Still using Comcast?

-
Dave Winer, who pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software posted yesterday a terrible experience he had with Comcast. It makes me ask again, "Given the choice, why are you still paying Comcast any money?"
Then this morning around 9AM the service went down. ...The recording said I was talking to their legal services department, Press 1 if you are stealing content, 2 if you are using too much bandwidth, 3 if Comcast hates your guts, 4 if you're a criminal. (I don't remember the exact wording, this wasn't it, but the implication was that I was guilty of abuse, me, a paying customer, in good standing. By pressing a button I was admitting to doing something wrong.)
...
It would be easy to cut back. Not sure I will though, cause I hate to be lectured and threatened by companies I pay $180 per month to.
Let's recap for a moment. (1) Comcast decides that P2P traffic is using too much bandwidth in general, and it must be illegal traffic; therefore shuts down the protocol and doesn't notify any users, when they could just narrow the amount of bandwidth allocated. (2) When a customer uses more than their allotted "unlimited" bandwidth, again instead of managing the bandwidth, they threaten the user and accuse them of doing something illegal.

Are you still paying Comcast?

Comments

David said…
I saw this article on LifeHacker, Determine If Your ISP is Throttling Your BitTorrent Traffic. I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds like it would be a great utility to make sure that your ISP (whatever it is) is being honest with you.
Wed May 07, 12:24:00 PM PDT
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Digital Signatures in PDF Do Not Print

-
Image
Trouble getting the digital signature in a PDF to print? The solution is actually simpler than you might think. With your document open in Adobe Acrobat Reader, click File >> Print. When the Print dialog box opens, look for the "Comments and Forms:" drop-down below the Properties button, located in the upper-right. Click the drop-down and select "Document and Markups." Now print. That's all there is to it.
Read more

Referencing the value of a cell, not its formula

-
Image
In Excel, I will use formulas quite frequently for my analysis. At times I want to reference the resulting value of the formula for comparison or to feed another formula. Unfortunately, if you are doing a comparison, Excel will try to compare the formula instead of the formulas results. Well, turns out there is an easy way to correct this. If you want your formula result to be a number, then use the VALUE function. If you want the formula result to be text, use the TEXT function. Here is the syntax for each: VALUE(text) TEXT(value,format_text) -- The format_text value can be any format from the Category box on the Number tab (in the Format Cells dialog box) except General. Here is an example of each: =VALUE(MID(A2,46,FIND("&",A2)-46)) -- this actually finds a number beginning with the 46th character of a string, and continues until it finds the ampersand character. By wrapping the formula with VALUE, I can now compare the number to other numbers in my looku
Read more

CorelDRAW X4 Crash on Startup

-
I had a fresh install of CorelDRAW X4, and each time I tried to start it, it would crash. After some searching through Google, I found the following fix. Open the folder C:\Program Files\Corel\CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4\Programs\UIConfig\CorelDRAW Edit DrawUI.xml Find the line <dockpage guidref="bc1e2f70-3b58-41cd-8406-aaa550482972" visible="true" selected="true"> Change visible="false" and remove selected="true" <dockpage guidref="bc1e2f70-3b58-41cd-8406-aaa550482972" visible="false"> Save and close DrawUI.xml Fold down F8 and restart CorelDRAW X4 When prompted to update settings, select OK That did the trick for me. Apparently it is caused by a conflict with MFC dlls that are installed (version 1833) with SQL2008.
Read more