Everything’s shite since Roy Orbison died.

Well in, Paula. :)

150mb of goodness. thumbs up to UPC.

100mb is not only used for downloads but for Skype and online gaming.
So I think upc have nothing to worry about.There service is second to none compare to eircom.

3Mb is enough for Skype and gaming, pagan. The OP is right, the speed is for downloading or streaming, whether legal or illegal.

3mb is no where near enough for gaming

It sure is enough. Seeing as I managed all these years with just 2Mb and only recently have Vodafone been able to offer me 3Mb. Sure, I can’t game and torrent at the same time, but I can game away no probs.

Have you tried playing call of duty on it it’s like a constant 2bar and shitty hit detection

Mainly RPG and RTS on the PC, haven’t played a PC FPS in a while (laptop sucks for it) but Battlefield and CoD are fine on XBox Live.

*Ahem* Contention ratio?!

You definitely don’t need 100mb for gaming/skype.

Hi Eoghan, Barry is right! Latency is far more important than bandwidth for online gaming!

Yes, its all about latency with gaming online. I play Battlefield and Fifa on PC with only 2.5mb and its perfect. I could get UPC but I dont need any more.

Skype would use a tiny portion of that as voice only occurs between 2 – 4kHz and is compressed. You can use any decent VOIP effectively with less than a MB and still surf the web with no issues. The problem with regular broadband is that there is no QoS for VOIP so downloading files, listening to music and using Skype at the same time is a problem (without a packet shaper). Gaming depends on a number of factors but it certainly doesn’t on the type of game (RTS / RPG) as you aren’t sending graphics or sound down the wire (unless you are using voice in which case it is compressed even more than regular VOIP).

Realistically even if you were gaming (even fps) , using skype or watching netflix etc.. 10mbps is enough even for 2-3 people in the house online at the same time , 100+ mbps would be data centre / large office speed , for home users it makes no sense unless your downloading a lot,

Barry, I am in the graphics industry and work from home. Because I regularly upload and download files between 20MB and 200MB that means I am engaging in criminal activity?
Get real!

Where exactly did I say you are engaging in criminal activity, Paul? Putting words in my mouth, eh? There’s no doubt that there’s legitimate uses for fast speeds – I myself download a lot of Linux distros (albeit in work where I can get 2.5MB speeds so it’s only a matter of minutes vs hours at home).

I used to work as a web dev from home, and because I’m in a poorly serviced rural area had to make do with dial up when most of the rest of the population of Ireland was changing from 512Kb to 2Mb. I was probably one of the last web devs in Ireland who still optimised for dial-up but not because of concern of the users but to make things easy on myself :)

@Paul, just rereading my original comment again and I sure did say the words “downloading” and “whether legally or illegally” so by your post where you say you use the extra speed for downloading large [legal] files you completely validated my point. Thanks.

what about netflicks.???

So you probably pay the same for 2.5 as you would for 30 on UPC.

Barry’s just jealous because he has crappy bogger speeds.

:-) Brightened up my morning Sean

Hear hear Sean muck savages

Ah Malcolm,
You are so cool.
When you are commuting to work do you haul your vinyl collection behind you in a trailer, with a little elf employed to play your favourite tracks at his random discretion?

Best sound?
Are you one of the few audio phd geniuses to have noticed that the melody lines of clarinets and piccolos aren’t audible on digital music files?

Respect.

Hi Jo – I don’t buy vinyl to be cool, it’s something I buy to listen to at home. As I’m an old fart, that’s one way I like to enjoy music. Sitting down with my ears open. The sound is fantastic – warmer, more genuine and fuller than any compressed digital formats. You don’t have to be an audiophile with a phd in sound dynamics to hear for yourself the difference between two different sound formats. So is someone who prefers the sound of a CD to an mp3 also a snob? Luckily the seperates I invested in 15 years ago (all secondhand apart from the speakers) still work perfectly, they don’t have battery issues, glitches or cracked screens. Great value!

When on public transport I listen to an ipod or read a book.

have to agree about vinyl i think its actually the sound of the needle in the groove

Whatever you are into.
I’m just pointing out that all of the instruments are audible on a digital music file.
All of this “warmer, more genuine, fuller” shit – I don’t get it.
Some vinyl enthusaists go on about the crackle – that’s just psychological nostalgia reminding them of their youth in the 1970s.
Something that impinges on the actual sound of the instrumentation enhances it? Respect.
For me, as a composer and producer of modern music, if I can hear all of the instruments and their different rhythms and melodies – that’s what constitutes the full music experience.
But I guess most humans are very confused about everything.

