Re:No, there *AREN'T* competing telcos
on
ISP War in the UK
·
· Score: 2
Plus, then you can go to screaming.net and get free evening and weekend Internet access.
Don't you mean free evening and weekend enganged tones?:-) Screaming.net is *far* too slow for me. They've created too tempting a service, and so have more customers than they can deal with. They don't have enough bandwidth or the number of modems needed to cope with the demand.
I'd rather pay reasonable ISP and phone call charges to get a decent service.
No, there *AREN'T* competing telcos
on
ISP War in the UK
·
· Score: 3
There's a thriving cable industry, lots of competing telcos
You have no idea how much I wish this was true. However, it's not. If I want a phone, I have exactly two choices: BT or Cable & Wireless. Mobiles aren't an option -- they can provide phone calls, but not ISDN or ADSL. Even if they could, living in the shadow of a large hill, mobile coverage at my house is poor from all four networks. So much for "lots of competing telcos".
What the UK really needs is true telco competition. Cable infrastructure should be owned by a single regulated company, and the end user should get to choose their service provider. This is how gas works, for example. TransCo own the physical pipes to your house, but the actual gas comes from whichever provider you've chosen. As it stands at the moment, cable companies effectively have a government approved monopoly in any given area. That's great for the company, but poor for the consumer.
This could be a big breakthrough in the amount of time that Brits spend online.
Nope. The real breakthrough will be when ADSL becomes widely and cheaply available. Mine's hopefully coming before Christmas, but my ISP has to wait for BT to sort out their ADSL pricing structure first...
Lowering local call costs will make some difference, and it has to be a good thing, but I wouldn't call it a breakthrough.
I have to agree with those the others that have said it. Standards compliant HTML 4.0 *is* portable across different clients already.
What this may do (I couldn't tell from the article) is clean up dirty HTML to make it portable. If so, then yes, it's a fairly clever little piece of software.
It's not just limited to HTML, either, and may take input in a number of different formats (Word, PDF, SGML, XML, more?). The thing they have to ensure is that their transcoding backbone is extensible enough to cover all possiblities. If they fall into the trap of aiming for the lowest common denominator, it'll be doomed. Hopefully, IBM are smarter than that...
You say you want to live in a world where software doesn't suck. I couldn't agree more. However, do you see closed source software on an open source OS as a step in the right direction, or just likely to be a more stable platform on which to run your potentially bug-ridden software?
Did anyone else notice that they think aliens are twice as likely to land on the Millennium dome than in Washington on Jan 1st? Trust me, that part of Greenwich is a total dump -- I wouldn't want to go there! Picture the scene:
Alien captain: Navigator, land us in the prime spot on Earth
Alien navigator: How about Washington, Sir, the centre of power in the developed world?
Alien captain: No, actually, I was thinking about that large dome thing built on that wasteground near the Blackwall tunnel -- you know, the one with all the nasty fumes from the nearby industrial works.
The difference isn't that Qwest doesn't use PPP, it's that some ISPs use traditional scripted logins (text-based prompts) whereas Qwest only uses PAP.
...which, for the record, works just fine from Linux. My ISP stopped using scripted logins years ago, and apart from having to change my chatscript slightly, I haven't had any problems.
Havoc said: What things are slow for you? Are you actually timing things?
By far the most obvious one is the time taken for the Gnome start menu to become visible. No, I haven't timed anything, but it should appear almost instantly, even on low-end hardware. It's slow whether I click the foot on a panel, or bring it up from within E -- BTW, I find E to be more than fast enough for everything else. It's slow whether I use the default theme or pixmap themes. Using my preferred wm (fvwm2) doesn't help, either.
There's also the Gnome configuration utility. It redraws things *far* too much. This could be an inefficiency of gtk+, or it could just be that Gnome uses gtk+ calls in a less than optimum way.
