Slow as a wet week

Finally, some rain.

-File Photograph

It's certainly welcome here, thats for sure. Here's Cheers for the rain!

Hello,

www.hello.com

Hello is a little piece of Google software that ties in with Picassa to let you share your photos with people. It is especially good for sharing photos with people on dial-up Internet because when you offer the photo, they get to see a thumbnail version before they choose to accept it. It can also be helpful to tech support people or that guy that everyone calls when they have a computer problem because it lets you send them a snapshot of your screen! This lets you show them the error instead of having to explain it over the phone or type it out - letter by meaningless letter - in a chat box.

Goodbye.

Vividas

There is still some contention over whether the Internet is good enough for voice. Even I have gone through quite a few "Internet voice programs", always looking for something that can deliver a clearer sound and use less bandwidth. NetMeeting in the early days was usually used with voice only even though it had webcam capabilities. RogerWilco (now owned by GameSpy) was one of the first programs that was designed to allow players in multiplayer games to chat to each other. I used it under Windows95 while playing Doom II. Dial-up internet back then and it didn't work very well anyway, but worked great on a LAN.

Most instant messenger programs started to implement voice and webcam capabilities to a certain extent. I'm still not keen on a webcam. Just give me voice, you don't need to see me. Next thing you know someone has recorded you picking your nose and stuck it on YouTube!

TeamSpeak was the next VoIP software I used and it was pretty good at not using very much bandwidth and working very well over Hamachi. Lately I've been using Ventrilo which seems to have better clarity of voice but, from what I've read is a bit more hungry on the bandwidth.

When I started playing the original shareware Doom game with my mates under a house on Simpson Street using coax network cable with 10Mb/sec network cards on 486 computers running MSDOS, we were amazed at the real-time 3d looking graphics flew about on our half-meg graphics cards. Then we amazed ourselves even further by playing it across town on 14.4 Kb/sec Modem! Wow! Thats Wow, in its previous, non-World of Warcraft, sense. Speaking of Warcraft, the original Warcraft: Orcs & Humans was another game we used to play on that hardware.

Since I got my broadband turned on I have seen plenty of methods for streaming audio and video. RealPlayer was a contender for top spot for a while. Microsoft, as usual, nearly got it with WindowsMedia HD. Macromedia did some nice stuff with Flash, which belongs to Adobe now.

But one piece of technology has really impressed me today. Vividas. It seems they've lifted some tasty code for encoding and streaming audio and video from the Open Source Community called FFmpeg. The cool thing is that it plays quickly, looks good, sounds good and doesn't stop! Well, its done that everytime I have successfully used it. A few times it crashed FireFox and the controls are far from sophisicated with pause/play and stop being the only functions. But damn it loads fast, is fullscreen and is of an incredible quality. In my humble opinion anyway.

Vividas

Check it out and leave me a comment about quality of sound and video and what speed your connection to the internet is. My connection is a 1.5Mb ADSL Broadband link through TPG.

Sneakernet still has better bandwidth sometimes.

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And in other news...

Broadband. Everyone wants it. It is nearing the end of the year 2006. When I was a kid, 2006 was the future. We are supposed to have hovercars by now. But here we are and there are still people in Australia that can't get broadband.

My brother was called by a marketing guy from Telstra BigPond and offered a broadband package. He told the guy that broadband wasn't available in his area but the telemarketer assured him that his exchange had just been upgraded and he could indeed get broadband. He was signed up.

His exchange was not upgraded. He was billed for a months access. Oh, sure, he was able to ring up and get the charges removed from his bill, but there is no word on when the exchange will be upgraded and until then he is stuck to dial-up. 33.6k dial-up at that! This is so slow it renders useless many services that I take for granted. GoogleTalk simply will not log in with such narrow bandwidth.

Who's fault is it?

Check out this story from ZDNet Australia who blame Telstra for these broadband black spots.

Weren't we guaranteed service to remote and regional areas when Telstra was sold? Shouldn't John Howard be held at least partly responsible?

Telstra turned on their G3 network recently for mobile broadband. Even there rural and regional areas are pushed to a back seat and, well, ignored.

"You'll get it when we get around to it! Us big city folk are busy, okay? Hush now!"

Then we have the T3 Float. Why does it feel like Australia is selling it's greatest asset? Will my brother ever be able to enjoy brodband or does everyone have to move into town to access these basic services?

Life was meant to be a constant struggle. If you are ever happy, be patient, it will pass.