DSL is only available in some areas at present. They have two systems, a 'home' system at 40 GBP per month, and a 'business' system at 100 GBP per month.
The 'home' system users a USB based interface, with closed specifications. Drivers are only available for Windows 95, 98, ME and 2000, so Linux, Macintosh, BeOS, NT 4.0 and other users are not able to use it. It is made worse by the fact that the USB device exceeds the USB specificaation regarding the amount of current it draws.
The 'business' system is OS independant, requiring a UTP network connection instead.
Oftel, our telecomms regulator, has done absolutely nothing constructive about this mess.
Other privatised industries are just as bad. Our railways are an utter shambles.
I'm getting to the state where I'm ashamed to be British.
This sounds a bit like the lists available under StreetTalk, Banyan's directory services that have been around since the late 1980's. I supported this technolgy for many years, and there were a couple of interesting problems associated with such structures.
StreetTalk names were in the format x@y@z, where y was confusingly called a group, and z the organisation. StreetTalk had 4 main data-item types, users, nicknames (a pointer to another streettalk item), services (a process) and lists. Lists could contain one or more instances of the other, including other lists, and also wildcard patterns which only matched users and services.
The problem was with list evaluation. If a list pointed to other lists these searches could be time consuming, particularly if one of the lists to be searched was remote.
It was time consuming to search lists, particularly if users were not in the list (a common occurance in access permissions). We'd often get the case where administrators could access resources immediately, but normal users would have 40 second delays in getting to their data, as a list of valid administrators had to be searched in full before the user could be validated. I even had one factory in Scotland which made remote StreetTalk calls to the head office in Ohio whenever a non-admistrative user attempted to open a local file.
I used to spend a large amount of time optimising the use of lists to be as simple as possible, usually replacing them with wildcards. The problem was that those designing such list mechanisms didn't understand the underlying technology.
I'd want to avoid using a structure as proposed due to these, as a lookup will need to be performed everytime one of the groups is evaluated. This will take some time. Best bet is to have some mechanism for generating the new/etc/groups file on the fly.
One magazine published a flexi with 5 tracks for different machines. Spectrum, C64, BBC and a couple of others (Oric, Dragon - certainly pre-Amstrad due to my circumstances at the time).
I had a Spectrum, a friend had a C64. We spent hours dubbing both these two to tape with little luck, but eventually I managed to get the Spectrum one to load on my machine, only to discover that the program was a really awful basic game. My friend's C64 didn't want to play at all with his track.
I lived in the grounds of a local Grammar School (my father was the caretaker) and one weekend spent a day trying the same with the schools only BBC Model B. No luck there, either.
Later C&VG published another such disk, this time containing a Spectrum game in Quill format, with a competition prize for the first to solve it. I never got that one to work - pity, as I had managed to reverse engineer the Quill data format to some extent.
I used to work in an environment where I spend 50% of the time giving 3rd line support to customers, and 50% of the time administrating our network used by a motley crew of programmers. I had to deal with the following:
Developers changing IP settings at will for test purposes, causing quite a few duplicate IP addresses.
Public storage areas losing 300MB or more overnight, due to someone installing pirated software on their project data area.
Backing up entire workstations to the same project area during the day, slowing down our filesserver to a crawl whilst at the same time consuming all of that segments LAN utilisation.
Hardware breaking due to one developer believing he knew what to do with a screwdriver. Also during one training course *EVERY* PC in our training room had it's memory tinkered with in some way.
Complete disregard for file permissions. Chmod everything to 777 recursivly, as it works.
Borrowing AUI to UTP transceivers from important equipment, believing them to be network cards.
Installing a demo network for an important client whilst using Parrallel port NICs, then wondering why the demo ran slowly. (I was out of the office that week).
'Installing' Windows based software to the network, eating bandwidth when executing the code. Very common in our office. My boss (a developer) did this with a 30-40 user roll-out of an Office suite at an important client. I had to fly out there on a weekend to fix it.
10 years ago (or more) the UK end of Alpha Micro sold PC-based SCO Xenix systems. The hardware was made by a company called Rexon.
We had one nicknamed 'The Pig'. It was a huge 20MHz 386-DX machine with 6MB of RAM, and a lot of ISA slots. One novel feature was that all hard disks were in removable trays, making it possible to remove the drive without having to take the cover off. Of course they weren't hot-swappable. It got knocked out in a storm before I arrived at the place, and was repeatedly being reinstalled (usually by me!), before a fortune was spent on reparing it.
