You must be fecking joking (or paid by BT). Have you had a look at the roll out plan lately?
25% by the end of 2002 maybe, for the rest of the country forget it. Where I live the nearest CITY will get it in 2002 and anywhere is scheduled for never.
BT is in the process of thinking about breaking itself up (these things move kind of slowly) and this may just provide the solution you've been asking for.
One of the four companies they plan to split into will have the boring bits like the wires and the COs (I forget their proposed names, something like Whizz!, Bang!!, Ooops!!! and Boring Co.). The other companies will try and sound exciting and take the internet traffic, business customers, etc.
Boring Co. will then sell access to it's stuff to all comers in a supposedly equal way.
Ok, I'm doing 2+2 and coming to 400, but you can hope!
The IIS and Space Shuttle are a huge waste of money, about the only good thing they do is get NASA on television so that the proles think something good is happening. The science and value that comes out of these missions is pretty much zero.
The big problem with these missions is that they include people. People are big, clumsy, need a hell of a lot of support equipment and if they as much as get a bruise then there is a outcry. The wet public is not prepared to accept that space exploration is difficult and dangerous.
It would be far better for NASA to scrap these expensive white elephants and get on with doing real science (like more unmanned probes to Mars and other planets in the Solar System).
You probably want to look at a more suitable link that includes more of the chrome for those of you that like to see things in full technicolour.
The game is sort of given away by the "low" in the original URL. The BBC site is meant to viewable in many forms from latest bells and whistles, embrace and extend HTML, through plain and simple HTML to *cough* WML.
I understand from a friend that worked on the Cassini project that the problem was that there no more power plants available of that type left.
Apparently they were built to power nuclear subs but only a limited number were made. No more are ever planned to be made due to the namby pamby, wishy washy, liberal eco-loons. Which completely stuffs the deep space exploration programme.
This may of course be complete rubbish, so if someone more qualified wants to comment, please do so.
Eeerm, not exactly sure I agree with you on this. In my view Open Source is exactly what telephony needs. You quite rightly pointed out the telephony needs obscene amounts of reliability and uptime, but this is exactly what Open Source is good at.
You get many experts from all around the world to actually look at the code and you get less bugs. Even the thought that your code may be looked at by lots of people much cleverer than you makes you think twice when writing it.
Before you scoff, I've been there and done that. I've spent ten years writing telephony code and managing telephony projects, I've done the SS7 thing, and believe me, the code I've written as Open Source is better quality and has had more thought put into it than the closed source code I have which has millions of calls running through it. For example a lot of my code handles millions of calls a month on British Telecoms internal networks, it ain't pretty bit it works, but the Open Source code I've written not only works, it's pretty too.
If you want some examples of extremely reliable, well thought out and well tested Open Source code check out OpenH323 and OpenGatekeeper. (Okay the last bit is a blantant plug!)
Take a look at the OpenH323 effort at www.openh323.org, they have a well thought out, open source, cross platform H.323 stack that is being used by lots of people and is one of the most robust stacks available. In short, it's the dog's danglies.
Contrary to what a lot of people are saying in this discussion, H.323 is real, it works, and it is already in use. Sure it's not going to work great running of you Soundblaster over a congested 33.6 link, but given the right hardware and the right network it works perfectly!
Hmmm, I don't what phones you tried, but I've tried it and you could not tell the difference in quality between a VoIP call and a "standard" telephony call.
I say "standard" because a lot of international and long distance traffic is already going over VoIP and you probably don't realise it. I believe that international carrier VoIP traffic passed a million minutes last year, not much in the scale of things but getting there.
Last time I looked they added loads of junk to the definition of the "top" object class - not a very sensible thing to do.
Being charitable, I believe they just didn't understand. If I was being uncharitable... well what better way to break interworking with everybody else's implementation of LDAP.
"Just as you don't want drunk-drivers, mentally ustable, extremley elderly, or blind/deaf people on you highways, do you want child molesters, script kiddies, etc on the net? Be carfeul what you wish for... "
Well actually I do want these sort of people on the net. It's called freedom.
As soon as you start discriminating against people your are on the start of a slipperly slope.
"We must ban child molesters!" becomes "We must ban sexual content!" becomes "We must ban extreme political views!" becomes political correctness becomes a "dictatorship".
Who is going to make the decision that someone is too "mentally unstable" or too "extremely elderly" to be trusted?
That used to be the case with the "first" generation of bots, but it is changing. (Speaking from my not so great knowledge of the BBC's Robot Wars).
