Posts by Giles Guthrie

Two UK web hosts go down

In defence of 1&1

I've been on a shared hosting plan with 1&1 for seven years. In all that time, I've had about 5 outages, ranging from 3 minutes to two hours. Once they had a database problem that was a bit dramatic, but we were able to collectively recover from that. These are not guesses either, as I have the web site remotely monitored.

So, my view of 1&1 is that they offer a stable, feature-rich service at fair prices.

Virgin Media, on the other hand, consistently disappointed me. All of their services have suffered a tangible decline in quality since the VM rebranding, to the point where they are utterly incapable of providing the service for which you're paying. I'm no longer a VM customer, being happier to pay £5/mo for an 8Mb internet service that runs at 5Mb than to pay £37/mo for a 20Mb internet service that runs at 11Mb. Virgin's problem is that they need to drop the best part of £20bn on a to-the-house network upgrade. We'll see that just after I land in France at l'aeroport du cochon.

Microsoft vs. Google – the open source shame

Just that good eh?

"If Google has a near-monopoly, it's because they're just that good. Microsoft has a monopoly because it's hard NOT to use their products."

Erm, and why, exactly, is it "hard NOT to use [Microsoft] products"? Is it because, when they were embryonic in the market place, they were "just that good"? Can you think of a word processor in 1988 that was better than Word for DOS? Or even Word 6 & Excel 5 on Windows 3.1? Sure, you had to put up with Windows, but what was better? Even the Mac versions were up to speed. Microsoft didn't get to the top of the pile by being anticompetitive, that only happened after they got to the top of the pile.

What we're looking at here is a gorilla colony. There's a new kid around who's gunning for alpha-male status, and so is doing anything to make himself look the best. When he gets alpha-male status, THAT's when the rot will set in. Whilst Ashlee's article was far from the best journalism I've read in the last ten minutes, it does help cause people to question whether Google is the saintly one they would have us believe.

What's happening here is that history is about to do its famous repeating trick, and we as "general public" need to be on our toes to make sure we don't get screwed in the same way we were by Microsoft.

Reader succumbs to apostrophe apoplexy

Not even a flame by your standards

El Reg should look at its own guidelines: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/01/12/how_to_write_a_flame/

This alleged "flame" is in breach of most of them.

Sony says no to Euro PS3 price cut

Re: Oh Look. A USA Price Comparrison ...

For every fatuous US/EU price comparison, there's always some feckless idiot who bangs on about the multiple languages in Europe and the translation costs yada yada yada.

The last time I checked, UK citizens spoke substantially the same language as those in the US, and the character sets in the whole of Europe are within the same ASCII range.

So, on the basis that neither of these is the case in a comparison with US & Japan, the argument is fallacious.

This is particularly galling in Adobe's case, where they charge us for a "European" version, and then insist we install it in "English (US)".

Netgear Storage Central Turbo SC101T network storage box

Won't be going anywhere near this

I too threw out my SC101 after an appalling time with it. Frankly, it didn't work. I found the management system unusable (and having worked with Compaq SmartStart disks, I KNOW unusable), it was abhorrently slow, lacked feedback and consistency. Half the time the disks weren't there.

Worst of all though: it would simply crash my system if I tried to move more than 9GB data to it in one operation. Useless.

Incidentally, the 300GB drives I bought for it are now sitting in an old Dell Dimension I had lying around, running Ubuntu 6 and Samba. It's been running for 7 months now with no downtime.

DARPA scramjet nudges Mach 10

Re: Sydney to London in...

By the time the Scramjet is available and working in a commercial airliner, it will take 73 hours to get through Airport Security anyway.

Virgin faces customer exodus over Sky battle

As ye sow so shall ye reap

Virgin Media is reaping the rewards of its two botched mergers. I'm a VM customer, formerly of Telewest. While Telewest were hardly stellar, they make the current arrangements look gleaming.

As soon as the second merger completed, I started to get significant connectivity issues across my three services. My V+ box still won't record the ends of TV shows, and the much-hyped On Demand services usually work for three days out of every seven. Now, with Sky One gone, the use of ex-NTL call centres (staffed half with people who cannot speak English, and half with people who know nothing and care less) and savage bandwidth throttling on the internet pipes, it has become apparent that VM is hellbent on taking the worst elements of each of its constituents, and building a service portfolio based upon these.

I am scheduled to move house this year, to another cabled area. It is by no means certain that my cable services will move with me.