What has this got to do with the original topic? Nothing, really.
One of the UK PC shops specialising in games sells them for around 40 UKP. Contains an ISA card with 2 phono jacks, the relevant cable, and some Windows software for reading and writing to tape. They've had them in stock for a couple of years.
In around 1983 some UK magazines carried software on flexi-disk on their covers. The idea was to dub the flexi-disk onto tape and then load the software via tape. It usually didn't work for numerous reasons. I recall only once being successful, and that was after many retries. It would have been quicker to copy the software from a printed listing.
One magazine even published an adventure game, with a prize to the first to complete it, in this format. They got a lot of complaints.
I remember when the first cover-mounted CD-Rom appeared over here. I bought the magazine, even though I didn't have a CD-Rom drive at the time. The CD was padded out with appalling audio tracks.
I currently run 2.2.17 with the IDE patch set - this allows my VIA MVP3 to work in UDMA mode.
I'll have to wait for the IDE patch for 2.2.18 before upgrading. Pity as I want to try out USB at some point, and 2.4.0-test wasn't too stable on my hardware last time I tried it.
Maybe the IDE patches will make 2.2.19, but as there are IDE chipsets out there that can't implement DMA safely, I doubt wether this will happen.
Time and time again I see inaccurate reports, either in the printed media or on a web site. Either the author didn't check their facts before writing, or clearly didn't understand the issue in the first place.
Unfortunatly the article here seems to indicate that there's a problem with the Linux kernel itself, when instead the problem is with some of Redhat's user-space installation tools. I've personally not used Redhat since version 4.x - so have no experience of their software, but I do know for a fact that there is nothing in the linux kernel itself that prevents it from not working on a Pentium IV. Granted it may not work as well as possible until the proper tweaks are added, but it will work.
Could we please have accurate articles? You are starting to look like Linux Format, which is an utterly dreadful UK magazine famed for clueless reporting.
You should not be running ReiserFS in a production environment - it just isn't 100% stable enough to be trusted, and can lead to data-loss in some circumstances.
I'm holding fire until it appears in a stable kernel release, before it goes onto live systems.
I had a bad experience with something like this in the past.
The PHB (technically clueless) decided it would be a good idea for us to remotely manage customer sites via Managewise (over a single ISDN line - natch!). He got hold of some 3rd party speech software for Managewise, and installed it on the managewise console which incidentally was next to my desk. Why me - I had nothing to do with the Netware side of things. Both the soundcard (an el-cheapo 8-bit jobbie from 1990) and speakers (very low quality - bundled with another card) were mine - I had brought them in for some other project and they were still hanging around.
Whenever a user logged in or out I'd here some speech indicating what had happened, or some other noises. No-one was actually monitoring the machine (too much effort), and I'd get thoroughly annoyed by this thing blasting out noises and messages all day.
Eventually I trashed the speakers by disconnecting the cables inside - peace at last!
The PHB left shortly afterwards - Managewise was a disaster over ISDN.
.... Microsoft spent as much effort into debugging there code as they put into their Marketing and Legal departments, they wouldn't have as many security fixes to publish in the first place.
Try telling that to the Football Association and Football League. (Soccer to those on the left side of the pond).
Both have copyrighted their fixture lists, and some fan sites have been told not to post fixture lists. Apparantly you have to pay them money to be able to print such lists.
The last major thing I downloaded was Netscape 4.76, which took some time. Now this appears!
Doesn't matter as I have to reinstall everything anyway. My root filesystem went belly-up on Sunday, causing many major things to either disapper or become corrupted. May be due to an IDE/DMA bug, a hardware failure, or dual-booting into Windows. I'll be doing a thorough disk scan tonight,
In 1990 I started work for a small UK reseller, giving support to their accounts (up to about 50 organisations), and only supported the major products we sold to the customers. During those days technical infomation was hard to get hold of, and we survived by being a repositry for all the products we handled.
We won many contracts with other users of the products we sold on my skills alone. I was even flown overseas to fix broken systems that even the manufacturers couldn't resolve.
