Their site is fast, HTML only as far as I can tell (little JS, NO Java, NO Flash etc) and it's bloody great. Works fine on Moz, Phoenix, Konq, NN4..and IE:)
They have to do a little more server-side than if it was some massive bloated 'application' that allowed you to, say, add a new regular payment_and_then add money to that payment_and_then_do_something_else_ (which is why so many of the others seem to do it so wrong, as they want to do it all so 'seamlessly client side') but hell... it just works
My previous bank was the Woolwich who, after years of not doing anything online, suddenly started closing branches, moving everything over the phone banking and Net banking. This is where the problem comes if your almost-essential-to-users-lives website doesn't work properly. I can't NOT use my bank's website, or only do my banking in work hours/ on a Windows machine.
ANything beyond the login page of their site, needless to say, was unusable on anything other than IE4 & 5 (not even IE6!) Terrible hierarchical menus in Java, JS used to calculate balances, show recent transactions, etc. Half the time I was staring at a screen that said 'you have a balance of "undefined call to variable bar...."'
The Woolwich didn't get it right AT ALL - I would call and report it as a fault, they'd panic, then eventually realise I wasn't running IE, and their support people would tell me all sorts of rubbish about 'Mozilla isn't secure' or 'Java is supposed to do that' (crash:) so I left them. I wrote them and told them why as well. They have lost the ~300 UKP a year they made from running my account.
(a figure half-remembered from a recentish survey about average profit per bank customer in the UK)
A bank's website - or an ecommerce website - is different to, say, a whizz-bang movie release website that needs Flash, or a vanity site that asks for plugin foo - they have websites to keep customers, and allow them to save costs. If even the 2% of people quoted elsewhere in this thread can't use their service - hell, they'll just move.
End of story. IF you have a serious, customer facing website that you are relying on to help you cut costs and increase efficiency, it is NOT an option to restrict what software the site runs on.
Just ask amazon.
We've had DAB in the UK since 1995. (Don't know why the UK is so ahead on some of the broadcasting innovations, but hey. Maybe it's the BBC:)
Takeup has been slow, gradually starting to take off with a) Cheap (~150USD) sets and b) digital radio being able to be received on Digital TV sets as well
Sound quality is excellent, reception seems miles better than analogue radio, usability great - tune via genre, station, etc. Newer DAB sets have track/ artists info displayed on the set.
I haven't yet succumbed, as I get many new channels through my DTV set, and also as I live in London where there are many, many local/ pirate stations to choose between
>Each day's capture was reconstructed using >proprietary software developed by the FBI
god forbid that they used anything publicly available, It's not my tax $$ (UK resident) they are spending on developing their own code, but are they really gonna better the Free stuff? If so, why not release? Oh, yeah, cos secrecy is good, especially for security software
Hi. I sympathise. These people aren't *evil* and they aren't *misguided*, they have just ben (ignored) and allowed to get away with too much useage for too long.
They are intelligent, else they wouldn't be teachers. So be reasonable.
Post something [physical] somewhere [physically] obvious and non-threatening.
'Hi I'm your new sysadmin. Nice to meet y'all. I have a problem: We have xKb/ month for education, and yKb/ month is being taken up with (all the things you are concerned about)
Here are my rules....(name them)
If anyone has a problem with these, I'd be really interested in your thoughts. You can come find me in room z, or mail me at roomz.wherever
Regards
BOFH (or whatever your real name is)
__
I promise, this will shift 70, 80% of the problem, then you can start to worry about the ones that ignore this.
This woefully-thin-on-facts puff piece misses some essential points (facts, any sense of editorial tone, etc)
The 'demand' will be confined to the same 400,000 (at best) households that have been waiting for this, agitating for this, for >2 years.
Here's my 2c worth on what's holding it up:
BT monopoly. There are tales of people 'phoning BT to get broadband and being signed up for unmetered dialup (56k) instead due to BT customer service idiocy. The BT/ BT OPenworld/ BT whatever split makes Railtrack's look sensible.
UK Cableco current funding. This does *not* indicate any future network upgrades will be forthcoming soon. I am with TelewestBlue Yonder - my service is excellent for what it is (>60 days same IP, between 100-250k down, 40-80k up) but does not come close to US definitions of broadband. I pay 25 UKP/ month for this. NTL are bringing in 1mps for 50 UKP/ month (!) in selected areas, but have many pockets of analogue only TV / dialup subs.
