January 18, 2008 11:27 AM PST
Buzz Out Loud 643: Silicon Valley drink-off
Steve Jobs says Robbie Bach must be drunk if he thinks the Zune is a worthy competitor to iPod. You know what we say? Old Mad Dog should put his shot glass where his mouth is, thereby enabling us to launch a new hit show on CNET TV: Silicon Valley drink-off. Come on, Steve! It'll be great! In other news, iPhone hacking takes a violent turn.
--Molly
Listen now: Download today's podcast
--Molly
Listen now: Download today's podcast
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EPISODE 643 |
TODAY'S LINKS:
TODAY'S VOICE MAIL:
Hiram from Brazil
Metered bandwidth is not so great here.
Metered bandwidth is not so great here.
William from Las Vegas
iPod Touch keeps bugging me to pay money.
iPod Touch keeps bugging me to pay money.
William from Las Vegas
Whoops. My mistake. I was on drugs (Sudafed).
Whoops. My mistake. I was on drugs (Sudafed).
Weird guy
What's up with Christina Del Ponte?
What's up with Christina Del Ponte?
TODAY'S E-MAIL:
Love the Linux chaser to balance Apple stories
My elderly aunt, who understands little else from the podcast (or the rest of life these days), loves it too. She perks up every time she hears the jingle. Though I'm pretty sure it's because she thinks it's a liquor ad since she starts yammering on about booze-filled reminiscences.
But it makes her happy ! And I think a Linux story--it's the perfect antidote to all that crApple.
Great show, love Molly's rants, Tom's libertarian angle, and Jason's (niiice) voice. :-)
Thx,
Solunas
My elderly aunt, who understands little else from the podcast (or the rest of life these days), loves it too. She perks up every time she hears the jingle. Though I'm pretty sure it's because she thinks it's a liquor ad since she starts yammering on about booze-filled reminiscences.
But it makes her happy ! And I think a Linux story--it's the perfect antidote to all that crApple.
Great show, love Molly's rants, Tom's libertarian angle, and Jason's (niiice) voice. :-)
Thx,
Solunas
Bandwidth limits
Buzz crew,
I have been listening to your podcast for awhile now and wanted to comment on the metered bandwidth issue. I live in Lawrence, Kansas, (home of the KU Jayhawks), and our Internet provider has had limits on bandwidth for as long as I have their service. I paid $28 additional dollars last month in overages for using 14 addition GB of bandwidth on top of the allowed 10. Usually I do not exceed this amount, but with my increasing list of podcast subscriptions and now iTunes movie rentals, I might have to upgrade to the Gold package which allows 40GB and has faster service.
I believe the package pricing is not too unreasonable, especially since the lowest package is only $15/month with 1GB of bandwidth. Someone who is a light Internet user would benefit from broadband at a low price.
I have included a link to my provider.
Thanks and great show.
Phil
P.S. Natali, I miss watching Textra, but I wish you the best in New York.
Buzz crew,
I have been listening to your podcast for awhile now and wanted to comment on the metered bandwidth issue. I live in Lawrence, Kansas, (home of the KU Jayhawks), and our Internet provider has had limits on bandwidth for as long as I have their service. I paid $28 additional dollars last month in overages for using 14 addition GB of bandwidth on top of the allowed 10. Usually I do not exceed this amount, but with my increasing list of podcast subscriptions and now iTunes movie rentals, I might have to upgrade to the Gold package which allows 40GB and has faster service.
I believe the package pricing is not too unreasonable, especially since the lowest package is only $15/month with 1GB of bandwidth. Someone who is a light Internet user would benefit from broadband at a low price.
I have included a link to my provider.
Thanks and great show.
Phil
P.S. Natali, I miss watching Textra, but I wish you the best in New York.
Useage based broadband
Hi Tom, Molly, and Jason!
I'm a long-time listener and love the show but I completely disagree on your views of Usage-Based Broadband from Time Warner. How could anyone possible want this? In the age of HD video streaming/downloading and interactive content I certainly don't want to worry about "going over my gigabytes." For goodness sake, people already have to deal with that with their cell phone minutes. What's stopping the companies from charging usage-based cable TV? It makes just as much sense! Now people will have to be more aware to turn off their Internet when they're not using it. This is not the same thing as "turn off the faucet" or "turn off the lights." I shouldn't have to turn off my Internet so I don't use excess bandwidth. Are we back in the dial-up era again? I keep track of my bandwidth usage and each month I use about 100-200GB of bandwidth each month. This includes gaming, video streaming, downloading, etc. I don't want ISPs to throttle traffic but I would rather them do that the switch to usage-based plans!