Later things started to go bad. Sales decided we could act as a 'one-stop shop', giving support on software other than the products we had supplied, and passing hardware calls onto a 3rd party. I took calls on 8 year old DOS applications I'd never seen, never mind used. I even had a support call on an obscure installation issue with an even more obscure OS no-one in our company had ever used. I also had 50 faulty printers and monitors logged by one company on the same day, and I had to log each one in turn with the relevant hardware maintainer. Yuck!
The real fun started in 1997, soon after a merger with a Netware reseller. The new head of my department (who was about as technically knowledgeable as my mother's cat) decided we could support major networks remotely via Managewise (ick!) over a single ISDN line. We signed up 3 or 4 customers for this, including a major 500+ user network spread across 3 sites in the same city. Needless to say it didn't work, and we ended up being no-more than a call centre for these comapanies. I stuck it out for a year and left the place in disgust, particularly after the non-Netwarae products I had dealt with since 1990 was on its way out.
IMHO Technical Support used to be a decent job, back in the days when the customer's themselves had some intelligence. Now it isn't worthwhile, as there are few gifted individuals left in that field.
I test financial trading systems, all of which reside on remote systems across a private network.
Some of my tests involve simulating various fail conditions, and these tests need to be improved. Currently I terminate my process abruptly, or have my process ignore all messages for a set period of time - neither test is enough. Adding random line noise would be an extra test.
The main advantage of normal radio is that it is extreemly portable. Stick a radio in your pocket and you can listen anywhere. I carry a pocket radio on the long bus journey to and from work, and also use it on a Saturday afternoon when leaving the football to find out how the other teams have done. How is sattelite going to work here?
Digital radio would be a lot better. Currently I have problems with co-channel interference when travelling back from work, meaning that I can't here my local radio station until about 6.45pm, missing essential news bulletins. Digital terrestial radio would make things better. It would also make Radio 5 listenable on an evening.
A few ISPs in the UK have gone under. One notable one provide unlimited free call access for a single fee - usually in the UK local telephone calls are charged at a per-minute rate.
They had serious problems from the outset - staff were not being paid on time, treated like dirt, that sort of thing.
Eventually they got a bill from their provider for around 2 million GBP, and realised that they couldn't pay it.
This sounds like, pardon my english, a load of old cobblers. A typical technical ignorant journalist working for a national newspaper swallows a lot of hype and says very little.
The Omniputer will probably be a standard PC clone with a few extra bits of hardware (the touch screen) bundled into the package, sold with the typical low quality drivers and software you get with OEM hardware. The rest is marketing bull.
It's typical of the clueless morons we have writing for the UK press. Even technical publications suffer from the same; with page after page stuffed full of reinterpretations of the lasted diatribe from another ex used-car or double-glazing salesman. The UK press never seem to employ competant journalists - look at 'Linux Format' for an example of how not to write a Linux magazine.
The only reason that Arthur C Clarke is involved is that he too moved to Sri Lanka many years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
The more expensive NIC based solution is also avaiable, but that is too expensive for a typical home user.
The 'home' system users a USB based interface, with closed specifications. Drivers are only available for Windows 95, 98, ME and 2000, so Linux, Macintosh, BeOS, NT 4.0 and other users are not able to use it. It is made worse by the fact that the USB device exceeds the USB specificaation regarding the amount of current it draws.
The 'business' system is OS independant, requiring a UTP network connection instead.
Oftel, our telecomms regulator, has done absolutely nothing constructive about this mess.
Other privatised industries are just as bad. Our railways are an utter shambles.
I'm getting to the state where I'm ashamed to be British.
StreetTalk names were in the format x@y@z, where y was confusingly called a group, and z the organisation. StreetTalk had 4 main data-item types, users, nicknames (a pointer to another streettalk item), services (a process) and lists. Lists could contain one or more instances of the other, including other lists, and also wildcard patterns which only matched users and services.
The problem was with list evaluation. If a list pointed to other lists these searches could be time consuming, particularly if one of the lists to be searched was remote.
It was time consuming to search lists, particularly if users were not in the list (a common occurance in access permissions). We'd often get the case where administrators could access resources immediately, but normal users would have 40 second delays in getting to their data, as a list of valid administrators had to be searched in full before the user could be validated. I even had one factory in Scotland which made remote StreetTalk calls to the head office in Ohio whenever a non-admistrative user attempted to open a local file.
I used to spend a large amount of time optimising the use of lists to be as simple as possible, usually replacing them with wildcards. The problem was that those designing such list mechanisms didn't understand the underlying technology.
