Re:Dixons stopped VHS because of TiVo/PVRs?...
on
The VHS is Dead
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· Score: 1
I was considering getting a basic PVR for UKP 150.00 in February, but it was very limited
Have a look at MythTV - with the advantage that it's opensource so if theres a feature missing you can implement it yourself.
I went for Myth because it's open source and at the time Sky Plus had some long standing (and serious bugs) with the "series link" feature which lets you record a whole series whcih showed no sign of getting fixed. I still think the way Myth decides what to record is superior - I can tell it to "Record all episodes of Battlestar Galactica on any channel" and it will. If there are 2 programs it wants to record at the same time it will look around to see if any of them are repeated later (even on another channel) and reschedule to avoid the conflict. At the end of the season I won't delete the instruction to record Battlestar Galactica so when the next season starts it will automagically start recording it for me so I don't have to keep an eye out for the new season starting.
From my experience designing my own web site, I've found that Opera does nowhere near a good job of standards compliance - it's better than IE but nowhere near as good as FireFox.
Don't get me wrong - I think it's good that there is another browser around that's not as broken as IE, but I don't really understand why people would pay money (or put up with ads) on their browser when FireFox is free and seems more standards complient.
Oh, and don't get me started on Opera defaulting to pretending it's IE - I really hate what the User Agent string has become - every browser pretending to be every other browser. The User Agent string should reflect what you're actually running and anyone who uses the UA string to adjust the content they're serving should be shot. I do wonder how many of the "IE" users in the stats are actually running a non-IE browser that's forged it's UA string.
I would be inclined to say that the browser (or IE specifically) is only "mature" by the standards of the non-techy end-users.
A mature technology would be one where the standards are well defined and followed quite well by all current software across all platforms - clearly not the case where IE is concerned.
We're getting a long way there through Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. but we've still got a way to go - there are useful features specified in the standards (e.g. parts of CSS2.1, etc) which are not yet supported. There are certainly a few bugs in the way all of the browsers render some stuff (annoyingly there are different bugs in different browsers, making it sometimes difficult to design a page to render in _exactly_ the same way under each browser) - I expect there will always be some bugs there since bug-free software is just a pipe dream, but I think we can probably do better before the technology is "mature".
I also think that before the technology can be considered mature it needs to do a better job at coping with clueless people coding web pages - XHTML goes a long way towards this by preventing people from producing pages with parse errors, unfortunately IE doesn't support XML. IMHO the XHTML specs should also include a couple of extra features:
- The browser should provide the ability to override the "parse error" message after displaying it and try and fix the broken XML. The page would still be obviously broken so the developer would still need to fix it but visitors would actually be able to get at the data in the interim.
- There should be some (automatic?) method for the browser to report a parse error to the web master otherwise the webmaster may never know there's a problem.
I'm also of the opinion that XHTML will reduce the security problems by reducing the complexity of the parser.
I think (as a developer) a "WOW" feature would be all browsers doing validation of pages and warning if they don't validate: Imagine you're a clueless manager who just hired a web designer. The web designer currently can knock together something that works in IE but no other browser and doesn't validate and will get paid. If, on the other hand, the manager visited the site and was immediately informed by his browser that the code is crap the web developer won't get paid and so standards of professional sites will be improved.
My problem with them is mainly that they're a complete waste of money. They will do nothing to improve security (all the 9/11 terrorists had official documentation), but will cost millions which could be spent on something more worthwhile.
I remember all the cold war movies where people would get arrested if they weren't carrying their "papers" at all times - are we heading into that kind of society? Why did the west consider that kind of environment a bad thing during the cold war but now it's ok? Oh that's right - everything's justifiable by the 'T' word isn't it?
but it's not a fair comparison unless you've reset them so a black desktop is really black, as compared to an unlit part of the screen.
I always set my monitors this way - the TFTs I've used in the past couple of years are still way brighter than CRT computer monitors (although of course it's adjustable, but being able to crank the brightness up all the way is great if you wanna watch movies).
I've also seen a couple of 42" TFT HDTV screens designed for outdoor use - you can see the image even in direct sunlight, and you generally don't want to sit in a darkened room and look at them coz they will hurt your eyes:)
I wonder if plasma displays are better for that? Plasma TVs are certainly clearer.
