Desktop Blog App!

I have a blog app for my desktop now, which means that I should be able to update my blog more! I usually forget about it, but if there’s an icon in my tray.. well, we’ll see.

I guess I need to find a new search engine

After all, I can hardly use a search engine that might harm my computer. But then again, they are saying that they may harm my computer themself.. such refreshing honesty. Maybe I’ll keep using Google!

Note: This seems to be appearing, no matter what you search for. What’s up, Goog?

The beginning of YouTube’s demise?

So, someone mentioned a song to me today, one I hadn’t heard before. Said it was good! So, I went off to try and find it, see if I liked it. My first port of call, as usual, was YouTube. Search.. there we go! Found! Click.. and nothing. I had alt-tabbed, so it took half a minute before I realised that I wasn’t hearing anything. So I went back.. okay, it’s playing. Still no sound, what gives?

I check a number of things, headphone connection, system sound level.. then notice something. Something I hadn’t seen before, below the video. This:

What the fuck? Since when does YouTube specifically disable audio. Who knows how many videos have been hit by this. I checked the YouTube blog and only found a single mention of this, back in december. Which I think will, understandably, irritate a lot of people. They tout a service called Audioswap as  a way to fix this, but lo and behold.. all the music on this truly fucking wonderful service of theirs is really, really obscure crap. I took a browse through the list. I don’t think I had heard of a single one.

YouTube themselves say that they are working things out that are win:win for content owners and users, but so far from what I have seen? Everything is just taking a huge crap from a great height onto users. They remove home videos if you happen to have a radio on in them, they’ll take down ANY video without a question if a major copyright owner asks for it, without even checking. And now this.

YouTube is already degenerating fast into five thousand videos a day of people farting, happy slapping and ‘partner videos’, the last of which is whatever the record labels deem to dribble out (Usually with all the fun things like embedding prevented).

Fuck sake, YouTube. You used to be so good

The Gay Tax

Few people know about this, so I am making this entry so that people don’t get caught unawares when it comes to the issue of tax and domestic partner benefits. Let us tell a story.

I am somewhat unwell and so that I can find out what is wrong with me, when it came up for elections time at my partner’s employer, we thought we’d see if they covered domestic partners. Turns out, they do! And it wasn’t that much more either, only $45 extra per pay period (Which is a fortnight).

Well, this is a great deal we thought, sign us up. I can get healthy! Hooooray! Of course, time came that this actually kicked in and the first paycheck after this happened, was over a hundred dollars light. “What the fuck?”, said my partner. “They’re charging a fortune for you!”. So I investigated.

Turns out, that domestic partner coverage, unlike primary coverage (eg, the employee him/herself) isn’t tax-free. You heard me. Now, this applies to both straight AND gay couples, but there is a caveat. A straight couple can get married and in doing so, can avoid paying the tax on their healthcare. A gay couple cannot.

Yes, you heard me right. This is a tax that ONLY gay people are forced to bear. It is a tax on homosexuals. In our case, this comes out to the tune of about $130 a month. And that’s on top of the the money we’re already paying for the healthcare alone.

Yes, that’s $130 a month in extra taxes. Simply because we’re of the same gender, and we love each other.

Sickening, isn’t it.

Powerband: Like an Elephant down a Straw

It’s been a while since I have felt that someone has tried to sell me an entire cartload of horseshit, but today, that day has come again it seems. What a way to start off 2009…

We turn, today, to self-professed “Local Nerd” Mike Pronovost who is apparently some kind of incredible genius who has concocted the most efficient compression algorithm in existence, so that he can cram massive amounts of data through a dialup connection at Ludicrous Speed. Needless to say, I am skeptical.

Though it seems that others are not so skeptical and indeed, seem to have thrown caution clear to the wind. But what do you expect from the online press these days. Facts? Hah. Facts are for losers! And those guys are, obviously, winners. Now, where was I?

Oh right, Powerband, yes. I haven’t seen such a crock of shit since, well, since the last time I went to the bathroom. As many of us have used VPN connections over a slow link know, it doesn’t matter how fast you get things to the remote server. It still has to squeeze down that tiny pipe, to YOU, at some point.

Let us use his example of getting a 10gb movie in 10 seconds. That’s 1 gbyte per second, or, 8 (and a bit) gigabites. That’s 9 Gig-E Ethernet Connections, right there. But hey. Maybe he’s got servers with fifty network cards in them or something. But the real question is, how does this movie get to you?

Well, through your shitty connection of course. Lets say you have 56K. That’s, at max, 7kbps. Lets assume he can compress that video down to 1/100th of it’s original size (A ludicrous amount. You’d never get that much. Even from the original source.) This takes us down to 100MB and that’s still a large size.

100MB x 1000 = 100,000KB.

100,000KB / 7kbps = 3 Hours, 58 Minutes. Or, without any special extra compression, that’d be.. oh yes, that’s right, 16.5 DAYS. Not hours, DAYS. Half a month of your super sexy powerband just to download that 10gb movie which you got in.. 10 seconds, was that?

Here’s why it won’t work and here is a juicy analogy for you. You go to work every day in.. in.. the City of Townsville. But you live in Little Village. As do 300,000 other people. Somehow. Now, you all want to go to work every day, taking Country Route 4, to I-17 and into the Big City. But there is always congestion and it takes you hours to get in. So the city decides to build a brand new, bigger road.. to replace the I-17. But you still have to get there, on your tiny Country Route 4. Seeing it yet?

Our wunderkind, Mr. Pronovost, has decided that to solve the problem of the straw being too small.. he’s going to give you a bigger glass. When what you really need, is a bigger straw. So I can only come to one of a few conclusions.

