Time Warner Cable Implements Packet Shaping

Time Warner Cable Implements Packet Shaping

That is, any service they don’t like will be purposely degraded.

I wonder if they will degrade encrypted traffic too, since they can’t see what’s inside? Or maybe the scary-sounding language at the end of the press release means they’ll simply terminate your account if you have a suspiciously high amount of encrypted traffic - either way, sucks to be you if you have a legitimate need for it.

Sad. I’ve used EarthLink Cable through Time Warner for a long time, and I’ve been very satisfied with their service thus far.

Twitterrific 2.2 beta, WWDC edition

Twitterrific 2.2 beta, WWDC edition

Heh, nice. It scans for other Twitterrific users on your LAN via Bonjour, and automatically displays them in the window. Only useful if you’re on a really big LAN… like there (presumably) will be at WWDC…

Comparing the Photo-Sharing Sites (David Pogue)

Comparing the Photo-Sharing Sites (David Pogue)

I don’t know why more people don’t use PicasaWeb (incorrectly referred to here as ‘Google Images’). Flickr’s interface drives me bonkers.

‘omg my mom joined facebook!!’ - New York Times

‘omg my mom joined facebook!!’ - New York Times

Heh heh heh. This is why:

1. Every little thing on Facebook has elaborate privacy controls that you can set
2. Don’t accept the friend requests of every single person you’ve said ‘hi’ to once in your life (via reddit)

Twitterrific 2.1 (final)

Twitterrific 2.1 (final)

If you weren’t using the beta, then upgrade and get Growl and stuff. If you were… still upgrade, I guess.

a softer world

a softer world

OpenOffice.org Mac OS X Aqua Developer Preview

OpenOffice.org Mac OS X Aqua Developer Preview

This is a very early public alpha version of OOo’s official effort to port their program to the Mac, without the need for ugly Unixy X11.

For the time being, of course, most Mac users will still want to stick with NeoOffice (the developers of which seem to be taking this in stride, despite having been inexplicably excommunicated from the official OOo efforts).

The end of Guest Week(s)

…which has been more like Guest Eternity. For both Scary Go Round and Sluggy Freelance, it has finally come to an end today. O joy!

iPhone ads

iPhone ads

Educational. (via Darkwing Freefall)

The real purpose of gNewSense

The real purpose of gNewSense

gNewSense is a derivative of Ubuntu Linux, which seeks to leave out absolutely everything that’s not Free Software. Now, Ubuntu already aims to use Free Software when possible, but when it comes down to it they’ll still offer a proprietary solution if it’s the only one available.

When gNewSense was announced, I joined much of the Linux crowd in shaking my head asking ‘why?’ - it may be nice philosophically, but it results in a lot of difficulties (read: things that don’t work), and hence is very much less useful, pragmatically speaking.

And lo, here is the answer to my question, which I only just stumbled upon:

[gNewSense is] like a reference implementation for Free Software. Standards often (alas, not often enough) ship with a reference implementation which focuses on correctness at the expense of everything else (including performance, scalability, and backward compatibility). You’re not actually supposed to use reference implementations in the real world; you’re supposed to test against them. gNewSense is the reference implementation of software freedom …

If you use Linux, knowing that your hardware works with it now is good; knowing that your hardware will always work with Linux is better. Again, this is from my purely pragmatic approach to software, as I try not to get caught up in the silly holy wars that abound.

It looks like gNewSense is going to be spun back into yet another ‘flavour’ (third paragraph) of Ubuntu, and supported by the latter community.