Category: Geek Stuff

As you’ve probably read here and at other Internet sites, Time Warner is temporarily shelving plans to offer capped bandwidth plans to customers. But that doesn’t mean that the company still isn’t acting like a petulant child – news is leaking out that users in Austin, Texas are running into TWC’s “proposed” 40GB limit and having their Internet service cut off. Worse yet, when Time Warner contacts heavy users, the company’s not giving them an explicit cap – just advising them to “use less”.

Did Time Warner learn nothing from the Comcast debacle?  Last year, Comcast got in trouble for threatening to disconnect heavy users… but not telling them how much data was “too much”. This led to considerable criticism from tech websites, who (rightly) stated that it was impossible for people to stay within the company’s bandwidth limits if no one would tell them what those limits were. Imagine, if you will, signing up for an “unlimited” cellphone plan, then getting a nasty call from the company’s “security team” telling you to not use so many minutes. And when you ask “well, how many minutes can I use?”, the only answer you get is “fewer”. That’s essentially what Comcast was doing, and it got a smackdown for it (well, that and actively interfering with Bittorrent protocols). So now Comcast has an explicit cap of 250GB/month.

Of course, TWC wants to have a smiliar cap… of only 40GB/month. Let me break down the math on that for you again: assuming that each company’s “basic” broadband plan costs $45/month, Comcast is charging its customers around 18¢/GB/month, while TWC wants to charge its customers $1.13/GB/month for the exact same product.

If people could change cable providers as easily a cell phone companies, I wouldn’t be up here bitching up a storm about it. But, in many areas, TWC is the only choice for broadband. They’re a monopoly. And one of the key legal tests of an illegal monopoly is whether a company, as the sole provider of a good or service, increases its prices for no legitimate reason. We all understand that companies occasionally have to raise prices to account for inflation. Or they might have to increase their prices significantly if the price of one of the raw materials skyrockets. But that isn’t happening with Time Warner. Bandwidth has never been cheaper, yet TWC wants to double the rates for your home Internet connection, if not treble them.

I’m watching you like a hawk, Time Warner.

Oh, and just this past Friday, the missus and I got a slick new color catalog from AT&T about their U-Verse offerings. Hmmm……

I know it’s a little late, but Ars Technica posted this great article on Wednesday about how Time Warner just might be stretching the truth about their bandwidth costs. Apparently, all of TWC’s whining about “increased costs” just doesn’t bear out analysis… of the company’s own shareholder reports. In fact, external bandwidth is the least of all of TWC’s contractual obligations, except for existing debt obligations.

How’s this for a figure: Time Warner pays around $40 million per year for their external bandwidth. Compare that to how much the company pays for carriage contracts – the contracts between cable networks and cable providers ($3 billion), digital phone bandwidth ($453 million), and purchases of set-top cable boxes ($175 million) and you can see that TWC really is raking it in on its Internet service.

And not only that, the cost of backbone bandwidth is dropping by around 50 percent every year. So whatever Time Warner pays for bandwith this year, expect the price per megabyte to actually fall next year… and the year after that, and the year after that.

You should really read the linked article. It will open your eyes.

It seems that Time Warner and Embarq never really paid much attention to the town of Wilson, NC. So when residents got fed up with paying too much for subpar service, they decided to do something about it.

They created Greenlight, an ISP that provides awesome packages for very good rates. How good are Greenlight’s deals? Well, for $99/month, you can get for 81 cable channels, unlimited phone service, and 10Mbps of synchronous bandwidth Internet; compare that to a similar “basic” plan from Time Warner, which offers fewer channels and less bandwidth for an “introductory rate” of only $137. For only $33 more per month than Time Warner’s “introductory rate”, Greenlight has a plan that provides every single channel (including premiums, like HBO and Showtime), unlimited phone service and 20Mbps of (let me mention this again) synchronous Internet.

Of course, Time Warner doesn’t like this one bit, so they’re teaming up with DSL provider Embarq to try and convince the North Carolina legislature to ban this type of “community-owned” ISP. And frankly, I can kind of see their point. Why is it fair for a community to use tax dollars to create a company that competes with Time Warner? Why not use tax money to create a chain of “community-owned” fast food restaurants or “community-owned” tire stores?

Continue reading “Time Warner vs. Wilson, NC”

Time Warner Cable, stung by criticism of its data capping plan, has apparently picked up all its DOCSIS 3.0 toys and stomped on home. DOCSIS, you see, stands for Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, and it’s the standard that cable companies use to send Internet data over their systems.

Almost every cable Internet user in the United States is currently using DOCSIS 2.0, which allows for theoretical speeds of up to 50Mbps. DOCSIS 3.0, which is in early field testing, would allow for double that theoretical speed. Indeed, at least one US cable company is beta testing 100Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 setups, which is around 14 times faster than Time Warner’s standard Internet service.

