The thing is, what Skype did was take VOIP and turn it into an actual consumer usable product. Actual real IP phones are indeed based on an open standard but it's a really really stupid standard. Seriously, buy one and visit the configuration web page for it. I've tried many with several real VOIP services and they are pretty much a pain to set up even if you do know what you're doing, and as products they're under polished and buggy. That's today, go back to when Skype started up and these things were even *worse*.
So yeah it's a closed standard because, not for the first time, a company sitting down to design a protocol and infrastructure from scratch often comes up with something remarkably better than designed-by-commitee products.
Now I'm not saying everyone should dump stuff and go to Skype, I still find their service haphazard and buggy at best particularly when using the Skype in/out functionality. However I think a bit of respect is due for a company that realised the killer application and went on to deliver in a consumer friendly manner that was genuinely useful and, more or less, single handedly forged the entire consumer idea of net phones full stop.
I've read through the whole article and it would appear that the above is what the rep said.
I'm not sure you actually did.
This is a case of removing a quote without context. If you examine the history of the dealings, Hexus offered a review to Alienware and Alienware refused. There's no threats and in fact the same computer system had been previously reviewed so the Alienware guy saying he'd have rocks in his head to have to go back after a previous review seems fair comment to me? What is all being spun as threatening an editorial publication is actually nothing of the sort. It's entirely up to a company to send a review product or not and they'd be fools to do so unless they thought that the publication would at least give it a fair chance.
I don't know, I think the whole printing of a private email discussion is pretty low too and the editorial rants about all sorts of things you simple cannot infer from what was actually said.
Uh, so what? If a remixer in the U.S. takes BBC content and uses it, WTF can the U.K. do?
This remarkably naive view point ignores the fact that the rights for BBC IP are assigned to BBC Worldwide incorporated in the US.
There wouldn't be any need to extradite you. Instead you could be sued in the good 'ol US of A. And the great thing about that? In the US they can afford better lawyers than you can.
This thing was driving me crazy. It plagued all my machines with Firefox installed no matter what the version. Like you in this thread, I also got lots of people claiming there was no problem because it worked fine for THEM.
Well I found the problem. It's RDC. If I vape RDC windows, then Firefox copy/paste works fine. If one is open, then suddenly it goes screwy and randomly works again.
RDC isn't something that you'd think would break things like this but it is doing clipboard work too of course.
It seems to falls to me to say something other than the standard slashdot paranoid naysaying.
Upper Street is a very nice place and it's packed with an unfeasibly large number bars and restaurants, much of which are spilling out onto the pavement (sidewalk for Americans) at this time of year.
I can think of no better place than to have wifi access for free. It makes Upper street quite an attractive weekend haunt for me now as well as being a damn near perfect location for informal business meetings. Hooray!
I think this is a genuinely good thing for the area and it's heartening to see a council give something back for our ever-soaring rates. Of course I do wonder if some of the businesses wont start getting a little annoyed by the wifi camper syndrome - Eg someone who takes up a table and chair and sits on a coffee for 2 hours.
I guess the bars and restaurants will have to find ways of dealing with that too.
And perhaps a little more Slashdot like, seems that these guys (beware irritating Flash) make a Star Wars branded PC..com for the US site of course. Which is kinda cool if dorky but the neat thing is, burried within their site is a competition to win one.
It's here. I guess they'd rather people bought one than winning one which is fair enough! Not sure if there's a competition on the US web site.
... Thats possibly exactly what SPEWS want to happen.
Undoubtedly but I contrasted that with the fact that their last effort on cracking down on this sort of thing (in the case of mail relay), they got wrong and it lost them a customer. So Telewest may be wary of pissing anyone off too.
Yes, I've tried Nildram too. Good stuff. The problem is they're DSL and basically it's just not as good as cable. Not as fast, not as low latency, not as reliable.
After six different providers on both business and domestic tarrifs, I don't make this statement lightly.
I've run into the same problem that this guy has with ADSL and BT. Despite disconnecting from an ADSL service for six months, when I came back to it and wanted another provider - I was told I still had ADSL and had to jump through hoops to get things sorted out. It was a right pain.
However this isn't particularly indicative. While the sort of ADSL-wholesale-provider concept does undoubtedly introduce hiccups from time to time, it's also quite cool in a way which Americans might not necessary get.
We can order ADSL pretty much nationally (our coverage is very good) and then get it connected to an ISP of our choice. So your service and support comes from a smaller outfit much more helpful than going to a large ISP, as a rule. On the whole it's working quite well like that.
