Our computers have at least 18 ways to connect with the outside world. Enough for any sane person, surely? With such a wide choice of getting data into our Macs, why do people still send us floppy disks?

Starting with the oldest laptop, we have Infrared, useful for connecting to mobile phones and the occasional computer to computer connection but painfully slow.

Next comes Bluetooth 1 and 2. A new venture for us since our mobile phones have all been IR until the latest. The tiny D-Link Bluetooth dongle sitting in the USB port in the back of the monitor is acceptably fast at over a megabyte a minute throughput. Unlike the serial modems built into our two oldest computers. They are for those times when DSL is unavailable and for faxing, which is seldom since idiots sending junk faxes ruined fax use in the UK in the same way spam is for e-mails.

USB 1 and 2 are the next slowest interfaces. Apple pioneered USB after abandoning its proprietary Apple Desktop Bus. Around the same time it also abandoned SCSI, the problematic high speed connector, still in use today in some settings but which brings back memories of correct termination, SCSI ID’s and daisy chaining scanners, hard disks and CD drives. Our first Microtec SCSI scanner had an annoying habit of zapping any hard disk it was connected to.

The throughput achieved by USB is not great but it works well. Apple’s Firewire 400 and 800 seem more robust and have much higher speeds than their respective USB counterparts. Firewire can also connect computers together in two other ways. One is in hard disk mode, something that most Windows PCs are seemingly incapable of because of the way their hard drive boot sectors are written. In Firewire disk mode, the drive of the slave computer can be mounted on the host and used as an external drive, or even start up the host.

Firewire can also make a very high speed network which matches the best ether-networks for consistent throughput. We have always expected more to come from Firewire networking which is dead easy to set up and extremely rapid.

As for LAN networking, we have wireless 802.11 a, b, g and n capacity as well as 10/100/1000 base ethernet the latter being something we wait for a DSL router with gigabyte ethernet and wireless capability. Even Apple’s Airport Extreme is only 10/100.

Finally there are hot-swapable hard drives, CDs and DVDs plus a new device due to arrive here, ethernet over power circuits. That will come with our Apple TV box when we order it.

So please, don’t send any more floppy disks.

Take two scenarios. One where I take my old ma to buy a new lamp from Homebase, the other where I try to buy a Bluetooth USB dongle from High Street stores. In both cases the shops failed miserably. Then compare them with two Internet deals I made recently.

Appalling staff training

Homebase had exactly what ma wanted. There, on a large display, the lamp priced at £14.99, with directions to shelf 8 to find the boxed-up lamps. But the price sticker under shelf 8 says £24.99. I query it with a member of staff who confirms the price with her bar code scanner and refuses to honour the displayed price of £14.99.

As this was exactly the lamp ma wanted we reluctantly took it to the till where they charged her £29.99 and refused to accept the two other prices. Raising this with the “Section Manager” only got us the soft-voiced ‘dealing with a stroppy customer’ attitude and no change. Personally, I’d have shoved the lamp somewhere painful and go find one elsewhere.

No knowledge of goods

Next day I tried to buy a Bluetooth dongle from Currys Digital and a small independent store. My one query being that it has to run under Mac OS X which will take any standard USB or Bluetooth device. The packaging on the ones displayed blab on about Windows XP only, driver software, blah, blah, blah. When queried about the device and can I bring it back it if doesn’t work, the sales staff state categorically that it won’t work under OS X.

“Have you ever used OS X, seen it running or have any training in it?”

“NO” they respond (even though Currys sell Macs).

“So how come you are an expert in Mac OS X?”

As it is, all the Bluetooth dongles would work fine with no drivers necessary.

With staff as badly trained (and possibly committing offences in the case of Homebase) it is no wonder High Street shops are feeling the pinch. I’m buying increasing amounts from the Internet where the type of products on sale have become completely diverse.

Quality service, great prices

Recently I purchased a heavy-duty garden shredder from Gardenlines one Sunday afternoon. The following morning a nice lady calls and tells me the courier had just collected it and the next day the courier company call to ensure they could deliver it in an hours time. They even offered to help unpack the machine, a heavy beast, and dispose of the bulky card and polystyrene.

