Why is it necessary at all for the article to say this?! The issue is a 'hot topic' every summer in the UK media when Oxford admissions selection takes place. As a result, there have been edit wars over this artice, and the Article Discussion includes gems such as:
"Sorry, folks, but if you genuinely believe that admission to Oxford is based exclusively on academic merit, then heaven help you.... It is also a total disregard for the truth to claim that Oxford is making any sort of worthwhile progress towards attractive more state-educated students. There remains a huge discrepancy at the institution." - James.F.
This is a prime example of the motion of the topic of this thread. Clearly (in my personal opinion) (some of) those editing the article, and those commenting upon it, are biased and ill-informed non-experts.
At the previous SANE conference (on Systems Administration) there was an excellent poster presentation titled "PPTP Must Die" by Jacco de Leeuw.
The poster (and website below) explain what's wrong with PPTP, and present the alternative: L2TP/IPSec which is widely available. Having been implemented later than PPTP there are some holes in the specs, being filled by pseudo-standards for the time being.
I imagine the BBC to be one of your larger customers, at least by public profile if not client connections. They've said on many occasions that they find the Real licensing model difficult to integrate with, and are publicly developing alternative encoding formats.
In the future, what argument do you have for maintained support of Real by the BBC in favour of Microsoft or Open Source alternatives?
I'm interested here in your opinion of relative quality (which is important to many Internet radio listeners), cost, ease of installation (for which Real has had some bad press before), as well as any other points you think might matter.
Many moons ago, I was (quite willingly) in this same situation (NB: not current employer).
The one thing I learnt in hindsight was that someone way up the ladder had created an advertisment that misrepresented one very difficult and troublesome aspect of the job. I really wish I'd read that in advance, and chucked in a question to see how they'd feel if, *hypothetically* (cough, cough) this difficult situation were to arise.
As it was we hired a fantastic guy who coped well, but it could have gone the other way.
you numscull. who funds the 'academic community' then? why British taxpayers, of course.
and who benefits from mirror.ac.uk (apart from.ac.uk)? why British Internet users, of course.
in other words, it's wholly appropriate that JISC run a publicly available mirror service. myself - sad to see the current service go, but without seeing the replacement (apart from the press releases) there's not much more to say.
Surely what's impressive to us about Stonehenge nowadays is that the stones are massive but it was built in a time without the engines and machinery we have today?
If so, why build a similar-scale henge? That's no news. You need to build something like a 200 storey skyscraper - that'd get them thinking in the future.
I think for the most part, British Licence Fee payers such as myself are proud to offer the world both the journalism and technology that the BBC produces.
Coming back to your question; I think the burden is accepted reasonably well, although the fee (in fact the funding model alltogether) is reviewed every few years by the government.
And yes, the BBC radio and TV really are non-commercial! It makes me really happy - I think the fee is fantastic value for money (121GBP per TV-owning household for those that don't visit links). The British government don't actually spend any tax revenues on the BBC - it's all from the Licence Fee.
However the BBC is of course allowed to earn money from selling its programmes, either to networks abroad or by running, say, BBC America.
Over the past couple of months I've been putting together a MythTV system at home. My overall impression is that it's a fantastic piece of software, that's getting better by the week
My hardware cost (in the UK) was around 600GBP, including:
semi-posh case from Coolermaster that looks good under the telly
AMD Athlon XP2200 based system
160gig hdd
Hauppauge PVR350 MPEG2 encoder/decoder
which makes this article's product seem very competitive, really (at, what, ~500GBP?). Especially considering the fact that mine took days and days of configuration (and I'd humbly consider myself to be a GNU/Linux pro) to get it 'just right', and some things still don't work properly (e.g. DVD menus).
