Jason's Notes About Stuff

This makes me mad. The recently released CRTC Telecommunications Monitoring Report highlighted how lack of competition in the cellular phone market is leading to increased profits year after year. From the report : "The telecommunications industry's earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) increased from $12.4 billion to $13.1 billion, a $0.7 billion or 5% increase. The increase was due to the mobile phone service providers, whose EBITDA increased from $4.4 billion in 2005 to $5.6 billion in 2006, a $1.2 billion or 27% increase. " Most of the Canadian market (95%) is served by a group of three providers -- Bell, Rogers, and Telus. None of them really compete, as their plans and pricing are nearly identical, and far more expensive than other G8 countries. There's no easy solution to this problem. Foreign competition has been introduced on several occasions, but subsequently crushed by the "big trio". Sprint introduced very c

Update: New 2010 numbers can be found here. The other day, I was wondering to myself, "What are the most popular web frameworks right now?" Finding accurate numbers is actually pretty hard, so I decided to go to the expert: Google. Sometimes you can (very unscientifically) determine something's popularity by simply noting how many references Google has to a particular keyword or phrase, so here are the current results: Web programming languages: ASP.NET: 86 million Ruby: 101 million PHP: 2.95 billion Specific web frameworks: Symfony: 4.6 million CakePHP: 4.8 million Ruby on Rails: 5.4 million I was really surprised that PHP beat ASP.NET by such a wide margin. I was also happy to see that Symfony (my framework of choice) was holding its own against CakePHP and RoR. It was really surprising to see that Ruby had more references than ASP.NET. Perhaps I'm not searching for the right string. I'd be interested to hear others' results.