Google the ISP and the case of the YouTube speed test

By power666

^{Fri, February 12th, 2010 at 9:31AM CST}
Google is getting into the ISP business. Their goal is to wire up several neighborhoods with 1 Gbit fiber connections while maintaining affordability for mere mortals. The best way to describe this new is that of a game changer. This is the first time a new player is challenging the telecoms and cable companies with enough resources to start a full scale war on price, speed and features. This also affects net neutrality as Google is promising unfiltered access much like their recent public DNS offering.

If you want Google to wire up your neighborhood, sign up.

If you are lucky enough to get 1 Gbit fiber connection from Google, what are you going to do to test it? Well Youtube has introduced a new feature that may come in handy: a speed test. This not only records in an overly how fast you are able to download the streaming video but information like how many dropped frames are dropped during playback. Your speeds are compared with other users from your ISP as well as your geographic region. While this is a genuine real world scenario of your online speed, sites like SpeedTest.net are still useful. ISP's are notorous for throttling sites like YouTube where as sites built for testing your speed are left untapped. The one thing missing from YouTube's test is the geographic location where their servers are for delivering video to you.

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When nerd pr0n gets weird

By power666

^{Mon, February 8th, 2010 at 3:25PM CST}
First off is a computer case that is really a spider and eats cats:



Neat case but weird advertising. It makes one wonder if you could mount that thing on a wall or upside down on a ceiling...

The other bit of weird marketing comes from IBM via Facebook. The big news for Big Blue is the official release of POWER7 hardware to the public. To no one's surprise the new gear is setting various world records but the marketing push is a bit odd. For example, the following video was posted on YouTube and Facebook:



A subtile hint with the demonic sheep is that IBM will likely go after HP but is quitely waiting for them to show off their new Itanium systems later this week. (Carly Fiorina, former CEO of HP is running for the US Senate this year and has a bizarre political ad complete with demonic sheep.)

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Microsoft's worst enemy is Microsoft

By power666

^{Thu, February 4th, 2010 at 4:36PM CST}
With all the hype of Apple's iPad settling down from last week's introduction, attention is turning to tablet designs from other PC manufacturers. Google quietly released some concept designs over the week end to wet everyones appetites. For current tablet PC's, there is Microsoft and a dedicated version of Windows for that form factor. However it is not without its bugs. The New York Times has an op-ed by a former Microsoft VP that MS Office was intentionally sabotaged to not run well on tablets. Internal corporate politics dictated design in a market where innovation dominates. While the jury is still out about how usable commodity applications like word processing and spreadsheets are handled on tablets, Microsoft has handed the advantage over to Apple's iWork suite in this area.

This raises the question is Microsoft losing traction in the market place because its competitors are that superior or because of their own missteps in the market place? Perhaps a little a both?

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OnLive responds to beta test leaks...

By power666

^{Sun, January 24th, 2010 at 5:03PM CST}
OnLive's official blog has a post responding to the PC Perspective leak about the service. The content was pretty predictable: latency, latency, latency. They're blaming the poor reception on the user being outside of their beta coverage area.

Of course that doesn't stop beta users complaining inside the coverage area.

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