Hey guys,
I just upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.5, and I have to say WOOOW. The new admin panel can only be described by saying: WOOOW.
If you are using Wordpress too, definetly upgrade. It’s worth it.
First off, if you have a good 3G data plan with unlimited everything, or don’t care about paying your precious €€€s to mobile service providers, you can skip this article altogether 
The last few weeks I’ve been traveling quite a lot, and didn’t always have Open WiFi near me. So I needed to use overpriced 3G connections by Proximus.
Before you tell me, why don’t you have a Data Plan, let me tell you that they are only valid for Belgium itself, and not foreign networks. Why should I need a Data Plan when I am at home? So much about that.
Using 3G a lot in foreign countries, I asked my provider what the actual costs would be. They told me, using Pay&Go Cards you are paying 1,50€ / 100KB. I thought, hey, sounds fair. I mean, the only thing I want to do is check my Jabber Offline Messages and E-mail from time to time.
Let me tell you one thing in the beginning: Do NOT check E-mail with such a rate plan. I downloaded the headers of my E-mail once, and it cost me 400KB! That were just the headers. So forget that directly.
So I used Jabber. My setup was Talkonaut 3.0 with compression enabled. Do not try to use Jabber without compression. Ask your Server Administrator if the server supports compression, and make sure your client supports it. Using compression I had about 10x less data transferred. If you think about the overpriced traffic, it’s worth enabling it.
I have to say, compared to MSN, yes, I have that installed too, Jabber consumes a lot less. So use Jabber transports instead of native clients.
But what can be improved?
First of all, typing notifications. They consume bandwidth for nothing. And when being mobile, do you really care about someone typing? You don’t. This should be filtered on the server and not sent to the mobile device.
Then you have status changes. About 50% of all my traffic were status changes of people on my roster. Ok, I have a big roster (around 400 persons), but again, I don’t care about people coming online or offline, when I am chatting with someone. I don’t see the roster, and I don’t want to. As proposed at the XMPP DevCon, these statuses should be queued on the server, and just the last status should be kept, until my client requests them, i.e. I check my Contact List, or hit a refresh button.
On third place, I have my contact list. Every time I log in, the contact list is downloaded. This consumes with compression enabled about 30KB on my account. That’s just a waste of bandwidth. My contact list doesn’t change that often, why can’t the client cache it? Then you need to get the status of every contact. My guess is, that you get them one by one. I.e. contact 1 is online, contact 2 is online, contact 3 is offline … etc. You could do: contact, 1,2 are online, contact 3 is offline. This would compress better and you would save bandwidth. Again, this should be prepared on the server.
I remember that a big part of the discussion for mobility was about power consumption. I have been using 3G quite a lot and WiFi, whenever I found one, and I have to say I don’t see any problem with the consumption. But if anyone has seen the battery of an E61 by Nokia, you know why. It’s huge! I think it’s more important to get clients that consume less bandwidth, as that is something that you really have to pay for. You can recharge your mobile phone nearly anywhere.
Well, that’s it for today. Feel free to comment with your ideas and experiences with your mobile and 3G roaming.
I think it’s time for some political humor.
After having seen this cartoon, don’t you agree that no other president has given more to his country? We should ask him if he would like to lead Europe in that direction. Maybe let him replace Trichet?
Illustration by Kevin Kallaugher
So DivX Corporation’s Stage6 has croaked. The service’s ‘goodbye, cruel word’ note says it was a victim of its own success, but that it proved ‘it’s possible to distribute true high definition video on the Internet’. What it really showed is how deliriously inefficient streaming video is, whether it’s high def or otherwise.
It cost at least $1m a month to run Stage6 with its 17.4 million unique users a month, whereas (at an informed guess) The Pirate Bay costs about $50,000 a month all-in for its 92.5 million. That’s $57,000 per million users for Stage6; $540 per million for The Pirate Bay (not including people using its tracker without visiting the site, which adds a lot of Mininova’s traffic as well, not to mention the other big indexes.) So at the very least, The Pirate Bay is a hundred and five times more efficient than Stage6 was.
But inefficiency is not the only reason the service is no more, while the vilified Pirate Bay, Mininova et al. are still with us. Stage6 was also a lot more illegal than a BitTorrent tracker — whether it pretended to be complying with the DMCA or not. Surprisingly under reported after the abrupt demise of the service was the 6th Feb US court ruling against DivX’s attempt to establish its protection under the DMCA’s safe harbour provisions ahead of a legal battle with Universal Music Group. My reading of the company’s consequent, speedy exit from the stage (and correct me if you think I’m wrong) is that Stage6 didn’t have the cash or confidence to test its luck any further. (How much this affects DivX as a whole remains to be seen. But only six days after the court decision, Jerome Vashisht Rota, the inventor of DivX and a major shareholder in DivX corporation, was openly dumping stock.)
