Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
My first impressions are that it's all about the speed, the pretty and small improvements that make it more usable.
One of the generally accepted rules of computing seems to be that if you retain the same hardware and upgrade the operating system, then you can expect it to run slower. For example, Windows XP runs pretty well on my laptop, but Vista would be barely useable.
This seems to have been accepted as a fact of computing. But noone seems to have told the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community. They clearly don't subscribe to this idea!
Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex" Alpha 6 absolutely flies on my laptop. It boots faster and generally feels more responsive than the 8.04 version, which again felt faster than 7.10 and 7.04.
At the same time, I have a lot more applets loading on startup (and software installed generally) in 8.04, so I will be interested to see what happens when I enable them in 8.10. I suspect that things will just be faster in 8.10 anyway as the quality of FOSS just keeps increasing.
The biggest difference is in the wireless speed. In Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10, my Broadcom 4318 WLAN card used the bcm43xx driver, which had a maximum speed of 24Mbps (3MB/sec), although being wireless it was usually quite a lot slower. This was replaced by the b43 driver in 8.04, which usually connected somewhere between 11 Mbps and 36 Mbps (although due to a bug in Network-Manager which remains unfixed, it only ever showed that it was connected at 1Mbps). I was able to get about 1.2-1.5MB/sec when downloading off my ISP's local file mirror.
However, in 8.10 I can get 2.3MB/sec, sustained, over wireless! I am quite close to the exchange and on ADLS2+ (theoretical maximum speed of 24Mbps), so I am pretty much maxing out that connection. Interestingly, this is faster than the speeds that the Vista SP1 machines in the house can achieve (about 1.5MBps for the same file).
Having a fast connection speed - Network-Manager tells me 54 Mbps at the moment - and good throughput on wireless is a very welcome change.
One thing to keep in mind is that (as far as I am aware) Broadcom themselves have not helped with this driver, it is the open source developer community that have improved it to this point.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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