Uh-huh. So NTL would be after you if you did that consistently, they say. Despite your service being contended deliberately to stop you from affecting the usage of others. They're a pretty poor ISP.
No I'm afraid you're the one talking bollocks. We are charged a fixed fee for broadband. We are not charged a fixed fee for electricity. If NTL want to charge a pay-as-you-use fee then hey they should. But they don't. Instead they charge a fixed cost for use of a particular speed line. They don't charge us for a fixed amount of bandwidth because, if you read the terms of the NTL contract, it doesn't mention fixed traffic levels in there. They've just added this little restriction as a caveat. Talk of heavy users subsidizing others is a joke, right? At 100:1 contention how the hell does a heavy user get to monopolize the network? Did you imagine their packets were somhow given priority over those of other users? Please go away and think again before trying to make an argument out of this. Consider why it is that people on ADSL don't pay extra for "heavy users". Maybe it's because the ADSL providers don't think like you and deicded to provide a quality service?
It's actually not sold as that at all. They are saying that people who sit there downloading gigs and gigs all day will get a ticking off. If you happen to download 2GB one day they won't mind.
Having said that.... They won't spend money upgrading their piss-poor piecemeal network and so try to sneak in daft limits on usage. There is absolutely no point any longer in buying a 1Mbit cable link if we are supposed to constantly observe this limit. What is the difference between 1GB a day on 600Kbit and 1Mbit, really? We're talking about an extra hour or two to download this much aren't we? For an extra 15 quid a month that's pathetic. Given NTL cable is contended 100:1 this may well be a moot point anyhow. NTL have just shot themselves in the foot as they strive to become the new BT.
What part of 'always on' do you not understand then? You pay the same flat fee for your web browsing as those running VNC sessions because you bought the same product. If you have a problem with that then can ask your ISP you limit your service and charge you less. If you under-utilise the service you've bought then that's your problem.
Yes of course. It's all so much better in the commercial world. Ho ho ho.
Yes sometimes it really does do good. It's laughable to suggest that a better product would just emerge if everyone worked together. You'd just get a misdirected mess most likely. We can't all use the same system because we all have different needs. Open source has been extremely successful in producing quality code and the "commercial opposition" are now shitting themselves in certain monopolistic quarters.
It helps to have real focus on projects, like you say, and you only have to look at OpenBSD as an example of diversity producing focus that benefits users.
Nothing like those partisan feelings to really contribute to a ripping debate! They just used the system that fitted them best. You'll note Slashdot uses MySQL and is very happy.
Microsoft compete a lot by trying to buy their way into the market and they appear to have spent billions on development costs to get to...a distant second. They could now hope to force Nintendo out...only Nintendo are already making a profit on their GameCube! So that won't work. So MS look to produce the next generation of X-Box and make it even better than before by buying up games companies to produce exclusive content for that platform. So PC gamers are left without. So MS lose the importance of the PC as a gaming platform. The platform that they make a profit on. And they increase the importance of the XBox as a gaming platform - the platform they make a heavy loss on. Will X-Box 2 make a profit? Well let's see - no, if they produce an X-Box 2 that is just another PC in a VCR-sized case. Sony and Nintendo will continue to churn out boxes that force MS to drop prices to a level that is unprofitable for them.
Depends what software you run doesn't it? A fully-patched IIS 5.0 box that ran a website I use got broken into last September. The next day the patch for the actual exploit that was used to get in was put out by Microsoft. The issue is whether this sort of thing happens with any more regularity than on some Linux box running Apache. I don't have figures to hand. I don't see why you'd want to have a machine with a GUI running as a server though. For me it's a power issue.
Okay. Microsoft witheld code that they should have produced and Sendo lost out as a result. They may go insolvent. That is, clearly, a consequence and if they broke the contract twice then they can clearly be sued for that.
They insult everyone, to try and be fair. Hence Intel is ChipZilla and AMD is ChimpZilla. The only exception to this really is when it comes to figures in the Linux world.
OK. Biggest computer company. Who have no phone market share. Show me they have a winning strategy in that marketplace and I'll believe you have a point in this instance. You may be right about desktop apps but this is just not the same. Similarly games companies, if looking to tie themselves to a console maker, would do better to tie themselves to Sony than MS.