Yesterday I bought two books from Tescos on-line. Their email told me the books were dispatched at 21.56, the package arrived first post this morning. I make all our bread and pizzas, purchasing speciality flours direct from Wessex Mill’s website where Paul the miller will help you decide which flour to use for special tasks. Our cider comes straight from Rich’s Orchard where Jan, the farmer’s wife, mixes it to our taste. Our wine is direct from the vineyard. Garden products such as compost, manure and bark chips are bought on line and delivered by the coalman to the exact spot needed, even lugging it across muddy borders (he gets a drink for that).

The High Street is under attack and it isn’t fighting back, neither on price nor service. As things go, it deserves to lose.

DOG tags are digital on-screen graphics, those little symbols which are always on-screen for digital TV channels. Why are they there? They serve no useful purpose, are intensely annoying and at times ruin the program underneath. They have even been blamed for damaging plasma screens.
Channel 5 were the first to use them on terrestrial TV in the UK. In 1997 they put a very bright one on screen, then toned it down a little after complaints from viewers, before removing it completely when they rebranded to “5″.
BBC Responds
The BBC have them on all their digital channels, particularly large and intrusive logos which don’t even move to the edge during wide screen broadcasts but stay at the old 14:9 position. Paul Wheeler at BBC Information told me: “The BBC has adopted a policy of inserting Channel Identifiers in the top left-hand corner of the screen on its dedicated digital channels. This is because it was felt important to ensure that viewers could quickly identify they were watching BBC services. As the number of channels grows, this branding aspect is likely to become increasingly significant. ”
In other words, we might mistake Top Gear for the Teletubbies so we need a logo to help us. Come to think of it, Clarkson does look a bit like Laa-Laa.
Wheeler is right about an increase but not in significance, just more on-screen rubbish we don’t want or need. Now it is telling us to press the red button or advertising the next program. It would be acceptable if it were to announce an item of national significance that couldn’t wait until the next break in the program – nuclear war, the death of the Royal family or something like that. Digital TV has so many other sources of information, many hardwired into the sets themselves, we don’t need the constant nagging inflicted on us by the BBC, et al.
Wheeler continues: “I appreciate that you may continue to disagree with the use of these graphics, rest assured that your views have been registered on our daily log which is made available to programme makers and BBC management in order to improve the quality of our service.”
And that’s another load of manure because this campaign has been running since 2000 to get rid of the logos and broadcasters refuse to listen. They reply with formula letters and hackneyed responses.
So what?
What does this have to do with ITPro? It’s all about branding and that is the next big thing to hit our desktops. Apple is there already, in a tastefully discrete way, of course – for example the Apple logo that appears in the iTunes Visualizer just when you’ve relaxed into chilled, spaced-out fuzziness. Mac OS X and Vista are capable of fancy, layered and transparent effects so it seems inevitable they will be used. Especially as firms like Google and Adobe are offering web-based software which will have to be paid for in some way or the other.
I hope some clever hacker writes something to turn them all off again.

An author with whom I have worked since the early 1990’s, called me to talk over revising some of his books ready for reprinting. He was surprised that we still had those old files. What I didn’t tell him was while we had a DiskTracker database listing the CDs they were on, finding the CD itself could prove the problem. After all the years it was one of the many hundreds we have stored. More to the point would be if the files are in any format we could still read.

As it appears from the database, they should be: mainly WordPerfect for Windows, QuarkXPress 3 and Aldus Freehand files. These applications were the best of breed for 1992 and are still available, albeit heavily revised although not with a great deal more features even after a decade of development.

What to do with old data

We’ve been through various formats of data retention, starting with floppy discs capable of holding an 8-page newsletter in their day. Then via internal drives and data compression, to removable external hard discs such as Syquests whose 44MB seemed enormous. Until, that is, we discovered we had over £1000 of cartridges at printers, photo-setters, scanners and with clients. Not a happy situation to be in, luckily early CD writers became affordable around that time. We abandoned Syquests immediately, had a massive burning session to back-up data stored on the cartridges and moved to tiny Zip drives for transporting data up to 100MB per Zip, or CDs which used to take an hour to burn.

Nowadays, CDs are too small and the data they hold capable of being sent electronically. DVDs are little better, one large format book amounts to 35GB of data so we are back to storing on hard drives. With a terabyte of space as little as a couple of hundred quid, our desks are rapidly filling up with Firewire boxes looping together. At least file access is extremely rapid but off-site back-up has become impossible.

Freehand or Illustrator?

