common usage like typing on a keyboard or watching a movie ON YOUR 50 INCH HDTV would be by wirelessly connecting to them from the phone.
In this case, your "phone as a terminal" idea makes no sense. To start with, we'll ignore the fact that you're talking to the TV wirelessly and look at the 2 options:
1. Your phone has the CPU grunt. It accepts an HDTV H.264 stream from somewhere (its internal memory? the network?), decodes it and chucks out the decompressed data to the TV over a wire. So you're going to need to power the CPU (or more likely, an ASIC) to do the heavy job of decoding the movie. 2. You are using your phone as a terminal - the HDTV H.264 stream is being decoded elsewhere on a server somewhere on the internet and transmitted to your phone, which then displays it on the TV. But wait, that decoded stream has to somehow get over the network from your server to the phone - uncompressed 1080p needs a *lot* of bandwidth, so we'd better compress it. Lets look to see what compression algorithms suit HDTV best... oh yeah, H.264 looks good. So your phone is *still* decoding the H.264 stream because there's no other sane way to get that data over the network.
Now, we'll bring the "wireless TV link" thing back into the equation. You're going to need the link between the TV and the phone to be compressed. So now you've just moved the decompression stuff into the TV - you no longer need the phone to do any work, or some remote server in the cloud.
In any case, if you've got a 50 inch TV next to you then you can plug the phone into a power supply. I don't care where the CPU is, if your phone is hammering out HDTV data over wifi, the battery isn't going to last the length of the movie.
Wrong. Every time you did anything computer related, you would be activating the transmitter in your phone, because your phone was your computer.
Eh? No, the original poster was talking about using your phone *locally* as a computer. I.e. plugging a montior and keyboard into your phone. This doesn't require the phone's transmitter to be active, any more than reading my calendar on my phone's display does. Now, I think the idea of a phone replacing a workstation is utterly crazy, but not for the reasons you are claiming.
Which is still less bandwidth than trying to use your desktop as a thin client for the phone.
No one is suggesting doing this. The original poster's suggestion was that you just plug your monitor and keyboard directly into your phone - no "desktop thin client" required. I don't need to use the cellular network to shift data from the phone to the monitor when they are sat about half a metre apart!
Not if your reading it on a decent sized screen.
What on earth does the size of the screen have to do with whether or not I need to use the network to display stuff on it?
In a PaaT situation, the radio will be receiving all the time as well, and only using the transmitter when you are actively using the phone.
Conversely, the (lower powered) CPU is only active when I'm using my phone.
This means that in your scenario, when you wanted to sit down and watch an HD movie, the transmitter on your phone will crank up and run full speed for the entire hour and a half that you sit there watching a movie.
Why on earth would I want to watch an HD movie on a phone of all things?
No, I use my phone to send SMS messages, emails, browse the web, write notes, manage my calendars, etc. All of these are things that can be done largely offline, only powering up the radio periodically. On the other hand, if you're using the phone as a thin client you need to power up the radio the whole time you're using the device because each time you press a key it has to go over the network to the server and each time the display needs to be updated all those graphics have to be pulled over the network.
It also means that when you sit down to read Slashdot, your transmitter would be running the entire time.
Now you're arguing backwards. If you were using a phone as a thin client then reading slashdot would require the transmitter to be powered up a lot - each time you scroll the screen, etc, you have to shove those graphics over the network. Running the browser application locally on the phone would mean that it only powers up the transmitter when retrieving the article - while you're reading it the transmitter can power down.
I can 100% guarantee you that writing one app that has multiple interfaces is always going to be easier
I guess you haven't done a lot of development work if this is what you think.
your phone will BE your computer. You'll stick it in your pocket, then when you get to work, you'll drop it in the monitor-connected dock and fire up your bluetooth (or whatever) input devices.
But why? If I'm going to have to have a docking station, monitor and keyboard at the office and at home I may as well have an actual PC too - a desktop PC is cheap (by far the most expensive piece of my workstation is the monitor) and isn't going to be accidentally dropped down the toilet.
As an employer, I would be _extremely_ resistant to this idea: I don't want an employee sitting there idle because they lost their phone - if they have a real PC on their desk then they can carry on working without it.
Not to mention the security risks of having everyone unnecessarily carrying confidential data around with them all the time - I have data on my workstations that I wouldn't dream of putting on my phone for security reasons. Whilst you can encrypt data, not having it on the device at all is far safer, and this is currently a good option where the office PC stays in the office.
