GPON, like other PON fibre to the premises (FTTP) technologies, uses a single fibre at the central office (telephone exchange), which splits again and again on its way to homes. A single fibre does deliver about 2.5 Gbps, but it is split up to 32, 64 or 128 times (depending on how many subscribers have signed up, and how the telco has deployed the fibre. So the real bandwidth you get is something like 20 Mbps (1:128 split) to 80 Mbps (1:32 split). Good, but not quite gigabits...
GPON is the ITU (international) standard, while EPON, aka GEPON is from the US's IEEE - GPON is used more in Europe and US, while GEPON is bigger in AsiaPac, where NTT and others are investing huge amounts in fibre (DSL is already on decline in Japan and Korea). See http://lw.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm ?ARTICLE_ID=231662&p=13 for details of the various standards.
The other FTTP architecture of interest is Active Ethernet, in which you have a fibre per home/business, and plain old powered Ethernet kit driving the fibres. It gives you 100 Mbps bidirectionally, and possibly more depending on the kit (just upgrade the switches as technology becomes available). So it's more future-proof, but generally costs more to deploy initially, though in some cases it's a better bet according to some (in rural areas or densely populated cities, where it becomes fibre to the basement with VDSL in-building over pre-installed copper, 100 Meg end to end).
Exactly - the TWiki project, which I'm involved in, has created a VM that enables a Windows user to download a complete, working TWiki system to evaluate for use as an enterprise Wiki for group collaboration. This radically simplifies installation for people who used to take many hours to install on Windows (primarily the issue was getting Cygwin, Apache, Perl and RCS installed properly) - the VM is actually a Debian GNU/Linux system but that's pretty much invisible to the person installing the VM. The result is that after a hefty download you can have a working Wiki within 5 to 10 minutes, most of which is waiting for Linux to boot in the VM.
See this page for more information and download links.
Or you can just buy an older version of the WRT54G - there should be plenty on eBay. I bought a 2.0 version and it works fine with DD-WRT's latest version, which was easy to flash and set up (only a couple of minor bugs, be sure to set a suitably low MTU if you use PPPoA/PPPoE for your broadband connection). This is amazing value compared to the cost and inflexibility of buying an equivalent router with VoIP, VPN, firewall, QoS, WMM (WiFi QoS), etc. And unlike the Belkin pre-N WiFi box that I used to use as a firewall, it doesn't interpret completely normal web server responses as a DoS attack, and drop all future packets from that server! (I now use the Belkin as a WiFi access point only, i.e. Ethernet bridge - it is fantastically good at providing coverage to a radius of about 50 yards/metres, including penetrating several foot-thick stone walls.)
My strategy now is to use commercial routers/WAPs only where the open source firmware is not ready - e.g. ADSL routers are still bleeding edge, as is pre-N WiFi - and use DD-WRT or similar for everything else.
I really recommend DD-WRT as it's very flexible and amazing value for money (a $20 donation to the author is recommended so he can keep working on this as his full-time job, but not mandatory). It's also easy to install extra packages from the very impressive OpenWRT project (installing tcpdump on the WRT54G to debug a VPN problem took about 30 secs!) - OpenWRT is more command line oriented, with a basic GUI, but probably more extensible since you can have a smaller basic image.
Whatever you do, don't go with Sveasoft - their firmware is not as up to date or featureful as DD-WRT, and it is MAC-locked to your specific device, and there are serious debates over their GPL compliance (IMO they are beyond the boundary of what is acceptable).
You're omitting a huge step between having the idea and delivering a product - there's the whole process of specifying requirements, designing the product in detail (thousands of decisions, not just the part covered by a patent), developing it, debugging it, testing it, writing documentation, training support people, training pre-sales and sales people (if needed), etc.... All of this takes a huge investment, resulting in the core deliverables (software and documentation) being protected by *Copyright*.
Software patents are really only useful to act as a roadblock to other companies, and in particular for patent trolls - they don't stop a truly motivated competitor from replicating your software product in a cleanroom environment, as long as they can code around the patents, which should virtually always be possible.
