/*
 * Hides the captions for the photos on Screenshots Of Despair
 *                 (they were rather trying)
 */

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://screenshotsofdespair.tumblr.com/){

.photoCaption {
      display: none !important;
 }

 }

To combat the stagnation of your neural pathways (remember: use it or lose it) here are two excellent essays:

Tim Berners-Lee (he created the world-wide web): Long Live The Web

Cory Doctorow: What Do We Want Copyright To Do?

The first one is important if you use the Internet to do anything (even fckbk) and the second one is important if you have any interest in completing any transactions involving copyright.

In other news I’ve been writing two albums and one of them is very near completion. It’s going to need its own website and some people to write about it (other than me) because I quit facebook and now I am bereft of a marketing tool (but I’m up productivity hours and down on stress/rage so I win).

The Internet is physically stored on servers (most of which are in the U.S.A. Go here and search some sites for proof) and is distributed to our computers all around the world through these submarine and subterranean cables. The total bandwidth a country can consume is dictated by the total bandwidth the cables can carry. Bear in mind that phone traffic and internet traffic travel through the same cable.

New Zealand only has one cable supplying the Internet to us. The total amount of bandwidth that cable can carry is either 860 gigabits per second or 1.2 terabits per second (Wikipedia isn’t clear if the planned upgrade has occurred or not). The reason internet isn’t getting faster is a hardware reason: The information can’t all get to us faster because it all has to come down one pipe and the pipe can only carry so much of it at one time. More and more people are transferring more and more information over that one cable. Basically, every dumb motherfucker updating facebook with WAT U DOIN 2NYT is ruining the internet for everyone else who is just trying to torrent copyrighted material.

That Wikipedia page says the cable has a proposed upgrade to 2.4Tbp/s, which sounds pretty good but basically until we get another cable the internet isn’t going to get faster.

EDIT: Joff provides some nice details which add a lot of good understanding. The last line of this post is now this:

…basically until we get another cable the internet isn’t going to get cheaper.

For now instead of referring to the ubiquitous “companies” I am proposing a company by the name of “Suffice.” Suffice will be a large, multi-national affair with heaps of money. Probably some kind of product of the merger of a bunch of software, hardware and engineering firms or something convenient like that. Anyway – how the company came about is not important. Suffice will probably work with, and be subsidised by, the various governments that require Suffice’s services.

Suffice will sell realisation and will be viewed as a utility, much like a telecommunications company. To encourage realisation, the government would subsidise the cost of realisation for various things. Certain sectors of the employment industry will be the first things to be realised. Any job which is largely conducted from an office or on a computer will be prime candidate for realisation.

The company would sell most, or all, of its current real estate to Suffice (or the government, depending on who is paying for the business to be realised) and Suffice would fill this space with the computing power required to virtualise the business. In the early days this would probably consist of servers in shipping crates, much like Google’s server farms. Later, these facilities would be replaced with something more permanent.

Once realisation has become more of an everyday event, businesses will be eager to convert because they will save money by not being in the physical realm. If a business does not occupy real estate they will not pay rent. Nor do they need to conduct maintenance on their building or train their staff in basic first aid. A business that formerly occupied two floors of a large, inner city building would no longer need to pay window cleaners. Staff that exist virtually will not be as prone to physical injury in the virtual world, therefore companies will not need to train employees in first aid or have fire escape plans.

Understandably, this is seems to be a very far-fetched and imaginative idea. However, technologies exist today that could very easily be the ancestors for the future that I am examining here. Cloud computing is the process where resources are provided over the Internet. These resources are virtual and are stored on servers. The users of cloud computing access these resources through a tool like a web browser. If we take this technology to it’s conclusion, we can conceive entire companies existing virtually and being access through some kind of tool – in this case networked virtual reality.

Right now the owners of the Pirate Bay are trying to figure out a way to turn their massive, questionably legal, service into a massive, soundly legal service. They are talking to big record companies and are going to create some kind of scheme where users share their personal system resources in exchange for the Pirate Bay service. What I think this means is that the Universal Music Group are going to give people certain albums for a monthly subscription fee that is collected by the Pirate Bay. In turn, users will have the opportunity to seed these files to a large group of people consisting of other users in the Pirate Bay’s service and other people who are downloading the file from iTunes or Amazon or wherever it is they have paid for the music. The Pirate Bay will sell this pool of resources to companies and this will provide them with the resources to continue running their service.

If I understand cloud computing correctly, this will create a massive cloud of computing resources that is analogous to businesses working in realised environments: Consider the files that Pirate Bay users download and seed to be actual time a user spends on a given task. Consider the Internet to be networked virtual reality. Rather than have a user download and seed a file, have an employee complete an activity in a realised environment. Today someone might download a game and seed it to other people. Tomorrow someone might create the sequel to that game from a realised software business. The Pirate Bay provides the service for that user to seed the game today. Suffice provides the service for the development of the sequel tomorrow. Suffice will basically be turning every business it realises into clouds.

