₦airaland Forum

@samir101ng

well, since you and i have no choice we may as well embrace the inevitable, do our patriotic bid and just accept fate as it is. lets give them the benefit of doubt and say they are just starting. perhaps overtime they may iron out the kinks although i seriously dout that. why? because after seven years of operating in Nigeria MTN's core service (phone call) is still utter rubbish. this morning i had 18naira and i couldnt send a text.

what bothers me is the 3gig limit which is a very good pointer to the limit MTN has on bandwidth. if you do have true broadband, why impose such a severe restrictive policy? naija is a nation of downloaders. wallahi ive seen creeps here in cafes downloading three episodes of prison break and a movie torrent on a speed of 0.6kbp/s. their patience must be infinite.

imagine what they'd do with broadband. they'll download hollywood and the entire music industry. (maybe ive just made MTN's argument )

with true broadband you can download a whopping 1gig in less than 30minutes. with MTN in that duration all you get is like 100mb, your days' quota.

i heard Glo has raised its cap to 5gigs. thats fair. but with broadband, unlimited access is the killer app because all that speed just doesnt make sense for roughly 100mb a day.

my wifi this mornin was going on 69.5kiloBYTES per second, thats 556kilobits per second. though its web accelerated broadband, its not 3G which is supposedly faster. my biggest issue with the wifi is that it breaks downloads on download accelerators and oftens drops connection for no apparent reason.

at least MTN is better than them visafone them and *ahem* starcomms.

mtn's advertised speed is 3.2 megabits per second with a dropdown consistence of 800kilobits per second. this means, using your measurements, 400kiloBytes per second and 100kilobytes per second respectively. since none of us here is getting anything near those speeds then clearly the advertised speed is bogus. that has been the basis of my argument all the while.

now in my first post i said i was getting 44kilobits a second (5.5kilobytes) which is still far from broadband and i was not using any download accelerator. even if i was getting what the others claim to be getting we are still being shortchanged what ever measurement you use.

now you mentioned that available download speed from the server differes from network download capability. well, that may be so but i beg to differ on one ground: HTTP GET and FTP are not Torrent where speed downgrades based on the ratio between seeders and leechers or the activity of the tracker. the server side pipeline is bigger at that end than my side of the pipes where my connection by default is 8 per server and since most HTTP servers allow indidvidual maximum connections of 128 im still underutilized. now if the server in question suffers a swarm (massive coonections from multiple downloads) then of course speed may degrade. but im still getting 44kbps irrespective of the server i connect to whether im downloading or not.

the key is the bandwidth we all are on. the gateway is slower than what the network is capable of. on the USB modem the link speed is 7.2mbits/sec (900 kilobytes) but the realworld speed hovers between 120kbps (for some) and 44kbps (for me and others). clearly you can see the problem there.

on Etisalat in Dubai you get 1.2mbits/sec on average and 700kbps on bad days from a link of the same 7.2mbits/sec.

that says something.

i dont use speedtest.net nor do i use a 'bandwidth monitor' (whatever that is). i use a more reliable packet sniffer in combination with NetStumbler to monitor my net activities and they bear out my slow 44kbps.

please keep in mind that all this while im narrating my own experience, it will be different for others. but lets rule out the following;

1. distance from mast
2. lack of 3G coverage
3. faulty modem
4. reverting to GPRS
5. faulty OS

if the checklist above is eliminated, then clearly the problem stems ffrom MTN somewhere down the backbone.


@Flyuche

permit me to make a correction in my earlier post.

480kbps is the link speed one gets with the phone modem while 7.2mbps is the connection one gets with the USB modem. i do not know which modem you use so pardon me for hastily assuming you use the phone type.

KarmaMod:
even if I am, so what? I'm still bored

and most "autistics" are actually brilliant

like Rainman.

you are entitled to self-consolation. believe me, you have my empathy. it cant be easy being you.

and boredom thrown in. <sigh>


to be honest, we have flogged the main topic of the thread to an inch of its blessed life. recommend an opener and lets see if we can revive the donkey yet. nairaland is becoming boring-er every blessed day.

well, im off. laters.

KarmaMod:
can't believe you took such a lame and predictable shot

I'm disappointed 

i was dumbing it down for the in-house autistics.

such as your blessed self.