"Making money off the finished work" in this scenario would imply taking the copyrighted software and illegally selling it - copyright protection is more than enough to stop this. Patent protection is simply unnecessary for a thriving software business, as long as it is reasonably diligent in its use of copyright and trade secret protection.
So corporations are amazingly energy-efficient, right? Just to take some examples from offices I've worked in:
- many people leave their PCs and CRT monitors switched on all night and weekend - huge numbers of flights are made (probably the biggest CO2 emission generator for any white collar employee who is not wholly office based) - vast amounts of commuting, business car trips, Fedex delivery, etc
Some of this is unavoidable, but greater use of videoconferencing, shared whiteboards, wikis, blogs and telecommuting could greatly reduce this.
Please stop being complacent about this - corporations are part of the problem, just like individuals.
That's a bit like saying that Bugzilla is built on MySQL, and is really only a thin layer over it, so you might as well just use SQL directly to submit your bugs. For example, TWiki has a huge feature set, and over 100 plugins, including a LaTeX plugin if you want to use it for some content. See http://twiki.org/
Most people don't need read access security on their TWiki sites, or if they do are willing to set up another instance (which is quite easy particularly in the upcoming 4.0 release).
Patches to add this feature (i.e. make search respect access controls) would be of interest to the development team (which I'm part of).
No technical changes are needed - IPv4 has had QoS (the IP Precedence field and 6-bit DiffServ codepoint that has superseded it) for decades, and virtually every router has QoS support. The hard part is the political/commercial agreement, and after that, agreeing on what the QoS levels should be. Telcos already run IP networks for use by business IP VPNs (MPLS not IPSec) this way, so they have a lot of experience.
As Google's spokesman said in the article, this might not be a bad idea as long as it's fully open-access - anyone who wants to pay can send high-QoS data. I think it also needs some regulation, so that the high-QoS packets don't completely squeeze out the best-effort Internet packets. Actually running (parts of) the Internet like this could be a big challenge, but it would mean that PSTN (the normal telephone network) and TV broadcast networks could finally go away, and that any VoIP or IP TV company could just set up, buy suitable amounts of QoS transport, and start delivering high quality voice and video.
ADSL2+ does drop in speed as you get further out, but there's also the prospect of remote DSLAMs (fed by fibre from the exchange) that end up shortening your local loop (line from the DSLAM to you) - these are already used, partly as a way of reaching more remote areas for telephone service and more recently upgraded to handle DSL. Sometimes known as FTTN (Fibre to the Neighbourhood/Node) since fibre is used to link the remote DSLAMs to the central office (exchange building). Being deployed by SBC in the US.
A variant of this model is to deploy a smaller DSLAM closer to the subscriber's building (probably 500-1000 feet) you will even be able to get VDSL2, which gives you up to 100 Mbps - this is FTTC (Fibre to the Curb/Kerb), and is being deployed by BellSouth in the US, and BT and Deutsche Telekom in Europe. This FTTC model gives you about the same bandwidth as FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) using GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Networks), which is what the US telcos are moving to (about 40 to 80 Mbps per subscriber depending on number of subscribers on each PON 'fibre tree').
WiMAX is another option but it's debatable whether it can ever support enough simultaneous users at 40 to 100 Mbps in a densely populated area - probably best for competitive carriers and less populated areas.
Since I live about 12,000 feet from my exchange, remote DSLAMs / FTTx are my main hope for more than 512Kbps (at least without getting satellite, WiFi/WiMAX or something more exotic)... I just checked with Be and my home is indeed too far away for ADSL2+...
Deregulation is a horrible term - it's used in the UK to describe the process of going from a European-type PTT to a private company, with strong regulation of the market as a means of allowing competitors to survive without being crushed by the newly privatised PTT.
So I think the UK model is closer to the Canadian model as you describe it, with strong regulation and forced unbundling resulting in real competition (eventually).
POSIX is an IEEE standard, not a US Government standard, and no doubt is copyright protected like almost any other written work. However, this has no impact on products attempting to be POSIX compliant, which can do so without breaking the POSIX copyright (i.e. you can use a document without copying it).
