CyberNet News » General

Should We Prefer Metered Bandwidth Over “Unlimited”?

Pieter — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:47:18 +0000

We love unlimited. Everything is better when it’s not limited, right? Then what’s not to love about unlimited bandwidth? Actually it’s bad for us consumers. Here’s why.

ISPs currently give you unlimited internet access… as long as you don’t use it too much
Did you look into your contract when you signed up for your ISP? If you’re on an unlimited plan, in most cases you’ll find the term ‘fair use policy’ buried somewhere between five hundred paragraphs of Legalese. This term generally has two possible definitions.

There’s a hidden limit. If you want to know much you can use, beg our customer service representatives to tell you what it is.
We can cut off your connection or throttle it whenever we feel like it.

In my book, ‘unlimited’ doesn’t mean ‘limited in a secretive way’.

With metered bandwidth, you know what you’re gonna get
You know what you’ve paid for when you’re on a metered bandwidth plan. Consumers with metered plans have a legally binding agreement with their ISP where they have to let them send and receive a set amount of data through their pipes. This is more transparent than vague fair use policies that impose a hidden limit. With a little collaboration between ISPs and tools such as ISP Monitor (pictured above), the customer always knows what he’s up against.

There’s only so much traffic our pipes can handle anyway
The only reason why ISPs lie about the bandwidth limit of their plans, is marketing. You could compare the internet to a highway: you can only fit so much cars on a highway at the same time. Similarly, internet resources are limited too so it is only fair that we have to pay for what we use. Otherwise, your grandparents are overpaying for their internet connection because some kid is constantly torrenting movies.

In conclusion

ISPs need to be upfront about their limits and provide an easy way for their users to check their bandwidth usage. As long as these limits are fair compared to what you pay for it, I for one think we’re better off banning unlimited plans.

Thoughts? Rebuttals? Let us know what you think in the comments section.

DivShare 3.0 Sports a New Interface

JAlbum Launches Image Hosting Solutions

DivShare Disappoints – No Longer Unlimited

Time Warner: More Bandwidth = More Money

Remove “Accessory Connected” Screen from Jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch

Ryan — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:57:33 +0000

Last week I purchased a car interface kit that gives me the ability to hook my iPhone up to the audio system that I have installed in my car. The install went fairly smooth, but I was rather disappointed with the level of control I had over my iPhone using the audio controls on my car. I thought to myself “hey, no biggie… I’ll just control the audio through my iPhone.” Apple, however, didn’t agree with that idea.

When I went to pull up the iPod portion of my phone I received the pretty little icon that you see to the right. It told me that I had an “accessory connected,” and there was basically no way for me to control the audio using the native iPod app. If I used a third party app, such as something that provided streaming Internet radio, there were no issues. So I knew it was possible to control the audio using my iPhone, and then I started to see how many other people had the same complaint.

Apparently there were quite a few users that were just as upset by this, and that’s when I happily came across a Cydia package for my jailbroken iPhone. Just do a search for “NoAccessorySplash” on the ModMyi repository and you’ll be ready to roll. Once installed it will bypass this screen so that you can control your audio through the device connected to the dock port or on the iPhone or iPod Touch itself.

I had found other hacks out there that did something similar, but they require you to SSH into your device, modify a file using a hex editor, and pray that it will actually work. This, however, is a quick 10-second solution (assuming you’ve already jailbroken your device). I’m currently using it on the 3.1.2 firmware, and it works flawlessly. It’s little things like this that make me happy I’ve jailbroken my device.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox
Remove “Accessory Connected” Screen from Jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch

The Ultimate iPod Accessory: Blinkit iPod Safety Light

Use Your PSP as a Navigation Device… Coming Soon!

Backup Music from iPhone or iPod

Apple App Store Refund is Possible

Welcome to the CyberNet Redesign

Ryan — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 19:55:08 +0000

I told you earlier in the week that a redesign was coming today, and I wasn’t lying. Hopefully when you see it for the first time you recognize how much we were pushing for simplicity. We moved common navigation-bar items like “about us” into the footer since a majority of users will never need them, and at the same time we made subscribing to our site via RSS, Twitter, and email much more prominent in the header area.

