February 2009 Archives

I used to love the William Gibson 'Cyberpunk' novels.

Set in a near future of high technology and crumbling society they seemed to represent a possibly accurate vision of what might come to pass, with corporations ruling the roost.

Of course, they were successful not just because they were about the technology and science fiction. At the heart of each such as Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive was a well written thriller.

In this genre, cyberspace was where people met each other electronically - and they did so by 'jacking in' - plugging a cable into a cranial socket in their bonce

Social networking was a bit more hard work in this vision of the near future and I suppose it's now unlikely to come to pass.

With facebook, twitter, ever more hi-tech mobile phones, and so on all providing a mass of easily accessible, user friendly and instant communications technologies, it's hard to imagine surgery ever playing a part in everyday networking and conversation.

Perhaps Cyberpunk is dead - shame really as I'd trust the brain as a bit of hardware more than my error prone computer. Mind you if it crashed after a virus...

Follow me on twitter.

Below - one vision of the future which may never come to pass - everyman communication cybernetics.

A while ago I blogged a moan about Plusnet, my home internet provider.

I discovered that buried in an emailed 'account update' they had introduced a 4gb download limit on my account (the information was buried in a huge list of items and I had missed it).

As I review games, and some are delivered via the web I had encountered problems.

I downloaded Spore and at 3gb had bust my monthy limit for 'peak usage' which, it turns out, is between 8am - midnight.

Plusnet drastically throttled back my speeds making me annoyed, and it was only after complaining that they were put back up again (I'm not a big user at all - no movies etc).

Today I thought I'd check their site and found they're offering a new 'value' package for £5.99 a month, rising to £11.99 depending on your area.

My exchange is actually in an area which is 'market 3' coverage so I would be able to stay at the lower subscription level.

The 'value' package offers 10gb monthly peak usage - so it would, in fact be a substantial upgrade from the current one I pay £14.64 a month for.

Just goes to show, it pays to keep a check on what your provider is doing!

I'll let you know if Plusnet manage to shift the goalposts again, if the speeds are slow, or they try to dodge allowing me to stay on the lower pay level etc etc!

I see B&Q has acted to take its range of house wind turbines off the shelves.

These items, selling for a cool £1,900 were supposed to deliver a pretty impressive 1kw of power - drastically reducing bills in the long run and going a long way to giving enough juice for the whole house.

However following complaints from customers, and studies into the claims, it was discovered that in many cases they actually used more electricity than they produced.

On average they were able to produce just 5 - 10 per cent of the power claimed by the manufacturer.