The UK has a highly deregulated telecoms market and pretty good broadband penetration figures, mainly through ADSL. You can now get ADSL from various ISPs for US $30 upwards (512K) with some 2 Mbps and 8 Mbps services (latter costs about $55). This covers 90% plus of population.
There is also local-loop unbundled (LLU) ADSL now, in which an ISP (Easynet/UK Online at present) puts its own kit in the telephone exchange (central office) - costs just $20 per month (£9.95), but since they are just starting to roll out, they only cover 40% or so of population.
ADSL prices are already competitive with all-you-can-eat dialup (people pay per minute for local calls here), and with LLU broadband may end up being cheaper than dialup.
The real solution for broadband to sparsely populated communities is WiMAX or similar non-line-of-sight technologies that are much cheaper to deploy than CDMA/UMTS type cellular networks. NLOS means that you can cover a large area with a single WiMAX tower, and that foliage growth in spring doesn't cut off the service you had installed in December.
WiFi also has a role, but is more of an in-fill or point to point for truly remote communities where you can hop via a point-to-point to link to somewhere that does have wired or WiMAX broadband. Satellite services are also available in the UK - more expensive but useful if you are truly in a remote area.
Despite the unregulated market, government is getting involved with limited subsidies for rural areas that would otherwise not get (reasonably priced) broadband at all. Mostly, however, this is driven by the incumbent telco's vision that they have to deploy ADSL to everyone in order to sell next-generation IP-based services such as VoIP, IP TV, etc. Google for 'BT 21CN' for more about how BT is ripping out the PSTN to replace it with an all-IP network.
Not surprisingly, this is a trademark case - submitter is confused. It's really not hard - trademarks are for business names, while patents are for (hopefully) innovative and industrially applicable technical ideas (even if re-invented by someone else). Copyright is for the specific expression of an idea (i.e. your particular sci-fi novel or web application, not the *idea* of sci-fi novels or web applications).
How come the editors don't catch this sort of basic mistake? They only post a handful of stories a day, and checking the short text from each submitter can't be that hard... Yes, I know the editors never read the stories and barely skim the submissions...
In the UK, Pacelink offer a cable that provides more reliable connection between the Sky (satellite) box) and the TiVo. Channel changing now works 100% of the time, which wasn't the case with IR.
The nmake Makefile.win supplied with Apache 2.0 makes many calls to msdev - so the build process relies on both the IDE project files and (top level) makefiles.
Thanks, but I already have nmake and would be using Makefile.win - the problem is MSDEV, which is missing from the free downloads that Microsoft provides.
Anyone know if this includes the equivalent of MSDEV? This is the one thing I needed to build Apache 2.x on Windows, having downloaded Microsoft Nmake and their free Visual C++ Toolkit.
Any other approaches to developing for Apache on Windows without having to pay for development tools would be great to know about.
Try listening to NPR, BBC Radio 4 or BBC World Service - they do really good news, factual programmes and some drama. You can get all of these over the Internet if you're not in the right place, and the BBC has its own 'we TiVo it for you' service called Listen Again, which lets you listen over the Internet for a week after broadcast.
Almost everything you say here is wrong or misleading...
Some mobile packages include free mobile to mobile calls, up to N minutes per month at least, but many don't (probably the majority of low end packages anyway).
See my other post - most VoIP providers that I've seen (BT, Vonage and Gossiptel) do NOT require premium rate.
Mobiles are very convenient and people with plenty of cash or who make shorter phone calls tend to use them all the time. However, the cost and health concerns (recently in the press) mean that VoIP is still quite interesting to home phones. Telecoms companies are investing a lot in VoIP for home, so it's just a touch premature to write off VoIP.
'Hardly anyone has landlines anymore' is just rubbish - perhaps in a very small circle of people switching to mobiles, but not for the vast majority of people in the real world who, surprisingly enough, do still have land lines...