As for the advert skipping thing... I don't actually use it. I have my Myth's remote control configured with a button that skips forward by one minute, and another that skips backwards by 10 seconds. This means I get to an ad break, skip, skip, skip, possibly skip backwards a couple of times then back to CSI:-)
I think we should welcome the incorporation of maturing OSS projects such as this into commercial products. There will surely be positive feedback to the community in the way of features and bugfixes. Don't give them hassle over the lack of ad-skipping - it surprises me just how much people forget how much of the excellent Internet and TV programming is brought to us through this revenue stream and we take it for granted.
Oh, yeah, there's some crap programming too, but that's why I have a digital video recorder to avoid it all:-p
I haven't spotted a post mentioning the Tech Support burden.
There are lots of IT staff posting here, telling their tales of woe, and my point is that AOL have craftily shifted the burden of support from their own (probably inadequate) tech support lines to your companies'.
That's certainly the case at my site's helpdesk, where they regularly field calls from AOL or Planet Online customers who are confused by their ISP's mail handling and expect us to sort it out. This is reasonable in the eyes of the customer, because our organization is the one with the blackholed emails; no-one else is.
It just peeves me that we're being taken for a ride by these corporates. And no, we can't, sadly, just say "bugger off to AOL tech support" - they're our customers, too.
> Sure you can get a few people who will punch in for someone
> what's the big deal
yeeeees, and if you were the director of a manufacturing company with the odd employee or two cheating, you'd still care so little? how about if I come and siphon some petrol from your car? it's just a little, you won't notice - what's the big deal, eh?
stealing is stealing, and if these devices prevent it then it's for the best.
there was a case a while back in the UK where one company wanted to use similar technology, but they placed the device where even leaving for toilet-visits would require its use! that was soon beaten down by the unions, of course.
actually they were allowed to say this by the ITC, as they were at the time shifting more passengers internationally (hence, The World...) than other airlines.
the really busy US carriers are mostly due to their domestic (internal) market, and not overseas.
say you want to contact postmaster@example.com, but instead type postmaster@wxample.com into your mail client.
oliver:~$ host wxample.com
wxample.com has address 64.94.110.11
oliver:~$ host 64.94.110.11
11.110.94.64.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer sitefinder-idn.verisign.com.
oliver:~$ telnet sitefinder-idn.verisign.com. 25
Trying 64.94.110.11...
Connected to sitefinder-idn.verisign.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 snubby3-wceast Snubby Mail Rejector Daemon v1.3 ready
HELO oliver.ox.ac.uk
250 OK
MAIL FROM:<oliver.gorwits@computing-services.oxford.ac. uk>
250 OK
RCPT TO:<postmaster@wxample.com>
550 User domain does not exist.
w00t! verisign have just got your email address in the MAIL FROM: SMTP command after your helpful local mail server attempts delivery to their server:
uhmm, apart from the slick web interface to ask the user what they want, has anyone thought about the poor sodding router that has to hold all these personalized rules?
even the big cisco PIX jobbies barf at the thousand rule mark. you'd have to go for a user-wide policy which would put off all the technically competent / meddlers.
it's just not going to work on this scale, I believe. the solution is to have operating systems and small domestic 'broadband routers' have default-deny policies, and lease the ISP (no matter what size they are) to shifting packets and answering DNS, like they're good at.
I attended Aston University in the UK [ www.cs.aston.ac.uk ] and they are still providing a final year module 'Formal Software Development' based around the Z language.
Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the final year senior tutor has written a book on it - but that doesn't make it any less (or more) useful.
Slashdot Mirror
From the University of Oxford Wikipedia page: "Admission to the University of Oxford is entirely on academic merit and potential."
Why is it necessary at all for the article to say this?! The issue is a 'hot topic' every summer in the UK media when Oxford admissions selection takes place. As a result, there have been edit wars over this artice, and the Article Discussion includes gems such as:
"Sorry, folks, but if you genuinely believe that admission to Oxford is based exclusively on academic merit, then heaven help you. ... It is also a total disregard for the truth to claim that Oxford is making any sort of worthwhile progress towards attractive more state-educated students. There remains a huge discrepancy at the institution." - James.F.
