Comments (0)

By Matthieu, January 15, 2012 11:26 am

Found this somewhere a few months back. Some food for thought.

Comments (0)

By Matthieu, November 11, 2011 7:44 pm

is deliciously retro-nostalgic.

Also, e-mail is in a really sad state following the advent of Facebook. Does anyone want to send me a real e-mail? Please?

Comments (0)

By Matthieu, October 29, 2011 4:34 pm

It’s true, it’s very hard to figure out what to post on which social network. Between Google+, tumblr, twitter, Facebook, WordPress, posterous and the rest… There are so many places to “share” and yet none of them really is the be all, end all network, and I doubt they ever will be.

The consensus in my group of friends seems to be Facebook, but FB doesn’t really lend itself to long-winded posts or all the random thoughts, images and other media that I collect and want to sort of scrapbook for future reference.

Meanwhile, I’m just going to go ahead and cross-post this to Facebook, G+, my blog, tumblr….

http://mayip.tumblr.com/post/12086328596/its-true-its-very-hard-to-figure-out-what-to

Comments (0)

By Matthieu, January 30, 2011 8:13 pm

Hello. As you may or may not have heard, Canada has approved UBB, that is, Usage-Based Billing for all ISPs. This means the end of unlimited internet for individuals in Canada.

This makes me incredibly angry, because it’s backwards, it’s anti-competitive, and it’s expensive.

“Bandwidth (computing) or digital bandwidth: a rate of data transfer, bit rate or throughput, measured in bits per second (bps)”

I believe it’s fair to charge for BANDWIDTH. i.e. THROUGHPUT. That’s what actually costs money. If these telecom idiots hadn’t overprovisioned their infrastructure in the first place so that they could scam customers for more money, they wouldn’t have to do this to save their asses.

Ever notice how at “peak hours” the ‘net gets slower? That’s because Rogers or Bell or whoever it may be did not bother spending the money to upgrade the fiber to your local hub. In any other business this is unacceptable (taking into consideration interference and other such factors). I have a 100Mbps network, I EXPECT at LEAST 60Mbps out of it.

Once the physical medium is in place, who gives a damn how much data goes through it? It’s not like there’s physical wear on the equipment. Sure there’s maintenance, but like everything else in computing, it makes more sense to upgrade rather than to repair. So why not make network upgrades, and offer higher speeds at higher prices?

Charging for usage is wrong. Plus they’re making up rules while misusing technical terms. =Double angry.

Comments (0)

By Matthieu, December 17, 2010 8:17 pm

Vancouver’s city council says that Internet traffic metering discriminates against video and audio streaming providers.

Finally, some level of government is taking action against Bell and the CRTC’s decision! For those who don’t know, all of us Canadians are being ripped off by our broadband carriers. They impose arbitrary bandwidth caps and require end uses to pay premium prices for extra speed in order to up these limits.

Now, before you get all “well I never hit my cap, it must be all those BitTorrenting pirates. They should stop complaining and buy movies like the rest of us”, let me point out that there are a many ways of acquiring content with high bandwidth requirements legally online. To name a few, iTunes, Netflix, YouTube, as well as the websites of every national television network and radio station. Not to mention the loads of freeware/shareware and open-source software, digital downloads of proprietary operating systems and productivity software, SDKs, game demos, benchmarks, software updates, and even data transfer for business purposes. The list goes on and on and I won’t bother or even attempt to list more uses.

Point is, what is the purpose of having an “information superhighway” if some users are faced with arbitrary tolls and speed limits in addition to advertising?

How is streaming media supposed to render optical media obsolete if we aren’t free to consume it? How do we keep our systems up to date if we have to count the bytes downloaded for each update pack? How are we to move to video conferencing, VoIP, and social media with horribly limited upstream bandwidth?

Anyway, enough with the negativity. Thanks to Vancouver and openmedia.ca, there is a glimmer of hope for Canadian Internet users!

For more info, check out http://stopthemeter.ca/ .

via Canada: We might be America\’s hat, but we don\’t like caps.

Comments (0)

By Matthieu, November 2, 2010 4:33 pm

Last week, I went to watch The Social Network with my cousin. I was quite impressed with the lines they gave Mark Zuckerberg when he was describing how he “hacked” together facemesh. I never imagined anyone in hollywood would know what Apache or wget was, much less mention it in a film. Turns out they aren’t that creative, they just pulled the lines from Mark Zuckerberg’s Online Diary.

Oh well.

At least they paid enough attention to use KDE3 on the screens in the movies, instead of one of those bogus future-computer interfaces.

Comments (0)

By Matthieu, September 22, 2010 1:21 am

So I was going through my old hard drives today, and came across a few old desktop screenshots. It’s interesting to see what I was up to back in the day… Using MandrakeLinux, testing Windows Vista….

Comments (0)

By Matthieu, September 9, 2010 4:36 pm

Google has just unveiled the latest in search technologies. Because hitting Enter or clicking search took too long, we now have Google Instant.

In light of this fun new feature, I decided to compile a short list of a few suggestions provided by Google Instant. Perhaps in the future this will provide a snapshot of the Web in 2010.

1. 14th amendment
2. 24
3. Nintendo 3DS
4. 4chan
5. 50 Cent
6. CBS 60 Minutes
7. 7-zip
8. 84 lumber
9. 90210
10. Not really 10, but 0. 007

Mind you, these are U.S. results. I know this is nothing new, and that Google search suggestions have been around for a while, but it’s more fun now.

Comments (0)

By Matthieu, August 18, 2010 9:56 pm

Why Facebook is weird #1:

I can look at pictures of friends I haven’t seen in years and realize that they’ve become quite attractive.

Comments (0)

By Matthieu, May 30, 2010 10:47 pm

So, I now have two blogs. The old faithful WordPress, and the new kid, Tumblr. I’ve been thinking over the past little while which one to use, or how best to make use of both. And now I’ve decided.

WordPress will remain my main blog, where I will write whenever I’m really in the mood for writing. Tumblr will be a repository of all things memorable or interesting, but not so much as to motivate me to write a blog post.

Posts on the WordPress blog will be sent over to Tumblr (hopefully) by RSS.

We’ll see how this goes.