I always get upset when somebody tries to squeeze more money out of something that was free since it was created: recently, several network operators decided to kill the Network Neutrality over the Internet, as (I assume) they cannot raise their annual profit enough under the current circumstances. So, they want to charge Internet content providers for enhanced IP services (and the content provider will shift the cost to the consumer of course).

But what is Network Neutrality anyway? “Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet. Fundamentally, net neutrality is about equal access to the Internet. Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power to control activity online. Today, the neutrality of the Internet is at stake as the broadband carriers want Congress’s permission to determine what content gets to you first and fastest. Put simply, this would fundamentally alter the openness of the Internet.” (from Google)

So, long story short: if they succeed, the websites of smaller companies and nonprofit organizations, blogs etc. would move slower through the wire, as they do not have money to make the data „valuable” enough… But if your company can afford it, your site would get to the user as fast as lightning.

Finally, they were not be able to push the amendment through the legislature, but I think it was not the last time we heard about this… (Same happened to the software patent-case: they tried to push it through over and over again).

I believe that a very minimal regulation is needed over the Internet, (as they say it is for regulation to “shake out” illegal contents) but not this way. Just think about it: could we really stop spam for example by charging the sender for every mail? The legal users should pay, but will the spammers? I don’t think so. (That’s another story for another time :)

Some links if you want to know more about Net Neutrality:

Wikipedia – Net Neutrality
Save the Internet
News.com – Net Neutrality Showdown
News.com – Without ‘Net neutrality,’ will consumers pay twice?

And some funny stuff:

Daily Show with John Stewart on Net Neutrality
The Daily Show revisits Net Neutrality

According to The Register, Borland is near to full completion of the sale of its Developer Tools division to a buyer not specified yet. Wow. I can only hope that the new owner of Delphi will restore the fading shine of this otherwise once-excellent development tool. Quickly, if I may. I have a couple books C# stacked up on my shelves.

Two days ago version 3.0 was released. It took 10 months and 4 days, 17 820 new and at least twice as much changed lines of code, but finally it is ready for production use. Great :)

As for the future, we discuss the strategic questions these days, so there is little information to be leaked. We already decided to extend the ORF team with new devs and to update the ORF identity and web site design (it’s so 90′ish!).

Never buy open headphones for office use. They may sound excellent, may be comfortable and may allow you to hear if someone calls you, but one day you will run into issues: if you listen them quietly enough to not to bother your coworkers, you will hear the neighbor knocking on the wall with a hammer. That’s not mere speculation, but an actual experience that I am having since 8:00AM this morning.

It has been quite a long time since I last posted to Vamsoft Insider and I have no good excuse, other than loads of work, but that is absolutely usual here and everywhere. I think the reason is like with emails that you never respond: the more you delay a response is the less you want to respond. I am not sure why is it so, I guess the delay changes the attitude towards the given activity: as fun turns into unwanted obligation, motivation falls sharply. So let this post be an attempt to overcome this.

A few weeks ago we released the first beta of ORF 3.0 and it works great, thank to the efforts of the ORF Feature Test Program members, who identified lots of the bugs in the intermediate releases. If you are not familiar with this program, here is a brief summary: a bunch of great guys volunteer to risk their emails by testing intermediate releases of the upcoming version. Most of them do this on their live system. Without these brave souls, beta users would have a much harder time testing ORF.

Beta testers also caught two more bugs and now we consider the code base stable enough to release ORF 3.0, so once we get the documentation back from Dave (the guy who fixes our funny English “accent”), we can do the release. If this happens before Wednesday, 3.0 will be announced next week. (If you are wondering why, the reason is simple: our internal policy is to not to release new versions after Wednesday, because this way we can provide faster technical support for early adopters and we can react if something goes wrong).

I cannot wait to get 3.0 shipped. It is a great (and rather anxious) moment when you have everything compiled, tested, signed, updated, uploaded and the only thing left on the checklist is “Send the announcement”. You get another café latte, hit the Send button, sit back and watch how emails are flowing out to our clients in 81 countries. It’s a great energy booster: you are finally done with months of work and you can focus on what comes next. And this time we have lot coming!