The Australian Broadband Network is the envy of no one. This is terrible. Constant dropouts, and slow speeds are the norm in Australia. We could have had super fast Internet in Australia, but we got copper wires combined with some fiber connections. But the presence of a 1000 Mega Bits Per Second network like the NBN would allow hi-resolution scans of X-Rays and live streaming video to schools in remote areas to revolutionize the school of the air in the outback. The Obama administration has proposed a 4G network covering 98% of the population of America at a cost of 3 Billion dollars. That would be a wireless network like the Telstra Next G network. That network has a pretty fast connection, but is below the rest of the world in terms of connection speed. South Korea are the fastest in connection speed and way ahead of Australia. Three years ago they had 7 Mega Bits Per Second, soon they will get 1 Gigabit Per Second, which is ludicrously fast. The below video shows a Korean Internet speed test of 807 megabits per second. I am jealous of this, maybe in 2050, we in Australia will have a Internet connection to rival these amazing speeds.
Romania has 1 gigabit per second. That is in 2016. Nowadays, it might be faster. I had an interesting day today, I was in the town library and I was asked for help by a gentleman who was using a laptop with the latest Mepis Linux distribution and he wanted help with getting the sound working. I showed him a few commands for Linux like how to type mplayer -tv input=0 tv:// to display the webcam. He then showed me a Pinnacle PCTV DVB-T dongle that he wanted to get working on Linux. I used dmesg to find out what device it was and downloaded and installed the appropriate firmware file into /lib/firmware and then it was working according to dmesg, I then tried it with mplayer after downloading the appropriate channels.conf file for my town and installing it into ~/.mplayer but the mplayer window would not display when I typed mplayer dvb:// but the signal must have been too weak. I suggested installing a better program for viewing DVB broadcasts on Linux and that might fix things. But he was happy with the webcam working and learning a bit about the Linux command line.
It feels good to help someone out and share Linux knowledge first hand. More people should do this and make some-ones day. He went to the Telstra shop, but the people there would know nothing about Linux and getting a Telstra NextG wireless adapter working on Linux which was his main problem. I have tried a Dodo one before on Ubuntu 8.10, and they suck. Very hard to get working on Linux. He also had Windows Vista Home Premium installed, which worked well and supported his TV dongle and the Wireless Broadband device, but using that OS is only for those who like suffering. Getting back to broadband though, Uganda in 2015 had over 100 megabits per second 4G speeds, I wonder how useful this is, how much does it cost to get an Internet plan with 4G. I would prefer to have proper broadband connected with a wired installation using fibre, but this is now what the government wants right now.
The One Thousand and One nights is a good book I have read with many good stories with good messages in them that tell the reader that greed will destroy you and that when you are a captain of a ship, landing on an island that is actually the back of a whale is not a good idea. But Sinbad the sailor was unlucky and it is surprising that any captain would let him on his ship. I also enjoyed reading the Necroscope series of books that dealt with a guy, Harry Keogh, who fights vampires and can communicate with the dead. He fights an evil guy who can torture dead bodies and the spirits of the dead can still feel it, like when he was working in a mortuary and a slaughterhouse. Harry Keogh worked in a secretive group of special people, sort of like Hellboy. He dies at the end of the last book then he regenerates himself. And there were vampires in the book that were super vampires called the Wamphyri that had a gauntlet glove thing they wore on their right hand that was studded with knife blades and other sharp objects. Very nice people indeed.
Arabic literature is always the best for reading. Plato’s The Republic is also a good book written about 400BC and it accurately described the George Bush Administration, talking about how the Democratic leader will distract the people with wars and entertainment to keep them from questioning his rule. Sounds like America at the moment. After the US Military attacked the twin towers they are cracking down on human rights and putting the naked body scanners in the airports and now the body scanners in vans prowling the streets that can scan you from the road. That is a huge invasion of privacy. But I prefer to read books than watch too much tv, I have read some of the works of Edgar Allen Poe, the Pit and the Pendulum is pretty horrifying, I wish I knew what was actually at the bottom of the pit. Some kind of eldrich man-eating fungus I suspect.