Posts Tagged 'rant'

I was reading an EFF article advocating free open wifi for all and it got me thinking. When did people get the idea that internet should be free? Certainly it wasn’t from working at an ISP, getting peering, negotiating bandwidth pricing, buying gear, leasing fiber… Having done all of the above, let me rant! (Ok so I’m ranting about broadband quotas and torrent throttling like always)

Let’s say I buy a full non-burstable gigabit link from one of the cheaper telcos like Cogent or Level 3. Depending on your market, you will end up paying $4-8/megabit for it. Thats not including termination, port fees, the hardware required to route it, cost of transport (i.e. your fiber conduit rental) , etc and those things can certainly add up to 5-20% of the total cost, but for the sake of simplification we’ll ignore them. 1 gigabit, when run to the horrible limit (resulting in very unhappy customers) is 328, 718 gigabytes/month of actual data moved, and frankly is a lot of traffic in any sense. (Lets leave peering out of this discussion, the larger an ISP the more of their footprint they can get through peering, but it really doesn’t help the independents and even mid-sized guys without international fiber to meet in lots of POPs and IXs)

Now presume I don’t want to oversell it what so ever. I want to sell enterprise grade DSL to businesses who demand a reasonable 10mbps guaranteed. This is a very common scenario. If I split my gigabit link up to 10megabit customers, the most I can fit on it and guarantee their performance is 100 customers. If we take our cost to buy just the transit, ignoring any of the related costs, we’re going to run $40-80/customer. Tack on termination of the DSL/cable (hardware, very expensive), lines to the customer (very very expensive) and of course support, you are looking at easily 2x that cost. While a business will have no trouble stomaching this cost+ profit for us, a consumer obviously will not.

This is where over-selling comes in. If I assume that my 10 megabit users will use roughly 50 gigabytes per month of data, that means I can fit in 6400 subscribers onto that link. (Nobody would run their links at 100%, this would add at least 20-30% to the total cost of bandwidth to buy overhead, but we’ll ignore it for simplification sake) 6400 subscribers, each now are only using a dollar or so of our transit, and with support, hardware and line costs fixed, we can sell the service for $40, cover our costs and make profit. Yes profit. People seem to forget, a company needs to make profit or its share holders will terminate them. Profit is not evil or crooked.

This all worked great in the early 2000s. Bandwidth was cheap, space and power to build telecom sites was cheap, and fiber transport was nearly free. Bandwidth is still cheap, but everything else has gone up an arm and a leg. None of that really matters though, because the real problem is that we don’t use the internet like we did 10 years ago. Who can stand to watch Youtube or Netflix at less than 720p? How many households have a kid (adult) running BitTorrent all the time? And really, who wants a sub-25 megabit link nowadays?

Providers cannot oversell at the levels they did even 5 years ago. While we may say boo hoo why do I care what XYZ evil company makes (not fair, remember these are people working like anyone else), remember we also want startup and new ISPs to compete. They have it even rougher as their cost/subscriber is higher.

Basically it comes down to this. The cost to provide internet, in North America, has not gotten massively cheaper, but per capita we are using much much more. In order for providers to maintain their levels of overselling they are imposing quotas and throttling p2p. People hate quotas and DPI, but trust me, people hate rate increases more. Yes it would be totally cool if we all had gigabit fiber to the doorstep, but sadly this is a huge undertaking, and companies like Rogers or Bell is going to invest in it, wide spread, only to have the government force them to let other providers use the links/equipment at cost. It’s not in the private sector’s best interest to do this. (typo fixed ;) thanks everyone!)

So yea, we have out dated infrastructure since we put it in much earlier than say Asia and Europe. I think, the real solution is for the government to step in and use tax dollars to improve it (OMG, I can’t believe I said that) if we really want deregulated residential internet. Run fiber to the homes, maintain it, charge providers at-cost to use it, and yea we’ll have great competitive internet again.

Yes I advocated for publicly funded internets, I must need coffee.

