Both the Inland Revenue and the Paymaster General Dawn Primarolo have assured opposition MPs and contractor representative organisations that it will meet for further consultation over implementation in the coming months. After which IR35 will be included in the Finance Act next year.
What interested me about this press release was not so much that they have decided to go Open Source. This is great news, but lots of companies have done this recently.
Rather, I found it interesting that the reason seems to be that HP has realised that this is the only way to to deal in this business. Only by Open Source can they get their producta accepted widely.
Way to go, HP! When will you release the rest of your software?
As far as I know, it's even worse than that in Scandinavian countries.
My direct income tax was 67% when I left Denmark about 6-7 years ago. From what I hear the higher rate tax band has not changed much. The VAT ("sales tax") is 25%.
Guess why I left! In the UK I usually end up with about 2/3 of the gross pay and with only 17.5% VAT I think it is a cheap country. Most sane people would disagree.
Thanks for that post! It is notes like that that makes/. worth the time and effort.
For those of us that are a bit hazy on the finer points of Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM), there is a very decent tutorial by Lucent at http://www.webproforum.com/dwdm/topic0 1.html.
I think I see your point: it is not enough to be able to route tons of data, you also actually have to lay extra fiber to give you increased volumes. The limit on the Internet at the moment is not the capacity of the routers, but the total banwidth (bps, latency, etc. all in one). Right?
Is this actually true? Are the routers on the internet limiting our access times, or is it only the "thin" wires? Any comments/thoughts or, even better, measurements, experiences, facts?
In other words, this is NOTHING to get excited about, unless you own fiber.
Sure it is worth getting excited about. I don't have fiber (in fact only a lowly 28,800 bps modem) but the internet backbone (as far as it exists) does, and freeing up the congestion there will help me get my data faster. (Especially when the UK wakes up and builds a decent comms infrastructure, but it is surprising how often my modem is running at less than full capacity when I'm downloading. Now if/. could have one of these connected to my ISP, and a faster server, I'd be very happy.)
According to the article, the new routers will no be generally available until December 2000, so they didn't really buy on "the same day that Lucent starts shipping" the new hardware.
The point of the related news, presumably, was that Lucent seems to go from strength to strength. (Unlike Cisco, as a previous poster pointed out.)
Will any other hardware be able to keep up with this any time soon?
It seems to me that if the new router is "10 times" faster than existing products and the data is split into "256 channels", then each channel is only delivering 3% of capacity we know we can handle now, and you should therefore be OK. You might need 30 times as many boxes, but they should be able to handle it.
This is all-round good news. I wonder how much they will cost...
Customers that move from real-time operating systems such as VRTX and QNX to Linux sacrifice a few milliseconds worth of responsiveness, but gain the speed of the open source development community.
The author seems to misunderstand the point of real-time operating systems, which is not to be fast (though, of course, that is always nice), but to have a guaranteed response time.
So in a real-time OS you have pre-emptive scheduling and an upper limit on the time it takes to context switch. This way you can guarantee that an important signal ("this patient is about to die, doctor") is serviced (page the doctor, or whatever) in real-time and in the appropriate time (i.e. before the patient dies.)
Do the current Linux kernel have this feature? There is no reason why it couldn't have: good ol' VMS had basic real-time features built in (pre-emptive scheduling), you could add the rest (I think the product was called ELN and was described as "the best kept secret in DEC"), and you could still use it as a "normal" operating system.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to get the facts right: The House of Lords have just passed the IR35 bill, according to http://uk.news.yahoo.com/991110/22/awa 1.html.
Maybe it is time to leave the UK? Let's see.
What interested me about this press release was not so much that they have decided to go Open Source. This is great news, but lots of companies have done this recently.
Rather, I found it interesting that the reason seems to be that HP has realised that this is the only way to to deal in this business. Only by Open Source can they get their producta accepted widely.
Way to go, HP! When will you release the rest of your software?
My direct income tax was 67% when I left Denmark about 6-7 years ago. From what I hear the higher rate tax band has not changed much. The VAT ("sales tax") is 25%.
Guess why I left! In the UK I usually end up with about 2/3 of the gross pay and with only 17.5% VAT I think it is a cheap country. Most sane people would disagree.
Thanks for that post! It is notes like that that makes /. worth the time and effort.
For those of us that are a bit hazy on the finer points of Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM), there is a very decent tutorial by Lucent at http://www.webproforum.com/dwdm/topic0 1.html.
More list of resources can be found at http://www.atmdigest.com/WDMResources.htm (DWDM specific), http://disa11.disa.atd.net/tutoria l/tutorial.htm (general ATM), and at your favourite search engines.
I think I see your point: it is not enough to be able to route tons of data, you also actually have to lay extra fiber to give you increased volumes. The limit on the Internet at the moment is not the capacity of the routers, but the total banwidth (bps, latency, etc. all in one). Right?
Is this actually true? Are the routers on the internet limiting our access times, or is it only the "thin" wires? Any comments/thoughts or, even better, measurements, experiences, facts?
Sure it is worth getting excited about. I don't have fiber (in fact only a lowly 28,800 bps modem) but the internet backbone (as far as it exists) does, and freeing up the congestion there will help me get my data faster. (Especially when the UK wakes up and builds a decent comms infrastructure, but it is surprising how often my modem is running at less than full capacity when I'm downloading. Now if /. could have one of these connected to my ISP, and a faster server, I'd be very happy.)
According to the article, the new routers will no be generally available until December 2000, so they didn't really buy on "the same day that Lucent starts shipping" the new hardware.
The point of the related news, presumably, was that Lucent seems to go from strength to strength. (Unlike Cisco, as a previous poster pointed out.)
It seems to me that if the new router is "10 times" faster than existing products and the data is split into "256 channels", then each channel is only delivering 3% of capacity we know we can handle now, and you should therefore be OK. You might need 30 times as many boxes, but they should be able to handle it.
This is all-round good news. I wonder how much they will cost...
The author seems to misunderstand the point of real-time operating systems, which is not to be fast (though, of course, that is always nice), but to have a guaranteed response time.
So in a real-time OS you have pre-emptive scheduling and an upper limit on the time it takes to context switch. This way you can guarantee that an important signal ("this patient is about to die, doctor") is serviced (page the doctor, or whatever) in real-time and in the appropriate time (i.e. before the patient dies.)
Do the current Linux kernel have this feature? There is no reason why it couldn't have: good ol' VMS had basic real-time features built in (pre-emptive scheduling), you could add the rest (I think the product was called ELN and was described as "the best kept secret in DEC"), and you could still use it as a "normal" operating system.