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Tuesday 6/08/2002Curious goings-on over at The Register, our comrades in cyber-news and fellow seekers after truth, fairness and highly-paid advertising. Not content with merely reporting the news, they're taking over the means of production and setting up their own ISP.
Written by Rupert Goodwins, Contributor
Tuesday 6/08/2002
Curious goings-on over at The Register, our comrades in cyber-news and fellow seekers after truth, fairness and highly-paid advertising. Not content with merely reporting the news, they're taking over the means of production and setting up their own ISP. Now, these are challenging times and no source of revenue is too infra dig to overlook -- just this week we went out and bought another online news company, Silicon, and we're about to launch our fab newsletter, ZDNet Week -- but doing an ISP? When you spend your time writing about the things? Not that the Reg will in any way let this new commercial interest change their attitude to other ISPs, which will remain, I'm quite sure, one of unabashed cynicism with a garnish of full and frank suspicion. And I'm delighted to give them a spot of free publicity: if it works -- and I feel there may have been better times to launch such a thing -- then it'll open up new media models for the rest of us. I for one fancy starting up a wireless ISP, turning all of central London in a giant 802.11b/a, Bluetooth (and what the heck, ZigBee) hotspot by means of a giant antenna stretched between the pointy bits of Tower Bridge. Alternatively, now that crows have been shown to be cleverer than chimps in designing and using tools, we could train the ravens of the Tower itself to do simple IT management and configuration skills -- they might have a bit of a problem with the mouse, so we'll stick to text-mode systems. They're good at hunt-and-peck typing, and they won't run up a fortune in cab fares rushing to sort out clients' problems. Tell me, expert IT corvid, will processors continue to double in power every eighteen months? Quoth the raven: "Never Moore!".
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