Scrooge loves alt blockchains

I’m sure you’ve all heard the news swirling around the usual Bitcoin (BTC) related news outlets that there are a myriad alternative Crypto-currencies available now (referred to colloquially as “alt blockchains”). Popular ones being IXcoin, I0coin and Solidcoin to name a few, all touting the reasons why users should jump the Bitcoin ship over to their new ark on the path to cash laden greener pastures.

So what’s the catch?

If you’re currently working, mining or trading on any of these Bitcoin alternatives and haven’t asked yourself that question, then please read on with an open mind. If you’re currently looking into these new alternatives but are unsure, I hope the information I’m able to provide gives you enough knowledge to make your own informed decision.

I wanted to title this blog entry “Why Alternatives to Bitcoin are Horse Shit”, but I thought that might show a bit of a bias… that and Google doesn’t exactly give pages with swear words in them a prominent page rank But the fact of the matter is, it’s the truth.

I’ll start with saying that Bitcoin isn’t perfect. It’s very literally a Version 1.0 of Crypto-Currency and broke a lot of new ground in how we view payment online and fiat currencies in general. From the growth of Bitcoin over the past year, several shortcomings in the architecture of the protocol as well as the client application have come to light. Dan Kaminsky actually gave a great presentation at this years toorcon in Seattle on the topic of Bitcoin in which he went into detail on Bitcoin and issues related to. You can view the slides for his presentation here.

It’s important that you read the slides from his presentation because the issues outlined within ARE valid issues with Bitcoin and the current implementations of crypto-currency. For those who are� too lazy to read it, a couple issues of note:

• High Bandwidth Costs – Since all transactions are downloaded by all notes, even at 1/100th the volume of VISA’s transactions would equate to 10MB/sec network traffic PER NODE.
• High Storage Requirements – Currently a new client has to download the entire 200MB block chain, which will only go up over time. At high volume, the block chain could grow up to 1TB per day.

So obviously there’s room for improvement within Bitcoin, I don’t think anyone would argue against that.

At this point you’d think that alternatives to Bitcoin would address the obvious shortcomings to the core of what Bitcoin is, right? Wrong.

I’ll say this up front: No Bitcoin fork to date has addressed any shortcomings within the Bitcon protocol.

If not make the Bitcoin protocol/system better, then what did they change?

• IXcoin

• Shorter Maturity Period – Where as Bitcoin will take until 2033 to have all blocks mined and available in the pool, IXcoin will reach maturity by 2013
• This means that people mining IXcoin will earn them at a much faster rate than Bitcoin
• It’s worth a note here that the creator of IXcoin mined over 500,000 coins for himself before making IXcoin public under the guise of “using them for bounties on improvements”
• I0coin

• Clone of IXcoin but without 500k blocks mined before opening it to the public
• Solidcoin

• Faster transaction confirmation
• Twice daily difficulty re-targets
• Maturation by 2022

Out of these three alternatives, one thing becomes clear to me right away: People who created these clones didn’t do so to make Bitcoin better, they did it to make money… quickly.

I mean seriously, look at those features! Not a single one of them addresses critical long term growth issues that would be vital to the lasting survival of a Crypto-currency. The only modifications these alternatives provide for is faster payout, faster transaction confirmation and the ability to get more coins out to those who are “daring” enough to make the jump.

The underlying motivator here is Greed. A lot of people are very bitter that they missed the early days of Bitcoin where difficulty was below 100 and someone could solo mine and earn thousands of Bitcoins. So when the “Bubble” came, these fortunate few were in the perfect position to cash in on their bet. As Bitcoin matures along with the marketplace that trades it, price fluctuations, high difficulty and downward pressure on the price means the gold rush is over. This also created the opportunity of alternatives to cash in.

So back to the original point of my post, that these alternatives, if not TRUE alternatives or next evolutions of Crypto-currency need an audience and interest before they become worth anything to anyone. So as with any pyramid scheme, the creator (especially in the case of IXcoin) is in a position to make the most money. From there, the word needs to be spread to more people, they need to spread it to more people and so on. So over time, those who got in early are in the position to make the money money (even if just a couple hundred dollars) and those who are in late are left trying to earn the same rate (or less) in BTC.