Freehand has always been our favourite over Adobe Illustrator, the latter seems limited and awkward in comparison but we have always kept both programs around and current. Sometimes we jump from one to the other, their Postscript files being interchangable, as we did when we created JP233 in CSO Blue for the Tate Gallery. Illustrator just wasn’t up to the job but it’s text control easier than Freehand’s at that point.

Monopoly Lost

The history of Freehand stretches back to 1988 and over four companies. Adobe has owned Freehand twice, once when it bought Aldus in in 1994 and again when it bought Macromedia in 2005. After the first acquisition, it was ruled by a US Federal court that Aldus/Adobe had to hand Freehand back to its developers. This was a company called Altsys who had employed Aldus to market Freehand with whom they had a contract stating they couldn’t market any competing product. The Federal judge said that as Adobe already owned PostScript and Illustrator, they couldn’t have Freehand as well or else they would have a monopoly on the desktop illustration market.

Altsys started to market Freehand and at the same time developed a version to run under NextSTEP, called Altsys Virtuoso. Shortly after, Altsys were bought by Macromedia who continued to develop Freehand from version 4 bought with Altsys, up to version 11, aka Freehand MX. Over this time, Freehand grew to encompass multi-sized documents in the same file, animations and Flash graphics, a superb auto-trace facility and even image manipulation.

In many respects it could become a digital design package to challenge QuarkXPress and Adobe inDesign, at one point it was even marketed as such. Freehand also has the major distinction of being the first major design package to run native on Mac OS X. An operating system which is, in reality, NextSTEP. The original Altsys Virtuoso was based on an old version of NextSTEP and Freehand 4, so this hadn’t enabled the fast transition to OS X. Rather it was the engineers who had programmed it in the first place.

Monopoly regained… for the moment

Now Adobe have regained their monopoly, only time will tell whether they continue to develop Freehand. Apart fro Adobe Illustrator there are alternatives, some of which is very good. Even free Unix openware alternatives running under X11, Apple’s free Unix X Window system that runs as a window in Mac OS X. It’s on the System disks that come with all Macs.

This website http://www.osalt.com, found while writing this blog, lists alternatives for all major software packages on multi platforms.

The ink has just dried on last week’s blog, about cavalier updating techniques that have always worked for me. Then those nice people at Unsanity have come up with a nasty scenario that is worth avoiding by not doing very simple things.

After installing new software, Mac OS goes through a process called “updating pre-binding” or “optimizing”. Since Mac OS x 10.2 this is done automatically whenever a new program is installed or if a program is launched and the pre-binding information is out of date. The end result of pre-binding is that applications running from the start-up disk will launch faster.

This looks like it…
I am not an engineer but my understanding is that this is due to how modern computer programs are written. Each application doesn’t have to come with everything it needs to do its business, possibly hundreds of little files and pieces of information. Instead, the computer’s operating system includes standard libraries which every application can access. This has many benefits including less Ram needed to run multiple applications because they can all use the same chunk of memory that is allocated for the relevant library. Once the first application has opened that library, subsequent ones will open faster because the information is already available to them.

When Apple makes a new operating system update, they rewrite many of the libraries to iron out bugs, add new features and so on, even moving things from one library to another. Any computer program that uses the libraries will automatically benefit from the changes. When the program is run it has to search through all the libraries finding what it needs before starting up. If it knew in advance where to look for the information it would be far quicker and this is where pre-binding comes into play by saving it into a cache ready for the application to jump straight to.

Avoid at all costs
The guys at Unsanity found that when the “Optimize System Performance” screen comes up – when pre-binding is updated – it is possible for an essential system file to be destroyed. All the information in it is deleted and nothing rewritten, possibly making the Mac un-bootable. The problem occurs only when one or more applications are trying to pre-bind at the same time and both work on the system file.

The answer is simple, don’t touch your Mac when the screen says it is Optimizing the System. I have been warned.

For those of us with a discerning and rarified taste in computers, Mac OS X was updated on Tuesday – if Software Update hasn’t told you already. This latest revision, 10.4.9, is probably the last before Tiger’s exit stage left and Leopard leaps into action.