It's early days for VoIP here, but your view on it is unusually pessimistic, perhaps because you signed up early and got burnt by a bad deal as mentioned in your other post.
1. I agree Skype is still slightly more expensive (as in my original post). Skype is very high quality generally, some think it's better than PSTN because of its frequency range.
2. Let's take Vonage UK as an example (others such as Gossiptel are similar). They offer the following area codes for no extra fee, you just choose one when signing up:
0121 Birmingham 0131 Edinburgh 0141 Glasgow 0151 Liverpool 0161 Manchester 01914 Newcastle 020 London (Central) 020 London (Greater) 02380 Southampton 02392 Portsmouth 024 Coventry 02891 Bangor Co Down 029 Cardiff
Try reading the sites yourself before you accuse me of not doing so...
3. You pay one line rental to BT, then you pay the next 1-2 'line rentals' to the VoIP company - these are much cheaper than a new BT line. If you are really on a budget, use Skype or SIP on a PC and get your friends to use it too, i.e. stay off PSTN, and you don't pay any extra line rentals.
4. First you said VoIP was not retail, which I agreed with. Now you are saying you've had no calls on VoIP - if you have premium rate or lo-call inbound I can see that would limit things, but why not have people call you via SIP (off PSTN) if they are that price sensitive?
Getting VoIP phones down to £10 is unlikely - even PSTN phones are rarely that cheap, and most people want cordless (DECT) these days which is more expensive. Fortunately you can just plug in the old PSTN phones to a VoIP router.
Number portability is something that needs to come, but until you can get rid of the line rental you might as well keep the old number on PSTN anyway for incoming calls and 999 emergency calls outbound (which I'm not convinced VoIP providers have addressed.)
VoIP is developing but you are way off the mark except for point 1.
1. SkypeOut works out very close to the cost of 18866, who are one of the cheapest 3rd party analogue providers. IMO the real reason to get VoIP is (a) cheap 2nd or 3rd line and (b) ultimately to dump BT line rental. The UK Post Office is getting into line rental so perhaps costs for that will drop too. In the long term you might just have a cheaper WiMax connection and no landline at all.
2. VoIP providers such as BT, Vonage UK and Gossiptel do NOT require a premium rate number for incoming VoIP calls in the UK. Stop spreading misinformation.
3. See 1.
4. There are lots of people selling VoIP off the Web - it's still early days but since most non-geeks book holidays and buy many other things on the Web, lack of a retail channel isn't an obstacle at this stage in the development of the VoIP market.
Another reason to get VoIP is teleworking - I have VoIP at work and home, so while I'm working from home I have a work extension through a softphone on my laptop.
As you say, crashing is not really the problem, though my sister's PC sometimes crashes with her kids' games (video driver issue). However, Windows XP has now moved on (mostly) from crashing to some really hard problems that are almost as annoying and in some cases worse.
I have a brand new WinXP laptop from Dell for work, with 2GB RAM and 1.8 GHz or so CPU - it has two entertaining problems that illustrate this:
1. Kept on waking up from sleep mode after an hour or so - turned out to be that WinXP SP2 will not hibernate if you have more than 512 MB of RAM. Disabling hibernate fixed this, but why should I have to?
2. Takes over an hour to reboot - started in last month, this involves the 'Applying computer settings' stage lasting over one hour. I've spent several hours trying to debug this so far - there is no way around the one hour reboot so this is actually worse.
The hibernate problem could well happen under Linux but it would probably be easier to trace what was happening (debatable though).
The very slow reboot is something that is really hard to debug without Windows ninja skills - I have looked at the event logs but it's not at all clear which service is causing the problem. Disabling services mentioned in various MS KB articles has not helped. I class this problem as almost worse than a crash - sometimes I have to reboot to install new software and I then lose the use of the laptop for over an hour... WinXP is really not helping my productivity here.
My point is that WinXP is now so complex, particularly as you install a lot of software, that it's really hard to find out what is going on. Linux or perhaps MacOS X would be a much better platform for power users - since they are both *nix based, it is a lot easier to see what's going on.