Just a quick rant. I’ve generally enjoyed Nintendo’s handheld offerings, especially since they evolved from time wasters to serious gaming platforms. Some of my best gaming moments ever (i.e. the Castlevania series) were on the Nintendo DS. Sadly the 3DS has failed to capture any interest from me. I thought I’d share my quick rant on why that is:

1. 3D is the new motion touch gimmick. Nintendo loves their gimmicks. The gimmicks bring in the casual gamers, and Nintendo is wildly profitable as a result. However I find because these things really are gimmicks for the marketing department, developers seem to treat them as such too. How many Nintendo DS games were hindered by thrown in usage of the second screen or pen controls? Far too many. For every game that really used the touch well, much to many used it for nothing but distracting motions that required breaking the flow of the game. (Compare this to the iPhone where most games use the touch well, with very few falling back to shitty on screen joypad buttons). It ruins the immersion to constantly switch control schemes between buttons and stylus, and frankly the stylus is a shitty way to play games. Game developers will use the 3D in gimmicky ways, ruining the immersion. While I generally find his movies to be awful, Michael Bay hits the nail on the head when it comes to the gimmicky use of 3D in *every* movie nowadays:“Right now, it looks like fake 3D, with layers that are very apparent. You go to the screening room, you are hoping to be thrilled, and you’re thinking, huh, this kind of sucks. People can say whatever they want about my movies, but they are technically precise, and if this isn’t going to be excellent, I don’t want to do it. And it is my choice.”Milk the 3D fad dry Nintendo…
2. The price is too high. Sure lots of people will argue that it has a camera, and storage, and a buncha other crap to explain the $100 jump over the DS, but at $249 USD its $20 more than an 8GB iPod Touch, which features more storage, a far richer software echo system (minus the AAA titles that Nintendo themselves always develop, really the only thing keeping serious gamers on their platforms), two cameras, and a gorgeous 960×640 IPS panel which is far better than the silly 3D + second panel which will surely look jaundice over time like every previous DS…
3. The battery lifeThis is a big one. One of my favourite things about the DS lite is that it has superb battery life, literally a week of my commuting and casual play. The official Nintendo rating on it is 15-19 hours. Superb. It’s a big reason why I enjoy the experience over the PSP which always had maybe 6 hours at the most (though thankfully you could easily carry two batteries for those overseas flights).  Iwata himself dismissed the PSP for having ‘sub 10 hour’ battery life at one point (I can’t find the quote). Here we are and the 3DS is quoted at 3-5 hours while playing 3DS titles. Yikes. That becomes a hindrance guys. My *laptop* pulls 12 hours of normal workload, my iPad pulls like 10 hours of HD video. This reminds me of the GameGear. I was so excited about it, until I realized it had like two hours of battery life, then you had to dump the six AAs… good thing most games didn’t have SRAM. With the 3DS reportedly taking 3.5 hours to charge… its all together possible you’ll have to spend more time charging it than playing it…
4. The 3D tech isn’t well suited to a casual handheld. So I really was excited about this since I hate 3D glasses, but sadly the Nintendo tech has its draw backs. First of all, the 3D effect depth slider is a bit weird. This itself ruins immersion. The reason they need this though, is to ] different hand holding positions. Yep, this means as you adjust yourself you will need to fiddle with the slider to get the 3D effect looking good again. Maybe its just me? but I am pretty fidgety when playing handheld games. Many people have reportedly complained of eyestrain, Nintendo has suggested you need to keep the unit steady while playing. Well if I was supposed to be sitting at a desk while playing, I should probably not be playing a handheld game. Nintendo has issued the usual eye-strain warnings and provided a way for parents to disable (and lock out) the effect for children under 6... sounds like the VirtualBoy all over again (I did have one of those when it was new, it was awful, and gimmicky)
5. Region locking is back. Really Nintendo? I thought you and I were passed this. One of the main reasons I loved this latest generation was that the DS, the PSP and the PS3 were completely region free. The Xbox360 has region protection but its up to individual publishers if they want to enforce it, and the Wii was shittily region locked. Some people like to play imported games. I am one of those people. My game library is pretty huge (near 1000 titles) and is about 50% is NTSC-J content. On the DS and PSP I was never forced to buy a second console just to play import games. Frankly I’m not nearly as hard core as I used to be, and probably wouldn’t double buy a console to play titles that don’t get localized, as sad as that is. Nintendo has decided the 3DS will once again be region locked, this is a regression.

