Posts by Andrew Bristow

DrinkorDie warez leader jailed for 51 months

Team America: World Police strike again

Its obvious that this guy committed a crime. However, as the crime was comitted in Australia why oh why do Team America: World Police get to ship him over to 'the land of the free'?? Its theft so they say. So why wasnt he procecuted for theft in Australia. We arent talking about someone who hacked the pentagon and got access to the X-Files here. This is someone who violated the copyright of computer games and applications developers. This should have been covered in Australias own courts.

The main reason they did this was because they wanted a big name they could put behind bars in the US as a warning to everyone. It doesnt matter what country you live it. Team America will force your country to bend over and if they dont? Economic sanctions or invasion will follow no doubt!

Virgin throttles national cable network

Broadband = Download large files, stream video and audio. Wave of the future...

Anyone remember when broadband first arrived on the scene. It was incredible! All the ISP's told how if we signed up to their great service we could dowload large files, stream video, download music, game online lag-free and all of the above at the same time! So what ever happened to this?

These days if we want to download those large files that all the ISPs used to tell us about we have to leave our computers on all night when we are asleep. Call me impatient here but if i see something i want to download i generally want it asap. I dont look at it and think id like to use that in 12 hours time.

The transfer limits listed by Virgin are a joke. Fortunatly im on ADSL with a half way decent ISP (Eclipse). They do throttle speed but it seems to depend on what you are doing. The other weekend i downloaded about 4gb worth of PS3 demos and the PS3 YDL Linux iso at around 3gb. The demos came down at a very good speed but the Linux iso took about 12 hours.

I used to be jealous of my collegues who have cable in their area and have 10mb lines. Now, with this throttling, it doesnt matter if they are on 5mb, 10mb or 20mb. My 4mb ADSL line, at two thirds the price of their 10/20mb line will actually provide a much better peak time service.

Hopefully the ISPs will soon be forced into changing their advertising to remove the word 'unlimited' and to remove any reference to the line speed as it seems that this figure will be irrelevant in the near future.