by on 21 May 2008 115 Comments

What is a heavy user?

Since Orange has imposed its Fair Usage Policy on us, there has been intense discussion here. The latest version of the FUP states that:

Your FUP threshold, i.e the amount of data that you can download will depend on the offer to which you are subscribed to. Monitoring of your downloads will be done on a monthly basis and if you exceed your FUP threshold over a period of 2 consecutive months, you will be subjected to FUP on the third month. 

Orange then gives the following example:

(1) you exceed the FUP threshold for your package during months 1 and 2. (2) during month 3, you again exceed your threshold, say on the 21st. (3) after the 21st until the end of month, you will be subject to speed restrictions. (4) at the start of month 4, your speed will be back to normal as long as you do not again exceed the FUP threshold.

Naturally, there is a major unknown in this equation: what is the FUP download threshold per month?

It seems that the following has been said by the Orange people:

  • FUP download threshold for Home 128K is 10Gb,
  • FUP download threshold for MyT 256 is 3Gb.

The 3Gb monthly threshold is causing some uproar in the Mauritian Internet community as many feel that 3Gb is pathetically low. At first, I had the (wrong) impression that 3Gb was reasonable. But then I checked what I’ve been using on my own MyT 256 ADSL connection for the past six months:

  • 1.6Gb in November 2007,
  • 2.4Gb in December 2007,
  • 3.1Gb in January 2008,
  • 2.7Gb in February 2008,
  • 2.5Gb in March 2008 and
  • 3.2Gb in April 2008.

… and I realized that 3Gb is really too low a threshold!

As you can see, I’m dangerously close to the FUP threshold. But I am not a normal Internet user. For the time being, Christina and I browse a lot and we do indulge in some MP3 downloads from time to time but we don’t watch videos from YouTube a lot and we don’t download DivX movies at all.

BUT this might change anytime. Christina and I might like to start watching videos and listening to radio all day long and this is bound to make me a heavy downloader even though we’re just being normal (and very patient given the ridiculous speeds we have to endure here) Internet users.

I wonder how the Orange people came up with the 3Gb for the MyT 256. I guess they only did some simple divisions using their calculator. But they must realize that we are in 2008 now and video and streaming audio is the norm (ask Steve Jobs and Bill Gates). Sure, I understand the need to have a FUP (or else the whole system will just break) but 3Gb is too low. In my opinion, Orange must think carefully about this threshold and communicate clearly with its subscribers. I am sure that together, we can come up with a threshold which is more in line with how people use the Internet now. Of course, given the fact that the nature of information is changing rapidly on the Internet, this threshold will have to be reviewed upwards very frequently.

The Internet is a major enabler (like Computer Science in fact). It is a tool that allows people to innovate and to create wealth. Orange has a social responsibility towards the development of the country. Limiting the usefulness and potential of the Internet is going to harm Mauritius in the long run.

Get your sights right, Orange!

(PS to my readers: what has been your own Internet consumption over the last six months? Use the online tool to calculate this.)

Filed Under: News, Technology, Web
by on 08 May 2008 43 Comments

In awe at Mac OS X 10.5 aka Leopard

I’ve upgraded my MacBook to Mac OS X 10.5 also known as Leopard. And I love it!

I have been using computers proficiently for, let’s see, around 20 years now and I am as excited with Leopard as when I first got my Commodore Amiga 500 around 1990 and I first discovered Linux around 2000. This has nothing to do with being an Apple fanboy or whatever. I am just an ecstatic geek.

Of course, I dislike the translucent menu bar and the new dock but I can confidently say that I am in awe at the 298 remaining enhancements. Funnily, I resisted upgrading to Leopard for weeks as I thought that Tiger was perfect. Now that I have been using Leopard for a few days, I can see how wrong I was…

Luckily, making the translucent menu bar opaque is easy as there is an option for that in the Desktop & Screen Saver system preference window. To have a saner dock, you only have to issue the following in a terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

and maybe install Quicksilver.

