7 posts tagged “internet”

If you're looking for some spiritual guidance, I suggest the two creations Sean Timberlake posted at Hedonia, both made with Hangar One's amazing Chipotle Vodka.

Dateline Los Gatos: Bitter cheating ex-wife bitches to "Doctor Phil" about her ex-husband's post-divorce success, gets like totally pwned on the show, blames it on taking drugs and bad editing. Bonus: The comments on the story.

SFist continues the Google Maps quirk log with a look at what appears to be a N Judah the size of a BART consist.

Unprepared: People trying to get a passport not happy about having to wait twelve-plus weeks for one. I have moderate amounts of pity, but honestly, kids, the logjam-generating passport requirements for travel to Mexico and Canada weren't exactly state secrets.

Today's selections from SFGate:

eHarmony gets matched with a lawsuit accusing the company of discriminating against gays and lesbians. The suit was filed in California, where such discrimination is illegal. Lawyers for the Christian-themed dating service equated it to suing a sushi bar for not serving Blanquette de veau.

 "You dare to rape people's will, betray us, and threaten the community," said the newspaper ad directed at two legislators opposing a Chinatown expansion of City College.

They failed at math, bought homes they couldn't afford and at least one California legislator wanted to save them from foreclosure. Alas, the bill to save idiots who attempted to live beyond their means dies a quick death in committee.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts offered a demonstration of DOCSIS 3.0 on Wednesday. The new standard will offer cable broadband delivery speeds "up to 25 times faster" than what's currently available. Says Rocky Mountain News:

In the presentation, Robert Stanzione, ARRIS Group chief executive, downloaded a 30- second, 300- megabyte television commercial in a few seconds while a standard modem took 16 minutes.

Stanzione also downloaded the 32-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica 2007 and Merriam-Webster's visual dictionary in under four minutes, when it would have taken a standard modem three hours and 12 minutes.

"If you look at what just happened, 55 million words, 100,000 articles, more than 22,000 pictures, maps and more than 400 video clips," Roberts said. "The same download on dial-up would have taken two weeks."

The article gets one bit of terminology wrong -- DOCSIS 3.0 doesn't use four separate physical cable lines, rather, it bonds together multiple frequencies to resemble a single connection, like watching four channels at once, except everything makes sense.

Don't flood Comcast with requests for this service just yet, the industry leaders are referencing rollout time in terms of years, not months. I'm betting markets where cable operators compete directly with Verizon's FIOS offering will see this technology first.

In 1993, AT&T looked into the future of the Internet and it saw -- among many other things -- instant voice translation and videophone calls from airplanes:

This is part one of a six-part series of a vintage 14-minute AT&T promotional video, uploaded and commented-upon at Paleo-Future.

After scanning your 125th profile of yet another pale, spazzy Good Charlotte fan from Minneapolis, after seeing 257 pictures of Jenny from Orlando's drunk, giggly friends at hookup parties and reading about her love of dolphin tattoos and her desire to get her eyebrow pierced, oh my God my mom will kill me lol, it hits you: Sweet Jesus with a bottle of Tanqueray and a polysyllabic thought, these are the most boring people I have ever seen in my entire life.

From SFGate's Mark Morford: I'm drunk and naked on MySpace!

Damn!

If you're having a bad week (already? by Tuesday?) chew on this: You could have ended last week working for Speakeasy and started this week working for Best Buy.

One of the largest and certainly most popular DSL providers in the United States has been acquired by Best Buy, according to the two companies. The purchase price was reported as $97 million, which the companies put at 20% greater than Speakeasy's 2006 revenues.

And another independent ISP cashes in. I haven't felt this disappointed since the dotcom days of Verio buying up dozens of small providers and Web hosting companies, usually within 90 days of me moving somewhere to avoid them. On the other hand, I've had bad experiences with both companies so perhaps this is just kindred souls making a perfect match.

Oh, well. I'm sure Best Buy will run Speakeasy with the same class and integrity their retail operations are known for!

I have a couple of friends who spend a few minutes on hold with Comcast every three to six months for the sole purpose of telling them they're going to cancel their broadband service. They don't actually want to cancel, they just want the retention rep to gift them with another three to six months at the promotional price.

Comcast has a new message for my friends: Go on, cancel. We dare you.

According to Personal Finance Advice, the region's cable monopoly now requires customers to wait sixty days before they can use new promotional pricing. Apparently you can get around this for cancelling service for a couple of days and signing back up, but who wants to go without the sweet, sweet crack pipe of the Internet for that long?

Says Macleans:

The idealists who conceived and pioneered the Web described a kind of enlightened utopia built on mutual understanding, a world in which knowledge is limited only by one's curiosity. Instead, we have constructed a virtual Wild West, where the masses indulge their darkest vices, pirates of all kinds troll for victims, and the rest of us have come to accept that cyberspace isn't the kind of place you'd want to raise your kids. The great multinational exchange of ideas and goodwill has devolved into a food fight. And the virtual marketplace is a great place to get robbed. The answers to the great questions of our world may be out there somewhere, but finding them will require you to first wade through an ocean of misinformation, trivia and sludge. We have been sold a bill of goods. We're paying for it through automatic monthly withdrawals from our PayPal accounts.

Let's put this in terms crude enough for all cyber-dwellers to grasp. The Internet sucks.

Favorite comment from the MeFi discussion calls out the article for the sour grapes that it is, and includes this bit:

I bet my words have been read by more people in more countries than you. How's that feel? You feeling obsolete yet? Suck it, hater. Adapt, perish or get the fuck out of the way.