Rogers a Screwy Bunch

So I've been thinking for a while of ditching my Bell cell plan for a shiny new Rogers smartphone plan. Unfortunately I just discovered that if I want to get the good voice and data "Deal" (if thats what you call price gouging), I HAVE to sign up for 3 years, chaining myself to there exorbitant prices. If I try on their website to sign of for a 1 year contract *poof* the Voice and data plan disappears leaving only the voice plan as an option. To then get data on top of that you would have to add it to you contract separately for a higher monthly cost. Things like this make me really wonder how much time and money Rogers devotes to the fine science of putting the screws to the customer as much as possible. I can only hope that Ontario's 3 new cellphone providers really take off and setup shop in my area.   

CRTC Helps out Big Bell and Screws Canadians Again!

According to CBC news the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission has approved Bells proposal to allow billing based on bandwidth-usage.

Bells side of the story, is that high volume users like customers downloading files using bittorrent are slowing its networks and its solution is if you use more bandwidth downloading movies, games etc you'll have to pay more. This is all fine and dandy for illegal movies and the like but what about the several legal high bandwidth applications like Steam or youtube? are they trying to send us back to the days when all we used the net for was email!?

For anyone thinking "oh I only use my internet for email anyways, so my bill should be lower right?" no that wont happen  would Bell ever do anything to put itself into a position where it would be making less money? I doubt it. Rates for minimal users will be the same and for the majority they will be higher.

I guess severely screwing Canadians for the cellphones wasn't enough, now they want to do it to us again with our internet.
  

Skype 2 Go for Canadians... Sorta

Skype has Released Skype 2 Go for Canadians, yay! Now the bad news, at least for me I live in the 519/226 area code. Unfortunately I live near London and the 2 Go number they give me to call is based out of Kitchener/Waterloo area, which is still long distance for me. Which is totally pointless since I get charged long distance for a service design to negate long  distance costs.

Hopefully they add some London numbers soon, it is the 10th largest city in Canada, kinda a big market if you ask me.

Steve Jobs More Evil by the minute?

So aside from kicking in doors of stolen prototype phone buyers, and denying a future for flash on his iphone/pad/ipod cartel. Now he wants to attack opening source video! see his response to "An open letter to Steve Jobs" his response was

From: Steve Jobs
To: Hugo Roy
Subject: Re:Open letter to Steve Jobs: Thoughts on Flash
Date 30/04/2010 15:21:17

All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source.

Sent from my iPad

whats next Steve? do you want to patent taking a shit?

Lubuntu wireless with my old Acer

My old Acer Aspire 5000 laptop had been doing a fine job as a dust collector under my bed for a while since the xp install was getting pretty bloated and sluggish. Therefore I decided to wipe the hard drive clean and do a fresh install of the Lubuntu 10.04 beta 1. Overall i was very impressed with the speed of boot-up and operation on the old acer, my only problem was getting the wireless to work, since it has a broadcom card and they have never been the most linux friendly cards around. I did a little research and found this site http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43


It guided me through well enough and I downloaded the fwcutter program which is automatically downloaded the necessary drivers and installed them and on reboot the wireless worked wonderfully :).

 

Yuri's Night!

April 12th, Tonight is Yuri's night Celebrate in your own special way for the 1st man in space!

Google Voice Blog: Google Voice, Explained

Google Voice Blog: Google Voice, Explained I wish they'd explain how it will come to CANADA!!

Yod'm 3D allows one desktop to become 4!

Ever want a cool 3d desktop for you windows XP machine? or maybe you wanted that second monitor but can't afford it, or maybe just just want a cool spinny 3d desktop to amaze co-workers and impress the ladies. Either way in my internet stumblings I found a neat, free, non-virus giving 3d desktop appilcation that takes one desktop and makes it 4. It's no Compiz-Fusion which you can use with Linux, but for XP its the right price. Yod'm is nice little unit that works well and doesn't require fancy graphics to get the required effect. Don't take my word for try it yourself

http://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=1286

Heres a picture of it in action

Scratch that Open Office Remains

People cried out, Ubuntu listened, Open Office remains

Ubuntu Netbook remix loses open office

Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10, they are dropping Open Office in favor of Google Docs, interestingly Ubuntu has stated through a new revenue sharing deal with yahoo, there default search engine is now going to be yahoo opposed to Google. This begs the question did they switch to Google docs just to keep in the internet search giants good books?

Google Voice Blog: Google Voice for iPhone and Palm WebOS

Google Voice Blog: Google Voice for iPhone and Palm WebOS

Every new feature it gets is a Kick in the pants for Canadians

Ubuntu Rocks!

I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix on my Acer Aspire One, and its probly the coolest thing ever I encourage anyone and everyone to try Ubuntu the level of customization is unparalleled

Bell Charges for what Google does for free!

Recently Bell has added new services to it mobile plans. For the low low price of 5 bucks a month you can get your voicemails transcribed to emails or txt messages. Google has currently released (in the US only) "Google Voice" which allows you to get a google number or use your existing phone number, and get Voicemail to txt or email, plus many other cool features for free!!
Check out the Google Voice link for more info.

Google we NEED this in CANADA