@Jo – each to their own. Subtleties like the quality of production and particularly engineering are more apparent in analogue reproduction. Maybe you don’t care about that, but for me that’s an important part of most of the music I like. It’s essentially the difference between an unencoded analogue soundwave and an encoded then decoded finite digital soundwave (quantization) which results in people using terms like “warmth” and “realism” to describe why they prefer vinyl. The crackle is only audible between tracks anyway. But there are people out there of course who spend absurd amounts on seperates – my attitude to them is probably a bit like yours is to me! There are reasons I’ve continued to buy records and it has nothing to do with fashion or nostalgia – it was very uncool to have vinyl when CDs were all the rage!

@Jo Hickey I agree with your points for the most part, it’s just the obnoxious way in which you worded them that put me off. I’m not for the whole vinyl shenanigans that some people love to propogate, but I do hold a soft spot for memories of sitting next to the vinyl player when I was a child listening to Simon & Garfunkel records. So don’t be an arse just because you feel like someone’s wrong and you feel some valedictorial need to change someone else’s views with an insult.

I have Cantate Domino by Oscars Motettkör, one of the best audiophile albums ever released. I riped it to FLAC (lossless) and Ogg Vorbis. They both sound flawless, just like the original. I rip to 192 kbit Ogg Vorbis most of the time.

Tests show people can’t tell the difference between CD/Vinyl and 192 kbit HE-AAC and Ogg Vorbis.

You’re all wrong, cassette tapes is where it’s at. :-p

I’ve just converted the latest Orbital album from mp3 to vinyl and you are correct – it does “sound” warmer and more real.
If something is uncool enough there is a good chance that it is actually cool.
I really don’t want to have the last word on this.

The “warmth” has little to do with the source, vinyl. It’s go more to do with the amplifier, and tube Amps produce the warm sound of Lo-Fi listening. Given it’s the Amp, if the source was good quality digital Ogg or AAC, the sound would be as nice, and warm.

The best Amps use KT88 or L6L tubes, which are still manufactured in Russia and China maybe a few other places. Some enthusiasts only use vintage valves, claiming the modern copies are not good enough.

Thanks for that David.
I have good speakers.
Whatever the miniscule, miniscule, miniscule difference is with those vintage speakers, for me it’s not worth the hassle or cost.
I’m sure I could get a graphic equalizer with a setting of “vintage vinyl” or “vintage amplifier” that will do the job, if I wanted to.
:-)

Nothing, this is exactly what it’s for.

I doubt there is any ISP in the world that knows exactly what every subscriber is accessing!

Are you implying everyone with a fast connection is involved in piracy¿ I have 150mb connection for watching videos on vimeo.

@Cpm What videos are you watching on Vimeo? Out of interest.

@Andrew – mostly snowboarding videos. About 20 new home made HD videos are added per day, so watching them is part of my daily ritual.

42 days to go…

@Cpm Are you sure some of the snowboarding videos aren’t uploaded by public users from some sports channel like Eurosport or such like? Wouldn’t it be bad if people could take those back down just because they don’t want you watching little snippets of them on Vimeo, Youtube and Veoh?

@Andrew all material on vimeo is original

Because of sony licensing and how new bluray is, the cost per disc is still relatively high, the machinery used to produce cd’s was just upgraded when dvd’s came around, sonys heavy industry division insisted on new machinery to manufacture bluray when it came about and the machines to do this would be in the 100k region each, so some media manufacturers are still recouping costs, theres also the licence fee for drives and media itself, the wholesale cost of a bluray disc vs a dvd is about 3x , studios had to buy new equipment to edit the movies on , new cameras to shoot in HD, the cost of bluray discs will not fall to dvd levels for another 5-6 years if even, optical storage is a dead duck for home media distribution anyway.

Exactly. Every artist that I listen to I have seen speaking on this subject has said the same thing. They don’t mind people downloading their music, more people will hear them that way. They just ask that if you like it maybe you’ll check them out live, or maybe you might buy a tshirt or some other merch.. If you like the album maybe buy it.. But every one of the fully accepted that people did this and to start getting snarky about it just gets you the Lars Ulrich treatment..

By contrast, all the local bands / artists I know of use the likes of YouTube and bandcamp etc to their advantage.. For the first while they just want people to listen. Then when some people decide to pay for it it just gets better.. There’s less and less need for record labels. That’s the real crux of this matter..

They’re two different things. “IrishSOPA” was an adjustment to current Irish legislation to allow groups like IRMA to take service providers to court in Ireland. ACTA was the other which was a strict reform on how the internet is governed and was disguised as a trade agreement to try and get it passed. This agreement was signed by the Irish ambassador in Japan along with other European ambassadors however after being reviewed in Europe, the proposal was scrapped.