I'd want to avoid using a structure as proposed due to these, as a lookup will need to be performed everytime one of the groups is evaluated. This will take some time. Best bet is to have some mechanism for generating the new /etc/groups file on the fly.
One magazine published a flexi with 5 tracks for different machines. Spectrum, C64, BBC and a couple of others (Oric, Dragon - certainly pre-Amstrad due to my circumstances at the time).
I had a Spectrum, a friend had a C64. We spent hours dubbing both these two to tape with little luck, but eventually I managed to get the Spectrum one to load on my machine, only to discover that the program was a really awful basic game. My friend's C64 didn't want to play at all with his track.
I lived in the grounds of a local Grammar School (my father was the caretaker) and one weekend spent a day trying the same with the schools only BBC Model B. No luck there, either.
Later C&VG published another such disk, this time containing a Spectrum game in Quill format, with a competition prize for the first to solve it. I never got that one to work - pity, as I had managed to reverse engineer the Quill data format to some extent.
Developers changing IP settings at will for test purposes, causing quite a few duplicate IP addresses.
Public storage areas losing 300MB or more overnight, due to someone installing pirated software on their project data area.
Backing up entire workstations to the same project area during the day, slowing down our filesserver to a crawl whilst at the same time consuming all of that segments LAN utilisation.
Hardware breaking due to one developer believing he knew what to do with a screwdriver. Also during one training course *EVERY* PC in our training room had it's memory tinkered with in some way.
Complete disregard for file permissions. Chmod everything to 777 recursivly, as it works.
Borrowing AUI to UTP transceivers from important equipment, believing them to be network cards.
Installing a demo network for an important client whilst using Parrallel port NICs, then wondering why the demo ran slowly. (I was out of the office that week).
'Installing' Windows based software to the network, eating bandwidth when executing the code. Very common in our office. My boss (a developer) did this with a 30-40 user roll-out of an Office suite at an important client. I had to fly out there on a weekend to fix it.
10 years ago (or more) the UK end of Alpha Micro sold PC-based SCO Xenix systems. The hardware was made by a company called Rexon.
We had one nicknamed 'The Pig'. It was a huge 20MHz 386-DX machine with 6MB of RAM, and a lot of ISA slots. One novel feature was that all hard disks were in removable trays, making it possible to remove the drive without having to take the cover off. Of course they weren't hot-swappable. It got knocked out in a storm before I arrived at the place, and was repeatedly being reinstalled (usually by me!), before a fortune was spent on reparing it.
What has this got to do with the original topic? Nothing, really.
One of the UK PC shops specialising in games sells them for around 40 UKP. Contains an ISA card with 2 phono jacks, the relevant cable, and some Windows software for reading and writing to tape. They've had them in stock for a couple of years.
One magazine even published an adventure game, with a prize to the first to complete it, in this format. They got a lot of complaints.
I remember when the first cover-mounted CD-Rom appeared over here. I bought the magazine, even though I didn't have a CD-Rom drive at the time. The CD was padded out with appalling audio tracks.
I currently run 2.2.17 with the IDE patch set - this allows my VIA MVP3 to work in UDMA mode.
I'll have to wait for the IDE patch for 2.2.18 before upgrading. Pity as I want to try out USB at some point, and 2.4.0-test wasn't too stable on my hardware last time I tried it.
Maybe the IDE patches will make 2.2.19, but as there are IDE chipsets out there that can't implement DMA safely, I doubt wether this will happen.
Get a clue.
Unfortunatly the article here seems to indicate that there's a problem with the Linux kernel itself, when instead the problem is with some of Redhat's user-space installation tools. I've personally not used Redhat since version 4.x - so have no experience of their software, but I do know for a fact that there is nothing in the linux kernel itself that prevents it from not working on a Pentium IV. Granted it may not work as well as possible until the proper tweaks are added, but it will work.
Could we please have accurate articles? You are starting to look like Linux Format, which is an utterly dreadful UK magazine famed for clueless reporting.
I'm holding fire until it appears in a stable kernel release, before it goes onto live systems.
The PHB (technically clueless) decided it would be a good idea for us to remotely manage customer sites via Managewise (over a single ISDN line - natch!). He got hold of some 3rd party speech software for Managewise, and installed it on the managewise console which incidentally was next to my desk. Why me - I had nothing to do with the Netware side of things. Both the soundcard (an el-cheapo 8-bit jobbie from 1990) and speakers (very low quality - bundled with another card) were mine - I had brought them in for some other project and they were still hanging around.