Now a lot of bots are either naturally self righting, can work either way up or have wonderful self righting mechanisms. The original self righting flipper of Cassius was a marvel to behold and Chaos 2 is even better (their flipper is amazing!).
So we have the evolution of bots such as Razer which are self righting and inflict serious damage, and I do mean serious!.
One very important thing in 2.2.14 is telephony support.
This could be an area were Linux could really shine. Telephony is all about reliability and can be very price sensitive, especially when you are trying to put together systems for small companies.
I should know, I work for a company producing exactly these kind of systems, unfortunately on NT:-(
For more details see this article on LinuxTelephony.
I think that here in the UK we have suffered a huge erosion of our personal freedom in the last few years, generally due to the current Labour government although to be fair it occured a lot under the Major government too.
Transport fiascos are bad enough. Seeing Two Jags Prescott or our Glorious Leader swanning down the "bus" lane of the M4 like Soviet style leaders makes my blood boil. Recent tax hikes on fuel prices while halting road building and mantainence programs is absurd and is making our transport system practically Third World. But this are just some of the minor things we are losing.
What about the proposed restriction of the right to a trial by jury?
What about the loss of the House of Lords and its replacement by Tony's Cronies?
What about our continual loss of democratic government (including tax and defense issues) and replacement by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels?
I live in the UK and I own a Classic and I fear that this is yet another example of the current Labour government trying to get rid of anything that isn't "New" or modern and their extreme anti car attitude.
Recently we have had the abolition of road vehicle tax exemptions and the abolition of leaded fuel. Coming up we have the planned huge tax rises on "excessive" engine capacity (my poor V8!).
If you had our petrol taxes in the US there would be riots in the streets.
Slashdot Mirror
You must be fecking joking (or paid by BT). Have you had a look at the roll out plan lately?
25% by the end of 2002 maybe, for the rest of the country forget it. Where I live the nearest CITY will get it in 2002 and anywhere is scheduled for never.
BT is in the process of thinking about breaking itself up (these things move kind of slowly) and this may just provide the solution you've been asking for.
One of the four companies they plan to split into will have the boring bits like the wires and the COs (I forget their proposed names, something like Whizz!, Bang!!, Ooops!!! and Boring Co.). The other companies will try and sound exciting and take the internet traffic, business customers, etc.
Boring Co. will then sell access to it's stuff to all comers in a supposedly equal way.
Ok, I'm doing 2+2 and coming to 400, but you can hope!
No, no, no.....
The IIS and Space Shuttle are a huge waste of money, about the only good thing they do is get NASA on television so that the proles think something good is happening. The science and value that comes out of these missions is pretty much zero.
The big problem with these missions is that they include people. People are big, clumsy, need a hell of a lot of support equipment and if they as much as get a bruise then there is a outcry. The wet public is not prepared to accept that space exploration is difficult and dangerous.
It would be far better for NASA to scrap these expensive white elephants and get on with doing real science (like more unmanned probes to Mars and other planets in the Solar System).
I applaud this mission.
You probably want to look at a more suitable link that includes more of the chrome for those of you that like to see things in full technicolour.
The game is sort of given away by the "low" in the original URL. The BBC site is meant to viewable in many forms from latest bells and whistles, embrace and extend HTML, through plain and simple HTML to *cough* WML.
I understand from a friend that worked on the Cassini project that the problem was that there no more power plants available of that type left.
Apparently they were built to power nuclear subs but only a limited number were made. No more are ever planned to be made due to the namby pamby, wishy washy, liberal eco-loons. Which completely stuffs the deep space exploration programme.
This may of course be complete rubbish, so if someone more qualified wants to comment, please do so.
Eeerm, not exactly sure I agree with you on this. In my view Open Source is exactly what telephony needs. You quite rightly pointed out the telephony needs obscene amounts of reliability and uptime, but this is exactly what Open Source is good at.
You get many experts from all around the world to actually look at the code and you get less bugs. Even the thought that your code may be looked at by lots of people much cleverer than you makes you think twice when writing it.
Before you scoff, I've been there and done that. I've spent ten years writing telephony code and managing telephony projects, I've done the SS7 thing, and believe me, the code I've written as Open Source is better quality and has had more thought put into it than the closed source code I have which has millions of calls running through it. For example a lot of my code handles millions of calls a month on British Telecoms internal networks, it ain't pretty bit it works, but the Open Source code I've written not only works, it's pretty too.
