Posts by Jubal Harshaw

O2 and Be customers suffer network congestion

Be* are too cheap

Many years ago, I was a customer of Pipex (back when they were considered decent). I paid around £45 for 2Mbps ADSL.

Now, I'm with Be, and I pay around £24 for a connection that runs at between 13 and 16 Mbps. Over the last week, the pings to popular and well-known UK-based gaming services have been atrocious at peak times. So much so that I simply cannot play.

Be may well be over subscribed, and this is their fault. However, they position themselves as a superior service and, as such, shouldn't really be selling to every torrenting Tom, Dick or Harry for bargain prices.

I would be willing to pay around £65 a month for a decent, unlimited, ADSL2+ service from a company that doesn't frantically boost its subscribers and then wonder why everything is slowing to a crawl. That equals 2 and a bit Be Pro subscribers or 3 Be Unlimited subscribers.

So, who else here would happily pay a premium for decent service?

Nuke-frying raygun 747 all ready bar the raygun

No Mirrors.

The laser in question is more about heat than light (it's an infrared laser). The sheer amount of heat (or vibration, depending on how you want to look at it) produced would crack even the hardiest heat-reflecting mirror. A shiny surface would certainly be unable to reflect enough heat to not be compromised, these lasers can achieve several megawatts of continuous flow.

El Reg seeks ultimate 'nom de sex'

Using the first pet's name and mother's maiden name method...

... I am 'Smokey Rolls.'

I'm unsure as to what particular type of porn that name would be suited for.

UK firm pays biggest ever fine over 'pirate' software

Re: Oh dear god

My word, that's a pretty prickly reply - did open-source software kill your parents or molest you as a child or something?

As far as lost productivity goes, that's par for the course when moving to any new software - open source or proprietary. As for FOSS alternatives to the products you mentioned, you're right in saying that there isn't currently a decent alternative to AutoCAD but, as a sometime-graphic-designer, I have found Scribus, Inkscape, The GIMP and Blender to be pretty reasonable alternatives to Quark Xpress, Illustrator, Photoshop and Lightwave - and they're rapidly improving.

I'm not sure, though, that this story is a good reason to switch to open-source, unless your company habitually commits copyright infringement and breaks license agreements on a whim.