Hooray….Good Move Nokia!!!

In following the saga between Telecom, the NZ Govt, and the other Players in the NZ Telco market (i.e. Vodafone, Telstraclear, etc), I’ve often been reminded to little Oliver Twist and his request for an additional serving of gruel, i.e.

“Please sir, can I have some more”

 When other companies have requested access to the almighty Telecom’s network, they’ve either snubbed them, thrown them a scrap at some ridiculous price, or FINALLY, they get told to share by the government. Well, thanks to a fantastic move by Nokia, the tides may finally turn!! The article below explains this very well

 

Link To Story on Stuff.co.nz

 

Telecom under 3G pressure 29 June 2006

By ADRIAN BATHGATE

Telecom will be under serious pressure to build a new mobile network because of Nokia’s decision to stop making handsets for its CDMA technology, analysts say. Because Nokia accounted for 40 per cent of Telecom’s handset sales, pulling out of the CDMA market meant Telecom had no choice but to switch to the third generation (3G) WCDMA technology or face losing customers, analysts at Credit Suisse said. Credit Suisse also put the price tag on a WCDMA network at $800 million, at least $200 million higher than previous estimates. This led Credit Suisse to add another $500 million to Telecom’s capital expenditure bill for the next three years. Telecom has previously said it is considering building a WCDMA network and will decide by the end of the year. General manager Telecom mobile Kevin Bowler said yesterday Telecom was happy with its 027 network, which runs on CDMA, and there was no guarantee WCDMA was “the way of the future”. Analysts have agreed Telecom’s resurgence against Vodafone in the past few years has been largely because of the greater range and quality of phone it has been able to supply. Losing more than a third of that range from a Nokia pullout would place Telecom under serious pressure, Credit Suisse said. To reduce the $800 million price tag Telecom could come to an infrastructure-sharing arrangement for rural areas with rival Vodafone, Credit Suisse said. Less likely would be a shared network build with TelstraClear, which has said it wants a 3G network in New Zealand. Telecom’s financial outlook for the next two years has been downgraded by Credit Suisse as a result of an expected new network, alongside the effects of Government changes, with dividends predicted to fall by 14 per cent during the next two years. WCDMA – or UMTS as it also known – is the 3G technology employed by rival Vodafone. It is the dominant technology for 3G networks worldwide, and Telecom’s preference for CDMA has been struck a blow by the decision of Telstra and Hutchison to shut down their CDMA networks in Australia within the next few years. This left Telecom “in an increasingly difficult competitive landscape”, Credit Suisse said. Telecom is looking at dual-chipset phones that will work on CDMA and WCDMA networks so Telecom customers can use their phones in Australia from 2008.

I look forward to seeing the CEO of Telecom Grovelling in the mud!!

Trying to access an innocuous page? Find you’re blocked by a firewall? Are I.T. getting you down?

One of the most annoying things that I have encountered in my centuries of office work is that often the I.T. guys will use some hack method of blocking out websites.

The worst one I’ve encountered was where, in order to prevent staff from commiting the cardinal sin of checking their webmail while at work, all websites with ‘mail’ in the URL were blocked by the WebMarshal.  Well that’s all well and good for blocking out webmail sites, but little old me was wanting some information about an address and postcode in the UK, and as it turns our, their version of NZPost.co.nz is in fact www.royalmail.co.uk. 

But Alas, I was restricted to wading through screeds and screeds of meaningless mumbo jumbo in a myriad of tourism sites in order to get to the information I need.

This in fact resulted in me spending more time and using more bandwidth than if I had been able to go the the site that I wanted to go to in the first place!!

 Go Figure !!

Well stress no more as an interesting little “tool” has been found with our friends at Google !!

If you’re tired of searching for anonymous proxy servers well try this:

Using the Google translation tool, you can copy the url and then enter the website that you wish to go to. 

e.g. http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=sashots.wordpress.com

Simply replace the sashots.wordpress.com part with the webiste you want to go to and viola! you’re there

This simply uses the google translation tool to “translate” from english to english, but it goes through the google server so your firewall recognises it as google.

A bit fiddly but definitely very cool

Until next time…… 

Frustrating Frogs

According to the email that accompanied this little game, you should be able to complete it within 3 minutes if your IQ is above 50.

The idea is to move all off the frogs so that the green frogs change positions with the brown frogs.

The frogs may only move one step at a time/or jump one other from at a time 

Hmmmmmmmmm……that left me a little disturbed

Frog Leap Game

 

Hope you do better than I do

Tech Tanty 1.0

So I tried to find some statistics on average email volume or time spent checking and organising emails at home or at work,  I was unable to find any, but I can safely say that I get an avalanche of stuff everyday via this electronic media.

 

In an effort to try and categorise this chaotic cataclysm, one of my standard practices has always been to create a suite of folders so that messages that I wish to keep are stored in the relevant folder and the rest are condemned to the Trash, thus  ensuring that my Inbox fairly clear most of the time.

Being a sprightly young go-getter, I thought that this would surely be a good habit to develop at work , so off I go into lotus notes and create a new folder.

But Oops…small error I named it wrong

e.g 'Random FOlder' rather than 'Random Folder'

No Problem, a simple Right-Click and Rename will fix that right?………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

WRONG!!

Trying to change a Caps mistake results in this:

It appears that Lotus is unable to recognise the difference between upper and lower case letters..hmmmm…

If you have made the monumental and unforgivable mistake of using the Wrong Caps, you must:

1) Right Click on the Folder and choose rename

2) Rename the Folder to a completely different name

3) Right Click the Folder and choose rename again

4) Now Enter the name that you originally wanted to correct

IMPORTANT!!!!!!!!!!  Try to use the correct caps or you'll have to do it again!!

Until Next Time

Good Day

After months of heated debate, endless meetings and discussions, alignment and re-alignment of key strategic initiatives and policy adjustment and re-adjustment….a decision was finally reached that there would be a meeting held to schedule the meeting where a vote would be made on the penultimate decision. 

Actually, I just thought that because it was raining and it was a day in the week ending in “Y”, I would finally venture into the daunting world that is Blogging!   

Well, I figured that being a self confessed technophile and geek of all trades (master of none), it seemed inappropriate for me not to have some sort of a forum and/or media where my infinite wisdom and boundless knowledge could be presented to the world, as my gift to everyone. 

If you don’t buy that then I just wanted a place to spout random stuff and things. 

Either way, it all good