Don't joke about the footboard - Kinesis keyboards support footboards well (like another Shift key basically), so you can do all sorts of nice macros. Another Slashdotter recently swore by it.
Slashdot Mirror
GPON, like other PON fibre to the premises (FTTP) technologies, uses a single fibre at the central office (telephone exchange), which splits again and again on its way to homes. A single fibre does deliver about 2.5 Gbps, but it is split up to 32, 64 or 128 times (depending on how many subscribers have signed up, and how the telco has deployed the fibre. So the real bandwidth you get is something like 20 Mbps (1:128 split) to 80 Mbps (1:32 split). Good, but not quite gigabits...
m ?ARTICLE_ID=231662&p=13 for details of the various standards.
GPON is the ITU (international) standard, while EPON, aka GEPON is from the US's IEEE - GPON is used more in Europe and US, while GEPON is bigger in AsiaPac, where NTT and others are investing huge amounts in fibre (DSL is already on decline in Japan and Korea). See http://lw.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cf
The other FTTP architecture of interest is Active Ethernet, in which you have a fibre per home/business, and plain old powered Ethernet kit driving the fibres. It gives you 100 Mbps bidirectionally, and possibly more depending on the kit (just upgrade the switches as technology becomes available). So it's more future-proof, but generally costs more to deploy initially, though in some cases it's a better bet according to some (in rural areas or densely populated cities, where it becomes fibre to the basement with VDSL in-building over pre-installed copper, 100 Meg end to end).
Mod the parent up - didn't know about the closed-source binary part of the 'open-source' Matrox drivers...
See this page for more information and download links.
Or you can just buy an older version of the WRT54G - there should be plenty on eBay. I bought a 2.0 version and it works fine with DD-WRT's latest version, which was easy to flash and set up (only a couple of minor bugs, be sure to set a suitably low MTU if you use PPPoA/PPPoE for your broadband connection). This is amazing value compared to the cost and inflexibility of buying an equivalent router with VoIP, VPN, firewall, QoS, WMM (WiFi QoS), etc. And unlike the Belkin pre-N WiFi box that I used to use as a firewall, it doesn't interpret completely normal web server responses as a DoS attack, and drop all future packets from that server! (I now use the Belkin as a WiFi access point only, i.e. Ethernet bridge - it is fantastically good at providing coverage to a radius of about 50 yards/metres, including penetrating several foot-thick stone walls.)
My strategy now is to use commercial routers/WAPs only where the open source firmware is not ready - e.g. ADSL routers are still bleeding edge, as is pre-N WiFi - and use DD-WRT or similar for everything else.
I really recommend DD-WRT as it's very flexible and amazing value for money (a $20 donation to the author is recommended so he can keep working on this as his full-time job, but not mandatory). It's also easy to install extra packages from the very impressive OpenWRT project (installing tcpdump on the WRT54G to debug a VPN problem took about 30 secs!) - OpenWRT is more command line oriented, with a basic GUI, but probably more extensible since you can have a smaller basic image.
Whatever you do, don't go with Sveasoft - their firmware is not as up to date or featureful as DD-WRT, and it is MAC-locked to your specific device, and there are serious debates over their GPL compliance (IMO they are beyond the boundary of what is acceptable).
You're omitting a huge step between having the idea and delivering a product - there's the whole process of specifying requirements, designing the product in detail (thousands of decisions, not just the part covered by a patent), developing it, debugging it, testing it, writing documentation, training support people, training pre-sales and sales people (if needed), etc.... All of this takes a huge investment, resulting in the core deliverables (software and documentation) being protected by *Copyright*.
Software patents are really only useful to act as a roadblock to other companies, and in particular for patent trolls - they don't stop a truly motivated competitor from replicating your software product in a cleanroom environment, as long as they can code around the patents, which should virtually always be possible.
"Making money off the finished work" in this scenario would imply taking the copyrighted software and illegally selling it - copyright protection is more than enough to stop this. Patent protection is simply unnecessary for a thriving software business, as long as it is reasonably diligent in its use of copyright and trade secret protection.
So corporations are amazingly energy-efficient, right? Just to take some examples from offices I've worked in:
- many people leave their PCs and CRT monitors switched on all night and weekend
- huge numbers of flights are made (probably the biggest CO2 emission generator for any white collar employee who is not wholly office based)
- vast amounts of commuting, business car trips, Fedex delivery, etc
Some of this is unavoidable, but greater use of videoconferencing, shared whiteboards, wikis, blogs and telecommuting could greatly reduce this.
Please stop being complacent about this - corporations are part of the problem, just like individuals.
That's a bit like saying that Bugzilla is built on MySQL, and is really only a thin layer over it, so you might as well just use SQL directly to submit your bugs. For example, TWiki has a huge feature set, and over 100 plugins, including a LaTeX plugin if you want to use it for some content. See http://twiki.org/
Most people don't need read access security on their TWiki sites, or if they do are willing to set up another instance (which is quite easy particularly in the upcoming 4.0 release).
Patches to add this feature (i.e. make search respect access controls) would be of interest to the development team (which I'm part of).
No technical changes are needed - IPv4 has had QoS (the IP Precedence field and 6-bit DiffServ codepoint that has superseded it) for decades, and virtually every router has QoS support. The hard part is the political/commercial agreement, and after that, agreeing on what the QoS levels should be. Telcos already run IP networks for use by business IP VPNs (MPLS not IPSec) this way, so they have a lot of experience.
As Google's spokesman said in the article, this might not be a bad idea as long as it's fully open-access - anyone who wants to pay can send high-QoS data. I think it also needs some regulation, so that the high-QoS packets don't completely squeeze out the best-effort Internet packets. Actually running (parts of) the Internet like this could be a big challenge, but it would mean that PSTN (the normal telephone network) and TV broadcast networks could finally go away, and that any VoIP or IP TV company could just set up, buy suitable amounts of QoS transport, and start delivering high quality voice and video.
ADSL2+ does drop in speed as you get further out, but there's also the prospect of remote DSLAMs (fed by fibre from the exchange) that end up shortening your local loop (line from the DSLAM to you) - these are already used, partly as a way of reaching more remote areas for telephone service and more recently upgraded to handle DSL. Sometimes known as FTTN (Fibre to the Neighbourhood/Node) since fibre is used to link the remote DSLAMs to the central office (exchange building). Being deployed by SBC in the US.
A variant of this model is to deploy a smaller DSLAM closer to the subscriber's building (probably 500-1000 feet) you will even be able to get VDSL2, which gives you up to 100 Mbps - this is FTTC (Fibre to the Curb/Kerb), and is being deployed by BellSouth in the US, and BT and Deutsche Telekom in Europe. This FTTC model gives you about the same bandwidth as FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) using GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Networks), which is what the US telcos are moving to (about 40 to 80 Mbps per subscriber depending on number of subscribers on each PON 'fibre tree').
WiMAX is another option but it's debatable whether it can ever support enough simultaneous users at 40 to 100 Mbps in a densely populated area - probably best for competitive carriers and less populated areas.
Since I live about 12,000 feet from my exchange, remote DSLAMs / FTTx are my main hope for more than 512Kbps (at least without getting satellite, WiFi/WiMAX or something more exotic)... I just checked with Be and my home is indeed too far away for ADSL2+...
Deregulation is a horrible term - it's used in the UK to describe the process of going from a European-type PTT to a private company, with strong regulation of the market as a means of allowing competitors to survive without being crushed by the newly privatised PTT.
So I think the UK model is closer to the Canadian model as you describe it, with strong regulation and forced unbundling resulting in real competition (eventually).
POSIX is an IEEE standard, not a US Government standard, and no doubt is copyright protected like almost any other written work. However, this has no impact on products attempting to be POSIX compliant, which can do so without breaking the POSIX copyright (i.e. you can use a document without copying it).
The UK has a highly deregulated telecoms market and pretty good broadband penetration figures, mainly through ADSL. You can now get ADSL from various ISPs for US $30 upwards (512K) with some 2 Mbps and 8 Mbps services (latter costs about $55). This covers 90% plus of population.
