I lived in the US for several years, and was in a GTE (which became Verizon whilst I was there) area. They sucked every bit as hard as this guy's complaint against BT, and that was just for voice (I used RoadRunner cable for broadband). Specifically:
- two weeks after I moved in, they disconnected me without warning because they unilateraly decided my apartment was 'abandoned' (yes, that was the word they used). - I got disconnected *again* when a new neighbour moved in because they thought my line belonged to my neighbour. - more billing errors than I care to mention - abysmal line quality; in the middle of a metropolitan area, when I was on dialup it was impossible to get much better than 33k dialup connections. Yes, they DO have line faults in the US. They just don't actually fix them.
Then there was MCI. They had a whole new level of suckage. I wasn't even a customer of theirs, and one of their charges showed up on my bill. "Third Party Call" it was called - a $10 call from Florida to New Jersey (and I lived in Texas). MCI never did properly refund the money and I had to PAY Verizon for 'third party call blocking'. I had to PAY them to fix a horrible security hole whereby you can charge money to a different phone line! Apparently you can set up a 3rd party call by calling the operator and having the charge sent to another phone line. I suspect you do have to provide some details so the operator knows you're not just picking a line at random, what I suspect is the operator mis-keyed the number to charge to.
I also got charges put on my phone line from another random long distance company with no explanation. I could never get them to remove that charge, fortunately it was trivially small.
mmo2 own Manx Telecom, yet I *still* get charged exhorbitant roaming charges when in the UK and using the O2 network. Then Manx Telecom ass rapes us hard at home - our 512 down/256 up costs more than 2Mbit does in the UK because MT have a total monopoly.
You're unlikely to ever get on a plane with a JPI instrument. They are not used on airliners, they are used on privately owned light aircraft (and even then, in over 1000 hours of flight experience I've still not flown a plane with a JPI instrument). Unless you learn to fly yourself or know a private pilot, you're unlikely to ever see one.
JPI isn't a military supplier - they make products for light aircraft (not even airliners). JPI is quite popular with homebuilders (people who build planes at home from kits or plans).
I'm glad you didn't say you were the ALSA maintainer. I've just done battle with libasound. It was awful (mainly as a function of the state of the documentation which is appalling. I've been using Linux since 1992 when kernel 0.12 came out and I'm a true Linux fanboy, but I can't paper over the awfulness of the ALSA documentation especially since it's the mainline sound in the 2.6 kernel! If we want games developers to consider Linux things like this need to be taken care of:/)
HP do that proprietary stuff too for their own machines (ever seen inside the (admittedly Hewlett Paqard) d530 compact desktop PC? It has a very interesting fan arrangement, unfortunately, it doesn't cool the hard drive and we've seen the hard drive failure rate exceed 10%)
I have an ancient Dell Optiplex (which is NOT a compact machine) and had no problem adding extra off-the-shelf drives. Similarly with the HP d530, although it only has one drive bay, it's really easy to replace the drive (which is a good thing given their reliability)
It's another FTFF (Fix The Fscking Finder) issue I think. Finder behaves the same way with NFS - really poor transfer rates under Finder, but normal speed using 'cp' on the command line.
As for HTTPS requests, it is simply not *possible* for them to cache them even if they wanted to. If you have a proxy, when getting an HTTPS page, your browser issues 'http connect www.example.com:443' to the proxy. All the proxy can do is pass the data unmolested since the data is encrypted end to end (i.e. server to your browser).
Well, it'd be useless for one - sodium doesn't melt at even the temperatures that the P4 runs at. To be effective, the metal would have to be liquid at pretty near room temperature.
Mail.app _slow_? I became a first-time Mac buyer when I bought my Dad an eMac (so I wouldn't be lumbered with constant support calls). I found the responsiveness of this low end Mac as least as good as the HP d530s we use at work, and it cost the same (and had a monitor included in the price). I've found mail.app no slower than any other email application I've used.
Indeed, I liked OS X so much after setting up my Dad's eMac, I got myself a PowerBook instead of the PC laptop I was planning on buying.
Having also lived in the US, I wasn't impressed with the flapper-style cisterns (which seem to want to always develop leaks) as opposed to the Thomas Crapper style siphon system which gives a much more vigorous flush. Of course the TC syphon is a bit more complex, but it does a much better job.
There are some virtual reality setups that have been going for years and keep improving - and are very important - flight simulators. The modern airline training flight simulator is a very high fidelity virtual reality system which allow airline pilots to practise situations that are just too dangerous to carry out in training in a real aircraft.
