SEACOM prices announced – some light at the end of the tunnel?
From http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Telecoms/2911.html:
Brian Herlihy, SEACOM president, said that the idea behind the cable is to offer international bandwidth at a lower price but to increase usage to ensure profits.
In a move seldom experienced in the local telecoms arena, SEACOM revealed their wholesale pricing structure and strategy to the media.
The company will have a four tiered bandwidth pricing approach where bandwidth prices for larger products, in this case STM-64, STM-16 and STM-4 connections, are sold at reduced rates to the standard STM-1 connection.
Their price for an STM-1 connection however sets a roof for the resale of bandwidth by larger bulk-bandwidth buyers thereby ensuring that smaller players receive a competitive rate.
The price for an STM-64 connection, supplying 9.6 Gbps of bandwidth, is $ 1 663 875 or R 267-00 per Mbps per month. The price per Mbps per month for a STM-1 (155 Mbps) service is R 673-00 while a STM-4 (600 Mbps) connection costs R 575-00 and a STM-16 (2.5 Gbps) service will cost R 435-00.
or in other words:
| STM-1 (155 Mbps) | R673 per Mbps per month |
| STM-4 (600 Mbps) | R575 per Mbps per month |
| STM-16 (2500 Mbps) | R435 per Mbps per month |
| STM-64 (9600 Mbps) | R267 per Mbps per month |
As I understand it, this means the cost for an always on 128 KB/s connection will cost between R267 and R673 per month, but we still don't know the contention ratio, so I can't speculate too much.
Certainly good news though, but I'll wait to see the actual cost to the end consumer before I start jumping for joy. Only the bigger ISP's will be able to afford STM-64, although, considering the current cost of bandwidth, STM-1 will be far less than the current offerings anyway.
At least we have a specific date and pricing this time. Hopefully change is more imminent now than the imminent change promised by DoC in the past...
W850i UTF-8 and ID3v2.4 bug
Arrghh! A unicode/utf/latin-1 confusism again...
Been playing around with my new Sony Ericsson W850 - and so far it's pretty impressive.
But there's a problem with some mp3 ID3 tags which I tracked down to be UTF-8 used in some ID3v2.4 tags. I first thought it choked on the ID3v2.4 tag like so many other crappy players, but it handles ID3v2.4 fine if you convert the encoding to Latin-1 or UTF-16.
ID3v2.3 does not allow UTF-8, which is why it will always work fine. ID3v2.4 adds UTF-8 support, so this is a bug in the phone software. I'm using version R1JG001.
I used eyeD3 to convert the tags, which can also add album art btw.
Edit:
It looks like there's a problem with track numbers as well. UTF-16 works fine, but track numbers are mixed up, so the tracks play out of order. And **don't try UTF-16BE.** Your phone will *reboot repeatedly until you remove those files*. Looks like using either ID3v2.3 or ID3v2.4 doesn't matter. So all that is left is Latin-1 encoded tags.
*So if you have problems, make sure you don't use UTF or unicode encoded tags on your mp3s*
I made this rough python script to convert to lower bitrate mp3s and fix the tags to work with the W850i. It will also add any picture named folder.jpg or album.jpg in the same directory as album art to the tag.
http://www.floatinginspace.za.org/w850_cp/cp2w850.html
Google Talk Gadget in the Firefox sidebar
Google Talkabout: Popouts, Buttons and Slideshows
Cool! A few ways to use the Google Talk Gadget:
Click this link to open Google Talk in the Firefox Sidebar
Or to open it in a popup window, click the button:
There is a problem with the Gadget if you have the Customize Google firefox extension installed. The 'Anonymize Google UID' setting will cause problems when trying to log in. For some reason, if you open the gadget in the sidebar however, this is not a problem...
Edit: The developer of the extension fixed the problem. Everything is working fine now.
Special Assignment on cell towers
As a regular Special Assignment viewer I'm generally very impressed by the presentation and the level of investigation in most of the programs.
I must say though that I was dismayed at the lack of proper investigation on the program about cell masts. It is clear that they should stick to social and political issues because when it comes to informing the public on scientific issues they are miserably failing. But of course that is not their goal. They just report news worth stories.
This is a very important and sensitive issue and will certainly become even more important as more people take advantage of wireless technology. It will not be solved by reporting anecdotal stories and speculating about things without understanding the issues involved.
There are no evidence that suggest radiation within the approved levels are dangerous.
There was as far as I could tell no effort made to investigate other causes for the ill effects the people in the program experienced.
There was no mention of checks on the cell towers to make sure they are operating within safe limits.
There was no mention of why cell towers are making buzzing sounds or even if the buzzing sounds are from the microwave transmitters.
With the number of cell phone towers in the world, why are there only one family that turned grey?
I find it amusing that one of the 'experts' were a homeopath. Other than the cell phone radiation issue, homeopathy does have a lot of research proving that it is only as effective as the placebo effect.
The placebo effect of living next to a cell tower will now have to be neutralized by the placebo effect from an expensive 'hi tech' (magnetic) pendant on a chain. :| :? :roll:
Inkscape whiteboard
Inkboard is a whiteboard extension for Inkscape, a free SVG editor.
Just tried it out. All you need is a jabber account. Then you just log in from inkscape and share whatever you draw in realtime with anyone you care to invite.
Cool!
Power lines and cancer
I heard someone say this week that it was proven that power lines cause cancer. Apparently not.
from [Bob Park's What's New](http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN02/wn053102.html "Bob Park's What's New")
EMF: CALIFORNIA PREPARES TO RESURRECT THE POWER LINE SCARE.
It's been more than 20 years since it was first claimed that power lines induce cancer. In 1995 the APS Council stated that such conjectures "have not been scientifically substantiated" (http://www.aps.org/statements/95_2.cfm). A year later, the National Academy of Sciences concluded the same thing (WN 1 Nov 96). In 1997, a National Cancer Institute epidemiological study found no detectable EMF/cancer link (WN 4 Jul 97). Not a single lawsuit based on health effects of EMF has ever succeeded. Yet, California's Department of Health Services, inexplicably turned to three obscure scientists in the Department to "review" EMF studies. Without any new evidence, the three "are inclined to believe that EMFs can cause some degree of increased risk of childhood leukemia, adult brain cancer, Lou Gehrig's disease and miscarriage." Their review has not yet been released to the public. When it is, it will start this whole thing up again.