HEINEKEN Walk-in Fridge commercial
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Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros
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An awesome rough-edged version of Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros’ HOME. The foot-tapping contagious happiness emanating from this band is just amazing, leaving you whistling their tunes with a smile on your face for days after.
Also: Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros – 40 Day Dream
and Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros – Home, live @ kcrw
I just downloaded and installed Namebench, a new open source project that benchmarks DNS servers, with a view of seeing how well my DNS is performing these days. All of these developments stem from the recent launch of Google’s public DNS service and the sudden realisation that a large part of the reason for interweb slowness, if you’re not in Africa, is the length of time it takes for a DNS query to complete. I do most of my mobile connectivity via iBurst, so I guess I like them to be speedy, unfortunately as the results below show, my closest DNS provider, my ISP, iBurst, has really bad average DNS response times…
And it’s got fuck all to do with latency over a wireless link – the same connection shows an average DNS response time that is 217% faster from Datapro, and MTN just a little bit behind that. It’s the Windows servers iBurst is using to try run an ISP. Sad.
All I can say is I won’t be using iBurst’s DNS servers anymore, unless I *really* have to. But wait a minute, if I don’t need them to waste money on DNS infrastructure anymore, so why should I be paying them for it?
(Yes, I’m bitching and moaning – I’m tired of being served shit. I want more, better and cheaper).
(Yes, I’m bitching and moaning – I’m tired of being served shit. I want more, better and cheaper).
The world of consumer broadband is starting to turn a little cut-throat in South Africa. It’s a relief at least – I’ve been waiting for ten years for this to happen. Not to be left out in the cold, iBurst has also dropped their prices to place them on an, erm, even?, footing with the ADSL providers. And they did it not by matching the lower prices, but by splitting their single unified subscription cost into a “Subscription Fee” and a “Data Fee”, allowing the cost per gigabyte of bandwidth to appear cheaper than it actually is.
I’ve amended their pricelist with the appropriate cost-corrections:
How can the new “Subscription Fee” vary so greatly across packages? The account and equipment is exactly the same, whether you use 80Mb or 15 Gigs, yet there’s a difference of R335 between the two? Fuck you for playing me stupid, iBurst.
There has been a slight increase in the bandwidth allocation, mostly on the high-end packages, which is cool, but iBurst’s attempts to pawn this off on us as ADSL-competitive is tantamount to calling us retards.
They’ve also scrapped their “64k throttling” if you’re out of bundle – one of the original major draw-cards for me – if you want “uncapped anytime” now it’ll cost you R200+ per month, and if you don’t want to buy more bandwidth you’ll be hard-capped.
I guess what this really means for the average consumer is that broadband providers are now going to try trick customers using any marketing tactic in the book, and are going to play the numbers to try and convince you their service is cheapest and best.
Let the buyer beware – the spin doctors are in the house…
- Image by Shaun Dewberry via Flickr
Two interesting news articles I came across over the weekend show exactly which direction the music industry is turning, and it’s a direction that I think is good, and long-time-coming.
Firstly, Nielsen SoundScan is reporting an increase in Vinyl record sales, up around 100 000 units over last year. (Yes, digital sales are up too, but that’s no news). Having recently purchase my first LP, I can testify to the satisfaction that throwing on a 33RPM can give you.
Secondly, the Times Online has stats showing that artists are making more money than ever from live concerts, despite the fall in record sales. Record labels are the only people that are actually losing money due to piracy. I think this is a very necessary shift in the power-balance away from talentless overpaid money-grubbing record execs back to the artist. I hope the trend continues. The clincher is this quote which pretty much sums things up:
“when the BPI releases its annual report claiming how much ‘the music industry’ has suffered from the growth in illegal file-sharing, what it perhaps should be saying is how much the record labels have suffered”.