There is also local-loop unbundled (LLU) ADSL now, in which an ISP (Easynet/UK Online at present) puts its own kit in the telephone exchange (central office) - costs just $20 per month (£9.95), but since they are just starting to roll out, they only cover 40% or so of population.
ADSL prices are already competitive with all-you-can-eat dialup (people pay per minute for local calls here), and with LLU broadband may end up being cheaper than dialup.
The real solution for broadband to sparsely populated communities is WiMAX or similar non-line-of-sight technologies that are much cheaper to deploy than CDMA/UMTS type cellular networks. NLOS means that you can cover a large area with a single WiMAX tower, and that foliage growth in spring doesn't cut off the service you had installed in December.
WiFi also has a role, but is more of an in-fill or point to point for truly remote communities where you can hop via a point-to-point to link to somewhere that does have wired or WiMAX broadband. Satellite services are also available in the UK - more expensive but useful if you are truly in a remote area.
Despite the unregulated market, government is getting involved with limited subsidies for rural areas that would otherwise not get (reasonably priced) broadband at all. Mostly, however, this is driven by the incumbent telco's vision that they have to deploy ADSL to everyone in order to sell next-generation IP-based services such as VoIP, IP TV, etc. Google for 'BT 21CN' for more about how BT is ripping out the PSTN to replace it with an all-IP network.
Not surprisingly, this is a trademark case - submitter is confused. It's really not hard - trademarks are for business names, while patents are for (hopefully) innovative and industrially applicable technical ideas (even if re-invented by someone else). Copyright is for the specific expression of an idea (i.e. your particular sci-fi novel or web application, not the *idea* of sci-fi novels or web applications).
How come the editors don't catch this sort of basic mistake? They only post a handful of stories a day, and checking the short text from each submitter can't be that hard... Yes, I know the editors never read the stories and barely skim the submissions...
In the UK, Pacelink offer a cable that provides more reliable connection between the Sky (satellite) box) and the TiVo. Channel changing now works 100% of the time, which wasn't the case with IR.
The nmake Makefile.win supplied with Apache 2.0 makes many calls to msdev - so the build process relies on both the IDE project files and (top level) makefiles.
Thanks, but I already have nmake and would be using Makefile.win - the problem is MSDEV, which is missing from the free downloads that Microsoft provides.
Anyone know if this includes the equivalent of MSDEV? This is the one thing I needed to build Apache 2.x on Windows, having downloaded Microsoft Nmake and their free Visual C++ Toolkit.
Any other approaches to developing for Apache on Windows without having to pay for development tools would be great to know about.
Try listening to NPR, BBC Radio 4 or BBC World Service - they do really good news, factual programmes and some drama. You can get all of these over the Internet if you're not in the right place, and the BBC has its own 'we TiVo it for you' service called Listen Again, which lets you listen over the Internet for a week after broadcast.
Almost everything you say here is wrong or misleading...
Some mobile packages include free mobile to mobile calls, up to N minutes per month at least, but many don't (probably the majority of low end packages anyway).
See my other post - most VoIP providers that I've seen (BT, Vonage and Gossiptel) do NOT require premium rate.
Mobiles are very convenient and people with plenty of cash or who make shorter phone calls tend to use them all the time. However, the cost and health concerns (recently in the press) mean that VoIP is still quite interesting to home phones. Telecoms companies are investing a lot in VoIP for home, so it's just a touch premature to write off VoIP.
'Hardly anyone has landlines anymore' is just rubbish - perhaps in a very small circle of people switching to mobiles, but not for the vast majority of people in the real world who, surprisingly enough, do still have land lines...
It's early days for VoIP here, but your view on it is unusually pessimistic, perhaps because you signed up early and got burnt by a bad deal as mentioned in your other post.
Yes, one that also includes VoIP outbound to PSTN lines. Not a great VoIP solution but it is VoIP.
