Re:Training and Planning are the keys.
on
KDE 2.2.1 Up
·
· Score: 1
Whilst I agree that RTF probably doesn't support everything, I would be surprised if it did not support most of the functions you have mentioned.
I am fairly certain that of the list you mentioned, only figures may not be supported.
When I mentioned RTF, I only chose this format as a possible candidate for transfer. HTML springs to mind as another one, although what Word normally does to HTML is to horrendous to mention in polite company.
99.9% of Americans when polled, believed that a total ban on flying would have prevented the WTC disaster.
The poll was conducted with a random sample of 1000 people on September 13th/14th. Followup questions revealed that the 1 person who dissented had not heard of the World Trade Centre terrorist attack.
Asked to comment, a source close to the statistics department said "it was a damn stupid question to ask, just like the earlier question on crypto. But hey! We have to spend our grant money somehow!"
Re:Knode and Kmail were better in 2.1.1
on
KDE 2.2.1 Up
·
· Score: 1
I've found KNode and KMail in KDE to be the best mail and newsreader for Linux (date bug notwithstanding), and infinitely preferable to Mozilla mail, which I only use because I want to browse my email from Windows machines too.
Konqueror I find effective, reliable, but a bit on the slow side. Hope 2.2.1 fixes this.
Anyway, whaddya complaining about a 1.2GHz Athlon for? My Linux fileserver/ dogsbody is a K6-2 366 [with 400MB RAM + 80GB drive, which does help a lot]!!
Re:Training and Planning are the keys.
on
KDE 2.2.1 Up
·
· Score: 1
You're forgetting the small matter of KDE not supporting MS Office
No, but you can probably export to a common file format (RTF ?). The fact that KOffice does not support MS Office files is not damning if all your files are produced locally. However, more seriously KOffice is still not as professional as MSOffice in terms of features and even reliability, and I think it will be about 6-12 months before it gets close.
The fact that KDE does not have every feature MSWord does is not really a bad thing either (we can all get along without that damn paperclip for instance), but prospective buyers will compare KWord and MSWord using a blob comparison chart and work out KWord is the poor relation, despite the fact that the missing features are usaully the ones that no one uses.
Troll response: who needs Gnome AND KDE ?
on
KDE 2.2.1 Up
·
· Score: 1
Whilst I'm a KDE fan, I'm the first to admit that it does not hold all the answers to desktop design.
Competing products are ALWAYS necessary, open source or no open source, to ensure that the dominant product stays sharp. Open source has the advantage that if the Gnome guys do come up with some good ideas, observant KDE developers can insert it into KDE and vice versa.
..I must say that none of my collegues would use anything less than PGP and RSA even if it became illegal to do so. For one thing, a tiny sentence for using an illegal encryption system is nothing compared to frying for plotting to blow up a building or killing someone.
All that having backdoors in all crypto systems would mean is that me and my collegues would have a much easier time getting access to potential targets, as we could use the backdoors to track movements of important businessman and politicians, by breaking into systems of them and their collegues.
..if I had more than 5000 employees, it would be unlikely to be on one site, and I'd like my computing and email facilities to be distributed so that a disaster (e.g. fire, flood, planes crashing into building) was not fatal to organisation operation. In that light having a number of boxes over the country or site rather than a big lump of metal in one place looks very attractive.
Even if I did have one massive site, I would like some ability to continue operations if one building was out of action for any reason. In that light, even as a Linux junkie I wouldn't support the idea of buying a single big IBM system. The words 'putting all my eggs into one basket' seem to come to mind.
As a Briton, we don't regard one car bomb and a dozen dead in a week as "acceptable losses". Given the intransigence of both sides in Northern Ireland, we regard each and every one of the atrocities which have occurred there with deep dismay.
But I would gently point out that the murder rate including terrorist offences in Britain is *MUCH* lower than the murder rate in virtually any major US city.
My attitude to security is that the security services should be free to try and listen in by whatever method possible to any communications they feel necessary to protect our national security. But that doesn't mean as individuals we have to make it terribly easy for them! Personal security is to some extent the responsibility of the individual, and if the state has difficulty reading your emails, then you can be reasonably certain that your love life, business secrets and personal details sent in encrypted emails are equally secure.