Have I done an adequate job of explaining this? I am more than happy to present examples of why I believe this is feasible. If you have lengthy thoughts on this subject, please email them to me rather than write eight-hundred words in the comment box.

Although I didn’t make it clear, the little piece of chipmusic attached to the end of the first VR essay is my debut chipmusic release. Here is my second one. They are meant to be taken in context of these essays.

Played for 60 minutes!

This depressed me so profoundly that I actually had to get up and leave the Internet for a while.

When you’re depressed it’s always good to read the paper for a while because you can congratulate yourself on not being the editor of the Press – I’d prefer to clean up toddler vomit at McDonald’s before I’d let people know I was the one responsible for putting a photo of clouds on the front page of the paper – when on the world page I found what is probably the most important single piece of news this year:

China has decided to ban the use of electro-shock therapy on teenagers who are addicted to the internet.

WHY THE FUCK DID NO ONE TELL US THAT CHINA WERE ELECTROCUTING KIDS FOR CHECKING TOMORROW’S WEATHER?

And anyway – I don’t know shit about EST (this is my own acronym) and I can’t be bothered doing any research right now) so this probably isn’t true – electroshock therapy is kind of bullshit. The idea of “shocking the bad out of you” is pretty similar to the medieval idea of blood-letting to cure disease or trepanning to LET THE DEMONS OUT. It would probably work a bit better if they did it as conditioning where they electrocuted you when you typed the ’4′ in ’4chan’ or if you tried to trick Google into letting you browse /b/.

For now feel free to troll the fuck out of it in the sidebar – best troll gets a prize.

EDIT: I think I broke this for about a day or so but it is all good now.

One thing that is annoying about this, however is having to have a bunch of tabs open in the browser that you use to access all of your contacts at once. I find it unlikely that you have all of the people who you talk to on fckbk in your Gmail chat – but you might.

Anyway – for my Debian installation that I am trying to maintain without the use of any GUI (graphics) I need to be able to chat with a bunch of people. Because Gmail won’t work in my text browser, I had to use other tools to be able to chat to people. I chose Finch as my solution. Finch is the non-graphics version of Pidgin, a multi-protocol IM client. It looks like this:

Those are my GMail chat contacts (some of them). To get that to happen in Finch or Pidgin (or Adium, I guess – Adium is the OS X version of Pidgin) make your account settings look like this:

You can have all of your other contacts from MSN etc in here but I don’t because fuck them.

Internet banking is something my Dad is kind of scared of and I understand his concern to some extent because I logged on to my bank account today and I saw THIS:!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok, I just rang the bank. The $0.00 CR thing is a glitch in Westpac’s system that happens when you have more than six figures of credit available in a recession and the bank don’t want just any motherfucker to know about it.

Rad.

Here is my tab list right now:

Yep. I’m learning how to DEVELOP THE INTERNETS. Things might start changing around here (but they probably won’t). Last night I made a shitty RSS feed up from scratch, which was fun and educational but not the great accomplishment that I had hoped.

I hope you guys liked George’s movie is really funny. You should watch it.

There are heaps and heaps and heaps of RSS readers out in the big, bad world of the Internet. Opera has one built into the browser that I have used in the past. I’m not going to bother going through a comparison of them because that would be uninteresting and not fun for me.

The RSS reader I use right now is Google Reader. Gmail is the best webmail provider in my opinion and there are a suite of online applications that work really well with Gmail. One of them is Google Reader. Up the top of your Gmail page is a list of links: Gmail, Calendar, Documents etc. Clicking on “Reader” takes you to something that basically looks like Gmail. This integration is one of the reasons I use GReader (This is not actually what it is called but it is what I use as a keyword in Firefox so I can get there quickly). I don’t know exactly what it will look like because I never saw mine before I’d subscribed to anything.

Yeah, so go to some site with an RSS feed (like this one omg omg omg omg) and click on the button. Choose “Google Reader” to subscribe to posts and you’ll be able to read whatever gets updated in your RSS aggregator.

Good Things About RSS Readers

1) Useful for sites that update irregularly.
2) I don’t necessarily like going to all of my bookmarks for blogs and webcomics every time I get on the Internet.
3) Some sites suck and it is better to read whatever they write in GReader. Questionable Content is one of these.
4) GReader automatically shows the blogs that you “follow” with your Blogger account.

Annoying Things About RSS Readers

1) Some sites are good and you miss out on seeing if they update or add links in a sidebar or something.
2) Sites are organised differently and this may mean that images that look good on the original site may look retarded in your reader.
3) Some readers don’t display embedded media.
4) If you like a reader because it makes all of the Internet look the same then you are kind of missing out on a lot of the Internet.
5) Some RSS feeds (what your reader shows you) don’t display the actual content. This happens with the Cyanide and Happiness feed. I think this is because GReader doesn’t display .gif images.