Plasma is nice for TV, but (AFAIK) you can't get a reasonable dot pitch out of them so not a lot of use for computer displays. They also have quite a short life (ISTR something like 2 power-on-years?) which is going to be fine for a home TV, but for a computer display thats on maybe 12 hours a day it's not good.
Another problem with plasma screens is that they dissipate quite a lot of heat - probably about what you get out if a CRT. But unlike a CRT, where the heat comes out of the top, a plasma screen radiates it straight out of the front so you really don't want to be sitting at close range infront of a plasma screen (so ok for a TV but not a lot of use for a computer screen).
Ideally I'd like to have a flat display around twice the size of a standard 21" monitor, that would still do very fine resolution. Even on this 19" monitor, my desktop is NEVER big enough!:(
I know what you mean - a couple of 21" 16:9 flatscreens running in a sane resolution would be great. I can't understand the people who buy a 19" screen that will do 1280x1024 and they think it's great - hell, I run a 15" Sony CRT in 1280x1024.:)
(My workstations have dual CRT displays - at work I have a 21" and 14", at home I have a 15" and 14". I'll upgrade my home setup to a 21" TFT when they come down in price coz I really can't acaommodate a CRT of that size)
All I can say is roll on creap OLED displays - it'd be great if I could have a curved display running 180 degrees around me...:)
The REAL difference between LCD and CRT? LCD isn't nearly as bright. Compare how much waste light each produces, by having each screen as the only light source in a dark room.
Actually, most of the modern LCD screens (for desktops) I've seen are brighter than a CRT. However, the picture always seems to be "crisper" on the LCDs. I really want to get myself an LCD monitor for my home machine, but I'd want something the size of a 21" CRT (so that'd be at least a 19" LCD) that does at least 1600x1200... and for that you're looking at mucho cash.
Even nicer would be a 21" flat panel of that kind of resolution but 16:9 ratio - I want the screen area of a 21" screen, but I prefer it to be wide instead of tall (I hate looking up at the top of the screen and so generally only put stuff I don't need to look at much at the top and I work on the bottom part). Sadly for a 16:9 screen of a sensible resolution you're really looking at astronomical costs ATM... hopefully the price will go down soon. (Silly really coz the cost should really be related to the screen area and resolution rather than aspect ratio).
When I eventually decided to go for broadband a year later, I was pretty much forced to go with NTL as Demon (my dial-up ISP at the time) only dealt with BT lines.
Using BT lines isn't as bad as you might think - they generally run the DSL network itself quite well, it's just that the ISP site is useless. So if you use another ISP over the BT DSL line you don't have to put up with it. I would *never* advise getting the actual ISP services off BT since they really are clueless.
Their customer service has been excellent every time we've called them.
It must've improved massively since I left NTL then - I used to have to hang on the phone for anywhere between 45 minutes and 90 minutes before my call was answered... and then there was porbably a 25% chance of them just hanging up your call immediately.
Basically, around August 2000 I ordered phone and TV off NTL - there were no digital services in the area at the time, but they would "be available in November 2000" and I would get a free upgrade. The previous owner of my home had had NTL but it was disconnected (so the cables were all in) but they couldn't schedule an installation immediately so I had to wait about 6 weeks.
Eventually the engineer appeared, connected the TV up, which worked right away and then told me he needed to go connect the phone line at the multiplexor... he never returned so eventually I phoned customer support (waited an hour on the phone) and asked what the hell was going on... I was told there were no free connections in the multiplexor and it needed to be upgraded... this would happen in about 3 months.
Now, 1. they could've checked this in the 6 weeks before the engineer was due to show up, and 2. the engineer could've actually told me himself instead of just vanishing without a trace.
Anyway, eventually I got my phone line connected. By the start of 2003 there was still no digital in the area (so no digital TV, no cable modems) so I gave up and dropped NTL, replacing it with Sky Digital for the TV, BT for phone and PlusNet for DSL - I haven't looked back.
This last summer, NTL came knocking on doors asking people if they wanted to sign up for their "new" digital services (so only 4 years late - I doubt they got many takers since most people would've got DSL ages ago, especially since NTL were more expensive for internet connections).
