Geekery

How low can you go? Uncapped internet price-wars!

Posted on 29. Mar, 2010 by Jake.

Today the latest company to step into the fray in offering South Africans the cheapest possible uncapped internet were MyISP, who undercut all competitors in launching their 384 Kbps uncapped service for R159 per month, and their 4 Mbps service for R459.
For more details see here.

As far as we are aware this is the cheapest yet! With reference to a great post on Chris Mills’s blog iMod as well as Hellkom, let’s look at what the others are offering. I have stuck to those offering 384 Kbps for less than R300.

MWEB

* 384k uncapped – R219
* 512k uncapped – R299
* 4096k uncapped – R539

The guys who kicked off the price war! They need no introduction, though it must be said they aren’t everyone’s favourite company.

OpenWeb.

* 384k uncapped – R219
* 512k uncapped – R299
* 4096k uncapped – R539

They are partnered with MWeb and with the same prices this is pretty much the same deal, although their support and services have a good reputation (and may well be better than MWeb’s).

Imagine (IS)
* 384k uncapped – R199
* 4096k uncapped – R499
Of course it was only a matter of time before IS joined the fray.

Snowball
* 384k uncapped – R199
* 4096k uncapped – R499
Must say I don’t know much about these guys but I saw their uncapped option listed on Hellkom.

AfriHost

* 384k uncapped – R197
* 512k uncapped – R297
* 4096k uncapped – R497

They were tied as the cheapest available until MyISP stepped it.

Axxess

* 384k uncapped – R196
* 4096k uncapped – R496

Going with Axxess instead of AfriHost means a whopping saving of R1!!!

If we are leaving anyone out please comment below. Also, if you have any criticism and praise for the above ISPs please help any readers of this article by telling us about your experiences below. Game on!

Continue Reading

I hate your blog

Posted on 12. Nov, 2009 by Jake.

The pure socialist beauty of the blog is that anyone can have one. You don’t need a license or any form of qualification. These days they are like opinions, or arseholes, everybody has one, and many of them are full of shit. And so I present to you some of the worst blogs on the interweb:

1. Deep Thought: http://easyasfallingoffablog.blogspot.com

In its own words, this blog is about:

‘Random thoughts on subjects such as youth work, worship, God, the Church of England, films, paintings and occasional peeks at Latin, Medieval history, Merovingians and bishops along with a healthy smattering of children’s television, books, cooking and other oddities!’

If you find this interesting, you are probably the blog’s author, or a lobotomy patient, or maybe both.

2. Toast 99: http://hornytoubab.blogspot.com/

Billed as the ‘everyday musings of a middle-aged man’, the five most recent posts on this blog are about the author’s attempts to get his wife decent travel insurance. Gripping stuff.

3. Baller King: http://www.ballerking.com/

God’s gift to women now has his own blog.

It contains educational posts with titles such as ‘The Recession Will Make Getting Laid Easier’ and ‘becoming “exotic” and “intelligent” to a girl”‘.

Here is a sample of the blog’s sagely advice:

‘…when dating girls, remember two things:

1. Don’t spend too much money on them before they sleep with you. Otherwise they wont’ respect you.

2. You still need to pay for any date you go on with them though. So don’t go on any expensive dates before you stick it in her’.

I would bet any amount of hard cash that whoever writes this blog is actually a virgin with chronic BO and at least four cats.

4. Bad Hair Day: http://badhairday.typepad.com/bad_hair_day/

Yes, believe it or not this site is literally about catching people who are having bad hair days and posting the pics online. This is what happens when Heat Magazine’s rejection of your job application isn’t enough to kill your dream of being a writer.

Continue Reading

3 of the Many Reasons Why the Internet is Depressing

Posted on 16. Oct, 2009 by Jake.

