Cheap & Fast Wifi FTW!!!
Just got my combo in the mail today. Used WPS in windows 7 to configure it. Turned on 40mhz channels and am getting 300Mbps from it now. :)
Act fast, expires on 5/31.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.193238
Update:
Comcast speed using the new gear (over wireless even) looks pretty darn good.
This should hereby serve as my official plea to Comcast. PLEASE DO NOT ENCRYPT QAM CHANNELS! PRETTY PLEASE! (I should clarify, that if you want to leave the analog channels on AND encrypt them in digital form, I suppose that is ok, but to BOTH remove the analog channels AND encrypt them seems like a pretty crappy thing to do.)
The Boxes you are sending out are LAME. No HD, no AV ports at all? You have a very serious tech savvy following who rely on certain technologies for their TV watching experience. In my opinion, alienating this audience will NOT drive people to buy cable boxes, but will probably just cause people to watch less TV or switch to watching shows online only. (Not to mention the companies you are going to drive out of business.) [yeah, that last one too…]
In the meantime though, I just got my HD HomeRun set up at home as well as re-configured my QAM tuners for a total of 6 now (see above). (Note that the ATSC tuners are just the HDHR, and are really digital cable as well.) With this setup, the media center can see 193 different channels (some are just repeated across the different tuners though). The REALLY hard part was deciding which channels to match to which service and also match up which channels were which. The SiliconDust Lineup was completely wrong actually, and I had to do it over from scratch.
As a test, I kicked off 6 simultaneous recordings across all of the tuners (below). The PC gets sluggish when you do this, but in general it seemed ok. The two analog tuners have MPG encoders on them, so no CPU needed there. The 4 digital tuners just take the stream off of the cable and store it to buffer. Really, the only tax on this is just raw BUS IO speed.
This all may be short lived though if Comcast ends up with a waiver from the FCC.
Gotta run for now, but I can type more on this later.
J.P.
I am writing this now sitting on the connector on my way to work. The Dell Mini is perfect for this. Not only that but the BT PAN experience with my new phone rocks as well. No wires needed, just hit connect on my laptop and its connected at 3G speeds. (The wifi on the connector sucks…)
Here is a snapshot of the speedtest I just took from the bus. Again, this is with the Mini 9 connected via bluetooth to my phone, which then provides internet access.
Pretty darn good. This also means that this should be great for traveling on airplanes as well. I am slowly also getting used to the smaller keyboard as well, I can type relatively fast. The only exception so far are symbols like “\” and “[“ and of course ‘ & “. These are terrible to use since the first two are relegated to function keys and the later are moved down next to the space bar.
Oh and on a second note, I am really happy with Firefox 3.0. IE6, 7, and 8 just crash or hang on me almost every day and on a good week only once a week. This is just unacceptable. FF has been pretty good so far. Oh and I had switched to Google search just because the relevance had shot WAY up compared to live, but they just started modifying ALL of their result links to be redirects. That sucks by itself, but its worse when they redirect site seems to always take 30 seconds just to complete the http request, when the target site loads almost instantaneously. They will really need to fix this. I may go back to Live Search for a while until they do.
The more and more I have gotten used to what people generally reward/value in society versus what is panned, the more I notice a disturbing trend. We expect everything to grow. In general as a society we have no tolerance for anything that just remains the same unless we have a negative association with whatever that is, and then we want it to steadily decline (which I see as the same as positive increase). Take a few examples for instance: Salaries, Stock Prices, Gas Prices, Number of Schools, Number of lanes on the interstate, Airline prices, Job performance, Home sizes, What car you drive, how much kids learn in school, plus many more. Just keep this concept in mind for a while and start noticing expectations which you have and the others around you have and think about it.
Technology seems to be the perfect catalyst for this behavior as well. Its rooted in knowledge (which we also expect to always expand), and seems to be able to grow at an alarming rate because we humans (think that we) have just about mastered the art of efficiently building on previous technologies to product new more powerful, more efficient technologies. Anyone that knows me realizes that I relish this process and true efficient engineering is what I live for. But I need to also step back and analyze the macro-engineering of society as well. In my lifetime, I see the growth of society as a whole as almost an explosion of knowledge, experience, expectations, and even just in terms of population as well.
It all makes me want to ask when will this ever end? Sure, we all learn in math that there is no theoretical concept of an end to anything (such is infinity), but at the same time, the earth is finite. The number of atoms on our planet (while immense) is finite. This may sound silly, but are we going to in earnest think about whether we must as a species take a hard look at our long term plans on this planet? I watch a lot of documentaries as well as interviews on a wide variety of topics. Everyone I hear speak of “the future” speaks of hundreds of years forward.
This feels like apples and oranges to me. Given that the earth is “roughly” 4.5 billion years old and some time around 2 million years ago (or close enough to that for this example; the real argument about when doesn’t matter here) is when we came around and civilizations have been around for at least 10 thousand years, thinking in terms of hundreds of years seems short sighted. Lets illustrate this:
Lets now put this to another analogy. Lets say that you want to plan a driving trip from San Francisco, CA to Portland, ME. Imagine this trip as your plans for our species. Lets make a quick assumption then for another 10,000 years then. This seems easy since its just doubling how long we know civilizations have been around. Well planning for 200 years (64mi) won’t even get to you Sacramento, let alone out of California. (And this is longer than many even think about. I hear lots of “long term” plans for only 50 years out.) For the hell of it, lets look at the other numbers above as well. Lets say you want to use 2 000 000 as the number and hope that our species can double the time we have been on the planet (again … roughly). Then planning for 200 years (now .32 mi) will only get you from city hall to about market street. If you like completing these analogies, you should know that there is no point in thinking of another 4.5 billion since some say that in at most another billion years, all the water will have boiled off of the earth. (note references 32&33)
Ok, so I spent a lot of time illustrating a point, but I wanted to make sure that it was understood. Let’s recap for a moment. 1. We have a finite amount of time (in our life, on our planet, in our solar system…etc). 2. Our society as a whole is valuing plans and progress over periods ridiculously tiny in comparison to above milestones. 3. Within such comparisons, they are all done on a logarithmic scale (whereas expectations == slight improvement).
