caffeine powered automaton

14

Oct

Vote!

Normally I talk about technology or geeky news here, but today I'm going to remind everyone that the election is November 4th and anyone who can should vote.

voting bitches

04

Oct

Graph Fun Time

sucks

So some reason its okay to use 'sux' for Microsoft and Apple, but when it comes to Linux only 'sucks' will do.

web 3.0

"Web 4.0" had 104,000 results and "web 5.0" had 28,200 results.

28

Sep

Flickr's Most Annoying Feature

The ability of people other than the original photographer to add notes to a picture is the most annoying feature that Flickr offers. Not only do 90% of the notes have nothing to do with the area they are highlighting, but often they are redundant and are totally out of control. The extremely popular pictures quickly become obscured by the sheer number of notes on the image. Notes are also buggy to the point where they don't always disappear when you move your mouse outside of the image.

flickr notes

This image clearly shows notes gone completely out of control. The original image can hardly be seen beneath the flood of notes.

07

Sep

The Young Child's Shooter

I was getting ready to launch Unreal Tournament 3 from the Vista Games window when I noticed something strange about the ESRB rating for the game.

05

Sep

It's Comcastic

After the FCC moved against Comcast in its blocking of P2P traffic, Comcast retorted with a couple of moves of it's own. The media giant is appealing the FCC's ruling and now imposing a 250GB transfer cap on all of it's users. Although this fairly large cap will not affect most of the users of Comcast's internet it will have repercussions later down the line.

Comcast claims that this cap has been in place for awhile, but is just now being put in place in the user agreement. I haven't heard mention yet as if if this is just on downloads or if this is on uploads as well, but surely this is an attempt to try to prevent torrenting and seeding of torrents on their network. Yes, these action do use a lot of bandwidth, but if Comcast was able to provide the bandwidth it promises it's users it simply would not be a problem.

The cap does seem fairly high and quite difficult to reach at this point, however, the amount of data and services that use the internet are increasing. So in later years this cap will be quite restrictive unless there are plans to increase the cap to go with the technology, but the likeliness of this happening seems to be quite slim. However, the fact rather than throttling users that go over the cap like ISP's with caps outside of the U.S. have been doing Comcast will be charging its users when they go over. Which doesn't seem to alleviate the problem at all.

It will discourage some users to stay under the cap limit. However, to others this seems to be encouragement to stay just under the cap by the end of the month just to get everything you are paying for. Additionally, this just makes Verzion's FiOS look all that much better. Uncapped, faster service for the same price a Comcast's slower speeds and limitations? Sign me up! Now is the perfect time for Verizon to strike Comcast. Comcast looks bad already with the FCC's ruling and when the users get information about the cap they will look even worse. Verizon should be waving their "unlimited internet" flag high and proud.
about
Lindsey Bieda is currently a senior at The University of Pittsburgh studying Computer Science.

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