If you want some examples of extremely reliable, well thought out and well tested Open Source code check out OpenH323 and OpenGatekeeper. (Okay the last bit is a blantant plug!)
This is probably too late to get noticed but....
Take a look at the OpenH323 effort at www.openh323.org, they have a well thought out, open source, cross platform H.323 stack that is being used by lots of people and is one of the most robust stacks available. In short, it's the dog's danglies.
Contrary to what a lot of people are saying in this discussion, H.323 is real, it works, and it is already in use. Sure it's not going to work great running of you Soundblaster over a congested 33.6 link, but given the right hardware and the right network it works perfectly!
Hmmm, I don't what phones you tried, but I've tried it and you could not tell the difference in quality between a VoIP call and a "standard" telephony call.
I say "standard" because a lot of international and long distance traffic is already going over VoIP and you probably don't realise it. I believe that international carrier VoIP traffic passed a million minutes last year, not much in the scale of things but getting there.
I understand that they are going to explicitly block IP telephony unless you go for the more expensive business service.
You could of course use no standard ports etc. and probably run rings around their sys admins, but the would be a royal PITA!
(sigh)
Alex de Joode has posted a well reasoned reply.
It's a good read.
Last time I looked they added loads of junk to the definition of the "top" object class - not a very sensible thing to do.
Being charitable, I believe they just didn't understand. If I was being uncharitable... well what better way to break interworking with everybody else's implementation of LDAP.
If you are relying on a search engine to "reconnect" the link you are going to have problems.
/.ed so I probably am missing the point entirely!)
Even the best search engines only index a small percentage of the entire web and then they are hideously out of date.
Not to mention the problems of someone hijacking your unique id by stuffing the search engine with bogus words.
(Disclaimer - I haven't read the actual article due to it being
"Just as you don't want drunk-drivers, mentally ustable, extremley elderly, or blind/deaf people on you highways, do you want child molesters, script kiddies, etc on the net? Be carfeul what you wish for... "
Well actually I do want these sort of people on the net. It's called freedom.
As soon as you start discriminating against people your are on the start of a slipperly slope.
"We must ban child molesters!" becomes "We must ban sexual content!" becomes "We must ban extreme political views!" becomes political correctness becomes a "dictatorship".
Who is going to make the decision that someone is too "mentally unstable" or too "extremely elderly" to be trusted?
You?
That used to be the case with the "first" generation of bots, but it is changing. (Speaking from my not so great knowledge of the BBC's Robot Wars).
Now a lot of bots are either naturally self righting, can work either way up or have wonderful self righting mechanisms. The original self righting flipper of Cassius was a marvel to behold and Chaos 2 is even better (their flipper is amazing!).
So we have the evolution of bots such as Razer which are self righting and inflict serious damage, and I do mean serious!.
This things have to be seen to be believed!
But this could make sense if priced in a similar way to mobile phones - i.e. use the monthly revenue to subsidise the cost of the device itself.
Say $50 to get the device and you're committed to paying $20-30 a month for a minimum of twelve months for net access.
One very important thing in 2.2.14 is telephony support.
:-(
This could be an area were Linux could really shine. Telephony is all about reliability and can be very price sensitive, especially when you are trying to put together systems for small companies.
I should know, I work for a company producing exactly these kind of systems, unfortunately on NT
For more details see this article on LinuxTelephony.
I think that here in the UK we have suffered a huge erosion of our personal freedom in the last few years, generally due to the current Labour government although to be fair it occured a lot under the Major government too.
Transport fiascos are bad enough. Seeing Two Jags Prescott or our Glorious Leader swanning down the "bus" lane of the M4 like Soviet style leaders makes my blood boil. Recent tax hikes on fuel prices while halting road building and mantainence programs is absurd and is making our transport system practically Third World. But this are just some of the minor things we are losing.
What about the proposed restriction of the right to a trial by jury?
What about the loss of the House of Lords and its replacement by Tony's Cronies?
What about our continual loss of democratic government (including tax and defense issues) and replacement by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels?
I live in the UK and I own a Classic and I fear that this is yet another example of the current Labour government trying to get rid of anything that isn't "New" or modern and their extreme anti car attitude.
Recently we have had the abolition of road vehicle tax exemptions and the abolition of leaded fuel. Coming up we have the planned huge tax rises on "excessive" engine capacity (my poor V8!).
If you had our petrol taxes in the US there would be riots in the streets.