Comcast to make monthly Internet use cap official

NEW YORK (AP) — Comcast Corp., the nation’s second-largest Internet service provider, Thursday said it would set an official limit on the amount of data subscribers can download and upload each month.

On Oct. 1, the cable company will update its user agreement to say that users will be allowed 250 gigabytes of traffic per month, the company announced on its Web site.

Comcast has already reserved the right to cut off subscribers who use too much bandwidth each month, without specifying exactly what constitutes excessive use.

“We’ve listened to feedback from our customers who asked that we provide a specific threshold for data usage and this would help them understand the amount of usage that would qualify as excessive,” the company said in a statement on its Web site.

Comcast: Users Who Exceed 250GB Cap Twice Face Service “Termination”

Sam Gustin says: It’s been rumored, but now it’s confirmed. Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, is instituting a 250GB bandwidth threshold to begin October 1, the company said today.

“If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,” the company said in an update on its network management Web page.

As part of the policy, if a user exceeds the 250GB usage cap twice in a six-month period, they face losing their service.

As a (relatively pleased) Comcast customer, I have sort of mixed feelings about this.

On one hand, this is better than a lot of alternatives. It’s good that they’re coming out and giving a number. I much prefer above-the-board policies over vague terms like “too much”. If 38 pieces of flare is the number, say it’s 38. I also think that this is probably better than Time-Warner’s tact of tiered plans. My first thought was “Comcast should let people that go over just pay extra” but I think that would incentivize them to revise that number downward and find ways to overcount used bandwidth because it’d mean more money. By kicking people off, they’re drawing a line in the sand that would more accurately put the limits closer to profitability. It’s worth noting that the companies that are simply charging more for “over-use” are putting their caps waaaaay lower. Absurdly low. That’s another good thing about Comcast’s plan… 250GB is a lot of transfer. Almost enough that you can be sure that anyone that goes above that is probably doing something rather sneaky.

Almost, but not quite. That’s what brings me to the reservations with the plan. As Web pointed out when we discussed TW’s tiered plan, used bandwidth is something very hard to gauge. Sometimes when you don’t think you’re using much, you are. Sometimes when you think you’re using a lot, the people at the other end are trying to save on their own bandwidth and have thus minimized the transfers. Could a person that’s not downloading tons and tons of nefarious gigabytes from BitTorrent or what have you go over 250GB? It’s not easy, but it can be done. Though they throw out a lot of numbers about how many songs someone could download or whatever, they overlook one huge thing which is streaming video and streaming audio. Some people don’t just watch trailers online, they watch movies from Netflix and TV shows from Hulu and listen to Internet radio and Rhapsody and a ton of other stuff. I honestly don’t know how much of that would be required to hit their maximum. That’s a problem in and of itself. I’m a relatively knowledgeable guy when it comes to computers… and I don’t know.

The good news is that they will alert users that are going over the limits. That’s good. They need to do something like that. If I’m at risk of getting my service shut off entirely, I want to know. The problem is that I want to know well before it happens. I need some sort of meter or gauge. If they add that, that’d go a pretty long way towards easing the uncertainty and allowing people to moderate their use when they can and if they find that they’re running low on bandwidth they can curb their uses towards more critical functions.

So in review, I think that they did a good job setting the limit as high as they did in order to target only the worst offenders and it’s good that they’re giving hard numbers. They just need to give a little more notice than a phone call when it’s already too late and cut service the second time around.

I made a decision about this blog of utterly minimal consequence, which is actually the reversal of a decision that I don’t think that anyone actually noticed. But it’s related to the history of my online nickname, so I’ll share a bit about that.

All of you have probably figured out that “Trumwill” is the first four letters of my last name followed by the first four letters of my first name. The name was derived from the account naming convention of a former employer wherein they did the same. The formulized account name became so prevalent in everything we did and the office environment itself was so cold and impersonalized that when it was pronounceable we called each other by our account names rather than our real names.