I’m not here to hate on all alternative block chains, but really just call into question the reason for their existence. I don’t buy their veiled reasons for technical superiority when it’s blatantly obvious that they only exist for people to earn more “coins” faster. I think people willing to take the gamble on alternative block chains need to really look into hyperinflation throughout history.

All that being said, I’m not sold on these alternatives to Bitcoin. They are slathered with greed under a thin veil of false technical merit. My hope is that one day there WILL be an alternative to Bitcoin that addresses some of the fundamental issues that Dan Kaminsky brought up. Solutions to these issues would make Bitcoin more viable in a fast moving, high volume global market. Until then, we’re just left with a bunch of “Get Rich Quick” pyramid schemes.

Cheers!

The All-MIghty Bitcoin (BTC)

I don’t want this blog entry to be about explaining Bitcoin (BTC), so I’ll point you folks looking for more information over to Wikipedia where they have a very in-depth article on the topic. What I will talk about in this post is a story of my involvement in the whole Bitcoin shenanigans that are happening on the net and where I think I’ll go with, or leave it.

In early June of this year I caught wind of Bitcoin really taking off through a friend who had started experimenting with solo mining using his CPU. At the time, I had thought nothing much of it and brushed it off as just another distributed project along the lines of SETI@Home or Folding@Home.

Over the course of a week or two, through bloggers and twitter feeds the whispers in the wind of Bitcoin had turned into a full on fog horn! Bitcoin was a modern day gold rush and if you weren’t in on it, you were missing out! The numbers at the time were ridiculous and it sounded like you’d be stupid not to get in on it. Earnings for miners being upwards of $2000 per month, people investing thousands of dollars in new hardware and obviously the news media coverage of the less glamorous use of Bitcoin… that of the drug trade through the Silk Road.

I didn’t want to be the last person to the party, so I jumped in.

Stranger in a strange land

I started off like most, running Bitcoin mining clients on any bit of hardware I could get my hands on. My home CPU (Intel Q6600, about 12Mhash/sec),  GPU (nVidia GTX295, 64Mhash/sec) and… other computers I had access to at the time. The most powerful being a 24-core Xeon 2.4Ghz (62Mhash/sec). I was on my way, spooling up the printing presses and waiting for the money to start rolling in.

Obviously as the days passed, I spent more time on the Bitcoin Forums (now bitcointalk.org) researching how I could squeeze more power out of my small cluster of machines. At the time, people were crazy with mining and were buying up applicable hardware left and right. I’ve been an nVidia owner for the better part of 15 years and spit nothing but hateful vitriol when talking about ATI (they really burned me with their shitty drivers for my ATI All-In-Wonder back when Windows 2000 came out). When I read that the REAL money is to made in GPU mining and the only cards that can do this right were ATI/AMD Radeon based cards… I was a bit taken aback. Was I really going to have to put my (albeit, probably dated and baseless) biases aside for the sake of getting on the internet bandwagon?

After a day or two of thorough research of topics such as OpenGL, CUDA, AMD APP Engine and the architectural differences between AMD/ATI based video cards and nVidia, I was able to sell myself on the technical merit for the requirement and made the investment. My first card was a Gigabyte 6870, which wasn’t the OPTIMAL mining card, but at the time, my plan was to replace my desktop card which would give me the ability to still game when I wanted to and mine with the spare cycles and downtime.

Within a couple days, I had generated my first Bitcoin!

…and a couple days later, something happened that I wasn’t ready for: The Epic Difficulty increase of 2011.

See, without getting too technical, the Bitcoin network has a way to adjust how frequently Bitcoins are generated. As the computing power of the network skyrocketed, it adjusted to keep the rate of generation steady (which is roughly 5.5-6 blocks per hour). The difficulty doubled, meaning that my earning rate was cut in half.  The difficulty continued to increase 40-50% per week as people kept joining up and throwing their computing power into the fray.

During all this, another notable event in Bitcoin history occurred: The bubble burst.

