So unbelievably lame! I am paying for the 16 MBit down / 2MBit up internet pipe and for the entire day my internet access is capped at a modem-esque (well not really, but close enough) 200KB/s!
All of a sudden at 10pm, my bandwidth magically improves! The real giveaway is in the Azureus Network Status Monitor which is clearly showing the insane rate of TCP resets which Charter is performing on my connections.
My internet provider sucks, can we have FIOS please?
Good little video on net neutrality, oriented more towards the mainstream instead of the usual slashdot / boingboing / digg crowd.
The classic net neutrality diagram for those too lazy to watch:
via iPower
Many people (including my family) are always asking whats the point of Twitter, Friend Feed, BrightKite, social media and all the other cool new stuff out there. As I have said before I have a grasp on these issues, but communicating to nonbelievers sometimes proves difficult. The good news today is that there is serious money behind web 2.0, blogging 2.0, mashups, etc. Some choice quotes via Twitter today:
Social media and web 2.0 is possibly recession proof (article 1)
Furthermore, James Cooper in his Business Week column points that the Services sector continues to add new jobs while the overall employment rate continue to recede.
All of this is a 4.6 billion market. That’s billion with a capital B. (article 2)
A new study by Forrester forecasts that Enterprise 2.0 solutions to capture an astonishing market share of 4.6 billion by 2013 and Social Networks related technologies are expected to take the lion share of these investments, accounting for approximately $2 billion.
In short, it’s a NEW field here. Enterprise 2.0 they are calling it but its really just another cross-discipline segment of the workforce. Looking around at all the big players in the consulting areas I see nobody, not IBM, Accenture, etc. doing anything specifically in this space. I postulate that the reason for this is a lack of talent in this space. It’s like the computer revolution, almost nobody knows how it works and has experience in this. This will eventually change of course, but in the meantime its time for us to make some loot. Your blogging hobby which you are starting to monetize, your deep interest in social media, your experience building and designing messaging tools are all worth a lot of money right now. This value will decrease over time so lets do something cool today!
@boblozano have another BBQ 
Great article on what open source actually means to Microsoft (it’s disruptive) and big business in general that doesn’t subscribe to the open model. The open model allows my startup costs to be zero and I will probably try and monetize the business without selling a a product or a software package. Notice the lack of need for anything Microsoft related whatsoever.
In sum, Microsoft still doesn’t understand the Internet, the ultimate child of the open-source movement. It is the Internet that simultaneously makes Google and open source so brilliantly destructive and disruptive to Microsoft’s future.
via CNET
So very awesome. Grab The Slip here.
as a thank you to our fans for your continued support, we are giving away the new nine inch nails album one hundred percent free, exclusively via nin.com.
the music is available in a variety of formats including high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE. your link will include all options – all free. all downloads include a PDF with artwork and credits.
via DiggNation
Oddly different benchmarking results from speedtest.net and dslreports.com.
Charter just offered a new package and I upgraded high speed internet to 16Mb down / 2Mb up. It’s also now $44.95, cheaper than the old 10/1. I think this should barely hold me over until FIOS is available in St. Louis.
However Charter is still resetting about 15-25% of P2P traffic according to the Network Status Monitor plugin for Azureus.
I’ve been outside. It’s overrrated.
Traditionally Outside receives extremely high ratings by those who like to see others play it, and these people are in many cases comfortably ensconced Inside themselves. Outside was released many years ago, it was in fact the first massively multiplayer game, and yet it has always managed to avoid the double-edged Retro tag. In its favor, continual user updates have kept Outside current; there are always new things to see and do Outside. Participants are permitted, to some extent, to modify their own areas of Outside, which is a large part of the fun of the game. However it seems that in the end one is modifying Outside largely for the sake of it, and having done it, there is a distinct feeling of “now what?”
In terms of the traditional target age content metrics, Outside is remarkably high in sex, violence and challenges to traditional values, despite the strong child-focussed marketing it receives. Many would go so far as to say that for a child to develop the ability to cope with Outside is essential, as long as the harm incurred is not too debilitating. Children injured playing Outside are usually comforted by parents, and soon encouraged to go Outside again; this leads to the conclusion that somehow Outside has escaped any and all of the usual moralizing that surrounds the videogaming industry. One might say that Outside gets a free pass from the Jack Thompsons of this world.
That aside, how does Outside actually rate? The physics system is note-perfect (often at the expense of playability), the graphics are beyond comparison, the rendering of objects is absolutely beautiful at any distance, and the player’s ability to interact with objects is really limited only by other players’ tolerance. The real fundamental problem with the game is that there is nothing to do.
…. awesome!
via Metafilter
Shame on you Network Solutions! Pre-emptive censorship!?
Un-American asshats!
How can a site with no content violate your terms of use, yet you host all sorts of porn and hate speech (Al Queda, Hezbollah), etc. Cultural marxism is a scary thing.
 ”The problem, Glenn, and you and I talked about the political correctness tyranny in this country. There`s a great British social commentator Named Pat Cundeau (ph) who said the lie of political correctness is that we`re being told that what we should think is more important than what we do think. “
Now my kids are going to know what my day to day life was like, yikes. Bye-bye prehistory!
The date marking the end of prehistory, that is the date when written historical records become a useful academic resource, varies from region to region. In Egypt it is generally accepted that prehistory ended around 3200 BC whereas in New Guinea the end of the prehistoric era is set much more recently, 1900.
via Wikipedia
I did find a super video about Twitter, why it’s useful, and it’s role in social relationships and interactions. I got the video from jasonbutler42 and hist post made me go find my first tweet (
This is the most accurate flowcart ever created. It speaks truly to the process of geek evolution and how D&D is at the root of all that is awesome. Thanks Gary Gygax, rest in peace.
via nytimes.com