Thanks guys! Love the show!
-Martin
Hi Tom, Molly, and Jason!
I'm a long-time listener and love the show but I completely disagree on your views of Usage-Based Broadband from Time Warner. How could anyone possible want this? In the age of HD video streaming/downloading and interactive content I certainly don't want to worry about "going over my gigabytes." For goodness sake, people already have to deal with that with their cell phone minutes. What's stopping the companies from charging usage-based cable TV? It makes just as much sense! Now people will have to be more aware to turn off their Internet when they're not using it. This is not the same thing as "turn off the faucet" or "turn off the lights." I shouldn't have to turn off my Internet so I don't use excess bandwidth. Are we back in the dial-up era again? I keep track of my bandwidth usage and each month I use about 100-200GB of bandwidth each month. This includes gaming, video streaming, downloading, etc. I don't want ISPs to throttle traffic but I would rather them do that the switch to usage-based plans!
Thanks guys! Love the show!
-Martin
Packet-sniffing watermarks
Tom, Molly, and Jason,
You recently talked about watermarking video/audio files and ISP scanning for the watermarks. You said you didn't see a problem with ISPs doing this. I would have a problem with ISP's scanning for watermarks since I backup my files to Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Solution) my ISP would try to block me backing up these files to the cloud. Fortunately my backups are sent encrypted so they wouldn't be able to read the watermarks. Any file-sharing software would only need to transfer files using SSL to prevent ISP's from reading the watermarks.
Love the show,
RJ
Tom, Molly, and Jason,
You recently talked about watermarking video/audio files and ISP scanning for the watermarks. You said you didn't see a problem with ISPs doing this. I would have a problem with ISP's scanning for watermarks since I backup my files to Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Solution) my ISP would try to block me backing up these files to the cloud. Fortunately my backups are sent encrypted so they wouldn't be able to read the watermarks. Any file-sharing software would only need to transfer files using SSL to prevent ISP's from reading the watermarks.
Love the show,
RJ
MacBook Air OS reinstall solution
Hello, this is Sean from Pittsburgh and I just wanted to say three things...
Hope that clears those issues up, love the show!
Thanks,
Sean
Hello, this is Sean from Pittsburgh and I just wanted to say three things...
- I was thrilled when you mentioned Sidney Crosby on the show a few weeks ago, he is great.
- Regarding the reinstall of OS X on your MacBook Air, that will never crash...during the keynote, Steve specifically mentioned that the remote disc feature will indeed work if you need to reinstall the OS or upgrade to 10.6.
- The Apple TV was also using a subscription revenue model that iPhone is using, hence the free update...I remember reading that somewhere last year at least.
Hope that clears those issues up, love the show!
Thanks,
Sean
Digital copies included on movie DVDs?
Hey, guys.
During Steve Jobs' keynote, a rep from 20th Century Fox said that a digital file copy would be included on the Family Guy Blue Harvest DVD. I assume one could download this copy to his or her hard drive and watch it as many times as they wanted. This is a great idea, but considering services such as Netflix, wouldn't movie studios be inadvertantly distributing these digital copies to many people who didn't buy the DVD? And what would stop people from sharing these digital copies via bittorrent? I can't imagine there'd be DRM on it, or there would be no point in offering it on their DVDs to begin with.
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Michael Tolosa
Hey, guys.
During Steve Jobs' keynote, a rep from 20th Century Fox said that a digital file copy would be included on the Family Guy Blue Harvest DVD. I assume one could download this copy to his or her hard drive and watch it as many times as they wanted. This is a great idea, but considering services such as Netflix, wouldn't movie studios be inadvertantly distributing these digital copies to many people who didn't buy the DVD? And what would stop people from sharing these digital copies via bittorrent? I can't imagine there'd be DRM on it, or there would be no point in offering it on their DVDs to begin with.
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Michael Tolosa
As host of the Buzz Report video series, Molly provides a fresh and funny perspective on the latest consumer electronic products to hit the market, as well as commentary on the stories and development that she thinks are truly buzz-worthy. She is also co-host of Buzz Out Loud, CNET's "podcast of indeterminate length," which entertains listeners with a funny and skeptical take on the day's technology news. Her other podcast, Gadgettes, is proof that girls can be geeks too.
Tom Merritt appears on
CNET TV, specializing in help and how-to and the ever popular Top 5
lists. He also co-hosts CNET's The Real Deal podcast. 