Yeah BT is the weakest-link again but this guy's problems aren't what everyone can expect and there's plenty of good things about the system too. BT, at present, is trialling an uncapped ADSL service where you get whatever your line is capable of. This is a huge deal for us in the UK because for the very longest time, all the broadband opperators colluded to ensure that 256k upstream was the maximum you could get off anyone.
Fortunately the cable guys broke ranks eventually and this has forced BT into action.
I can't win. For ages I've run my own mail server for myself and two other flats in London that run off my 4MB Telewest cable modem. Unfortunately there's a number of these blacklist operators that have mapped out the IP space of the cable modems themselves and I find the odd email gets bounced.
So awhile ago I switched to using their own mail servers and now I'm getting even more blocked. Argh!
Broadband providers will actually have to start taking responsibility for this sort of thing and disconnect zombie infected clients. Not just for the good of the Internet as a whole but so their OWN customers don't jump ship to a small DSL provider to avoid this irritating blacklist nonsense.
Interestingly a couple of years ago, or so, they cut me off because they eroneously claimed that my mail server was relaying. It wasn't, it never was. They refused to take my calls and sort it out and I had no option to cancel the service and write a letter of complaint to their management. I spent another six months on a DSL provider before running back, tail between legs. Maybe they've taken the view that enforcing these tests (which are necessary, I will admit, although they did seem inept at it) costs them customers like me - users of their highest and most expensive tier of service? But surely the biggest problem is zombies on family PCs via the basic service?
Note: Other than that, Telewest/Blueyonder is by far and away the best broadband service I have used. Never any evidence of contention and it's many times more reliable than any DSL service (and I've tried six) with pretty much bugger all down time.
In addition to the rest of the comments by your post, I just want to add that Microsoft Digit Image Suite 10 (which is what it's up to now), is not 'rapidly improving' and is nowhere near the functionality of pretty much all of the also-ran software in the consumer paint/photo software space.
In the UK the product has failed to hit the top 10 at all. Adobe, meanwhile, has overtaken their REAL arch rival in consumer software, JASC and Paint Shop Pro, because they put an easy user interface on a power peice of software, rather than JASC putting a ridiculously complex user interface on a ridiculously complex paint package.
Microsoft instead chose to put a simple user interface on an extremely basic software package and then charge the same money as Adobe was for Photoshop Elements. I was at a the press unveling of Digital Image 10 and put this to them "How do you expect this to sell when Photoshop Elements 3.0 is out on Monday for the same price?". Microsoft product manager said "Oh, is it?"
It's actually embarassing to see how badly Microsoft's consumer photo/paint software is doing. So you're all kinds of wrong on this issue I'm afraid.
I don't see any mention of the copy & paste issue so I assume this is not fixed. It's a bug that seems to affect people at random but for reasons I don't understand, it manifests on EVERY Firefox installation on all my machines at home and work. So I often have to reload ten times or load IE just to copy a bit of damn text off a page.
This is probably the only issue I have but it does make me think that the whole thing just isn't anywhere near as tested as IE is.
I think you're misunderstanding the situation with digital terrestrial television there. It cost a lot of money to put the infrastructure in place and it was all paid for and set up as a commercial concern as part of the ITV partnership On Digital.
It didn't work and it went backrupt.
The BBC merely came along and offered to join up with the terrestrial channels in the Freeview organisation. A good move but the BBC was not pivotal in introducing DTT - a commercial company was and they failed initially.
Erm, your laptop is trying to make do with a fan about the size of a... what is it you call that 25 cent coin again, a quarter?
If you take the Pentium M and you put it on a desktop board and add the smallest of heatsinks and fans assembly - such as those provided with the DFI and AOPen PentiumM desktop boards - they seriously don't crank above 40C ever.
One might equally ask how many times you press your gonads to the underside of your desktop processor. Apples and oranges.
I don't agree. I bought a 1.7 less than I bought a 2.8 P4. I overclocked the 2.8 P4 to 3.2 before. I overclocked the 1.7 on a desktop board (which I've been playing around with to amazing results) to 2.0 and the performance is around about the same.
Only this time I'm not chewing 150W of power, I'm using less than half that. That means a silent cooler too.
I think the issue of cooling down hot/fast CPUs needs to be brought back onto why we need these hot CPUs in the first place.
Intel have, in fact, been pulling the blinds over our eyes with the Pentium 4 series - particularly the infamous Prescott infernace. An entire industry exists in cooling down CPUs to the point that there's more reviews of silly cooling contraptions and water cooling kits on the web than there are the bits in PCs that do useful stuff.
Why the Intel blinds? Because the Pentium M manages to be just as fast and frequently faster - when given a fair trial on a desktop board - as the latest and greatest Pentium 4s. What's more, the chips cost less and they use a fraction as much power.
