Slashdot Mirror
Mirror.ac.uk to Scale Back Operations
KingDaveRa writes "It would seem that the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (www.jisc.ac.uk) have decided to withdraw funding from the www.mirror.ac.uk service. They still want to run a service, but '...perhaps on a smaller scale, and limited to the most popular mirrors. This would, however, depend upon securing sponsorship or alternative funding very quickly, and the approval of our host institutions.' This could turn out to be quite an inconvenience for the UK, as the mirror.ac.uk service has proven itself very fast and reliable."
Dupe ...
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
If you want to register your disapproval, try their "general enquiries" email address: info@jisc.ac.uk.
I used to go to Lancaster Uni where the physical mirror was located and knew some of the guys involved in it when it was known as hensa). It was a valuable service back then in the early internet days and still is, fantastic bandwidth, and a well structured archive of only decent software, no fluff, it was alot more than just a mirror. I can't really understand how they are going to save money or resources this way either, as someone pointed out all its going to do is put pressure on the SuperJanet interconnects.
Oh I do hope so. He needs as much stick as possible at the moment. To my knowledge he still hasn't admitted he is at fault.
For those outside the UK, you may want to take a look at the front page of todays Mirror
wot no sig
How about because it saves them money? My university pays quite a lot for transatlantic bandwidth, but it does not pay anything (beyond the flat rate connection charge) for bandwidth between sites on JANET. If I download the latest release of Fedora (for example) that's 2GB (or more if I get the source CDs as well) which either comes from mirror.ac.uk (at 2MB/s) or from an external source. If it comes from mirror.ac.uk, they don't pay for it. If it comes from anywhere else, they do.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You could do worse...
c .sunsite.org.uk/
Now a new server (as of this year) with kind thanks to [well earned plugs]:
Sun Microsystems - hardware
Thus (Demon) - Network feed
Veritas - Software
Brocade - Hardware
for their contunuing sponsorship.
and of course, the Department of Computing, Imperial College London for
housing and feeding it.
Currently it has 1.8 TB of publicly accessible mirrors and supports the following access mechanisms:
http://www.sunsite.org.uk/ [See here for full details]
ftp://ftp.sunsite.org.uk/
rsync://rsyn
Why can't women be like Hedy Lamarr - beautiful, talented and inventors of frequency-hopping spread-spectrum techn
The Daily Mirror (now just The Mirror) is a left-wing tabloid newspaper in the UK. Last month, the paper (which was until yesterday edited by Piers Morgan) published pictures of alleged abuse in Iraq which are now widely believed to be fake. Morgan quit last night and has not apologised, while his paper has.
I used to have some respect for the guy, but fuck him now-he's dragged his paper's reputation through the mud and he's making a bad name for everybody who was every against this war. If you're in the UK and want a decent anti-war left-wing newspaper, try here, here or maybe even (for the insanely left wing) here.
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
Last year JANET started charging institutions for all traffic, not just traffic which goes outside the JANET network.
I presume that this means that JANET won't lose much money through external charges as institutions are being charged for access to mirror.ac.uk now anyway, and if costs go up they can just increase the charge to institutions...
The most interesting bit of the blurb is:
Having said that, I'm somewhat sceptical awarding the contract based on cost won't lead to a degradation of service. Whatever happened to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"?
And here's more from the horse's mouth...
I'm frankly amazed they bid cheaper, but we don't know all the details. We already have the kit (that belongs to Lancaster and Kent unis), and the software (that too), and the mirroring agreements and existing data (they don't get copies of that, either).
However, AIUI (I wasn't involved in the tendering), we wanted to continue adding value to the mirror service, make it more reliable, more easy to use, offering more advanced access systems, and lots of cool features. I believe the winning tender was single-site, bare-bones service, from a JISC 'Strategic Partner'.
Oh, and tenders don't have to go to the lowest bidder. When UKMS formed, it had a slightly more expensive bid than the competition, but the promise of added-value and dual-site operation won us the day. I wasn't there then, either, but I've been told by the folks that were.
SamBC
Appologies to non-UK folks -- this is completely off-topic. But its also an absolutely red hot topic for UKer's, so please don't mod as OT!!
:)
<snip>...only for it to be show (by the Military police...) that the photos are faked (apparently by matching scratches on vehicles no less.)..<snip>
Going on the "by Military police" bit I'm guessing you doubt this. From what I've heard, the evidence is also the kit the solidiers in the photo where using and the type of vehicle in which photos were take were both incorrect -- not they stuff that was shipped to Iraq. This where some of the initial, fairly obvious (to those in the know... which *doesn't* include me btw!), errors. From this they've found the actual vehicle used... which I must admit to being suprised they could do... but given that all this evidence has been independantly corroborated *AND* the Mirror has agreed with it, I think we can be sure that *the photos WERE fake*!
So instead of it being soldiers engaged in acts that have been reported to the government already, it is solders faking sick and degrading behaviour and passing these off as real to a newspaper. Either because they are mentally disturbed psychotics who get a kick out that sort of behaviour or in an attempt to set up the newspaper.
Or perhaps because the paper *paid* for the photos? Maybe? Or perhaps there was political motivation? (I haven't heard this mentioned... yet... but it is another possibility)
Now call me picky, but one is confirmation that the army has some sick and twisted soldiers while the other is confirmation that the army has some sick and twisted soldiers.
LOL.. point taken, although *aledgedly* it might've perhaps been TA's who staged the pictures. Aledgedely. You might argue that they're essentially the same... but I suspect that a full time Soldier might disagree!
The only difference is that the mirror has paid for its opposition to the war by being set up - in either event it shows that there is something fundamentally broken in the discipline and behaviour of British soldiers.
In the case of the Mirror, thats the way these things go. It isn't the first time and it isn't the last, and although I detest Piers Morgan, he has simply screwed up. Largely, he's been unlucky, but it all goes with the territory; when this kind of stuff up happens, someone has to go. But on the plus side, *everyone* hates him, so no problems there!!
As for this bit about "something fundamentally broken in the discipline and behaviour of British solidiers", I think you're way out of line there. In any organisation there *are* going to be bad apples and you know there's some horrible shit going on over there. But this "news" report blatantly smeared the good name of the British solidiers and it was compeltely wrong to do that and has put lives at risk. There fact that "this is the type of thing that might also be going on" is besides the point... it implied that this kind of behaviour was rife, when it clearly isn't (even the reports of abuses that do exist do make this point).
The Mirror "report" was fundamentally flawed news reporting, and had very serious repercusions. Reporting on actual events is fine, but the Mirror report didn't do that. It used made up, false information.