My goal was to give you a design that flows easily with your eyes, and minimizes distractions as much as possible. This is a tough thing to balance because I need to make things convenient, but at the same time weigh what features I think people will use. And then I have to try and present those features in a way that won’t annoy the people who don’t want to use them.

–The Homepage–

Let’s start by looking at the homepage. Here I tried to think about what I’d want on the homepage if I was a reader. Previously we had about 7 articles on our homepage most of which could be read in their entirety without ever clicking a link. If you’re reading a bunch of articles all at once that works out great, but it can take awhile to load if we’ve included some large images in our posts.

To get over this obstacle I tried to find a good median. What I came up with was displaying the latest article in all its glory right there for you to read, and then all subsequent articles are shortened up in a way that lets your eyes quickly skim past them looking for topics that interest you. Plus you should see that the page loads significantly faster since your browser is downloading a thumbnail that’s pulled from the article instead of the full resolution images. To help put the significance of this into perspective: the new homepage that has 10 articles is about 55% lighter in size than our old homepage displaying 7 articles.

–Article Pages–

When reading articles you may notice that the content area is significantly larger than what it previously was. This gives us an opportunity to include bigger screenshots in our articles, and will hopefully mean we have to thumbnail photos a lot less.

The main thing that I want to highlight, however, is the “share” button located at the bottom of each article (assuming you have JavaScript enabled). In there is where you’ll find options for bookmarking an article, viewing tags, and seeing a few related articles. If you’re a registered user (and are logged in) this is also where you can turn comment tracking on/off or CyberMark an article. Here’s a brief overview of those features for those of you unfamiliar with them:

Comment Tracking – This will let you follow new comments on articles and even get email notifications when a new comment is posted. You can choose to follow new comments on all articles, only articles you comment on, or only articles you explicitly select.
CyberMarks – This is our own internal bookmarking system. It lets you save your favorite articles where you can go back and sort or search through them to find what you’re looking for.

Both of these features have been completely rewritten, and perform much better than they did before.

–Commenting–

Our comment system has received a rather significant overhaul. We decided to move to a threaded comment system, which means you can reply to comments that other users leave. There’s a downfall to a system like this that I’m very much aware of. Some commenters like to take advantage of threaded comments by always replying to the first comment on the page, which ensures that their comment will show up above many others. I hate that, which is why I made sure I have the ability to “de-thread” comments that are unrelated the parent comment.

Threaded comments also posed another issue for people tracking new comments. If you get notified that there’s a new comment on an article how are you supposed to know which one is new? Sure you can go through them all looking at the dates/times, but when comments are threaded this becomes very difficult. That’s why we now “flag” all new comments so that you’re able to find them in a heartbeat.

We also managed to rewrite our custom AJAX comment system to work with the threaded comments. It was a little trickier than I had anticipated, but I feel like it works pretty well. After leaving a comment you’ll also notice that the page scrolls to where your comment was just posted on the page.

And then there is comment editing. We have migrated to a specialized WordPress plugin for editing comments (with a few custom hacks I through in), and editing comments should be much more reliable for our registered users now.

Note: For avatars we dropped support for MyBlogLog. Now you’ll either need to use Gravatar , or registered users can head to the account settings to provide a URL for an avatar you want to use.

–Searching–

I knew I had to do something about our search system because even I got frustrated trying to find an article with our search system. So now our search engine will sort results by relevance making it a lot faster at hunting down what you’re looking for.

We also tried to put some intelligence behind displaying the search box on the page you’re viewing. For example, if you’re viewing our home page or an article you’ll see the search box tucked away into the pull-down menu at the top of the page. If, however, you’re going through our archives we assume you’re looking for something specific and will therefore expand the search box to aid in your hunt. And we know what a pain it can be at times to work with those tiny search boxes, which is why we super-sized ours.