One wonders what tricks Intel will use to bump the heat up on the new 800 series (basically just two Pentium Ms on a chip) to safeguard the enthusiast cooling industry?
I hope for everyone's sake you're wrong. That Fox peice hit news worldwide as everyone pointed and laughed and said "My god, they can't really believe that, can they?"
What I'm tired of sometimtes are narrow people like yourself, sir, who see the sharing (be that torrent or else) as being bad and sharers as being or doing evil
I don't know why you think you're in a position to second guess what my views are. In any case, in this instance you're absolutely wrong.
Don't you people get tired of spinning this record?
That all these nasty corporations that want you to stop stealing their content are satanic morons and don't get how fundamentally cool and right peer to peer stuff is?
There must come a time when you will stop deluding yourselves on this mass scale. Your stealing stuff and these companies are not evil trying to stop you, you're the ones that are evil.
My father once told me that the secret to happiness was either trying to make money from your hobby or work a real job that lets you support your hobby.
Your father is a very wise man.
I've skirted back and forth doing both. The only time I was ever unhappy was doing a job which was kind of in the industry of my hobby but really was about neither of the above points.
Slashdot Mirror
So yeah it's a closed standard because, not for the first time, a company sitting down to design a protocol and infrastructure from scratch often comes up with something remarkably better than designed-by-commitee products.
Now I'm not saying everyone should dump stuff and go to Skype, I still find their service haphazard and buggy at best particularly when using the Skype in/out functionality. However I think a bit of respect is due for a company that realised the killer application and went on to deliver in a consumer friendly manner that was genuinely useful and, more or less, single handedly forged the entire consumer idea of net phones full stop.
I'm not sure you actually did.
This is a case of removing a quote without context. If you examine the history of the dealings, Hexus offered a review to Alienware and Alienware refused. There's no threats and in fact the same computer system had been previously reviewed so the Alienware guy saying he'd have rocks in his head to have to go back after a previous review seems fair comment to me? What is all being spun as threatening an editorial publication is actually nothing of the sort. It's entirely up to a company to send a review product or not and they'd be fools to do so unless they thought that the publication would at least give it a fair chance.
I don't know, I think the whole printing of a private email discussion is pretty low too and the editorial rants about all sorts of things you simple cannot infer from what was actually said.
This remarkably naive view point ignores the fact that the rights for BBC IP are assigned to BBC Worldwide incorporated in the US.
There wouldn't be any need to extradite you. Instead you could be sued in the good 'ol US of A. And the great thing about that? In the US they can afford better lawyers than you can.
This thing was driving me crazy. It plagued all my machines with Firefox installed no matter what the version. Like you in this thread, I also got lots of people claiming there was no problem because it worked fine for THEM. Well I found the problem. It's RDC. If I vape RDC windows, then Firefox copy/paste works fine. If one is open, then suddenly it goes screwy and randomly works again. RDC isn't something that you'd think would break things like this but it is doing clipboard work too of course.
Upper Street is a very nice place and it's packed with an unfeasibly large number bars and restaurants, much of which are spilling out onto the pavement (sidewalk for Americans) at this time of year.
I can think of no better place than to have wifi access for free. It makes Upper street quite an attractive weekend haunt for me now as well as being a damn near perfect location for informal business meetings. Hooray!
I think this is a genuinely good thing for the area and it's heartening to see a council give something back for our ever-soaring rates. Of course I do wonder if some of the businesses wont start getting a little annoyed by the wifi camper syndrome - Eg someone who takes up a table and chair and sits on a coffee for 2 hours.
I guess the bars and restaurants will have to find ways of dealing with that too.
It's here. I guess they'd rather people bought one than winning one which is fair enough! Not sure if there's a competition on the US web site.
The thing is though, right, who actually cares?
Heh, no he really is not. If you don't get that point then there's really not a whole lot for you to understand in the entire debate.
Undoubtedly but I contrasted that with the fact that their last effort on cracking down on this sort of thing (in the case of mail relay), they got wrong and it lost them a customer. So Telewest may be wary of pissing anyone off too.
After six different providers on both business and domestic tarrifs, I don't make this statement lightly.
However this isn't particularly indicative. While the sort of ADSL-wholesale-provider concept does undoubtedly introduce hiccups from time to time, it's also quite cool in a way which Americans might not necessary get.
We can order ADSL pretty much nationally (our coverage is very good) and then get it connected to an ISP of our choice. So your service and support comes from a smaller outfit much more helpful than going to a large ISP, as a rule. On the whole it's working quite well like that.