No, a smartphone is useful as a portable device, and whilst it is useful to occasionally do desktop-PC-type things with it I just don't see that being the norm. Sure, when I'm on holiday I may want to be able to plug my phone into the hotel's HDTV and get out a bluetooth keyboard and use it as a desktop, but I'm not going to want to do that *instead* of having a real desktop machine in my office.
It will be receiving all the time, but turning the phone into a thin client means it will be transmitting a lot too. This will far outweigh the energy benefits of using a remote CPU.
Writing the same code for a half dozen different platforms is a waste of resources and money.
That's why programmers use libraries. Adapting a single application to serve several very different platforms is often far harder than just writing several different apps (that may all use the same libs for the backend functionality).
Far greater battery life, as once the phone is a good terminal, adding more processing power to the PC will add power, but since that part is plugged into the wall, it won't drain your battery at all.
I think you got this the wrong way around - powering the radio in your phone uses a _lot_ of battery power - far more than the CPU. If you're going to use the phone at a thin-client all the time then you're going to be keeping that radio powered up all the time and your battery won't last long at all.
You can access the same application from a desktop, TV, or the phone, and there is no reason the interface cannot change for each.
If you're going to have a totally different UI for each platform (and you will need that - a desktop UI is completely unsuited to a small-screen device), you may as well be using a different application on each platform anyway.
Cheaper. It will always be more expensive to build these things smaller, so putting it in a PC makes it cheaper.
I think you underestimate the cost of mobile bandwidth.
I can't begin to count the number of times I've received an error dialog box in an application that told me nothing useful.
Possibly one of the most annoying error messages I see are the ones that end "Please contact your system administrator."... Which is great when I *am* the system administrator and I don't have a clue what's broken because, rather than give me enough detail to figure it out, it just told me to go talk to myself...
That's because all machines have a physical component whose state is sometimes unable to fulfill user requirements, and we need to communicate that state to users. We call those communications "error messages" in the software world, and they cover everything from "out of memory" to "printer on fire."
Error messages don't just apply to hardware problems in any case - the idea that you can make software free from user-error messages whilst still making it usable is just downright silly.
Lets take an email application for example. How do you send an email when the user has forgotten to enter the recipient's address? Some options spring to mind:
You could grey out the "send" button until all the required data is filled in - this eliminates the need for an error message because it prevents the "sending with a blank recipient" condition ever occurring. But the cost is high - you're now relying on the user to figure out for themselves why the "send" button can't be pressed, instead of allowing them to press it and then informing them why it doesn't make sense by displaying an error message.
Another option is to convert the whole thing into a step-by-step wizard, whereby they *have* to complete each step before moving onto the next. But this means that the user has to adjust their workflow to conform to the software. For example, I frequently don't enter the recipient's address until after I have read the message body (I probably needed to look up the address and didn't want to break my train of thought that led me to write the message in the first place).
In a discussion about the speed of provision to UK homes?
Yes. "Home broadband" services are almost always basically the same services as the business ones - same network, slight tweaks to the terms of service and SLA, maybe some tweaks to the traffic shaping, but basically they are the same thing.
NTL became blueyonder (who were always outstanding) before they became Virgin.
Not really. Blueyonder was Telewest's cable modem service. Although the NTL and Telewest companies merged, their networks were still largely separate affairs at the time they became Virgin.
Virgin's support is likely blueyonder's legacy and bears little resemblance to anything NTL ever did.
NTL's support had already improved by leaps long before the Telewest merger. The support staff are basically the same people in the same callcentres (although have now been outsourced).
"provide stuff like static ip subnets" - you just lost 95% of the population, maybe more. *Most* people just want to download stuff, fast.
I was specifically talking about my customers, who are universally businesses. Sure, they want fast, but if fast comes at the expense of reliability and important stuff that they need (which usually includes things like static IPs) then they are happy to opt for a slower (but still perfectly fast enough) connection, such as ADSL.
which implies you don't need support
When your business is at a standstill because your internet connection has fallen over then you _do_ need support. I deal with the support staff at ISPs on behalf of my customers all the time, and it really does make things a lot easier when the ISP has a clue. The number of times I've had all hell break loose because I've done something like asked the ISP to make a trivial DNS change and they have utterly fucked it up (yay for customers' email all suddenly bouncing or disappearing into the bit-bucket!) tells me it really isn't worth bothering with ISPs who don't have decent support staff.
The service is rock solid, and if it isn't, then you ringing to moan about it is just wasting their time, they know and they are fixing it.
