On Technology

Comcast Bandwidth-Capping Notification and Solution

· Comment

With news from dif­fer­ent tech/internet-focused sites writ­ing about bandwidth-capping, I finally have received an email from Com­cast. They seem to be updat­ing their AUP which mostly adds a clause to whats con­sid­ered “exces­sive use of [their] ser­vice”. Here’s the email:

Dear Com­cast High-Speed Inter­net Customer,

We appre­ci­ate your busi­ness and strive to pro­vide you with the best online expe­ri­ence pos­si­ble. One of the ways we do this is through our Accept­able Use Pol­icy (AUP). The AUP out­lines accept­able use of our ser­vice as well as steps we take to pro­tect our cus­tomers from things that can neg­a­tively impact their expe­ri­ence online. This pol­icy has been in place for many years and we update it peri­od­i­cally to keep it cur­rent with our cus­tomers’ use of our service.

On Octo­ber 1, 2008, we will post an updated AUP that will go into effect at that time.

In the updated AUP, we clar­ify that monthly data (or band­width) usage of more than 250 Giga­bytes (GB) is the spe­cific thresh­old that defines exces­sive use of our ser­vice. We have an exces­sive use pol­icy because a frac­tion of one per­cent of our cus­tomers use such a dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount of band­width every month that they may degrade the online expe­ri­ence of other customers.

250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of band­width and it’s very likely that your monthly data usage doesn’t even come close to that amount. In fact, the thresh­old is approx­i­mately 100 times greater than the typ­i­cal or median res­i­den­tial cus­tomer usage, which is 2 to 3 GB/month. To put it in per­spec­tive, to reach 250 GB of data usage in one month a cus­tomer would have to do any one of the following:

* Send more than 50 mil­lion plain text emails (at 5 KB/email);
* Down­load 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song); or
* Down­load 125 stan­dard def­i­n­i­tion movies (at 2 GB/movie).

And online gamers should know that even the heav­i­est multi– or single-player gam­ing activ­ity would not typ­i­cally come close to this thresh­old over the course of a month.

In addi­tion to mod­i­fy­ing the exces­sive use pol­icy, the updated AUP con­tains other clar­i­fi­ca­tions of terms con­cern­ing report­ing vio­la­tions, news­groups, and net­work man­age­ment. To read some help­ful FAQs, please visit http://help.comcast.net/content/faq/Frequently-Asked-Questions-about-Excessive-Use.

Thank you again for choos­ing Com­cast as your high-speed Inter­net provider.

On their FAQ, this will prob­a­bly be one of the most asked/searched one:

How does Com­cast help its cus­tomers track their usage so they can avoide exceed­ing the limit?

There are many online tools cus­tomers can down­load and use to mea­sure their con­sump­tion. Cus­tomers can find such tools by sim­ply doing a Web search — for exam­ple, a search for “band­width meter” will pro­vide some options. Cus­tomers using mul­ti­ple PCs should just be aware that they will need to mea­sure and com­bine their total monthly usage in order to iden­tify the data usage for their entire account.

But those who have done a search on “band­width meter” will only find “speed tests” rather than a log of current/past “true” band­width. Even if they find a good “band­width meter”, it’s hard to keep track if they are on a net­work of mul­ti­ple users. How­ever, don’t fret.

I remem­ber read­ing up on this a cou­ple of weeks back. This is mostly for those who can install DD-WRT. If you have a Linksys router, you’re in luck as most of their mod­els can be updated to run this mod/hack. Any­ways, click here to read up on the Life­hacker arti­cle on how to mon­i­tor your monthly band­width with your router.

I hope that helps, and good luck.

Apple Shines The New iPod Touch

· Comment

Not to be out­done by the new col­or­ful and sur­pris­ingly thin iPod Nanos, the sec­ond gen­er­a­tion iPod Touch made its debut as well in Apple’s Sep­tem­ber 2008 Spe­cial Event enti­tled “Let’s Rock”.