Yeah BT is the weakest-link again but this guy's problems aren't what everyone can expect and there's plenty of good things about the system too. BT, at present, is trialling an uncapped ADSL service where you get whatever your line is capable of. This is a huge deal for us in the UK because for the very longest time, all the broadband opperators colluded to ensure that 256k upstream was the maximum you could get off anyone.
Fortunately the cable guys broke ranks eventually and this has forced BT into action.
So awhile ago I switched to using their own mail servers and now I'm getting even more blocked. Argh!
Broadband providers will actually have to start taking responsibility for this sort of thing and disconnect zombie infected clients. Not just for the good of the Internet as a whole but so their OWN customers don't jump ship to a small DSL provider to avoid this irritating blacklist nonsense.
Interestingly a couple of years ago, or so, they cut me off because they eroneously claimed that my mail server was relaying. It wasn't, it never was. They refused to take my calls and sort it out and I had no option to cancel the service and write a letter of complaint to their management. I spent another six months on a DSL provider before running back, tail between legs. Maybe they've taken the view that enforcing these tests (which are necessary, I will admit, although they did seem inept at it) costs them customers like me - users of their highest and most expensive tier of service? But surely the biggest problem is zombies on family PCs via the basic service?
Note: Other than that, Telewest/Blueyonder is by far and away the best broadband service I have used. Never any evidence of contention and it's many times more reliable than any DSL service (and I've tried six) with pretty much bugger all down time.
In the UK the product has failed to hit the top 10 at all. Adobe, meanwhile, has overtaken their REAL arch rival in consumer software, JASC and Paint Shop Pro, because they put an easy user interface on a power peice of software, rather than JASC putting a ridiculously complex user interface on a ridiculously complex paint package.
Microsoft instead chose to put a simple user interface on an extremely basic software package and then charge the same money as Adobe was for Photoshop Elements. I was at a the press unveling of Digital Image 10 and put this to them "How do you expect this to sell when Photoshop Elements 3.0 is out on Monday for the same price?". Microsoft product manager said "Oh, is it?"
It's actually embarassing to see how badly Microsoft's consumer photo/paint software is doing. So you're all kinds of wrong on this issue I'm afraid.
I don't see any mention of the copy & paste issue so I assume this is not fixed. It's a bug that seems to affect people at random but for reasons I don't understand, it manifests on EVERY Firefox installation on all my machines at home and work. So I often have to reload ten times or load IE just to copy a bit of damn text off a page. This is probably the only issue I have but it does make me think that the whole thing just isn't anywhere near as tested as IE is.
Yeah except they don't, you know, do wooden computers and stuff.
I think you're misunderstanding the situation with digital terrestrial television there. It cost a lot of money to put the infrastructure in place and it was all paid for and set up as a commercial concern as part of the ITV partnership On Digital. It didn't work and it went backrupt. The BBC merely came along and offered to join up with the terrestrial channels in the Freeview organisation. A good move but the BBC was not pivotal in introducing DTT - a commercial company was and they failed initially.
If you take the Pentium M and you put it on a desktop board and add the smallest of heatsinks and fans assembly - such as those provided with the DFI and AOPen PentiumM desktop boards - they seriously don't crank above 40C ever.
One might equally ask how many times you press your gonads to the underside of your desktop processor. Apples and oranges.
Only this time I'm not chewing 150W of power, I'm using less than half that. That means a silent cooler too.
Intel have, in fact, been pulling the blinds over our eyes with the Pentium 4 series - particularly the infamous Prescott infernace. An entire industry exists in cooling down CPUs to the point that there's more reviews of silly cooling contraptions and water cooling kits on the web than there are the bits in PCs that do useful stuff.
Why the Intel blinds? Because the Pentium M manages to be just as fast and frequently faster - when given a fair trial on a desktop board - as the latest and greatest Pentium 4s. What's more, the chips cost less and they use a fraction as much power.
One wonders what tricks Intel will use to bump the heat up on the new 800 series (basically just two Pentium Ms on a chip) to safeguard the enthusiast cooling industry?
I'm sure they'll think of something.
That's what I was thinking...
I hope for everyone's sake you're wrong. That Fox peice hit news worldwide as everyone pointed and laughed and said "My god, they can't really believe that, can they?"
Except the bit about every British person being a monarchist isn't even remotely right.
That all these nasty corporations that want you to stop stealing their content are satanic morons and don't get how fundamentally cool and right peer to peer stuff is?
There must come a time when you will stop deluding yourselves on this mass scale. Your stealing stuff and these companies are not evil trying to stop you, you're the ones that are evil.
Your father is a very wise man.
I've skirted back and forth doing both. The only time I was ever unhappy was doing a job which was kind of in the industry of my hobby but really was about neither of the above points.