This is a prime example of the motion of the topic of this thread. Clearly (in my personal opinion) (some of) those editing the article, and those commenting upon it, are biased and ill-informed non-experts.
At the previous SANE conference (on Systems Administration) there was an excellent poster presentation titled "PPTP Must Die" by Jacco de Leeuw.
The poster (and website below) explain what's wrong with PPTP, and present the alternative: L2TP/IPSec which is widely available. Having been implemented later than PPTP there are some holes in the specs, being filled by pseudo-standards for the time being.
Jacco's site is here. HTH.
regards, olly.Rob,
I imagine the BBC to be one of your larger customers, at least by public profile if not client connections. They've said on many occasions that they find the Real licensing model difficult to integrate with, and are publicly developing alternative encoding formats.
In the future, what argument do you have for maintained support of Real by the BBC in favour of Microsoft or Open Source alternatives?
I'm interested here in your opinion of relative quality (which is important to many Internet radio listeners), cost, ease of installation (for which Real has had some bad press before), as well as any other points you think might matter.
Many thanks,
olly.
Many moons ago, I was (quite willingly) in this same situation (NB: not current employer).
The one thing I learnt in hindsight was that someone way up the ladder had created an advertisment that misrepresented one very difficult and troublesome aspect of the job. I really wish I'd read that in advance, and chucked in a question to see how they'd feel if, *hypothetically* (cough, cough) this difficult situation were to arise.
As it was we hired a fantastic guy who coped well, but it could have gone the other way.
you numscull. who funds the 'academic community' then? why British taxpayers, of course.
.ac.uk)? why British Internet users, of course.
and who benefits from mirror.ac.uk (apart from
in other words, it's wholly appropriate that JISC run a publicly available mirror service. myself - sad to see the current service go, but without seeing the replacement (apart from the press releases) there's not much more to say.
Surely what's impressive to us about Stonehenge nowadays is that the stones are massive but it was built in a time without the engines and machinery we have today?
If so, why build a similar-scale henge? That's no news. You need to build something like a 200 storey skyscraper - that'd get them thinking in the future.
I think for the most part, British Licence Fee payers such as myself are proud to offer the world both the journalism and technology that the BBC produces.
Coming back to your question; I think the burden is accepted reasonably well, although the fee (in fact the funding model alltogether) is reviewed every few years by the government.
And yes, the BBC radio and TV really are non-commercial! It makes me really happy - I think the fee is fantastic value for money (121GBP per TV-owning household for those that don't visit links). The British government don't actually spend any tax revenues on the BBC - it's all from the Licence Fee.
However the BBC is of course allowed to earn money from selling its programmes, either to networks abroad or by running, say, BBC America.
HTH!
olly.
Virgin offer power sockets beside all seats, not just the first class ones.
Tried an Apple Powerbook? Battery life in multiples of two hours! But that's okay, cos Mac owners are rich anyways ;-)
Over the past couple of months I've been putting together a MythTV system at home. My overall impression is that it's a fantastic piece of software, that's getting better by the week
My hardware cost (in the UK) was around 600GBP, including:
semi-posh case from Coolermaster that looks good under the telly
AMD Athlon XP2200 based system
160gig hdd
Hauppauge PVR350 MPEG2 encoder/decoder
which makes this article's product seem very competitive, really (at, what, ~500GBP?). Especially considering the fact that mine took days and days of configuration (and I'd humbly consider myself to be a GNU/Linux pro) to get it 'just right', and some things still don't work properly (e.g. DVD menus).
As for the advert skipping thing... I don't actually use it. I have my Myth's remote control configured with a button that skips forward by one minute, and another that skips backwards by 10 seconds. This means I get to an ad break, skip, skip, skip, possibly skip backwards a couple of times then back to CSI :-)
I think we should welcome the incorporation of maturing OSS projects such as this into commercial products. There will surely be positive feedback to the community in the way of features and bugfixes. Don't give them hassle over the lack of ad-skipping - it surprises me just how much people forget how much of the excellent Internet and TV programming is brought to us through this revenue stream and we take it for granted.