3) The UK government's terrible record on encouraging broadband - hell, even dial up - access. Last year the Guardian reported reported that the UK has committed
£30m to extend broadband technology outside metropolitan areas. Sweden is committing £1.19bn.
This despite the UK 'e-zar' loudly boasting about how good things are.
Basically, the UK gets whipped at non-LANned betwork gaming evry time:(
'People react to it [using WiFi] the way they did to the first time they used the Internet, or heard 'Smells like Teen Spirit,'" said Cliff Skolnick, an engineer...'
It features simple two-button (CALL / END) operation and employs the very latest automated voice-recognition technology, making number entry both easy and mistake proof.
This sounds like Jakob Nielsen's dream...and could turn out to be his nightmare.
I dount very much that this has 'mistake proof.' VR - has it been invented yet? Is it ever possible? Certainly not in a 30USD phone, and especially not given the non-dictionary words this address book will need to have in it - peoples' names and nicks, and business names.
Mobile/ cell Phones - however cheap they are - are always treated as mission critical appliances wby their owners. Owners will NOT appreciate having to f*** around trying to get the correct number to dial 'cos there's no other UI alternative.
example (and probably what hopon are basing their tech on - if it does exist, but that's another matter)
I have one of these nokias details here
with VR for top ten numbers of your choice, and I never use it. Try standing on a noisy street shouting 'Mum, Mum' into the phone and it keeps dialling 'Mee Mee' - your local food delivery place, and you'll see what I mean.
Don't make all tech too simple! How can you 'EZ-Interface' an SMS/ Text msg UI?
Re:Good points, but *how* is the market different?
on
Red Hat Invades Washington
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Sure, as I said, I am sure RH is addressing these markets. The question is though, where do they see their key strengths?
Is it in the kernel level improvements in speed and rendering time they need to power a DSAT receiver?
Or is it the ability to mass manufacture distros for one (ish) platform, in which there's already a hacker culture that can be tapped into, where the hardware guys have started sticking 'red hat ready' stickers on new peripherals.
Or maybe just being veryveryvery good at runing apache?
How good are they at winning big, f*** off hardware contracts - how many PCs come shipped with RH? How many different appliance level versions are they going to produce? DO they want the GUI market for appliances or the end user? So that end users with box X running digital platform Y care about neither cos it's got RedHatInside?
Which appliance OEMs are they talking to? Who are their competitors? Are they interested in the OS fight? Who is the fight with?
The above markets are not imposible to dominate *as well* as making the desktop software that's EZ to install and packed full of apps, but it's a different ball game. I am not questioning their ability to do that, in fact I'm keen for them to do it, but more detail is needed. I'll check the RH embedded site out, though, thanks
The most interseting comment in that i/v -
that he thinks the PC desktop market is dead, and that other markets (embedded, appliance-led products, networked devices) are the way forward, was not picked up by the interviewer IMHO.
'...all show high projected growths, except for PCs. Tiemann taps the dismal PC projection] That is what I'm saying is dead..'.
How is RH addressing these markets? I am sure they are, but more clarity would be nice. I work with Interactive TV boxes in the Uk, and we dont care about the OS, and neither do the consumers.
It's the middleware that counts. Pace boxes running Liberate middleware run VX Works OS, but as a developer for the Interactive box I'm not allowed anywhere near that level of code. So, is RH gonna go for the OEM market, or is it going to what is the *equivalent* of the desktop and build OSs that fit nicely with higher level code?
Nope, I'm not making much sense, but as this is, after all, as he has said, an entirely different market than the one he's used to, I'd like to know more.
I susbscribe to a mobile email service through my (UK) mobile phone telco. It's a 2.5G kludge - sending involves writing email as an SMS, using emailaddress@wherever#subject##body and then texting this to my telco's gateway (via '191')
Yeah it's complicated but it works and it's here NOW. It used to be fixed cost receipt, extra cost to send - once you sent more than 10 emails a month.
however, recently, they started introducing paying (10p a go) for *receipt* of mobile emails.
So, all the crazy newsletters I'd signed up to which got forwarded to my mobile email, I had to kill, leaving only some urgent ones going to my mobile.