When I started this blog, a lot of it involved talking about work. The email addresses and account names at Falstaff, where I was working at the time were our first name followed by our last initial. Most of the accounts I’ve had were my first initial followed by my last name. Sometimes my first two initials. Once it was like “Trumwill” except it went 6-2 rather than 4-4. I was initially going to go with WillT (and I do use that sometimes), but I came to the odd decision that if someone from my work saw that naming convention it might be familiar or something, so I explored alternatives. wtruman and trumanwi were both lame, but trumwill was perfectly pronounceable and even if no one knew precisely where it came from it was indicative to me of corporate absurdity in a blog about (at the time) corporate absurdity. So “trumwill” it was.

So that brings me to the current decision. At the former employer, our account names were never capitalized. So for this blog, I almost never capitalized my name. Everyone else did, but I didn’t. Even in blog post titles. The idea in my mind was that it harkened back to the former job with the former company. I’ve since come to the conclusion that it is more easily interpreted as lame like a black-clad teenager that things that never capitalizing anything or capitalizing sporadically is kewl like ee cummings or some crap like that.

So despite its origins (which are largely irrelevant and will be made moreso as it’s unlikely that I will get into the grit of my current work since it’s all so bloody obvious who it’s with), Trumwill is now officially capitalized.

I know that I have at least a couple computer-people that read this blog. So for y’all I have a question.

One of the advantages of SATA hard drives over IDE hard drives is supposed to be that the former are “hot swappable” while the latter are not. I understand “hot-swappable” to mean that the computer will accommodate adding or removing a hard drive with the computer still on without any ill-effects (unless a file on a removed HD is open).

This is how USB Thumb Drives work. You put it in there and the drive appears. You take it out and the drive disappears. Does “how-swappable” mean something different when it comes to SATA drives?

I ask in part because I have a SATA hard drive that is somewhat blinkered. It seems to sporadically cut out. I have a USB external drive that cuts out, too. When the latter cuts out, the drive simply disappears and reappears and as long is nothing on it is open, there’s no problem. Even if something is open, typically the worst that will happen is an error message or two. The SATA, though, throws Windows XP into fits. If you so much as open Windows Explorer, the app will freeze even if you’re not trying to access data from that particular drive. Even if you don’t open explorer or try to access the drive the system itself will intermittently freeze for about 5-10 seconds every minute or two.

I was willing to attribute this to a faulty drive that was doing more than cutting out. Somewhat unrelated to this problem, I purchased a front-loading SATA bay wherein you can put the HD into the system while it’s on and take it out. The SATA drive connects to a port that connects to a SATA port on the motherboard. The box says in large letters “HOT SWAPPABLE!”, so I assume that I am not doing anything that this particular device did not intend.

Yet the behavior is identical to the faulty HD. If I take a drive out, the system throws fits. If I put a drive in after it’s booted, it doesn’t show up. The documentation I’ve seen on Windows says that XP and Vista both are hot-swap-capable for SATA drives, though maybe I’m looking in the wrong place. I haven’t actually seen all that much information beyond “Hey, isn’t it cool that it is capable of this?!”

So the two questions I have are:

1. Do I not understand the meaning of the term “hot-swappable”? If so, what does it actually mean?

2. Is there something in particular I have to do within Windows to enable this? Is it like USB drives in Windows 2000 where you have to tell it you are about to disconnect a drive? I haven’t found any information on this whatsoever.

(Please be aware that the bulk of this post was written before any conflict-of-interest that may or may not occur may or may not have begun occurring. Over the next couple of weeks I will be clearing the decks of such old posts so that they are not influenced by recent circumstances.)

I have written four different novels in my life using four different document formats. The first was originally written on Microsoft Write (*.wri), the freebie that came with Windows 3.1 that was replaced with WordPad on Windows 95. We didn’t own Microsoft Word at the time, but I probably wouldn’t have used it even if we did because I had the opportunity to use Microsoft Works but didn’t. The second was written on Word (*.doc). The third was written on OpenOffice.org 1.1 (*.sxw). The most recent one was also written on OpenOffice.org, but it was using the new OpenDocument Format (*.odt). I’ve toyed around with the idea of writing the next one on a more recent version of Microsoft Works (*.wkd) just to keep the streak going, but I probably won’t.