Whenever a user logged in or out I'd here some speech indicating what had happened, or some other noises. No-one was actually monitoring the machine (too much effort), and I'd get thoroughly annoyed by this thing blasting out noises and messages all day.
Eventually I trashed the speakers by disconnecting the cables inside - peace at last!
The PHB left shortly afterwards - Managewise was a disaster over ISDN.
Number the letters of the alphabet sequentially from 1 to 26, then spell out "Love" and "War", adding the value of each letter together.
Interesting?!?
.... Microsoft spent as much effort into debugging there code as they put into their Marketing and Legal departments, they wouldn't have as many security fixes to publish in the first place.
Both have copyrighted their fixture lists, and some fan sites have been told not to post fixture lists. Apparantly you have to pay them money to be able to print such lists.
The only thing Windows wise that may have triggered this was a DirectX 8.0 upgrade. Surely DirectX can't have smashed my hard drive?
Doesn't matter as I have to reinstall everything anyway. My root filesystem went belly-up on Sunday, causing many major things to either disapper or become corrupted. May be due to an IDE/DMA bug, a hardware failure, or dual-booting into Windows. I'll be doing a thorough disk scan tonight,
We won many contracts with other users of the products we sold on my skills alone. I was even flown overseas to fix broken systems that even the manufacturers couldn't resolve.
Later things started to go bad. Sales decided we could act as a 'one-stop shop', giving support on software other than the products we had supplied, and passing hardware calls onto a 3rd party. I took calls on 8 year old DOS applications I'd never seen, never mind used. I even had a support call on an obscure installation issue with an even more obscure OS no-one in our company had ever used. I also had 50 faulty printers and monitors logged by one company on the same day, and I had to log each one in turn with the relevant hardware maintainer. Yuck!
The real fun started in 1997, soon after a merger with a Netware reseller. The new head of my department (who was about as technically knowledgeable as my mother's cat) decided we could support major networks remotely via Managewise (ick!) over a single ISDN line. We signed up 3 or 4 customers for this, including a major 500+ user network spread across 3 sites in the same city. Needless to say it didn't work, and we ended up being no-more than a call centre for these comapanies. I stuck it out for a year and left the place in disgust, particularly after the non-Netwarae products I had dealt with since 1990 was on its way out.
IMHO Technical Support used to be a decent job, back in the days when the customer's themselves had some intelligence. Now it isn't worthwhile, as there are few gifted individuals left in that field.
Some of my tests involve simulating various fail conditions, and these tests need to be improved. Currently I terminate my process abruptly, or have my process ignore all messages for a set period of time - neither test is enough. Adding random line noise would be an extra test.
Time for a LART, methinks.
Do THWACK! not THWACK! run THWACK! any THWACK! binary THWACK! attachments THWACK!!
I can nominate them for a potential failure at FuckedCompany.com. Should earn me some points!
The main advantage of normal radio is that it is extreemly portable. Stick a radio in your pocket and you can listen anywhere. I carry a pocket radio on the long bus journey to and from work, and also use it on a Saturday afternoon when leaving the football to find out how the other teams have done. How is sattelite going to work here?
Digital radio would be a lot better. Currently I have problems with co-channel interference when travelling back from work, meaning that I can't here my local radio station until about 6.45pm, missing essential news bulletins. Digital terrestial radio would make things better. It would also make Radio 5 listenable on an evening.
They had serious problems from the outset - staff were not being paid on time, treated like dirt, that sort of thing.
Eventually they got a bill from their provider for around 2 million GBP, and realised that they couldn't pay it.
The Omniputer will probably be a standard PC clone with a few extra bits of hardware (the touch screen) bundled into the package, sold with the typical low quality drivers and software you get with OEM hardware. The rest is marketing bull.
It's typical of the clueless morons we have writing for the UK press. Even technical publications suffer from the same; with page after page stuffed full of reinterpretations of the lasted diatribe from another ex used-car or double-glazing salesman. The UK press never seem to employ competant journalists - look at 'Linux Format' for an example of how not to write a Linux magazine.
The only reason that Arthur C Clarke is involved is that he too moved to Sri Lanka many years ago.