The idea that the ISP always knows about a problem without being told is just plain wrong. There are many problems where the only way the ISP gets to find out that it is a problem is because someone reported it. This ranges from configuration errors on their network (e.g. routers blocking stuff they shouldn't - I see problems with ISPs dropping ICMP type 3.4 packets with some frequency, and this is something that the ISP won't notice themselves because it causes intermittent TCP hangs in certain specific situations, not outright connectivity failures) to water in the local loop (again, the ISP will only know that your modem isn't connecting properly, they won't proactively fix it because they have no way to know that it is a line problem until they are told). Misconfigured traffic shaping is another thing that seems to come up with some frequency - they ISP won't spot the problem unless they are testing with that specific application themselves, they are relying on the customers reporting these problems.
I assume you don't use virgin, I do, have done for the last 10 years.
Personally, not anymore, nor am I likely to ever go back. I was an NTL (i.e. before they became Virgin) customer between 2000 and 2002 and the service was so bad that it just wasn't funny. Broken promises and outright lies were the norm on the odd occasion that you could actually get through to the support staff (90 minutes waiting in a call queue and probably a ~25% chance of them just hanging up on you immediately when you got through in order to make their call statistics look better). As soon as ADSL was available in my area I dropped them as fast as I could and switched to PlusNet, and now UKFSN - I've never looked back.
As mentioned above, I do deal with various ISPs on a day to day basis on behalf of my customers. Virgin's service has improved an untold amount since I dropped them - their customer support seems to be more or less adequately staffed with no more 90 minute queues and they have ripped out the broken transparent proxy servers which were forever causing web access to completely vanish.
Overall, I think I hear more complaints of the quality of Virgin's service than the service of the various ADSL ISPs, but it is hard to tell. I think that most of the complaints I hear about Virgin's service tend to be "it's working but not very well" style infrastructure problems, whilst ADSL issues tend to be "it isn't working at all" problems centred around the local loop. ADSL's problems are slightly exasperated by the way the ISPs have to interact with OpenReach in order to resolve local loop issues - this has a habit of turning reasonably trivial problems into a bit of a slog to convince them that they really do need to send out an OpenReach engineer.
Utter tripe. Compared to *any* ADSL provider they look like paragons of virtue. 8meg ADSL my ass. I have yet to meet anyone that's gotten above 5.
My ADSL syncs at 7.4Mbps and I can usually get over 6Mbps throughput during the day (falling to maybe 4Mbps in the evenings)
That's your choice entirely but to recommend people use a slower service than cable?
For most of my customers, speed is far far less important than reliability, support, ability to provide stuff like static IP subnets, etc. (all of these are things that Virgin fall flat on their faces on).
I haven't seen an ADSL connection that doesn't need the modem rebooting at least once a week
My ADSL connection hasn't had an outage in the last year, and no major outages for several years.
(though in a lot of cases, it's the router's fault, not the connection).
You gets what you pay for - buy crappy hardware and don't be surprised when it's... err.. crappy.
Admittedly, my Dlink DSL router is crap and loses its routing table on a regular basis, which is why it gets used as a modem, terminating the PPP stream on a SheevaPlug so it doesn't need a routing table. However, if this was a problem for me I'd just go get a decent router.
I've just bought a Point Of View Intel Atom 330 / nVidia Ion motherboard, case and RAM - total cost was well under £200 and it does pretty well as a home theatre system.
The iPhone launched in the UK as exclusive to the O2 network. In the last few months it's become available on two of the other four biggest networks Vodafone and Orange (who have announced that they will merge with the other big four, T-Mobile). The pricing and plan are practically identical.
So buy a second hand phone on ebay, unlock it and stick a PAYG SIM in it (or whatever contract works for you)...
Just stop using things that aren't banks. Declaring paypal a bank would just give it a large aura of legitimacy. They can still be very shady and do things that are ALMOST illegal.
No problem, you send a very small/light elevator-car up the cable, and when it gets to the end of the cable, it stays there and becomes part of the counterweight. Now you send a slightly larger/heavier elevator-car up the cable, and when it gets to the end, it stays there too. Repeat as necessary until you have enough mass at the end of the cable to support whatever payloads you want to bring up.
You can't keep sending stuff up a space elevator without bringing stuff down to compensate. Each time you haul some mass up the elevator, you rob the elevator and counterweight of orbital momentum. You'll need to bring some mass back down to put that energy back into the system, otherwise you'll end up deorbitting the elevator and counterweight. Another possibility might be to lift a rocket and fuel up the elevator and fire that to increase the orbital momentum again once it gets to the end, but that isn't going to be vastly more efficient than launching the rocket from high altitude instead of using the elevator since the amount of energy the rocket puts into the system is basically going to need to be the same as the amount needed to accelerate the rocket to orbital speed.
