The UBB sitch (or why we will pay up to 300% more for internet access)

Before I go on, it stands for Usage Based Billing, because I'm sure many of you were confused by the acronym.

Chances are, some of you may read the title, and think it doesn't affect you. If you're Canadian, give it a chance and read this. If you're American, I don't think this is much of a problem now, but may be in the future.

The New App Store

It offers easy access to thousands of free applications. It offers the ability to purchase applications. It launched in October 2010. It's...

Apple's October 20th 2010 updates and why I'm not impressed

Yesterday, Apple had a press conference where they announced some updates and new stuff. I'm going to go over them and give my opinions on each of them in my post.

Does the "You get what you pay for" saying always hold true? Also, some FUD.

Microsoft recently started a campaign as Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice.org . It's filled with propaganda and FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). Since OO.o is free and is increasingly gaining market-share, Microsoft is obviously getting scared that now less people are using their overpriced office suite.

With that out of the way, on to the video.

LibreOffice, a fork that isn't cutlery

I figured I should write a bit about what LibreOffice is since my next post gives a brief mention of it.

When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, they gained four open-source projects that Sun was working on. MySQL (Database engine), OpenOffice.org (Office suite), OpenSolaris (Unix-based operating system), and Virtualbox (Virtual Machine application). It's not really that Oracle was being hostile towards these projects, it was more that they ignored them outright... except OpenSolaris, they killed that off. Because these projects are open-source, people (likely developers) are able to obtain the source code and create a fork of the project. OpenSolaris was forked into Illumos and OpenIndiana. MySQL has a bunch of forks, but they aren't as popular as the OpenOffice and OpenIndiana forks.

I think I'm going to give this another go

It's been about 8 months since I've made a new blog post. I think I'm going to try getting back into blogging. I'll see how it goes.

Georges Laraque did WHAT now?

At first I thought this was an April Fool's day joke, but the date in the post and on my menu bar said February 22nd, and there's a press release, so I guess it's real.

How to avoid Bell Canada's torrent throttling

In late 2007, Bell Canada started throttling bittorrent transfers on their network down to 60KB/s or 30KB/s depending on the time of day. As you might expect, many people got frustrated with it and switched to using some of the many Wholesale DSL Internet Service Providers such as Acanac, Electronicbox, TekSavvy, Velcom, etc. Around March 2008, Bell Canada started throttling users of these wholesale ISPs without telling them. Sometime around May 2008, members on the TekSavvy forum on DSLReports found that MLPPP (meant to bond lines) has a side effect that it bypasses the throttle. In July 2008, a company called Per Vices publicly mentioned a way to bypass the throttle. Whenever the µTorrent 1.9 beta was released, it was found that Bell Canada does not throttle the UDP protocol. µTorrent 1.9 beta and later supports torrent transfers over UDP instead of TCP.

Bell Canada introduces a new tier and new names. Brings many lies along with it.

Two days ago, Bell Canada introduced a new internet tier in Ontario and Quebec. Aside from that, they renamed their Performance tier and Max tiers. They are now called "Fibe" and there's also a new tier called "Fibe 25".

Now, the name "Fibe" sounds an awful lot like "fiber", doesn't it? In fact, you'd probably think it is fiber. Nope. Bell just uses FTTN (Fiber To The Node) which connects what's called a "remote" to the central office via fiber optic cabling. From the remote, the data gets to/from your modem via ADSL/ADSL2+/VDSL2+.

I think it's an old old wooden ship

(and I think I'm also mixing up my quotes)

The times are changing, and so is the Virtualbox logo. It just won't be the same anymore.

Old logo Taken from the icon in the app.

New logo Taken from the Virtualbox website.

Oracle's logo is being plastered throughout Sun's website and other websites that Sun previously owned.

Goodbye Sun, welcome Oracle.

Another thing. I wasn't using Virtualbox when Sun bought out Innotek.

Apple announces the iPad

Today, Apple announced the iPad which is their new tablet computer. To put it simply, it's a giant iPod touch.

Are electronics a ticking time bomb?

I was looking on Engadget and saw the post "Sony's secret kill switch: myth, rumor or hearsay?" which got me thinking a bit.

I don't know much about the TV part of it, but I guess anything is possible. TVs don't use the same kind of software that they used to. Many TVs these days run an embedded linux system, so it probably wouldn't be that hard to program a clock that would disable functionality after a 5-year time period.

In the case of computers, I wouldn't be surprised if this was true. Most people I know with a Dell computer have needed parts replaced one way or another. Some of them have had their motherboard bust or malfunction about 1 year after buying it. In one case, it was eleven months, giving a chance to buy the extended warranty. I should note that all of these Dell computers are Inspirons, which is their cheapest line of laptops, and they do feel really cheap.

I think HP is also known for having super cheap computers where parts need to be replaced after about a year.

Any comments?

What is 17 years old and from the year 1993?