Oh, yeah, there's some crap programming too, but that's why I have a digital video recorder to avoid it all :-p
I haven't spotted a post mentioning the Tech Support burden.
There are lots of IT staff posting here, telling their tales of woe, and my point is that AOL have craftily shifted the burden of support from their own (probably inadequate) tech support lines to your companies'.
That's certainly the case at my site's helpdesk, where they regularly field calls from AOL or Planet Online customers who are confused by their ISP's mail handling and expect us to sort it out. This is reasonable in the eyes of the customer, because our organization is the one with the blackholed emails; no-one else is.
It just peeves me that we're being taken for a ride by these corporates. And no, we can't, sadly, just say "bugger off to AOL tech support" - they're our customers, too.
You can get them at ThinkGeek, and they're not expensive at all. 128Mb storage iirc, and a not too ugly watch. He'll know what to do with it.
> Sure you can get a few people who will punch in for someone
> what's the big deal
yeeeees, and if you were the director of a manufacturing company with the odd employee or two cheating, you'd still care so little? how about if I come and siphon some petrol from your car? it's just a little, you won't notice - what's the big deal, eh?
stealing is stealing, and if these devices prevent it then it's for the best.
there was a case a while back in the UK where one company wanted to use similar technology, but they placed the device where even leaving for toilet-visits would require its use! that was soon beaten down by the unions, of course.
A Linux kernel version 2.4.23 provides SCTP, enabled by default.
> British Airways - The worlds favorite airline
actually they were allowed to say this by the ITC, as they were at the time shifting more passengers internationally (hence, The World...) than other airlines.
the really busy US carriers are mostly due to their domestic (internal) market, and not overseas.
not sure if the BA claim still holds, tho.
regards,
oliver.
say you want to contact postmaster@example.com, but instead type postmaster@wxample.com into your mail client.
oliver:~$ host wxample.comwxample.com has address 64.94.110.11
oliver:~$ host 64.94.110.11
11.110.94.64.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer sitefinder-idn.verisign.com.
oliver:~$ telnet sitefinder-idn.verisign.com. 25
Trying 64.94.110.11...
Connected to sitefinder-idn.verisign.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 snubby3-wceast Snubby Mail Rejector Daemon v1.3 ready
HELO oliver.ox.ac.uk
250 OK
MAIL FROM:<oliver.gorwits@computing-services.oxford.ac
250 OK
RCPT TO:<postmaster@wxample.com>
550 User domain does not exist.
w00t! verisign have just got your email address in the MAIL FROM: SMTP command after your helpful local mail server attempts delivery to their server:
cheers,
oliver.
uhmm, apart from the slick web interface to ask the user what they want, has anyone thought about the poor sodding router that has to hold all these personalized rules?
even the big cisco PIX jobbies barf at the thousand rule mark. you'd have to go for a user-wide policy which would put off all the technically competent / meddlers.
it's just not going to work on this scale, I believe. the solution is to have operating systems and small domestic 'broadband routers' have default-deny policies, and lease the ISP (no matter what size they are) to shifting packets and answering DNS, like they're good at.
does the book warn users about how blindly applying official patch clusters will nuke their beautiful Exim in favour of a broken Sendmail daemon?!?
I attended Aston University in the UK [ www.cs.aston.ac.uk ] and they are still providing a final year module 'Formal Software Development' based around the Z language.
Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the final year senior tutor has written a book on it - but that doesn't make it any less (or more) useful.
see:b usinternet.php?inputmod=CS3120
http://www.cs.aston.ac.uk/phpmodules/displaysylla
for the lowdown. So in answer to your question - yes people are still using it, at least academically.
cheers,
olly.