When are you going to realise what the actual real cost of bandwidth is? Clue: It's a fucking lot more than what you're paying now which is why contention ratios exist.

I assume you're one of those people who thinks that if you pay for 10Mbit, you should be able to get that 24/7? Here's a simple task for you. Find out the monthly supply cost to an ISP of a typical 640MBit pipe. Divide that by the package you're paying for (so if you're on 10Mbit and it's a 640Mbit pipe, the answe is 64). Divide the monthly cost to the ISP of that pipe by your answer and you get the actual bandwidth cost to the ISP, excluding any costs for their infrastructure, to provide your bandwidth 24/7. I can guarantee that the cost is many many times what you're paying a month. If you want your bandwidth fully available 24/7 with no slow down, no problem but it'll be at least 10% higher than the end answer you came up with.

No problem. If you want a dedicated 10Mbps unrestricted service you can have it but you'll pay the full cost of that bandwidth supply which is $100's a month.

...whilst hypocritically expecting the Police to enforce laws designed to protect you made by the bodies you don't recognise. You'd be really pissed off if no laws were enforced, someone decided they wanted your computer and either beat the living shit out of you or shot you in the process of relieving you of its ownership.

You voted them in. Stupid fuck.

Ah yes, because we all have hours to sit around waiting for it to finish only to find that there's a missing dependency and it fails right at the last hurdle because it's expecting version 1.2.3 of a file and you have version 1.2.2-99. And if it does compile OK, find out that it's crap and gets uninstalled quickly. At least with a .deb or .rpm file, you download it, package manager executes it and it takes a couple of minutes tops.

With the piddly desktop market share Linux has coupled with the fact that a very large percentage of Linux users will simply not pay for software if there's a FOSS equivalent, no matter how bad, they'll just decide it's commercially not worth bothering doing a Linux port and concentrate on Windows and Mac OSX instead. If 1% of the user base is causing 90% of the headaches trying to get it to work with their OS of choice, simply remove that OS from the list you make it available for. The $$ amount you'll lose in sales will be recouped in the savings you make in development and aftersales support.

I'm sorry but as someone who spends a lot of time countering the Linux is good, Windows is shit brigade, that you're wrong. USB works a treat and has done for many a year. I have however had issues with an iPod on Windows and the usbstor.sys bug.

Of course it's a mess. Configuration files all over the place. Different X servers, Qt new version or GTK new version breaks backwards compatibility with old stuff. That 5k application you've downloaded needs 128MB of dependencies because it's a KDE app and you use Gnome (and vice-versa). Different locations for the same file depending on whatever distro you use.

Compare this to Windows where the core OS is the same. One graphics server, one central place for configuration, Windows files in the same places across the board. Completely different to Linux. If you write a 32 bit app for Windows, it'll work across them all. You don't have to worry about Windows X having a different quirk to Windows Y etc etc.

STOP BREAKING THINGS THAT WORK FINE

Take Gnome Password Protected Windows Network Share Browsing. Worked fine in Gnome 2.22, completely fucking broken in 2.24. Why? Because they changed to gvfs, decided to take out/omit authentication and now don't know how the fuck to fix it. And then you have CIFS which can't resolve Windows Computer Names on a network. What fucking idiot decided that in a world with a 90% Windows desktop market share that removing the ability to browse windows networks was a good idea?

And that's why when I installed Fedora 10 instead of Ubuntu and realised I would have to go back to hours of fucking around to get my wifi working instead of having a simple 2 click process that pops off to get the proprietry firmware as Ubuntu does, I shoved in the Ubuntu CD and snapped the Fedora 10 one in two, never to darken a computer I own again.

Does it work? Yes. Therefore I don't give a flying fuck whether it's closed source or not. Being prevented from being able to do something even though there's a freely available solution there simply on the grounds that you can't look at the source code where you wouldn't know what the fuck you were looking at or what to do with it in the first place is utter madness.

What the article fails to mention is that there is hardly anyone in the UK who cannot get broadband. My parents live in a small 10 house hamlet 5 miles from the nearest town and get 2MBit. You have to be basically living in a solitary house half way up a mountain in the middle of Scotland not to get broadband in the UK.

Compare this to a country like the USA where even a town with a population of 30,000+ is deemed unworthy of getting broadband by the telcos.

...2002