A form of telephone service where those answering the phone have read one more page of the relevant documentation that those who call. See also "unhelpful", "pointless", "frustrating", "desparate", "last resort".
When the ISP adds more users they add more capacity? Wow, I want an ISP like that. Most just let things slow down, until the subscribers start quitting.
Its easy to add capacity in the backbone - you just add $$$. Adding capacity in the cable tree is much messier, and can require major time-consuming rewiring - i.e. it doesn't get done.
"Guaranteed" quality of service agreements normally have words about "best efforts" and such like - i.e. they are no guarantee of anything. You can't guarantee megabits per second, 24 hours a day for $60 a month, unless you are a very rich charity.
Principal: Don't ask if the answer may complicate your life!
If you don't use an Intel machine you are stuffed. If you do use one, but don't use Windows, there may be no problem. If you have one of those 95/98 disks the supplier won't refund you just tell the ADSL operator: Yes, I have a Pentium Yes, I have lots of RAM, and disk Yes, I have a LAN card Yes, I have Windoze 95 Just don't tell them that these are not all used together.
When the installer arrives tell them any LAN card details they need. Then tell them which shelf to stand the modem on, and to clear off. Then you just set up the networking yourself. Setting up is a procedure you would need to know, even if you are using Windows. After all, you will need to set it up after each Windows re-install.
Actually many flight controls have true software peer review - multiple packages, independently comparing each other's decisions on-line. In other words, when they use triplicated redundancy solutions for flight critical computing the three computers run three different software packages from three different suppliers. Sometimes they even choose three separately developed hardware platforms too.
Yes, look at the traditional media. In many countries free local newspapaers abound. National ones don't, however.
Most free paper advertising is like a bulletin board sent to your home. John Does advertises his car for sale, and people looking for a car scan the paper. In many cases these papers have no editorial, and are purely classified adverts.
This is very focused advertising (a kind of dynamic yellow pages), and generally very localised. How can you translate that to the Internet, which thrives on broad coverage? How can you get a surplus from it to finance your other non-paying Internet activities? I don't say its impossible, but the attempts I have seen to do this so far have failed.
The UK has some of the world's highest Internet charges, because the call to connect to the ISP costs a bomb. I am British, but currently live in Hong Kong. It costs me less to call my mother in London, than she pays to call her friends within the UK. Its easy to finance an internet service in that environment.
Of course, when the phone bills come in, most of the Freeserve customers will probably give it up, or greatly cut down their use. Remember the chatline fiascos 8 or 10 years ago?
This refund day thing is a bad idea - it will backfire. We all know that only a tiny percentage of Windows licences to be returned. Microsoft can then point to a massive level of user satisfaction. If you consider the amount they will pay out, it must be one of the cheapest pro-MS publicity stunts they could invent!
Has anybody noticed that one of the sponsors of the development of ACE and TAO is Microsoft? I presume they are in the CORBA project to try to screw it up, but it seems they have failed so far.
I don't like weapons, so I have never bought any. Vote with your wallet!
Yes, I think most of us have Linuxconf 1.13r12-1 So what? Its a joke. As a proof of concept it would be OK, and I would say they may be heading in a good direction, but they call it 1.something. That is what makes it a joke. There is hardly anything it will configure properly.
Worst of all RedHat describe it as the bee's knees in configuration software. Not the future bee's knees, but the "we were blown away when we saw this package" right now bee's knees.
Most of the complaints about RedHat posted here are based on a poster's single gripe. If you have only one gripe with a product it can't be all that bad.
Its not much use saying RH 4.2 was stable, and RH 5.2 isn't. Its not a one way street. Most of the security fixes in recent versions fix problems that were there in every older version. They are just part of the process of refining stuff.
RedHat has problems, but the time consuming problems I get are usually nothing to do with RedHat. Like I have hassle at the moment with a lot of incompatible versions of GTK. Now its a great package, and I know they need to make incompatible changes to create a better world for the future. Its hard to eliminate the hassles I get. Nevertheless, I think this type of problem is where most of us spend most of our problem solving time.
I use RH5.2 on a 486, a Pentium and an Alpha. Its OK on the Intel chips, but the Alpha has some REAL problems. Seg. faults on Intel seem to exist, but be a rarity (I have only seen a couple). On Alpha you get frequent alignment faults. Also, I fill the whole of my 64MB of RAM just by booting and starting X. RISC code is bigger, but not THAT much.
Gee, too many people here act like RAID means totally reliable. It doesn't. RAID controllers go wrong; power supplies go wrong; many RAID controllers don't handle power outage properly (there is no such things as an "uninterruptable" power supply) as they have no battery support for data in transit; RAID controllers with battery support don't properly detect when the batteries have died, and won't provide any real support when their big day comes; hosts go wrong and scramble their disks; and even the best operating systems can go a bit pear shaped some days. There is also the good old "some idiot just typed a dumb command and wiped thousands of files" issue.