In closing: Oh, man. I hate auto-tune so bad it is killing me.

Items of interest:

1. NO YOU ARE RIGHT, MACS DEFINITELY CANNOT GET VIRUSES
2. ZOMBIES AHEAD
3. Bawwwwwwww

1
2
3

Recently, this happened to me.

I only found this email after attempting to use my internet at home and getting redirected to a page of a big red frowny face, saying “Your account has been temporarily suspended”
This made me mad, because:

I don’t play strategy games, because A: they suck. So this wasn’t even for me.

And: Xnet are a bunch of little bitches. If they get a letter threatening them under USA law (yeah, USA LAW, NOT NZ) then they will suspend your account. They won’t contact you directly by phone like they say the will. I rang them up, and got put onto some nerdy tech kid, who proceeded to tell me that if they got any more letters from grumpy people halfway across the other side of the world, they will ban me permanently from their internets. Great way to keep customers, huh? Oh and if I own a copy of this game/music/program and I download a copy since mine got scratched/broken, is this download illegal as I actually have bought the game at some stage? I don’t own anything like this, but I feel it would be a good excuse.

I also got banned from Counter-Strike, as some faggy mod decided I had been cheating, as I win ALL THE TIME, and am way better than everyone else. I hope Mr Obama doesn’t get banned from the White House, I’m pretty sure they have the same sort of policy where you get cut if you’re way better than everyone else at things, which he clearly is.

At least my main man, tech guru John Key knows what the hell is up about the series of pipes we call the interwebs.
If you scroll about halfway down the page in this speech here: http://www.national.org.nz/Article.aspx?ArticleID=12143
You can see that he knows all about this new thing all the kids are on about.

“I’m not talking about broadband speeds as we know them now. I’m talking about download and upload speeds many, many times faster than most Kiwis have ever experienced.”

“I want New Zealand to be linked by a network of fibre that ensures almost all premises – be they small businesses, schools, or households – can be linked into the main fibre grid with fibre right to their door”

“With a fibre network like the one I aspire to, New Zealanders would be able to download and upload data from the Internet at lightning-fast speeds. Workers would be able to telecommute with ease. Video-conferencing could happen between seven people in seven parts of the country at once.”

oh god!? 7 people!!!! 7 parts of the country?!!??! WITH EASE, YOU SAY?!!!!!

“Right now, most of us still depend on a copper wire of varying lengths, depending on where we live, to link us up to the main fibre network. That copper line may have been up to the job a decade ago, but in 2008 it looks like a dirt track when compared to the fibre highways we could be using. It just can’t carry enough data fast enough to service the latest cutting-edge Internet applications.”

From this I think I have learned that: NZ is going to be linked together, held together if you will, by a network of nutritious fibre, the kind that doesn’t taste good but the people at Weet-Bix reckon it’s a must for a healthy diet. Also if your connection breaks, there will be a grid of fibre right next door so you don’t have to miss out on your daily intake.

Also: we will be ablo to upload and download at exactly the speed of lightning, approximately 186,000 miles per hour, idk how this relates to data speeds but it sounds like I’m going to be able to upload all the legal copies of games and music I own much quicker, chur John.

And: COPPER WIRE IS NOT JUST CONFINED TO ONE LENGTH: YOU CAN HAVE ANY LENGTH YOU WAAAAAAAANT

tl;dr: I need to get better at internet, can one of Y’ALL pleeease let me know how to not get banned from everything, and how to get lightning fast speeds? Actually if you have ANY LIFE ADVICE AT ALL, please leave a comment or email me, I’m scared I might get perma-banned from life.

Oh and vote national if you want leaders that know about tech shit.

Is saying Y’all cool? I’ve noticed Zach has started doing it as a result of reading to much HRO, maybe I should start doing it too.

Today this employee at a store called “Guitar Center (sic)” said this when we asked for a discount: “Well, the tax rate isn’t that high here. Well, not yet. We don’t get taxed like you Europeans but if Obama gets in, we will. You Europeans think Obama is so great but he actually isn’t.” Then Josh said: “Yeah, but we have thing called health care.” That basically kicked his ass until he said that his job (getting paid shitty commission working shitty retail around people who are all about Steve Vai because they get hell of sucked in by really shitty gimmicks like having a handle in your guitar and having wind machines as part of your guitar rig to blow your poorly conditioned hair around. After a while of this kind of scalp irritation you develop dementia which makes you think that it is alright to wear see-through t-shirts so the public no longer need to guess what your nipples look like.

) so that was the end of the bracket loz oh yeah then we were talking to this other dude that worked there and mentioned health care and he goes “Oh yeah, that’s true. It just comes out our wages.” Nice work, you fucking loser – it costs $2000 just to get an ex-ray. This means you would have to sell two BC-Riches a day for two 6-day weeks straight AND you would probably have to give your boss a blow-job and let him film it.

Laugh it up New Zealanders: