No, I hadn't been running any up till that point that day and don't distinctly remember running any in the days preceding... I was getting ready to upload a file via FTP to my webhost and decided to test my speed for kicks and giggles before starting it, and the result was as I described. (A side point, my FTP upload speed seems somehow capped by them as well. It'll start fast and then can never reach speeds above 46 kbps or so. Truly annoying.)
None of the Comcast Lies and Propaganda about this so called "Powerboost" are true for me at all. In fact, last time I ran a speed test I only got 384 kbps up and something like 4-6 mbps down. Hardly an "improvement".
In case you were wondering, no, I wasn't running any torrents at the time. In fact, I didn't have anything else going at the time so I have no idea why it was so slow.
Eh, not everyone in Indiana has it. I'm in Fort Wayne, about 3 hours SSW of Chicago, and despite the fact that it's been rolled out nearly everywhere else in Fort Wayne, I can't get it. Apparently, being about two blocks outside of city limits means I'm too far away.
So I'm still stuck on Comcast, and they are REALLY getting bad. My up speed has dropped significantly, my torrents barely run and slow down the rest of the connection while they're going, and half the time it seems like I can hardly get pages to load at a decent speed. On top of all THAT, Comcast is now apparently shaping or doing SOMETHING to FTP traffic to slow it down, because despite the fact that I can connect to and use various different servers (I've tried about 3) and start uploading or downloading at a very nice speed, it suddenly drops to 40 kb/s and stays there about 2 or 3 minutes into the process.
I'm sick and tired of it but thanks to the monopoly and no viable (IE under 60 dollars) alternatives, there's nothing I can do, short of calling Verizon and begging them to hurry up and come down my road. It's so sad that we're now running TO Verizon instead of from it...
I live in Fort Wayne, IN, where there are well over 2,000 Burmese refugees living, (I recently heard another huge number of them have moved in due to the refugee camps in Thailand closing, but haven't heard an official estimate yet) and we supposedly have the largest Burmese population outside of the country of Burma itself. At least that's the claim.
At any rate, I've learned a few Burmese phrases, and while I don't know how they pronounce their countries original name in their language, the name of their language ("Burmese" in Burmese) is something like Buh-Muh-Zuh-Gah. So the "Buh-Muh" is probably where the "Burma" came from.
More interesting information about the language and culture can be found at this site.
Before. I bought a laptop from Best Buy. A Gateway. (Yes, it probably sucks but I don't really care, it was a laptop and I only needed it for simple tasks like Internet, Word Processing, etc. while at school since I didn't want the hassle of messing with computer labs. I like control, basically.)
Anyhow. After I basically got to the point that I wanted to purchase it, he said "By the way, Gateways and no longer offer any restore disks with their PCs, they just have the restoration stuff stored on another partition on the hard drive. If your hard drive has a head crash, then you'll lose all that information and you won't be able to reinstall your OS or the software it came with. But we can make a restore disk for you for only 25 dollars!"
Now, I'm pretty savvy with computers in general, but I didn't have any backup software at home, and it sounded like more work than I cared to do. So I agreed once he assured me that it would only take 2 hours and I could come back and pick up the computer the same day. Then he pressured me to get the ridiculous warranty. I passed, except for the accidental damage only for one year since I figured if I didn't get that I'd end up dropping it for sure and then be stuck. Plus, it wasn't very outrageously priced. Sounded good to me, so I paid and left to get some food and hang out with some friends for a bit, and after more than two hours had passed, I went back to pick up my computer and my nifty new Restore Disk.
I go up to the Geek Squad window, show them my receipt, and the guy goes. "Oh. I wasn't aware that we were supposed to make a restore disk for that computer back there." (I could see it, sitting in the box still on the shelf, looking lonely...) "I saw the computer but didn't know what it was there for."
I was flabbergasted. So I explained that I'd bought it just a bit ago and the salesman told me the laptop didn't come with any sort of restore disk at all, so Geek Squad would make one and it'd be ready for pickup in two hours.
"Oh. Well, the laptop does come with the Windows OS disk so you can reinstall the OS, just not any of the preinstalled programs, and you might have to search for drivers on the internet. Plus, it would've taken more than two hours to make the disk anyhow."