The salesman asked me what type of internet connection I currently have and I replied "DSL"... he looked at me blankly and said "is that dialup?"... so I told him what I thought of NTL, especially since he didn't even know about the only competing technology to their own cable modem services.
Many of the people I deal with in the course of my business have similarly bad things to say about NTL... infact its very rare that I hear anyone saying anything good about them (including my friends who work for NTL).
if you can't get cable and can only have ADSL, use Demon.
I have found DSL to be much more reliable than (NTL) cable, although it is true that trusting BT to do the ISP side of things is a very bad idea (they seem just as clueless as NTL). I used to use Demon for my dialup, but when I switched to DSL a couple of years back their network was in pieces and was generally quite flakey so I moved to PlusNet who have done a excellent job of running a very stable DSL line. I think it's gone down a total of twice in 2 years - once was a very short outage caused by an equipment failure at PlusNet and the other was about 4 or 5 hours which was BT's fault (and also took out most of the DSL lines in the South-East of the UK).
Admittedly I only use them for the connection, I run all the services (mail, DNS, etc) myself because I frankly don't trust any consumer ISPs to know as much as me about networking.
I have also heard good things about Bogons if you want an ISP with a clue and they're aparantly happy to do almost anything with a DSL line (moving portable IP addresses onto it, multi-channel bonding, etc).
The msnbot has been around for many months. I have seen many complaints about the amount of bandwidth it uses and I know many web masters (me included) have blocked it's access because of this so I dunno how useful the search results will be. I've seen reports of it sucking gigabytes off a site in a day, and then doing exactly the same again the next day, which is really quite serious for those people who have a reasonably small bandwidth limit on their web space.
For me it was sucking several gig a month off my site, and was obviously very badly coded since it was refetching the same pages over and over (cachable pages, non-cachable pages and 404's). So in the end I gave up and outright blocked the damned thing - yet another bit of shoddy MS code out to break the internet..:(
You rarely need more than the graphical software found in the control panel and start menu to do basic stuff.
Ok, here's an example: A while ago I was setting up a Windows system. The network wasn't working, something somewhere was blocking the traffic. On a Linux box I would've got out tcpdump and looked to see what traffic was actually going where, but on Windows, about all I could do was check the IP settings were correct and then sit there wondering what to do now. Yes, I know I could've used a different machine to download Ethereal or something, but that's not the point.
(I've never had a mouse go unrecognised on WinXP, and I've never seen the graphics card repaint things funnily because I didn't tell the OS exactly how much video RAM or what graphics card I was using). This is the sort of shit an end user HAS to deal with under Linux, and it doesn't need to be that way!
You're right - it doesn't need to be that way... infact it hasn't been that way for years. I certainly haven't had any problems like those for years... probably not since XFree86 4 became mainstream.
On the other hand, I have seen Windows systems do some truely insane things and have had to spend hours or days trying to work out WTF they were doing.
The end user who doesn't know a hundred obscure commands, and another hundred obscure config files is just as screwed in Linux as they are with Windows.
That is exactly my point - if you don't know what you're doing, you're screwed either way, but if you have some clue you're better off with linux... so where's the advantage for anyone in running Windows? It's no better for any of the users, and for some it's worse.
You said that home users need to be able to trouble shoot stuff themselves, but you just admitted that most of them can't nomatter what OS they're running, and the ones who can would be far better off with an OS that actually has the resources for them to trouble shoot it.
If anyone knows of a VoIP app for Symbian UIQ I'd be very interested - I've been looking around for one to run on my Sony Ericsson P900 phone for ages and so far have found nothing.:(
End users NEED to be able to trouble shoot their OS to some level - otherwise you'll never get people running it at home.
This is one of the big reasons why I _won't_ run windows - If something breaks in Linux I have all the tools I need to poke around and debug the problem. If I'm presented with a non-functional windows machine I find myself standing there saying "well, it's screwed innit?" and theres usually very little debugging I can do. This is probably why the usual solution for a broken windows machine seems to be a reinstall whereas I have never had to reinstall Linux because some software broke.
where staff turnover is high (you are loosing the knowledge that people have of existing software anyway when they leave).
