Categories
annoyances internet technology

Data Caps – Bad, Ugly or Evil?

That’s right, there is no way in the world the data caps imposed by ISPs are in any way good. They are either bad, ugly or evil – or, most likely, all of the above. Here’s why.

By limiting (in any way) our consumption of internet as a resource, ISPs are essentially setting up a mental model that “your internets may run out“. Imagine the next iteration of home routers that, in addition to bandwidth metering will have an off-switch, once you hit 99.9% of your monthly allowance it will switch your connection off to prevent an outage. Your car has ran out of gas. With astronomically high overage fees it’s obvious no one would want to pay for it. Households will – consciously or subconsciously – limit their use of internet. Which means – a lot less online video, online games, in fact – a lot less of our usual online activity as a whole. Your Facebook updates don’t take much, but any video streaming (YouTube/Hulu/Netflix), Skype/Oovoo video chat or games downloading goes out the window. Those cute baby videos you’ve uploaded for your grandma in Michigan – bye bye. If you’re just checking e-mail or working on some documents – you may still fit into your limit, but if your job requires some massive data movement or exchanging large files (think – video editing or backups or database dumps to your local development environment) – goodbye working from home.

Who is going to win? In a short term – ISPs, of course, that will keep profiting until their customers will adjust to new usage patterns. After that (I’ll give it a few months, two – three quarters tops) their cash inflow will significantly drop. In addition to that – they’ll keep spending a fortune on army of lawyers battling class action suits where they will have to explain our computer-illiterate judges why 100kb picture takes 120kb of bandwidth (HTTP headers overhead? Good luck with that mumbo-jumbo). That is – instead of investing money in upgrading the infrastructure.

Who is going to loose? Everyone else. Consumers will suffer the most, since there is no real way we can vote against that, thanks to government supported monopolies (try finding an alternative to a high-speed ISP in your area). We may actually go back to REAL human interaction, exchanging movies and TV programs via removable flash drives and hard drives (Arrgh, those damn pirates would never stop, would they!). Content providers will see a decrease in demand which, in turn, will result in a lot less money available to be invested in the whole online content business model. They will have to spend another fortune on lobbying laws and regulations in their favor – instead of spending that money on acquiring better content or improving their own infrastructure (CDNs and such).

Most likely in a few years we’ll see giants like Google, Apple and, maybe even some movie studios, if they hire CEOs that can see a bit further their noses and expensive suits, will lobby for some kind of solution that will neutralize the negative effects of caps, at least to a satisfactory level. However, the time we will lose will inevitably put us so far behind our main technology competitors that we may never be able to catch up. It’ll be like cell phone market – we’re still paying around $5 for 200 SMS (while they are totally free to phone company) and are capped to measly 2GB of cell data plans while in some other “not-so great” countries people already using their cell phones for video streaming and full blown video conferencing. Try that on your 2GB plan of “fastest some-G network” that drops regular voice calls like crazy in the middle of the largest US cities.

Categories
programming

Einstein’s Riddle – A Complete Solution With Illustrations

If you haven’t heard about this riddle before then you should try solve it yourself first. It’s a lot easier than you think. Most web sites post it with huge notices that Einstein himself said that 98% of the population would not be able to solve it. Well, this could have been true in his time, since about 98% of the population would not have a chance to read the riddle in a first place, but now with the power of the interwebbies you can read and solve it too. It’s not really hard, if I could do it in under 15 minutes – so could anyone else.

I am posting the rules the way I found them on the internet – this way you can get hyped up about 2% vs. 98%.

ALBERT EINSTEIN’S RIDDLE

ARE YOU IN THE TOP 2% OF INTELLIGENT PEOPLE IN THE WORLD? SOLVE THE RIDDLE AND FIND OUT.

There are no tricks, just pure logic, so good luck and don’t give up.

1. In a street there are five houses, painted five different colours.
2. In each house lives a person of different nationality
3. These five homeowners each drink a different kind of beverage, smoke different brand of cigar and keep a different pet.

THE QUESTION: WHO OWNS THE FISH?

HINTS

1. The Brit lives in a red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The Green house is next to, and on the left of the White house.
5. The owner of the Green house drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
7. The owner of the Yellow house smokes Dunhill.
8. The man living in the centre house drinks milk.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
12. The man who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Prince.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbour who drinks water.

The solution is under the cut. I encourage you (again!) to try and solve it yourself before you look there.

Categories
technology

Verizon Wireless Data Tests From Florida

As I was returning the Storm after a little test run (I talked about it in the previous post), I decided instead of ditching Verizon altogether to try out their data plan. I got UM175 USB wireless modem and Verizon’s “unlimited” 5GB data plan for $59.99. But testing all that from the middle of New York City isn’t as much fun as taking the set to vacation.

So here I am, in one of Orlando, FL resorts, checking the quality of the service. There’s no problem with connectivity, my question is – just how good the internet connection is for an advanced user like me. All tests were conducted through SpeedTest.net, so that you can enjoy the pretty graphic fonts instead of boring tables.

The most important criteria to look at are latency (how fast the signal travels from point A to point B and back) and upload speed. Big latency is what will kill your IP phone conversation, your online meeting or your live webcast. Download speeds are usually more than adequate, but when you’re trying to upload a bunch of pictures from vacation, a huge Excel spreadsheet or heavy PDF, the podcast or videoblog post – that’s when little upload speed is starting to hurt. Besides, slow upload speeds will also have their say in making your online meeting or IP phone conversation useless.