@sketched I joined deezer a few months back after my iPod packed in and it’s fantastic. cant see any need for either buying physical cds or downloading

Have you listened to the Beatles or Led Zeppelin on Spotify?

Some day for sure. Metallica have just published all of their studio albums.

Sorry… On Spotify

ya don’t even need that Simon. i am with eircom and i can access tpb just fine. just go to tab.nothingishere.com or many other such tpb proxies. just Google “tpb proxy” and i agree. nothing illegal here folks ;)

I agree that there will always be methods for piracy or sharing of music in this manner but to restrict my internet use just on the off chance I download a track from a Sony artist is wrong, it would be like putting speed bumps on every section of road that you can do greater than the posted speed limit in case you go over it. Why wont Sony just requests that all mp3 aff wav flac etc are blocked from downloading or are they frightened that it may effect their revenue.

Wasn’t Kim dotcom producing a model called blackbox I belive? Whereby users could torrent music for free while artists got paid through advertising on the site.

I would be more inclined to buy the CDs if there was some hope it made any difference to the artist, but the people who make most of the money from album sales is the label. So they can spend so much money pushing crap like Britney Spears at us..

This is why gigs and merchandise are so important, and why I try to buy direct from artists / independent labels.

As for the big wigs? Screw them. They’ve been screwing over artists for years.

I don’t see why anyone wouldn’t. Nobody realistically gets hurt along the way. A few advertising & branding executives might need to look for a job in a different area; but nobody is going hungry just because a small group of hangers-on and bloat are no longer needed to get the stuff out there. Creativity won’t cease to exist just because the middle men have a smaller role to play.

I have no problem supporting artists but I know that when I purchase a cd very little goes to the artist themselves. Artists need to get creative and learn how to make money in other ways. They need to embrace the idea of free music like some artists already have.

Check out thepiratebay and see that they are promoting artist who understand that they are by-passing record exec thieves who are stifling creativity in order to get their work out.

If this kind of BS is fought for 10 years everyone will wonder what the fuss was all about.

Kim Dot Com was meant to have been launching megabox the week or two after he got arrested. This service would have been an artist to audience direct platform, allowing artists to make revenue from the advertising on the site as well as contributory downloads (think Radioheads In Rainbows). The royalties were to be considerably more generous than those offered by labels or google YouTube.
All of the ads were pulled from YouTube by record labels on the grounds of copyright, because one of their artists was in the ad (Snoop Dogg I think), note – not recorded copyrighted material, the artist themselves. After all, the artist is merely a possession of the label.. Their “stock”..

Nice justification.
Gets your conscience off the hook.
That’s what I say to charity collectors. I will happily give but I don’t know the money will get there.
For every U2 there are 10,000 struggling artists. If you like the music then pay for it and stop justifying theft.

@ Gavin
Exactly. David Bowie for example!

Who is justifying theft? The record labels take an up to 93% share of royalties from an artists work, they tell them what they can and can’t release. They lock them into contracts and then claim copyright over their personhood!

Who is committing theft? Perhaps the guys trying to offer artists a better deal are being punished for upgrading the business model of an industry that refused to move with the times?

And perhaps artists are gaining a new freedom, taking control of their own marketing and telling these overpaid suits where to go? Finally releasing the albums they want to release without some executive telling them it’s not “marketable to the target demographic”..
Music is supposed to come from the heart, it’s ART. It’s not supposed to be this crass drivel that these record labels are forcing down our throats every ad break and mainstream radio station. It’s supposed to speak to you not thunder in via your eardrums and refuse to stop looping around your head..

@sean, it’s not justification – it’s weighing up the truth about the situation. If you can’t acknowledge that then unfortunately you’ll never see it.

You’ve never downloaded anything with suspect copyright?

I love what Roots Manuva’s label does, his albums typically cost around £10 and when you buy one from his website you get the CD in the post and you can download the album and artwork straight away. that’s a good deal.

Very well said!

That was at Shanti by the way for the first comment

It’s very easy to point at the fat cats of the record cos while ignoring the huge input they have in making an artist successful. Take a look at they new fat cats in a certain streaming company. The kind of money they are taking out of the company that has made huge losses would embarrass most fat cats in the record cos.

Be no lose now grr typo

I am with you there Vanessa. Makes me green with envy to see all those download speeds, knowing that I will never be able to have them.

A virus that seeks out hash keys? Have u just woken up? Keep on dreaming…..

Hash keys are lines of code embedded in every file, sometimes known as header code, these are used to ensure that files match, and what application is needed for the file, tagging your music with info changes this information, viruses are simple programs that run unnoticed,
1. Search for file type.
2. Compare header if key equal code
3. Run script to randomise music either the code or names itself.
Some us have been awake for a longtime.

Do you get paid repeatedly if work you did is used again and again? I think not.