Once upon a time, in the olden days, if you wanted any new information you had to ride by horseback to the next town to talk to its wisest men and risk being attacked by a sabre tooth tiger in the process. Now we have all the info we could possibly want at the click of a mouse and what do we spend our precious time doing? Searching for pics of Britney Spears flashing her panties, that’s what. Instead of ushering in an age of knowledge, the internet is instead a celebration of human stupidity, and I’m sure I’m not the only geek out there who finds this a tad depressing. Here are some examples…

Reason no. 1:
People who shouldn’t be famous
There are a whole bunch of them. The Numa Numa kid filmed himself on a webcam badly miming to a crap Eurovision pop song and became an icon. The Star Wars kid ran around on camera making a fool out of himself with a makeshift lightsaber and gained similarly instant fame. Mahir Cagri, a Turkish guy who must have been the inspiration behind Sasha Baron Cohen’s character Borat, became internationally recognised just for propositioning women in Broken English. The Tourist Guy found fame when he was deep etched and placed on a bunch of dangerous situations and locally, a similar idea turned humble (if strangely dressed) wait-lifter Cassie Booyse into Vernon Koekemoer. And Vincent Van Gogh died, unknown, after selling one painting in his entire lifetime. Depressed yet?

Reason no. 2:
LolCats and ROFLCats
Whether you go to lolcats.com, roflcats.com or icanhascheezburger.com you will be met with the same thing – pictures of cats being unnecessarily cute with a pathetic pidgin internet English caption tacked onto it. The phenomenon was started when Eric Nakagawa found the original I Can Has Cheeseburger pic on the net and started the site of the same name. As if any proof were needed that people are mostly very stupid, the site soon had millions of hits a day. Countless imitations, including LOLDogs and, far more disturbingly, LOLBums, now exist. While we like to think we are more intelligent than animals, the fact that they don’t sit around on Photoshop making ROFLPeople suggests it’s the other way round.

Reason no. 3:
Very bad things
There are sites on the internet hosting things so disgusting that they make you question the humanity as a whole. These range from the bizarrely amusing (example – Cakefart.com, which literally is exactly what its name says it is) to the utterly diabolical, the kind of thing it one watches out of morbid curiosity and then has to work through in therapy for years afterwards. Famous examples include Goatse.com, LemonParty.org and, worst of all, the infamous 2 Girls One Cup. I will not describe the content of any of these sites to you and, if you visit any of them, I take no responsibility whatsoever for any psychological damage caused. All I know is that after viewing any one of these clips it is hard to argue that makind is inherently good.
PS: I have mercifully decided not to provide any links on this one

Continue Reading

Google versus Microsoft’s Bing

Posted on 03. Aug, 2009 by Jake.

Ok, so English was never the most fascinating subject for me back in the day. No surprises right? Gimme a comp sci, science or biology class any day over another reading of ye olde Will Shakes and I was a happier kid. Having said that, this stuff is just a little bit more interesting than trying to conjugate your average verbs.

The verb ‘to Google’ was chosen by the American Dialect Society as the ‘most useful word of 2002’, according to the most useful innovation of the 21st century, Wikipedia (incidentally, my go-to source for first stop info).

Too useful, in fact, for the lawyers of Google Incorporated to sleep easily at night.  If ‘to Google’ is merely to perform an internet search then it doesn’t matter how that search is achieved, right? It’s understandable that Google wants to protect its trademark from entering mainstream use, but does this make marketing sense? Xerox managed to protect their brand, but would anyone looking for a photocopy machine favour a Xerox over another big name? If they did once, it just ain’t like that anymore. And the internet age has increased the rate of change – and the rate at which we forget.

Farhad Manjoo argued persuasively in Slate mag that Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, doesn’t try to out-Google Google, a strategy that has tended for every other attempted player, to fail. Rather, Microsoft’s product is no worse than Google (and sometimes, according to David Pogue in the New York Times, it’s better).

Instead, the company aims to outmaneuver Google by presenting Bing as users’ default search engine at every opportunity they have. And being Microsoft, there are plenty of opportunities. In turn, they want you ‘to Bing’.

Unless Google can maintain a clear technological edge that distinguishes Googling from Binging( try say that fast five times!) then browsers will search with whatever they’re presented with. For now, Google has entered our daily language and, with it, our consciousness. Why give that up? Some things are too sacred for even Microsoft to hold a monopoly on.

Continue Reading