In the usual manner of Apple’s last updates before the first digit clicks onwards, 10.4.9 is a biggie, weighing in at 310MB for Intel Macs and a more reasonable 163MB for PPCs. Those sizes are for the Combi versions which will work on any GM of 10.4. Smaller Delta upgrades are available if your Mac has received incremental updates although there are good reasons to use the Combis. Sometimes reapplying a Combi update can cure niggling problemettes which have defied alternative repairs. All updates can be downloaded manually from http://www.apple.com/support/downloads.

Infinitely Loopy
In the past, the 10.x.9 upgrades have proved to be the best for that version of Mac OS X. I know many users who eschewed 10.4 and remain steadfastly at 10.3.9. I still keep a version here, “just in case”, along with Mac OS 6.0 to 9.2 but those are more historical documents and especially as Apple used to ship them to me from Infinity Loop by overnight courier, on hand-addressed disks signed by the engineers. My G5 is too elderly at 3 years old for them to be interested in me as a beta tester so it looks like time to find a punter for my Mac so I can afford a new one and get back into Apple’s good books. This will be the first time my current machine has not felt “slow” when I update it, the dual IBM Power 4’s may run hot but they are still up for any task.

Silverkeeper
The ‘Net has many recommended strategies to prevent any glitches when applying System updates. I ignore them all. Usually Vicki tells me that Software Update has downloaded something for me to install. She is the nice lady with the faint Canadian accent, who lives inside my computer and reads dialogue boxes for me. I installed the latest one while reading the Times online newspaper, watching Breakfast TV in an EyeTV window in the corner of the screen and I noticed that LaCie’s free Silverkeeper was busy backing up yesterday’s work as well as the latest free iTunes Tuesday’s download.

It’s a cavalier way to install a new System and shouldn’t work, but it does. Apple’s update mechanisms create new items but keep the old ones working (in memory?) so that they only come into play after restarting. This is probably the Unix underpinnings that will happily go about deleting themselves and the operating system if they are asked to.

After the new 10.4.9 system has been installed, about 5 minutes, and Mac restarted, it is worth running Disk Utility to check permissions. While Disk Utility is open check the hard disk/s as well. This is done automatically to the start-up disk when the Mac is restarted – which is why there are sometimes two start-up chimes. A repair was made and the Mac automatically restarted itself to take the repair into account.

SuperDuper
I have five hard drives in total, about 2 terabytes, split into many partitions, so while they are all being checked, SuperDuper erased one partition and installed a mirror of the new System. In the past I used Mike Bombich’s free Carbon Copy Cloner to do that same.

All appears to be running as before, nothing untoward happened, as usual. I wonder whether this would be the same if I were updating Vista?

Most men never believe the old chestnut that size isn’t everything. But now Pfeiffer Consulting have the evidence to prove them wrong.

They examined large screen, high definition monitors, in particular the Apple 30-inch Cinema HD display, an object of lust for many a designer. Pfeiffer found there are definite gains in productivity and the return on investment can be paid off over the period of a year or even less. The complete 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display Benchmark Report can be downloaded at www.pfeifferreport.com.

I’m of the generation who started “real” computing on the old Amstrad Joyce with it’s little green and black screen, before moving via the Atari Mega STs to a Mac which came with a brilliant (for 1990) 13-inch colour display. My colleagues bought even larger screens that were hideously expensive and had lower resolutions than today’s laptops.Their fronts looked like the curvature of the earth, moving the mouse from top to bottom saw the pointer travel in an arc and ending up “underneath” somewhere.

For years I stuck with 17-inches, enough for any man, surely? But then a job involved designing A3 landscape pages and 840mm spreads just wouldn’t show up large enough. An Apple 23-inch Cinema screen came to live on my desk and I realised the error of my ways. Bigger is better, more productive and easier on the eyes for just about any computing task. That’s exactly what Pfeiffer found as well.

Productivity and efficiency gains were measured and found to increase significantly for users of the display, in office applications as well as for digital imaging and design. Users changed their work strategies to incorporate the screen real estate and ended up working in ways that would be impossible on smaller screens. This is something I can vouch for, especially with the new wide-screen format, compared with the old 4:3 ratio.

LCD screens are also a lot easier to use because they have a stable image and whiter whites. Whenever an LCD users returns to an old cathode ray-tubed screen the first thing they notice is the display’s flickering caused by the scanning of the CRT gun.

Modern computers allow multiple applications open all the time, each often with many windows. They can fit side-by-side on a wide screen enabling easy access to them all. Pfeiffer found dramatic time differences between screen sizes. For example: applying selective formatting in large spreadsheets on a 17-inch screen took nearly double the time taken on a 30-inch one.