No, this sums [potaroo.net] it up. If you'd bother to read this or an estimation done by someone else, then you'd know that the uncertainty is less than 3 months with high confidence.
One thing is certain though - we _will_ run out of IPv4 addresses soon. It doesn't much matter how soon at this point - it's soon enough that people should be seriously thinking about implementing IPv6 networks. And anyone writing network software would be very foolish to not have already implemented and tested IPv6 support at this point.
Hey! I insist in patting down! Seriously, if I didn't fly I wouldn't have any sex life, so please, you can't take that away from me!
I assume most countries are similar to the UK in this rule, but in airports males pat down males and females pat down females. This stops the "I’ve been sexually assaulted" suits (in most cases). so what does this says about your sex life:)
I think you're wrong on this count - I'm male and have been patted down by female security officers at airports both in the UK and elsewhere.
Maybe people should just stop coming to the US. I've advised it before, and I will say it again; do not come here on vacation.
Don't worry, I'm not planning to - the US is firmly on my "avoid list". However, getting to other places may involve connecting flights in the US, and that is a problem since the US has previously shown a complete disregard for international treaties that treat the airport as international territory. (There have been a number of incidents whereby people catching connections in the US, and therefore not going through customs, have been apprehended and generally treated like shit - they don't consider you to be on US soil so the US legal protections don't apply to you, but similarly they don't consider it to be international soil so they are quite happy to enforce US laws. In some of these incidents, the arrestee was innocent (or at least, never charged with anything), was held for several days without being allowed to contact their embassy or get any form of legal representation before being deported back to their home country).
Don't do business with US companies, either.
That's *really* hard. You're going to struggle to do stuff like buying a computer that hasn't got any parts supplied by any US companies...
Problem is that your neighbor is just dumb enough to think the government is doing the right thing. A solution would be to educate people as to the toxic nature of our governments intentions.
The problem is that the government is much better at educating people than individuals, largely because they have access to the mainstream media. The government runs around shouting "terrorists are going to kill us all!" and the newspapers spread the word manically because scaring the shit out of people sells papers. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the population also seem to blindly accept what they are being told, rather than actually thinking it through and realising that it is basically bunk.
Also, even if you somehow manage to convince a large proportion of people about the wrongness of the government's policies, getting them changed is a real problem, because all the parties who stand for election have very similar policies. Sure, party A might do 10 really bad freedom destroying things and you manage to get the word out that one of those things is bad; People vote for party B instead, who are going to do the remaining 9 really bad things anyway and probably introduce a few extra really bad policies of their own.
A terrorist is defined as "Anyone who uses terror as a weapon in a political struggle" - as far as I'm concerned, this describes my government perfectly. They may not be going around blowing people up themselves, but they _are_ using terror to push their political agenda by saying "if you don't let us make these laws then people will blow you up!" Every time someone manages to start getting the word out about the badness of a new law, the government responds by shouting loudly enough about terrorists in order to get people to accept it that they may as well be holding the bomb themselves.
When I was growing up, IRA attacks and threats were a reasonably regular occurrence and they were played down by the officials. It was generally considered that if people got scared and we started making major changes to to way we live then the terrorists had basically won. I guess the terrorists have won now...
Allowing people to "defend" themselves against the police because they think they are in the right is not one compatible with the rule of law.
Why is allowing police to be violent because they think they are right compatible with the rule of law? Are the police above the law?
Because there's no point in leveling loitering, vagrancy or trespass charges since they carry no jail time and you obviously can't fine the guy.
If you think these laws need harsher sentences then get the law changed, don't charge someone with something bogus just because you want a harsher penalty. Taking things to extremes, how would you feel if a police officer decided that a minor crime deserved the death penalty and started framing people for murder in order to make it happen? The police should not be responsible for defining what sentence should be given for a crime - that is not their job.
That's the sad reality of things but it's all been the evolution of our society. We end up holding ourselves back and I doubt things will get much better.
I suspect it is the evolution of pretty much all societies - once you lose freedoms it is extremely hard to get them back, so the trend is to gradually lose your freedoms. Eventually it gets to the point where there is an almighty bloody revolution and you get many of those freedoms back, then the cycle starts again.
Slashdot Mirror
common usage like typing on a keyboard or watching a movie ON YOUR 50 INCH HDTV would be by wirelessly connecting to them from the phone.
In this case, your "phone as a terminal" idea makes no sense. To start with, we'll ignore the fact that you're talking to the TV wirelessly and look at the 2 options:
1. Your phone has the CPU grunt. It accepts an HDTV H.264 stream from somewhere (its internal memory? the network?), decodes it and chucks out the decompressed data to the TV over a wire. So you're going to need to power the CPU (or more likely, an ASIC) to do the heavy job of decoding the movie.
