One day after the referendum took place in Sweden, anti-Euro campaigners all over the UK express their satisfaction and assure everyone that the UK should and will not adopt the Euro for years to come. But what does this mean for the UK and what does it mean for Europe?

Reading the opinions and polls taken by the BBC yesterday, it was clear to me that most people that voted ‘yes’ were pretty clear as to why they chose to do that. On the contrary, almost everyone voting ‘no’ either claimed ignorance, fear for something new or indifference. Not a single person (out of those interviewed by the BBC Online) had any serious or economically valid comment to make with regards to the ‘no’ vote that they cast earlier that day, although, of course, there are several arguments in favour of this decision.

It seems to me that, both in the UK, Sweden and in other countries outside the Eurozone, the majority of people against the adoption of the single currency are entrenched with politics and erroneous beliefs — most of them completely irrelevant to economics — and fail to see the true potential of the Euro as a European currency. They attach political beliefs, social beliefs and decades old ideology to something new, something purely economical (in the scientific sense), something that, in my view, in the long term will definitely help preserve the culture, society and values of Europe, by keeping/making Europe a stronger economic power in the world arena.
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I recently tried Ximian Gnome 2. What do I think? Well, it is definitely a good try, but it is very similar to the Gnome desktop I had on my machine more than 18 months ago. I don’t know whether it is me or it is really happening, but I find the Linux Desktop developments slowing down in the past year or so.

I have been privileged with a ’switch’ to Macintosh computers, thus making my interaction with Linux boxes more infrequent, and even then from a server administration point of view which is not really focused on getting fancy desktop environments, but — really — has there been much happening on the linux front (at least from a Desktop/HCI/User Experience point of view) in the past 18 months? I don’t think so.

Ximian Gnome is very nice, very polished (although I did find several bugs here and there) and definitely a product I would choose over Windows for Enterprise use, considering the costs involved. But where is the Linux Desktop scene going? With both MacOS X and Windows evolving into composite-based desktops, and the industry slowly adding those same human-centric features that they claimed they would add ten or fifteen years ago (think Object orientation, the Cairo OS, the Taligent OS et al), such as file meta-data and associations, increased integration between applications etc., how is linux going to compete?
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Part of my development efforts in the past few months has been based on Java and since MacOS X is the operating system of choice for me I usually use it for Java development.

On the C/C++ and of course Objective-C front, MacOS X is doing alright, despite the largely obsolete development tools involved. It has, not only due to Apple’s engineering efforts, a top-notch (albeit not the fastest one) compiler, gcc, a good debugger, gdb and an excellent RAD API, Cocoa. So, on this front I have no reason to ditch OS X and choose another platform for my development. OS X is as great as an OS a developer could ask. And with the advent of XCode, things can just get better — although maybe not as good as they could.

On the Java front, however, things are less rosy than this. Sun does not officially support Java on the OS X platform. Instead, due to a (very good!) relationship between the two companies, Apple gets to optimise Sun’s JVM for OS X usually releasing a J2SDK/JRE some months late. This is not just Apple’s fault. Apple shipped Web Start in 10.1, it also included support for Cocoa development in its development tools. Apple supported Java from the first moment, when Microsoft dropped support whatsoever in Windows XP. Apple is definitely trying.
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Just happened to stumble upon an interview by Tim O’Reilly (if you don’t know who he is, maybe this is not for you). In that interview he speaks of Apple as an innovator in the computing industry.

One of the comments in the article are what made me want to write a few things about it. One of the readers mentioned how much more exciting, enthousiastic and meaningful the computing industry was in the 1980s. And yeah, he did mention Atari, Commodore Amiga and one could also add Spectrum, Archimedes and of course NeXT, on whose Operating System, MacOS X is largely based. Think about it for a second: What MORE have people added in the 90s desktop and overall computing experience? Multitasking was there; GUIs were there (ok ok, much simpler, but still the concept was there); audio and multimedia was there (at least in the most advanced computers of the time — clearly not talking about your average DOS box).

The only difference I see is that computers do not cost €2500, but €800 and that more or less the same software in terms of features requires ten times the memory, processing power and storage. Even though I agree with Tim when he states that Bill Gates is largely responsible for the “ubiquity of personal computing”, I believe he is also responsible for killing the enthousiasm and passion behind the most challenging and interesting industry the world has seen.
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Well, I have managed to correlate several - seemingly unrelated - things again to my own surprise. Think for a sec. about the way the unipolar governing of the world by — currently — the US, personal freedom/privacy, the power provided to the world by electronics and computing. I just watched Colossus: The Forbin Project, a cheesy 1970 sci-fi film about a computer similar to SkyNet in Terminator, that decides to take over the world: fortunately not immediately killing the whole of mankind plus Colossus, the computer at hand, joins forces with an equivalent Soviet computer called Guardian and combine their forces to achieve total control over the world. In the movie, the computer demands that its creator, a certain Dr. Forbin, is being put under constant surveillance.

Think for a second how easy it is today, 33 years after the release of that movie to monitor someone’s actions. Most personal financial transactions take place using credit or debit cards or at the very least ATMs. Registrations everywhere provide information as to someone’s personal details. And computerised bank networks as well as digital telephone exchanges retain (in the post 11th September world) extensive logs about people’s phonecalls. As if this was not enough, anyone living in a large city will have noticed the hundreds of CCTV cameras everywhere. I am sure this is more evident in the States than Europe or the rest of the world. The recent Verizon appeal turned-down, to not reveal their subscribers’ identities to RIAA increasingly worries me about how Orwellian the future could end up. A lot of people have written about privacy on the internet and how the Verizon case — at least in the case — will set a precedent that could literally end up forcing ISPs to reveal user data to anyone claiming they have broken the law *before* they prove it!
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It is not the first time I am writing about my frustration with internet connectivity in Greece. In a country such as Greece, with more than 60% of its land being in the form of islands or mountainous terrain, making human communication and transportation difficult, one would think that advanced telecoms would be available to the masses; one would also reasonably expect that those services would be cheap, so that most people could enjoy them. Unfortunately, this is far from true; Despite being an EU country, I am sorry to say that Greek transportation and connectivity is among the worst I’ve seen in *any* western country. The roads are neglected as much as a road can be, several not tourist-friendly places are extremely hard to reach — especially islands — and, last but not least, communication services are years behind the rest of Europe. And mentioning ‘Europe’ does not limit this to the EU: Even countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Cyprus, some with much smaller ‘target markets’ than Greece, where people have much lower income and are not at all acquainted with technology the way Western people are, enjoy much better telecommunications, be it for data or voice. Something like this is completely incomprehensible to me.
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It was in 1990 that Microsoft released Windows 3.0, making the PC the dominant platform as it is today, by providing a cheap, easy to use environment for people to use and developers to program (without the horrible Apple royalties that had to be paid for Macintosh development at the time). Windows 3.0, as other graphical desktops before it (Atari, AmigaOS, GEM Desktop etc.) all borrowed from Xerox’ innovation which was commercially introduced to the world with the Macintosh in 1984. But all of those technologies, the concept of a file and a folder represented by a 2D rectangular entity on the screen and the hierarchies that emerge from it are 30 year old ideas that have been proven not to be sufficient for the complex interactions between pieces of information of our times. Computers have grown from (solely) scientific, military, research and statistical instruments to everyday companions in all aspects of modern life: music, cinema, communication, entertainment, task assistance, education; I am sure there are much more.

For those interactions, the leading desktop companies of the early 90s — namely Apple Computer Inc. and Microsoft Corporation — were considering object-oriented desktops with much increased capabilities and a completely departure from the archaic model even ‘advanced’ modern desktop environments (such as those offered by MacOS X and modern Windows as well as all Linux desktops). Projects such as the much-awaited Cairo operating system from Microsoft or the sophisticated Copland successor to MacOS from Apple, gave me, and I am sure millions of others hope for a better future; a time when interacting with your computer, even with the limited CPU power of the mid-90s would be much more sophisticated than the poor experience of Windows or MacOS. Unfortunately, such technologies were never realised in a commercial form. Windows is the most popular desktop operating system in the world, but is still based on 30 year old concepts. Apple Computer, although it provides by far the most well-done integration of UNIX with a graphical, polished environment, offers eye candy and object-orientation which is skin deep. Be Inc., perhaps the only true innovator in terms of desktop innovation of the last decade, is now defunct.
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I am in my room in Madrid in a hotel that provides free ADSL to every and each one of its rooms. I must admit I was impressed. Downloading files, checking email and surfing was generally a pleasure with transfer rates ranging between 16 - 55KB/s (something pretty impressive considering at least one other person in the hotel was using the service!)

The sorry state of Greek broadband options for consumers along with the fact that Greece is the only out of the European “15″ states (and one of the few out of the European “25″ of the future) that does not have ADSL and Cable solutions for fast internet coupled with the ever reducing prices of fast internet access all over Europe are certainly concerning. In Spain, ADSL adoption is growing rapidly, perhaps as fast or even faster than the UK. Other countries enjoy fast and cheap DSL and cable connections for at least three years. Greek ISPs and the formerly nationalised Telecom provider (OTE) has delayed the roll-out of ADSL services for at least two years: Why?

Adoption of high-speed DSL or cable solutions to consumer internet access is costly. Not only is the roll out, purchase, configuration and training for setting up new equipment such as ADSL AMs etc. expensive — something of an increasing importance in the post-e-commerce bust era — but bandwidth costs for such providers is still prohibitively high for small providers. Moreover, the income from DSL connections is certainly lower as compared with the income from PSTN or ISDN based internet access.

In the UK, as well as other countries, laws and provisions for broadband services adoption force ISPs and Telecom companies to ease the tarrifs and increase their offerings, both in terms of cost and variety. In 2003 a standard 512/128 DSL connection in the UK cost from about £20 - £30 depending on the provider.

With companies such as Vivodi offering ADSL services in Athens (with much more limited bandwidth) for twice or three times the price, things look as bleak as ever. Intraconnect a pioneering company offering DSL — in several ‘pilot’ programmes, failed miserably to convince of its maturity or expertise; low quality services were the typical during the first year of their offerings with demand for their product dwindling fast, after acquiring such a bad reputation. Big internet providers, such as Forthnet and Otenet have merely mentioned DSL as an upcoming service in the near future, whereas smaller ones haven’t even done that.
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