Yes but not just infrastructure to the home: having suffered as little as 300kbit/s peak-rate speeds out of an 8Mbit/s line from BT I'd like them to sort out capacity to the exchange before showboating ever faster technologies. That was in a city centre - there are some exchanges in the UK which have been oversubscribed continuously since ADSL switch on nearly 10 years ago.
I used ipac-ng http://ipac-ng.sourceforge.net/ for many years, until its lack of maintenance caused it drop significantly behind newer Linux kernels. sigh. Worked brilliantly when it did work though.
It means running all data through a linux box, but this is a given for me as I always have a firewall box for iptables, so I can split off my public IPs and home network. But all a bit much for a home ADSL connection really.
Everyone else has already covered everything I can think of, but this is my current 'method':
* Everything older than about 6 years is contained within a few box files. All held together, just ordered by when it was received. The oldest papers would be 15 years old. * Since then everything is sorted into a few (er, 12?) small "piles" - some in boxes, some in folders, some piled on shelves. I know where something should be and can usually guess at the depth. * As time goes on, I gradually makes new piles which are more organised but never go back through old documents to re-sort them. I definitely receive more paper per year as time goes on, but thankfully e-invoicing is starting to take a bite out of that. * Unfortunately I hoard papers so these piles will grow in number forever, though I have half a plan to burn piles once they get to 10 years old. * I scan stuff that is really important or that I might need at any time (I'm not always at home, but I nearly do always have Internet). * Generally, I very rarely need to look at a paper copy of something. If it means something, the information has already been extracted into GnuCash, Jira, Confluence (highly, *highly* recommended even just for home use) or a text file.
I do feel your pain though, ADSL2 is long overdue at our current exchange, we can only get 2mbps at the best of times on ADSL Max, and it's been that way for a while.
ADSL2 probably won't change that - it's likely due to oversubscription at the exchange. What's your speed like at 3am?
I have a beautiful ADSL Max connection and can get 7.1MBit/s - the theoretical maximum - but only in the early morning, or at any time when the students leave (I'm in a university town). Around 7pm it drops to 1MBits/s or less. It's been this way for the year and half that I've lived here. BT won't do anything because it's usual over the ADSL Max minimum guaranteed speed, which is just 600KBit/s!
At another property a few miles down the road I can download all day at the maximum speed with not a single blip or wobble, but it is on a different exchange.
First we had people pull them apart and report poor build quality
One report of some internal untidiness! One!
I love all the Dell laptops with 2 hours battery life out-of-the-bx in particular, very useful concept...
I've had a couple of MBPs pass through my hands in the last year (one new and one refurb, zero defects) - both came fully charged which I thought was a nice touch.
That's not my experience with the unibody machines. Thermals on the 2009 MBP 15" are really good - yes, full CPU will get the fans up to 6200RPM but I'm really very impressed overall. It takes a lot to get them to spin up and even then they're nice and quiet considering the RPM they're doing.
Contrast that with the plastic bodied ~2007 MacBook - I found that the single fan would spin up high at the slightest provocation and be louder than the two in the MBP for the same RPM.
Because it's yet another link advert for "Network world"
I too was surprised to click the link in a story about iFixit's teardown and find myself on that god-awful website again - and I try my best to avoiding clicking through to them!
I can understand the need to link to websites that can withstand the slashdot effect but these days slashdot itself is really suffering from the quality of story abstracts and the continual linking to the same awful blogs, no doubt paid adverts.
Agree. I started using Spotify to have music to listen to in work, without having to spend time choosing music to go on my iPhone / iPod, find I'm not in the mood for anything I've synced, or the effort of streaming from my home network. Over time I've been using it more and more even to listen to music at home which I already have as MP3.
I've still bought a few of my favourite tracks and albums (through iTunes) but my 14 year old MP3 collection running to hundreds of GB has hardly been touched for a while now. Of course, my CDs just sit taking up space on shelves. I've considered eBaying the lot - which would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
As for the format question, I'm not really a fan of flac. I've not really been able to hear the different between it and good quality MP3, and while disk space is cheap it's not free - especially if you want to run RAID and have reliable backups. On top of that, I got sucked into the iTunes world (life is honestly so much better) and iTunes won't play flac.
Yes, iFixIt have found problems which should not exist, but there are only two internal, inconsequential assembly errors in an absolute engineering marvel which is cranked out in massive numbers.
These machines are generations ahead of the PowerBooks in terms of sophistication and precision engineering.
Leaked on the eve of release, after the products have been sent out to thousands of resellers who/might/ just open the boxes and post pictures on the internet?
The "anonymous coward" who submitted the article actually links to a website, the blog of a 2nd year UK university student. There are articles complaining about the quality of his education. I concur with that.
display that most UK ISPs 'aggressively throttle BitTorrent traffic after 6 p.m. at night,' with speeds suddenly going 'off a cliff.'
