Here is another story related to bandwidth shaping from the major ISP’s.  I like the authors arguments and stance, we really do not know what our ISP (comcast, att, verizon) are doing with our traffic.  We sign up for DSL and Cable under the assumption that we will get our 4 megabits of bandwidth.  At some level we probably do, from your cable modem to your ISP, they then get to choose / Route your traffic to the internet. At high consumption times they throttle you down to some level and at low peak times they may let you go.

What the article depicts is a time where the ISP will actually look at what the traffic is and then determine if it should go or not go. Example:  P2P is often used to share illegal files, the ISP may see that P2P is being used and instead of your normal 1megabit it throttles it down to 256k.

In theory that would help justify how the ISP saves bandwidth, and I am not opposed to that (in the end it saves me money).  Where I am opposed or upset is when they look at what the P2P traffic is.  I use P2P to backup my machines to other machines and in that process they are slowing down my backup.  I also use my internet connection to share access to my files / Source control, etc…

I think we will be hearing a lot about this in the near future.  The reason is simple $$ (money).  Bandwidth costs money, the more our kids use it to stream video, share files, and make calls the more we need.  We begin to expect service, and also expect performance and reliability.  In the past people have been ok with slow downs, but now we are dependent. Our ISP’s should offer that as a service if they do intend on filtering traffic.  I would pay more to guarantee my bandwidth.  Right now the ISP’s are making the decision for us.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20071026/cm_huffpost/069960

For the record I use itunes, I just don’t like it.  It does things that I just don’t like and don’t need.  For example, I have to use itunes to put music on my ipod.  I happen to have a lot of music and typically just rotate music on and off.  It seems lately that itunes has been updating their software frequently.  When itunes updates it then pops a user agreement window.   That would normally not be an issue, but it seems that this agreement happens to pop behind all other windows, so you can’t find it.  I sit and wait for itunes to open so I can move files and it never shows.  You also never see this prompt in the task bar.  Also, there is no need for a audio playing software to take almost as much memory as Internet Explorer.  As I type this and not even using itunes just have it open it is taking 50 meg of ram, and somewhere near 13% of cpu. 

For a day to day audio software I use foobar2000.  It is small, has playlists, key controls and is easy to use.

One of my co-worker sent me a link to this site http://www.thoof.com

I really like what the site is doing.  If you continue to scroll down the page continues to load stories via ajax page call.   This is really slick, I think of all the blog sites I read where you have to click on the next page or previous posts.   It’s a great idea to keep someone on the same user experience or page.

Not sure how well it does to computer memory, but the idea is sweet.

I was reading lifehacker.com and came across this post http://lifehacker.com/software/featured-windows-download/manage-multiple-remote-desktop-connections-with-mremote-310293.php

All of a sudden I realized wow, what a simple great idea.  I bet in some form I had even thought of something similar.  It’s written in .NET and would be pretty easy to do.  I’ve started using this and realized how much crap I put up with on windows to make simple remote connections…

I have been obsessed with wind power for a long time.  I wanted to try it on our new house, however it did not fit in the budget.  Here is a great KISS idea that a 20 something inventor came up with.

If this goes live, I would love to see what I can use it for at the house.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4224763.html?series=37