If these allegations are true it could have very serious consequences for Microsoft. That's pretty obvious. But one possibility is that companies will simply refuse to get into similar deals with them in future. As the article notes, it is not as if MS have been able to produce the goods even now for the Orange phone. A handset that dials your friends' names as opposed to their numbers, anyone?
Two words: Lorraine Heggesey. Controller of BBC ONE. Will she replace TW with something as good as the show we (I certainly include myself in this group) remember? Probably not. TW is not going away but it just not going to go out regularly.
An alternative theory is of course that with the rise of multichannel television in the UK, TW woudl have even lower ratings if it had kept its Peter McCann-era geekiness. However the BBC is about REACH (variety of audience) rather than sheer numbers so this is not a decent argument.
But then we've been listening to massively degraded music for years! Our old tinny-sounding radios and cassette players have a top end frequency reproduction limit below that of what a young-ish adult ear can hear. In fact the voices and sounds we listen to on commercial recordings are often compressed dynamically (as opposed to data compression). If there is any worry about not hearing accurate representations of sound then surely we'd have begun to see the consequences by now with many decades of imperfect sound playback behind us? The truth is, I think, that our brains hear many different reproduced versions of the same original sounds and we recognise by general patterns. We're very good at working around distortions of sound to pick out useful information.
Then you must have picked some bad eggs. I run a lot of sites with a small hosting firm that have machines in a huge data centre with on-site engineers. The link has never ever gone down. I am charged 95th percentile for bandwidth and I can ring an engineer to fix things if it goes wrong. More importantly I am not just another customer - the firm are small enough to know my exact requirements and advise me accordingly. Just a better, cheaper, deal than Rackspace.
Best uptime? But you can crash your server quite easily if you start running 3 million things on it at once. I don't see them providing anything that I cannot get from technically clued up smaller outfits. Oh well.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh-huh. So NTL would be after you if you did that consistently, they say.
Despite your service being contended deliberately to stop you from affecting the usage of others.
They're a pretty poor ISP.
No I'm afraid you're the one talking bollocks. We are charged a fixed fee for broadband. We are not charged a fixed fee for electricity. If NTL want to charge a pay-as-you-use fee then hey they should. But they don't.
Instead they charge a fixed cost for use of a particular speed line. They don't charge us for a fixed amount of bandwidth because, if you read the terms of the NTL contract, it doesn't mention fixed traffic levels in there. They've just added this little restriction as a caveat.
Talk of heavy users subsidizing others is a joke, right? At 100:1 contention how the hell does a heavy user get to monopolize the network? Did you imagine their packets were somhow given priority over those of other users?
Please go away and think again before trying to make an argument out of this.
Consider why it is that people on ADSL don't pay extra for "heavy users".
Maybe it's because the ADSL providers don't think like you and deicded to provide a quality service?
It's actually not sold as that at all. They are saying that people who sit there downloading gigs and gigs all day will get a ticking off. If you happen to download 2GB one day they won't mind.
Having said that....
They won't spend money upgrading their piss-poor piecemeal network and so try to sneak in daft limits on usage. There is absolutely no point any longer in buying a 1Mbit cable link if we are supposed to constantly observe this limit.
What is the difference between 1GB a day on 600Kbit and 1Mbit, really? We're talking about an extra hour or two to download this much aren't we?
For an extra 15 quid a month that's pathetic.
Given NTL cable is contended 100:1 this may well be a moot point anyhow.
NTL have just shot themselves in the foot as they strive to become the new BT.
What part of 'always on' do you not understand then?
You pay the same flat fee for your web browsing as those running VNC sessions because you bought the same product. If you have a problem with that then can ask your ISP you limit your service and charge you less.
If you under-utilise the service you've bought then that's your problem.
Who gives a damn what they do? Isn't that the point?
The net link is their for whatever they want to do with it, within obvious parameters.
How are they going to make a profit on it?
Yes of course. It's all so much better in the commercial world. Ho ho ho.
Yes sometimes it really does do good. It's laughable to suggest that a better product would just emerge if everyone worked together. You'd just get a misdirected mess most likely. We can't all use the same system because we all have different needs.
Open source has been extremely successful in producing quality code and the "commercial opposition" are now shitting themselves in certain monopolistic quarters.
It helps to have real focus on projects, like you say, and you only have to look at OpenBSD as an example of diversity producing focus that benefits users.
So MySQL isn't an RDBMS then?