I'm not so sure about this - it can probably be assumed that most new recruits will have at least a basic knowledge of using Windows. Using an alternative means more training, which may not be cost effective if you have to train lots of people who won't be there long.
Really, if computers were easy to use as cars it would be one thing, but it's not the case currently and I don't see a future that is accepting of it.
Really? IMHO computers probably are as easy as cars. i.e. if my car needs some maintenance, I don't do it myself (at least, not for anything but the most simple stuff - I wouldn't know where to start), I go to the garage and pay someone who knows what he's doing to fix it. The same applies to computers - if you need some maintenance doing to your computer and you don't know enough to do it yourself then you should be paying a professional to look at it.
Too many people have an attitude of "it should be simple enough for me to maintain" when it comes to computers - I have to ask why? How many people strip down their car engine and then are left with a pile of bits on the floor with no clue how to put them back together and blame the car manufacturer for not making it "easy enough"?
Just because a computer plugs into the wall like a toaster doesn't mean that the user has a "right" to be able to maintain it without any training. I think people need to get out of the idea that computers are things which you buy and then they don't need any upkeep - computers are definately things that you buy and then need maintenance every so often. Some of us are knowledgable to do it ourselves, but the rest should get a professional to sort it out. Maybe manufacturers specifying that a computer requires a yearly service by a professional engineer would be a good idea?
One disk per application set, and game-styled menus to select between apps on a single disk...
Ok, so what happens if I want run my word processor and web browser at the same time if they're on different disks? Or if I want to install that new plugin on my web browser?
What happens when a new security update comes out? does microsoft ship everyone a new cd each week for free?
I'm sure this is a great idea in some very specific areas - i.e. if I was giving my mum a PC then I could quite happilly give her a linux box with a word processor, email reader and web browser on it and she'd be completely happy. But I couldn't do the same for my dad, coz he wants to install some newfangled software he bought at the highstreet shop (which admittedly may well work under WINE, but he doesn't have the technical knowledge to get it working).
So as far as I can tell, you have 3 types of people using computers: 1. The people who don't know much about computers but know what they want it to do - you can set them up with a linux system and all the applications they need and they never need it to change, very little maintenance. 2. People who know lots about how to drive a computer - they can use a linux system to do whatever they need because they have the knowledge to get it working. 3. People who don't have a huge technical knowledge, but have changing needs (e.g. they see that newfangled bit of software in PC World and want to install it) and so they're stuck with Windows. I fear you'd have similar problems with the read only workstation idea - yes, it suits certain people, but probably not the majority of users.
I don't think that host-terminal setup is showstopper for good graphics. OpenGL is networked from the births.
I challenge you to run doom3 at a sane speed, displaying over an IP network...
I don't think it is too restrictive. Some years ago I've written security policy for Linux server in our company. It reads "If user wants a program which is included in Debian (excluding "games" section, it is office server after all), and system administrator doesn't like the idea, it is admin's responsibility to provide reasons why thing shouldn't be available for user.
What if they want something not included in debian? Besides, you're talking about a corporate environment, which is traditionally much more restricted than a home machine anyway.
Debian includes more software than user can learn in his whole live, and if thing is not included, it probably is not worth that.
I use Fedora - similar to Debian in that it has masses of bundled software... but I still use stuff thats not bundled with it.
You can even allow clueless users to do apt-get install via sudo
What if they need something not in the apt repository you've told them to use? If you let them apt-get from arbitrary sources then there's nothing stopping them installing that new game/tool/application that just happens to be spyware.
Once you let smart guy in, you depend on his honesty with all your sensitive data.
When you ask the garage to change your brakes you rely on their honesty and competence (unless you take the brakes to pieces and check them yourself after they finished). I for one would prefer to trust someone with my sensitive data than trust them with my life.
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I was considering getting a basic PVR for UKP 150.00 in February, but it was very limited
Have a look at MythTV - with the advantage that it's opensource so if theres a feature missing you can implement it yourself.