This makes spam doubly annoying, as not only does it clog my inbox up, but if it comes to any of the aliases that I *do* want forwarded, it a) sets off alarm bells in my head (ahh! urgent email to mobile) but it costs me money.
Slashdot Mirror
My current bank is the Halifax
:)
:) so I left them. I wrote them and told them why as well. They have lost the ~300 UKP a year they made from running my account.
(a figure half-remembered from a recentish survey about average profit per bank customer in the UK)
Their site is fast, HTML only as far as I can tell (little JS, NO Java, NO Flash etc) and it's bloody great. Works fine on Moz, Phoenix, Konq, NN4..and IE
They have to do a little more server-side than if it was some massive bloated 'application' that allowed you to, say, add a new regular payment_and_then add money to that payment_and_then_do_something_else_ (which is why so many of the others seem to do it so wrong, as they want to do it all so 'seamlessly client side') but hell... it just works
My previous bank was the Woolwich who, after years of not doing anything online, suddenly started closing branches, moving everything over the phone banking and Net banking. This is where the problem comes if your almost-essential-to-users-lives website doesn't work properly. I can't NOT use my bank's website, or only do my banking in work hours/ on a Windows machine.
ANything beyond the login page of their site, needless to say, was unusable on anything other than IE4 & 5 (not even IE6!) Terrible hierarchical menus in Java, JS used to calculate balances, show recent transactions, etc. Half the time I was staring at a screen that said 'you have a balance of "undefined call to variable bar...."'
The Woolwich didn't get it right AT ALL - I would call and report it as a fault, they'd panic, then eventually realise I wasn't running IE, and their support people would tell me all sorts of rubbish about 'Mozilla isn't secure' or 'Java is supposed to do that' (crash
A bank's website - or an ecommerce website - is different to, say, a whizz-bang movie release website that needs Flash, or a vanity site that asks for plugin foo - they have websites to keep customers, and allow them to save costs. If even the 2% of people quoted elsewhere in this thread can't use their service - hell, they'll just move.
End of story. IF you have a serious, customer facing website that you are relying on to help you cut costs and increase efficiency, it is NOT an option to restrict what software the site runs on. Just ask amazon.
Some FAQs
:)
Some technical FAQs (from the BBC)
We've had DAB in the UK since 1995. (Don't know why the UK is so ahead on some of the broadcasting innovations, but hey. Maybe it's the BBC
Takeup has been slow, gradually starting to take off with a) Cheap (~150USD) sets and b) digital radio being able to be received on Digital TV sets as well
Sound quality is excellent, reception seems miles better than analogue radio, usability great - tune via genre, station, etc. Newer DAB sets have track/ artists info displayed on the set.
I haven't yet succumbed, as I get many new channels through my DTV set, and also as I live in London where there are many, many local/ pirate stations to choose between
If I lived outside a city, you betcha.
>Can anyone point to any actual useful uses it's been put to so far?
yep. sonyericsson t68 plus any bluetooth laptop or palmtop means you can do sync/ Net/ data stuff with no cable, line of sight, etc.
yeah 802 is cool, but yeck it's expensive plus new Europe cellphones don't come with it as standard.
You don't need to worry about getting your 802 connected, you can roam with no worries about local datacentres..It's not competing, just different.
>Each day's capture was reconstructed using
>proprietary software developed by the FBI
god forbid that they used anything publicly available, It's not my tax $$ (UK resident) they are spending on developing their own code, but are they really gonna better the Free stuff? If so, why not release? Oh, yeah, cos secrecy is good, especially for security software
Hi.
I sympathise. These people aren't *evil* and they aren't *misguided*, they have just ben (ignored) and allowed to get away with too much useage for too long.
They are intelligent, else they wouldn't be teachers. So be reasonable.
Post something [physical] somewhere [physically] obvious and non-threatening.
'Hi I'm your new sysadmin. Nice to meet y'all. I have a problem: We have xKb/ month for education, and yKb/ month is being taken up with (all the things you are concerned about)
Here are my rules....(name them)
If anyone has a problem with these, I'd be really interested in your thoughts.
