Posts by Ben King 8 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2007
Just looking at the list of stores closing and it looks sensible to me.
In Coventry, Game had 2 branches of Game and a branch of GameStation within 5 minutes walk of each other in the city centre, with the only vaguely viable competition in the form of HMV (that I can think of).
While I am sure they will lose a bit of HMV its nothing like as much as running 3 stores within very close proximity.
I have two good reasons:
1) 64bit, if you want to get more than 4GB of RAM, you need 64bit windows, and I get hardly anyone still using XP is using 64bit and they would be insane to upgrade to 64bit XP... Hence Windows 7 is a good option.
2) (warning network techie point), Windows XP and 2003 do not have TCP window scaling, this is the ability of the IP stack to scale the TCP window size on dependant on the size of the connection and latency... in a nutshell this means that if you are on XP downloading content from far away places, even if you have 100Mbit/s, you will NEVER get more than 2Mbit/s from asia, and maybe 3Mbit/s. (though i accept you could do some reg hacks to permanently increase the window size - if you have the ram - which you don't cos you haven't gone 64 bit :)).
Windows 7 is really good, and I think M$ release cycles are quite restrained, especially compared with say Ubuntu - which I love but they drive me crazy with a new version and new pain every 6 months.
As for Windows 8, may I remind everyone that like Star Trek films, only alternate versions of Windows are any good - so wait for Windows 9.
I have been using spinvox for about a year, and regardless of how they do it, it is wonderful as it saves loads of time especially if like me you hate listening to VMs!
I am actually sceptical about how much is done by humans, simply due to the amount of mistakes it does make (generally though you get the jist), also the number of messages that simply come through has 'x has left you a message, we can transcribe it, dial xyz to hear the message', you listen to the message and its perfectly understandable.
Ultimately the world would be a worse place without spinvox.
I suspect the 300m is meant to be a rate of climb of 300m per minute, just is just shy of 1000ft per minute which is a very respectable rate of climb for an aircraft of its class. A 1000ft ceiling wouldn't be able to get any sort of certification as it wouldn't be able to keep to minimas above built up areas, etc.
I have used Vyatta and Cisco extensively, and I have probably completed one of the larger Vyatta deployments by a UK company (company WAN spanning 6 countries).
A few responses:
1) Vyatta vs Cisco, I am sure there is a point where the high end Ciscos out perform PC opensource based solutions, however at the commodity level this simply isn't the case. Bang for buck when you look at what you get with Vyatta feature and performance wise the equivalent Cisco is way way more expensive.
2) Vyatta vs Other Opensource, the argument is absolutely right, Vyatta does nothing that you can't get anywhere else on the opensource community, we actually use a Debian/iptables/imq solution elsewhere in our ISP business very successfully, and I would recommend if you are doing anything specialist you stick with the bespoke route. However Vyatta is extremely quick to deploy, give me a bare metal server, a Vyatta CD, and I will have an installed working Vyatta router with base config in 10 minutes, you simply can't do this with a custom build.
3) Cisco vs Opensource, long raging argument, we run our albeit small ISP all on Linux opensource routing equipment because its cheaper. Where Cisco wins though is support and the high end gear.
4) Support. Where Vyatta really wins is the support, if you decided go with Vyatta pay the subscription fee and get the support, its really superb.
Regards... Ben
The point is that end users never come even vaguely near to using 100% of their connection, in truth (and the gamble that ISP's play) its a very small percentage of the connection is used (and this is why P2P traffic causes ISPs havoc).
As an ISP our average utilisation is around 1% of the total connectivity we sell and peak usage is around 5%, so putting that in context for every100mbit/s we sell to end users leads to a backhaul usage of just 5mbit/s.
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