I went for Myth because it's open source and at the time Sky Plus had some long standing (and serious bugs) with the "series link" feature which lets you record a whole series whcih showed no sign of getting fixed. I still think the way Myth decides what to record is superior - I can tell it to "Record all episodes of Battlestar Galactica on any channel" and it will. If there are 2 programs it wants to record at the same time it will look around to see if any of them are repeated later (even on another channel) and reschedule to avoid the conflict. At the end of the season I won't delete the instruction to record Battlestar Galactica so when the next season starts it will automagically start recording it for me so I don't have to keep an eye out for the new season starting.
From my experience designing my own web site, I've found that Opera does nowhere near a good job of standards compliance - it's better than IE but nowhere near as good as FireFox.
Don't get me wrong - I think it's good that there is another browser around that's not as broken as IE, but I don't really understand why people would pay money (or put up with ads) on their browser when FireFox is free and seems more standards complient.
Oh, and don't get me started on Opera defaulting to pretending it's IE - I really hate what the User Agent string has become - every browser pretending to be every other browser. The User Agent string should reflect what you're actually running and anyone who uses the UA string to adjust the content they're serving should be shot. I do wonder how many of the "IE" users in the stats are actually running a non-IE browser that's forged it's UA string.
I would be inclined to say that the browser (or IE specifically) is only "mature" by the standards of the non-techy end-users.
A mature technology would be one where the standards are well defined and followed quite well by all current software across all platforms - clearly not the case where IE is concerned.
We're getting a long way there through Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. but we've still got a way to go - there are useful features specified in the standards (e.g. parts of CSS2.1, etc) which are not yet supported. There are certainly a few bugs in the way all of the browsers render some stuff (annoyingly there are different bugs in different browsers, making it sometimes difficult to design a page to render in _exactly_ the same way under each browser) - I expect there will always be some bugs there since bug-free software is just a pipe dream, but I think we can probably do better before the technology is "mature".
I also think that before the technology can be considered mature it needs to do a better job at coping with clueless people coding web pages - XHTML goes a long way towards this by preventing people from producing pages with parse errors, unfortunately IE doesn't support XML. IMHO the XHTML specs should also include a couple of extra features:
- The browser should provide the ability to override the "parse error" message after displaying it and try and fix the broken XML. The page would still be obviously broken so the developer would still need to fix it but visitors would actually be able to get at the data in the interim.
- There should be some (automatic?) method for the browser to report a parse error to the web master otherwise the webmaster may never know there's a problem.
I'm also of the opinion that XHTML will reduce the security problems by reducing the complexity of the parser.
I think (as a developer) a "WOW" feature would be all browsers doing validation of pages and warning if they don't validate: Imagine you're a clueless manager who just hired a web designer. The web designer currently can knock together something that works in IE but no other browser and doesn't validate and will get paid. If, on the other hand, the manager visited the site and was immediately informed by his browser that the code is crap the web developer won't get paid and so standards of professional sites will be improved.
I married an American, which exempted me from needing H1 status.
:)
If I can do it...
Most slashdotters are falling down a few stages before the "getting married".
but what exactly are people's concerns about them
My problem with them is mainly that they're a complete waste of money. They will do nothing to improve security (all the 9/11 terrorists had official documentation), but will cost millions which could be spent on something more worthwhile.
I remember all the cold war movies where people would get arrested if they weren't carrying their "papers" at all times - are we heading into that kind of society? Why did the west consider that kind of environment a bad thing during the cold war but now it's ok? Oh that's right - everything's justifiable by the 'T' word isn't it?
(Serious question)
Did you guys consider using a small RTG instead of batteries? Are there good reasons for using batteries instead of an RTG (cost, environmental, etc?)
China is a bully
And the US isn't ?!?
ARGH! s/creap/cheap/ even :-/
s/creap/sheap/
but it's not a fair comparison unless you've reset them so a black desktop is really black, as compared to an unlit part of the screen.
:)
:(
:)
:)
I always set my monitors this way - the TFTs I've used in the past couple of years are still way brighter than CRT computer monitors (although of course it's adjustable, but being able to crank the brightness up all the way is great if you wanna watch movies).
I've also seen a couple of 42" TFT HDTV screens designed for outdoor use - you can see the image even in direct sunlight, and you generally don't want to sit in a darkened room and look at them coz they will hurt your eyes
I wonder if plasma displays are better for that? Plasma TVs are certainly clearer.