Time Warner was set to test out new DOCSIS 3.0 equipment… but has apparently tied DOCSIS 3.0 adoption with capped Internet. So, like a petulant child, TWC is saying that you can stick with DOCSIS 2.0 and have unlimited bandwidth, or you can have DOCSIS 3.0 and be stuck with 40GB/month caps. Which makes no sense if you think about it: TWC wants to upgrade their systems so that the “basic” plan would have 50Mbps speed, but a 40GB cap. So instead of waiting a week to hit your limit, you could now hit that monthly limit in 8 hours??

What the hell, dude?

Read more here.

Time Warner Cable, stung by a barrage of criticism from everyone from customers to Congress, has (temporarily) abandoned plans for data caps on the company’s residential Internet service plans. Note the key word temporarily, however. TWC CEO Glenn Britt released a statement today that read, in part:

“It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing. As a result, we will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met.”

So apparently, the public is just “stupid” and needs to be “educated” as to why Time Warner increasing their broadband bills by 300% is actually a good thing. I have this awesome mental image of a 30-foot high razor wire fence encircling a “Time Warner Cable Re-Education Center”, with hoi polloi like myself shuffling around an exercise yard in a Seconal stupor, lobotomy scar prominent on my forehead.

As I’ve said to anyone who will listen, this is nothing but a blatant money grab by Time Warner, and just today I mailed letters to North Carolina governor Bev Perdue, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, my state legislator and senator, and the FCC – in addition to sending online letters to the President, Vice President, my two Senators and my Congresswhore (Sue Myrick – where’s the “puke smiley” when you need it?). I’m as serious as a fucking heart attack about opposing these caps, and while I’m happy about today’s victory, I’m sure those bastards at Time Warner will try to come up with some sort of end-around.

For this reason, you need to stay vigilant on this issue. Check out the following websites if you have some spare time:

http://droptwc.com/
http://stoptwc.info/
http://stopthecap.com/

For more information about today’s events, check out this article at Ars Technica, or this article at eWeek.

In this post, I talked about Distributed File System (DFS), a technology that lets you combine disparate file shares into one “virtual” share that can be shared out to all users. So, for example, if you need to share ten folders off of seven different servers, you can opt to create a DFS share containing all of those shares, instead of mapping a drive letter to each individual share.

You might, however, encounter a problem with Windows XP-based PCs trying to connect to a local share via DFS. In SP2, Microsoft changed the way Windows XP handles loopback connections; this might cause a user to receive a “network path not found” error when trying to access a local share hosted on DFS.

If other users can access the share, and if the share can be accessed locally via UNC path (\\computer\share), then the fix should be easy:

1) Fire up Regedit.

2) Go to HKLM > System > CurrentControlSet > Services > Mup > Parameters.

3) Create a new DWORD value called “EnableDfsLoopbackTargets” (without the quotes).

4) Give it a value of 1.

5) Reboot the computer.

After the reboot, the local user should now be able to access the local share via DFS without that pesky error message.

Bookmarklets are tiny snippets of JavaScript code that can be stored in a bookmark (or Favorite, if you’re an Internet Explorer user).

Although many bookmarklets can handle tasks that browser extensions or plug-ins can do, bookmarklets have a few added advantages: they’re platform agnostic (most bookmarklets work in all browsers, so if you want to switch from Firefox to Opera most of your bookmarklets will still work); they don’t require any type of installation (Firefox extensions require a browser restart after installation, and also occasionally “break” when a new version of Firefox is released); they use far less memory than even a well-written extension; and lastly, bookmarklets work with bookmark synchronization sites and software, so if you use something like Weave or Foxmarks, you can easily have the same bookmarklets on every browser you use.

So… what can you do with bookmarklets? Check out this quick list I threw together:

Share on Facebook – One of Facebook’s most popular features is the “Share Link” app, which allows you to paste a website address into a Facebook window and send it out to all your friends. To use this feature, you normally have to to copy the target URL to your clipboard, open a new tab and login to Facebook, then paste the URL into the “Share:” box. With this officially-supported bookmarklet, you just go to a web page that you want to share and load the “Share on Facebook” bookmark; this makes a pop-up window appear with all the pertinent sharing information, so you can share it on Facebook with far fewer mouse clicks than the old way.

PressThis! – PressThis is like “Share on Facebook” for WordPress. You can highlight some text on a web page and click the “PressThis!” bookmark… a pop-up window will open to your WP blog with the text you highlighted already added to a new post. It’s awesome! Go to your WP dashboard and click on the main “Tools” menu to find out more.

Legiblize – converts the active web page to a more readable format. Excellent for older web pages or long Wikipedia articles.

Continue reading “All About Bookmarklets”

As you may know, I got a new computer for Christmas. The new machine’s pretty boss, but came with a rather disappointing onboard graphics chipset. So I ordered a new video card for my birthday: a Sparkle GeForce 9400 GT from Newegg. My first PCIe card, the 9400GT has some pretty amazing specs, considering the less than $50 price tag.

I suppose the most amazing is the 1GB of onboard video RAM. I remember getting really excited when I doubled the amount of video RAM on my old Pentium II 350 from 8MB to 16MB. That was something… and here I am, years later, fawning over a video card with 1000MB RAM!

The new card really boosts my WEI rating, too. Here’s a screencap from before the upgrade:

Continue reading “New Vid Card Goodness!”