I first started moving away from MS Word in 2002 when StarOffice released the code for its software suite under the name OpenOffice.org and allowed it for free consumption. My friend Tony, a big-time Open Source Software (OSS) advocate, suggested it to me. I’d toyed around with StarOffice before and though it was perfectly fine I still ran into the licensing problem that MS Office had insofar as I had numerous computers and didn’t want to be responsible for holding numerous licenses*. OpenOffice offered me a chance to be thrifty and legit, so I decided to give it a shot. I was planning to write a November Novel and decided that I’d give it a trial-by-fire test run while writing it.

It took a bit of getting used to for finding the various features, but for the most part it passed with one grave problem. I did have a few complaints, though. It was resource-intensive (even compared to its Microsoft counterpart), interoperability with MS Office was flawed, and the aforementioned grave problem. I was writing the novel on a laptop and whenever I closed the laptop it would go into sleep mode. OpenOffice couldn’t handle that and when it came back up the document would revert to the previous saved version. Further, the auto-save feature was not very diligent. So I’d have to rewrite a page or to. How I actually put up with that considering the tight deadline I was under is beyond me, but I guess after it happens the first couple times you remember to save your work with OCD-like vigilance.

I voiced my complaints to my OSS-boosting friends and they responded how OSS people frequently did whenever their product fell short, which is to blame the user. It was my fault for expecting it to be able to handle such user behavior and my fault for not saving my work just to be careful. Further, they explained to me that it was Microsoft’s fault because their sleep mode should save everything exactly as-is. Be that as it may I simply said that even if it isn’t OOo’s fault it is their problem and that I wouldn’t be using the software on the laptop anymore (which, at that point, was the only place that I was using it).

Fortunately the corporations that contribute to Open Source Software are more large-minded than many of its advocates, so when OpenOffice.org 2.0 came out they specifically addressed all of the above issues. The part that sold me, though, was the implementation of OpenDocument Format (ODF). What ODF promised was an open standard that would be consistent across almost all software suites so that even if development on OOo stopped or at least stopped improving, I could simply take my documents and use them with something else. Microsoft hadn’t signed on** (of course), but Corel Suite and various others had.

Around that time I heard that Microsoft was itself changing its document formatting and that though conversion would be possible it would still have to go through conversion process and that without a patch of some sort my Microsoft Office wouldn’t be able to read new documents anyway. This was something of a last straw for me. I’d managed to keep on keeping on with MS Office 2000 and this started sounding more and more like a play to force me to upgrade when Office 2000 still did everything that I needed it to do. It also lifted the immunity I had from whatever draconian authentication schemes Microsoft came up with and made me want all the more to become independent of the company.

So when OpenOffice 2.0 came out, I downloaded it. In addition to fixing the problems above and the ODF support, it also have a very handy conversion tool so I was able to convert all of my documents at once (saving old copies, of course!). Interoperability with Microsoft had improved marvelously. All but the most complicated of my Word documents converted perfectly and even those that didn’t convert quite right came a lot closer than with OOo 1.1. Ironically, conversion was better between Microsoft’s formatting (*.doc) and ODF (*.odt) than it was between the old OpenOffice formatting scheme (*.sxw) and and ODF.

I’ve been reasonably pleased with it and use it 90% of the time. I had intended at the same time to start transitioning away from Windows. That transition was not nearly as successful.

Soon I will write more thoroughly about what OpenOffice can and cannot do.

* – Turns out that this was a needless worry. StarOffice, as opposed to MS Office, allowed you to install the software on multiple computers provided that it was the same person using them.

