Starvin’ Marvin

I was just reading my daily links and I just found out something really unfair. Take a look at this. It seems that OCN, the japanese carrier operated by NTT Communications is imposing daily limits for uploads. Not fair right? Well, not quite like that… It seems they are imposing a… 30 Gb limit of upload per day. How’s that for abuse?! Oh, by the way, downloads stay uncapped.

Word of advise, portuguese operators deploying fiber: prepare your core networks and ask manufacturers for your 10Gb uplink cards - 10 users at 100Mbps = 1 Gbps. Having in mind the portuguese way, if you offer something like 100Mbps some people will use it to the limits in order to improve their cinematographic and musical culture.

Let’s see how it goes…

Ever wondered why Google launched a mobile version of Google Maps, even for non-GPS enabled handsets? Your answer is right here. The updated version of Google Maps for mobiles comes with a new service that gives you rudimentary location information without needing a built-in GPS. The name for this new feature is My Location and is still in the beta phase but will provide your location in the map wherever Google Maps is available.

It seems that this new application takes advantage of the information broadcasted from cell towers and from the Cell ID it is able approximate your current location. Of course, this feature is pretty intrusive (google could track your location with this, but hey, they already can track what search for and you care do you?), so if you are a privacy freak, don’t use this. Nevertheless, this is a innovative piece of software and very useful if you don’t have a GPS enabled hanset.

I’ve tried the feature in Lisbon, and it work pretty well, giving me an accuracy of about 2km in my tests. I must confess I was not expecting this to work here in Portugal, because I thought Google wouldn’t have geolocation of cell IDs used here in Portugal, but it seems that they already have a huge database with this. I wonder how they built this database… Did they bought this information from operators or did they gathered this info by wandering around?

I found out a really interesting article on Ars Technica about some schools banning Wikipedia as a source for student’s assignments. I’ve also found out some places were puting in practice some more aggressive measures to avoid wikipedia: bans on campus computers, stickers saying “Just say no to wikipedia”, etc. The argument is that wikipedia is not accurate enough for citations in school work. Well, I might agree with that in some cases and I generally believe that wikipedia is a very good starting point when you’re starting to study a certain subject, not the absolute reference about everything. In fact, the concept is similar to a encyclopedia (that, as wikipedia, generally you don’t use as citation in your school work, right?) and, as far as I know encyclopedias don’t get banned at schools!

So, where it goes my understanding about this subject: please, don’t make wikipedia your worst enemy, because it is your best friend. Learn from it, and when you study some subject deeply take some minutes and correct what you found wrong or inaccurate there. This way, you will be improving the overall quality of wikipedia. Hopefully, others will do the same and probably you’ll benefit from this on other subjects.

Conversation with an telephone operator of a portuguese ISP that I won’t say, but i will point.

(skipping the part where I was listening to advertisements for about 10 minutes while waiting)

me - Hello, I’m thinking to install your 2mbit Internet service but i would like some questions answered….
she - OK. I’ll try to answer your questions.
me - OK, I would like to know how much uplink bandwidth is avaible to me in this package.
she - That I don’t know… Do you have any more questions?
me - OK, but can you check it?
she - It’s not written here. Any more questions?
me - I see… Can you ask somebody?
she - No… Any more questions?
me- I only wanted to know that…
she - OK, in that case… If you don’t have any more questions… Have a nice day.

(hanging up)

Nice service, uh?