You should remember that the desire of the US not to engage in widespread codebreaking probably contributed in some measure to Pearl Harbour. I seem to remember that between the wars US codebreaking efforts were nearly killed with the famous phrase "Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail".
are you joking? have you ever even looked at
MFC code? it's HIDEOUS! I can't believe people
make a living writing that kind of garbage
Yes, but with MFCs development environment you hardly have to write anything at all, which is probably the only reason why anything is produced using MFC.
I'm not sure a DirectX type package is required for Linux so much as a GUI IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that makes writing and developing such programs relatively simple. Then, hopefully, this will cause games developers to move over or at least port onto Linux.
The reason is simple; when space becomes available people think of applications to use that space. Any MP3 junkie will probably be able to happily fill a few GB with music, and it seems that video on disk is becoming more and more commonplace; see below for reasons why I'm a disk junkie)
As far as high speed is concerned, I'm not sure its truly necessary; what does appear to be a prerequisite is the ability to smoothly stream the data from the drive, and this can normally be met by the various caches in the system.
My Linux file server has just acquired an 80GB disk drive, and that just supports four people.
Some of that is because I'm a Unix software developer working on a mixture of projects involving GUI and Oracle, so I have a very complete RH and Oracle installation on my system. That alone seems to be about 6GB.
My TiVo hopefully will have a pair of 80GB drives, as soon as I read up on how to upgrade a two drive unit.
In addition to the above:
I've joined the digital photography world, and with 3-6 megapixel cameras on the market, single shot JPEG files are round about 1MB a pop.
My system also has complete Windows and Linux CD images, so remote machines can upgrade without having to find the damn disk. In addition to that I archive all Windows drivers I use - trying to locate the right floppy or CD at the right time is always impossible.
Anyway, with your who needs more disk space shot, you join a famous crowd -
BillG: Noone will need more than 640K RAM
IBM: Only about 5 computers in the world will be sold.
AFAIK, the French did have some rather tight laws on encryption, but the security services were told to get stuffed when the question of enforcing them came into question.
The French have this rather strange idea of puting laws on their statute books, but not implementing them in practise, as any visitor to a french kitchen restaurant will agree with regard to EU Health and Safety regulations. Its a subtle ploy to make English products hideously uncompetitive, as here we believe in implementing and enforcing every daft notion which comes out of Brussels and Frankfurt.
[ I have to say that the Resolution in the headline, though, seems to be one of the better ones! Maybe as a result of this, once a bureaucrat gets a Linux system and finds he can't play DVDs on it, maybe he'll realise that implementing the European equivalent of the DMCA is a damn stupid idea....:-) ]
OK, here's a strategy for Linux to take a Great Leap Forward in the HP world. What would happen if HP GPLed the code to TRU64 and HP-UX, so it could be assimilated into Linux ?
Result: you'd have a Linux that would operate on anything that HP could throw at it in 6-9 months, and there would be no denying that after Linux incorporated these changes that it was a Very Serious Operating System that can operate in the banking, financial and other feelgood sectors that mean that any purchasing manager may suggest using Linux without risking his/her career [ we all know it does anyway, but in a rather furtive manner].
HP-UX may be a nice operating system, but compared to Linux, the amount of stuff being developed for it is trivial. What does exist on these platforms howver is of excellent quality and therefore if it could be ported to Linux, both HP and Linux would benefit.
I don't think any lego vehicle is indestructable, but I'm open to ideas.
Actually we used to just forgo the puppets and try to design vehicles that were indestructable, and then take turns ramming them into each other till one vehicle could not maintain motion along the ground.
The best construction we came up with was a couple of rows of angled roof bricks sandwiched between two flat boards. Most ramming attempts on this sort of vehicle would simply result in the attacker going up the ramp of the bricks and causing more damage to itself than the defender.
Main vulnerability of this design appeared to be the wheels, which if repeately rammed, would "lever out" the top bottom plates, allowing the rest of the vehicle to be broken up.
I am surprised that CPU manaufacturers don't contribute specialised sections for their new processor to GCC rather than going the whole hog and producing a new compiler. For one thing, you have a baseline to work on, and for another, you ensure long term support of your compiler.
When I used compilers produced for a specific processor I find the initial support is there but there is certainly not going to be long term support. Opening up the development of a compiler would ensure long term support for the CPU and provide the manufactur with more potential sales.
Thanks for the info on the TiVO GPLed code, maroberts C'est rien.
Sounds like the device has the bits and pieces to do everything required. The TiVo (again IIRC) uses a mere 50MHz PowerPC chip [being RISC, this probably delivers similar performance to a 200MHz Pentium, but a lot of TiVo reverse engineers believe the Tivo gets very near to its processing limits at times] with a number of support chips.
If you're really interested in the TiVo, see the ongoing discussions in the TiVo AVS forum:
http://www.avsforum.com/ubbcgitivo/Ultimate.cgi Also Andrew Tridgell (of Samba fame) has done some engineering to get the TivO to take a network cardand other goodies. See
http://www.samba.org for more details.
I have a TiVo - IIRC they made some modifications to the kernel which they have released (I believe for better real time support and to support the filesystem) under the GPL; however the main TiVo program is NOT GPL for the simple reason that they need to protect their subscription payments.
I'm not sure which came first, National support or the choice of National IC, but one reason could be that to make a reasonable set-top box they need a chipset with a lot of the required features of a settop box to keep the need for extra ICs down. One feature of such a box needs to be that unnecessary costs are kept to a minimum.
P.S. Is the IC chosen a CPU, microcontroller, or just an IC which requires an external CPU ?
I'm too lazy to RTFM!
The answer is probably a lower spec PC, but since you need enough power to DVD generation this is probably not an option.
What about something which doesn't need a fan (Apple ??) or even a non-Intel Linux box (Alpha, or IBM RS chip - not sure if these need lots of air circulation or not).
There are lots of lots of fans and PSUs which have low noise fans around (see Slashdots passim); anyone know of a high efficiency PSU or possibly switch mode PSU which doesn't need a fan ? One thing to bear in mind though is that the PSU fan also IIRC circulates air round your PC box too, so if you get rid of the fan from the PSU you may still need some form of CPU/ processor cooling.
After that, you have the hard disk drive noise; I believe there are also low noise HDDs, or alternativle have enough RAM on board such that your PC can spin down your hard drive when not in use.
80 decibels is the level of heavy traffic. That's almost as loud as standing next to a lawn mower.
Poetic license doesn't exist where you are then ?:-)
Actually I've recently suffered from a ear infection which gave me tinnitus, which in turn totally stuffed my hearing, headphones or no. Fortunately I got better, but my hearing is still not 100%. Headphones are not an option, as I'm normally only allowed to play games when I'm keeping an ear out for any noises coming from our children upstairs, so I don't want to screen out important ambient noises.
Whilst not a hardcore gamer, I am an occassional gamer, and noise is very important.
If you are listening in (say) Half-Life/Counterstrike or Quake for the sounds made by your opponents, having several fans generating 80dB by your ear is not conducive to hearing the sounds made by your enemy slowly creeping up to a good shooting position.
Therefore boxes which generate little extraneous noise are a good thing to gamers, and your frag ratio!! What you really want is a killer box with no fan noise.
Also gamers want low heat as well, a sweaty gamer fragging in just his/her underwear is not a pretty sight (and may get him/her arrested)!
can anyone recommend a (preferably UK based) source of cases with power/ reset switches(and even better CD drive) which can't easily be accessed by a 14 month old son who is fascinated by all the bright lights?
i.e. power and reset behind either a sliding or locking door.
My views on StarOffice were tainted by my attempts to use version 5.0, and to be honest I didn't really like the StarOffice way of doing things.
Haven't tried OpenOffice, but KOffice looks quite promissing albeit a bit basic and non-MS Office compatible at the moment (unfortunately a prerequisite).
People without broadband just simply do batch downloads - I get my PC to download files in the backgound, then get on with something else.
Due to the fact that BT have done their level best to make broadband access rollout as complicated as possible, and also the fact that England has lots of itty bitty villages that noone will regard rolling a cable out to as profitable, and whose local exchanges are last on the list to be ugraded, the majority of the UK is still on 56K modems.
There are things you can do to make your life easier. I use one of the BT Anytime connections (unlimited net access for £14.99) but note it has a 2 hour timeout, which makes downloading the latest release of KDE a bit of a b*tch. So I've written a simple script which downloads a directory/ list of files, resuming if the net connection goes down by means of the FTP reget.
(If there's a properly written script to do this let me know)
Anyway, just because you have a broadband connection does not mean you're going to get 256K uploads - there are enough choke points at various points on your net travels to ensure that you are unlikely to be able to eplout your full upload rate. Web sites that don't bear this in mind are likely to be out of business RSN anyway. Web site designers catering to just the top of the market forget the principles that if you sell on the web you should appeal to as many people as possible, since only a tiny proportion of site accesses are likely to result in sales.
Slashdot Mirror
Whilst I agree that RTF probably doesn't support everything, I would be surprised if it did not support most of the functions you have mentioned.
I am fairly certain that of the list you mentioned, only figures may not be supported.
When I mentioned RTF, I only chose this format as a possible candidate for transfer. HTML springs to mind as another one, although what Word normally does to HTML is to horrendous to mention in polite company.
99.9% of Americans when polled, believed that a total ban on flying would have prevented the WTC disaster.
The poll was conducted with a random sample of 1000 people on September 13th/14th. Followup questions revealed that the 1 person who dissented had not heard of the World Trade Centre terrorist attack.
Asked to comment, a source close to the statistics department said "it was a damn stupid question to ask, just like the earlier question on crypto. But hey! We have to spend our grant money somehow!"
I've found KNode and KMail in KDE to be the best mail and newsreader for Linux (date bug notwithstanding), and infinitely preferable to Mozilla mail, which I only use because I want to browse my email from Windows machines too.
Konqueror I find effective, reliable, but a bit on the slow side. Hope 2.2.1 fixes this.
Anyway, whaddya complaining about a 1.2GHz Athlon for? My Linux fileserver/ dogsbody is a K6-2 366 [with 400MB RAM + 80GB drive, which does help a lot]!!
You're forgetting the small matter of KDE not supporting MS Office
No, but you can probably export to a common file format (RTF ?). The fact that KOffice does not support MS Office files is not damning if all your files are produced locally. However, more seriously KOffice is still not as professional as MSOffice in terms of features and even reliability, and I think it will be about 6-12 months before it gets close.
The fact that KDE does not have every feature MSWord does is not really a bad thing either (we can all get along without that damn paperclip for instance), but prospective buyers will compare KWord and MSWord using a blob comparison chart and work out KWord is the poor relation, despite the fact that the missing features are usaully the ones that no one uses.
Whilst I'm a KDE fan, I'm the first to admit that it does not hold all the answers to desktop design.
Competing products are ALWAYS necessary, open source or no open source, to ensure that the dominant product stays sharp. Open source has the advantage that if the Gnome guys do come up with some good ideas, observant KDE developers can insert it into KDE and vice versa.
..I must say that none of my collegues would use anything less than PGP and RSA even if it became illegal to do so. For one thing, a tiny sentence for using an illegal encryption system is nothing compared to frying for plotting to blow up a building or killing someone.
All that having backdoors in all crypto systems would mean is that me and my collegues would have a much easier time getting access to potential targets, as we could use the backdoors to track movements of important businessman and politicians, by breaking into systems of them and their collegues.
..if I had more than 5000 employees, it would be unlikely to be on one site, and I'd like my computing and email facilities to be distributed so that a disaster (e.g. fire, flood, planes crashing into building) was not fatal to organisation operation. In that light having a number of boxes over the country or site rather than a big lump of metal in one place looks very attractive.
Even if I did have one massive site, I would like some ability to continue operations if one building was out of action for any reason. In that light, even as a Linux junkie I wouldn't support the idea of buying a single big IBM system. The words 'putting all my eggs into one basket' seem to come to mind.
As a Briton, we don't regard one car bomb and a dozen dead in a week as "acceptable losses". Given the intransigence of both sides in Northern Ireland, we regard each and every one of the atrocities which have occurred there with deep dismay.
But I would gently point out that the murder rate including terrorist offences in Britain is *MUCH* lower than the murder rate in virtually any major US city.
My attitude to security is that the security services should be free to try and listen in by whatever method possible to any communications they feel necessary to protect our national security. But that doesn't mean as individuals we have to make it terribly easy for them! Personal security is to some extent the responsibility of the individual, and if the state has difficulty reading your emails, then you can be reasonably certain that your love life, business secrets and personal details sent in encrypted emails are equally secure.
You should remember that the desire of the US not to engage in widespread codebreaking probably contributed in some measure to Pearl Harbour. I seem to remember that between the wars US codebreaking efforts were nearly killed with the famous phrase "Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail".
are you joking? have you ever even looked at
MFC code? it's HIDEOUS! I can't believe people
make a living writing that kind of garbage
Yes, but with MFCs development environment you hardly have to write anything at all, which is probably the only reason why anything is produced using MFC.
I'm not sure a DirectX type package is required for Linux so much as a GUI IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that makes writing and developing such programs relatively simple. Then, hopefully, this will cause games developers to move over or at least port onto Linux.