I did not come up with this terminal incantation by myself. Instead I got it in one of the most comprehensive and exhaustive reviews I’ve ever read in my life. It’s (of course) John Siracusa’s review of Leopard for Ars Technica. I spent hours reading this review today and ingesting and trying everything. I hope that one day I’ll manage to write something similar comparable.

I’ll finish with John’s conclusion:

The stage is set for Mac OS X 10.6 to triumph beyond the bounds of its ancestors. In the meantime, it’s the Mac development community’s opportunity to shine. Whether it reigns for two and a half years, like Tiger, or even longer, I’m looking forward to my time aboard starship Leopard.

Filed Under: Apple, Technology
by on 05 May 2008 33 Comments

A new look for Noulakaz.net

What do you think of the new look of my weblog? I’ve tried to keep things simple while enhancing navigation. I’ve also doubled the number of Google adverts in order to get more money :-)

As you’ve noticed, I’ve used a Mac-inspired theme which I find really nicely done. I’ve also added a Random Posts widget in the right sidebar as I feel that this will allow people to (re)discover ancient posts that might be useful to them. Personally, I’ve just spent 30 minutes reading my old writings and they are not too bad…

I’ve still some work to do. I have to put more obvious links to the photos, music and videos I’ve put online. I’ll do that tonight while the kids are sleeping…

Filed Under: News, Web
by on 03 May 2008 192 Comments

What is the fair use policy?

Since the rebranding, Orange in Mauritius has quietly imposed on us its fair use policy which is described as follows on the website of Mauritius Telecom:

[The Fair Use Policy] is designed to make sure your broadband service is as fast as possible and reliable whenever you are connected.

Some of our broadband customers use file sharing software and download large files like music and videos. This uses up lots of network capacity leaving less available for others. This means that the speed of your broadband service is then affected.

Am I likely to be affected by the Fair Use Policy?

If you don’t regularly use file sharing software or download large files from the internet it’s unlikely you’ll ever be affected by this policy.

What will happen if my use is very high?

If you only occasionally have very high usage, we’re unlikely to be concerned. If your usage continues to be very high, we’ll advise you if your usage is excessive. Ultimately, if your usage still remains excessive, we may have reduce the transmission speed of the service whilst we monitor your usage.

In general, this seems like a good thing. Those who continuously download too much will first be contacted by the MT personnel and if, consequently, they don’t reduce their bandwidth requirements then they’ll be penalized. This seems like the most sensible thing to do given the geographical situation of Mauritius and the limited number of Internet links we can have access to.

There are two aspects that somewhat disturb me though:

  • The Fair Use Policy has been retrofitted in our existing contracts. Is this legal? Or should have we been contacted by Mauritius Telecom to sign a new contract?
  • The Fair Use Policy system is not transparent. What happens if the son (or daughter) of one of the big-bosses of Mauritius Telecom (or a Minister) uses too much bandwidth? Will the MT technicians contact him or her? Will they have the courage to limit his/her bandwidth? I have some doubts. For the system to work (i.e. so that people do not complain), it must be 100% transparent (i.e. everyone should know what all other Internet subscribers have used as bandwidth) but this looks a lot like a privacy violation to me…

Opinion?

[Thanks to Ajay Ramjatan for initiating this whole thought process...]

Filed Under: Technology, Web
by on 01 May 2008 16 Comments

Watch TV less. Create more.

I’ve just come across a very interesting and deep transcript of a talk by Clay Shirky on Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. Here is my favorite part:

It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ‘s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer. It doesn’t mean that we’ll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we’ll do it less.

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

You bet, Clay!

Personally, I prefer reading a nice online article on technology, trying to make sense of it, suddenly getting the point and feverishly write something in the same vein on my own blog than sitting in front of the TV spending hours being passive and eating peanuts.

I believe that TV as we know it will die in the near future. Instead we’ll all use Pay-per-view and we’ll watch TV only when we want to waste some time doing nothing productive. The rest of the time, we’ll be in front of our nice Linux- or Mac OS X-based computer (Windows does not exist in my future…) educating ourselves… and others in the process.

(Photo courtesy of Mary Hockenbery)

Filed Under: Education, News, Web