KarmaMod:
I hear retards are easily amused.

really? wow. you must be amused right now then.

KarmaMod:
I'm amused by the fact that YOUR hair doesnt grow.

im amused by the fact that you even have a head

but whether its screwed on the right way is subject to debate

KarmaMod:
I'm pretty sure if it gets to that point, I'm the one that'll end up dealing with you guys

Quit boring me to death and maybe i'll have pity on you people.

gasp! we? bore you to death? ha! a real headscratcher, that one. i figure you amuse yourself watching hair grow. this is without question the liveliest thread. think: pun, wit, sleaze, curses, love triangle, a tranny (vesc), and death threats.

for utter banality please check out the politics section.

THEY will bore YOU to death.

but then, for someone who watches hair grow-boredom is a moot point.

KarmaMod:
and?

you really wanna know? well, someone did mention guns and clubs a few posts ago. we are thinking drive-by.

watch out.

Sisikill:
*Adjust butt pillow*

someone should sneak a whoopee cushion in there.

pseudo-intellectuals? apparently the lesser mind is befuddled before the weight of superior intellect. one can almost perceive the envy wafting in the intimacy of the wind, which sadly is being rendered into hot air by the excruciatingly mundane Vesc.

(ps. this parley was spawned by boy-meets-girl-and-other-boy-wants-a-pound-of-flesh sort of rivalry. maybe its post-teenage angst, who knows?)

yoruba road. hmm, brings memories of heavily-spinached Waina stew. once upon a time it enjoyed a brief stint as a haven for teenage prostitutes. now its a meeting point for a coven of witches.

sisikill, if you were like the early pioneers in yoruba street, i guesstimate your age nearer to the paleolithic. thats after the asteriod that wiped off the dinosaurs, right? talk about a living fossil. you ought to be in the Smithsonian, gal.

KarmaMod:
I'm reporting you all for going offtopic

the requisite whistle blower. theres a killjoy in every forum. rasp!!

well well. spikyn, whereever you are, it seems The Hobbit is being filmed right now, set for a 2011 release. WETA Digital will handle the digital effects. no word yet if pete jackson will helm it but seeing as WETA is his company we can reasonably expect the effects to be good at least.

heres hoping and waiting,

flyuche:
@ Ex, The download speed with MTN 3.5G is above 500kb/s when you have full bars. It's a fact! I am not in PH now, but i promise you a screenshot when i get back. I don't have 3G here in my hometown. 44kb/s you get is what i achieve on gprs. I think it depends on location.

careful, 500kbp/s is not the same as 500kbps which is probably what you mean. mind you, im not disputing your claims but i find it a bit hard to swallow on my experience and that of freinds and family members. if my 44kbps wasnt consistent across kaduna, abuja and lagos as i travel id assume the problem is confined to kaduna alone, or if i used only one modem i'd attribute it to some fault in the modem. sadly that is not the case.

in any case, i fail to see how you can get 500kbps since at connection the modem registers the link speed at 480kbps. noenetheless im not saying you are lying perhaps your situation is unique since obviously im not the only one having this problem.

oh, and i do get full bars considering i live very close to a mast (in kaduna) as i pointed out earlier. lets just hope MTN sorts this all out and give us as good as our money.

im glad to see Etisalat will soon flag off their services. given that they have perhaps the fastest 3.75G in the middle east maybe they will give MTN a run for their money.

Etisalat has lots of cash and technical expertise, besides.

Orbit is the best

vescucci:
Those, I think, are screenshots from his iPhone. He's probably browsing with it via some freakazoid connection with MTN data-card. Pardon me, but I'm not a "techie". What's all this Vincent business? You mean Ex was the bloke we thought we sent to the bottom of the ocean? Drat! I told Louis that we shoulda used the spikeball, but no, he was more concerned about leaving "evidence". Evidence! Evidence! Mush! Like them ascari's could differenciate between a blood stain and tomato juice. I digress! Not only do you, B-28435 (that's his real name back in Gryjdliskite planet) want to steal my catch (with all this Cavewoman wahala, she might be a little more than I can chew), you want to brand me. Have you heard about the invisible telluric currents, Sisi? Or Feng-shui? No? Our friendly returnee has a hidden agenda. Why not fess up and tell about your peeps at Area 51. And uh, George Bush, Paris Hilton, Ben Affleck, McCain, Condeleeza Rice, Nostradamus, Albert Einstein and Hitler were all from the Gryjdliskite planet. Finally I'll let go of my genome ingrained polygamous nature just to get on your good books. That's extra points for me since I've made a sacrifice! So what do you say we go to Yoruba road and go eat some wayna,

