Black Friday

It's Black Friday tomorrow in the states, a day where all hell breaks loose in shopping land, traditionally it's the day after thanksgiving and the start of the Christmas shopping season, (unlike the UK that starts in September), the good thing about it for shoppers is the mega crazy deals retailers have, the even better thing for us UK'ers is we can share in the joys.

Amazon.com have some good offers on items including DVDs, check this link on the day only, I'm not sure if they'll deliver ll items to the UK as they sometimes redirect you to the UK store.

The best we seem to get in the UK this Friday is a 20% off day at Debenhams, tempted SWMBO and her mother though, left me all alone at home feelin terrible, almost to ill too blog (is there such a thing).

I wonder if there's a "Bring Black Friday to the UK" petition/group on Facebook yet.

Newsgroups

Newsgroups are (apart from IRC) probably the oldest form of file sharing / downloading / P2P(ish) I know of.

I've used newsgroups as long as I've used computers, back in the days of outlook express newsgroups I had access to 20,000+ newsgroups although they weren't brilliant.

About 5 years ago when I moved up to broadband with Pipex, I had access to their newsgroups, again more than 20,000 and again not brilliant,
I then tried out Easynews, the first difference being I had to pay (Yes Lee, Pay !!!!) for this, $9.98 per month for 4Gb usage per month, however there were more groups and the retention was 30 odd days, the retention meant the files stayed on the servers longer and therefore had better availability for everyone.

Over the years the price has stayed the same, but the usage increased to 6Gb, 10Gb and now 20Gb per month.

I have not had a single problem with Easynews. the search pages are great, the Zip Manager is great and all in all, I would and have recommended him to anyone.

NOW...
I read on NewZbin, Giganews, a similar service had a retention of 120 days, which they have now increased to 200 days.

they also have a different levels of usage plans

• Bronze - 2Gb/Month for $7.99
• Sliver - 25Gb/Month for $12.99
• Platinum -Unlimited/Month for $24.99
• Diamond - Unlimited/Month (plus SSL) for $29.99 ($19.99 for first Month)

I'm not, and never have been sure of the legal implications of newsgroups, you can download all types of files from newsgroups as you can with torrents etc, I guess the difference being you are not uploading files, which made P2P illegal.

I am not yet tempted, unlimited access and longer retention just mean my broadband connection get hammered more, giving the ISPs more reason and justification for limiting & throttling my download speed.

Im Moving to Sweden.. .....................................
.I'm not really, but this report states a 75 year old woman has a 40Gpbs internet connection, that's not just opening the gates, thats ploughing the whole field.

What does a 75 year old woman with an internet connection that fast....

In fact. I don't want to know.

Silver "Bullet" surfing indeed.

Pipex...

So we moved into the house on 7th November, couldn't transfer my old telephone number so had a number, I then arranged for my broadband to get activated.

The previous owners' broadband hadn't been cancelled, therefore ADSL was still active on the line, I had to arrange the cancellation myself, so called BT and was advised this would take 6 working days.....

8 working days later it was done, called Pipex again, the line tests etc were required and I broadband would be active within 10 days,

29 November - Back online and flying

9 December - Problems, I got home from watching Derby thrash Leeds to find my Internet running slower than , did the usual speed checks to find my line was connected at 0.2Mbs (should be 5.5Mbs). Had to wait until Monday to call Pipex to log the fault, not sure what the problem was, but it seems to have now been fixed,

After reading a ton of forum entries on the net, it appears the problem with ADSL Max is that it's constantly being monitored for the best speed, unfortunately it gets a bit confused and fixe the connection at a daft speed (in my case 0.2Mbs),

All these forum members were slagging off Pipex and its customer/technical support, but I haven't had any problems with them, the worst part of it all, everything needs to be passed to BT to work on the lines etc. Now these are the people who dont seem to care.

Luckily I have moved my phone calls to Pipex too.

If only I could ditch Severn Trent Water.