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Unreasonably low – a rant against a certain ISP
Dear Victim,
Yesterday you exceeded the daily usage limit of 500MB as referred to in our Terms and Conditions. Â This type of activity could have a detrimental effect on our network and therefore we cannot allow this to continue. Â Should you continue to exceed the daily download limit we will, unfortunately, be forced to downgrade your service to a throughput limit of 56Kbs dial-up speed, for a period of 5 days.
If you exceed these limits on a regular basis, we may be forced to suspend your account.
For users of Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications such as BearShare, Warez, Morpheus, BitTorrent, iMesh and KaZaA note the following:
Most P2P applications you install will usually be configured so other users can access your hard drive and share your files all of the time. This constant file transfer can degrade your computer’s performance and generate heavy traffic loads on the network, making it difficult for other users of the network to work well. The network is a shared resource and we all must use it responsibly.
Network bandwidth consumption is monitored. If your users could possibly impact the overall performance of the network, your computer may be blocked until the situation can be discussed.
Should you have any queries regarding this email, please contact Customer Services
Regards
Appallingly crappy ISP
I’m a third-year media student who has spent the past decade online practically every day. I know where to find content. I understand the nature of the medium. I’m not your garden variety fifty-five-second user.
I’m the type of user that would wake up every morning and download a gigabyte or more a day when at home. I go to the uni network and I’ve downloaded 600 megs within about ten minutes and my daily allowance is a pathetic 500 megs.
Five hundred megs is not even one full copy of Linux. Some video podcasts are over a hundred megs each. Podcasts can be up to 100 megabytes in size.
I hate their false advertising and promises. I have no choice though, I’m not the one selecting the ISP.
afterthought
Where did Yahoo go wrong with their implementation of advertising along the same lines as google? They took two years longer than they should have to implement what belonged to them. I hope they go bankrupt.
Nanox,TRP files and Mpeg streamclip
Satellite television broadcasting is an interesting field to looik into, especially now that there are thousands of channels available on a multitude of satellites. Over the past two days I have been learning about the Nanox HDTV recording device.
What I like about using the Nanox receiver is the ability to see stream information, what format is being broadcast as well as resolution. What’s interesting is that some satellite channels are broadcasting at full HD quality whilst others are broadcasting at no more than 576*352 for example. You get the bit rate information too.
Now that I’ve lost most people here’s the part I like. You can attach any USB hard disk to the device and record programs off the television. This is particularly interesting if there’s a documentary you intended to watch but weren’t around to watch it. It can record two simultaneous streams at once.
TRP files are a compressed file format that are ideal for storage. They’re not recognised by quicktime but if you download mpeg streamclip then you can convert this file format to any file format you desire.
If you record a number of files with the satellite receiver with mpeg streamclip you can batch encode a number of files at once. This means that a spare computer can do the rendering without you having to be there.
If there is an EPG available for the channel you are watching you can schedule the receiver to record the program. In other situations you can start a recording and it will ask whether to stop recording at the end of the scheduled program. If there is no EPG the process is manual to start a recording but you can select how long you want to record for. It’s a shame that you need to go into the menu to set the record duration however.
Two weeks of recreation
The next two weeks or so shall see me resting but not from media work. There’s a good chance I’ll be working on a project about a Prison in the Lebanon. It was shot a few weeks ago and the person in charge of the project needs help with the editing.
It looks as though it’s going to be an interesting project. I’ve already viewed quite a bit of footage, read the voice over text and discussed the idea. I’ve started to form some ideas of how to create the story and tomorrow this should progress further with me going in to work.
In around two weeks I’ll have an interesting work shift, from 5am to 1300 hours, in other words my work day will be finished when other people get their work day started. We’ll see how that goes anyway.
Ciao for now
zynga and maxis
Zynga and Maxis are from very different computer gamer times. Maxis came at a time when the game was the source of entertainment. You would build a farm, worry about pests and locusts, about fertilizing the fields and having enough income to build the next series of crop. Zynga on the other hand is a game that teaches you to behave like a machine rather than a human, where repetitive actions are the standard.
Simfarm, among other games was one of those games that you could play for weeks at a time. You would select a difficulty level and according to that difficulty level you would need to use knowledge you acquired through experience. If you put cows next to fields without a fence they would walk through and eat the crop. If you didn’t save enough money then if a crop failed your farm was toast.
With Zynga you can put pigs with crops, animals in barns and more. There is no intellectual aspect to this game unless you’re a garden designer. You plant the fields, you wait a while and then you harvest. This is great if life doesn’t get in the way. How many of you know what you will be doing in two hours, 8 hours or sixteen hours? i kind of do, but my life will not center around such a simple game.
What I liked about simfarm is that it was not mechanical. There was an aspect of game strategy. By obeying certain principles you could progress quite nicely in the game. Zynga has two ways for progression. The first is patience and the second is money. If you pay money then you can have everything immediately. If you spam your friends and they participate then you are rewarded. Do you really want to have to spam your friends to progress in a game? I don’t.
I don’t like this trend, that you encourage people to spend money for a mechanical rather than intellectual game and I think that game makers should take this into consideration. If Civilization V came to facebook then I would play it. I would pay an upfront payment and expect to have the full game.
And this reminds me of a recent documentary on the BBC called Coast. Do you, as a gamer, as a facebook user want games that are teaching you a different form of managment where right decisions bring profit or do you want penny arcade style games that require that mechanical put the coin in the slot type response?
I would like to leave you with an interesting TED talk to help you think about this topic. I watched it a week ago but it’s relevant to the question of time spent gaming and what we should expect to get out of it.
The 50,000th tweet
For Valentine’s day I reached my 50,000th tweet which I dedicated to @orchideane through twitterfone, as asked by @toppgold. I really want to lay in to twitter for having database maintenance. really I do, but I won’t. I’ll concentrate on other things.
There; contemporary joke:
What’s the difference between twitter and the Stock market?
None they’re both down.