09/03/08
When I hear my U.S. friends complain about the 250 GB cap that Comcast is implementing I have to laugh. Rogers is my ISP and they have implemented a 60 GB after which they charge overage fees. I have never used 60GB a month but when my wife was watching the Olympics streaming on the internet in August I was worried. Turns out I had nothing to fear, my usage for August was only 30GB, That's without any downloading anything through bit torrent. Why doesn't Rogers have a clue? When you mention Rogers in a group of people be prepared for the horror stories. They have to realize they should sell connectivity not bandwidth. The internet is the crack cocoaine of the 21st century and if they want to succeed they need to feed the habit. That means providing their customers connectivity anywhere they can for a flat fee.
I was at Ivor Wynne stadium in Hamilton yesterday and Cogeco has free wifi there for their customers. What does Rogers have for their customers at the Rogers Centre in Toronto? Nada. They seem to be truly surprised when there was the hug e backlash when they introduced the iPhone with an insanely low data cap. Even if the majority of customers would never use that amount of data people don't want to have to worry about it. Now that the 6GB special data package for the iPhone is done, I expect to see the number of new iPhone customers drop. If everytime you pull the phone out of your pocket you are worried how much it's going to cost you why would you bother buying one?
If someone came today and offered me connectivity with a guaranteed minimum rate for $100 a month with half decent roaming wifi connectivity I'd drop Rogers internet and cable in a second, ditch the phone and go VOIP. Bell keeps trying to sell me DSL for a lower price with crazy low bandwidth and transfer levels. Forget it guys, you don't have a clue either. If Rogers want to bury Bell then they need to differentiate their offering from Sympatico not match them GB for GB in their transfer cap level. Rogers needs to look back in history to all those dial up ISP who were left on the technological trash heap and learn a lesson before they get whacked.
Innovate or die boys and girls at Rogers otherwise in 10 years you'll be wondering why the world has passed you by. Sell connectivity not transfer volume. Do you want to be the empty downtown small businesses or the Walmart Superstore?
Now I'm off to watch some streaming video on the web and download a movie from iTunes, if I haven't used too much transfer volume this month.
08/28/08
When I found out I was going to be in San Jose I decided to see if my Twitter friend shoppingnotes wanted to tweetup for lunch. I went to her profile and was shocked to see that her account had been suspended and is being investigated for "strange activity". WTF? ShoppingNotes posted links to her blog articles on Twitter. On her blog she writes about deals, primarily with women in mind. Stella McCartney dresses on EBay, skin care products, designer shoes at half price. In short the sort of things women on a budget who want be fashionable are interested in. Evidently other Twitter users find this valuable as she has more followers than people who are following her.
She tells me Twitter has labelled her as antisocial. Now I know some antisocial people on Twitter and Shoppingnotes is not one of them. If people found her antisocial and her tweets of no value then they wouldn't follow her. I don't need Twitter to tell me who is antisocial, they should concentrate on the extremely offensive or extremely rude people like the person who was attacking Ariel Waldman and let the community decide whether someone is antisocial or irrelevant and not follow them. Come on Twitter, give me back my Shoppingnotes! What can you do to help? If you are a Twitter user go to http://twitter.com/help and tell them you don't need them to tell you who is antisocial, but be nice about it. Pissing them off does no good. (update August 28th) Evidently Twitter reconsidered as ShoppingNotes Twitter account is not suspended anymore, Thanks Twitter!
In the interest of journalistic integrity I must disclose that we did manage to meet for lunch while I was in San Jose, she paid, over my great protests, but that has not influenced me in the least.
08/27/08
By the end of day two I thought my head was going to explode it was so filled with visual computing goodness.
We got to wtiness a BSOD during the second day keynote, I feel sorry for the CEO who got Microsofted, but that's what happens when you rely on Windows.
A few minor points, I spoke to on Japanese researcher who had come for the CUDA training sessions and was disappointed it wasn't more hands on. Education techniques have come a long way from static lectures, maybe Nvidia should talk to a teacher. Training requires an expert, Nvidia should hire a teacher. Another attendee was a bit pissed when he found out that Nvidia was giving away tickets to the Show he had paid $50 to see. It was announced in one of the sessions I attended that Nvidia was going to make all the conference slide packages available on their website. No time frame was announced but at least they are trying. This is their first time running a conference so I'll cut them some slack but I expect better next year. Another thing they might want to try and build in is more networking opportunities, maybe a meet and greet with the conference speakers and the conference attendee's. Nvison was a pretty ambitious project with so many simultaneous tracks, as a conference attendee I was constantly weighing off which of two conflicting sessions to attend. Videoing the sessions and making them available on the Nvidia website would be a great value adder for conference attendees too.
I had another brush with celebrity when I got the chance to have my picture taken with the Mythbusters just before I had to leave for the airport. I expect my kids to be much more impressed by that than the picture with Tricia Helfer. I also got a chance to attend the live Diggnation taping. I never got around to watching Diggnation but I will now. Those guys are funny, but beware they are NSFW.
I'm writing this on my EEEPC using the free wifi at the San Jose airport, now I shound go get security screened. That's it for now.
I hope you appreciate this, the lan party room had spotty wireless coverage so it took me a while to get this recorded.
08/26/08
A few items I forgot to mention in my last post from Day 1.
What is with people taking pictures in a darkened sessions of the screens using their flashes? Come one people, Nvidia is sure to release the presentations on their website. Nvidia could have helped to reduce this detestable practice by announcing that the conference proceedings would be available to registered attendees.
The large group of friendly people handing out the fliers on Nvidia's chipset problems don't look like concerned laptop users. Who is funding them, perhaps AMD or some class action lawyer? They are asking for full disclosure on the Nvidia chips affected. I want full disclosure on who is paying for the fliers and the people handing them out. (update) A guy who sounded like he knew told me they were being funded by a union who is in a dispute with Nvidia. Sorry for slagging you AMD.
That's two complaints now a compliment, whover booked Buzz Adrin to speak deserves a big pat on the back. He spoke before the 3D movie presentation ans was interesting, insightful and inspiring.