I'm not saying RAID is a waste of time. It improves reliability a great deal, and the better designs make things go faster. They aren't perfect, though.
Backing up a monster partition is a pain in the neck. If you have a monster database you have little choice, but smaller partitions make life easier.
There have been a lot of comments about DVD artefacts here, but consider:
1. VCD gives poor video and sound. However, its video is about the same as VHS. VHS looks like an impressionist painting. While I love the French impressionists, I don't want to see the world like that 100% of the time. With the latest encoders the VCD's MPEG1 artefacts aren't too nasty, and even subtitles can be kept clean. The sound is pretty awful, though (MP3 essentially, at a fairly low bit rate). The PCM sound on VHS is certainly better.
2. DVD is way ahead of VHS and VCD in picture quality. Sure, you can get some amazingly nasty artefacts. With the right material it goes completely crazy. However, most of the time it looks about the same as LD. Subtitles are about as clear as a conventional TV can resolve. The sound is still a bit iffy, though (MP3, but I don't know the bit rate).
3. LD quality has always been limited by the quality of the source material, and not the medium itself. That is true for DVD too. You don't need something better than DVD until the production people produce cleaner results.
4. MPEG2 broadcast quality is a totally variable thing. They can give you high or low quality, depending on how they program the bit rate. It can be excellent. It can be awful. Don't judge the technology by a few samples you may have seen. This is especially true in the US, where price wins over quality every time. Demand quality, and be prepared to pay extra for it.
5. None of the new media - DVD, MP3, etc. - offer Hi-Fi sound. As in the phone market, there seems to be a drift away from sound quality to reducing costs with excessively low bit rates. The DVD audio disks offer wonderful sound - far better than CD, especially in the quieter passages of a classical piece - but so far I have only seen demo disks. It is unclear whether there will be any production releases (though I may be wrong). Until the production costs of DVDs come down I don't expect to see any mass market audio disks.
6. There is no good reason why an inexpensive DVD machine should give poor pictures. Those high end machines are a con. There is a good reason why the sound quality may vary, especially if they really market the DVD Hi-Fi audio disks.
7. Rental DVDs suffer scratch problems, just like game CDs. Soemone made a reasonable comment about them not being used by 8 year olds. If you have rented LDs, though, you will know they get badly scratched. DVD will be worse - its compact format encourages mis-handling.
8. Compared to a fractal coded solution, MPEG-2 quality stinks at equivalent same bit rates. Fractal coding is very asymmetric, though - it requires enormous resources to code, but quite limited resources to decode. MPEG-2 was designed for things like mini-DV, as well as replay only systems like DVD. I guess DCT based solutions were the only choice to suit all needs.
Hey guys, what is DIVX? I assume it is some US only thing, as we haven't heard of it in Asia. DVD, meantime, is big time in Asia - limited only by our economic woes.
There don't appear to be any pirate DVDs at present. The pirate production business haven't taken off so far as DVDs are so damned hard to produce.
Probably the first pirate DVDs will be from Sony or Pioneer. Don't laugh. Their contract pressing divisions are the main source of pirate LDs. Their confidentiality practices don't allow them to check what they press. I guess in another year or so the villages in GuangDong will be buying DVD making machines, and the piracy business will take off.
The authorities in China are making some real efforts to reduce piracy, but its tough. A pirate CD plant can be a village's main money earner. Try to shut it down and the villagers get violent. They have to sent armed soldiers to shut these plants down, and people have been killed.
Get one good vibrating pager. Wait till its battery is running down, and it decides to completely flatten its battery by vibrating continuously. Rest it on each desk in your office, until you find a desk that resonates at the frequency of the pager. Then wait for everyone within a 100 metres to come and find out what the bloody noise it. They are wonderful.
Does this mean they will add the RedHat disks to the pack of CDs you get with a Compaq? If so this is wonderful.
For those who don't use Compaq ProLiants, they come with CDs for most systems. You can't install them without licence information. If you call up and pay for the one you want by credit card, they give you the licence details and you install it.
Now there will be one CD in that pack that installs without any payment. Which one are lots of people going to choose?
If I understand the way they derive their figures, in the next survey the percentage for Apache will fall. They seem to list anything that is not vanilla Apache as something else. With so many changing to PHP-Apache, the success of PHP will distort their figures further.
Its a pity they can't measure Web throughput by server. I bet that would show an amazing bias towards Apache and its derivatives.
One dark cloud on the horizon. I assume a lot of the Web's commercial growth will now be in various forms of e-business. If Apache isn't part of an effective e-business suite it may loose out. I know IBM is using it in their e-business suite, but that isn't fully open source. I wonder how this will play out.