** – I think that Microsoft has since announced that it will support ODF files natively, which could mean that I can send my ODF files directly without having to risk a conversion blip or taking the time to stamp any blips out. The area where this would be most helpful is with my resume.

quenkyle: Did you ever get those Exo-Squad files to work on your computer?
trumwill: No, I never did
trumwill: It never ceases to amaze me when a show hasn’t been released to DVD
quenkyle: Well, it does cost quite a bit
quenkyle: and some shows may not have enough of a following to make a profit
trumwill: Someone needs to find a way to do it cheaply.
quenkyle: What *does* surprise me, is that they don’t sell them online
quenkyle: Online distribution is that way
quenkyle: But the rights-holders are old school DRM enthusiasts
quenkyle: Generally speaking
trumwill: There’s got to be a way to put low-volume shows on DVD at relatively little cost.
trumwill: I mean, look at the $1 DVD section at Walmart! These aren’t exactly high-demand products.
quenkyle: True, but the quality of the video and audio tends to be godawful
quenkyle: I do want my DVDs to be in a semi-watchable state
trumwill: Oh, they’re at least semi-watchable. Not really DVD quality, but for low-volume stuff I don’t see that as a problem.
trumwill: It’s about as good as VHS (in fact, probably taken straight from VHS)
quenkyle: It’s a fine line to walk, though. Even if they put it out like that, the company in question may get a reputation for less-than-stellar DVD releases
trumwill: That’s why you create a special Discount label. Something like Cheap {Spit} Productions.
trumwill: Then you say “We’re going to release this via CSP, but if enough people buy it we’ll do a full-on release. So go buy this crappy product if you want the real thing!” Studios love pulling that crap.
quenkyle: But word will get out about who owns it. Just like when Disney quietly purchased Miramax and started editing things they didn’t like out of their movies
trumwill: See, I didn’t know that Disney even did that! 🙂
quenkyle: haha
quenkyle: I still think digital distribution is the best way to go. Especially for shows like Exo-squad, which they’ll never revive. Better to make a few bucks off it than have it moulder in a vault somewhere
quenkyle: Oh!
quenkyle: That’s another reason
quenkyle: A lot of those old shows have been lost. As in the masters are gone
quenkyle: Did you hear about The Who and Rock Band?
quenkyle: They wanted to release a full album, but the band itself couldn’t find their own masters.
quenkyle: Shit like that is pretty common, it seems
trumwill: Actually, what they could do is contract it out. Sell the right to produce crappy DVDs to some third party distributor for a commission or something. Kind of like the pirates do now, except legit (and probably of somewhat better quality)
trumwill: The masters only matter so much if you want to release something that looks really nice.
quenkyle: haha
quenkyle: That is kinda the point, though, I think.
quenkyle: Even if it were cheap, I wouldn’t buy a DVD that looked like ass
trumwill: What if you couldn’t get it any other way?
quenkyle: VHS quality is a no-go these days
quenkyle: Then I’d wait for someone to post the shitty quality one online and download it
trumwill: Damn pirates!
quenkyle: haha
trumwill: People actually pay $100 for VCR-recorded episodes of The Practice, Crossing Jordan, Judging Amy, and other shows that (thus far) have not made it to DVD. There’s money to be made here!
quenkyle: O.o
quenkyle: I had no idea
quenkyle: crazy bastards
trumwill: If it’s the only way that you can get the show, you’ll do what you gotta do. I almost broke down and bought The Drew Carey Show.
quenkyle: crazy bastard

When I was in college I bought my first color printer. I’d done all the research and determined that the best deal was easily an Epson that was out at the time. About the same time, my roommate Hubert got an HP. I scoffed. He’d paid more for a printer with a lower DPI. The fool! Despite the lower DPI, though, his prints came out consistently better than mine. I went from scoffing to envious. He said that though HP was cheaper, it was a better brand name so he knew that he couldn’t go wrong with it.

As I worked more and more with computers, I realized that he was absolutely right. Sometimes the specs matter a lot less than the manufacturer. The brand. I was still too much of a cheapskate to get an HP printer, but I did get HP products where they were price-competitive for products such as scanners. Since then (though not necessarily because of that specific experience) I’ve become big into brand name.

A couple years after that I was the solo IT department for Wildcat, an engineering and manufacturing company in Colosse. When one of our office printers died, it was up to me to find a replacement. I immediately searched for an HP printer. Yeah, it was more expensive, but as Hubert had pointed out, you couldn’t go wrong buying it. They didn’t make bad printers. Risk-aversion is a powerful force when you’re the IT guy, so I made the order and received it not long after.

