Investec Struc Share Discussion Threads

[krakow] 11/10/2001 22:36

Thanks Paul, I'll check it out.

Any more??

[ahead-computers.com] 11/10/2001 19:59

Been using Demon Internet since 1997..... They've been very reliable and offer nice extras, like an free personal electronic 24/7 FAX that e-mails the FAX to you....

Nice features like a fixed IP Address.

Quality

All the best

Paul V

[krakow] 11/10/2001 19:36

I'd appreciate opinions on decent ISPs. I've recently had trouble with BT, Nutshell but especially thefreeinternet. I'm not in a broadband area (miss by 1 km!) There are many posters on ADVFN whose opinion I respect. Does anybody have any good experiences of 24/7 unmetered access for £10/15/20 per month. (with a good chance of getting on-line first time every time). Thanks in advance.

[the blacker prince] 21/4/2001 17:36

Thanks everyone for your time and opinions.

[the other kevin] 21/4/2001 10:42

08002go unmetered access starts next Tuesday for £10 a month or £90 a year or thereabouts if they have any registrations remaining. Might be worth a look. TFI works excellently in the North West. My only grumble is about the automatic one hour cut off although you can re-dial immediately . (If I'm connected up to CMC when it happens, however, everything freezes and I'm into a re-boot) Also BT Anytime is another excellent service in the North West and the automatic cut-off is advertised at two hours but it seems to vary. I used AOL about a year ago and found it intrusive and unfriendly with IE5 but the newer versions might be better. Check out all the possibilites on www.net4nowt.co.uk

[e*trade] 21/4/2001 10:15

I myself use AOL but it crashes that often
I have had to buy a crash helmet !

[lightning] 21/4/2001 10:11

ISPs are the same as everything else in this world, remember

1. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
2. You get what you pay for.

With free ISPs you will always get a slow service when things are busy because you will be sharing ports at the server.

With telephone lines, quality is dependent upon the quality of your phone line and you may have service drop outs with a poor line. ISDN or BT Highway may not be available to you if your line is a bad one.

External modems will severly limit the speed of data transfer, especially on older PCs where transfer rate is limited to the speed of the serial port.

Also, many ISPs will kick you out after a set time on line, these are useless to someone trading when minutes may be critical.

If you can, I would advise a broadband cable service if you have access to one.

Note these are personal opinions but based on experience with Modem, ISDN and Blueyonder.

A note of caution, if you opt for an 'always on' broadband, get yourself a personal firewall. You would be surprised how many external users will scan your machine to try to gain access. You will also be surprised how much data your machine sends out to to other users unbeknown to you. Many of them you will never have heard of. This happens even with standard modems so if your machine suddenly starts sending data when you have not requested it, your privacy is being compromised. This may be indicated by your machine suddenly running very slow on the net, followed by a sudden speed up when the unauthorised transfer ends.

[wibble] 21/4/2001 09:06

Two web sites worth looking at are:





They've both got lots of info on the available ISPs and bulletin boards discussing all the main ISPs.

I just joined Freeserve's Anytime a couple of days ago and so far it seems fine. Nice easy sign up and only £13/month for unmetered 24/7 access. Having said that, ISPs usually start playing up as soon as I say they're ok!

I had lots of problems with plus.net so would recommend not going with them. While they're ok if nothing goes wrong I've found them terrible once you want to cancel.


Wibble!

[amjh] 20/4/2001 23:23

AOL.
I was using the Free Internet. Absolutely hopeless service.
Now with AOL

[jgp212] 20/4/2001 22:31

Quite simple really,



:-)

Jeff

[the blacker prince] 20/4/2001 22:08

How did u do that astraleisure ?

[collinsmith1] 20/4/2001 21:04

Hi

We have changed from the bog standard BT to AOL. The reason for this is that over the past few weeks the time it takes to connect takes longer, and the cut off times are more rapid. This may be due to the free local rate calls cheap rate with a £5 payment by customer thus resulting in the standard lines being more busy.