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Support hotline:
A form of telephone service where those answering the phone have read one more page of the relevant documentation that those who call. See also "unhelpful", "pointless", "frustrating", "desparate", "last resort".
When the ISP adds more users they add more capacity? Wow, I want an ISP like that. Most just let things slow down, until the subscribers start quitting.
Its easy to add capacity in the backbone - you just add $$$. Adding capacity in the cable tree is much messier, and can require major time-consuming rewiring - i.e. it doesn't get done.
"Guaranteed" quality of service agreements normally have words about "best efforts" and such like - i.e. they are no guarantee of anything. You can't guarantee megabits per second, 24 hours a day for $60 a month, unless you are a very rich charity.
Principal: Don't ask if the answer may complicate your life!
If you don't use an Intel machine you are stuffed. If you do use one, but don't use Windows, there may be no problem. If you have one of those 95/98 disks the supplier won't refund you just tell the ADSL operator:
Yes, I have a Pentium
Yes, I have lots of RAM, and disk
Yes, I have a LAN card
Yes, I have Windoze 95
Just don't tell them that these are not all used together.
When the installer arrives tell them any LAN card details they need. Then tell them which shelf to stand the modem on, and to clear off. Then you just set up the networking yourself. Setting up is a procedure you would need to know, even if you are using Windows. After all, you will need to set it up after each Windows re-install.
Actually many flight controls have true software peer review - multiple packages, independently comparing each other's decisions on-line. In other words, when they use triplicated redundancy solutions for flight critical computing the three computers run three different software packages from three different suppliers. Sometimes they even choose three separately developed hardware platforms too.
Yes, look at the traditional media. In many countries free local newspapaers abound. National ones don't, however.
Most free paper advertising is like a bulletin board sent to your home. John Does advertises his car for sale, and people looking for a car scan the paper. In many cases these papers have no editorial, and are purely classified adverts.
This is very focused advertising (a kind of dynamic yellow pages), and generally very localised. How can you translate that to the Internet, which thrives on broad coverage? How can you get a surplus from it to finance your other non-paying Internet activities? I don't say its impossible, but the attempts I have seen to do this so far have failed.
The UK has some of the world's highest Internet charges, because the call to connect to the ISP costs a bomb. I am British, but currently live in Hong Kong. It costs me less to call my mother in London, than she pays to call her friends within the UK. Its easy to finance an internet service in that environment.
Of course, when the phone bills come in, most of the Freeserve customers will probably give it up, or greatly cut down their use. Remember the chatline fiascos 8 or 10 years ago?
This refund day thing is a bad idea - it will backfire. We all know that only a tiny percentage of Windows licences to be returned. Microsoft can then point to a massive level of user satisfaction. If you consider the amount they will pay out, it must be one of the cheapest pro-MS publicity stunts they could invent!
Has anybody noticed that one of the sponsors of the development of ACE and TAO is Microsoft? I presume they are in the CORBA project to try to screw it up, but it seems they have failed so far.
I don't like weapons, so I have never bought any. Vote with your wallet!
Yes, I think most of us have Linuxconf 1.13r12-1 So what? Its a joke. As a proof of concept it would be OK, and I would say they may be heading in a good direction, but they call it 1.something. That is what makes it a joke. There is hardly anything it will configure properly.
Worst of all RedHat describe it as the bee's knees in configuration software. Not the future bee's knees, but the "we were blown away when we saw this package" right now bee's knees.
Most of the complaints about RedHat posted here are based on a poster's single gripe. If you have only one gripe with a product it can't be all that bad.
Its not much use saying RH 4.2 was stable, and RH 5.2 isn't. Its not a one way street. Most of the security fixes in recent versions fix problems that were there in every older version. They are just part of the process of refining stuff.
RedHat has problems, but the time consuming problems I get are usually nothing to do with RedHat. Like I have hassle at the moment with a lot of incompatible versions of GTK. Now its a great package, and I know they need to make incompatible changes to create a better world for the future. Its hard to eliminate the hassles I get. Nevertheless, I think this type of problem is where most of us spend most of our problem solving time.
I use RH5.2 on a 486, a Pentium and an Alpha. Its OK on the Intel chips, but the Alpha has some REAL problems. Seg. faults on Intel seem to exist, but be a rarity (I have only seen a couple). On Alpha you get frequent alignment faults. Also, I fill the whole of my 64MB of RAM just by booting and starting X. RISC code is bigger, but not THAT much.
Gee, too many people here act like RAID means totally reliable. It doesn't. RAID controllers go wrong; power supplies go wrong; many RAID controllers don't handle power outage properly (there is no such things as an "uninterruptable" power supply) as they have no battery support for data in transit; RAID controllers with battery support don't properly detect when the batteries have died, and won't provide any real support when their big day comes; hosts go wrong and scramble their disks; and even the best operating systems can go a bit pear shaped some days. There is also the good old "some idiot just typed a dumb command and wiped thousands of files" issue.