Plasma is nice for TV, but (AFAIK) you can't get a reasonable dot pitch out of them so not a lot of use for computer displays. They also have quite a short life (ISTR something like 2 power-on-years?) which is going to be fine for a home TV, but for a computer display thats on maybe 12 hours a day it's not good.
Another problem with plasma screens is that they dissipate quite a lot of heat - probably about what you get out if a CRT. But unlike a CRT, where the heat comes out of the top, a plasma screen radiates it straight out of the front so you really don't want to be sitting at close range infront of a plasma screen (so ok for a TV but not a lot of use for a computer screen).
Ideally I'd like to have a flat display around twice the size of a standard 21" monitor, that would still do very fine resolution. Even on this 19" monitor, my desktop is NEVER big enough!
I know what you mean - a couple of 21" 16:9 flatscreens running in a sane resolution would be great. I can't understand the people who buy a 19" screen that will do 1280x1024 and they think it's great - hell, I run a 15" Sony CRT in 1280x1024.
(My workstations have dual CRT displays - at work I have a 21" and 14", at home I have a 15" and 14". I'll upgrade my home setup to a 21" TFT when they come down in price coz I really can't acaommodate a CRT of that size)
All I can say is roll on creap OLED displays - it'd be great if I could have a curved display running 180 degrees around me...
The REAL difference between LCD and CRT? LCD isn't nearly as bright. Compare how much waste light each produces, by having each screen as the only light source in a dark room.
Actually, most of the modern LCD screens (for desktops) I've seen are brighter than a CRT. However, the picture always seems to be "crisper" on the LCDs. I really want to get myself an LCD monitor for my home machine, but I'd want something the size of a 21" CRT (so that'd be at least a 19" LCD) that does at least 1600x1200... and for that you're looking at mucho cash.
Even nicer would be a 21" flat panel of that kind of resolution but 16:9 ratio - I want the screen area of a 21" screen, but I prefer it to be wide instead of tall (I hate looking up at the top of the screen and so generally only put stuff I don't need to look at much at the top and I work on the bottom part). Sadly for a 16:9 screen of a sensible resolution you're really looking at astronomical costs ATM... hopefully the price will go down soon. (Silly really coz the cost should really be related to the screen area and resolution rather than aspect ratio).
When I eventually decided to go for broadband a year later, I was pretty much forced to go with NTL as Demon (my dial-up ISP at the time) only dealt with BT lines.
Using BT lines isn't as bad as you might think - they generally run the DSL network itself quite well, it's just that the ISP site is useless. So if you use another ISP over the BT DSL line you don't have to put up with it. I would *never* advise getting the actual ISP services off BT since they really are clueless.
Their customer service has been excellent every time we've called them.
It must've improved massively since I left NTL then - I used to have to hang on the phone for anywhere between 45 minutes and 90 minutes before my call was answered... and then there was porbably a 25% chance of them just hanging up your call immediately.
Basically, around August 2000 I ordered phone and TV off NTL - there were no digital services in the area at the time, but they would "be available in November 2000" and I would get a free upgrade. The previous owner of my home had had NTL but it was disconnected (so the cables were all in) but they couldn't schedule an installation immediately so I had to wait about 6 weeks.
Eventually the engineer appeared, connected the TV up, which worked right away and then told me he needed to go connect the phone line at the multiplexor... he never returned so eventually I phoned customer support (waited an hour on the phone) and asked what the hell was going on... I was told there were no free connections in the multiplexor and it needed to be upgraded... this would happen in about 3 months.
Now, 1. they could've checked this in the 6 weeks before the engineer was due to show up, and 2. the engineer could've actually told me himself instead of just vanishing without a trace.
Anyway, eventually I got my phone line connected. By the start of 2003 there was still no digital in the area (so no digital TV, no cable modems) so I gave up and dropped NTL, replacing it with Sky Digital for the TV, BT for phone and PlusNet for DSL - I haven't looked back.
This last summer, NTL came knocking on doors asking people if they wanted to sign up for their "new" digital services (so only 4 years late - I doubt they got many takers since most people would've got DSL ages ago, especially since NTL were more expensive for internet connections).