Needless to say, I don't care about the crap programs that are installed on it to start with, I just want the OS reinstall disk! I mean, even though I planned on putting Linux on, I wanted to dual boot with some flavor of Windows to test things out on and use for the occasional game. Searching for drivers to reinstall hardware was a fact of life and was to be expected. So I got my 25 bucks refunded and left.
We've owned 5 computers so far in my life. The first was from Acer via a catalog or something, next was from a local, small computer shop (it's still chugging, using it as a Linux based storage server), the next two were from Dell, and then this laptop. I've learned my lesson. Never buy a laptop (or any computer really) from a big box store. I'd sooner order from Dell again if I couldn't build it myself as I've started doing.
I find this pretty interesting in general, just because of how all kinds of wild predictions about computers have been made by all kinds of people, most of them totally wrong, but for one person to be (more or less) correct more than once about things is pretty fascinating to me.
I have to say, though, speaking of newspapers, the Epic 2014 video makes some pretty interesting predictions about the future of print newspapers. I'm relatively sure that news is going to continue to make a move to be more online (and probably subscription) based, but the Epic 2014 video is pretty interesting to think about.
You know, you'd think that if someone was going to do something sneaky that they shouldn't be doing, they'd at least double check who they're sending this stuff to. Doing something like this is basically the equivalent of writing a fellow co-worker bashing your boss and then carbon copying that email to... your boss.
This just goes to show how ridiculous US society has become. What will this mean for anyone who uploads a video of something that is copyrighted to You Tube? Or even the poor sap that attempts to watch said copyrighted video? There are so many people that do this now, and I just don't see how it could be feasible for the Justice System (let alone the overcrowded prisons) to have to try to prosecute and imprison all of those people alone.
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No, I hadn't been running any up till that point that day and don't distinctly remember running any in the days preceding... I was getting ready to upload a file via FTP to my webhost and decided to test my speed for kicks and giggles before starting it, and the result was as I described. (A side point, my FTP upload speed seems somehow capped by them as well. It'll start fast and then can never reach speeds above 46 kbps or so. Truly annoying.)
None of the Comcast Lies and Propaganda about this so called "Powerboost" are true for me at all. In fact, last time I ran a speed test I only got 384 kbps up and something like 4-6 mbps down. Hardly an "improvement". In case you were wondering, no, I wasn't running any torrents at the time. In fact, I didn't have anything else going at the time so I have no idea why it was so slow.
Errr, SSE not SSW... Typical geography skills for an American though I guess...
Eh, not everyone in Indiana has it. I'm in Fort Wayne, about 3 hours SSW of Chicago, and despite the fact that it's been rolled out nearly everywhere else in Fort Wayne, I can't get it. Apparently, being about two blocks outside of city limits means I'm too far away. So I'm still stuck on Comcast, and they are REALLY getting bad. My up speed has dropped significantly, my torrents barely run and slow down the rest of the connection while they're going, and half the time it seems like I can hardly get pages to load at a decent speed. On top of all THAT, Comcast is now apparently shaping or doing SOMETHING to FTP traffic to slow it down, because despite the fact that I can connect to and use various different servers (I've tried about 3) and start uploading or downloading at a very nice speed, it suddenly drops to 40 kb/s and stays there about 2 or 3 minutes into the process. I'm sick and tired of it but thanks to the monopoly and no viable (IE under 60 dollars) alternatives, there's nothing I can do, short of calling Verizon and begging them to hurry up and come down my road. It's so sad that we're now running TO Verizon instead of from it...
I'm rather partial to the Adobe Acrobat pong like game that shows up on the stories here sometimes. It's great!
I live in Fort Wayne, IN, where there are well over 2,000 Burmese refugees living, (I recently heard another huge number of them have moved in due to the refugee camps in Thailand closing, but haven't heard an official estimate yet) and we supposedly have the largest Burmese population outside of the country of Burma itself. At least that's the claim. At any rate, I've learned a few Burmese phrases, and while I don't know how they pronounce their countries original name in their language, the name of their language ("Burmese" in Burmese) is something like Buh-Muh-Zuh-Gah. So the "Buh-Muh" is probably where the "Burma" came from. More interesting information about the language and culture can be found at this site.