Bitcoin peaked at around $35 per BTC and within a matter of a couple days, came crashing down to almost half the previous price. Between the difficulty increases and the price crash, I had to come to reality that my get rich quick scheme wasn’t as full proof as I had thought.

I decided to go all in for the long haul and invested in additional hardware to setup a dedicated “mining rig” (computer dedicated to mining for Bitcoins). My final choice was to run two ATI 6870′s and overclock them, which gave me a total computational power of about 600 Mhash/sec. The decision to run two 6870′s wasn’t the smarted in terms of Bitcoining as the cost/performance ratio wasn’t the highest, but I already had one 6870 and at the time they were still readily available.

So it was at this point I settled in for the long haul an let the mining rig work day and night.

Understandig

A month passed and over that period, I spent a lot of time doing research on Bitcoin. Research on both the technical operation of mining for Bitcoins and the financial side of things (profitability and economics). I had amassed my first 10 BTC and was ready to cash in my first haul. After transaction fees, I was able to bring in a little over $200 from my first month. This more than paid off the first video card and put me on the path to paying off the second. Additionally though, it really brought me back down to earth as far as MY future with Bitcoin.

Due primarily to market instability, I decided to cash out every 1 BTC as I created them. My goal being that I needed to pay off the initial investment first and foremost before speculating. Over the next 30-45 days, I witnessed Bitcoin priced sliding slowly week over week from $20 to as low as $6.50 at points.

Mining is all about profitability, and keeping profitable means running efficiently. The primary drawback to mining is energy cost, being that you’re paying for the electricity that is being used to generate Bitcoins. Living in Texas, I have a flat rate of $0.091 per kw/h and at current difficulties, I could still turn a (albeit small) profit as long as exchange rates for Bitcoin stay above $3.50 per BTC. So being efficient meant no longer CPU mining and cutting back as much power usage from the mining rig as possible (minimal case fans, underclock the CPU and other energy saving measures).

All these points brought Bitcoin mining down from the altars of genius money making schemes to almost QuickBook like accounting of business operation and profitability. It sucked the fun out of it, but the number still didn’t lie: I was making money.

Looking Forward

So here I am two moths (to the day) after I first started down this rabbit hole that is Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining. I’ve learned a couple important lessons from reading about other users and also my own personal experience:

1. Bitcoin Mining will not make you rich – It just won’t. Your goal for Bitcoin mining should be to recover you initial investment and just enjoy anything after that. Because of the network adjustments for difficulty, your hardware value depreciates over time. When I first started, at sky high values and low difficulties, it would take WEEKS to pay off the cost of a mining rig. These days, you could expect two to three months to pay off a mid-sized rig and even then, you’re at the mercy of how many people are in the pool.
2. Don’t go all in – I’ve read many threads about people who’ve spent -thousands- of dollars in hardware to mine for Bitcoins. The days of being able to make your money back on hardware investments like that is long, long gone. Barring a doubling in market price, it’s just not something I would invest large amounts of money in, as it could take YEARS to see returns (now THAT’S speculating).
3. The volatility of the market place wreaks havoc on mining profits, but is the speculative traders wet dream – Literally, the opportunity exists almost daily for traders to make a 30-40% profit based on price swings. A buy/sell order of 200,000BTC can swing the market literally by a couple dollars, meaning those sitting on fiat currency have an opportunity DAILY to buy low sell high.

Where am I at? Well, to date I’ve made back the money I invested on the video cards. So I’ll consider myself lucky on that front.

I’ve decided from this point in, I’m going to just sit on my Bitcoins as they’re generated to see what happens. My risk from this would be possibly missing out on current prices ($9.50/BTC at the time of writing this), but at the same time I also gamble on the reward of Bitcoins eventually going up in value. So risking a possible “loss” of $0 since I’m already paid off (well, less energy cost which is negligible) for a potential profit of more than $0. I’ll take them odds.

So, I’m glad I got in when I did because I think if I had got in any later, I would be writing a much more frustrated post on the topic. My wife would probably be chiming in as well Do I wish I got in earlier? Of course! But that’s the story on investments, isn’t it? SHOULD HAVE DONE XYZ WHEN I HAD THE CHANCE!