The salesman asked me what type of internet connection I currently have and I replied "DSL"... he looked at me blankly and said "is that dialup?"... so I told him what I thought of NTL, especially since he didn't even know about the only competing technology to their own cable modem services.
Many of the people I deal with in the course of my business have similarly bad things to say about NTL... infact its very rare that I hear anyone saying anything good about them (including my friends who work for NTL).
if you can't get cable and can only have ADSL, use Demon.
I have found DSL to be much more reliable than (NTL) cable, although it is true that trusting BT to do the ISP side of things is a very bad idea (they seem just as clueless as NTL). I used to use Demon for my dialup, but when I switched to DSL a couple of years back their network was in pieces and was generally quite flakey so I moved to PlusNet who have done a excellent job of running a very stable DSL line. I think it's gone down a total of twice in 2 years - once was a very short outage caused by an equipment failure at PlusNet and the other was about 4 or 5 hours which was BT's fault (and also took out most of the DSL lines in the South-East of the UK).
Admittedly I only use them for the connection, I run all the services (mail, DNS, etc) myself because I frankly don't trust any consumer ISPs to know as much as me about networking.
I have also heard good things about Bogons if you want an ISP with a clue and they're aparantly happy to do almost anything with a DSL line (moving portable IP addresses onto it, multi-channel bonding, etc).
It payed attention for me with:
/
:)
User-agent: msnbot
Disallow:
iptables -A INPUT -p all -s 65.54.0.0/16 -j DROP
Or even better, if you have the TARPIT module:
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -s 65.54.0.0/16 -j TARPIT
It pays attention to robots.txt directives (finally, a small amount of standards compliance!)
Amazingly, there is some standards compliance and it pays attention to robots.txt directives.
The msnbot has been around for many months. I have seen many complaints about the amount of bandwidth it uses and I know many web masters (me included) have blocked it's access because of this so I dunno how useful the search results will be. I've seen reports of it sucking gigabytes off a site in a day, and then doing exactly the same again the next day, which is really quite serious for those people who have a reasonably small bandwidth limit on their web space.
:(
For me it was sucking several gig a month off my site, and was obviously very badly coded since it was refetching the same pages over and over (cachable pages, non-cachable pages and 404's). So in the end I gave up and outright blocked the damned thing - yet another bit of shoddy MS code out to break the internet..
You rarely need more than the graphical software found in the control panel and start menu to do basic stuff.
Ok, here's an example: A while ago I was setting up a Windows system. The network wasn't working, something somewhere was blocking the traffic. On a Linux box I would've got out tcpdump and looked to see what traffic was actually going where, but on Windows, about all I could do was check the IP settings were correct and then sit there wondering what to do now. Yes, I know I could've used a different machine to download Ethereal or something, but that's not the point.
(I've never had a mouse go unrecognised on WinXP, and I've never seen the graphics card repaint things funnily because I didn't tell the OS exactly how much video RAM or what graphics card I was using). This is the sort of shit an end user HAS to deal with under Linux, and it doesn't need to be that way!
You're right - it doesn't need to be that way... infact it hasn't been that way for years. I certainly haven't had any problems like those for years... probably not since XFree86 4 became mainstream.
On the other hand, I have seen Windows systems do some truely insane things and have had to spend hours or days trying to work out WTF they were doing.
The end user who doesn't know a hundred obscure commands, and another hundred obscure config files is just as screwed in Linux as they are with Windows.
That is exactly my point - if you don't know what you're doing, you're screwed either way, but if you have some clue you're better off with linux... so where's the advantage for anyone in running Windows? It's no better for any of the users, and for some it's worse.
You said that home users need to be able to trouble shoot stuff themselves, but you just admitted that most of them can't nomatter what OS they're running, and the ones who can would be far better off with an OS that actually has the resources for them to trouble shoot it.
If anyone knows of a VoIP app for Symbian UIQ I'd be very interested - I've been looking around for one to run on my Sony Ericsson P900 phone for ages and so far have found nothing. :(
End users NEED to be able to trouble shoot their OS to some level - otherwise you'll never get people running it at home.