–And More–

We’ve thrown a few new elements into the sidebar, including a better summary of unread comments and recent CyberMarks for users that are logged in. A little further down the sidebar you’ll also see some of our most popular articles (by traffic) in the last 7-days.
The account management pages are the same in terms of functionality, be I rewrote all of them to make them perform better
In the footer we still have a nice list of our active All-Stars. These are registered users that actively participate in commenting and send us tips.

–Conclusion–

So I hope you enjoy the new site! For the last month I’ve spent 40-50 hours a week working on the redesign (in addition to the 40-50 hours at my full-time job), which is why article posting slowed down quite a bit. I’ve got a lot of comments to catch up on, and I have a feeling you’ll be seeing some more great stuff roll out of our site in the coming weeks.

Drop us your thoughts on the new design in the comments below.

CyberNet Forum Gets an Update

Slashdot Announces CSS Redesign Winner

CyberNet Release Calendar is Back…in a New Form!

New Slashdot Design Active

CyberNet Redesign Coming This Sunday

Ryan — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:52:19 +0000

Sunday is the big day! Over the last month or so I’ve been spending every ounce of free time I could scrounge up working on a site redesign. After all, this one has served us for two wonderful years. This time around I took a lot of things into consideration based on the feedback I’ve heard about our current theme. The most common point of criticism is that our theme doesn’t have a “geek” feel to it. I’ve got good news… the new theme screams geekery.

That’s not all I wanted to do this time around. These days a lot of companies are placing a heavy focus on performance. Apple is doing it with their next operating system, and so is Microsoft. I’ve also seen a lot of websites getting tweaked so that they perform well. Computers continue to get more powerful and the Internet is getting faster, but there is an rapidly emerging market we need to take into consideration, and that is the mobile market. Apple showed us with the iPhone that a mobile device is capable of displaying full websites, but a lot of them are so media-heavy that this isn’t always feasible. The new CyberNet will even be fast to load on the devices that you carry in your pocket thanks to its light use of media. We’ve also rewritten all of the features our registered users can take advantage of, which includes new comment tracking and our homegrown bookmarking system called CyberMarks. Faster faster faster!

Performance was important during the design process, but that wasn’t what our primary focus was on. The more I read sites on the Internet the more I find myself amazed at how hard it’s getting to find the most important things on a page, which is the article content and the comments. And I’m not just pointing fingers at other sites because I’d classify our current site in that same category. When creating our new design I placed the content and comment area on the page first, and then worked around it. We wanted to make sure these things weren’t merely an afterthought where we’re left saying “um, let’s squeeze it in here.” Instead your eyes will naturally be drawn to all of the most important aspects on the page, which is the way it should be.

I’m sure some of you were hoping that we’d post a screenshot or something of that nature for you to grab a peak. Nope. All I’ll say is that the new design actually uses the same color scheme as our current design… the orange, red, and turquoise are all carried over in one way or another. To spice things up we’re also introducing some new colors. Don’t worry, the fact that we’re using a lot of the same colors won’t likely be apparent when you first see the site.

So stay tuned. Early Sunday morning (8-9AM Central Time) is when I’m hoping to roll it out. I’ll probably need about an hour to get everything upgraded and ready to go, but be sure to stop by. If you follow me on Twitter I’ll probably be posting during the rollout process.

Something New at CyberNet News!

CyberNet Forum Gets an Update

CyberNet News Is Having An iPod Nano Giveaway!

Slashdot Announces CSS Redesign Winner

Pixar Grants a Wish; Gets Well-Deserved Credit

Ryan — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:29:15 +0000

So last week there was a story about a girl, Colby Curtin, that touched the hearts of thousands of readers, and Pixar played an important roll in it all. She was dying of vascular cancer, and her last wish was to see the movie Up. The only problem was that the movie is only in theaters, and she was to ill to be transported. So a friend of the family made a call to Pixar, and it touched their hearts enough to fly an employee out with a DVD to the family’s home the next day (on June 10th). Just 7-hours after watching the movie Colby passed away.