You can come find me in room z, or mail me at roomz.wherever
Regards
BOFH (or whatever your real name is)
__
I promise, this will shift 70, 80% of the problem, then you can start to worry about the ones that ignore this.
george
'People react to it [using WiFi] the way they did to the first time they used the Internet, or heard 'Smells like Teen Spirit,'" said Cliff Skolnick, an engineer...'
here
These are odd examples of previous successes for an advocacy piece.
YMMV, but for me:
first time used the Internet - confused as hell,
first time heard 'Teen Spirit' - I felt ill.
I dount very much that this has 'mistake proof.' VR - has it been invented yet? Is it ever possible? Certainly not in a 30USD phone, and especially not given the non-dictionary words this address book will need to have in it - peoples' names and nicks, and business names.
Mobile/ cell Phones - however cheap they are - are always treated as mission critical appliances wby their owners. Owners will NOT appreciate having to f*** around trying to get the correct number to dial 'cos there's no other UI alternative.
example (and probably what hopon are basing their tech on - if it does exist, but that's another matter)
I have one of these nokias details here with VR for top ten numbers of your choice, and I never use it. Try standing on a noisy street shouting 'Mum, Mum' into the phone and it keeps dialling 'Mee Mee' - your local food delivery place, and you'll see what I mean.
Don't make all tech too simple! How can you 'EZ-Interface' an SMS/ Text msg UI?
That's if it isn't all vapour ware.
http://service.real.com/help/faq/security/bufferov errun.html
Sure, as I said, I am sure RH is addressing these markets. The question is though, where do they see their key strengths?
Is it in the kernel level improvements in speed and rendering time they need to power a DSAT receiver?
Or is it the ability to mass manufacture distros for one (ish) platform, in which there's already a hacker culture that can be tapped into, where the hardware guys have started sticking 'red hat ready' stickers on new peripherals.
Or maybe just being veryveryvery good at runing apache?
How good are they at winning big, f*** off hardware contracts - how many PCs come shipped with RH? How many different appliance level versions are they going to produce? DO they want the GUI market for appliances or the end user? So that end users with box X running digital platform Y care about neither cos it's got RedHatInside?
Which appliance OEMs are they talking to? Who are their competitors? Are they interested in the OS fight? Who is the fight with?
The above markets are not imposible to dominate *as well* as making the desktop software that's EZ to install and packed full of apps, but it's a different ball game. I am not questioning their ability to do that, in fact I'm keen for them to do it, but more detail is needed. I'll check the RH embedded site out, though, thanks
The most interseting comment in that i/v -
that he thinks the PC desktop market is dead, and that other markets (embedded, appliance-led products, networked devices) are the way forward, was not picked up by the interviewer IMHO.
'...all show high projected growths, except for PCs. Tiemann taps the dismal PC projection] That is what I'm saying is dead..'.
How is RH addressing these markets? I am sure they are, but more clarity would be nice. I work with Interactive TV boxes in the Uk, and we dont care about the OS, and neither do the consumers.
It's the middleware that counts. Pace boxes running Liberate middleware run VX Works OS, but as a developer for the Interactive box I'm not allowed anywhere near that level of code. So, is RH gonna go for the OEM market, or is it going to what is the *equivalent* of the desktop and build OSs that fit nicely with higher level code?
Nope, I'm not making much sense, but as this is, after all, as he has said, an entirely different market than the one he's used to, I'd like to know more.
no, you misunderstand.
I pay for the email kludge to SMS conversion.
Normal SMS receipt is free, but emails received are charge at 10p a shot
g
I susbscribe to a mobile email service through my (UK) mobile phone telco. It's a 2.5G kludge - sending involves writing email as an SMS, using emailaddress@wherever#subject##body and then texting this to my telco's gateway (via '191')
(more here one2one.net
Yeah it's complicated but it works and it's here NOW. It used to be fixed cost receipt, extra cost to send - once you sent more than 10 emails a month.
however, recently, they started introducing paying (10p a go) for *receipt* of mobile emails.
So, all the crazy newsletters I'd signed up to which got forwarded to my mobile email, I had to kill, leaving only some urgent ones going to my mobile.
This makes spam doubly annoying, as not only does it clog my inbox up, but if it comes to any of the aliases that I *do* want forwarded, it a) sets off alarm bells in my head (ahh! urgent email to mobile) but it costs me money.
Just some thoughts...