Buzz Out Loud Podcast

Read all 'metered bandwidth' posts in Buzz Out Loud Podcast
January 18, 2008 11:27 AM PST

Buzz Out Loud 643: Silicon Valley drink-off

by Molly Wood
  • 12 comments
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

EPISODE 643

TODAY'S LINKS:


TODAY'S VOICE MAIL:
Hiram from Brazil
Metered bandwidth is not so great here.

William from Las Vegas
iPod Touch keeps bugging me to pay money.

William from Las Vegas
Whoops. My mistake. I was on drugs (Sudafed).

Weird guy
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

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.

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

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

MacBook Air OS reinstall solution
Hello, this is Sean from Pittsburgh and I just wanted to say three things...

  1. I was thrilled when you mentioned Sidney Crosby on the show a few weeks ago, he is great.
  2. 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.
  3. 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

January 17, 2008 11:11 AM PST

Buzz Out Loud 642: Monkey see, robot do

by Tom Merritt
  • 9 comments
This is why we like technology: You can now just think about your robot servant getting you a beer and it will happen. If you're a monkey. And this is why we don't like technology: It's hard. At least it is for some judges who don't understand DNS. Plus, you get to meet Christina Del Ponte?

--Molly


Listen now: Download today's podcast

EPISODE 642

TODAY'S LINKS:


TODAY'S VOICE MAIL:
Tiger from Pennsylvania
Blame it on the S-OX.

Aneesh
Life imitates The Office.

Captain Kevin
Always keep paper maps around.

Weird guy
What's up with Christina Del Ponte?



TODAY'S E-MAIL:
Update on Macworld keynote
Hey gang,

Just a quick correction on the Macworld keynote on CNN. CNN replayed the keynote after the keynote was originally done. In other words, it was a replay, not live. Sorry I didn't add that in the original e-mail.

After watching a few minutes of the replay on CNN, the audio had an echo and the camera was always out of focus when they zoomed in on Steve Jobs. After watching five minutes, I'd rather read it or wait until Apple released the keynote.

Greg the Mass Comm student who moved from New Orleans to Baton Rouge,
Louisiana

Macbook Air: Thin doesn't equal portable
This is Matt from Maine.

I have a comment about the MacBook Air. The MacBook air is thin, but that doesn't mean it's "ultraportable." Most people concerned with size feel that x and y dimensions (the footprint, if you will) are more important than z dimensions (thinness). While the Air is not huge in the x and y directions, it is certainly larger than most other ultraportables in that respect. And that's what counts most when trying to fit a laptop into a small bag or large purse. Additionally, by making it so thin, Apple really burnt a lot of customers who want Ethernet built-in, FireWire, and user-replaceable batteries. Expandability is very limited, the cost (with SSD and 1.8ghz) is very high, and it's larger (x and y) than most ultraportables. I have to admit though, the design is just gorgeous, and I can still see it selling well...just not to performance-only minded people like me!

Reinstalling MacBook Air
Hi Buzz team,

I was looking at the Macbook Air and since it has no built-in DVD drive, what do you do when it comes to reinstalling the operating system when it crashes so you can boot. I assume the 'over wireless disk' won't work without a working operating system.

Just a thought which no one seems to have covered.

Keep up the good work.

Dave, U.K.

Apple Time Machine--really?
Tom, Molly,

I've been listening to the podcast for about a year and a half, and this is the first time I had to write you. You always answer my questions or extinguish my rants on the next podcast. You guys usually have the same questions/rants, or another listener corrects you and that usually satisfies all my problems.

My question here is about the new Apple Time Capsule. Is Steve really going to make us buy a hard drive and another wireless router to back up a Mac wirelessly? I just bought the Airport Extreme! And get this, it has a handy dandy little USB port on the back. I should be able to use Time Machine with my own external hard drive and the Airport. Do I really need to buy another overpriced wireless router from Apple just to get this wireless backup capability? Can't they just update the Time Machine or Airport software to allow this seemingly simple function. Uggh, Steve, where's the software update for this? Gosh, I might be willing to pay you $0.99 for this update, you know for accounting purposes.

I feel obligated to end with "Love the show!", but it's also true.

B-Mike
Jacksonville, Florida

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About Buzz Out Loud Podcast

Buzz Out Loud features Tom Merritt, producer Jason Howell, and a rotating roundtable of CNET's top tech experts reviewing the day's tech news. Each episode, five times a week, the crew analyzes, interprets, and argues about what all this technology means and what it's doing to us. Fans can join in the show by calling 1-800-616-2638, e-mailing at buzz@cnet.com, or commenting on the blog.


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Tom Merritt 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. See profile
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