2. You are using your phone as a terminal - the HDTV H.264 stream is being decoded elsewhere on a server somewhere on the internet and transmitted to your phone, which then displays it on the TV. But wait, that decoded stream has to somehow get over the network from your server to the phone - uncompressed 1080p needs a *lot* of bandwidth, so we'd better compress it. Lets look to see what compression algorithms suit HDTV best... oh yeah, H.264 looks good. So your phone is *still* decoding the H.264 stream because there's no other sane way to get that data over the network.
Now, we'll bring the "wireless TV link" thing back into the equation. You're going to need the link between the TV and the phone to be compressed. So now you've just moved the decompression stuff into the TV - you no longer need the phone to do any work, or some remote server in the cloud.
In any case, if you've got a 50 inch TV next to you then you can plug the phone into a power supply. I don't care where the CPU is, if your phone is hammering out HDTV data over wifi, the battery isn't going to last the length of the movie.
Wrong. Every time you did anything computer related, you would be activating the transmitter in your phone, because your phone was your computer.
Eh? No, the original poster was talking about using your phone *locally* as a computer. I.e. plugging a montior and keyboard into your phone. This doesn't require the phone's transmitter to be active, any more than reading my calendar on my phone's display does. Now, I think the idea of a phone replacing a workstation is utterly crazy, but not for the reasons you are claiming.
Which is still less bandwidth than trying to use your desktop as a thin client for the phone.
No one is suggesting doing this. The original poster's suggestion was that you just plug your monitor and keyboard directly into your phone - no "desktop thin client" required. I don't need to use the cellular network to shift data from the phone to the monitor when they are sat about half a metre apart!
Not if your reading it on a decent sized screen.
What on earth does the size of the screen have to do with whether or not I need to use the network to display stuff on it?
In a PaaT situation, the radio will be receiving all the time as well, and only using the transmitter when you are actively using the phone.
Conversely, the (lower powered) CPU is only active when I'm using my phone.
This means that in your scenario, when you wanted to sit down and watch an HD movie, the transmitter on your phone will crank up and run full speed for the entire hour and a half that you sit there watching a movie.
Why on earth would I want to watch an HD movie on a phone of all things?
No, I use my phone to send SMS messages, emails, browse the web, write notes, manage my calendars, etc. All of these are things that can be done largely offline, only powering up the radio periodically. On the other hand, if you're using the phone as a thin client you need to power up the radio the whole time you're using the device because each time you press a key it has to go over the network to the server and each time the display needs to be updated all those graphics have to be pulled over the network.
It also means that when you sit down to read Slashdot, your transmitter would be running the entire time.
Now you're arguing backwards. If you were using a phone as a thin client then reading slashdot would require the transmitter to be powered up a lot - each time you scroll the screen, etc, you have to shove those graphics over the network. Running the browser application locally on the phone would mean that it only powers up the transmitter when retrieving the article - while you're reading it the transmitter can power down.
I can 100% guarantee you that writing one app that has multiple interfaces is always going to be easier
I guess you haven't done a lot of development work if this is what you think.
your phone will BE your computer. You'll stick it in your pocket, then when you get to work, you'll drop it in the monitor-connected dock and fire up your bluetooth (or whatever) input devices.
But why? If I'm going to have to have a docking station, monitor and keyboard at the office and at home I may as well have an actual PC too - a desktop PC is cheap (by far the most expensive piece of my workstation is the monitor) and isn't going to be accidentally dropped down the toilet.
As an employer, I would be _extremely_ resistant to this idea: I don't want an employee sitting there idle because they lost their phone - if they have a real PC on their desk then they can carry on working without it.
Not to mention the security risks of having everyone unnecessarily carrying confidential data around with them all the time - I have data on my workstations that I wouldn't dream of putting on my phone for security reasons. Whilst you can encrypt data, not having it on the device at all is far safer, and this is currently a good option where the office PC stays in the office.
No, a smartphone is useful as a portable device, and whilst it is useful to occasionally do desktop-PC-type things with it I just don't see that being the norm. Sure, when I'm on holiday I may want to be able to plug my phone into the hotel's HDTV and get out a bluetooth keyboard and use it as a desktop, but I'm not going to want to do that *instead* of having a real desktop machine in my office.
The radio is always on anyway.
It will be receiving all the time, but turning the phone into a thin client means it will be transmitting a lot too. This will far outweigh the energy benefits of using a remote CPU.
Writing the same code for a half dozen different platforms is a waste of resources and money.