Application palettes are also an essential part of our work, on smaller screens closing and hiding them to see behind all takes time. Pfeiffer measured exactly how much this cost, when opening and closing palettes takes up to 10 seconds. Repeated 100 times that adds up to over 15 minutes wasted. If that’s time lost by a highly paid accountant or director, purely because they cannot see enough information on screen at one time, the extra costs of larger monitors are soon regained. A benefit I must remember next time I want a new screen.

Finally, one thing Pfeiffer didn’t look at is the effect on games. If the game can handle it and your video card up to it, games look absolutely brilliant.

Can you honestly say that you have never used pirated software? Not even a “borrowed” copy that you forgot to delete? Or the kids’ copy of a game they got from their friend?
I thought as much. Me too, although once Apple moved to a Unix-based operating system and the IBM Power series of chips I took the opportunity to clear out and become street legal. As I found out, there are always Unix shareware alternatives to just about every proprietary package.
I hear you knocking and you can come in
If you are using dodgy software there’s a man who is itching to get his hands on you, moreover, the Trading Standards will have to right to call and inspect all your software licences. They don’t even have to tell you when they are coming and at the end of the year Gordon Brown is going to give them five million quid to pay for their petrol.
I realised pirating software was a big no-no when I started to receive copyright payments for all my work. Now everything I do as a designer is eligible for an annual share of copyright fees, and will be for 70 years after my death. So my kids had better treat me okay when I’m 64 or I might forget to tell them how to make a claim.
Hard luck Sir Cliff, Sir Paul and Mr Ringo (MBE)
The Copyright law in the UK, and the world come to that, is a bit of a mess. If you think you’ve been hearing a lot of old rock ‘n’ roll tracks behind adverts lately it’s probably because they have dropped out of copyright, early Elvis will be next.
In the EC, sound recordings are only protected for 50 years so Cliff Richards and the Beatles will soon be losing payments for their seminal recodings. The first Beatles album will be free in six years, by 2013. Unless it is owned by Michael Jackson who went on a spending spree some years ago.
In Paul McCartney’s case, while the recording might drop out of protection, the song itself remains his for 70 years after he walks up the long and winding road.
Computing and the Internet
According to the UK Patent office:
“Copyright applies to computing and the internet in the same way as material in other media. For example, any photographs you place on the internet will be protected in the same way as other artistic works; any original written work will be protected as a literary work, and so on.
If you download, distribute or put material on the internet that belongs to others you should ensure that you have the owners permission, unless any of the exceptions apply.
Databases may receive copyright protection for the selection and arrangement of the contents. In addition, or instead, database right may exist in a database. This is an automatic right and protects databases against the unauthorised removal and re-use of the contents of the database.
Computer programs and games for games consoles are protected on the same basis as literary works.
Conversion of a program into or between computer languages and codes corresponds to adapting a work. Storing any work in a computer amounts to copying the work. In addition, running a computer program or displaying work on a video display unit (VDU) will usually involve copying and thus require the consent of the copyright owner.”
You have been warned!

The Mars Climate Orbiter was lost in 1999 because navigation units were mixed between English and metric. That’s American English of course where their ton is short and their mile is long. In these times it would seem eminently sensible for the world to use one standard measuring system, and we do it’s just that they don’t. But not all is rosy in the metric world either.

We have a hole to fill. As a gap it isn’t very big, just the area an old garden shed occupied. That was removed last week by Chris and Ron “No job too small” who charged us a hundred quid to dump the old building. Then another two hundred to dig up the reinforced concrete base it stood on. Sam picked it all up in his ancient pick-up that is part Ford, part rust. All four of them are of undefinable age, probably older than us, the Ford excepted.

After three hundred quid were are left with a flattened area that is apparently made of lumps of the Berlin Wall covered in a thin layer of dust. We dug a trench across it, the width and depth of a spade. Then spent the rest of the day taking the bricks to the local tip. Plainly we need some younger muscle with transport for the rubble. More to the point, with what do we fill the hole? Assuming it’s not full of old Trabants.