The military are also big on flight simulation too and have been for years.
I worked in the US for a while as an L-1 then an H-1B worker. I was paid considerably MORE than my co-workers (I used to work for IBM). So much so I banked my entire home salary and lived off my international service allowance.
Of course, since I'm not brown skinned I was accepted immediately. Most of these rants on Slashdot seem to be thinly veiled racism.
Those 'teen' jobs (at least when a chain like Ronnie's Burger Bar are involved) have a whole bunch of forms to fill out to prove the worker is not illegal. (as does any proper employer). I know, I had to fill the things out when I worked in the US. Sure, a disreputable employer will pay cash and avoid the firms, but the dominant fast food places won't do that because they don't want to get prosecuted.
The Minuteman project IS a bunch of vigilantes - just a bunch of people who get hard-ons from touting their guns. They are already causing problems for the *real* border patrols.
But it IS front page newsworthy when Microsoft upgrades one of their major product lines (Longhorn? New versions of Office?) and is IS front page news when Intel update their product line. Or have you set your front page to not display those articles?
Actually - no it's not the wrong design for rising oil prices. The bigger you make the plane, generally the more miles per gallon per passenger you get. The A380 is much more efficient per passenger mile than the B747 in its standard configuration of 500 or so passengers - let alone 800!
The other problem, particularly in densely populated European countries, demand for trans-oceanic air travel continues to increase but you can't expand the airports any more. Bigger planes mean you can move more passengers without having to add runways. Changing the airport to accomodate the A380 is vastly cheaper than adding more runways, and in many cases you can't do that!
Right tool for the right job: the Airbus A380 is primaraily designed for trans-oceanic routes which are not suited to smaller aircraft. On long-haul flights, generally you're going to use the biggest plane that demand dictates, and for such long haul routes there will always be somewhat of a hub/spoke system since it would be extremely uneconomical to operate, say, London to 50 different US cities instead of London to 4 or 5 US cities then a connection from there on.
Even then, the B737 has hydraulic controls only to the rudder
Only PURELY hydraulic controls to the rudder: the ailerons and elevator are also hydraulically controlled, but they also have wires/pulleys from the flight deck, and the ailerons/elevators can be operated on 'manual reversion' by using muscle power (although the controls get bloody heavy).
The computers in aircraft are NOT designed like consumer operating systems. Fly-by-wire planes have been in the air for years now, and I've not heard of a crash caused by the fly-by-wire systems failing.
However, there have been several accidents caused by your supposedly 'more reliable' hydraulic systems - think Sioux City (DC-10, all three hydraulic systems failed after a tubine disc failed) for the most famous example, but there have been others (Boeing 737 unexplained rudder hard overs, other DC-10s losing hydraulics when the cargo door was lost in flight including one that resulted in a loss of all on board, a JAL B747 losing all hydraulics and impacting a mountain with the loss of 500).
The only planes you'll get with manual reversion will be B737 sized and smaller, and you won't be crossing the Atlantic on anything that small. Even then, the B737 has hydraulic controls only to the rudder (and there have been at least two accidents caused by rudder hard-overs in a B737 where the plane impacted terrain so hard that the people who discovered the impact crater thought a light bizjet had crashed because the remains were crushed into such small pieces).
In short, there are problems with all control systems (even cable and pulley systems have jammed resulting in crashes), and fly by wire is by far the most reliable we've made so far - and it results in a more efficient safer aircraft.
I ain't a Going. I can't wait to see how long it takes the A380's tail to fly off like it did on the plane's younger siblings.
Older siblings, surely? The A340 that lost its tail was around 20 years old.
Losing tails is not unique to Airbus - your beloved Boeing 747 shed a tail over Japan when it was considerably newer than the plane that lost one over New York with the loss of around 500 lives (Japanese airlines ordered high capacity versions of the B747 for internal routes - I'm sure they'll be ordering 800-seat versions of the A380). The safety record of Airbus planes is very good - as is Boeing's safety record. It's irrational to travel on Boeing but not Airbus on safety grounds. I suspect the real reason for you is Not Invented Here syndrome. We won't even mention the rudder hard-over problems in Boeing 737s which have been responsible for a couple of crashes with impacts so severe all that was left was tiny, pulverized pieces in a small crater.
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BT doesn't have a monopoly on sucking.
