterday.
Something is often forgotten however.
Every war has two sides and most of the soldiers, on both sides, laying down their lives do so in a fight for their freedom. Freedom thus is always won at the cost of freedom from others. On a remembrance day we should not only give thought to those from 'our side' but also for the victims on the 'other side'.

Every remembrance day up to now has been chance to learn from the mistakes in the past.

 

The AS/400 starts from the wrong IPL-side (Initial Program Load; that is like booting from an alternative partition) with a different set of PTFs (Program Temporal Fix; IBM-speek for OS-patches) since the power cut a few weeks ago. This could be causing the problem we have with the synchronization on the DataBase schema for TOS.

Pieter reported a problem with the new TeleSales installation in Austria. A nasty type of problem : "Sometimes some items cannot be ordered". That the programs work flawlessly () in Germany, the US and the other opcos obviously does not mean a thing to him. After trawling trough the messages (in German) and checking their system we find that they did recompile the files. Of course they did not use the correct compile parameters and switches. For common operations in OMSI-3 that is not a problem because the access paths are always specified. Some uncommon operations in OMSI-3 and Logistics doe run into problems and of course TeleSales hits problems as well.
The rules say that they shouldn't compile the common files locally, heck we jump some special loops to not compile them ourselves.
But who plays by the rules anyway?

Another problem in Austria is a non-deleted record in the invoice print file. This cancels the printing program. That was just a single old record that remained in the file after a previous crash. Koen deleted that so they can go on.

 

In the news:

Telenet is being taken over by Callahan which is a relative (here) unknown American telecom operator.

Flanders has 100% coverage by cable, the best cabled region in the world, with about 70% covered by Telenet. Now that the year long waiting for financial stability is over all the old and new plans can be picked up again. While Telenet limited itself to telephone and internet access over the cable, mostly laid and owned by 'intercommunales' (that are commercial companies setup by multiple local governments). It has now agreements with the bigger intercommunales (70%) to actually take over the cable itself so it will be able to provide television channels. But also start Video on demand and widespread tele-voting schemes. Next year Digital TV will arrive.
Of course Government could not keep its hand behind its back and got an 'independent' committee organized to make sure that the 'quality and diversity of the provided channels' will be guaranteed and to determine the cost of the analog part of the transmissions.
One question that the intercommunales now have is what they will do with the money they get from the take over. return it to the local governments (as dividend) or use it to start new services.

Most interesting, from my point of view, is Pandora, the Internet department of Telenet. Some months ago they limited the upstream speed to 128kbps (victim of their own success). This will be pulled up again (at a cost of course) to 256 at first and maybe more later. Also, instead of being cut off when going over your budget you will be allowed to continue, at a reduced speed.

My main (or should I read Vain) hope is that this will put some extra competitive preasure on the clasic telecom operator, Belgacom. So maybe I can get a DSL line at last and for a reasonable price.

 

Adios
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Swijsen © 2000
Every remembrance day is a chance to learn from past mistakes.
But does anyone dares to count how many opportunities have ben missed?