Do I think people should get in/out? That’s a decision that needs to be made on a person to person basis due to the number of variables that are involved (start-up cost, energy costs, market conditions, etc., etc). I will say that I think it’s a much higher risk these days due to the continued slide in price paired with the high difficulties.

Personally, I hope more people throw in the towel. Bigger piece of the pie for me

Cheers!

LulzSec poisons Google?

I thought this might have been some funny business either with my SSH tunnel or Firefox, but I was able to replicate the results using IE and a different proxy altogether:

LulzSec poisoned Google Results in IE

The poison itself looks like a CSS or Javascript injection where it creates a rainbow connected to the search button. The rest of the search results are skewed.

So essentially I was able to replicate the poisoned results multiple times across multiple browsers. You have to search for the term “LulzSec” and F5 until you happen to get the result. I imagine this is a case where the Google Index with the poisoned results hasn’t propagated across the ENTIRE Google farm yet, so you’ll have to play search results roulette until you get it.

This is either something weird going on at Google, or LulzSec is indeed the most badass group of hackers this world has ever known. Poisoning the Google Search results is like the Holy Grail of awesome hacks!

ApocBot v0.0

ApocBot v0.0 — The First (not completely working) Open Source MTGO Trade Bot written in C#/.NET!

Now that the fanfare is over, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty.

What was with the delay?

The truth of the matter is that life just has a way of happening. My desire to play Magic The Gathering: Online waxes and wanes through the years and I started this project shortly after moving across the country. So you can say it was the product of my being bored in the evenings Over the course of a few months my interest in this project started to fade as I settled into my new job and had to travel a bit.

I had debated in my mind on how to handle the bot. I know over time it would be a maintenance nightmare as people would require support and updates, which is honestly why I decided to go Open Source with it. For some reason people feel that paying for software implies some form of support! In the end, I just stopped working on it because (a) MTGO is just a hobby, so I wasn’t looking to make money off the bot and (b) I didn’t want to have to constantly maintain and update the code to work with new versions/UI changes as they come out. That’s just the lazy bastard I am

That being said, I still feel this is an important project because it gives the community at large the ability to finally be more open about automation on MTGO (and possibly other games).

So what shape is the code currently in?

Out of the box, the code isn’t going to work. I’ll go into the details below on why/what needs to be updated to get it in running shape.

Other than updating some of the code to work with any UI/screen changes, it should still work pretty well! I know it worked the last time I tried to use it (six months ago?).. so I’m sure with some TLC, someone can get it up and running again.

And it’s free?!

Yep! Anyone is free to download and use the code for ApocBot in their own Magic Online Trading Bots as long as they adhere to the BSD License terms. If anyone is feeling giving, links back to my blog and some Magic Online gratitude would be appreciated! (My MTGO user name is “WndrBr3d“)

Download:

ApocBot and the source code are released under the BSD License. Please review the included “license.txt” file for terms and conditions. For more information on the BSD Licenses, click here.

ApocBot v0.0 (Source)

Requirements: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0

And now.. the very rough technical details on how it works…

How does it even work?!

I followed the same basic idea as a lot of the AutoIT bots that are out there in the sense that I’m snapping screen shots and determining what’s on the screen by creating checksums of specified areas. I figured, “Hey, if they can make it work in AutoIT, I’m sure I can make it work in C# even better!”

So using the idea of area checksums, ApocBot can identify what is currently being displayed on the screen and act appropriately.

The basic configuration for ApocBot to run was WindowsXP (Classic Theme) running at 1024×768 (32-bit color depth).

The Classes/Controllers

MTGOController.cs

The MTGOController class holds the primary logic for ApocBot including the main program loop and all MTGO Object definitions.

On start up, all the MTGO Objects are defined. Currently these are all hard coded but I had planned to eventually move them all to an XML file and just have them deserialized on start up (any takers on this? ).. but for now, they’re all hard-coded.

After everything is setup, the main program loop will start. The basic function is this:

1. Grab a screen shot
2. Determine the state of the bot (switch statement)
3. Based upon the state, check the screen for any known events/items to act upon
4. Sleep 250ms (to avoid CPU spike caused by constant screen polling)

ScreenController.cs

The ScreenController class holds all the logic required to grab the screen shots and calculate the area checksums.

