The Music Universe

See if you can spot what is wrong with this image of "The Music Universe."

Did you get it? There's no customers in the diagram! It just shows how unimportant the people who buy its product, are to the music industry. Thanks to p2pnet.net for pointing that out. The other problem is it assumes that artists need all that middlemen in the digital age.

Living With UBB

Now Usage Based Billing (UBB) of wholesale ISPs is a reality, how would this affect me? TekSavvy's usage report stop working in June (hope they fix that soon), but in March, April, and May I used about 66GB, 65GB and 59GB respectively. That would have resulted in a extra charge of $6.75 and $5.63 in March and April on top of my normal bill of $34.95 ($29.95 + $4 for static IP). This just shows that 60GB isn't that much once you start using the Internet as a TV source. A lot of people are going to be surprised by these extra charges because they stream video without really understanding how much data they transferring.

Now that the CRTC has rubber stamped UBB it is here to stay, and will probably get worse as Bell becomes emboldened by getting everything it wants. And there is little we can do about it as the CRTC seems to blithely ignore all protests. It rankles that Canada went from a world leader in broadband to worse than some Third Countries in the space of a decade. Back then the CRTC had much better foresight.

CRTC Must Die

Would somebody please kill off the waste of tax dollars known as the CRTC, and get us out of this misery? In its most outrageous decision yet the CRTC has approved Bell's application for Usage Based Billing of the customers of the independent ISPs.

This forces all ISPs to have a 60GB cap with a $1/GB overage charge. My TekSavvy account has a 200GB cap and charges $0.25/G above that. So the CRTC has allowed Bell to dictate business decisions to an independent ISP like TekSavvy. Remember that those ISPs already pay Bell to carry their customers data, so Bell is double dipping. The UBB comes into effect in three months time.

The only good news is that the CRTC did not ban MLPPP as Bell requested in its application. This means that it is still possible to bypass throttling for now, but how long before Bell makes another application to correct this oversight?

The CRTC has completely screwed up once again. I can only wonder how much worse it can get. The only recourse now is the government or the courts.

Feeding Your Media Player

At this month's TLUG meeting, Colin McGregor gave a talk on feeding your media player under Linux. In other words, if you use linux, what tools do you need to "acquire" the music and video for your media player. The talk was originally presented to a beginner Linux user group so it avoided too much technical details, but it was interesting nonetheless. One surprise was that Colin covered digitizing audio cassettes for those who are feeling nostalgia for the 1980's.

Perseid Meteors

Time for the annual Perseid meteor shower again. One disadvantage of living in the city is you don't really get to see much of any astronomical events due to the light pollution. This year a waxing moon will not help either. The Toronto forecast is for partly cloudy so at least it is not a complete right off. So the choice is: watch for meteors or get some needed sleep. I'll get back to you on that.

New Saturn Mystery

Exploring space will guarantee that we never run out of mysteries. The latest one is is just wonderful. Saturn is at its equinox so the sun light is illuminating the rings edge on. The Cassini probe took many pictures but one image is just plain weird. What the bloody hell is causing that?!

It's Over! It's Not!

Even as there are declarations that the recession in canada has hit bottom, the job losses are still climbing. The stupid thing is the jobless rate stayed the same, because it only includes people who are actively looking for work. The people who have given up searching for a job, are therefore not officially unemployed. So what are they then? Sounds like creative accounting to me.