So how does any of this add up? How long does it take for society to have built a house of cards around such high expectations before something comes down? We see micro examples of this with the stock market. It goes up and down over the years and it goes up even more based usually on very narrow optimistic parameters. Then it comes crashing down as more people realize how narrow the gains actually were. This happens over and over. Well now expand the same line of thinking to society as a whole. We can survive a crashed market. It is devastating sure, but we will survive.
What happens as a society when we realize that we just can’t learn as fast as we need, can’t grow as fast as we need, can’t produce as fast as we need, and so on? What does a crash of this magnitude map to? To be honest, I can’t honestly tell you. The best analogy may be similar to the lost civilizations we know about such as Greece and Rome. But that seems tiny in comparison to the complexities of today’s world to then. I shiver to think if Idiocracy is anywhere close. I doubt it, but the concept of the unknown has it’s standard fears.
In the mean time, I suppose I don’t expect anyone to go about changing their ways. We need to be on the brink of annihilation as a society before we consider changing. However, I would like it if at least every now and then people would give each other a break for doing “well” rather than doing “fantastic.” I just wish we could all appreciate the efficiency of small successes more than we appreciate the gratification of huge wins, since we won’t be able to maintain such progress forever.
J.P.
P.S. On an unrelated note, I finally thought I had merged all of my music in to one folder, only to find a few more. I am really close though. I am down to 659GB of data that I am trying to sort/merge though which is a few hundred less than a month ago. Its a MUCH larger effort than I ever thought needing several custom software tools I have written as well as several existing tools I have downloaded for both comparing and merging information from files. Its been more than 10 years since I have been this close to a common location for files. (How is this note related? Thinking about how much data I have accumulated in 10 years from drives which were 320MB to drives that are 2TB is an exact correlation to the point I made above.)
Dare just posted an interesting story online that I have been thinking about for a while.
It makes me think of the adage that Information is Free. Reading in the linked article about Gutenberg, made me think of those whose business is not the information but the distribution of it.
Isn’t that what papers really are? Are you paying for the content, for the journalism, for the information itself? Or are you paying for the ink, the paper, the delivery?
I am sure that there are people in both camps and that anything that I might say would only be sacrilegious to some no matter what it is. However, I think one of the points made in the article is that whatever we think the current model actually is, it doesn’t work and needs to change.
I suppose what I think about as I look back at what the focus of the new millennium thus far (starting in 2001 :P) has been about is that the focus is on how much information is out there available for consumption. There is both great information and bad information (at least as I see it), but that this IS the Information Age. People tent to use that term glibly without thinking much about it. But the manifesto for this movement as I see it is that Information is just bits of knowledge. The sharing of which can NOT be controlled, metered, or blocked as a whole. The sharing of information is only natural to human nature and building of industry or empires against this can only cause destruction in the end.
What does this mean to me? Stop trying to control the flow of information and start trying to organize, provide access to, and promote the spread of information. There are some recent success stories of this in the last 9 years. I am NO fan of online ads either. I think that it’s days are numbered because the current model is based on essentially the trickery of sites in getting users to click on the ads. (Because seriously who really WANTs to click on ads when they are trying to search for something?) But, I can’t argue with the fact that the inherent business model of late is to make your business the ability to inform and sort of piggy back on top of peoples curiosity.
Ad revenue aside, I do believe that the titans of the newspaper world need to realize this though. Your business of information itself will slowly die in the information age by drowning in the costs. Information is free and that’s impossible to compete against. What people WILL value in the information age is making sense of it, organizing it, providing access to, and especially now an avenue for users to publish their own information as well. ISPs have gotten this for a while now (though seem to almost teeter on the brink of implosion for what is reasonable access to information) and continue to profit from it (for now… there are similar revolutions coming).
Today I use my.live.com (formerly start.com) as my home page. Why? Because so far its the only site I have found that lets me customize my access to an onslaught of information. Here is a subset of my OPML file for instance (with all the personal blogs, twitter feeds, and facebook status feeds removed). But this is almost a case study in the current sad state of the web where tools which meet the needs of the current web as it is today can’t survive without also meeting the crazy business models which are out there as well. (This reminds me a lot of Tesla at the turn of the 20th century actually.) My only hope is in another 100 years, someone finds a way to make the technologies we have today work for everyone.
In closing though and coming back to the Gutenberg reference, what if the nations newspaper empires stopped focusing so much on making money on content, but started getting more serious about the business of producing and distributing information (sure some could say they do this today… but I really mean online distribution) in today’s age. What does that mean? Well maybe people would feel more comfortable paying for services which allow them to get the information easily, quickly, and from a VERY wide variety of sources? Imagine if the P-I was the new start.com and became my daily home page like my.live.com is today? Its almost a service I would not mind paying for if they can do a better job at it.
J.P.