Thats my rant. I’ll probably end up buying one when the next Dragon Quest title is out, the price has dropped, and it’ll sit in the 2D mode 90% of the time. Just slightly disappointed.

So my security related opposition to the G20 was proved very valid. Things got much worse down here in the financial and shopping districts of Toronto that I even imagined though…

Early in the afternoon on Saturday June 26th, all of the peaceful protests were in full swing in downtown Toronto. Despite having what I was told as 10,000+ police officers in the downtown core, a small group of several hundred protesters managed to break away from the marches and began rioting on Yonge St. They destroyed businesses in the name of hurting multi-nationals, Starbucks were a preferred target. Never the less they destroyed and looted many locally-owned stores like the iconic Zanzibar strip club an independent jewler on Yonge. Destruction was wreaked up Yonge from King to College for over an hour before police showed up. Where were the police? The only police I saw were cop cars on fire… Store after store was vandalized, peoples livelihoods destroyed, all afternoon and into the evening.

To put things in perspective for people: they literally hit every store I frequent on a daily / weekly basis (aside from our grocery store which is a bit east of the riots), and I’d been to every Starbucks destroyed, and there were many… Thankfully the Eaton Center was quickly put on lock down to prevent rioting, and for that I am grateful. Apparently anarchists are opposed to people like themselves being employed in the retail and hospitalities industries, because they surely will cause a lot of closures while places pick up the pieces this week… (Yea, guess what, destroying a Starbucks hurts more than just Starbucks Inc. in Seattle)

It hurts me that people would be chanting ‘Our Streets!’ while trashing my city. That riot was a few blocks from my home, on my street, and along my walk to work. There is absolutely no chance these people are downtown Toronto residents, financial district, south of Lakeshore or otherwise. These are not their streets, they have destroyed my neighbourhood. Many people suggests they were bussed in from long distances, specifically Montreal. (Google and Twitter searches on pro-anarchist hash tags have lead me to believe a lot of this anti-G20/anti-capitalism support comes from there as well, not to single them out though…)

There were more such incidents, specifically one on Queen near Spadina in the evening that involving more torched police cars going unchecked for large periods of time from law enforcement. The area near the fence was completely secure, even over night, but rioting went near unchecked across our downtown core. I am very disappointed in our poor security effort, though it was a near unfathomable task by hosting it in Toronto. See my other article on this subject…

The protesters look mostly like white trash. Lots of these so-called “anarchists” look predictably like angry older teens and 20-somethings. If they have an agenda to push, they are stupid beyond words; but I strongly believe they are just angry kids wreaking havoc by trashing property. What it says about our society I don’t know, but it sure is sad. Thankfully many of these protesters and even the so called Black Bloc protesters were photoed, often changing out of their black masks, thanks to journalists doing their part. Publish all the photos, black list these sociopaths.

Aside from the actual protesters, there were huge amounts of onlookers, who I am also disgusted with. Crowds of people supporting the rioters but not causing damage themselves, crowds of people with cameras (the small DRebel-esque SLRs seemed very popular) and cell phone cameras standing around photoing destruction in the city disgust me. Nobody aside from an elderly security guard seemed to try and stop the rioting. Are we that apathetic as a society? I even saw a lot of people smiling at the chaos, even if they were only there taking photos. That too is sociopathic behaviour, and is disgusting. These people should be prosecuted as well.

Violence went on over night, though nothing as organized. Trains, subways and even most surface transit is closed still. Hopefully today will be better than yesterday, but I’m not that hopeful. I am saddened by the state of society that caused this havoc, and the people too apathetic to do anything but snap photos for Twitter. Now we have massive damage from King to Bloor, pretty much everywhere between Spadina and Jarvis.

Harper government who put the G20 in *downtown Toronto*: Terrible.  Toronto police who focused too much on protecting the fence and not the rioting: Unacceptable. The human beings who would destroy other peoples property in the name of a political agenda? The worst of all. You people do not deserve the civil and human rights you obviously take for granted in this country.