NewsScan Daily, 15 June 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 15 June 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"  
       Message to Phone Companies: Work It Out Yourselves
       League of Women Voters Says No to Paperless Voting Systems
       India's Outsourcing Business in Trouble
       TI to Phone Companies: Help is on the Way
       The E-Mail Wars: Yahoo Gives 25x Memory Boost and 'Juicy' Addresses
       BT to Go All-IP

FEATURES        
       Flash Card
       Worth Thinking About: Bloomsday

MESSAGE TO PHONE COMPANIES: WORK IT OUT YOURSELVES
     The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to stop the Federal Communications
Commission from discarding rules it made to force regional phone companies
to lease their networks to rivals at deep discounts. (AT&T, one of those
rivals, argued unsuccessfully that it depends on those rules to offer local
phone service in regions where it must compete with the regional Bell
telephone companies.) FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell says the CEOs of every
major regional phone company have agreed to hold off on any rate increase
until next year. Powell urged the local and long-distance carriers to work
together to resolve their differences: "I also strongly encourage carriers
to find common ground through negotiation. Commercial agreements remain the
best way for all parties to control their destiny." (Washington Post 14 Jun
2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41856-2004Jun14.html

LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS SAYS NO TO PAPERLESS VOTING SYSTEMS
     The League of Women Voters has withdrawn its support of electronic
voting machines that can't produce auditable paper backup copies of
individual ballots. Computer scientist Barbara Simmons, a member of the
League as well as a past president of the Association for Computing
Machinery (ACM), said: "My initial reaction is incredible joy and relief.
This issue was threatening to split the League apart... The league now has a
position that I feel very comfortable supporting." (AP/San Jose Mercury News
14 Jun 2004)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/8922281.htm

INDIA'S OUTSOURCING BUSINESS IN TROUBLE
     High labor attrition, poor infrastructure, and lack of data protection
laws could derail India's booming outsourcing industry, says Nandan
Nilekani, the CEO of Indian software giant Infosys Technologies. Noting that
business process outsourcing (BPO) is based on reputation, Nilekani has
urged the industry to deliver quality work: "Every year, about 70,000 jobs
are added and the main challenge is how to attract people. The challenge is
also how to retain the pool. It's a collective challenge. We require a
holistic approach to expand the pool and train people. The question here is
how to retain the manpower to deliver quality and value." Analysts say
outsourcing labor attrition rates vary 20-40% in some companies while at top
firms it averages at least 15%. (The Age, 11 Jun 2004)
http://theage.com.au/articles/2004/06/10/1086749833478.html

TI TO PHONE COMPANIES: HELP IS ON THE WAY
     Texas Instruments is working on technology to help phone companies
offer high-definition television (HDTV) and voice over Internet (VoIP) lines
within about three years to increase the capacity of digital subscriber
lines, or DSL. TI chief technology officer Pete Chow predicts: "Video will
become the dominant application on DSL." To eliminate the need for laying
costly fiber right to customers' homes, Texas Instruments will locate its
equipment in facilities called "cross connects" that would allow phone
companies to provide service of 50-100 megabits/second (compared to only 8
megabits/second for typical DSL). (USA Today 15 Jun 2004)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2004-06-15-dsl-video_x.htm

THE E-MAIL WARS: YAHOO GIVES 25X MEMORY BOOST AND 'JUICY' ADDRESSES
     To compete with Google, Yahoo is enhancing free e-mail service with 25
times more storage -- 100 megabytes -- in a move made in response to
Google's plans to offer 1,000 megabytes of free storage through its Gmail
service. And to attract new users Yahoo will begin letting people sign up
for the "tens of millions" of unused e-mail addresses that have been
inactive for years. Analyst David Ferris says, "Some of these addresses
could be very juicy and might attract a lot of interest." (AP/Los Angeles
Times 15 Jun 2004) http://tinyurl.com/28nce

BT TO GO ALL-IP
     The UK's major telco, British Telecommunications, plans to gradually
shut down its traditional circuit-switched telephone network in favor of
Internet Protocol (IP) technology. The new multibillion-dollar system, which
is expected to be operational for most of BT's 28 million customers by 2008,
will involve electronic and computer-system changes rather than construction
work (such as digging up roads or pulling down phone lines). BT executive
Paul Reynolds says that the new program "will deliver our vision of a
converged, multimedia world where our customers can access any
communications service from any device, anywhere -- at broadband speed."
(The Australian, 11 Jun 2004) http://tinyurl.com/2w4ab

*****  

FLASH CARD
     "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." (James Joyce,
speaking as Stephen Daedalus, his fictional image of himself)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: BLOOMSDAY AND 20TH CENTURY MODERNISM
     Tomorrow, June 16th, is the 100th anniversary of the day the Irish
writer James Joyce made famous as the setting of his great novel about one
day in the life of Dublin, "Ulysses," the publication of which was a seminal
event in 20th century modernism. We commemorate it here with this excerpt
from comments made by Joyce's friend Frank Budgen, who wrote about the
making of the novel:
     "It is always difficult to agree with anybody about what is important,
yet if we enumerate the things that happen in Ulysses most human beings will
agree that of themselves, apart from the manner of the presentation, these
happenings are important. Included in them are a funeral, a fight, political
discord, an act of seduction, one of adultery, the birth of a child, a
drunken orgy, a rupture of friendship and the loss of a position. A new
theory as to the character and dominant motive of a great poet is expounded.
Domestic beasts, on which the life of human society largely depends, are
smitten with a dread disease and the community brings its varied
intelligence to bear on a means to end that plague. Acts of charity, both
public and private, are performed and acts of treachery as well. True, there
is no declaration of war with proclamations and the calling out of fighting
men, no revolution with conspirators issuing from cellars to take command of
the state, but war and revolution are present in the memories and
aspirations of the characters of the book. The Boer War and the
Russo-Japanese War are living memories and the Sinn Fein Party is actively
organizing the citizens of Ireland for rupture with Great Britain and the
setting up of a separate state.
     "Alongside these larger actions there are actions that may be called
common only because they are being constantly performed by many people all
over the world. They are not and never were unimportant. Thus the preparing
and eating of a breakfast, a bath, looking at bookstalls, wandering round
the town, looking in shop windows, buying odds and ends of things in shops,
lunch, a stroll through a museum, short talks in the street, the singing of
a few songs, a practical joke, stray drinks here and there: all the things,
in short, that somebody is doing all the time and everybody does sometimes.
If the experience is common why does Joyce narrate it?  Because he is
building with an infinite number of pellets of this clay of common
experience the character of Leopold Bloom."
     [See http://tinyurl.com/36gs6 for the opening of "Ulysses," and see
http://tinyurl.com/2vdqj for Frank Budgen's "James Joyce and the Making of
Ulysses" -- or look for it in your favorite library. We donate all revenue
from our book recommendations to adult literacy programs.]

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