The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘bandwidth’

Something’s wrong with uTorrent, the de facto Windows BitTorrent client. The client’s implementation of uTP has drawn the ire of certain private BitTorrent sites, saying that it favors uTorrent clients above all others

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Is uTorrent ruining Western Civilization as we know it? (And how big is BitTorrent still? Inquiring minds wants to know.)

You’ll find that opinions vary with respect to Tekken 6 ’s netcode. I didn’t run into too many problems, but others certainly have . What are you going to do, right?

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Tekken 6 update should improve online playability

Worried that Uncle John might be hitting the Night Train a little too hard this holiday season? Well, now you can keep a closer eye on him, and avoid that lawsuit when he crashes into that parked cop car. Sure, breathalyzer technology has been around for years

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Use a fuel cell to see how drunk you are this holiday season

While there are certainly fewer interfaces around today on the average computer than there were a decade ago, there are still too many. It’s all just data, why should it matter what kind of pipe it goes down?

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Apple played critical role in creating Intel’s “Light Peak” interface

Man alive is The Pirate Bay finished! Business Week has an interview with Hans Pandeya , the CEO of Global Gaming Factory, the company that’s set to buy The Pirate Bay for nearly $8 million (provided it can come up with the money). What’s mainly discussed it what type of business plan does this man have in store for The Pirate Bay. It’s safe to say that The Pirate Bay will be all but dead in one year’s time.

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The Pirate Bay, well on its way to irrelevance at record speed

MMS and Tethering — two features that have been readily available on many smartphones for years — are finally making their way to the iPhone. But if you’re in the United States, you won’t be able to use them for at least a few months. Because AT&T, the network with an exclusive lock on the iPhone in the US, couldn’t get its shit together in time to support them for the iPhone 3.0 software launch.

At launch on June 17th, MMS is going to be supported by 29 carriers, and tethering will be supported by 22 of them. So when can we finally expect these stateside? MMS is apparently coming “later this summer”. And tethering? A much more nebulous (and ominous) “later”.

This is ridiculous, plain and simple. AT&T has almost certainly known about Apple’s plans for many months if not years, and was probably involved in determining when these features would be launching in the first place.

AT&T has made it clear many times that it simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to support the millions of new iPhone users that are using their “unlimited” data plans far more than they would on other phones. It’s arbitrarily preventing data hungry applications from being deployed to the app store. It’s quickly becoming clear that AT&T is holding the iPhone back.

Unfortunately, AT&T still has the lock on the iPhone and you can be sure the network is doing everything it can to keep a firm grasp on its cash cow, like giving Apple a nice chunk of money for every iPhone sold.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Though you may not ever see them, there are apps in the App Store that sell for over $9.99. Mostly they’re for doctors or stupid gimmicks, but they exist. Now the first one relevant on a larger scale to consumers is about to become available with the SlingPlayer Mobile app launching tonight for $29.99 in the App Store.

How this app sells will be really interesting. While other consumer electronic companies have made apps, most have given them away for free like DirectTV and the Remote app from Apple. But SlingPlayer will be a bit different from those since it’s streaming content from a piece of hardware you own to your iPhone — so it’s basically an extension of that device to use on the road. Of course, there’s also a big caveat: It will only work over WiFi.

Talk circulated last month that Apple blocked the SlingPlayer app from the App Store because AT&T didn’t want it clogging up its bandwidth with streaming video. This is the same reason that it would block other bandwidth-intensive apps like a Hulu app, if that actually arrives. But what’s odd, as AppleInsider notes, is that SlingPlayer has an app for other phones like some BlackBerrys that lets it stream video over 3G — yes, on AT&T’s network. So it would appear that AT&T is showing bias against the iPhone, which has users that tend to use up more bandwidth.

Still, how the SlingPlayer app fairs could be an indicator of the types of apps we see with the release of the iPhone 3.0 software (and likely new hardware) this summer. We know that apps will now be able to take advantage of the iPhone connector port, so there should be some very interesting apps that come out of that — ones that could potentially be more expensive than the $9.99 app price wall that has seemed to exist in recent months.

And it’s in Apple’s interest for such a high-priced app to do well also. Remember, it takes a 30% cut of all sales, and seeing as it costs them no more to list a $29.99 app than a free one, that’d be a nice chunk of change for Apple. Of course, I still think the new in-app purchases also coming in 3.0 will be more important to the bottom line.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Google just closed out today’s Searchology event with an incredibly impressive application called SkyMap, made for Android phones. The application is launching today on Android Marketplace, and is definitely a must-have.