So what’s so dif­fer­ent, a new body. The new iPod Touch looks like it came from Quick­sil­ver’s board. It def­i­nitely got some ideas for the iPhone 3G’s con­tour, but its shiny and made from pol­ished stain­less steel. I won’t be sur­prised if we see Apple comes out with this cha­sis on the iPhone 3G in the Win­ter (pend­ing the sale of the new iPod Touch of course).

 

Other new fea­tures are:

Not­ing the built-in wire­less sup­port for Nike+, this sucks if Apple can’t just push a firmware update for iPhone 3G own­ers. I won’t nec­es­sar­ily be run­ning with an iPhone as its freak­ing just too much to worry about and a dis­trac­tion, but it just makes sense and a goodie for all Apple fans alike.

In terms of price-point, if com­par­ing with the pre­vi­ous one, the new iPod Touch starts at $229 (8GB model) and is def­i­nitely worth the upgrade if you are look­ing to have the feature-set of the iPhone 3G w/o the phone. Now, if being com­pared against the iPhone 3G and bas­ing on the fact that you are also look­ing for a phone, I don’t think its a good buy. Other than the sub­scrip­tion fee to a mobile car­rier, the only fea­ture that the new iPod Touch has over the iPhone 3G would prob­a­bly be its built-in wire­less inte­gra­tion with Nike+ (for now). With that said, if in the sit­u­a­tion I just stated, I would still get an 8GB iPhone 3G over this new iPod Touch.

Apple Introduces New iPod Nanos

· Comment


Apple Intro­duces New iPod Nanos, orig­i­nally uploaded by stechico.

Apple intro­duced its new fourth gen­er­a­tion of iPod Nanos today in 9 fla­vor­ful col­ors. Here are the fea­tures that set it apart vs. its pre­de­ces­sors1:

  • Col­ors of course! Sil­ver, pur­ple, blue, green, orange, yel­low, pink, (PRODUCT) RED and black.
  • Built-in audio record­ing features.
  • “Genius tech­nol­ogy” which auto­mat­i­cally cre­ates playlists from songs in your music library that go great together, with just one click.
  • UI/UX improve­ments with the help of the accelerom­e­ter. This allows it to behave like the iPhone/iPod Touch between switch­ing from Por­trait to Land­scape modes.
  • Improved 24 hours of music play­back or four hours of video playback.

I just won­der if its still nec­es­sary to buy the Nike+ piece since this new Nano now have an accelerom­e­ter built-in. If any, they should mod­ify the Nike+ piece to work with an iPod 1GB+ Shuf­fle; which will be tempt­ing for me to buy and use when run­ning. Bet­ter yet, just a stand­alone Nike+ piece that can sync on its own to the Nike+ site.

  1. Para­phrased from Apple Insider arti­cle. [↩]

Google Chrome Open Source Web Browser Released

· Comment


As announced in their blog yes­ter­day, Google released its open source web browser today at 12pm PDT. It is called Google Chrome (Beta). It was built with the help of com­po­nents from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Fire­fox, and some oth­ers. It is only cur­rently avail­able on Win­dows; though they are work­ing on the Linux and Mac ver­sions supposedly.

I took it for a quick test run ear­lier and I can say its fast and “min­i­mal” as to what they say. Although most of the key fea­tures are already in Fire­fox, I do like the “crash con­trol”. Here are the ones that have been highlighted:

  • One box for every­thing — Web search. Web his­tory. Address bar. Sug­ges­tions as you type. One uni­fied box serves all your brows­ing needs.
  • New tab page — Every time you open a new tab, you’ll see a visual sam­pling of your most vis­ited sites, most used search engines, and recently book­marked pages and closed tabs.
  • Appli­ca­tion short­cuts — Use web apps with­out open­ing your browser. Appli­ca­tion short­cuts can directly load your favorite online apps.
  • Dynamic tabs — You can drag tabs out of the browser to cre­ate new win­dows, gather mul­ti­ple tabs into one win­dow or arrange your tabs how­ever you wish — quickly and easily.
  • Crash con­trol — Every tab you’re using is run inde­pen­dently in the browser, so if one app crashes it won’t take any­thing else down.
  • Incog­nito mode — Don’t want pages you visit to show up in your web his­tory? Choose incog­nito mode for pri­vate browsing.
  • Safe brows­ing — Google Chrome warns you if you’re about to visit a sus­pected phish­ing, mal­ware or oth­er­wise unsafe website.
  • Instant book­marks — Want to book­mark a web page? Just click the star icon at the left edge of the address bar and you’re done.
  • Import­ing set­tings — When you switch to Google Chrome, you can pick up where you left off with all the book­marks and pass­words from your exist­ing browser.
  • Sim­pler down­loads — No intru­sive down­load man­ager; you see your download’s sta­tus at the bot­tom of your cur­rent window.

So after giv­ing it a spin, would I use it in my daily work­flow? Not quite yet. As noted, it is still in Beta and only avail­able to the Windows-user demo­graphic. It will be inter­est­ing to see where it goes for sure, or how peo­ple react to it as it approaches more and more to main­stream. That, and how Google would mar­ket it with their other appli­ca­tions and ser­vices.

That being said, I over­heard through the grapevine that Google’s inten­tion for releas­ing this is due the fact that Mozilla Fire­fox makes 85% of its rev­enue through Google Search. It does makes sense though. Whether that is totally true or only par­tial, its still a good idea if that’s the case. Why make some­one else money when you keep that money for yourself—right?

Another ques­tion that came to mind was: is it bad for every­one else, the every­day users? Not quite… yet. Unless every­one has been fol­low­ing Google’s blog, or are tech­ni­cally savvy and keep track of Tech news, the reach of Google Chrome’s release would most likely be by word of mouth between those in the Tech indus­try (for now). But when it does make its stake in the browser mar­ket share, it can be bad and good at the same time. Bad, that there will be another browser to add to the list to sup­port and care for by web­sites. And good, that it can be the one true browser to rule them all1.

Update
Kevin Purdy of Lifehacker.com recently released some Beta Browser Speed Tests ear­lier today com­par­ing IE 8b2, Fire­fox 3.1b and Google Chrome 0.2. There are 3 impor­tant find­ings from his tests:

  1. In terms of startup time, Chrome wins. On a cold start2, Fire­fox leads the pack. How­ever, on a warm start where the browser has just been closed and reloaded, Chrome sur­pris­ingly takes the deci­sive lead.
  2. In load­ing JavaScript & CSS, both Fire­fox and Chrome are near half of that of IE’s.
  3. Last but not least, with regards to mem­ory use, Fire­fox is undoubt­edly the win­ner. But this might be arguable as can be noted in Chrome’s fea­ture set. That is, its abil­ity of “crash con­trol” which makes each tab load its own process, rather than a sole Chrome process like that of IE and Firefox.
  1. Will there ever be one? I really don’t think so. That’s what’s good and bad about Tech­nol­ogy, there’s always improve­ment to be done and it is widely open for every­one to inno­vate. [↩]
  2. Refer­ring to a com­puter that just has been turned on or restarted. [↩]

What is Twitter?

· Comment

A cou­ple of friends and fam­ily have been asking:

  • What’s up w/ the sta­tus updates I see quite often?
  • What’s w/ the “@” (at sym­bol) next to names on your status?
  • What the heck is a tweet?
  • etc.

Rather than point­ing them to Twitter’s site, I rather just show them this video:

I hope that makes sense. Thanks to Com­mon Craft. They have done a great job explain­ing it “in plain english” =)

Update
Some Twit­ter terms writ­ten by Peter Cash­more on Mash­able.

« First…56789…Last »