I lived in the US for several years, and was in a GTE (which became Verizon whilst I was there) area. They sucked every bit as hard as this guy's complaint against BT, and that was just for voice (I used RoadRunner cable for broadband). Specifically:
- two weeks after I moved in, they disconnected me without warning because they unilateraly decided my apartment was 'abandoned' (yes, that was the word they used).
- I got disconnected *again* when a new neighbour moved in because they thought my line belonged to my neighbour.
- more billing errors than I care to mention
- abysmal line quality; in the middle of a metropolitan area, when I was on dialup it was impossible to get much better than 33k dialup connections. Yes, they DO have line faults in the US. They just don't actually fix them.
Then there was MCI. They had a whole new level of suckage. I wasn't even a customer of theirs, and one of their charges showed up on my bill. "Third Party Call" it was called - a $10 call from Florida to New Jersey (and I lived in Texas). MCI never did properly refund the money and I had to PAY Verizon for 'third party call blocking'. I had to PAY them to fix a horrible security hole whereby you can charge money to a different phone line! Apparently you can set up a 3rd party call by calling the operator and having the charge sent to another phone line. I suspect you do have to provide some details so the operator knows you're not just picking a line at random, what I suspect is the operator mis-keyed the number to charge to.
I also got charges put on my phone line from another random long distance company with no explanation. I could never get them to remove that charge, fortunately it was trivially small.
Grrr.
mmo2 own Manx Telecom, yet I *still* get charged exhorbitant roaming charges when in the UK and using the O2 network. Then Manx Telecom ass rapes us hard at home - our 512 down/256 up costs more than 2Mbit does in the UK because MT have a total monopoly.
As someone who enjoys sushi and rare steaks, not fully cooked meat is a feature, not a defect.
There's plenty of room on this Earth for all of God's animals. Right next to the mashed potato.
You're unlikely to ever get on a plane with a JPI instrument. They are not used on airliners, they are used on privately owned light aircraft (and even then, in over 1000 hours of flight experience I've still not flown a plane with a JPI instrument). Unless you learn to fly yourself or know a private pilot, you're unlikely to ever see one.
JPI isn't a military supplier - they make products for light aircraft (not even airliners). JPI is quite popular with homebuilders (people who build planes at home from kits or plans).
ETOPS actually stands for Engines Turn or Passengers Swim!
I'm glad you didn't say you were the ALSA maintainer. I've just done battle with libasound. It was awful (mainly as a function of the state of the documentation which is appalling. I've been using Linux since 1992 when kernel 0.12 came out and I'm a true Linux fanboy, but I can't paper over the awfulness of the ALSA documentation especially since it's the mainline sound in the 2.6 kernel! If we want games developers to consider Linux things like this need to be taken care of :/)
HP do that proprietary stuff too for their own machines (ever seen inside the (admittedly Hewlett Paqard) d530 compact desktop PC? It has a very interesting fan arrangement, unfortunately, it doesn't cool the hard drive and we've seen the hard drive failure rate exceed 10%)
I have an ancient Dell Optiplex (which is NOT a compact machine) and had no problem adding extra off-the-shelf drives. Similarly with the HP d530, although it only has one drive bay, it's really easy to replace the drive (which is a good thing given their reliability)
It's another FTFF (Fix The Fscking Finder) issue I think. Finder behaves the same way with NFS - really poor transfer rates under Finder, but normal speed using 'cp' on the command line.
As for HTTPS requests, it is simply not *possible* for them to cache them even if they wanted to. If you have a proxy, when getting an HTTPS page, your browser issues 'http connect www.example.com:443' to the proxy. All the proxy can do is pass the data unmolested since the data is encrypted end to end (i.e. server to your browser).
It does make a pretty good LART, certainly more portable than the traditional baseball bat most sysadmins carry.
Well, it'd be useless for one - sodium doesn't melt at even the temperatures that the P4 runs at. To be effective, the metal would have to be liquid at pretty near room temperature.
Mail.app _slow_? I became a first-time Mac buyer when I bought my Dad an eMac (so I wouldn't be lumbered with constant support calls). I found the responsiveness of this low end Mac as least as good as the HP d530s we use at work, and it cost the same (and had a monitor included in the price). I've found mail.app no slower than any other email application I've used.
Indeed, I liked OS X so much after setting up my Dad's eMac, I got myself a PowerBook instead of the PC laptop I was planning on buying.
Having also lived in the US, I wasn't impressed with the flapper-style cisterns (which seem to want to always develop leaks) as opposed to the Thomas Crapper style siphon system which gives a much more vigorous flush. Of course the TC syphon is a bit more complex, but it does a much better job.