Y'all quit it with the vernacular.I can't keep up. I'm not that good with it. I can understand way more than I can speak, but that's got to do with context and gesticulations. Since y'all are not gesticulating, I'm at wit's end.

Literature, eh? I read some of Ope's writs about one Brian and one, chic, I forget her name. Then skipped to the wet clothes part. We were getting warmer. If that's all the fun, I trust you implicitly then, Sisi.

P.S. I was actually writing exams and you know,

gesticulations? sound too much like "Master Bay Shawn" if you catch my drift <wink wink>

why you unformed foetus, you tiny speck of ice cold alien spermatozoa, how dare you? never EVER mention Area 51 again without security clearance. how did you even know about the place anyway since it is not on any map? aw hell, since the cat is out of the bag, let me spill the beans (hmm, idioms).

Area 51 is, like, this super secret facility where we keep ageing rockers, spent actors, fallen druggie pop stars and failed politicians, some of them in cryostasis. it is a monarchy currently headed by none other than the King, Elvis Presley (y'all suckers thought he was dead, huh?). second in command is Ambrose Bierce who is currently working on a revised Devil's Dictionary.

Byron is there, as is shakespeare (he doesnt really speak THAT victorian english. he only does that in his written plays. his diction is a yankee drawl. he goes, " dang, shoot boy. i done got stuck cauze mah muses is out a-hooting 'bout town".

and of course, we have a few extraterrestrial beings there as well. they crash landed their flying saucer decades ago in new mexico. the survivors include Hitler.

so there you have it, O Ye Being of Bombasts.


anyway, back to reality.

yeah those are iphone pics, using a wifi connection and not MTN 3G. its an application that allows you a peek behind the hallowed doors of the movie-making factory and peer at what is being cooked up. some of the offerings will give you food poisoning, others you will savor, while most you will swallow and sigh over your hard-earned cash.

[quote author=ice_zik link=topic=69799.msg2743644#msg2743644 date=1220365903]Unfortunately, no movie is going to seem good if you've watched Dark Knight unless the movie is comedy or franchise. As long as the movie is action/drama, people are going to compare it to Dark Knight and think it sucks. That's why Tropic Thunder is still number one in the Theatres, it's comedy. While movies like Clone Wars, Mummy 3, Death Race, Traitor etc are all going to fade away fast because they're action movies. On the other hand, movies like Pineapple express, the house Bunny, Mama Mia, Tropic Thunder will hang on in the top ten because they cannot be compared to TDK (Different genre). Don't be shocked if TDK climbs back to number 2.

Sha, that's my opinion. 

P.S:- HOpefully, Watchmen will rock![/quote]i respect your opinion, but no movie should serve as a yardstick for other movies except if they are sequels or same genre by the same director.

reason:
different studio (perhaps)
different schedule
different character types
different actors
different film crew
different script
different budget
different audiience (perhaps)
different temperament

so, different story. i bet you HellBoy 2 didnt set out to be like TDK, it just set out to be closer to the comics and hence familiar to fans. HellBoy was meant to be HellBoy and nothing more. HellBoy has his fans, Batman has his too, and they may not harbour cross-border appreciation for the other camp's hero. Nolan would want to please the fans of batman FIRST naturally, just as Del Toro will aim for the fans of HellBoy to be on his list and not place too much consideration for waht the fans of batman will want.

if you alienate your fanbase, you are asking for trouble and george Lucas is on the verge of asking for trouble because Clone Wars is hanging on a thin thread of consistency and originality. Harry Potter is a good example of pandering to the fanbase which is a feat Narnia failed to achieve. the connection wasnt there because its methodology is universal.

