Filed under “Dude, WTF!?” is the curious case of the Belgian ISP called Telenet, whom decided to publish numbers of how much data they are pulling and pushing for their top users. The amount for one user? 2.7 Terabytes. Or 2680 GB to be exact.

For fact loving number crunchers, that’s 571 DVDs (DVD-5 4.70GB Single sided, Single layer), 108 Bluray discs (Single-Layer), and if you are talking old 3.5″ floppies, that’s 1,905,778 of them (1.44mb formatted).

And for those who think this is just one customer heavily using their connection, think again. The top 10 combined is 13,567.4 GB of data, and it doesn’t improve the further down the list you go.

Is the ISP going to spank the user involved? Why, no. Instead, they’re showing off their bit-shifting abilities to encourage their customers to upgrade to the highest level of service, where there isn’t a cap, but there is a “fair use”. And this is very fair use, especially considering it’s just 99 Euro a month (£80/ $125).

I would say it’s almost worth getting it myself, but I live outside of Belgium and my provider already offers me a 20Mbit connection with the possibility of 50 for not much more and relatively relaxed caps. Others on heavily capped services would probably think otherwise.

Now, where’s my passport gone…

[Ars Technica]

The Canadian equivalent of the FCC has ruled today on net neutrality and the practice of throttling different types of data. In short, they seem to have made enemies on both sides of the camp: The ISP’s will be crying foul as they must notify users before they throttle them and that it must be as a last resort. The end users can still be throttled in the end.

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From the department of news-gathering labelled only as “Did this really need to be researched?” comes: Twitter is used for pointlessness…

Yes, someone with way too much time on their hands (Pear Analytics) has found out that out of a random sample of 2000 Tweets, that 40% of them are classifiable as “Pointless Babble”. The rest consists of conversation, spam and self promotion.

Although I would generally say the findings are probably accurate, I do feel that the 2000 sample Tweets checked are simply too few to confirm the findings. 2000 might be a lot, but there are many times more tweets sent on a daily basis, dwarfing the sample. Add in the fact that it’s only the public timeline tweets (ignoring private ones) captured every 30 minutes over a 2 week period, and it becomes really quite meagre. I would have thought that 20,000 or 100,000 Tweets would be a fairly decent amount to check from, but 2000? Seriously?

Pear Analytics have said that they aim to be doing this regularly. I hope next time they monitor more tweets, say, like ours?

I’m sure you’ve seen yesterday’s post about Wolfram Alpha and it’s semi-uselessness compared to the current big dog on campus Google. I did query if I was throwing the wrong data at it. And it turns out to be true.

Searching for “how many roads must a man walk down” actually comes up with a correct answer by Bob Dylan.

Scary…

[Via Digg]

Over the weekend, Wolfram Alpha was launched. And Google got worried. Let’s see if it needs to be worried with a little test of what they can do, and for no good reason at all, chuck Ask Jeeves into the mix too…

Search Term: Malcolm Owen
WA: Finds both Malcolm and Owen as names, comparing the two with US population stats with graphs over time, etc
Go: Obituaries about the lead singer of The Ruts, with Wikipedia as top listing. A post by me is 10th.
AJ: More obituaries for the singer, but a much more varied response after the first couple of listings.

Search Term: Third Tallest Mammal
WA: Doesn’t want to know
Go: Giraffe (Wrong, I want the THIRD tallest), mammals of Pennsylvania, “Mamma Mia!”
AJ: Similar to Google in terms of variety and wrongness.

Search Term: Chuck Norris
WA: Name, Place and Date of Birth, and, I kid you not, a TIMELINE of Chuck Norris, a straight line from 1940 onwards…
Go: Facts, Official Site, Wikipedia, Facts Facts Facts
AJ: Facts, Official Site, General Info, More Facts

Search Term: I before E Except After C
WA: Hissy Fit of nothingness
Go: Wikipedia, then book reviews
AJ: Wikipedia, mostly usage of the term, but also book reviews

Search Term: New York, London
WA: Populations, Distance, Local Time, Elevation
Go: Flights, Hotels, Gordon Ramsay, BBC News Story and a video of The Cranberries
AJ: Flights, Ramsay, BBC News Story, Vogue

Am I impressed by Wolfram Alpha? Not hugely. It just doesn’t want to know anything about things I care about, such as Chimpanzees Riding on a Segway. Maybe the data I’m throwing at it just isn’t what it’s looking for, such as mathematical equations. The speed is an issue, with Google spouting some answers almost instantly, and with some search term crafting would be practically unbeatable.I suppose it will get better the more information it sucks into itself, but I feel I’m going to have to stick with Google for the forseeable future.

Side Note: Ask Jeeves held it’s own. Granted, it’s not as fantastic as Google, but it stayed up there…

I’m sure that everyone in the world has tried Google Maps and loved to zoom in on streets to see their car on their driveway. But what if you could do that to photographs?

No, I’m not talking about normal photos of people posing. I mean of panoramas, such as of a group of skyscrapers. With people inside.

Well, apparently it’s all doable, thanks to Gigapixelphotography.com. They’ve somehow managed to take a really high resolution shot of some buildings in Vancouver, put it onto a page powered by Flickr and allowed people to zoom around it in the vain hope of seeing someone in a window wearing just a towel.
It seems to be working in a similar way to Google Maps, by making the image into tiles at various levels of detail and then only loading those that are needed. I dread to think what the full size image’s resolution and file size would be.

Sadly, it’s down thanks to a massive audience, but I would guess it will be up again once the people at Digg have left it alone…

[Via Digg]

As someone that really should be on the cutting edge of technology, it seems strange, but after a long and painful battle with my conscience, I have something to admit.

It’s taken me a while, but I am now a user of Twitter.

I know, I’m late to the party again, but hear me out.
When this microblogging thing came out, I just couldn’t understand the appeal of it at all. Why go from long and mostly informative communications, to short and extremely to the point posts with little or no detail added to make it interesting?
Cue attempting to use Pownce (I’m a closet Kevin Rose fan, sorrry). Unforunately the fairly limiting client given for usage didn’t help things along. There was little in alternative client development, so an Adobe Air client was what I had to put up with. And I just didn’t post much in that time.
Now, Pownce is in the coffin and lies in the cemetry after the project got wound up, and Twitter is the all-singing, all-dancing media darling being used by everyone, their zombie pets and Oprah.

I have already opened an account, and in the process have started to slowly “follow” people. Such as Stephen Fry, Kevin Rose, Brian Brushwood and, amazingly, Paul Daniels.

Over time I hope to be able to learn how to effectively use Twitter in a more full capacity than I am right now, maybe even by using my phone instead of waiting until I get to a PC, but for the moment would you mind Following Me?