That's why programmers use libraries. Adapting a single application to serve several very different platforms is often far harder than just writing several different apps (that may all use the same libs for the backend functionality).
Far greater battery life, as once the phone is a good terminal, adding more processing power to the PC will add power, but since that part is plugged into the wall, it won't drain your battery at all.
I think you got this the wrong way around - powering the radio in your phone uses a _lot_ of battery power - far more than the CPU. If you're going to use the phone at a thin-client all the time then you're going to be keeping that radio powered up all the time and your battery won't last long at all.
You can access the same application from a desktop, TV, or the phone, and there is no reason the interface cannot change for each.
If you're going to have a totally different UI for each platform (and you will need that - a desktop UI is completely unsuited to a small-screen device), you may as well be using a different application on each platform anyway.
Cheaper. It will always be more expensive to build these things smaller, so putting it in a PC makes it cheaper.
I think you underestimate the cost of mobile bandwidth.
Faster to market.
Faster what to market?
I can't begin to count the number of times I've received an error dialog box in an application that told me nothing useful.
Possibly one of the most annoying error messages I see are the ones that end "Please contact your system administrator."... Which is great when I *am* the system administrator and I don't have a clue what's broken because, rather than give me enough detail to figure it out, it just told me to go talk to myself...
That's because all machines have a physical component whose state is sometimes unable to fulfill user requirements, and we need to communicate that state to users. We call those communications "error messages" in the software world, and they cover everything from "out of memory" to "printer on fire."
Error messages don't just apply to hardware problems in any case - the idea that you can make software free from user-error messages whilst still making it usable is just downright silly.
Lets take an email application for example. How do you send an email when the user has forgotten to enter the recipient's address? Some options spring to mind:
You could grey out the "send" button until all the required data is filled in - this eliminates the need for an error message because it prevents the "sending with a blank recipient" condition ever occurring. But the cost is high - you're now relying on the user to figure out for themselves why the "send" button can't be pressed, instead of allowing them to press it and then informing them why it doesn't make sense by displaying an error message.
Another option is to convert the whole thing into a step-by-step wizard, whereby they *have* to complete each step before moving onto the next. But this means that the user has to adjust their workflow to conform to the software. For example, I frequently don't enter the recipient's address until after I have read the message body (I probably needed to look up the address and didn't want to break my train of thought that led me to write the message in the first place).
"uninitialized data" is meaningless. It's something only a programmer would understand.
Instead tell the user what *he* did wrong and tell him how to correct the situation.
In the case of "uninitialised data", what *he* did wrong was probably buy some software written by a chimp. :)
In a discussion about the speed of provision to UK homes?
Yes. "Home broadband" services are almost always basically the same services as the business ones - same network, slight tweaks to the terms of service and SLA, maybe some tweaks to the traffic shaping, but basically they are the same thing.
NTL became blueyonder (who were always outstanding) before they became Virgin.
Not really. Blueyonder was Telewest's cable modem service. Although the NTL and Telewest companies merged, their networks were still largely separate affairs at the time they became Virgin.
Virgin's support is likely blueyonder's legacy and bears little resemblance to anything NTL ever did.
NTL's support had already improved by leaps long before the Telewest merger. The support staff are basically the same people in the same callcentres (although have now been outsourced).
"provide stuff like static ip subnets" - you just lost 95% of the population, maybe more. *Most* people just want to download stuff, fast.
I was specifically talking about my customers, who are universally businesses. Sure, they want fast, but if fast comes at the expense of reliability and important stuff that they need (which usually includes things like static IPs) then they are happy to opt for a slower (but still perfectly fast enough) connection, such as ADSL.
which implies you don't need support
When your business is at a standstill because your internet connection has fallen over then you _do_ need support. I deal with the support staff at ISPs on behalf of my customers all the time, and it really does make things a lot easier when the ISP has a clue. The number of times I've had all hell break loose because I've done something like asked the ISP to make a trivial DNS change and they have utterly fucked it up (yay for customers' email all suddenly bouncing or disappearing into the bit-bucket!) tells me it really isn't worth bothering with ISPs who don't have decent support staff.
The service is rock solid, and if it isn't, then you ringing to moan about it is just wasting their time, they know and they are fixing it.
The idea that the ISP always knows about a problem without being told is just plain wrong. There are many problems where the only way the ISP gets to find out that it is a problem is because someone reported it. This ranges from configuration errors on their network (e.g. routers blocking stuff they shouldn't - I see problems with ISPs dropping ICMP type 3.4 packets with some frequency, and this is something that the ISP won't notice themselves because it causes intermittent TCP hangs in certain specific situations, not outright connectivity failures) to water in the local loop (again, the ISP will only know that your modem isn't connecting properly, they won't proactively fix it because they have no way to know that it is a line problem until they are told). Misconfigured traffic shaping is another thing that seems to come up with some frequency - they ISP won't spot the problem unless they are testing with that specific application themselves, they are relying on the customers reporting these problems.