if you alienate your fans they will kill your movie because in hollywood word-of-mouth can make or break a movie. what will be the global perception if the fans of a superhero are dissing the movie? fans make good critics. they make formidable critics so its much more than a balancing act pleasing them. on one hand you have the OTHER categories of audience to suck in; on the other a mob of excitable, hardened and opinionated fans who perhaps know about the superhero more than the director/scriptwriter. some of these fans were weaned on comics, they know intimate details of the superhero more than the creator perhaps. and they have ready cash to burn at the box office. but alongside that cash is their ctitique.

superhero movies are in a classs of their own; you appreciate tem more or vice versa when you are a fan. fans GET IT. fans know subtlety.

and this brings us to your precious Watchmen.

unless you are a fan, you wont really GET IT. unlike most superheroes, the Vigilantes in watchmen (lets just call them watchmen) are anything BUT supereroes. besides dr manhattan none of them qualifies as a true superhero in the general sense of the term. hey, even Batman glides and has a cool array of weapons. these guys, this watchmen, have only masks over their very numan, very frail, very vulnerable faces.

the true symbolism, the motif if you will, of the comment on our society (or American society) that the story makes is very subtle, so subtle that only mostly fans and those who read the comic/novel will understand and better yet, apreciate.

watchmen is slightly boring, mostly a murder investigation in slowmo and lots of global politics and nuclear threat. the kind of action we saw in HB2 and TDK will not feature in watchmen.

so be guarded in your optimism.

otokx:
No be to leave under abi on top mast be the koko for this MTN toy. The area has to be 3G confirmed. My area na GPRS i dey rock but not up to like 1km away na HSDPA dey reign. How does one get out of the post paid package and into the pre paid?

3G is still radio wave and like any kind of wave it drops of as you fan out away from the base station. those closer to the transceiver will no doubt receive better service and i only pointed that out because someone was suggesting that perhaps my 3G signal is weak. in any case weak signal means connection dropouts and dead spots and not necessarily low speeds.

flyuche:
i agree with you guys about the cost. it's rather exploitative. 10k for 3GB/month? glo even tried by crashing their tariff to 10k and putting the cap at 5GB, problem is they are just available in Lagos for now.
@ ex inferis. honestly. i don't get that kind of speed with mtn 3.5G. try using your 3G phone as a modem. see if it makes any difference.

i HAVE tried an N95 and a samsung F480 while my bro uses an N80. same thing. it also hapens when i go to Abuja (Wuse 2, not far from Sherif Plaza). it does not matter the kind of modem used as long as its HSDPA/UMTS capable. the rated realworld CONSISTENT speed is still 700kbps for 3.5G and slightly less on very bad days. on Etisalat in the UAE you can get a connection link of up to 7.2mbps!

listen, i dont dispute MTN is good, but only in comparison to the other so-called internet offerings out there, particularly for a dialup user or cafe regular. when you are used to getting less than 10kbps in your local cafe doubtless you will take MTN as a godsent bailout. afterall, 44kbps or even 120kbps is heaven in comparison to 10kbps.

but thats as far as the merit goes.

look at it this way: say you are in the market for a very fast car and you come across a salesman pitching a decked out Hooptie that he claims goes from 0 to 250 kilometers an hour in 3 seconds. you willingly pay because that acceleration is what you have been dreaming of. now you zoom off and discovered to your indignation that the blessed Hooptie can only go u to 250kph AFTER 3 MINUTES!. now, are you going to fold up your hands and accept the ripoff as a fact of life or will you demand for a refund and, if not possible, grumble publicly so others are forewarned about the kind of shady deal the salesman offers?

did that put my gripe in perspective?

sometimes you demand honesty when you are parting with money and one would expect MTN and like-minded folks to at least put up a small print owning up to the fact that their 3G offering may be degraded in certain places. if you dont whine about being short-changed, you have effectively become an enabler of con artists.

10 thousand naira is not peanuts by any Nigeria standard no matter your take-home pay. and the 3gig cap makes it a lot worse, i mean what am i paying 10k for if i cant download videos and games and cant stream content for a whole month? what did i pay for, wikipedia?

if most of you knew the kind of high speed unlimited internet service half of that money can fetch you on the same technology, probably you will feel cheated as well. its time we stop eveil corporations stealing from us. the government has done a remarkable job looting our collective wealth and now the private corporations are fleecing us as well. when do we say enough?

sfinxone:
With that kind of billing I'm afraid to go Mtn's way.