MouseKeyboardController.cs

The MouseKeyboardController class holds all the logic required to make mouse movements and send keys to the program. Hooks into the Windows API are used to simulate the mouse events to the OS.

The Objects

There are really three main objects used by ApocBot to know what’s going on:

1. MTGOScreen - Represents a screen in MTGO, such as the “Home” or “Trade” screens (Multiple Areas, Multiple Points)
2. MTGOArea - Represents an area on a screen, such as a pop-up dialogue, card graphic or window (Multiple Points)
3. MTGOPoint - Represents a point on the screen, such as an “OK” or “Cancel” button

Objects are referenced in the system to main properties: Name and Checksum.

The checksums that are currently hard-coded might be out of date. You can generate new checksums using the AreaChecksum() method in the ScreenController.

Almost forgot! It’s named “ApocBot” because Apocalypse was my favorite Magic: The Gathering expansion!

Cheers!

• Basic Trade functionality is completed
  • Trade x for y (i.e. 4 Uncommons for 1 Rare)
  • Buy/Sell x for x (i.e. 6 Rares for 1 Ticket or 1 Ticket for 6 Rares)
• Smart Bot functionality is 70% Completed

Currently ApocBot is able to correctly identify cards that are selected during a trade and quote the stored price for the cards.  So far, so good!

Want some more info?

Okay, so here’s the big announce. I’m going to open source the Basic Trade functionality. I think it’s something that’s really fundamental and should have been included in the MTGO client to begin with. To that, I think it’s stilly to charge for such a basic function after writing it.

So now to answer some obvious questions:

Q: ZOMG! You’re going to open source it?!

A: Yes. ApocBot will be the first free, open source MTGO trade bot

Q: What license will it be released under?

A: I’m going to release it under GPL v3

Q: When?!

A: It’ll be available on this site by January 1st, 2010 I’ll need some beta testers to use it before I release the source, just to make sure I’m not going to cause more problems than good. I’ll send out a call for that within the coming weeks.

Q: What about SmartBot functionality?

A: I’m still working on SmartBot and to be honest, it has been more trouble than it’s worth. I’ll make a decision on that as soon as I think it’s at a functional point. Because I’m currently working full time, I’m only able to dedicate a couple hours a week to ApocBot so this might take a bit. Part of me open sorucing ApocBot in the first place is so the community can begin development of such a plugin or enhancement.

Q: What will I need to develop ApocBot?

A: ApocBot is written in Microsoft C# and you will need Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (with .NET 3.5) to develop. And Magic: The Gathering Online.. of course

So that’s that! What’s funny is I was mulling this post around in my head and how to handle a MTGO bot that I knew (a) wouldn’t make a ton of money and (b) should really be free anyways.

Please feel free to e-Mail me or leave any questions you might have here on this post and I’ll be more vigilant in getting back to everyone.

Cheers!

The case I’ve been using is a Morex 3677B case, which is fairly small but still allows enough room for a 2.5″ Hard Drive and a Slim Laptop CD/DVD drive.

A couple gotchas I ran into while upgrading from the VIA board to the new Intel Atom based board:

1. The Zotac IONITX board has only SATA connectors, no PATA connectors to be found! This was a road block as both my previous hard drive and slim CD/DVD drive were both PATA so I was forced to upgrade them as well. Luckily I was able to score a 320GB Seagate drive for only $79!
2. Zotac provides a small 50mm fan to use on the heatsink because the Dual Core N330 CPU as well as the nVidia northbridge require active cooling. Luckily the Morex case has a 50mm exhaust fan that sits close to the heatsink. I was able to flip it around and use it to blow onto the CPU.
3. Speaking of the heatsink, it’s about 1.5″ high and ALMOST comes too close to not fitting into the case. So it’s something to keep in mind when you’re working on your setup!

I’ve got everything hooked up and it was very easy to get the driver package installed. Because the Zotac IONITX came out so recently, the CD it came with had the latest drivers and the motherboard had the latest BIOS installed.