I have more than enough memory (128MB), and a fast video card (Matrox G400), which I'm using with the XSVGA-3.3.5 server. Yes, G400 support is relatively new, but it draws on the previous G100/G200 support, and is fast enough for other things.
Actually this release may not be called 1.0.50, I think we are calling it "September GNOME" or something.
Please don't do this. Stick to regular version numbers. Since Win95, everything has started using a date to signify versions, and it sucks. October GNOME could have 3 typos corrected over September GNOME, or it could have 50,000 extra lines of code. There's no way to tell how whether it's a major new release of not. In contrast, 1.1 is a fairly good clue that nothing major has changed since 1.0, while 2.0 usually means major new functionality.
The Electric Ballroom [...] is OK on Friday nights.
Hmmm... I think "OK" is being a bit generous. It used to be a great place, but has gone seriously downhill recently. It's supposed to be a rock and goth club, but IMHO, it sucks from both perspectives. It usually starts off OK, but it rapidly degenerates into playing dance music downstairs and "rap-rock" upstairs. Sigh. Admittedly I haven't been for several months, and it might have improved since then, but I'm not hopeful...
Guns simply don't have a place in a modern society.
I've never been a believer in Heinlein's "an armed society is a polite society" -- the polite get just get killed first because they're too polite to use a gun. However, to say that guns have *no* place in a modern society is a bit extreme. I personally would love to be able to shoot guns at an approved shooting range, but am unable to do so. FWIW, there have been more handgun-related crimes in the UK since they banned private handgun ownership than there were before. Banning them obviously hasn't worked -- all it's done is deprive the few people that did use them responsibly from participating in their chosen sport.
On a completely separate note, it's time for a Killing Miranda gig in London on a night when I'm not already doing something else...
Walking back from the goth club one night: "what the FUCK is that?" "Hey, Marylin! Marylin Manson!"
Shortly after the incident, we were on our way to a goth club in London, when a few lager louts yelled at us (along with other general abuse):
``Goths! Marylin Manson! You killed those schoolkids in America.''
When the reply ``Yes, but we only selected assholes like you'' came back, there was a smatter of nervous laughter, as they tried to work out if we were serious or not. Yes, it was an amusing incident, but it might not have been so funny if we weren't in a large group. Had there been just one or two of us, it could have got nasty...
You didn't mention the critical system consideration: available memory. On my system Gnome was faster than KDE with 64 megs of ram.
I didn't mention KDE at all. It was slow, bloated and ugly on my Sparc 20, so I dumped it and have pretty much ignored it ever since. FWIW, I too have found GNOME to be quicker than KDE, but both are too slow. Regarding memory, I have 128MB, and the box was had one user (me) running X, GNOME and nothing else.
There have been many half hearted explanations for GNOME's poor performance, ranging from Gtk to CORBA to X itself. However, none of those really cut it. Given the responsiveness of standalone Gtk apps, I think Gtk can be ruled out. Orbit is supposedly 3 the fastest CORBA implementation by a factor of 3, even with all the assertions left in. While the X protocol may be somewhat slower than it could be, X is still quite responsive on my old 486.
I now have an AMD K62-450, and GNOME still feels sluggish, about the same speed as Windows 95 on my P75. That has to be wrong. Yes, GNOME probably does more than W95, including things like network transparency, and the like, but even taking that into account, along with Gtk, CORBA and X itself, you shouldn't be looking at more than, say, reducing performance by half, and that's being pessimistic. In reality, you're looking at GNOME being 3 or 4 *times* slower than it ought to be. Simple question: why?
But wouldn't we all like to see FreeBSD [...] on PPC chips?
No, not really. Despite the recent dabblings with the Alpha, the focus of the FreeBSD group has always been on getting it to work well on Intel hardware. Look to the other BSDs for PowerPC support:
MP3 is an encoding format. MiniDisc is both an encoding format and a physical medium. There's no reason why someone can't make an MP3 player that uses Minidiscs as the physical medium, and MP3 rather than the Minidisc native encoding. It's something I've been wanting for quite some time, now.