@Ex Infris
How far with your browsing speed on Mtn, any improvement?

hallo, fellow comrade in arms. i still get 44kbps. and i live near a mast.

i didnt set out to offend anyone but at the same time i wasnt in a mood to let insults bounce off me.

in any case it seemed my whole point was missed so permit me to clear the air.

my outrage against MTN was infromed by the misleading information they employ in marketing the 3G service. i have had the privilege of using proper 3G broadband and the least i get is a real world value of 700kbps (except once when it hovered around 300 for a few hours).
that being said, i fail to see how MTN can,with a straight face, claim that their service is broadband. its nothing short of disguised EDGE (which is a glorified GPRS) or throttled UMTS at best.

its time we put s stop to this.

a few more. by the way Ctulhu made a brief cameo in the opening CGI in Alone in The Dark : New Nightmare.

Sisikill:
You are Mr. Vincent? Of course, it all makes sense now! They way you came out swing at Vesc for his attempted rape with words, is exactly what Mr. Vincent would have done. He was a good man, a superhero. . . hates to see people get away with crime. Why didn't I see it?

Welcome back to earth. . . Mr. Vincent and you don't need to tell us you come in peace.  

Donallah, Ba na so foligamous mutumu. Muji Matan daya (maybe even biyu but shikena!). . . na wa ne.  

ni mata daya miji daya ne. ba zan aure wata ba. babu foligamus.

for fans of HP Lovecraft, Cthulhu is being filmed now. its an Indy so heres hoping. still, books in the Cthulhu Mythos are some of the best horrors around.

a few things coming our way: some good, some bad, some plain ugly.

content courtesy Movies application on Iphone.

sisikill


I am mr vincent. i followed your breadcrumbs all the way to this here infernal gathering of jobless humans with a penchant for crass banality. i have endured many a mundane postings in order to conceal my true identity but i hide no more.

behold, earth! behold the cosmic brainard too cool for your planet. i come with the cure for cancer, cold fusion, time travel, and the truth of who shot JFK. and of course, the wisdom to make you mere eartlings more interesting and less banal in this forum.

(cue thunder, lightning  and a caped silhouette)

but first, you must rid yourself of that creep Vesc. he is Galactus, destroyer of worlds and i fear he may hinder my quest to bring peace to mankind (and get down with you sisikill).

sfinxone:
Guys have veered so off topic in this thread, . . . .anyway, just wanted to know if anyone knows whether the Starcomms EVDO PCMCIA card has any advantages in terms of performance over the EVDO USB card.

that too is off topic; the topic is MTN 3.5g.

well, MTN "3g" fanboys here it is: on saturday 30th august my MTN 3G stopped browsing for reasons i couldnt fathom then. on monday i hauled butt to the MTN center and complained. the staff did something on the pc and dutifully informed me that ive exhausted my 3gig quota and infact im now owing MTN 6000 naira. in order to renew my account im expected to pay 16000 naira (10 for a new subscription, 6000 to overwrite the debit).

i was baffled. why? because i used the thing for only 9 days and the heaviest downloads ive doe are as follows:

1. iphone firmware @ 243mb

2. itunes 7.7.1 @60.9mb

3. winpwn 2.5 @19mb

4. N95 software update @115mb

6. Itunes AppStore downloads (apps and podcasts) @168mb

giving 605.9mb

those are all the downloads i did.

the remaining usage was posting in forums including nairaland.

now this is far from my 3Gigs quota so i failed to see how i could have used everything up to the point of accumulating almost 1.5gigs extra on credit.

well, one of the staff there, an old classmate, informed me that there is something horribly wrong with the billing system for postpaid customers which leads to indiscriminate and rather bizarre billing. i was told that someone a coule of days ago was found out to be owing around 400,000! the staffer told me this mostly affects postpaid customers and that he himself has discarded the service altogether. those on prepaid dont seem to be affected.

in any case i migrated to prepaid and paid off, but now i do all my downloads on the wifi broadband in my office inspite of the ISP's lockdown policy on using download accelerators. i get 30gigs for 20,000 which isnt too shabby.

anyway, i dont think this problem is endemic to kaduna alone since the billing servers are in lagos. i advise anyone on postpaid 24/7 to keep a keen eye on their downloads or they may well be unpleasantly surprised.

look for imtoo ipod computer transfer. it allows upload/download both ways.

search www.mininova.org.

i did tell you lot most movies gone south are the fault of the studio execs. well i guess its no news to u all babylon AD bombed horribly.

guess who the director blames?

