BT ditches broadband line length limit

Grok Headline matches for BT ditches broadband line length limit

Of the total 5 billion video streams
served during the first half of 2004,
79.1% were at broadband (100 kbps and
above) rates, with an average length of
view of 30 minutes per unique user per
month per site

Of the total 5 billion video streams
served during the first half of 2004,
79.1% were at broadband (100 kbps and
above) rates, with an average length of
view of 30 minutes per unique user per
month per site 08/28/2004 02:47 AM
[PRWEB Aug 28, 2004]

Speed limit Plans to get everyone using
broadband may fail says Bill Thompson

Speed limit Plans to get everyone using
broadband may fail says Bill Thompson 11/14/2003 11:29 AM
BBC Nov 14 2003 10:45AM ET

Leap leaps into fixed-line broadband

Leap leaps into fixed-line broadband 08/12/2004 05:46 AM
Irish unbundle for the business punter

Does Line Sharing Increase Broadband
Deployments?

Does Line Sharing Increase Broadband
Deployments? 09/22/2004 02:58 PM
A new study has come out, saying something that seems fairly obvious, but which seems to miss an important point. It deals with the ongoing debate over whether or not the FCC should get rid of line sharing rules for broadband providers. The report claims that, without low regulated line sharing rules, there would be fewer broadband deployments, because the prices would be higher. The report doesn't even look at whether line sharing rules should be ditched, but whether the rates should be kept lower. The results are pretty obvious, of course. Cheaper rates should lead to more deployments. What is left out of the equation, however, is what kind of impact this has on alternative forms of broadband competition -- which is exactly what the FCC is thinking about. If existing DSL providers do end up raising rates, then (the theory goes) it just gives more incentive for broadband alternatives that route completely around the current network owners to hit the market. All of the current talk about broadband wireless (and even, unfortunately, powerline broadband) offerings should make that clear. That's not to say the alternatives will automatically succeed (and the way most seem to be going about it right now, it looks like there will be plenty of failures to talk about). However, what the debate really is about is whether competition should be stimulated within existing DSL networks or outside existing DSL networks. What this report basically says is that if the FCC tries to increase competition outside of existing DSL networks, it will mean less deployments for those DSL networks -- which is exactly what the FCC is trying to do. To understand the real impacts of trying to stimulate demand outside of existing networks, shouldn't any study also look at what happens with alternative providers?

Fixed-line broadband will prevail -
analyst

Fixed-line broadband will prevail -
analyst 06/17/2004 05:12 AM
ZDNet UK Jun 17 2004 9:03AM GMT

FCC moves ahead with power-line
broadband rules

FCC moves ahead with power-line
broadband rules 02/13/2004 05:19 PM
The Federal Communications Commission has voted to move forward with a process to measure interference caused by broadband over power-line service.

Yahoo's No-Limit Query Limit As Opposed
to Google's -- So What?

Yahoo's No-Limit Query Limit As Opposed
to Google's -- So What? 08/19/2004 10:41 PM
I've gotten several mails about Four Things Yahoo Can Do That Google Can't. Many people asked about the query limit, mostly two things: 1) Is there any query limit? 2)...

Length isn't Everything

Length isn't Everything 03/14/2005 06:11 PM

The Harvard Law Review (where I served as an editor some ten years ago) is leading an effort to prune back the excessive length of law review articles. Eleven of the top journals have 110-page article in a law review last year. The dirty secret is that, in legal academia, longer articles are often treated as a proxy for "serious scholarship," when it's necessarily true that the biggest pieces are the best. I wouldn't have had much trouble condensing my piece to 70 pages, or 50, if that had been the standard. The rest of the material might have wound up in another article, which is fine.

There aren't many points that can't be made in 35,000 words. Even for law professors.

Hallmark and URL Length

Hallmark and URL Length 03/26/2005 09:53 PM

My wife sent a Hallmark eCard to someone today. She picked a format then typed a paragraph or so of text. The length of her prose was nothing out of the ordinary.

Hallmark then generated an email to the recipient and CC'd my wife. In this email was a link to the card. However, it appears to me that Hallmark embeds everything relevant to the card in that URL. The URL that arrived in the email was 622 characters long. It had five querystring arguments, one of which was 422 characters long. (Which, in light of this post, put me into instant convulsions.)

The entire text of my wife's message was embedded in this big querystring argument. It was encrypted, but it was all there because — not surprisingly — Outlook screwed up the translation URL of that length. When printed in the email, the URL spanned six lines, and when you clicked on it, you got the card but the message was cut off mid-word.