No, that's quite normal for some areas. It's not just BitTorrent but everything, due to oversubscription on BT's infrastructure. Right down latency, like a 12ms ping turning into a 50ms epic journey.
Ha, talk about mental gears clicking into place. I'd grown so use to seeing the dollar sign as a prompt I'd completely separated it from the currency in my mind, as if there were two different symbols.
This is a great idea! A problem I've seen is people banned from pubs in one town simply moving on to drinking a little further away. It's too easy for them. A nationwide system would help. Those who only go out at night to harm should not be allowed out anywhere... I would certainly be pleased to have to "sign in" to a pub if means nobody with me is going to randomly glassed or stabbed by someone out to cause trouble.
BT infrastructure monopoly. I can choose whatever ISP I want but the local exchange will remain the bottleneck. That's why the increasing capacity of the local loop is such a wasteful, hateful subject for me. I connect to the exchange at the maximum possible ADSL sync and receive the maximum theoretical throughput only as long as I am browsing at 5am.
What would you like to do with 100 times your own current network speed?
Shit man, I'd be able to watch videos off YouTube!
In nearly a year and half, my local BT exchange has been congested. "Virtual paths: red". I went from November to January last year at 300Kbits/s on an 8Mbit ADSL line. This month it's been 700Kbits/s. Yet if I wake up at 5am, I have 7.1Mbit/s and can watch two HD streams off iPlayer.
I don't care. Life is better with data. I would actually pay for a phone that records my heartbeat and location and communicates it to a trusted 3rd party. You know what, it might save my life.
It doesn't work with the general public who enter anything and everything, appropriate or not. It doesn't work with corporates who prefer face to face meetings and everything discussed and tracked and accounted for. It doesn't work with small business who won't use it or if they do expect everything entered for free.
I don't have much experience of open source. Perhaps it works there.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes but not just infrastructure to the home: having suffered as little as 300kbit/s peak-rate speeds out of an 8Mbit/s line from BT I'd like them to sort out capacity to the exchange before showboating ever faster technologies.
That was in a city centre - there are some exchanges in the UK which have been oversubscribed continuously since ADSL switch on nearly 10 years ago.
I did too. In 2003.
information is delivered on a golden spoon and you just have to absorb then regurgitate
Not my experience.
That may apply to the 1st year of some courses, but is not the definition of a B.Sc.
I used ipac-ng http://ipac-ng.sourceforge.net/ for many years, until its lack of maintenance caused it drop significantly behind newer Linux kernels. sigh. Worked brilliantly when it did work though.
It means running all data through a linux box, but this is a given for me as I always have a firewall box for iptables, so I can split off my public IPs and home network. But all a bit much for a home ADSL connection really.
Everyone else has already covered everything I can think of, but this is my current 'method':
* Everything older than about 6 years is contained within a few box files. All held together, just ordered by when it was received. The oldest papers would be 15 years old.
* Since then everything is sorted into a few (er, 12?) small "piles" - some in boxes, some in folders, some piled on shelves. I know where something should be and can usually guess at the depth.
* As time goes on, I gradually makes new piles which are more organised but never go back through old documents to re-sort them. I definitely receive more paper per year as time goes on, but thankfully e-invoicing is starting to take a bite out of that.
* Unfortunately I hoard papers so these piles will grow in number forever, though I have half a plan to burn piles once they get to 10 years old.
* I scan stuff that is really important or that I might need at any time (I'm not always at home, but I nearly do always have Internet).
* Generally, I very rarely need to look at a paper copy of something. If it means something, the information has already been extracted into GnuCash, Jira, Confluence (highly, *highly* recommended even just for home use) or a text file.
I do feel your pain though, ADSL2 is long overdue at our current exchange, we can only get 2mbps at the best of times on ADSL Max, and it's been that way for a while.
ADSL2 probably won't change that - it's likely due to oversubscription at the exchange. What's your speed like at 3am?
I have a beautiful ADSL Max connection and can get 7.1MBit/s - the theoretical maximum - but only in the early morning, or at any time when the students leave (I'm in a university town). Around 7pm it drops to 1MBits/s or less. It's been this way for the year and half that I've lived here. BT won't do anything because it's usual over the ADSL Max minimum guaranteed speed, which is just 600KBit/s!
At another property a few miles down the road I can download all day at the maximum speed with not a single blip or wobble, but it is on a different exchange.
First we had people pull them apart and report poor build quality
One report of some internal untidiness! One!
I love all the Dell laptops with 2 hours battery life out-of-the-bx in particular, very useful concept...
I've had a couple of MBPs pass through my hands in the last year (one new and one refurb, zero defects) - both came fully charged which I thought was a nice touch.