I love PostgreSQL and use it in preference to MySQL all the time.
But you're talking shit.
Nothing like those partisan feelings to really contribute to a ripping debate!
They just used the system that fitted them best. You'll note Slashdot uses MySQL and is very happy.
Microsoft compete a lot by trying to buy their way into the market and they appear to have spent billions on development costs to get to...a distant second.
They could now hope to force Nintendo out...only Nintendo are already making a profit on their GameCube! So that won't work.
So MS look to produce the next generation of X-Box and make it even better than before by buying up games companies to produce exclusive content for that platform.
So PC gamers are left without. So MS lose the importance of the PC as a gaming platform. The platform that they make a profit on.
And they increase the importance of the XBox as a gaming platform - the platform they make a heavy loss on.
Will X-Box 2 make a profit? Well let's see - no, if they produce an X-Box 2 that is just another PC in a VCR-sized case.
Sony and Nintendo will continue to churn out boxes that force MS to drop prices to a level that is unprofitable for them.
Depends what software you run doesn't it?
A fully-patched IIS 5.0 box that ran a website I use got broken into last September. The next day the patch for the actual exploit that was used to get in was put out by Microsoft.
The issue is whether this sort of thing happens with any more regularity than on some Linux box running Apache. I don't have figures to hand.
I don't see why you'd want to have a machine with a GUI running as a server though. For me it's a power issue.
Okay. Microsoft witheld code that they should have produced and Sendo lost out as a result. They may go insolvent. That is, clearly, a consequence and if they broke the contract twice then they can clearly be sued for that.
But Microsoft are accused of two breaches of contract.
They insult everyone, to try and be fair.
Hence Intel is ChipZilla and AMD is ChimpZilla.
The only exception to this really is when it comes to figures in the Linux world.
OK. Biggest computer company.
Who have no phone market share. Show me they have a winning strategy in that marketplace and I'll believe you have a point in this instance.
You may be right about desktop apps but this is just not the same.
Similarly games companies, if looking to tie themselves to a console maker, would do better to tie themselves to Sony than MS.
If these allegations are true it could have very serious consequences for Microsoft. That's pretty obvious. But one possibility is that companies will simply refuse to get into similar deals with them in future.
As the article notes, it is not as if MS have been able to produce the goods even now for the Orange phone. A handset that dials your friends' names as opposed to their numbers, anyone?
If only the karma hadn't been capped to 50....
Two words: Lorraine Heggesey.
Controller of BBC ONE.
Will she replace TW with something as good as the show we (I certainly include myself in this group) remember?
Probably not.
TW is not going away but it just not going to go out regularly.
An alternative theory is of course that with the rise of multichannel television in the UK, TW woudl have even lower ratings if it had kept its Peter McCann-era geekiness.
However the BBC is about REACH (variety of audience) rather than sheer numbers so this is not a decent argument.
And most ominously of all:
Gunning Other Kids Down In The Dinner Hall: A
But then we've been listening to massively degraded music for years!
Our old tinny-sounding radios and cassette players have a top end frequency reproduction limit below that of what a young-ish adult ear can hear.
In fact the voices and sounds we listen to on commercial recordings are often compressed dynamically (as opposed to data compression). If there is any worry about not hearing accurate representations of sound then surely we'd have begun to see the consequences by now with many decades of imperfect sound playback behind us?
The truth is, I think, that our brains hear many different reproduced versions of the same original sounds and we recognise by general patterns.
We're very good at working around distortions of sound to pick out useful information.
Some useful information on http://www.scee.com/corporate/sonyhistory.jhtml
Athough this only works in IE, not Mozila. Grrr.
UID means nothing.
You're right it is not the first time Slashdot has published a hoax but in previous cases they corrected themselves.
If you're based in the UK I have a recommendation but otherwise probably not...
Then you must have picked some bad eggs. I run a lot of sites with a small hosting firm that have machines in a huge data centre with on-site engineers.
The link has never ever gone down. I am charged 95th percentile for bandwidth and I can ring an engineer to fix things if it goes wrong.
More importantly I am not just another customer - the firm are small enough to know my exact requirements and advise me accordingly.
Just a better, cheaper, deal than Rackspace.
Best uptime? But you can crash your server quite easily if you start running 3 million things on it at once.
I don't see them providing anything that I cannot get from technically clued up smaller outfits.
Oh well.