ISPs burn in hell!
Publicado em , por Pedro Couto e Santos
Ah September! It has arrived. It means many things… it is the month the Summer ends and the Fall begins, heat gives way to breezy days, some rain, cold nights that make you feel lucky you have that nice blanket by the foot of the bed.
It is also the month in which I go back to the gym, recovering from a whole month without lifting a single weight more than once. It’s the month of my wife’s birthday (present already ordered, yes), it’s a nice month, isn’t it?
I’ve worked on cartoons all day, completing six full toons and coming up with a bunch of others, this is all for our top-secret, super-hush-hush 100 cartoon project. We have 48 down, 52 to go.
In the meantime, the three cats, Yellow, Michelle and Scully are all ill with some skin disease that makes their hair fall. And yes, it’s passed on to me. I am now the proud owner of a complicated skin condition which has already produced a small red circle on my forehead. Thankfully I’m on drugs already, hoping it’ll not be as hard to cure as everyone’s telling me (but knowing it is…)
I had a little evening with the family last night. My aunt brought me an Asterix helmet, which I wear all the time now. The wings on it can be moved to reflect my mood, which is very useful to warn others of my mood swings.
Anyway, the main subject of today’s ranting is my ISP. Or all of them. ISPs are like banks: they all offer an unnecessary service, for a high cost and low quality.
Unnecessary because we should all be able to connect directly to the internet, we should all be able to use UNIX as a second nature and we should all be our own sys admins. However, that wonderland doesn’t exist and so we’re given ISPs.
ISPs are considered telecommunications operators, and as such, they generate phone calls and so receive a percentage out of each phone call they generate from the phone company.
So far so good. Too bad that in most countries, on top of what they get from internet users’ fat phone bills, ISPs also charge a monthly fee for their services.
Still somewhat acceptable, although not very. The real problem comes with dud connections (which is what I’ve been getting all day). What’s a dud connection? Well, you all know a dud mine is a mine that isn’t a mine… meaning, it has no explosives or it has malfunctioned, it won’t go off and blow your legs out… it’s a dud . Dud connections are normal connections that are normally established between the user and the ISP but don’t work.
You’re connected, you’re paying your phone call, and your ISP is receiving you monthly fee, plus a percentage (often 30%) on your phone call… but it’s not providing a service at all! You can’t browse the web, you can’t download your porn, ICQ isn’t working, there’s no e-mail, you can’t read User Friendly and worst of all: your last Seti@home work unit is sitting in your harddisk with no hope of ever reaching Seti.
There’s simply no data being transmitted to you by your ISP, you can’t even ping anything except your pitiful self. In the meantime you’ll stay online for a while, trying… you’ll try a national page, a page installed abroad, you’ll check your proxy configs, try to send e-mail, receive e-mail, reconnect ICQ, download posts in Free Agent… nothing will work. You hang up your modem after 5 minutes, 10, sometimes more, and your ISP cashes in on your phone call percentage. Nifty! And they don’t even have to ruin their bandwidth so they can joyfully continue to play Quake III Arena.
It’s the decade of oppression by telecommunication providers, instead of being the decade of advance and freedom in personal communication systems. If you feel otherwise… why not e-mail me?
Sleep well, everyone, I’m gonna hit the Macadamia Nut Brittle Häagen Dazs.
John, 1:27 am, signing off.