At first glance, the application seems like a basic interactive starmap. You can flick through space, looking at your favorite stars and including overlays of constellations. But the application also houses far more impressive functionality. By tapping into the phone’s compass and accelerometer, SkyMap can serve as a virtual viewfinder for space - just point the phone in any direction in the sky, and the application will tell you which stars you’re looking at.

If there’s a specific constellation you’re looking for you can search through the application’s database, and SkyMap will help you find it in the sky, using an intuitive arrow system to tell you which direction to turn. When you get close, a circle will a appear on the screen surrounding the stars that make up the constellation. It’s really a stargazer’s dream come true.

Perhaps even more exciting: this is just a taste of what’s to come from our mobile devices. Phones are quickly becoming far more than communication tools - they’re becoming tools that streamline and enhance our lives. And now they can tell what we’re looking at in the real world, serving up contextually relevant information in real time.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Google has just launched a new “search options” feature on its main search page. When you click on “Search options” you can filter your search by different types of results (videos, forums, and reviews), by time (recent, past 24 hours, past week, past year), as well as seeing related searches, a “wonder wheel” view, or a timeline view.

At Google’s Searchology event, which is going on right now, Marissa Mayer listed the following as the hardest unsolved problems in search:

- Finding the most recent information
- Expressing that you want just one type of result
- Assessing which results are best
- Knowing what you’re looking for
- Expressing your searches in keywords

Notice that real-time search is the No. 1 problem. (Twitter and a bunch of startups from OneRiot to Tweetmeme are also working on it, with the latter two launching their own real-time search efforts today). And it certainly is a problem for Google, even with the new recent results option. Try searching for any of teh top trending results on Twitter right now like Miss California (vs. Twitter search results) or Star Trek (vs. Twitter results), and you don’t even get any Twitter results on Google.

While real-time search is still a big problem, it is not the only problem. Some of the new options address the difficulty of searching back through time. The recent results get as real-time as Google can get, but you can also expand the timeframe. And you can look at an actual timeline of results, which looks for dates within results and then places them chronologically (this is sort of hit or miss—just because a date is mentioned in a text does not mean the entire result is about or from that period of time). Google now also lets you see related searches as an option. And the Wonder Wheel is more of a visual aid to see how different related topics are clustered together. When you click on any spoke of the wheel, it then causes that search term to be at the center. We’ve seen many of these techniques in the past, but Google is giving them a higher profile by putting them in its main search page..

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Tweetmeme, a service which tracks the most retweeted messages, has been growing fast and getting a lot of buzz as the best way to discover hot items on Twitter. So naturally, they want to get into the search game as well. But simple tweet search, others like Scoopler and Twitter itself have covered, so the decision was apparently made to get into the new buzzworthy Twitter search game: Content search.

Yes, the second company within the last hour has launched a Twitter link search engine. Tweetmeme’s launch follows shortly after OneRiot’s offering which launched this morning. And both follow news last week that Twitter itself is working on the same feature. As an outsider, it would appear that a few of these companies are tripping over themselves to do this real-time content search before Twitter gets into the game — or worse, Google (which is also having its own search event today). But both claim to have been working on this for a while.

So how does Tweetmeme search stack up? Well, as far as I can tell this morning, both OneRiot and Tweetmeme are having launch issues. Certain functionality doesn’t work on either, so it’s hard to do a proper test. But as best I can tell, the two are slightly different. Tweetmeme seems to be more interested in relevancy of the links being tweeted out (something which it has always been good at thanks to its retweet data), while OneRiot is more apt at content coming in real-time. Tweetmeme does have an “Age” sorting feature, but it doesn’t auto-update the way OneRiot’s does.

But Tweetmeme claims it indexes videos and images as well, while OneRiot offers the indexing of Digg links on top of Twitter links. Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead claims Tweetmeme is indexing over 15 million links right now, while OneRiot general manager Tobias Peggs tells me they’re indexing over 2 and a half billion links. If you look in the comments of our earlier story, you can see the two of them playfully sparring with one another over their respective offerings. I think we’ll let the two duke it out for a while and get their search offerings in order a bit more before we declare a winner here.

The only thing that is abundantly clear is real-time search of content using a social layer is hot as hell right now. Everyone appears to be trying to stake their claim and yell “FIRST!” I don’t care about “first,” give me “best.”

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0