I compared the URL that loaded in the browser with the URL that appeared in the message, found the point where it got cut off, and copied the reaminder out of the message and tacked it onto the URL in the browser — voila — the rest of my wife's message appeared. Just for giggles, I entered some random text in the URL, and — sure enough — got a section of gibberish in the message.

This whole thing struck me as astoundingly bad form for a company as big as Hallmark, and it got me thinking about maximum URL length. It turns out that there's a lot of room for long URLs — Internet Explorer's maximum is over 2,000 characters. I couldn't find any references to maximum URL length in Firefox, only that it's "much longer" than IE.

Still, at what point does a URL get out of control? This particular link looked ridiculous sitting in an email. Hallmark even sent the email as plaintext so they couldn't hide its girth behind an A tag. What would have happened if Outlook put linebreaks in it? How do we not know that's what happened? (For the record, I forwarded the same email to myself and Thunderbird handled the mammoth URL like a champ.)

Jakob Nielsen says URLs shouldn't be any longer than 75 characters. He labeled this as a top mistake of Web design in 2002:

Long URLs break the Web's social navigation because they make it virtually impossible to email a friend a recommendation to visit a Web page. If the URL is too long to show in the browser's address field, many users won't know how to select it. If the URL breaks across multiple lines in the email, most recipients won't know how to glue the pieces back together.

He's talked before about URLs as user interface elements. So ha ve we — I'm anal-retentive about URLs.

I can't help but wonder why Hallmark wouldn't implement something like TinyURL: store the eCard settings in a database, then just tack a GUID onto the back of the URL. Yes, people could try random GUIDs (that post still makes me laugh), but even a 20-digit key would provide enough randomness to stave people off.

Could this be an attempt by Hallmark to avoid privacy issues altogether? I imagine people put some sensitive things in cards they send to people. Is Hallmark trying to stay out of this arena completely by making the whole thing stateless? If everything gets embedded in the URL, and they have nothing on their servers, then they can never be accused of a privacy breach, can they?

I'm left wondering. If anyone has a theory, post it.

Extracting the length from MP3 files
with Python

Extracting the length from MP3 files
with Python 12/03/2003 09:45 PM

Ned Batchelder recently wrote about the difficulties involved in extracting the length from an MP3 file. We're going to need to solve this problem soon at work; luckily, it seems that the answer may lie in the Python bindings for mpgedit, an audio file editing library available for both Windows and Linux.

After installing the Windows package and experimenting for a while, I managed to extract the time from one of my test files using the following:

>>> import mpgedit
>>> play = mpgedit.Play('example.mp3')
>>> play.total_time()
(213, 129)
>>> secs, msecs = play.total_time()
>>> mins = secs / 60
>>> secs = secs - mins * 60
>>> print "%d:%02d minutes" % (mins, secs)
3:33 minutes

However, for other files total_time() is returning (-1, -1). I'm sure there's a solution to this but I haven't stumbled across it yet.

Mark Shuttleworth Answers At Length

Mark Shuttleworth Answers At Length 04/04/2005 03:32 PM

V Two One ditches BT

V Two One ditches BT 09/13/2004 08:53 AM
Broadband mass migration to Telefonica UK

Article length slider in Safari RSS
support

Article length slider in Safari RSS
support 07/16/2004 07:05 AM
More than 10 years ago, during an InfoWorld interview I conducted with Ray Lane of Oracle, he predicted a slider bar control that would allow readers to get different length summaries of news articles. It sounded like science fiction to...

Full Length Movies on your Cell Phone

Full Length Movies on your Cell Phone 12/28/2004 03:41 PM
Technocrat.net Dec 28 2004 7:31PM GMT

Spider-Man 2 Full Length Theatrical
Trailer

Spider-Man 2 Full Length Theatrical
Trailer 04/10/2004 10:11 AM

Pope's Will Reveals Anguish Over Length
of Papacy

Pope's Will Reveals Anguish Over Length
of Papacy 04/07/2005 02:44 PM
In March of 2000, Pope John Paul II appeared to consider a momentous thought: resigning the papacy.

"Belmont Club has already considered the
implications at length."

"Belmont Club has already considered the
implications at length." 05/22/2004 03:34 PM

QRS ditches JDA merger

QRS ditches JDA merger 09/03/2004 12:10 PM
ZDNet Sep 3 2004 3:34PM GMT

DoCoMo ditches 3

DoCoMo ditches 3 05/28/2004 11:00 AM
Silicon.com May 28 2004 3:55PM GMT

Nortel ditches its CEO and CFO

Nortel ditches its CEO and CFO 04/28/2004 11:51 AM
ZDNet UK Apr 28 2004 3:35PM GMT

MITKRB5-SA-2003-003: faulty length
checks in xdrmem_getbytes

MITKRB5-SA-2003-003: faulty length
checks in xdrmem_getbytes 03/19/2003 10:25 PM
Tom Yu (Mar 19 2003)

Army May Reduce Length of Tours in
Combat Zones

Army May Reduce Length of Tours in
Combat Zones 09/26/2004 11:26 PM
Officials said the Army's ability to recruit and retain soldiers will steadily erode unless combat tours are shortened.