Jason Howell can
often be found producing Buzz Out Loud from the audio studios at CNET,
updating XML feeds from the comfort of his cubicle, and saying "uh-oh"
from time to time. 
microeconomists understand that metered pricing of ANY resource is by far the most efficient pricing model and is better for the overall good of society.
Here is an interesting analysis from Business Week: http://businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2008/tc20080118_598544.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_businessweek+exclusives
During the happy hours, nothing counts towards your monthly Capacity!!
So by simply using a scheduled P2P program or download manager, you'll never hit the monthly limit.
It seems like it's difficult to get across the difference between Bandwidth and Metered Usage. A good analogy might be the speedometer in your car. The speedometer represents how fast you're going expressed in mph which would be like bandwidth expressed in Mbps, or how FAST is your connection to the Internet. Metered usage refers to how much you use your connection in terms on Gigabytes downloaded, just like the ODOMETER on your car measures how far you drove.
So ... Metered Usage could be like renting a car. You can go as fast as your rental car can go (sometimes limited by a rev limiter), but you pay for how FAR you go in cents per mile.
Might just be a convenient way to get the point across.
JR
Moline, IL
P.S. Love the show!
And say hey to my "cousin" Jason.
Note on Harry Potter DVD: It doesn't work on Macs or iPods. http://www.siteofrequirement.com/news/warner-brothers-plays-favorites-with-microsoft/
Please read a little on these things before spending several minutes speculating something doesn't do this or that and complaining how terrible it is for not doing it when the answer is sitting right there, usually at a very easy Apple URL (http://www.apple.com/macbookair). It's almost as bad as Leo Laporte on Mac Break Weekly talking after the keynote as if he wasn't there or wasn't listening, saying the Air doesn't have this or that, when Steve Jobs clearly said it during the keynote.
Lets just say for example that I have a T1 at home and I pay $200 per month for it and my SLA says I should get a minimum of 80% of that capacity. Multiply it all out and it comes to a fixed finite number, representing the amount of data I could potentially transfer on that circuit. In fact (under normal circumstances) it would be impossible for me to exceed this
number given how the line is provisioned. Shouldn't that be my cap? For a provider to set the cap any lower than this number is just double billing me.
Some will say that the problem is aggregation of all the circuits. Organizations like Telegeography Inc. can provide the data to show that price for bandwidth has fallen dramatically (75% to 90% in many areas) especially after the fiber explosion of the late 1990s.
"The advancement in optical technologies, telecommunications deregulation, and general euphoria around the dot-com economy led to a boom in construction of optical fibers all around the world. Thousands of miles of terrestrial and submarine cables were laid in the anticipation of demand that, to date, has not materialized.
Today only 10 percent of potential wavelengths on 10 percent of available fiber pairs is actually lit. ... This represents 1-2 percent of potential bandwidth that is actually available in the fiber system. ... The result of this severe imbalance between supply and demand has understandably led to a tremendous price erosion of bandwidth products."
Grid Computing: A Practical Guide to Technology and Applications" by Ahmar Abbas copyright 2003
As someone who is involved in the provisioning of large network circuits I can personally say that I have not yet seen a substantial increase in bandwidth demand.
I think that there is some credibility to the argument that local providers are unwilling to adequately build out their last mile infrastructures to accommodate new levels of service.
To make a long story short providers like to take our money but they don't like to invest it back into infrastructure.
Love the show
JDS
The same thing is true of your internet connection: it's good that you can go faster than the daily average when you need to.
Of course there is a slight difference: for most of us, our water is metered but our internet access isn't. Having unmetered internet access is good for everyone: the people who don't use a lot know they don't have to worry about the bill because it's the same every month. ISPs save the costs of sending metered bills. And the high volume users get to use more than they otherwise could for the same money. But if the high volume users or the ISPs get too greedy, it doesn't work anymore so we'll all have to "suffer" the metering.
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by GraysonBuzz
January 24, 2008 1:10 PM PST
- Regarding metered usage, in general, I agree with someone paying their fair share. However, you make an interesting point that you feel that internet access should be a utility. Local wireline service is a regulated service, but when was the last time you saw a plan that metered your local phone usage? Whether you make 10 local calls per month or 1000, you pay a single flat rate. Your comments on metered data usage seem contradictory.
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Reply to this comment
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(12 Comments)For the record, one problem that I have with metered usage is that you do not always clearly comprehend how much data you are consuming. For phones, you can pretty much tell how long you are on the phone. With electricity, there is a long history of usage that, assuming usage patterns persist over the years, allows the user to generally be able to expect what their cost for power will be. Water service is very similar. I think regular data usage can be highly variable and not necessarily sufficiently transparent to make metered usage customer-friendly.