I assume you don't use virgin, I do, have done for the last 10 years.
Personally, not anymore, nor am I likely to ever go back. I was an NTL (i.e. before they became Virgin) customer between 2000 and 2002 and the service was so bad that it just wasn't funny. Broken promises and outright lies were the norm on the odd occasion that you could actually get through to the support staff (90 minutes waiting in a call queue and probably a ~25% chance of them just hanging up on you immediately when you got through in order to make their call statistics look better). As soon as ADSL was available in my area I dropped them as fast as I could and switched to PlusNet, and now UKFSN - I've never looked back.
As mentioned above, I do deal with various ISPs on a day to day basis on behalf of my customers. Virgin's service has improved an untold amount since I dropped them - their customer support seems to be more or less adequately staffed with no more 90 minute queues and they have ripped out the broken transparent proxy servers which were forever causing web access to completely vanish.
Overall, I think I hear more complaints of the quality of Virgin's service than the service of the various ADSL ISPs, but it is hard to tell. I think that most of the complaints I hear about Virgin's service tend to be "it's working but not very well" style infrastructure problems, whilst ADSL issues tend to be "it isn't working at all" problems centred around the local loop. ADSL's problems are slightly exasperated by the way the ISPs have to interact with OpenReach in order to resolve local loop issues - this has a habit of turning reasonably trivial problems into a bit of a slog to convince them that they really do need to send out an OpenReach engineer.
I'm always amazed they've got away with advertising like this for so long.
I actually complained to the ASA, who basically refused to do anything.
Utter tripe. Compared to *any* ADSL provider they look like paragons of virtue. 8meg ADSL my ass. I have yet to meet anyone that's gotten above 5.
My ADSL syncs at 7.4Mbps and I can usually get over 6Mbps throughput during the day (falling to maybe 4Mbps in the evenings)
That's your choice entirely but to recommend people use a slower service than cable?
For most of my customers, speed is far far less important than reliability, support, ability to provide stuff like static IP subnets, etc. (all of these are things that Virgin fall flat on their faces on).
I haven't seen an ADSL connection that doesn't need the modem rebooting at least once a week
My ADSL connection hasn't had an outage in the last year, and no major outages for several years.
(though in a lot of cases, it's the router's fault, not the connection).
You gets what you pay for - buy crappy hardware and don't be surprised when it's... err.. crappy.
Admittedly, my Dlink DSL router is crap and loses its routing table on a regular basis, which is why it gets used as a modem, terminating the PPP stream on a SheevaPlug so it doesn't need a routing table. However, if this was a problem for me I'd just go get a decent router.
I've just bought a Point Of View Intel Atom 330 / nVidia Ion motherboard, case and RAM - total cost was well under £200 and it does pretty well as a home theatre system.
The iPhone launched in the UK as exclusive to the O2 network. In the last few months it's become available on two of the other four biggest networks Vodafone and Orange (who have announced that they will merge with the other big four, T-Mobile). The pricing and plan are practically identical.
So buy a second hand phone on ebay, unlock it and stick a PAYG SIM in it (or whatever contract works for you)...
Just stop using things that aren't banks. Declaring paypal a bank would just give it a large aura of legitimacy. They can still be very shady and do things that are ALMOST illegal.
So.. uh... like all the other banks then?
PS - As a side benefit, we can invade the moon.
No oil on the moon...
No problem, you send a very small/light elevator-car up the cable, and when it gets to the end of the cable, it stays there and becomes part of the counterweight. Now you send a slightly larger/heavier elevator-car up the cable, and when it gets to the end, it stays there too. Repeat as necessary until you have enough mass at the end of the cable to support whatever payloads you want to bring up.
You can't keep sending stuff up a space elevator without bringing stuff down to compensate. Each time you haul some mass up the elevator, you rob the elevator and counterweight of orbital momentum. You'll need to bring some mass back down to put that energy back into the system, otherwise you'll end up deorbitting the elevator and counterweight. Another possibility might be to lift a rocket and fuel up the elevator and fire that to increase the orbital momentum again once it gets to the end, but that isn't going to be vastly more efficient than launching the rocket from high altitude instead of using the elevator since the amount of energy the rocket puts into the system is basically going to need to be the same as the amount needed to accelerate the rocket to orbital speed.