It was a piece of junk. The plastic broke even as it came out of the box. The colors didn’t align creating fuzzy prints. One of the print cartridges leaked. The drivers didn’t work right (taking up 100% of the resources whenever anything was printing). There was an additional series of events about trying to get updated drivers (they wanted money), but that’s a customer service problem so I won’t go into it here. From there I had an unofficial and inconsistent boycott against HP with any product that I wasn’t convinced would be good and that I couldn’t download the drivers for before it was even shipped to me.

For some reason, our laser printer didn’t seem to make it from Estacado to Cascadia. It may be boxed up somewhere mislabeled, but we’ve looked in just about every box that’s the right shape for it. In any case, Clancy and I each having our own printers would be a good thing, my (HP) scanner busted, we’ve spent obscene amounts of money at Kinko’s in lieu of having our printer, and it would be useful to have a color printer (the laser is B&W). So we decided to purchase an all-in-one scanner.

So I was knocking around Newegg looking at printers. I decided to bite the bullet and look at HPs, though I’d keep an eye on customer reviews to make sure that I was getting the best product I could. Even when I bought my crappy one, HP has always made some printers that were good, so I’d just have to pick the right one.

The problem is that since HP has started selling crappy printers in addition tot he good ones, it’s so difficult to tell which is which. In the customer reviews on Newegg, there are always some cranks that just go around trashing products as well as the dissatisfied customer that happened to get a hold of a lemon. So I take negative reviews with a grain of salt unless I see some consistently what aspects of the component the people are complaining about.

Most of the reviews on the HP printers I’m looking at are pretty positive (50-70% give it four of five stars out of five), but there are just enough to give me pause. It used to be that the brand name alone was enough to assuage my doubts, as with Western Digital, ThinkPad, and a host of other companies that I consistently buy parts from. The problem is that even if these are great printers and the people giving it low marks are just cranks, I have no way to know that for sure. In their attempts to compete for the bargain-shopper market, they lost something very valuable. They’re just another Epson at this point.

Canon printers, on the other hand, have almost universally high marks. Their printers are more expensive across the board, of course, but even their low-end machines get good marks. Even though Clancy and I want a fax machine (in the medical community you can’t always just scan and send it in email the way you can in IT). A Canon without a fax machine costs about the same as an HP with one and if I want a Canon that has fax capabilities then I’m going to have to shell out considerably more. However, just to avoid getting an HP printer that may be good or may be crappy, it might be worth losing some functionality (at this point, we can’t afford to shell out the extra money).

It’s unfortunate that a brand that was once so reliable is now cause for trepidation.

One of my hard drives died yesterday. Fortunately, very little data was actually lost due to backups. So it was just the drive, which was still under warranty and will be replaced soon.

Nonetheless, I am devastated.

Not for the hard drive itself but because it’s death means the end of a project that has cost not-inconsiderable money and hundreds of hours of troubleshooting. A couple years ago I had this idea. I won’t go into details, but it involved throwing together a whole lot of hard drives on a single computer. The number was originally 3 hard drives, then became 5, then 7, 8, and eventually 11 and a DVDRW.

A number of people told me that I couldn’t do it, but no one was quite able to explain why. Power supplies could be improved, PCI-IDE slots added, a new case purchased. So what would be holding me back?

I still don’t even know the answer, which is perhaps the most frustrating part of it. Once I got up to 11 hard drives, the system just started cratering. It cratered before, but that was fixed with a stronger power supply. This time it was different. If 8 drives can work on a 500W drive, then surely 12 can work on 1000W. But no, it couldn’t. Maybe the computer just couldn’t manage and distribute enough power. Maybe it couldn’t juggle so much at once. I don’t know. I managed to eliminate every possibility as a possibility. There was no reason for it not to work. It just didn’t.

If you’re not technically inclined, you can skip the next paragraph and start on the one after.

What would typically happen is one or two of the hard drives cut in and out from the system. I’d get those working and then another would start doing the same thing. For those of you that don’t know, when an internal hard drives goes offline while the computer is up and running, Windows pretty much won’t work anymore whether you’re using that drive or not. To the extent that you can get it to (by not mapping the drive), it makes actually using the drives rather inconvenient. Anyway, I finally got it narrowed down to one drive that was the problem. I tried swapping ports to see whether the problem was with the HD itself or the port. Suddenly both drives worked, and a whole ‘nother drive just died. Kapoot. Never to house data again.

