Because of the killing spree in Winnenden, the city of Stuttgart has banned the Intel Friday Night Game event in Stuttgart, an official “e-sports” event in the ESL Pro Series. At the same time, a much larger weapons exhibition only a few kilometers from the city was allowed even though the city went to court to prevent it. The judge ruled in favor of the wapons show’s organizers.
Clearly, the little elves and orcs in Warcraft III, not guns, kill people.
You might already know this, especially the technical writers and documentation helpers out there, but I only discovered it last week. AsciiDoc uses plain text files with Wiki-like markup to generate wonderful HTML, PDF, manpage, DocBook and of course plain text documentation from one single, easy to manage file. It’s amazing, and since PDF output goes through DocBook, you get totally crisp-looking documents, including source syntax highlighting, pretty quotations and many other goodies. There is even a filter to generate sheet music from text.
Look at the “Overview and Examples” section for an idea of what this can do. I am seriously considering it as an end-user and sysadmin documentation format for leihs and MAdeK. Single-source publishing. Yummy!
Wow. What a colossal disappointment. And it’s not what you expect, if you’ve only read the title.
I did some calculations and found out that for my Internet and phone needs, the cheapest possible combination is Sunrise Free Internet (5000/500 DSL) and Sunrise fixed line phone: CHF 30/month if combined with a mobile contract, such as Sunrise flat classic. This would put me at CHF 60.00/month. Add 7.50/month and you get 250 MB of mobile 3G Internet use — perfect! To compare: A similar offer at Swisscom is at least 109.25/month, but they give you no rebate at all for a bundle deal and charge you 49.00 setup fees for the line. Plus, their mobile prices are a lot worse.
Of course I can trick a bit by signing up through my employer, which puts Swisscom at 91.25. Still 23.75 more than with Sunrise.
Anyway. I really hyped myself for Sunrise, emitting little bleeps of joy on my way home. So I marched into the Sunrise store in Zürich main station and proudly announced that I’m their bitch, and to please sign me up for Free Internet plus mobile plus the 250 MB 3G data deal. I wanted to sign up early so that when I move into my new place on May 1, my ADSL is already there.
But none of this is possible. Can I take my home phone number with me? Sorry, no can do. Well, then give me a new one. That takes six to eight weeks too? Oh. Can I take my mobile number? Certainly not. And you’re saying that there’s no way my DSL will be installed by May 1 (think July instead). So I can’t keep any of my numbers and will have no Internet connection for over a month, plus signing up early does nothing to help the situation. Thanks a lot.
Seeing that none of the things that are supposed to work (number portability, unbundled last mile for ADSL, unbundled phone products…) actually work in Switzerland, I went home and cried a bit. But there is hope! There’s one competitor that many Swiss people forget. Cablecom.
No one likes Cablecom, but they seem to be able to do all of the above. They will transfer my home number and they’ll make sure I have Internet access on May 1. So I ordered a 10000/1000 line, with phone, for 69.00/month. The first 4 months are completely free, that’s how desperate they are. For mobile, I’ll go with my 17/month contract from work that gives me 250 MB mobile data. 86.00 is not quite 69.00, but my cable is twice as fast and they throw in flatrate calling to landlines as free bonus.
That’s how I became the man who ordered from Cablecom, in a world where no man orders from Cablecom.
Will they manage? Watch this space.
Edit: They managed! Right on time, on the first workday after May 1, a little package from Cablecom arrived containing a miniature cable modem with Ethernet, USB and two phone connectors. I hooked it up in the new apartment, and boom, it connected and worked immediately. Speeds are exactly as advertises, 10 MBit/s down and 1 MBit/s up. I couldn’t be happier. Proves that sometimes you should root for the underdog.
Good news for Norwegians and Norsk-learners. My own NRK scraper will die a fiery death as Norwegian national broadcaster NRK puts their broadcasts on their own BitTorrent tracker, using Pirate Bay technology.
They even have a Twitter account and an RSS feed of broadcasts. Plus, they recommend Miro. I couldn’t have done it better.
Epic wins for the internets.
Update: And here’s an interview with Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde, as broadcast on NRK.