The ONE issue I’m having and still searching for a solution for is that using HDMI as the audio output, I’m getting audio distortion. I’ve tried different source materials and even tweaking the audio settings, but it’s still happening. Other than that, I’ve been super pleased with it’s performance! I mean, seriously, a computer the size of a shoe box showing four CPU’s (2 physical + hyper threading) and an nVidia graphics adapter!

Hope this helps someone out there in the market for upgrading their own HTPC as well!

Cheers!

ME TOO AND IT WAS DRIVING ME UP THE FUCKING WALL!

After I updated my 15-inch Macbook Pro to 10.5.8 I noticed right away that my wireless performance was in the crapper. Ping times to Google jumped up to an AVERAGE of 300ms, sometimes as high at 1,500ms! Any other wireless device in the house? 40-50ms! So it was obvious, after pulling my hair out thinking it was an issue with my Airport Extreme base stations or Verizon FIOS.

Luckily my friend Joe (who has been suffering the same issue), pointed me towards a link on Apple Support that not only admits that the 10.5.8 update breaks “some” Intel based laptops, but they also released a fix! What was their fix?

It basically rolls back your wireless drivers to 10.5.7!

http://support.apple.com/downloads/AirPort_Client_Update_for_MacBook_and_MacBook_Pro

I hope this helps out anyone else who thought they were losing their mind!

Cheers!

What are they not telling you? That the 40GB plan is $54.90! The comparable in price plan they’re offering to customers who currently subscribe to Road Runner standard for $29.95/mo? A paltry 5GB! That’s right! Time Warner Cable is going to be charging home users almost THIRTY DOLLARS per month for a pathetically small 5GB of data transfer. Don’t think the marketing genius stops there! In addition to these new ridiculous bandwidth caps, they’re going to be charging you $1 per gigabyte over!

To break down these numbers, I thought I’d throw out some AVERAGE usage from my household, who DOESN’T use P2P file sharing or sites such as The Pirate Bay:

Average Amazon Unbox video rental file size: 1GB

Average weekly Rock Band DLC file size from XBox Live: 150MB (500MB if it’s a full album)

Average Netflix Streaming (High Quality) video: 2GB

So by looking at these numbers, just downloading the OCCASIONAL Rock Band downloadable content and watching a movie every OTHER Saturday Night would cause you to incur bandwidth overages if you’re using the standard $29.99/mo plan from Road Runner.

Is this a mistake? You’re damned right it is! Time Warner has obviously missed the boat that the internet is the future and by limiting people’s access to it, it’ll only drive customers away to other services that make online content more readily available (and cheaper!). So let’s discuss alternatives!

Alternative #1: DSL (“I just want regular Internet Access”)

"The Man"

Personally, I’m not a super huge fan of DSL because speeds vary depending on your distance from the telco and their bandwidth compared to the offerings from cable companies can’t complete. BUT, desperate times call for desperate measures!

AT&T offers a high speed DSL plan for $35/mo that has speeds of 6mbps downstream & 1mbps upstream. Comparable to Road Runner in price, AT&T offers a DSL plan for $25/mo that features 1.5mbps downstream & 384kbps upstream.

I agree that these numbers SEEM weak, but let’s crunch the numbers really quickly. What I want to do is compare maximum monthly cost assuming you leave your internet connection ONLY downloading 24 hours a day for 30 days (one billing cycle).

As you can see, if you’re only concerned with monthly transfer it would seem that AT&T DSL is the best alternative to your bandwidth requirements. If you need speeds higher than 6mbps, then it would appear you’re tired to Time Warner’s draconian bandwidth caps.

Alternative #2: Dedicated DS-3 (“I want speed, no matter the cost!”)

My doctor said I need more..

This sounds ridiculous, but hear me out. I’m sure nobody out there will debate that a dedicated DS-3 is a viable alternative to residential internet providers, but the numbers add up versus Time Warner Road runner because it’d be much cheaper per gigabyte and over twice the speed!

There are many DS-3 providers across the country and each one has different pricing structures. I took the average of a cross section of quotes it would cost me to have a DS-3 installed at my home in a coastal California city. I’ll break down the price using the same table above:

So as you can see from the above table, as ridiculous as a dedicated DS-3 line sounds as being used for residential internet access, it comes out being cheaper than Time Warner Road Runner! Food for thought for those people who have nothing but money to spare and demand top speed access and unlimited monthly transfers to their favorite… recipe sites.