I'd personally rather that those of us with higher karma get preference...;)
I agree, although it's worth remembering the Andover doesn't have the huge media frenzy that accompanied the Red Hat IPO, so it's likely to be a little more restrained.
Anyway, while not wanting to start a "my karma's higher than yours" flamefest, how about a "users with highest karma" hall of fame entry, Rob?
What were the terms of the acquisitions of/. and fm? Were they bought outright for cash, or was it a cash and shares deal, leaving CmdrTaco, Hemos and Scoop with shares in Andover? If so, I hope you guys make a fortune out of it.
However, someone else raised a valid point. If traffic decreases, will changes be forced upon you to try and increase readership? I believe there's enough integrity there to try and fight such a move, but at the end of the day, you may not have much choice. One of the perils of beign publically traded is that the company is legally bound to maximise shareholder value, whatever the ethics of doing so. Hopefully, it'll never come to that, but you never know...
Consider the demographics. "We" tend to have a significantly higher proportion of the rare personality types. Mine (INTJ), for example, accounts for less than 1% of the general population, but a significant proportion of the geek/slashdot community. However, those same rare personality traits that make us geeks also make us wary of the media (I have more reason to be wary than most -- I work for them, and know how ruthless they are). The sort of people that will go forward for this are going to be the few extroverts among us, and they certainly aren't going to be representative.
Am I the only one that thinks emailing out unsolicited passwords in plain text is a bad idea in the first place? Unencrypted email's not exactly the most secure way of transferring information. There may be times when I *request* a password via email, but I do so knowing and accepting the risks, and I wouldn't do it with something I couldn't afford to be compromised. Of course, the choice of password was dumb beyond belief as well, but that's a separate issue...
It's licensed per machine, with no option for site licensing or concurrent use from a server. That means that when people mail us round visio attachments, I can't see them, 'coz my department doesn't have the budget to put Visio on everyone's desk. A concurrent use license would be ideal, because it's not something we all use all the time...
I find the UK's government stance re: Y2K somewhat amusing. They're putting out a load of publicity aimed at companies, saying "you're running out of time, if your Y2K plans aren't already well underway, you're in deep shit. Y2K is a huuuuge problem."
Then the other day, I got a leaflet posted through the door, aimed at private individuals, claiming that everything's under control, and that it's all been blown up out of proportion, and that Y2K will not actually affect very much anyway.
So which is it, then? Is everything OK, or is the world going to end? Enquiring minds want to know!
I am opposed to all usage of the GPL because it destroys creativity and personal freedom
Ha ha ha ha ha. Go and get a clue. If GPL destroys creativity, why has so much usful, innovative software been released under the GPL? As for destroying personal freedom, that's just laughable. Personal freedom is the one thing it strives to protect. If you don't like the GPL, fine, don't use it on your software, but don't try and make it out to be something it isn't. I'll continue to use GPL for my software because it meets my requirements -- the BSD license doesn't, a point that was reinforced when a friend of mine released a BSD-licensed program that was later turned proprietary by it's subsequent maintainer.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you mean free evening and weekend enganged tones? :-) Screaming.net is *far* too slow for me. They've created too tempting a service, and so have more customers than they can deal with. They don't have enough bandwidth or the number of modems needed to cope with the demand.
I'd rather pay reasonable ISP and phone call charges to get a decent service.
You have no idea how much I wish this was true. However, it's not. If I want a phone, I have exactly two choices: BT or Cable & Wireless. Mobiles aren't an option -- they can provide phone calls, but not ISDN or ADSL. Even if they could, living in the shadow of a large hill, mobile coverage at my house is poor from all four networks. So much for "lots of competing telcos".
What the UK really needs is true telco competition. Cable infrastructure should be owned by a single regulated company, and the end user should get to choose their service provider. This is how gas works, for example. TransCo own the physical pipes to your house, but the actual gas comes from whichever provider you've chosen. As it stands at the moment, cable companies effectively have a government approved monopoly in any given area. That's great for the company, but poor for the consumer.