Before. I bought a laptop from Best Buy. A Gateway. (Yes, it probably sucks but I don't really care, it was a laptop and I only needed it for simple tasks like Internet, Word Processing, etc. while at school since I didn't want the hassle of messing with computer labs. I like control, basically.)
Anyhow. After I basically got to the point that I wanted to purchase it, he said "By the way, Gateways and no longer offer any restore disks with their PCs, they just have the restoration stuff stored on another partition on the hard drive. If your hard drive has a head crash, then you'll lose all that information and you won't be able to reinstall your OS or the software it came with. But we can make a restore disk for you for only 25 dollars!"
Now, I'm pretty savvy with computers in general, but I didn't have any backup software at home, and it sounded like more work than I cared to do. So I agreed once he assured me that it would only take 2 hours and I could come back and pick up the computer the same day. Then he pressured me to get the ridiculous warranty. I passed, except for the accidental damage only for one year since I figured if I didn't get that I'd end up dropping it for sure and then be stuck. Plus, it wasn't very outrageously priced. Sounded good to me, so I paid and left to get some food and hang out with some friends for a bit, and after more than two hours had passed, I went back to pick up my computer and my nifty new Restore Disk.
I go up to the Geek Squad window, show them my receipt, and the guy goes. "Oh. I wasn't aware that we were supposed to make a restore disk for that computer back there." (I could see it, sitting in the box still on the shelf, looking lonely...) "I saw the computer but didn't know what it was there for."
I was flabbergasted. So I explained that I'd bought it just a bit ago and the salesman told me the laptop didn't come with any sort of restore disk at all, so Geek Squad would make one and it'd be ready for pickup in two hours.
"Oh. Well, the laptop does come with the Windows OS disk so you can reinstall the OS, just not any of the preinstalled programs, and you might have to search for drivers on the internet. Plus, it would've taken more than two hours to make the disk anyhow."
Needless to say, I don't care about the crap programs that are installed on it to start with, I just want the OS reinstall disk! I mean, even though I planned on putting Linux on, I wanted to dual boot with some flavor of Windows to test things out on and use for the occasional game. Searching for drivers to reinstall hardware was a fact of life and was to be expected. So I got my 25 bucks refunded and left.
We've owned 5 computers so far in my life. The first was from Acer via a catalog or something, next was from a local, small computer shop (it's still chugging, using it as a Linux based storage server), the next two were from Dell, and then this laptop. I've learned my lesson. Never buy a laptop (or any computer really) from a big box store. I'd sooner order from Dell again if I couldn't build it myself as I've started doing.
Just what we need! Another list that people can mistakenly get put on for no particular reason other than having done nothing wrong.
I find this pretty interesting in general, just because of how all kinds of wild predictions about computers have been made by all kinds of people, most of them totally wrong, but for one person to be (more or less) correct more than once about things is pretty fascinating to me.
I have to say, though, speaking of newspapers, the Epic 2014 video makes some pretty interesting predictions about the future of print newspapers. I'm relatively sure that news is going to continue to make a move to be more online (and probably subscription) based, but the Epic 2014 video is pretty interesting to think about.
In the style of Homestar Runner... 503'D!! I wonder how long it'll take for this to get tagged "slashdotted"
So will this someday allow me to take parts from various trees and make a whole new species of tree? I think I'll call it "Frankenpine..."
You know, you'd think that if someone was going to do something sneaky that they shouldn't be doing, they'd at least double check who they're sending this stuff to. Doing something like this is basically the equivalent of writing a fellow co-worker bashing your boss and then carbon copying that email to ... your boss.
This just goes to show how ridiculous US society has become. What will this mean for anyone who uploads a video of something that is copyrighted to You Tube? Or even the poor sap that attempts to watch said copyrighted video? There are so many people that do this now, and I just don't see how it could be feasible for the Justice System (let alone the overcrowded prisons) to have to try to prosecute and imprison all of those people alone.