The reason is simple; when space becomes available people think of applications to use that space. Any MP3 junkie will probably be able to happily fill a few GB with music, and it seems that video on disk is becoming more and more commonplace; see below for reasons why I'm a disk junkie)
As far as high speed is concerned, I'm not sure its truly necessary; what does appear to be a prerequisite is the ability to smoothly stream the data from the drive, and this can normally be met by the various caches in the system.
My Linux file server has just acquired an 80GB disk drive, and that just supports four people.
Some of that is because I'm a Unix software developer working on a mixture of projects involving GUI and Oracle, so I have a very complete RH and Oracle installation on my system. That alone seems to be about 6GB.
My TiVo hopefully will have a pair of 80GB drives, as soon as I read up on how to upgrade a two drive unit.
In addition to the above:
I've joined the digital photography world, and with 3-6 megapixel cameras on the market, single shot JPEG files are round about 1MB a pop.
My system also has complete Windows and Linux CD images, so remote machines can upgrade without having to find the damn disk. In addition to that I archive all Windows drivers I use - trying to locate the right floppy or CD at the right time is always impossible.
Anyway, with your who needs more disk space shot, you join a famous crowd -
BillG: Noone will need more than 640K RAM
IBM: Only about 5 computers in the world will be sold.
He can perform both kinds of music... Country AND Western!
:-)
Guess who has had The Blues Brothers out on rental recently!
AFAIK, the French did have some rather tight laws on encryption, but the security services were told to get stuffed when the question of enforcing them came into question.
:-) ]
The French have this rather strange idea of puting laws on their statute books, but not implementing them in practise, as any visitor to a french kitchen restaurant will agree with regard to EU Health and Safety regulations. Its a subtle ploy to make English products hideously uncompetitive, as here we believe in implementing and enforcing every daft notion which comes out of Brussels and Frankfurt.
[ I have to say that the Resolution in the headline, though, seems to be one of the better ones! Maybe as a result of this, once a bureaucrat gets a Linux system and finds he can't play DVDs on it, maybe he'll realise that implementing the European equivalent of the DMCA is a damn stupid idea....
Someone mod the parent post - #2262446, up a few (+1 funny) points please.
OK, here's a strategy for Linux to take a Great Leap Forward in the HP world. What would happen if HP GPLed the code to TRU64 and HP-UX, so it could be assimilated into Linux ?
Result: you'd have a Linux that would operate on anything that HP could throw at it in 6-9 months, and there would be no denying that after Linux incorporated these changes that it was a Very Serious Operating System that can operate in the banking, financial and other feelgood sectors that mean that any purchasing manager may suggest using Linux without risking his/her career [ we all know it does anyway, but in a rather furtive manner].
HP-UX may be a nice operating system, but compared to Linux, the amount of stuff being developed for it is trivial. What does exist on these platforms howver is of excellent quality and therefore if it could be ported to Linux, both HP and Linux would benefit.
(:
Left handed smiley ?
Smiley wearing tin hat ?
[AOL]Me too![/AOL]
I don't think any lego vehicle is indestructable, but I'm open to ideas.
Actually we used to just forgo the puppets and try to design vehicles that were indestructable, and then take turns ramming them into each other till one vehicle could not maintain motion along the ground.
The best construction we came up with was a couple of rows of angled roof bricks sandwiched between two flat boards. Most ramming attempts on this sort of vehicle would simply result in the attacker going up the ramp of the bricks and causing more damage to itself than the defender.
Main vulnerability of this design appeared to be the wheels, which if repeately rammed, would "lever out" the top bottom plates, allowing the rest of the vehicle to be broken up.
I am surprised that CPU manaufacturers don't contribute specialised sections for their new processor to GCC rather than going the whole hog and producing a new compiler. For one thing, you have a baseline to work on, and for another, you ensure long term support of your compiler.
When I used compilers produced for a specific processor I find the initial support is there but there is certainly not going to be long term support. Opening up the development of a compiler would ensure long term support for the CPU and provide the manufactur with more potential sales.
Thanks for the info on the TiVO GPLed code, maroberts C'est rien.
Sounds like the device has the bits and pieces to do everything required. The TiVo (again IIRC) uses a mere 50MHz PowerPC chip [being RISC, this probably delivers similar performance to a 200MHz Pentium, but a lot of TiVo reverse engineers believe the Tivo gets very near to its processing limits at times] with a number of support chips.
