One of the problems with Comcast’s new 250 GB bandwidth cap is that, as Om points out on GigaOM, it’s metered without a meter. Comcast doesn’t provide you with a central tally of all your data use. The company instead suggests its customers install bandwidth metering software on their machines and then add up the numbers. Its FAQ reads: “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.” Got multiple home machines consuming data every day? Better bust out that spreadsheet — and get ready for some wild guesstimates. After all, you can’t just install a bandwidth metering application on your Slingbox.
The Slingbox is only one example of why the absence of a central bandwidth meter for your account is not inconvenient, but a central flaw in Comcast’s cap. More and more devices are bringing video to the living room, in turn consuming huge amounts of bandwidth. Most of them are not computers, but home entertainment devices with simplified interfaces that don’t burden their users with complicated stats and settings. That makes for a good user experience — unless you’re a Comcast customer that’s already using a lot of data and the box in your living room is busting your bandwidth-capped behind. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.
Swiss scientists have discovered that children above a certain age are driven by both genes and social factors to share with others even if they don’t have to. The Associated Press reported this week that the scientists gave kids in different age ranges tasks to divide candy amongst each others.
Three and four year olds were always trying to keep all the candy for themselves, but seven-to-eight year olds were trying to share fairly with others most of the time, even if that meant getting less candy for themselves. From the article:
“The study, published in the British journal Nature, could help explain how humans developed the ability to cooperate in large groups of individuals who are unrelated, the researchers say.”
To be fair, the AP article doesn’t mention file sharing at all, and I doubt the actual study does – but it still soundds like a perfect explanation for the dynamics on P2P networks to me. The study even confirmed that nobody likes leechers:
“But generosity had its limits. (…) (T)he older children were reluctant to let their counterpart have twice as (much candy) as themselves.”
It’s a curious problem: how do you compare two completely unrelated voting systems and say that one is more or less secure than the other? How can you meaningfully compare the security of paper ballots tabulated by optical scan systems with DRE sys…
A reaction to McCain’s recently announced technology policy. (Stupidly unclear in the video: the initial graph is U.S.’s global ranking in broadband penetration — so starting high (#5) in 2000, and declining to #22 by 2008. The rankings are based on OECD data.)
There’s also a version at YouTube (but please watch in “high quality”).
(I resisted the cheap shot “[sic]” at “and free to chose among broadband service providers.” Will someone please get them to fix this?)
So, finally I have collected enough new Moon optical illusions to justify posting them as a collection. Individually posting each one, wouldn’t make sense any more. Agree? Even though the idea isn’t something we haven’t already seen before (through rel…
Yesterday I went to another in a series of Product Management related breakfast discussions, the last one was on The Philosophy of Product, this one was about creating a value proposition. Once again Ellen Grace was an excellent host and facilitator of a great conversation.
Here are some of the key take-aways I had from this discussion:
A value proposition is a multi-layered and multi-faceted thing. Depending on what level you are at and what view you take the answer to “what is the value proposition?” may be very different.
Here’s my idea for the day, “Distributed Open Social Networking” free for anyone to take and implement.
Take wordpress or similar self publishing platform and add a few features to it to make it into a distributed social networking platform.
Make it easy to “add Bill as friend” from the DOSN enabled homepage so that when someone’s [...]