It’s not hard to read the tea leaves. While GooTube (famously being sued by Viacom on pretty much the same grounds) probably won’t lose sleep, smaller players eating their lunches off of pirate content will be paying very close attention. VCs burning money on pushing streaming media to the masses will at least want to imagine some returns on their investment rather than the further expense of executives in the dock.
So why is the exit of Stage6 a step in the right direction? Because for all the hyperbole in the mainstream (and sometimes online) media about the YouTube or Google Video or Stage6 ‘revolution‘, the relationship to media they offer us is far too traditional. Come to this place. Be served your media (and suck down your advertising along with it). Go away again. Yes, we can upload material, but I’m not the only one who feels that this wasn’t the primary function of Stage6, even if it did distribute about 50,000 copies of STEAL THIS FILM II before its demise. No need to share, no need to understand the technology, no need to think. It’s what they called ‘lean back’ media: millions of people slouching thoughtlessly in front of an marketing-emitting portal.
The promise of P2P is a thorough breakdown of the kind of power that congeals in a portal like Stage6. A user-owned, user-operated infrastructure that doesn’t require massive investment, doesn’t by default allow oligarchs to make more money from us. A disruptive, mutable infrastructure that brings media to us in the context we choose, forcing a massive re-think about what, why and how we create — as individuals, as businesses, as a society.
It is lazy for us to rely at all on portals like Stage6, but worse than lazy, it’s dangerous. It suggests we don’t value the potential autonomy P2P offers us. Our old media masters profited from control of content: are we really so happy to swap them for new ones who profit from control of our eyeballs? However lazy we are, I think that most of us are able to see that that this isn’t a model that we want to encourage. The demise of Stage6 and the portals that will follow gives us cause to think about strengthening our infrastructures: and that can’t be a bad thing.
Source: Torrentfreak.com
Hey guys,
just recieved an IM from a friend with the link to this Picture. This would of been great @ FOSDEM and the XMPP DevCon. The Wifi would probably not have been that overloaded if people would of have respected this sign.
Over and out.
I started using Jabber in 2004. Since then, I’m sorry to say, not much has happened.
Jabber still more or less only supports text messaging, file transfer works quite bad, compared to other IM Networks, and Jingle isn’t implement anywhere. This might be exagerated a bit, as there are some attempts for Jingle implementation, and file transfer works with some clients, but it doesn’t work with most of the clients.
I think this is a pity, as Jabber is a technology with alot of potential on so many levels.
Jingle:
Jingle would be great if it would be implemented. But apparantly it is too complicated. So if there would be a few good libraries, this could be realized.
File Transfer:
File transfer is more or less my favourite topic on Jabber . It often doesn’t work. Just tried to recieve a file without any success. Although both sides have a SOCKS5 proxy set up. Weird.
Then, at the XMPP DevCon, Pedro Melo came up with the idea, why not use torrent? There are tons of good libraries which can be added to the clients, and all of these libraries do very good NAT traversals and this technology could lead to cool new features.
In theory, you could send one file to several persons, without uploading it to everyone seperately. You could also have Pubsub deliver content, for example your podcasts as torrents.
Server operators could run a torrent proxy, which speeds up downloads, and many other things are possible.
Jabber vs. XMPP:
The last thing I’m going to talk about in this post, is the name. The technology has been renamed to XMPP to make sure that there will be no legal issues in the future with Jabber Inc., but many of us still use Jabber instead of XMPP.
As you can see on the graph, Jabber is far more known than XMPP. Red is Jabber, blue is XMPP. All the marks are explained here.
Invisibility & blocked contacts:
Then we have invisibility. There seems to be no real standard for being invisible. It doesn’t work with all transports. Then you have blocked contacts. I have to be honest, I haven’t played with Privacy Lists on my account, as I generally like everyone on Jabber, but I am missing the button, block contact. This is something which would be useful for all the switchers from other networks.
Well, I think this is all for today. Keep on Jabbering
Buffett explains what a trade deficit is in layman’s terms…
“In effect, our country has been behaving like an extraordinarily rich family that possesses an immense farm. In order to consume 4 percent more than we produce — that’s the trade deficit — we have, day by day, been both selling pieces of the farm and increasing the mortgage on what we still own.”
He goes on to explain why the US can spend like crazy…
“…we can behave today as we wish because our past financial behavior was so exemplary…”
…and warns that it will be over - sometimes.
“…our national credit card allows us to charge truly breathtaking amounts. But that card’s credit line is not limitless.”
AND he actually proposes a solution!
“We would achieve this balance by issuing what I will call Import Certificates (ICs) to all U.S. exporters in an amount equal to the dollar value of their exports. Each exporter would, in turn, sell the ICs to parties — either exporters abroad or importers here — wanting to get goods into the U.S. To import $1 million of goods, for example, an importer would need ICs that were the byproduct of $1 million of exports. The inevitable result: trade balance. ”
Buffe, we love ya! Now, let’s hope there will soon be a US president that has the balls to actually do something!
Source: marcialis.eu