How big is space, anyway?
We ran into the same problem as NASA as we searched the ‘Net for a lump of garden to fill the void. Exactly how large is space? Elementary maths told us it is width x length x depth which in this case is 14′ x 8′ x 1′ or 112 cubic feet or 12.4 cubic yards or 3.1 cubic meters. My Mac’s calculator even worked that out as 3171.5 litres but how much soil is that, an old Ford pickup full, a dumpy bag or several lorry loads?

No help was found from the web sites we visited. Most have calculators to work out the amount of soil required but they varied from £50 to nearly £1000. Even accounting for quality this is a ridiculous spread, plus they mixed metric and imperial as well as delivery sizes. Some are going to bring a tonne or a ton, others cubic meters, while the remainder prefer litres.

So we have a hole to fill in the garden which we are looking into.

Or should I say: Assim nós temos um furo para preencher o jardim em que nós estamos olhando.

Which roughly equals: Così abbiamo un foro per riempire il giardino cui stiamo esaminando.

In America, and that’s probably an “only in America”, one of the Senators on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Ted Stevens from Alaska , made a very strange speech last year. He described the Internet as running through a series of “tubes”. He thought that as soon as commercial pressures grew on the Internet, it would get clogged-up like an overused sewer pipe. All the TV shows, videos and movies, file-sharers, down-loaders and porn merchants would take all the space in the tubes so he wouldn’t be able to send his email.

It was surprising because the Committee are charged with overseeing legislation concerning the Internet and were deadlocked on an amendment to the tele-communicatons bill that would add just a little provision to keep the Internet’s neutrality. Ted’s speech was probably unrehearsed, possibly ill-advised and disconcertingly misunderstanding for someone who makes decisions concerning the future of the Internet. Nevertheless, does he have a point?

Big Brother reads our e-mail?
At the moment we take it for granted that we will have unrestricted access to the Internet and share our bandwidth with whoever else is on-line at the same time depending on our contention ratio. Traffic through the routers is, we think, unregulated and apart from peak times, almost instantaneous. Thankfully, there is no big brother snooping into each data packet as it zooms by, reading our emails and bank details in the nanosecond he has as traffic passes. Nor is there any company stating that theirs is the most important and should go faster than others. Or is there?

When the Internet arrived in the UK, we were all given our unique IP address and largely left to our own devices. If we wanted to set-up a file-sharing server or ftp site, it was okay if a little slow to send data at a miserly 256kbps. Gradually things changed and within a few years ISP’s started to limit how much we send and receive, some more severely than others. Aquiss, our own for example, limits us to 45GB per month but as we’ve only ever managed to use 12GB in any one month and most of that uploading, we have a ton of leeway. Others are not so generous and more often restrict certain types of traffic. They throttle back bit-torrent and game packets while at the same time offering bandwidth-hogging streaming TV and movie rentals.

The Good Old Days
A lot of the control of the Internet is via vertically integrated companies such as BT and Pipex, who supply both the telephone as well as acting as Internet Service Suppliers. In doing so they have an enormous influence in how we use our data communications, unlike the old days when BT supplied the lines to ISP’s who in turn supplied the data service to individual users. It was possible then to persuade your ISP to grab a huge download for you over their T3 line and have it ready for you to pick up at their office, and vice versa to send large files. Nowadays they want to charge extra just so you can ensure you actually have a stable Internet connection and pay heavily to access their “helplines” even if it is to sort out the problems they caused in the first place.

As the country moves to even further integration of entertainment with the Internet, are we going to see more services throttled back? Perhaps it is time for other forms of infrastructure to come into play.The much vaunted powerline transmission for example, could be used for TV services since every house in the country with a TV is already wired up. More importantly, if we have TV services coming in via our ADSL, what happens to our own data transmission? Will we be able to send and receive at the same speeds we have grown used to if TV is also on the same line, Freeview uses 1.5MBps (or so I heard).

Then there is VOIP and the rise of wifi. I’m sure the mobile phone companies are delighted that their hugely expensive systems could become obsolete in cities as free wifi and VOIP-enable phones take over. But is this going to affect our ordinary use of the Internet? Especially as some of the mobile phone companies also supply Internet services. Could it all become free?

Somehow I can’t see it happening and more to the point, I bet that we shall have to start paying for Internet services as commercial pressures take hold. Like the very reasonable idea of paying for our water use via meters, or equally reasonably pay for actual actual road use as recently suggested, rather than flat-rate charges for both. Will we start to pay for metered Internet use?