Haha! I help increase blog overpopulation!

I have now created a third blog. One has to separate one's interests you know. Anyway, old entries have been imported and published, will soon be gone from the old mixed blog. This one is my more public and global part of the "Speaker's corner", the others will return to being more personal. Oh and in swedish mostly... This one is english-only.

Tata for now!

My Windows vs Linux desktop fight

I really try to work with Linux, and for the most part it works ok. However I have issues with things not being stable and being difficult to get to work in a simple way.
With Windows everything almost always "just works". In addition, things are relatively stable, and when things do crash I may not know what caused the crash but it rarely happens again because I can avoid the condition for causing the crash. With Linux (ok, I don't use any of the directly end user centric distros (Arch, with KDE4.3) so I have myself to blame, but still) I can often cause crashes with subtly different effects just using the system as intended. And I still don't know what caused it!
One example is KDE and multiple desktop sessions with different users. It *should* work very simply, but every time it has caused window manager problems that forced me to at least log out and back in. Also, strange window manager behaviour in the second session.
So, you say, report the bugs! Sure I may do that - if I ever find the time to produce valuable bug reports. In this forum I can bitch and moan about problems in a slightly unstructured way, but it would be worthless as a bug report. I would like to help but it's difficult to find the time. I mean, I shouldn't even be writing this, I should be working!
Oh, and Adobe's flash plugin. Unfortunately they have basically monopolized dynamic content and media on the web so the closed-source plugin is completely mandatory on a desktop system. However, the Linux version crashes a lot - once it took down KDE, and once it *completely* locked up the whole machine. Comparing to the Windows Vista and XP computers I use my Arch Linux desktop crashes noticeably more frequently.
I'll continue to plug away at this, but it'll be quite some time before I can let me dear wife use it daily.
(You may wonder why I don't use Mint or Ubuntu or something similar? Well, I just got stuck on Arch since I could easily get a home server running with it, and Arch is so easy to manage. Desktop support is a bit trickier to get right it seems - but apart from the crashes it was easy to get up and running the way I wanted it to)

"BT spokesperson" suggesting tiered internet

This may or may not be news but I just saw it and I really became angry that this sort of misconception continues to be propagated. A BT spokesman (no name oddly enough) allegedly said the following:

Traffic is growing. The idea that ISPs will continue to pick up the bill is unsustainable. We want to work this out with the BBC and other content owners to come to some real-world compromise.

This person doesn't seem to understand that his industry is there to transport bits from point A to point B. It annoys me since the way it roughly works is this:

• Content provider pays for bandwidth from an ISP that charges based on usage (amounts of traffic up and down)
  
• Individuals/households pay ISP for internet access (based on certain speeds, sometimes with bandwidth caps)
  
• ISPs make arrangements to transport bits between each other so that if one ISP is sending much more data across another ISPs network it will end up paying for the used bandwidth

This means that usually ISPs share the cost of transporting data and end users (that is both content providers and consumers!) do pay for their activities. I assume that I may be quite wrong as there are likely lots of different deals between ISPs but I do think this is the generic model.

The "funny" thing that I guess this spokesperson does not realize is that both BBC and YouTube for instance are already paying, albeit not directly to BT in this case. In return, BBC gets to send data from its customers out to other ISPs without paying "extra". Now, if the costs are getting too high I suggest either increasing corporate efficiency or charging more for internet access. It's that simple. I just cannot understand how the spokesperson otherwise imagines things would work! Each individual ISP having to have agreements in place with each individual content provider that crosses some sort of arbitrary threshold in terms of the amount of traffic it causes in the network? Jeez, managing and negotiating that sort of dynamic scenario will cost more than increasing your bandwidth to just deal with it, I'm sure.

However I guess what they don't want is the increasingly symmetric internet, where the previous consumers are now producing content and will consume valuable uplink capacity since the ISP pays for that. Actually I suspect that they really are just afraid of the speed of change and want to slow that down to stay in control and maintain some sort of illusion of being in charge of their "products".

I have no problem paying more for internet access. As long as I know it is unlimited, I do not want to be limited in any way as to what sites I can or cannot visit, or about speed caps, or bandwidth caps. That is just silly and arbitrary censorship in my opinion. I will pay what it costs (within reasonable limits...), just don't come to me and say that "Yeah... you know, in order to access these sites that you seem to like so much we will need to charge an extra ten pounds... Yeah, sorry about that, but they're so popular, you know... Oh, and yes, we do charge them a pound each per individual user too of course. Mmm, yeah... that's in addition to what they already pay... Yeah..."

Now, luckily I don't live in the UK so BT is not a problem for me. However, any sign of such idiotic statements (well, I'll wait for them to actually implement it) from my ISP and I switch.