Pixar didn’t want to comment on the story, and from what I’ve read Pixar even asked the mother not to talk to the media about it. They wouldn’t even release the name of the employee who had gone out to the family’s house. They weren’t doing it for the publicity, they were doing it because they cared. They cared so much that they wasted no time getting out there, and that made all the difference. Bravo Pixar. It’s not often that you hear of a big company striving to make a difference in someone’s life.

After 24-hours the source of the article reported that it had been read by over 400,000 readers on their site. Not to mention the thousands of other people that I’m sure read the story in forums, blogs, and countless other sites. It’s safe to say that this story has traveled around the world.

I had also read that this isn’t the first time Pixar has done something like this, and it’s never the media attention they’re after. I guess they are the only ones who know how many wishes they’ve made come true, and hopefully they’ll keep doing so.

Prevent Someone From Viewing Private MySpace Pictures

How Are The PS3’s And Wii’s Doing On eBay?

CyberNotes: Funny Things that Kids Say…

Details Of Apple’s Big Event Get Leaked

Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy!

Ashley — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:03:27 +0000

Do you ever stop for a moment to think about how amazing it is that technology has advanced as far as it has? I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that a cell phone was something that only few were able to take advantage of. And let’s not forget the size of the original cell phones! What about laptops? They’ve become more and more affordable and at the same time smaller and more portable, while increasing performance. These days, it would be hard to imagine life without a computer in the home, but also the Wi-Fi Internet that allows us to roam around and access the Internet just about anywhere.

In this day in age, we’ve got GPS systems that help us find our way, cell phones that are practically mini-computers, cameras that instantly capture important moments in our lives, computers that connect us with people around the world, advanced video game systems, and the list goes on and on.

When I stop to think about all of the advances in technology I have witnessed in my lifetime, I can’t help but laugh when I view the video below. Comedian Louis CK appears on the Conan O’Brien show and talks about how “Everything’s Amazing, and Nobody’s Happy.”

Funny stuff, isn’t it? The problem with all of these advances in technology is that we almost expect great stuff all the time and if we don’t get it, we’re disappointed and complain. Other times, we’re surrounded by amazing things, but we don’t stop to appreciate them (e.g., the concept of flying and airplanes).

The next time you sigh because you get a dropped call on your cell phone, or you’re frustrated because there’s another Gmail outage, or (fill in the blank here), stop, take a deep breath, and be thankful that such technology even exists!

Related Posts:

Happy Easter!

Happy Birthday Ryan!

Happy Turkey Day!

Happy Birthday Vista!

Microsoft’s Mac ‘Secret’ — It Is Pretty Amazing

CyberNet in PC Mag’s Top 100 Blogs

Ryan — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 11:41:24 +0000

PC Magazine once again put together a list at the end of last year that wraps up 100 of their favorite blogs, and I’m pleased to say that CyberNet made it this time around! I don’t think they are in any particular order, but we’re on the third page. There are a lot of great blogs that made the list, so Ashley and I are very humbled to have been included.

Be sure to checkout the entire list because I discovered several new sites that cover some great topics.

Google Alerts Can Now Search Blog Posts

CyberNet Technology News Is #6 On Technorati Favorites

eBay Is Getting Blogs, Search Tags, And Wikis

CyberNotes: Blogarithm – Another Way to Track Your Online Content

2008 CyberNet Awards Recap

Ryan — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 19:12:13 +0000

So here we sit at the start of the year. We just wrapped up the 2008 CyberNet Awards series that we had been doing for the last few days, and today we want to wish everyone a happy New Year!