No, this sums [potaroo.net] it up. If you'd bother to read this or an estimation done by someone else, then you'd know that the uncertainty is less than 3 months with high confidence.
"Given the skewed nature of the distribution of allocations it is difficult to be any more precise than this and although the mathematical model may claim today that exhaustion will occur at 10:32 am on the 14th of June 2011, the range of uncertainty in such a prediction spans years rather than seconds."
One thing is certain though - we _will_ run out of IPv4 addresses soon. It doesn't much matter how soon at this point - it's soon enough that people should be seriously thinking about implementing IPv6 networks. And anyone writing network software would be very foolish to not have already implemented and tested IPv6 support at this point.
I missed the boat on buying stock in full-body scanner companies, but I may still be able to make a killing on the lead bathing suit manufacturers.
Can't wait for them to get sued when someone tries jumping in the pool wearing a lead bathing suit :)
Hey! I insist in patting down! Seriously, if I didn't fly I wouldn't have any sex life, so please, you can't take that away from me!
I assume most countries are similar to the UK in this rule, but in airports males pat down males and females pat down females. :)
This stops the "I’ve been sexually assaulted" suits (in most cases). so what does this says about your sex life
I think you're wrong on this count - I'm male and have been patted down by female security officers at airports both in the UK and elsewhere.
Maybe people should just stop coming to the US. I've advised it before, and I will say it again; do not come here on vacation.
Don't worry, I'm not planning to - the US is firmly on my "avoid list". However, getting to other places may involve connecting flights in the US, and that is a problem since the US has previously shown a complete disregard for international treaties that treat the airport as international territory. (There have been a number of incidents whereby people catching connections in the US, and therefore not going through customs, have been apprehended and generally treated like shit - they don't consider you to be on US soil so the US legal protections don't apply to you, but similarly they don't consider it to be international soil so they are quite happy to enforce US laws. In some of these incidents, the arrestee was innocent (or at least, never charged with anything), was held for several days without being allowed to contact their embassy or get any form of legal representation before being deported back to their home country).
Don't do business with US companies, either.
That's *really* hard. You're going to struggle to do stuff like buying a computer that hasn't got any parts supplied by any US companies...
Problem is that your neighbor is just dumb enough to think the government is doing the right thing. A solution would be to educate people as to the toxic nature of our governments intentions.
The problem is that the government is much better at educating people than individuals, largely because they have access to the mainstream media. The government runs around shouting "terrorists are going to kill us all!" and the newspapers spread the word manically because scaring the shit out of people sells papers. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the population also seem to blindly accept what they are being told, rather than actually thinking it through and realising that it is basically bunk.
Also, even if you somehow manage to convince a large proportion of people about the wrongness of the government's policies, getting them changed is a real problem, because all the parties who stand for election have very similar policies. Sure, party A might do 10 really bad freedom destroying things and you manage to get the word out that one of those things is bad; People vote for party B instead, who are going to do the remaining 9 really bad things anyway and probably introduce a few extra really bad policies of their own.
A terrorist is defined as "Anyone who uses terror as a weapon in a political struggle" - as far as I'm concerned, this describes my government perfectly. They may not be going around blowing people up themselves, but they _are_ using terror to push their political agenda by saying "if you don't let us make these laws then people will blow you up!" Every time someone manages to start getting the word out about the badness of a new law, the government responds by shouting loudly enough about terrorists in order to get people to accept it that they may as well be holding the bomb themselves.
When I was growing up, IRA attacks and threats were a reasonably regular occurrence and they were played down by the officials. It was generally considered that if people got scared and we started making major changes to to way we live then the terrorists had basically won. I guess the terrorists have won now...
Allowing people to "defend" themselves against the police because they think they are in the right is not one compatible with the rule of law.
Why is allowing police to be violent because they think they are right compatible with the rule of law? Are the police above the law?
Because there's no point in leveling loitering, vagrancy or trespass charges since they carry no jail time and you obviously can't fine the guy.
If you think these laws need harsher sentences then get the law changed, don't charge someone with something bogus just because you want a harsher penalty. Taking things to extremes, how would you feel if a police officer decided that a minor crime deserved the death penalty and started framing people for murder in order to make it happen? The police should not be responsible for defining what sentence should be given for a crime - that is not their job.
That's the sad reality of things but it's all been the evolution of our society. We end up holding ourselves back and I doubt things will get much better.
I suspect it is the evolution of pretty much all societies - once you lose freedoms it is extremely hard to get them back, so the trend is to gradually lose your freedoms. Eventually it gets to the point where there is an almighty bloody revolution and you get many of those freedoms back, then the cycle starts again.