If you're really interested in the TiVo, see the ongoing discussions in the TiVo AVS forum:
http://www.avsforum.com/ubbcgitivo/Ultimate.cgi
Also Andrew Tridgell (of Samba fame) has done some engineering to get the TivO to take a network cardand other goodies. See
http://www.samba.org
for more details.
I have a TiVo - IIRC they made some modifications to the kernel which they have released (I believe for better real time support and to support the filesystem) under the GPL; however the main TiVo program is NOT GPL for the simple reason that they need to protect their subscription payments.
I'm not sure which came first, National support or the choice of National IC, but one reason could be that to make a reasonable set-top box they need a chipset with a lot of the required features of a settop box to keep the need for extra ICs down. One feature of such a box needs to be that unnecessary costs are kept to a minimum.
P.S. Is the IC chosen a CPU, microcontroller, or just an IC which requires an external CPU ?
I'm too lazy to RTFM!
The answer is probably a lower spec PC, but since you need enough power to DVD generation this is probably not an option.
What about something which doesn't need a fan (Apple ??) or even a non-Intel Linux box (Alpha, or IBM RS chip - not sure if these need lots of air circulation or not).
There are lots of lots of fans and PSUs which have low noise fans around (see Slashdots passim); anyone know of a high efficiency PSU or possibly switch mode PSU which doesn't need a fan ? One thing to bear in mind though is that the PSU fan also IIRC circulates air round your PC box too, so if you get rid of the fan from the PSU you may still need some form of CPU/ processor cooling.
After that, you have the hard disk drive noise; I believe there are also low noise HDDs, or alternativle have enough RAM on board such that your PC can spin down your hard drive when not in use.
80 decibels is the level of heavy traffic. That's almost as loud as standing next to a lawn mower.
:-)
Poetic license doesn't exist where you are then ?
Actually I've recently suffered from a ear infection which gave me tinnitus, which in turn totally stuffed my hearing, headphones or no. Fortunately I got better, but my hearing is still not 100%. Headphones are not an option, as I'm normally only allowed to play games when I'm keeping an ear out for any noises coming from our children upstairs, so I don't want to screen out important ambient noises.
Whilst not a hardcore gamer, I am an occassional gamer, and noise is very important.
If you are listening in (say) Half-Life/Counterstrike or Quake for the sounds made by your opponents, having several fans generating 80dB by your ear is not conducive to hearing the sounds made by your enemy slowly creeping up to a good shooting position.
Therefore boxes which generate little extraneous noise are a good thing to gamers, and your frag ratio!! What you really want is a killer box with no fan noise.
Also gamers want low heat as well, a sweaty gamer fragging in just his/her underwear is not a pretty sight (and may get him/her arrested)!
can anyone recommend a (preferably UK based) source of cases with power/ reset switches(and even better CD drive) which can't easily be accessed by a 14 month old son who is fascinated by all the bright lights?
i.e. power and reset behind either a sliding or locking door.
My views on StarOffice were tainted by my attempts to use version 5.0, and to be honest I didn't really like the StarOffice way of doing things.
Haven't tried OpenOffice, but KOffice looks quite promissing albeit a bit basic and non-MS Office compatible at the moment (unfortunately a prerequisite).
People without broadband just simply do batch downloads - I get my PC to download files in the backgound, then get on with something else.
Due to the fact that BT have done their level best to make broadband access rollout as complicated as possible, and also the fact that England has lots of itty bitty villages that noone will regard rolling a cable out to as profitable, and whose local exchanges are last on the list to be ugraded, the majority of the UK is still on 56K modems.
There are things you can do to make your life easier. I use one of the BT Anytime connections (unlimited net access for £14.99) but note it has a 2 hour timeout, which makes downloading the latest release of KDE a bit of a b*tch. So I've written a simple script which downloads a directory/ list of files, resuming if the net connection goes down by means of the FTP reget.
(If there's a properly written script to do this let me know)
Anyway, just because you have a broadband connection does not mean you're going to get 256K uploads - there are enough choke points at various points on your net travels to ensure that you are unlikely to be able to eplout your full upload rate. Web sites that don't bear this in mind are likely to be out of business RSN anyway. Web site designers catering to just the top of the market forget the principles that if you sell on the web you should appeal to as many people as possible, since only a tiny proportion of site accesses are likely to result in sales.