1. I agree Skype is still slightly more expensive (as in my original post). Skype is very high quality generally, some think it's better than PSTN because of its frequency range.
2. Let's take Vonage UK as an example (others such as Gossiptel are similar). They offer the following area codes for no extra fee, you just choose one when signing up:
0121 Birmingham
0131 Edinburgh
0141 Glasgow
0151 Liverpool
0161 Manchester
01914 Newcastle
020 London (Central)
020 London (Greater)
02380 Southampton
02392 Portsmouth
024 Coventry
02891 Bangor Co Down
029 Cardiff
Try reading the sites yourself before you accuse me of not doing so...
3. You pay one line rental to BT, then you pay the next 1-2 'line rentals' to the VoIP company - these are much cheaper than a new BT line. If you are really on a budget, use Skype or SIP on a PC and get your friends to use it too, i.e. stay off PSTN, and you don't pay any extra line rentals.
4. First you said VoIP was not retail, which I agreed with. Now you are saying you've had no calls on VoIP - if you have premium rate or lo-call inbound I can see that would limit things, but why not have people call you via SIP (off PSTN) if they are that price sensitive?
Getting VoIP phones down to £10 is unlikely - even PSTN phones are rarely that cheap, and most people want cordless (DECT) these days which is more expensive. Fortunately you can just plug in the old PSTN phones to a VoIP router.
Number portability is something that needs to come, but until you can get rid of the line rental you might as well keep the old number on PSTN anyway for incoming calls and 999 emergency calls outbound (which I'm not convinced VoIP providers have addressed.)
VoIP is developing but you are way off the mark except for point 1.
1. SkypeOut works out very close to the cost of 18866, who are one of the cheapest 3rd party analogue providers. IMO the real reason to get VoIP is (a) cheap 2nd or 3rd line and (b) ultimately to dump BT line rental. The UK Post Office is getting into line rental so perhaps costs for that will drop too. In the long term you might just have a cheaper WiMax connection and no landline at all.
2. VoIP providers such as BT, Vonage UK and Gossiptel do NOT require a premium rate number for incoming VoIP calls in the UK. Stop spreading misinformation.
3. See 1.
4. There are lots of people selling VoIP off the Web - it's still early days but since most non-geeks book holidays and buy many other things on the Web, lack of a retail channel isn't an obstacle at this stage in the development of the VoIP market.
Another reason to get VoIP is teleworking - I have VoIP at work and home, so while I'm working from home I have a work extension through a softphone on my laptop.
As you say, crashing is not really the problem, though my sister's PC sometimes crashes with her kids' games (video driver issue). However, Windows XP has now moved on (mostly) from crashing to some really hard problems that are almost as annoying and in some cases worse.
I have a brand new WinXP laptop from Dell for work, with 2GB RAM and 1.8 GHz or so CPU - it has two entertaining problems that illustrate this:
1. Kept on waking up from sleep mode after an hour or so - turned out to be that WinXP SP2 will not hibernate if you have more than 512 MB of RAM. Disabling hibernate fixed this, but why should I have to?
2. Takes over an hour to reboot - started in last month, this involves the 'Applying computer settings' stage lasting over one hour. I've spent several hours trying to debug this so far - there is no way around the one hour reboot so this is actually worse.
The hibernate problem could well happen under Linux but it would probably be easier to trace what was happening (debatable though).
The very slow reboot is something that is really hard to debug without Windows ninja skills - I have looked at the event logs but it's not at all clear which service is causing the problem. Disabling services mentioned in various MS KB articles has not helped. I class this problem as almost worse than a crash - sometimes I have to reboot to install new software and I then lose the use of the laptop for over an hour... WinXP is really not helping my productivity here.
My point is that WinXP is now so complex, particularly as you install a lot of software, that it's really hard to find out what is going on. Linux or perhaps MacOS X would be a much better platform for power users - since they are both *nix based, it is a lot easier to see what's going on.
Don't joke about the footboard - Kinesis keyboards support footboards well (like another Shift key basically), so you can do all sorts of nice macros. Another Slashdotter recently swore by it.