ID is not a *theory*, it's a hypothesis (and barely so, I don't think ID is really 'testable').
Those that say "Evolution is _just_ a theory" don't understand what a theory is in the scientific context.
There are some virtual reality setups that have been going for years and keep improving - and are very important - flight simulators. The modern airline training flight simulator is a very high fidelity virtual reality system which allow airline pilots to practise situations that are just too dangerous to carry out in training in a real aircraft.
The military are also big on flight simulation too and have been for years.
I worked in the US for a while as an L-1 then an H-1B worker. I was paid considerably MORE than my co-workers (I used to work for IBM). So much so I banked my entire home salary and lived off my international service allowance.
Of course, since I'm not brown skinned I was accepted immediately. Most of these rants on Slashdot seem to be thinly veiled racism.
Those 'teen' jobs (at least when a chain like Ronnie's Burger Bar are involved) have a whole bunch of forms to fill out to prove the worker is not illegal. (as does any proper employer). I know, I had to fill the things out when I worked in the US. Sure, a disreputable employer will pay cash and avoid the firms, but the dominant fast food places won't do that because they don't want to get prosecuted.
The Minuteman project IS a bunch of vigilantes - just a bunch of people who get hard-ons from touting their guns. They are already causing problems for the *real* border patrols.
But it IS front page newsworthy when Microsoft upgrades one of their major product lines (Longhorn? New versions of Office?) and is IS front page news when Intel update their product line. Or have you set your front page to not display those articles?
Actually - no it's not the wrong design for rising oil prices. The bigger you make the plane, generally the more miles per gallon per passenger you get. The A380 is much more efficient per passenger mile than the B747 in its standard configuration of 500 or so passengers - let alone 800!
The other problem, particularly in densely populated European countries, demand for trans-oceanic air travel continues to increase but you can't expand the airports any more. Bigger planes mean you can move more passengers without having to add runways. Changing the airport to accomodate the A380 is vastly cheaper than adding more runways, and in many cases you can't do that!
Right tool for the right job: the Airbus A380 is primaraily designed for trans-oceanic routes which are not suited to smaller aircraft. On long-haul flights, generally you're going to use the biggest plane that demand dictates, and for such long haul routes there will always be somewhat of a hub/spoke system since it would be extremely uneconomical to operate, say, London to 50 different US cities instead of London to 4 or 5 US cities then a connection from there on.
Only PURELY hydraulic controls to the rudder: the ailerons and elevator are also hydraulically controlled, but they also have wires/pulleys from the flight deck, and the ailerons/elevators can be operated on 'manual reversion' by using muscle power (although the controls get bloody heavy).
The computers in aircraft are NOT designed like consumer operating systems. Fly-by-wire planes have been in the air for years now, and I've not heard of a crash caused by the fly-by-wire systems failing.
However, there have been several accidents caused by your supposedly 'more reliable' hydraulic systems - think Sioux City (DC-10, all three hydraulic systems failed after a tubine disc failed) for the most famous example, but there have been others (Boeing 737 unexplained rudder hard overs, other DC-10s losing hydraulics when the cargo door was lost in flight including one that resulted in a loss of all on board, a JAL B747 losing all hydraulics and impacting a mountain with the loss of 500).
The only planes you'll get with manual reversion will be B737 sized and smaller, and you won't be crossing the Atlantic on anything that small. Even then, the B737 has hydraulic controls only to the rudder (and there have been at least two accidents caused by rudder hard-overs in a B737 where the plane impacted terrain so hard that the people who discovered the impact crater thought a light bizjet had crashed because the remains were crushed into such small pieces).
In short, there are problems with all control systems (even cable and pulley systems have jammed resulting in crashes), and fly by wire is by far the most reliable we've made so far - and it results in a more efficient safer aircraft.
Older siblings, surely? The A340 that lost its tail was around 20 years old.
Losing tails is not unique to Airbus - your beloved Boeing 747 shed a tail over Japan when it was considerably newer than the plane that lost one over New York with the loss of around 500 lives (Japanese airlines ordered high capacity versions of the B747 for internal routes - I'm sure they'll be ordering 800-seat versions of the A380). The safety record of Airbus planes is very good - as is Boeing's safety record. It's irrational to travel on Boeing but not Airbus on safety grounds. I suspect the real reason for you is Not Invented Here syndrome. We won't even mention the rudder hard-over problems in Boeing 737s which have been responsible for a couple of crashes with impacts so severe all that was left was tiny, pulverized pieces in a small crater.