Nope. The real breakthrough will be when ADSL becomes widely and cheaply available. Mine's hopefully coming before Christmas, but my ISP has to wait for BT to sort out their ADSL pricing structure first...
Lowering local call costs will make some difference, and it has to be a good thing, but I wouldn't call it a breakthrough.
What this may do (I couldn't tell from the article) is clean up dirty HTML to make it portable. If so, then yes, it's a fairly clever little piece of software.
It's not just limited to HTML, either, and may take input in a number of different formats (Word, PDF, SGML, XML, more?). The thing they have to ensure is that their transcoding backbone is extensible enough to cover all possiblities. If they fall into the trap of aiming for the lowest common denominator, it'll be doomed. Hopefully, IBM are smarter than that...
Eric's a major science fiction fan, and I'd guess that the works of Robert Heinlein would figure prominently in any such list...
Very unlikely. I think his wife would probably have noticed by now. Of course, he could be bisexual, but that's not what you asked...
You say you want to live in a world where software doesn't suck. I couldn't agree more. However, do you see closed source software on an open source OS as a step in the right direction, or just likely to be a more stable platform on which to run your potentially bug-ridden software?
Alien captain: Navigator, land us in the prime spot on Earth
Alien navigator: How about Washington, Sir, the centre of power in the developed world?
Alien captain: No, actually, I was thinking about that large dome thing built on that wasteground near the Blackwall tunnel -- you know, the one with all the nasty fumes from the nearby industrial works.
Alien navigator: Righty ho, Sir. Beginning our descent now...
By far the most obvious one is the time taken for the Gnome start menu to become visible. No, I haven't timed anything, but it should appear almost instantly, even on low-end hardware. It's slow whether I click the foot on a panel, or bring it up from within E -- BTW, I find E to be more than fast enough for everything else. It's slow whether I use the default theme or pixmap themes. Using my preferred wm (fvwm2) doesn't help, either.
There's also the Gnome configuration utility. It redraws things *far* too much. This could be an inefficiency of gtk+, or it could just be that Gnome uses gtk+ calls in a less than optimum way.
I have more than enough memory (128MB), and a fast video card (Matrox G400), which I'm using with the XSVGA-3.3.5 server. Yes, G400 support is relatively new, but it draws on the previous G100/G200 support, and is fast enough for other things.
Please don't do this. Stick to regular version numbers. Since Win95, everything has started using a date to signify versions, and it sucks. October GNOME could have 3 typos corrected over September GNOME, or it could have 50,000 extra lines of code. There's no way to tell how whether it's a major new release of not. In contrast, 1.1 is a fairly good clue that nothing major has changed since 1.0, while 2.0 usually means major new functionality.
Hmmm... I think "OK" is being a bit generous. It used to be a great place, but has gone seriously downhill recently. It's supposed to be a rock and goth club, but IMHO, it sucks from both perspectives. It usually starts off OK, but it rapidly degenerates into playing dance music downstairs and "rap-rock" upstairs. Sigh. Admittedly I haven't been for several months, and it might have improved since then, but I'm not hopeful...
I've never been a believer in Heinlein's "an armed society is a polite society" -- the polite get just get killed first because they're too polite to use a gun. However, to say that guns have *no* place in a modern society is a bit extreme. I personally would love to be able to shoot guns at an approved shooting range, but am unable to do so. FWIW, there have been more handgun-related crimes in the UK since they banned private handgun ownership than there were before. Banning them obviously hasn't worked -- all it's done is deprive the few people that did use them responsibly from participating in their chosen sport.
On a completely separate note, it's time for a Killing Miranda gig in London on a night when I'm not already doing something else...
"what the FUCK is that?"
"Hey, Marylin! Marylin Manson!"