First conclusion is: Mike Pronovost is some kind of amazing idiot. I wanted to use retard, but, frankly, even people with mental disabilities aren’t this stupid.

Second conclusion: He’s not an idiot and instead, he plans to bilk usage fees from thousands of gullible idiots so as to pay his college bills, for giant paper bags filled with crack cocaine or some other nefarious purpose (Like hiring guerilla clowns to send Richard Stallman into an early grave. Maybe he’s coulrophobic, who knows!).

I mean, what else am I to think? This is the equivalent of those popups ads you get that say, “Make your internet 10x faster!” or “Get a bigger pen15 now!” or “YOU   HAVE A VI  RUS !!! CLICK HERE TO REPIAR”. The internet and, nay, physics itself just doesn’t work like that. You just cannot cram that much information, down that narrow a band width, in any reasonable length of time.

My suggestion is, go get yourself a seedbox, a nice fat cable connection and have a lot of fun. It’s the way to do it!

And to you, Mike Pronovost, I say this: Tell me. Are you an idiot, or a fraud? And please, if you want to prove me wrong, I am more than willing to try out your product and experience this INCREDIBLE SPEED. Just try to make me look like a liar, Mike.

drop.io/givingamazonalltheirmoney

drop.io is one of a few online storage.. dealies. drop.io’s particular shtick is that is gives you a tumblr-esque frontend to the things you have uploaded and is free, unless you want more than a hundred megabytes. Of course, this isn’t all they do. Like any self-respecting (or self-aggrandizing) Web 2.0 company, they have a whole slew of supposedly useful features.

• Twitter Integration – So that people can know when you just uploaded that picture of your dog, Scruffy.
• SMS Alerts – For when you have a public drop (Read: µImageshack) and you want to know that someone’s uploaded something. On your phone.
• Facebook Integration – So your work colleagues, old school buddies and more can know about said dog, Scruffy.
• Scribd’s iPaper – Because we’ve all wanted to read pdfs that’re wrapped in flash and javascript. And who needs to be able to copy & paste text anyway. What? You do? Too bad.
• Turn your storage into some kind of answering machine – Because that’s what we’ve always wanted. To be able to have people call in and leave clips of beavis and butthead, or farting noises/heavy breathing all over where we’re storing pictures of little Nicola’s third birthday.

But this isn’t even the start of the insanity that they cook up over in brooklyn. No, sir. Because their model is not so much unlike ones offered by everything from super-cheap hosting providers, like my one, to most consumer ISPs. That being, The Oversell.

In this case, drop.io will give you 100MB for free (or 1GB if you pay $10 for a year, or a lot more through their brand new enterprise service, the drop.io manager). The problem I see is that, if you were to make something that was very popular, you could very easily end up being what I call a Poor Value Propsition (eg, a customers that actually COSTS you money.). This is primarily because drop.io uses Amazon’s AWS and AWS is Not Cheap.

Let us look at the example of drop.io’s new Professional Plan. $19.99 a month, for 20gb (And of course, unlimited bandwidth). In the following calculations, we will use the cheapest possible prices for amazon services, so as to give the best case possible.

Now, you are paying them $19.99 a month. Presumably, there would be incidental costs like credit card charges, but we’ll make those $0 for now, giving the entire sum to drop.io. First, we subtract the storage costs for s3.

At $0.12 per GB x 20, that equals $2.40.  That’s 12% gone already, on pure storage costs. This leaves $17.59. Next, we have transfer costs. Now if you transfer over 150TB, the price goes down to $0.10 per GB. A little elementary maths gives us this:

$17.59 / $0.10 = 175.9, or 175.9 GB.

This means that, if you filled up your drop, you’d have to transfer 175.9GB a month and then anything after that, actually costs drop.io money. (This does not include incidental transfers like logos, CSS, etc and computational costs of EC2). Now, this seems like a lot, but infact, it’s not. That’s only 8.795x the size of your drop. If you were perhaps, posting HD videos of say.. urban exploration, or performances, or DJ sessions or something similar, do you really think it would be hard to get say.. 20 people to view half of the videos in your drop? Or 40 people a quarter? Or even 100 people to view just one or two? Probably not.

So lets run some possible numbers. 30 minutes of 720p video of say.. parkour antics (I like Parkour). That would be 1.8GB. You film these videos once a week, on the weekend. Each week, you get 2,000 video views of new and old content. Parkour is popular! That’s 2000 x 1.8GB, or 3600GB.

So 3600GB x $0.10 =$360. Per Week. Or $1440 a month. Now, as we calculated before, there is $17.59 left over for bandwidth. So you subtract that, $1440 – $17.59 and that leaves $1422.41. That’s a lot!

Every month, you end up costing drop.io over $1400 dollars. That’s around $18k a year. (($360 x 52) – Even if you assumed only 2,000 view a month, instead of a week, that’s still nearly $4500 a year.

Now, how many of these would you need before it eats up all the profit you make from people who pay for drops they hardly use, and then starts eating into the money you’re using for payroll?

To date, drop.io has raised $3.9 million dollars. By my reckoning, it’d only take about 250 of what I deem High Use (2000 HDvideo views a week) drops, or around 900 Medium Use (2000 HDvideo views a month) to deplete that capital in a single year.

And that’s just to pay Amazon.

In closing, this is why I feel that drop.io is something of a white elephant and that the companies risks being unprofitable. Perhaps some bandwidth limits are in order, guys. (And please, no, none of that “fair use” crap. Define Your Limits.)