Marcelo Toledo

Tell me something new:

“Last November, EarthLink announced it would not make any further “significant investments” in its muni wireless business and that it would “begin a process to consider its strategic alternatives.” Yesterday, the company announced that the alternative it has settled on is to sell off the business altogether. The news came when EarthLink released its Q4 and Full Year 2007 financial results.

While the company has committed to a plan to sell its muni wireless assets, which it values at $40 million, as yet, there are no takers.

The move did not come as a surprise to industry watchers, as EarthLink CEO—and newly elected Chairman of the Board—Rolla Huff has been clear about EarthLink’s declining interest in funding a venture that, while successful by some measures, was not producing the ROI stockholders were looking for.

“After thorough review and analysis of our municipal wireless business we have decided that making significant further investments in this business could be inconsistent with our objective of maximizing shareholder value,” said Huff, in a press release last fall.

In a press release issued yesterday, EarthLink made the decision to sell official.

Phil Belanger, a founding member of the Wi-Fi Alliance, who’s company, Novarum, has done extensive testing on many of EarthLink’s muni Wi-Fi networks, says its not the technology that failed, but rather the business model.

“I think that everyone has already concluded that the EarthLink-style model of building Metro Wi-Fi networks primarily for commercial public Internet access and residential broadband is not viable—particularly in large cities with competitive broadband alternatives. So, this is nothing new for the industry. It is simply the other shoe dropping. Municipal wireless networks are still being built, but the successful ones support multiple applications—usually private city applications with a commitment from the city to buy a minimum level of service,” says Belanger.” (…)

Source: http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/news/article.php/3726981

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I remember when I created my first website, totally different reality from today, the only tool to create a website for “normal” people was geocities and it was not as easy as to create a blog nowadays. Blog was a tool used exclusively by geeks, no normal people had one and it was not a very common word, my first website had one, coded with my own hands with comments and other resources, and since I used Emacs for everything I needed an interface to blog from Emacs.

I created one and worked smoothly, it had syntax highlighting differentiating the subject from the body, I could use flyspell to spell check while I typed, etc. Today I was looking for an interface for the famous wordpress, and what a surprise, we don’t have a wordpress.el, we do have a probably defuncted weblogger.el that don’t even exists in the download area.

It’s interesting how a few areas in Emacs just don’t evolve or die very fast, this blog package is just an example, Emacs is probably my favorite application, it’s an incredible text editor with almost unlimited capabilities because of it’s lisp virtual machine, but the time is passing and it’s not evolving how it should, but I saw many forks of it that didn’t go well, so might not be only the way it’s managed.

Probably it’s just adapting to the way it should be, today if you want to use an operating system like Linux you don’t need to learn how to use a text editor, you don’t need to learn how to program, and years ago it was a must, a requisite. Text editors was a hype, many fights from Vi and Emacs, releases was a boom, to have an idea of the type of the users we had, rms don’t like to release often, because he thinks you can just download the source, compile and use it unstable. See any possibility of hapenning this with new users? Absolutely not. The universe will decrease very fast, a lot packages of the editor will die, only programmers will use it, but I’ll keep using it happily.

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