"Masters of Scifi - Babylon A.D. Director Mathieu Kassovitz Describes a Disastrous Production


Mathieu Kassovitz is pissed off. The French auteur, who first made waves in 1995 with La Haine, is supposed to be celebrating the passion project he's been nursing for the past five years. Instead -- the week before Babylon A.D. hits theaters -- he is nursing a grudge. "I'm very unhappy with the film," he says. "I never had a chance to do one scene the way it was written or the way I wanted it to be. The script wasn't respected. Bad producers, bad partners, it was a terrible experience."

The film, starring Vin Diesel, is an adaptation of the French novel Babylon Babies by Maurice Georges Dantec. It tells the story of a mercenary (Diesel) in the year 2019 who is hired to transport a woman and her guardian from Eastern Europe to New York. "The scope of the original book was quite amazing," says Kassovitz. "The author was very much into geopolitics and how the world is going to evolve. He saw that as wars evolve, it won't be just about territories any more, but money-driven politics. As a director it's something that's very attractive to do."

Diesel emphasizes the movie's theme of smuggling people across national borders. "This whole thing that's happening in Georgia right now is so fresh that no one has even asked about it yet," he says. "We're coming into an age where borders are closing, and I think that our society will be numb to it because of our freedom in the virtual world, our freedom in the Internet."

But according to Kassovitz, Babylon A.D. fails to deliver any of these messages. "It's pure violence and stupidity," he admits. "The movie is supposed to teach us that the education of our children will mean the future of our planet. All the action scenes had a goal: They were supposed to be driven by either a metaphysical point of view or experience for the characters,  instead parts of the movie are like a bad episode of 24."

So how did a premise steeped in real-world relevance fall so far off track?

The film's production was reportedly riddled with problems, from vast delays to budgetary concerns to weather setbacks. Kassovitz points to the studio, "Fox was sending lawyers who were only looking at all the commas and the dots," he says. "They made everything difficult from A to Z." The last stroke, Kassovitz says, was when Fox interfered with the editing of the film, paring it down to a confusing 93 minutes (original reports were that 70 minutes were cut from the film; Kassovitz says the number is closer to 15).  Diesel too was astounded at the film's length. Having just completed production of the fourth installment of The Fast and the Furious, he had not seen a cut of the film in six months. "Am I even in the movie any more, or am I on the cutting room floor?" the actor joked. Fox could not be reached for comment on this story.

To be fair, Kassovitz doesn't entirely hate the film. "I like the energy of it and I got some scenes I'm happy with," he says. "But I know what I had -- I had something much better in my hands but I just wasn't allowed to work." That the movie follows on the heels of such strong summer scifi options, will also prove challenging. "Babylon will probably have a good first weekend, but the second weekend we're going to lose 30%," says Kassovitz. "I don't see how people who went through all these amazing blockbusters like The Dark Knight and Iron Man this summer will take it."

Diesel says that a director is always in the difficult position of being held accountable for a film's success or failure. "It's hard," he says. "Filmmaking is such a collaborative effort you can't look to one person." Where does Kassovitz look? "I should have chosen a studio that has guts," he says. "Fox was just trying to get a PG-13 movie. I'm ready to go to war against them, but I can't because they don't give a s--t."


http://blogs.amctv.com/scifi-scanner/2008/08/babylon-ad-mathieu-kassovitz.php

so thre u have it:

pg 13

budget concerns

studio meddling with the script and editing

the main thrusts of my earlier argument

babylon ad made me sick.

jesus

Seun:
Unless you have a contact in HP who has confirmed your tale, it is a baseless rumor.
Almost all modern laptops are made in Asia, including the ones that are sold in the USA.