Pope Succumbs to Illness Suffered at
Length and in Public

Pope Succumbs to Illness Suffered at
Length and in Public 04/02/2005 10:58 PM
John Paul II died on Saturday, ending an extraordinary, if sometimes polarizing, 26-year reign that remade the papacy.

Siebel ditches boss

Siebel ditches boss 04/13/2005 12:12 PM
Long walk, short plank

Ericsson ditches Bluetooth

Ericsson ditches Bluetooth 09/06/2004 05:13 AM
The Register Sep 6 2004 9:23AM GMT

Pru ditches plan for Egg sell-off

Pru ditches plan for Egg sell-off 08/03/2004 03:41 AM
The insurance giant drops plans to sell-off its internet banking arm.

Sun ditches UltraSparc V and Gemini

Sun ditches UltraSparc V and Gemini 04/12/2004 04:53 AM
ZDNet UK Apr 12 2004 9:23AM GMT

Wolfowitz: Length of force's stay in
Iraq still unknown (USATODAY.com)

Wolfowitz: Length of force's stay in
Iraq still unknown (USATODAY.com) 05/19/2004 06:04 AM
USATODAY.com - Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war, said Tuesday he had failed to anticipate "the resilience" of Saddam Hussein's supporters and did not know how long the United States would have to keep 135,000 troops in Iraq.

Rosecrans Baldwin walks the entire
length of Manhattan Island

Rosecrans Baldwin walks the entire
length of Manhattan Island 11/14/2003 05:46 AM
The Morning News - My Kind of Town .. a nice long walk .. TMN

themorningnews.org/archives/new_york_new_york/my_kind_of_town.ph p
track this site | 5 links

EEYE: Microsoft ASN.1 Library Length
Overflow Heap Corruption

EEYE: Microsoft ASN.1 Library Length
Overflow Heap Corruption 02/10/2004 04:13 PM
Marc Maiffret (Feb 10 2004)

“Smart” Emails Feature Full-Length
Videos Without Attachments

“Smart” Emails Feature Full-Length
Videos Without Attachments 03/29/2005 01:48 PM
Video Emails Are A Fast And Effective Way To Promote Products & Services And KOTW Makes It Easy With Attachment-Free Messages. [PRWEB Mar 29, 2005]

RE: EEYE: Microsoft ASN.1 Library Length
Overflow Heap Corruption

RE: EEYE: Microsoft ASN.1 Library Length
Overflow Heap Corruption 02/10/2004 04:14 PM
Marc Maiffret (Feb 10 2004)

Iacocca ditches Bush for Kerry

Iacocca ditches Bush for Kerry 06/24/2004 09:12 PM

Disney Does Digital, Ditches Drawings

Disney Does Digital, Ditches Drawings 11/10/2003 11:19 PM
Slashdot Nov 10 2003 11:36AM ET

Asono Play Ditches the Screen

Asono Play Ditches the Screen 06/24/2005 04:01 PM

Asono has released a tweaked version of their 'Mica' wearable MP3 player. Called the 'Play,' the unit is almost exactly the same as the Mica—it still looks like a little handbag—but the LCD screen on the bottom of the Mica has been replaced with two, iPod shuffle-like lights at the bottom in the Play. Navigation is don't through sound, including (they say), searching of folders and EQ adjustment. I can't imagine how'd they allow folder search with two LEDs and some beeps, but I didn't think you could build furniture out of sawdust, either, and the Scandinavians proved me wrong.

Product Page [Asono]

Microsoft Ditches Smart Displays

Microsoft Ditches Smart Displays 01/05/2004 07:59 PM

RIM's New Blackberry Ditches Thumboard

RIM's New Blackberry Ditches Thumboard 09/08/2004 06:30 PM

Sony ditches illegal flyposting

Sony ditches illegal flyposting 06/15/2004 05:22 AM
Lambs gambol through the sparkling streets of Camden

MS (nearly) ditches the PC religion with
home net plans

MS (nearly) ditches the PC religion with
home net plans 01/08/2004 08:24 PM
Maybe it's not the PC, stupid...
Grok Description matches for BT ditches broadband line length limit
GrokA matches for BT ditches broadband line length limit

BT ditches broadband line length limit

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