We are now with AOL on their 24/7 bog standard rate. ADSL is not for us as we do not now trust BT

Anyone else experiencing the same problems??

Collin

[collinsmith1] 20/4/2001 20:54

BT is out because of the awful connection times and cut offs since they started doing the free local calls for the extra £5.

we are with AOL now.

Good hunting

C Smith

[astraleisure] 20/4/2001 20:29

AOL 1 year pay in advance. i use it. cheap and cheerfull.

[lightning] 20/4/2001 20:13

If you are in a Telewest area, Blueyonder broad band. It's always on and very, very fast. £33 per month plus £50 installation. You need a network card in your PC.

Also, it will convince you to buy Telewest shares, is that good?

[jgp212] 20/4/2001 20:07

AOL, 14.99 per month, 24/7, unmetered
access, good service and tech support.

That's my penny,s worth!

Good luck.

Jeff

[the blacker prince] 20/4/2001 19:47

I have been let down by Connect25 and require another ISP. I now realise that these companies that offer 24/7 for a cheap one off payment just can't servive.

Does any fellow investor recommend his/her ISP ? Obviously 24/7 required and the less ££££ the better. Cheers.

[bootifulboy] 09/4/2001 12:33

Check out these 2 sites
for Java try

for Pearl / cgi etc try


BB

[oneliner] 09/4/2001 09:50

Thanks, you are a bootiful boy!

[oneliner] 09/4/2001 00:57

Thanks again, Brian.

Wibble!, the javascript ISP display script only works in Netscape with javascript, not IE with Javascript. I checked this last night, took hours!

Kind regards.

[bwakem] 09/4/2001 00:39

I cut and pasted it form a program I wrote a few months ago that runs a poll. The snippet you see is the part of it that logs the IP address so that they can only vote once. Perl is a programming language, which is used in CGI-scripts (common gateway interface). It is executed on your ISP's webserver, and the HTML is generated by it - you have to program it accordingly. It's a bit complicated to go into here, you'd need to get a book on it really. You cannot include Perl commands within an HTML document.


Brian

[wibble] 09/4/2001 00:36

Yep, Perl is probably the best way.

It looks like www.privacy.net work out the information on the server rather than using Javascript on the client.

If all you want is to make the user think their IP address has been logged, rather than actually logging it, then you could do it in JavaScript but you are relying on the user's browser having JavaScript enabled. Though if you don't have access to create cgi scripts it may be the only way.


Wibble!

[oneliner] 09/4/2001 00:26

Brian, many thanks. I appreciate you taking the time to type all that out or even cut and paste it.

I don't though know anything about PERL nor how to get the web page to refer to the PERL on the server. I assume these would be buried in script tags on the page like javascript?

The first script, "$ip = $ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'};
print "Your IP address is $ip";", do I include that within the body tags on the html page, and what file on the CGI server would that refer to if any?

The second script, I take it that would be a program sitting on the CGI server, how would that communicate with my web page, or if that PERL script is to go on my web page whereabouts in that script would I put the name of the file it is to write to on my web server.

If you've no time to go into that, then no problems, thank you anyway, much appreciated.

[bwakem] 09/4/2001 00:17

In Perl it can be done like this:

$ip = $ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'};
print "Your IP address is $ip";


You'll need an ISP that will let you run cgi-scripts though.

You could store them something like this:


$record = "$ip" . "\t";
$record .= scalar localtime . "\n";
open (DATAFILE, "+ $ipdata") or
die "Can't access database: $!";
flock DATAFILE, 2;
seek DATAFILE, 0, 0;
my @datafile = ;
my @new_datafile = ();

push @new_datafile, $record;

foreach $datafile (@datafile) {
($ip, $time) = split /\t/, $datafile;
push @new_datafile, $datafile;
}

seek DATAFILE, 0, 0;
truncate DATAFILE, 0;
print DATAFILE @new_datafile;
close DATAFILE;

# If an error occoured, let the user know.
if ($@) {
print "ERROR: $@\n";
}


Brian