If technicians' offices are full of HP laptops, it's because lots of people use them.
The same reason why most technician's offices are full of Windows PCs and not macs.

no one is disputing that almost all are manufactured in asia, even apple computers, but in your haste you miss the keyword: INFERIOR chinese made. get a hp pavilion dv5000 and compare its build quality with the dv6000s of today and you will see my point.

all you need is activesync, which either came with your phone or is downloadable.

60% of the Hps that come these shores are inferior chinese made boxes. the tablet pcs heat up inexplicably, the casings are cheap misaligned plastics and the buttons and keys feel rubbery and cheap too. but then, most people cant tell.

look around in any technician's repair shop and you will see mounds of comatose Hps and Acers.

i should know; my friends import a lot of them.

iice:
[color=#9900ff]What say ye to a voltron movie?

Seriously mehn, they should take a cue from speed racer and ax half the projects in the works.
Or maybe they are hoping for the transformers success

I really want to see the burn after reading movie. Looks hilarious[/color]

so to you, the glass is half empty.


cynic.

its time we own up to the truth: nigerian muslims are making the same mistake year after year. the month of ramadan DOES NOT begin until first september, ie tomorrow. right now in the whole world only nigerians are fasting. the moon rises in the EAST, and since most of the middle east is a couple of hours ahead of us (GMT +) i fail to see how year after year we are the first to sight the moon. the sun sets two hours in saudi arabia before it does here, and the moon rises from their side of the heavens. in Dubai they have an array of telescopes and other astronomical tools aimed at the sky since last night and this morning they conceded not to have sighted the ramadan new moon so i wonder how it is we here saw it with our naked eyes.

this practice is highly questionable and it speaks volumes that in the entire world only nigerians are in the month of ramadan. even a cursory glance at any islamic calendar will reveal 1st september as the commencement of the month of ramadan.

as for me, my fasting starts tomorrow.

you may also want to look here

http://www.moonsighting.com/calendars/2008ummulqura.html


and read this from the link above



A suggested Global Lunar Calendar based on Imkan-e-Ru'yah (sighting possibility) somewhere in the world is that if the moon is born before 12:00 UT [23:59 or less of the previous day at International Date Line (IDL)], then the month begins at sunset of that day everywhere in the world. If the moon is born after 12:00 UT, then the month begins on the next day's sunset everywhere. IDL has been universally accepted even by Muslims as the beginning of every day of the week. All Muslims pray Friday prayers on the same day starting at IDL. Global Lunar Calendar should also follow the same convention of the day, so that the whole world can start Ramadan or Eid on the same day.

The moon born before 12:00 UT has Imkaan-e-Ru'yah somewhere on earth, and the moon is born before the day begins at IDL, so the whole world can start the month on the same day. This suggested Global Lunar Calendar is so easy to calculate for any ordinary Muslsim that no expertise of astronomy or science is required. All that is needed is Conjunction time which is easily available from many sources on the Internet. This suggested Global Calendar was also discussed at Morocco Conference, November 2006  attended by representatives from various Islamic countries.




you may also want to read this:

When is Ramadan in 2008?

Ramadan in 2008 will start on Monday, the 1st of September and will continue for 30 days until Tuesday, the 30th of September.

Based on sightability in North America, in 2008 Ramadan will start in North America a day later - on Tuesday, the 2nd of September.

Note that in the Muslim calander, a holiday begins on the sunset of the previous day, so observing Muslims will celebrate Ramadan on the sunset of Sunday, the 31st of August.

Although Ramadan is always on the same day of the Islamic calendar, the date on the Gregorian calendar varies from year to year, since the Gregorian calendar is a solar calendar and the Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar. This difference means Ramadan moves in the Gregorian calendar approximately 11 days every year. The date of Ramadan may also vary from country to country depending on whether the moon has been sighted or not.

The dates provided here are based on the dates adopted by the Fiqh Council of North America for the celebration of Ramadan. Note that these dates are based on astronomical calculations to affirm each date, and not on the actual sighting of the moon with the naked eyes. This approach is accepted by many, but is still being hotly debated.

http://www.when-is.com/ramadan-2008.asp

tried them, abandoned it on the very 1st day.