Thursday, September 01, 2005

PTCL charging ISPs 15% CED, violating CBR rules

I nearly missed this new one from Imran Ayub at Daily Times: "In a recent move, the ISPs have approached the Central Board of Revenue, disclosing that the PTCL has been charging 15 percent CED on the broadband DSL service, violating the CBR rules and the government policy." Read the entire news item here: http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_30-8-2005_pg5_1

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's a unfortunate reality. Nothing is getting cheaper except the premium on life. So why should the PTCL be any different? I could count a thousand things that would qualify as "legalized extortion" here.

On a more +ve note, has anyone checked out Google Earth? I did today and it made me flip my eyeballs. It is awesome. The resolution is incredible. The overhead shots can zoom in to a height of 500 ft. over any location in all the major cities of the world. If you're searching in the U.S. you can even punch in a street address and it zooms in right on to it. I even saw the roof of my house in Karachi and it was a perfect shot. The satellite technology is amazing and so is the rendering and "fluid" motion. This one is a must-see. I have heard Google has improved the rendering lately. The panning and zooming effects are superb.

But a warning is that it is bandwidth intensive and is not intended for snail-paced connections. I tried it over a high-speed DSL connection and even on that it takes several seconds to render shots. You'll need to first download and install a widget that is about 10MB then that connects to their DB and downloads whatever you want to view.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Unknown said...

Google Earth, or just Google, rocks!! ... You know if WE can get our hands on this technology, one can only wonder how advanced the US Military's version of it would be.

And yet they can't find that guy, Osama! :P

Anonymous said...

A theory says that today's military technology is always "declassified" for consumer or commercial usage in one generation. This technology behind Google Earth is actually the military technology of one gen ago basically. Based on hearsay and idle reading today's imaging technology can apparently get a clear shot as if it was taken from a few feet away of a small candle if it were burning on the moon.

In other words today's photography-technology has a range of 186,000 miles for taking crystal clear shots...at least. These shots in Google Earth can zoom in with clarity to about 500 ft. Also modern telescopy is capable of photographing things that are thousands of light years away from us. So I wouldn't be surprised at the high-end results of what we cannot get our hands on.

Remember what happened with Will Smith in "Enemy Of The State"?