I have been thinking about the issue of bandwidth caps recently, well thinking more about it since my provider Comcast placed an unofficial 250GB/month cap (as well as others, in all fairness Comcast is one of the less draconian caps out there.)

This thinking was spurred first by Benoit Felten’s post entitled “Is the ‘Bandwidth Hog’ a Myth?” (by way of ArsTechnica) where he challenges the ISPs:

“Here’s a challenge for them: in the next few days, I will specify on this blog a standard dataset that would enable me to do an in-depth data analysis into network usage by individual users. Any telco willing to actually understand what’s happening there and to answer the question on the existence of hogs once and for all can extract that data and send it over to me, I will analyse it for free, on my spare time. All I ask is that they let me publish the results of said research (even though their names need not be mentioned if they don’t wish it to be). Of course, if I find myself to be wrong and if indeed I manage to identify users that systematically degrade the experience for other users, I will say so publicly. If, as I suspect, there are no such users, I will also say so publicly. The data will back either of these assertions.”

And second by a discussion around this that was had on TWIT 224 this week.

Ok, so I was wondering how I would go about defining a ‘Bandwidth Hog’. Setting a cap is a little arbitrary. For example, I get about 3MB/s download speed here. So at one end of the spectrum downloading 250GB at full speed would take me just shy of 24 hours during which the ‘other users’ would probably be seriously impacted. On the other end of the spectrum, I could throttle the download to about 95KB/s which would take me about 30 days during which I doubt very much any of the ‘other users’ would be impacted.

I admit that both ends of the spectrum are contrived but they illustrate that caps are complicated to implement.

Personally I have no problems with cap if (a) the service is tiered and (b) usage stats are easily accessible.

Very interesting piece on the current mudsling fest between the old guard and the new whippersnappers over on Ars (“Tech tapeworms”: Bloggers denounce “parasite” label at FTC). Worth the read I think.

One comment in particular caught my eye:

Much of the bellyaching by content producers is directed at Google, most notably at Google News. Senior Business Product Manager for News, Josh Cohen, noted that News now comes in 30 different language editions and sends “a billion clicks a month to publishers worldwide.”

The Wall Street Journal’s managing editor, Robert Thomson, sees this traffic a different way: as something that mainly benefits Google. Sure, Google may send search traffic to his sites, but the company gets far more value from the practice than the WSJ does; many readers don’t need to click through to find out more about articles, but are instead satisfied with headlines, a brief excerpt, and perhaps a picture.

The question that content producers should be asking (which is not asked in the piece) is what their traffic would be like if Google was not sending them traffic. I would bet that they would not make up the “billion clicks a month” if Google were to drop them. It would be an interesting experiment to for them to conduct though.

Updated later that same day – turns out that according to Hitwise the Wall Street Journal gets 25% of its traffic from Google and Google News (obtained via SearchEngineWatch.com).

So a friend and I have been batting a few emails back and forth about ChromeOS after I downloaded a disc image and played around with it for about 30 minutes. I also listened to some of Paul Thurrott’s thoughts on it on Windows Weekly and went back to play with it a little more. Generally I found it to be pretty good if a little slow, but this was running on a virtual machine and it is a year away from release.

So here are some chromulated thoughts about why this is a big deal:

1. This will open up new competition around the OS at the netbook end of the market. The first netbooks shipped with various versions of linux but Microsoft sensed that this was an issue and made sure that Windows XP and then Windows 7 became the dominant OS on those machines by bringing down licensing costs for netbook vendors. ChromeOS will re-open that conversation because it is free and it has Google’s backing. One possible outcome is that Windows will become free on netbooks.
2. This is one of those rare moments when Microsoft is up against a competitor (Google) that is as motivated and has deep pockets as it does. Motivation and money will enable Google to keep developing and pushing ChromeOS past the point where other might give up. Microsoft is not a stranger to this strategy having been well served by it in the past where products did not hit their stride until the third or fourth version.
3. Google is being very careful to present ChromeOS as something a user might run on a secondary computer, thereby avoiding directly challenging Microsoft (we all know what happened to the last company who did that!)
4. Apple will probably not be affected by this since it is not (yet) present at that end of the market. An Apple notebook is not something people looking to buy a netbook will consider.