For those of you who have missed out on some posts from the previous few days we’ve taken the liberty of assembling this recap. Here were the awards that were handed out:

Most Useful Forums
5th Place: Neowin, 4th Place: The Green Button, 3rd Place: [View]
Best Application Updates & Releases
5th Place: Songbird, 4th Place: Digsby, 3rd Place: [View]
Most Used Web Services
5th Place: Hulu, 4th Place: Google Reader, 3rd Place: [View]
Biggest Tech Stories of 2008
5th Place: Macworld with Jobs, 4th Place: T-Mobile G1, 3rd Place: [View]
Best Time-Saving iPhone Apps that are Free
5th Place: Google Mobile, 4th Place: Wikipanion, 3rd Place: [View]
Favorite New Gadgets
5th Place: Xbox 360, 4th Place: Kodak Digital Frame, 3rd Place: [View]

Here’s wishing a safe and happy New Year to all of the CyberNet readers!

Related Posts:

2007 CyberNet Awards Recap

Announcing the 2008 CyberNet Awards

Announcing the 2007 CyberNet Awards

CyberNet’s Year in Review: November-December

2008 CyberNet Awards: Best Time-Saving iPhone Apps that are Free

2008 CyberNet Awards: Favorite New Gadgets

Ryan — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 22:02:02 +0000

For this installment of the 2008 CyberNet Awards we are taking a look at some of my Favorite New Gadgets that I’ve purchased throughout the year. I think most of the ones on my list weren’t released this year, but they are new to me and I wanted to share my thoughts on them.

Without further ado here are my favorite new gadgets…

–5th Place: Xbox 360–

I finally got an Xbox 360 this year, but the main reason is probably not one that you’d expect. Sure it’s nice being able to play Halo 3 and some other games online with my friends, but in the end I got an Xbox 360 for it’s Media Center Extender capabilities. Using the console I’m able to stream shows from my living room Vista Media Center PC into the bedroom.

–4th Place: Kodak W1020 Digital Frame–

I’ve been waiting forever for someone to release a digital picture frame that had both WiFi and Flickr support, and the Kodak W1020 is almost perfect in that respect. It can stream photos without needing a memory card from either a PC or your Flickr account using the built-in WiFi connection. The only improvement that I’d like to see is a way to have it randomize the photos that it wirelessly pulls in, and I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed that a feature like that will be added with a simple firmware update.

P.S. Firmware updates are done directly on the digital frame as long as it can connect to the Internet via WiFi. So you don’t even have to hook it up to a computer to update it! Pretty cool.

–3rd Place: MacBook Pro–

Ashley and I both decided that 2008 was the year for us to become acquainted with Mac computers, and so we went out and bought a pair of MacBook Pro’s in the Spring. They are far from being a budget computer, but there’s no doubt that they are made very well.

It took a few weeks for us to warm up to the new operating system after having been Windows users for nearly all of our lives. We are happy to have the opportunity to tinker with both Mac and Windows operating systems each day just so that we can stay on top of the latest technology being developed from both sides.

–2nd Place: Canon Rebel XSi–

I’ve only had this camera for about a week, but I’ve already fallen in love with it. Up until this point I’ve really only had point-and-shoot cameras that have been fairly straightforward to use. I finally decided that it was time for me to go one step further with the hopes of taking some amazing photos.

I ended up receiving the camera on Christmas Eve about an hour before our Christmas party was going to begin. I originally thought I was going to have more time to get familiar with some of the advanced functionality of the camera before diving right in, but that wasn’t the case. I didn’t want to risk getting blurry photos so for that night I stuck primarily with the automatic mode that is on the camera, and I have to admit that some of the photos it was able to capture were rather remarkable. I can’t wait to see what I’m able to do once I tinker with some of the manual settings, and get a few different lenses.

–1st Place: iPhone 3G–

I know I know… we’ve already included this on a few of our other lists. The reason I wanted to include the iPhone 3G on this list is different than what we’ve mentioned thus far.