Anyway, after mulling it over a couple days the hard drive doesn’t bother me (like I said, backed up with a warranty)… and maybe it’s not even that I can’t do what it was that I was wanting to do. It’s that I set out on a very ambitious computer project and ultimately came up short. The nay-sayers that I’d talked to were right. Worse, I spend hundreds of hours of my life that I’m never going to get back. All because I was too stubborn to accept the defeat that has been so clearly thrust upon me.

Boo hiss.

I realized earlier today how lousy I have been about responding to comments, something on which I generally pride myself. So I went through the front page and got caught up. Here are the posts I’ve commented on tonight:

Serial and Bulk Viewing (in response to Barry and Abel)
2008: In Case of a Tie (in response to Abel, Willard, and Peter)
The Suzie Brigade’s Blockade (in response to Peter and Barry)
Trumwill, Counterfeit Gamer (in response to Linus, Willard, Web, and Beth)
Cleaning Up The Desktop (in response to Bob)
From the Ground Up (in response to Brandon and Kirk)

A while back I rendered aid to CG Hill and some of his commenters on an issue of Windows irritation:

It bubbles up from the System Tray on a seemingly-random basis: “You have unused icons on your desktop,” it scolds, while offering to invoke a Wizard to make things right. Click the X button to make it go away, and it comes back unchanged; wait a few more minutes and eventually it dissolves.

You can actually fix this with the following steps:

1. Go to Desktop Properties by either right-clicking on the desktop or going through the Control Panel
2. Click on the Desktop tab
3. Click “Customize Desktop”
4. Click checkbox that says “Run Desktop Cleanup Wizard every 60 days”

It’s a matter of taste, of course, but I have an aversion to clutter on the desktop. But even if you don’t feel the same way, I have a suggestion.

Some of you are probably familiar with the Quicklaunch button. When Windows 2000 or Windows XP is initially installed, it usually has four or so icons on it (Internet Explorer, Show Desktop, Outlook Express, and Windows Media Player, I think). As Microsoft gives it to you, it’s kind of an annoyance. But you can use it in a way that obviates the need for desktop clutter and even the Start Menu for the most part. If you set it up like I do, most likely you can have all of the applications that you use available at a single click.

Here is what to do:

1. Right click on the Start Bar and either unlock it or make sure it is unlocked. Note that this step is unnecessary in Windows 2000.

If the Quicklaunch Bar is not already on the Start Bar, right click, go to Toolbars, and click on Quicklaunch.

2. Left click the bar to the left of the Quicklaunch icons and drag it to the right side of your screen so that it places against the side. You can do this along top or to the right, though if you do it to the right you will accidentally open programs when attempting to scroll
   Right click on empty spot on the Quicklaunch bar and say “Always on Top”
3. Add shortcuts to all of the icons that you use on a regular basis by copying the shortcut over to the Quicklaunch Bar. You can find the icons in the Start Menu at {C:\Documents and Settings\-Your User Name Here-\Start Menu} and {C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu}. You can also right click to copy straight from the Start Menu, though this is a bit dexterity-requiring for me.
4. Play around with it a few days. Try to use it. Once you start, it becomes really handy. If you like having access to it but don’t like the fact that it’s always visible, you can try using the auto-hide feature.

You can click on the image to the right to get a full view of what it looks like and how much space it takes. There’s no particular reason that my Start Bar is double-stacked except that I use a lot of applications and I like it that way.

Judging by our internet history, Clancy has visited a site called deadiversion.usdoj.gov. I spent a good three minutes trying to figure out what the heck Dead Iversion was and why Clancy would be visiting a usdoj.gov before it occurred to me that the site was almost certain DEA Diversion and is thus probably linked to her efforts to get full licensure in a handful of states which includes the ability to prescribe heavy-duty narcotics which is handled in part by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the DOJ.

That makes sense… though I got to say that Dead Iversion does sound pretty cool.