This is one of the big reasons why I _won't_ run windows - If something breaks in Linux I have all the tools I need to poke around and debug the problem. If I'm presented with a non-functional windows machine I find myself standing there saying "well, it's screwed innit?" and theres usually very little debugging I can do. This is probably why the usual solution for a broken windows machine seems to be a reinstall whereas I have never had to reinstall Linux because some software broke.
where staff turnover is high (you are loosing the knowledge that people have of existing software anyway when they leave).
I'm not so sure about this - it can probably be assumed that most new recruits will have at least a basic knowledge of using Windows. Using an alternative means more training, which may not be cost effective if you have to train lots of people who won't be there long.
Really, if computers were easy to use as cars it would be one thing, but it's not the case currently and I don't see a future that is accepting of it.
Really? IMHO computers probably are as easy as cars. i.e. if my car needs some maintenance, I don't do it myself (at least, not for anything but the most simple stuff - I wouldn't know where to start), I go to the garage and pay someone who knows what he's doing to fix it. The same applies to computers - if you need some maintenance doing to your computer and you don't know enough to do it yourself then you should be paying a professional to look at it.
Too many people have an attitude of "it should be simple enough for me to maintain" when it comes to computers - I have to ask why? How many people strip down their car engine and then are left with a pile of bits on the floor with no clue how to put them back together and blame the car manufacturer for not making it "easy enough"?
Just because a computer plugs into the wall like a toaster doesn't mean that the user has a "right" to be able to maintain it without any training. I think people need to get out of the idea that computers are things which you buy and then they don't need any upkeep - computers are definately things that you buy and then need maintenance every so often. Some of us are knowledgable to do it ourselves, but the rest should get a professional to sort it out. Maybe manufacturers specifying that a computer requires a yearly service by a professional engineer would be a good idea?
One disk per application set, and game-styled menus to select between apps on a single disk...
Ok, so what happens if I want run my word processor and web browser at the same time if they're on different disks? Or if I want to install that new plugin on my web browser?
What happens when a new security update comes out? does microsoft ship everyone a new cd each week for free?
I'm sure this is a great idea in some very specific areas - i.e. if I was giving my mum a PC then I could quite happilly give her a linux box with a word processor, email reader and web browser on it and she'd be completely happy. But I couldn't do the same for my dad, coz he wants to install some newfangled software he bought at the highstreet shop (which admittedly may well work under WINE, but he doesn't have the technical knowledge to get it working).
So as far as I can tell, you have 3 types of people using computers:
1. The people who don't know much about computers but know what they want it to do - you can set them up with a linux system and all the applications they need and they never need it to change, very little maintenance.
2. People who know lots about how to drive a computer - they can use a linux system to do whatever they need because they have the knowledge to get it working.
3. People who don't have a huge technical knowledge, but have changing needs (e.g. they see that newfangled bit of software in PC World and want to install it) and so they're stuck with Windows.
I fear you'd have similar problems with the read only workstation idea - yes, it suits certain people, but probably not the majority of users.
I don't think that host-terminal setup is showstopper for good graphics. OpenGL is networked from the births.
I challenge you to run doom3 at a sane speed, displaying over an IP network...
I don't think it is too restrictive. Some years ago I've written security policy for Linux server in our company. It reads "If user wants a program which is included in Debian (excluding "games" section, it is office server after all), and system administrator doesn't like the idea, it is admin's responsibility to provide reasons why thing shouldn't be available for user.
What if they want something not included in debian? Besides, you're talking about a corporate environment, which is traditionally much more restricted than a home machine anyway.
Debian includes more software than user can learn in his whole live, and if thing is not included, it probably is not worth that.
I use Fedora - similar to Debian in that it has masses of bundled software... but I still use stuff thats not bundled with it.
You can even allow clueless users to do apt-get install via sudo
What if they need something not in the apt repository you've told them to use? If you let them apt-get from arbitrary sources then there's nothing stopping them installing that new game/tool/application that just happens to be spyware.
Once you let smart guy in, you depend on his honesty with all your sensitive data.
When you ask the garage to change your brakes you rely on their honesty and competence (unless you take the brakes to pieces and check them yourself after they finished). I for one would prefer to trust someone with my sensitive data than trust them with my life.