Each weekday I commute to and from downtown Chicago for my job via the train. It’s about a 40 minute train ride each way, and I couldn’t imagine not having the iPhone during that time. I often find myself listening to podcasts while also playing a game, reading some news, chatting with friends, looking for interesting restaurants, and much more. With the thousands of games and apps available on the iPhone I’m able to keep myself occupied for hours and hours each week, and it’s hands-down the gadget I use the most. Heck, I’m looking at the screen on my iPhone more in a weeks time than I watch TV.

–-And Your Winners–-

Now it is time for you to chime in! Let us know in the comments what earned your “Favorite New Gadget” award.

Related Posts:

2008 CyberNet Awards Recap

Announcing the 2007 CyberNet Awards

Announcing the 2008 CyberNet Awards

2007 CyberNet Awards Recap

CyberNet’s Year in Review: November-December

2008 CyberNet Awards: Best Time-Saving iPhone Apps that are Free

Ryan — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 15:43:59 +0000

For this installment of the 2008 CyberNet Awards we are taking a look at some of my Best Time-Saving iPhone Apps that are free. I think most of the ones on my list weren’t released this year, but they are new to me and I wanted to share my thoughts on them.

Without further ado here’s what I believe are the best time-saving iPhone apps that don’t cost a dime…

Note: All links point directly to the app’s iTunes page.

–5th Place: Google Mobile–

The new version of the Google Mobile app is actually really nice since it includes voice recognition. What you can essentially do is start the app, hold it up to your ear, and speak what you want to search for. I’d say that the recognition is correct about 95% of the time, which isn’t bad.

One of the biggest reasons this is a timesaver for me is that I can also use this to do conversions. For example, I can say “18 miles in kilometers” and the application will perform the standard Google search. The only difference is that the first result shown is the answer to your conversion!

–4th Place: Wikipanion–

I use Wikipedia for a lot of stuff, and Wikipanion makes me a lot more efficient at searching Wikipedia for the content I need. I think I use this the most for looking up television show schedules to see when the next one comes on (e.g., next week, a few weeks from now), or to recap the plot of some past episodes. Thanks to Wikipanion I don’t have to bust out my computer to do this.

–3rd Place: Dial Zero–

This is one of those apps that I’ve used only about a dozen times, but it has saved me a lot of time. It’s basically an enormous directory of companies that people have assembled, and each listing specifies the steps necessary to talk to a human being. If a bunch of menus are involved you will be told exactly what numbers you need to press at each prompt so that you don’t have to waste time listening to them all.

–2nd Place: Mocha VNC Lite–

Mocha VNC makes it possible to control both my Mac and Windows computers from my iPhone. On my Vista machine I installed UltraVNC so that I could connect to it whenever needed, and with Mocha VNC Lite it has absolutely no troubles. I can zoom and pan around the remote desktop, click the mouse, and type anything I want.

The main reason someone would want to buy the full version of the app would be if they need the ability to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete in order to login. I don’t need to do that so this free version is right up my alley.

–1st Place: Yelp–

A lot of times Ashley and I will be out and about around the suburbs of Chicago, and we’ll be looking for a new restaurant to try. The old fashioned way of finding a good restaurant would be to start asking some people, but nowadays we can turn to the web.

Using my iPhone’s location lookup capabilities, I can have Yelp show me a list of restaurants that are close by, and for each one I can read reviews that people have left. We have found some incredible restaurants using this program, and you’d have to fight me pretty hard to take this app off my iPhone.

The latest release of the app adds support for viewing multiple pages of results, which was previously one of biggest complaints. Seeing 20 results just wasn’t enough most of the time, but now I can go from one page to another until I see something that catches my eye. Now the only feature I want them to add is the ability to write reviews from within the application, which would definitely get me writing a lot more reviews as these places are on my mind.

–-And Your Winners–-

Now it is time for you to chime in! Let us know in the comments what earned your “Best Time-Saving iPhone Apps” award.

Related Posts:

2008 CyberNet Awards Recap

2007 CyberNet Awards Recap

Announcing the 2008 CyberNet Awards

Announcing the 2007 CyberNet Awards

2008 CyberNet Awards: Best Application Updates & Releases