I'm not saying RAID is a waste of time. It improves reliability a great deal, and the better designs make things go faster. They aren't perfect, though.
Backing up a monster partition is a pain in the neck. If you have a monster database you have little choice, but smaller partitions make life easier.
There have been a lot of comments about DVD artefacts here, but consider:
1. VCD gives poor video and sound. However, its video is about the same as VHS. VHS looks like an impressionist painting. While I love the French impressionists, I don't want to see the world like that 100% of the time. With the latest encoders the VCD's MPEG1 artefacts aren't too nasty, and even subtitles can be kept clean. The sound is pretty awful, though (MP3 essentially, at a fairly low bit rate). The PCM sound on VHS is certainly better.
2. DVD is way ahead of VHS and VCD in picture quality. Sure, you can get some amazingly nasty artefacts. With the right material it goes completely crazy. However, most of the time it looks about the same as LD. Subtitles are about as clear as a conventional TV can resolve. The sound is still a bit iffy, though (MP3, but I don't know the bit rate).
3. LD quality has always been limited by the quality of the source material, and not the medium itself. That is true for DVD too. You don't need something better than DVD until the production people produce cleaner results.
4. MPEG2 broadcast quality is a totally variable thing. They can give you high or low quality, depending on how they program the bit rate. It can be excellent. It can be awful. Don't judge the technology by a few samples you may have seen. This is especially true in the US, where price wins over quality every time. Demand quality, and be prepared to pay extra for it.
5. None of the new media - DVD, MP3, etc. - offer Hi-Fi sound. As in the phone market, there seems to be a drift away from sound quality to reducing costs with excessively low bit rates. The DVD audio disks offer wonderful sound - far better than CD, especially in the quieter passages of a classical piece - but so far I have only seen demo disks. It is unclear whether there will be any production releases (though I may be wrong). Until the production costs of DVDs come down I don't expect to see any mass market audio disks.
6. There is no good reason why an inexpensive DVD machine should give poor pictures. Those high end machines are a con. There is a good reason why the sound quality may vary, especially if they really market the DVD Hi-Fi audio disks.
7. Rental DVDs suffer scratch problems, just like game CDs. Soemone made a reasonable comment about them not being used by 8 year olds. If you have rented LDs, though, you will know they get badly scratched. DVD will be worse - its compact format encourages mis-handling.
8. Compared to a fractal coded solution, MPEG-2 quality stinks at equivalent same bit rates. Fractal coding is very asymmetric, though - it requires enormous resources to code, but quite limited resources to decode. MPEG-2 was designed for things like mini-DV, as well as replay only systems like DVD. I guess DCT based solutions were the only choice to suit all needs.
Hey guys, what is DIVX? I assume it is some US only thing, as we haven't heard of it in Asia. DVD, meantime, is big time in Asia - limited only by our economic woes.
There don't appear to be any pirate DVDs at present. The pirate production business haven't taken off so far as DVDs are so damned hard to produce.
Probably the first pirate DVDs will be from Sony or Pioneer. Don't laugh. Their contract pressing divisions are the main source of pirate LDs. Their confidentiality practices don't allow them to check what they press. I guess in another year or so the villages in GuangDong will be buying DVD making machines, and the piracy business will take off.
The authorities in China are making some real efforts to reduce piracy, but its tough. A pirate CD plant can be a village's main money earner. Try to shut it down and the villagers get violent. They have to sent armed soldiers to shut these plants down, and people have been killed.
Get one good vibrating pager. Wait till its battery is running down, and it decides to completely flatten its battery by vibrating continuously. Rest it on each desk in your office, until you find a desk that resonates at the frequency of the pager. Then wait for everyone within a 100 metres to come and find out what the bloody noise it. They are wonderful.
Does this mean they will add the RedHat disks to the pack of CDs you get with a Compaq? If so this is wonderful.
For those who don't use Compaq ProLiants, they come with CDs for most systems. You can't install them without licence information. If you call up and pay for the one you want by credit card, they give you the licence details and you install it.
Now there will be one CD in that pack that installs without any payment. Which one are lots of people going to choose?
If I understand the way they derive their figures, in the next survey the percentage for Apache will fall. They seem to list anything that is not vanilla Apache as something else. With so many changing to PHP-Apache, the success of PHP will distort their figures further.
Its a pity they can't measure Web throughput by server. I bet that would show an amazing bias towards Apache and its derivatives.
One dark cloud on the horizon. I assume a lot of the Web's commercial growth will now be in various forms of e-business. If Apache isn't part of an effective e-business suite it may loose out. I know IBM is using it in their e-business suite, but that isn't fully open source. I wonder how this will play out.