Alternative #3: Dialup (“I want more monthly transfer, I don’t even care about the speed!”)

+++ATAH0

Wait, wait. Don’t close your browser yet. Just hear me out on this one

Dial up is something a lot of us remember fondly as our first gateway to the net. Internet providers did limit our usage, but it was time limited (for example: 30 hours per month). Not because bandwidth was more expensive then (which it was), but because telco fees were so high when it came to installing additional POTS line to the ISP. This way they could operate on fewer POTS lines without having to charge users higher monthly rates.

Dialup modem technology has plateaued at 56kbps over your standard phone line (depending on distance to the telco, same as DSL). The average dial up plan these days is roughly $9.99 and can be found in almost any market. It’s a fantastic alternative because it can work virtually anywhere without much additional hardware, effort on the end user…. or trenching fiber down the street

How does this even make sense as an alternative? Total monthly transfer! That’s right folks! Did you ever stop and wonder “Wait, 40GB per month? How much is that in kilobits per second?” The sad and shocking answer to that is about 16.5kbps. You heard me! The best Road Runner plan you can buy offers you less monthly downloaded data than a 28.8 modem!

So now that I’ve got your attention, hows about that great service comparison table again!

Have I sold you on dial up? Probably not But I’m trying to make the point that Time Warner has gone completely off the deep end with their pricing structure compared to the services that you receive. Am I the only person who’s floored that dial up is not only cheaper than Cable Internet but now also offers better monthly transfer at a lower rate?

Is Road Runner bandwidth REALLY $100 more expensive than dial up? No, if anything, bandwidth has become many times cheaper than it was ten years ago. So what gives?

Well, my personal opinion is that the bottom line here is the cable industry is in trouble from competition who have more focused and more easily maintained infrastructure. Competition in the Television market from companies like DirecTV and DishNetwork have forced some cable companies into bankruptcy because upgrading and maintaining a physical network has overhead much higher than that of a single satellite floating through space.

In addition, you have internet competition from companies like AT&T and Verizon who are starting to offer Fiber To The Premises (FTTP) in newer housing communities, which bundles internet, television and phone all under one low cost bill.

I hope everyone takes these points to heart and contacts Time Warner and asks them “What gives?” And if it comes down to it, look into one of the alternatives I proposed above because that’s our rights as consumers!

Cheers!

PS: If you get the DS-3, invite me over to your house. I have some stuff I need to download

Of course I pointed him over to my posting provider, InMotionHosting! Why? Because their cheap $6.95/mo hosting account has UNLIMITED transfer and UNLIMITED storage! So of course it fit his needs perfectly and I think anyone would be insane not to jump at a hosting offer like this at such a cheap rate.

I mean seriously, these are the features for their ‘low end’ business account:

• Unlimited Storage Space
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Up to 7 domains on the account
• Free Nightly Backups of all your data
• Two MYSQL Databases (which are also of unlimited size)

All for only $6.95/mo! Seriously! I know, shameless plug but it’s seriousliy rediculous what you recieve for the price.

Use the link below and check them out!

Cheers!

Well, the other night my wife was watching a movie through Netflix on the TiVo and about four times it just quit out to the main TiVo menu. What the frick?

I told my wife to give the XBox 360 a try and see how it handles. Well turns out that the 360 had a hiccup too, but you know what it was? A buffer underrun! That’s right! My internet connection for whatever reason couldn’t keep up with the Netflix stream and it ran out of data. Of course the XBox client was smart enough to realize this, displayed a message and buffered some before streaming again.

My TiVo client? Crashed out. Talk about two code bases not up to par with one another.

So if you’re having the same issues, odds are your network connection (for whatever reason) is not keeping up with the Netflix stream and it’s just crashing out to the main menu of TiVo.

My suggested work around for the time being is try watching it on your XBox 360 if you have the option. Otherwise, you might want to contact your cable provider or stop torrenting all that norwegian snow porn

Cheers!