Shortly after the incident, we were on our way to a goth club in London, when a few lager louts yelled at us (along with other general abuse):
When the reply ``Yes, but we only selected assholes like you'' came back, there was a smatter of nervous laughter, as they tried to work out if we were serious or not. Yes, it was an amusing incident, but it might not have been so funny if we weren't in a large group. Had there been just one or two of us, it could have got nasty...
I didn't mention KDE at all. It was slow, bloated and ugly on my Sparc 20, so I dumped it and have pretty much ignored it ever since. FWIW, I too have found GNOME to be quicker than KDE, but both are too slow. Regarding memory, I have 128MB, and the box was had one user (me) running X, GNOME and nothing else.
I now have an AMD K62-450, and GNOME still feels sluggish, about the same speed as Windows 95 on my P75. That has to be wrong. Yes, GNOME probably does more than W95, including things like network transparency, and the like, but even taking that into account, along with Gtk, CORBA and X itself, you shouldn't be looking at more than, say, reducing performance by half, and that's being pessimistic. In reality, you're looking at GNOME being 3 or 4 *times* slower than it ought to be. Simple question: why?
No, not really. Despite the recent dabblings with the Alpha, the focus of the FreeBSD group has always been on getting it to work well on Intel hardware. Look to the other BSDs for PowerPC support:
MP3 is an encoding format. MiniDisc is both an encoding format and a physical medium. There's no reason why someone can't make an MP3 player that uses Minidiscs as the physical medium, and MP3 rather than the Minidisc native encoding. It's something I've been wanting for quite some time, now.
I agree, although it's worth remembering the Andover doesn't have the huge media frenzy that accompanied the Red Hat IPO, so it's likely to be a little more restrained.
Anyway, while not wanting to start a "my karma's higher than yours" flamefest, how about a "users with highest karma" hall of fame entry, Rob?
However, someone else raised a valid point. If traffic decreases, will changes be forced upon you to try and increase readership? I believe there's enough integrity there to try and fight such a move, but at the end of the day, you may not have much choice. One of the perils of beign publically traded is that the company is legally bound to maximise shareholder value, whatever the ethics of doing so. Hopefully, it'll never come to that, but you never know...
Consider the demographics. "We" tend to have a significantly higher proportion of the rare personality types. Mine (INTJ), for example, accounts for less than 1% of the general population, but a significant proportion of the geek/slashdot community. However, those same rare personality traits that make us geeks also make us wary of the media (I have more reason to be wary than most -- I work for them, and know how ruthless they are). The sort of people that will go forward for this are going to be the few extroverts among us, and they certainly aren't going to be representative.
Am I the only one that thinks emailing out unsolicited passwords in plain text is a bad idea in the first place? Unencrypted email's not exactly the most secure way of transferring information. There may be times when I *request* a password via email, but I do so knowing and accepting the risks, and I wouldn't do it with something I couldn't afford to be compromised. Of course, the choice of password was dumb beyond belief as well, but that's a separate issue...
It's licensed per machine, with no option for site licensing or concurrent use from a server. That means that when people mail us round visio attachments, I can't see them, 'coz my department doesn't have the budget to put Visio on everyone's desk. A concurrent use license would be ideal, because it's not something we all use all the time...
Then the other day, I got a leaflet posted through the door, aimed at private individuals, claiming that everything's under control, and that it's all been blown up out of proportion, and that Y2K will not actually affect very much anyway.
So which is it, then? Is everything OK, or is the world going to end? Enquiring minds want to know!
Ha ha ha ha ha. Go and get a clue. If GPL destroys creativity, why has so much usful, innovative software been released under the GPL? As for destroying personal freedom, that's just laughable. Personal freedom is the one thing it strives to protect. If you don't like the GPL, fine, don't use it on your software, but don't try and make it out to be something it isn't. I'll continue to use GPL for my software because it meets my requirements -- the BSD license doesn't, a point that was reinforced when a friend of mine released a BSD-licensed program that was later turned proprietary by it's subsequent maintainer.