I have been snowed under with work lately and was only able to spend a little time playing with Google’s new Chrome OS.

I did find a very good review by Paul Thurrott though, well worth reading.

I recently found out that you can make custom GelaSkins, the process is a little tedious but I got my three customs GelaSkins last week and they look great. The colors are well reproduced, crisp and clean. Be sure to upload high resolution pictures because a laptop lid is quite large, and bear in mind that you will probably have to crop the top and bottom of the image because of differences in the the aspect ratios between the it and the laptop lid.

I have been spending a lot of time this weekend looking at VC portfolios on their website for a client. My sense is that VCs would want these portfolios to be well structured and easy to navigate, after all the idea is to have a favorable exit. Turns out that there is a lot of variability in the way these portfolios are presented making navigation sometimes very difficult.

So here are some suggestions on how to improve this:

• Show the company logo, web site and a short description together in a simple list. Do not force the user to click a link to see the company description.
• If there are lots of companies be sure to give a way to narrow the list down quickly either through a faceted search or via tagging, so Networking, Social, Music, etc… And there is no harm in having multiple tags for each company.
• Separate prior investments from current investments, or provide a way to do so easily.
• Make sure the company descriptions are accurate and skip the marketing/hype adjectives, if I don’t see descriptions such as “Delivers revolutionary software solutions” or “Discover breakthrough improvement opportunities”, it will be too soon. This tells me nothing about what the company does and my time is limited.

The idea behind listing a portfolio is to communicate, the less I have to futz with the website the better the communication.

Plenty has been written about the Danger data loss over the weekend (TechCrunch). For me the most interesting commentary came from John C. Dvorak, he got some things right but he also got some things wrong:

Over the past week, users of the T-Mobile Sidekick platform found that all their contacts and other important information was permanently lost, because of server mishaps. If Microsoft had wanted to throw a monkey wrench into cloud computing, it could not have done a better job.

Huh, don’t think so, this was a data loss screw-up, nothing to do with the cloud. If what we are reading is to be believed, a SAN upgrade went wrong and the data was lost, with no backup.

Insert Ellen Feiss ad here…

Seriously though backups are essential because things will go wrong. Note that I use ‘will’ and not ‘may’, and these may or may not be under our control.

The other things I used to tell clients is to do a fire drill on a regular basis, by that I mean taking the backups and making sure they can be restored properly and completely. I had one client who discovered that all their backups were useless when they checked.

I came across Light Peak this morning on Engadget and MacRumors.

To me the really interesting thing is that this has the potential to replace all the connections on the computer, connections to external (and internal) drives, mouse, displays, whatever with a single cable and connector type, which would be really neat. No reason why you should not be able to replace network connections either.

I think this has real potential, can’t wait to see how this develops.

Yesterday I was asked if I could recover deleted photos from a memory card, some searching turned up Lexar Image Rescue 3 which works on both Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista.

I also came across this TidBITS review titled “Recover Erased Photos from a Memory Card“.

A few weeks ago I was on a plane playing some games on my iPhone and when we landed the person next to me asked how I liked my iPhone. I said that I loved it but that I did not like AT&T. He asked why and I trotted out the usual things, lack of MMS, lack of tethering, poor 3G speeds, dropped calls, poor coverage, calls and voice mail coming in late (up to 12 hours late for me). He sniffed and told me that he worked for AT&T and ask if I had any idea how much they were subsidizing the iPhone. I guessed a number which I suspect was not far off the truth. I got the impression that he felt AT&T was doing us iPhone owners a favor with that and that criticism was not warranted. The conversation pretty much died there because it was time to get off the plane.

But there were a few other things that I should have said. I bought the original iPhone for $600 so I was not that subsidized, and I am now out of contract which means that my monthly payment includes whatever payback on the subsidy as a free money for AT&T. AT&T is in business to make money, if did not feel it could not make money from the iPhone then it should not carry it, I am sure other carriers would love to get their hands on the iPhone. AT&T had its best sales day ever when the iPhone 3GS was launched and will get payments for those phones for the duration of the contract.