That's not my experience with the unibody machines. Thermals on the 2009 MBP 15" are really good - yes, full CPU will get the fans up to 6200RPM but I'm really very impressed overall. It takes a lot to get them to spin up and even then they're nice and quiet considering the RPM they're doing.
Contrast that with the plastic bodied ~2007 MacBook - I found that the single fan would spin up high at the slightest provocation and be louder than the two in the MBP for the same RPM.
Because it's yet another link advert for "Network world"
I too was surprised to click the link in a story about iFixit's teardown and find myself on that god-awful website again - and I try my best to avoiding clicking through to them!
I can understand the need to link to websites that can withstand the slashdot effect but these days slashdot itself is really suffering from the quality of story abstracts and the continual linking to the same awful blogs, no doubt paid adverts.
Agree. I started using Spotify to have music to listen to in work, without having to spend time choosing music to go on my iPhone / iPod, find I'm not in the mood for anything I've synced, or the effort of streaming from my home network. Over time I've been using it more and more even to listen to music at home which I already have as MP3.
I've still bought a few of my favourite tracks and albums (through iTunes) but my 14 year old MP3 collection running to hundreds of GB has hardly been touched for a while now. Of course, my CDs just sit taking up space on shelves. I've considered eBaying the lot - which would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
As for the format question, I'm not really a fan of flac. I've not really been able to hear the different between it and good quality MP3, and while disk space is cheap it's not free - especially if you want to run RAID and have reliable backups. On top of that, I got sucked into the iTunes world (life is honestly so much better) and iTunes won't play flac.
Sorry, I see what you're getting at. I'm not English so forgive the semantic interpretation I intended for the word 'marvel'.
I meant of course to compare it to current and recent laptop computers, not monumental construction in limestone.
For example, to compare to something new from another manufacturer like http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Motorola-Xoom-Teardown/4989/1
Really? I only opened a MacBook for the first time a couple of months ago. It was a revelation.
But not in this case.
Yes, iFixIt have found problems which should not exist, but there are only two internal, inconsequential assembly errors in an absolute engineering marvel which is cranked out in massive numbers.
These machines are generations ahead of the PowerBooks in terms of sophistication and precision engineering.
Two internal marks that look tiny even in macro photographs! Oh my, we'd better put in a link to Computer World!
Wait, make that two!
These ill researched, amateur summarisations make me fucking sick.
Yeah, and everyone should build their own computer before being qualified to use one. If you can't solder capacitors, you're not going on WoW!
Leaked on the eve of release, after the products have been sent out to thousands of resellers who /might/ just open the boxes and post pictures on the internet?
The "anonymous coward" who submitted the article actually links to a website, the blog of a 2nd year UK university student. There are articles complaining about the quality of his education. I concur with that.
display that most UK ISPs 'aggressively throttle BitTorrent traffic after 6 p.m. at night,' with speeds suddenly going 'off a cliff.'
No, that's quite normal for some areas. It's not just BitTorrent but everything, due to oversubscription on BT's infrastructure. Right down latency, like a 12ms ping turning into a 50ms epic journey.
I know of a newspaper that won't be publishing this story...
Ha, talk about mental gears clicking into place. I'd grown so use to seeing the dollar sign as a prompt I'd completely separated it from the currency in my mind, as if there were two different symbols.
This is a great idea!
A problem I've seen is people banned from pubs in one town simply moving on to drinking a little further away. It's too easy for them. A nationwide system would help. Those who only go out at night to harm should not be allowed out anywhere...
I would certainly be pleased to have to "sign in" to a pub if means nobody with me is going to randomly glassed or stabbed by someone out to cause trouble.
BT infrastructure monopoly. I can choose whatever ISP I want but the local exchange will remain the bottleneck. That's why the increasing capacity of the local loop is such a wasteful, hateful subject for me. I connect to the exchange at the maximum possible ADSL sync and receive the maximum theoretical throughput only as long as I am browsing at 5am.
What would you like to do with 100 times your own current network speed?
Shit man, I'd be able to watch videos off YouTube!
In nearly a year and half, my local BT exchange has been congested. "Virtual paths: red". I went from November to January last year at 300Kbits/s on an 8Mbit ADSL line. This month it's been 700Kbits/s. Yet if I wake up at 5am, I have 7.1Mbit/s and can watch two HD streams off iPlayer.
I don't care. Life is better with data. I would actually pay for a phone that records my heartbeat and location and communicates it to a trusted 3rd party. You know what, it might save my life.
It doesn't work with the general public who enter anything and everything, appropriate or not. It doesn't work with corporates who prefer face to face meetings and everything discussed and tracked and accounted for. It doesn't work with small business who won't use it or if they do expect everything entered for free.
I don't have much experience of open source. Perhaps it works there.