Author: luken7

Well, well, well. Time Warner Cable at it again. Now they’ve deployed packet shaping, a form of QoS for ALL TWC customers. They just started this a month ago, I wonder if this has anything to do with the week long outages here in the Raleigh-Durham area. I just have one question. How can they have a premium level of service of $50 for up to 8Mb/s, but implement QoS that restricts certain types of data all the way down to 1.5Mb/s? Simple, they’re the only game in town so you have no choice. Thank you FCC for doing all of ….. noting.

[TWC] TW Officially Announces Packet Shaping for All RR Users – dslreports.com From Time Warner’s Help Desk TIME WARNER ANNOUNCES INTRODUCTION OF PACKET SHAPING TECHNOLOGY NATIONWIDE June 6, 2007 — Time Warner today implemented a network management tool to improve the operation of the network for all subscribers. As a result, a small minority of users may experience slower speeds during peak hours when using certain applications that consume lots of bandwidth. You can address this situation by reducing your use of bandwidth-intensive applications during peak hours. "Peak hours" are generally in the evenings. "Packet shaping" technology has been implemented for newsgroup applications, regardless of the provider, and all peer-to-peer networks and certain other high bandwidth applications not necessarily limited to audio, video, and voice over IP telephony. Road Runner reserves the right to implement network management tools for other applications in the future. Customers are reminded of the terms of our Acceptable Use Policy at »help.rr.com/aup: * The Road Runner service may not be used to engage in any conduct that interferes with Road Runner’s ability to provide service to others, including the use of excessive bandwidth. * The Road Runner service may not be used to breach or attempt to breach the security, the computer, the software or the data of any person or entity, including Road Runner, to circumvent the user authentication features or security of any host, network or account, to use or distribute tools designed to compromise security, or to interfere with another’s use of the Road Runner service through the posting or transmitting of a virus or other harmful item or to deliberately overload or flood that entity’s system. Customers are further advised that efforts designed to circumvent our network management tools may be in violation of our Acceptable Use Policy and may result in account suspension without warning.

Road Runner Help & Member Services Red 8/3/2007 4:32:04 PM 8/3/2007 6:32:04 PM CARY, NC Road Runner is currently experiencing issues with the cable network. Subscribers in the affected area(s) may experience a loss of connectivity, usually indicated by flashing modem lights and/or a loss of video service. Our engineers are working quickly to resolve this issue. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

I cannot believe this nonsense. Five days later and TWC is still having network issues. This is absurd. Five days. And at the end of the month, we’ll get a bill which is expected to be paid in full, regardless of whether we actually have functioning service or not. I wonder how the business customers are doing, if they’ll get credited. Residential users? Probably not since TWC knows we really don’t have a choice when it comes to medium speed internet service.

San Jose Mercury News – Microsoft to offer free, ad-supported version of Works

Yup, they just ain’t getting it….I don’t want more bloated software with ads flashing all over the place. That’s one of the reasons I’m moving away from Quicken, and I paid for that. I have no intentions of looking at ads in an app whether it’s free or not. Second, I want less stuff on my machine anyway, so call me when it’s web based.

SEATTLE – Microsoft Corp. will test a free, advertising-supported version of Works, an already inexpensive package of word processing, spreadsheet and other programs, but would not say whether it is exploring a similar Web-based suite.
The company said Wednesday that a limited number of computer makers will pre-install Microsoft Works 9 SE on new PCs in certain markets, and that the test of the business model will last about a year.
Microsoft’s announcement comes a week after its top executives sketched out a strategy for supplementing traditional packaged software revenue with subscriptions and Web-based services, during a day of meetings with financial analysts at its Redmond, Wash., headquarters.
Industry watchers have been parsing those speeches for signs the company will develop an online version of the more expensive Office suite to compete with free offerings from Google Inc., but the company has so far been silent on the issue.

I’ve decided to stop waiting. besides, I only now use office for Work, and I can deal with the Office2007 on Parallels. Besides, MS isn’t making a version of Visio or OneNote, so the suite as a whole is worthless to me as far as integration and workflow. And you can also bet that the Mac version will be crippled or chaotic like Office2004 is vs. it’s Windows counterpart.

SEATTLE – Microsoft Corp. will delay the release of Office 2008 for Apple Inc.’s Macintosh computers until the middle of January 2008, in order to fix lingering bugs in the software.
The software maker previously said the new suite, which is to include Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the Entourage e-mail program, would go on sale sometime in the second half of 2007.
“It really is just a quality issue across the board,” Craig Eisler, general manager of Microsoft’s Macintosh business unit, said in an interview Wednesday.

March 23, 1933 – Reichstag passes Enabling Act On March 23, 1933, the newly elected members of the German Parliament (the Reichstag) met in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin to consider passing Hitler’s Enabling Act. It was officially called the ‘Law for Removing the Distress of the People and the Reich.’ If passed, it would effectively mean the end of democracy in Germany and establish the legal dictatorship of Adolf Hitler. It passed

Draw your own conclusion……but both were declared during a time of duress, where the nations were divided and its citizens uncertain….

So republicans are praying to the gods..oops, god, that Fred Thompson is their conservative extremist candidate that will ban gay marriage and abortion, hence solving all of America’s woes. Well not so fast, apparently, Mr. Thompson did some lobbying in the past for a pro-choice group. So this is one of two things. Either he’ll sacrifice his principles and belief for the sake of making money, or as he’s gotten older, had an ephifany like hte other candidates and became pro-life.

So how important is this book? How credible is this book? Well, The US Army War College, where colonels go to learn to become generals, has made this book mandatory reading for the upcoming semester. I think it shows the disconnect between the "feet on the street" and those whose are inside the beltline who have to adopt the administration’s story to keep their rank and positions.

‘Fiasco,’ by Thomas E. Ricks – The New York Times – New York Times he title of this devastating new book about the American war in Iraq says it all: “Fiasco.” That is the judgment that Thomas E. Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post, passes on the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq and its management of the war and the occupation. And he serves up his portrait of that war as a misguided exercise in hubris, incompetence and folly with a wealth of detail and evidence that is both staggeringly vivid and persuasive.

I find this ironic that their earning were released today in the midst of a network outage that has caused broadband customers in the Raleigh-Durham area to have degraded service for the hast 48 hours. Top speed has been around 1.2Mb/s for the last couple of days, while their website only says that technicians are working on it and that they are sorry. Are they sorry enough to provide a refund for the last couple of days? At $50 per month for their "extreme" speed of up to 7Mb/s, you would think that there would be a better level of service than this. But this is the result of competitive, or lack of to be more precise. My highspeed broadband options are Time Warner Cable, and….Time Warner Cable….

So how did TWC accomplish these earnings? Simple. Lack of competition allowing confiscatory rates, cust costs on customer service and quality of service. Whan can a customer do? Leave? And go where? True competition would be where I can go online and select from a host of cable and phone companies, and select a-la-cart,  all my services.  Until then, customers will continue to receive this type of service and support.
 
Cable Boosts Time Warner – Forbes.com Time Warner beat the Street Wednesday, helped by subscriber gains from its cable division. The mega-multimedia company, with holdings in cable, publishing, internet, and movies, said second quarter earnings rose 5.9% to $1.07 billion, or 28 cents a share, from $1.01 billion, or 24 cents a share. Similarly, revenues ticked up 6.0% to $11.0 billion. On a continuing operations basis, the company made 25 cents a share–leaving Time Warner (nyse: TWX – news – people ) comfortably above analysts’ expectation of 21 cents a share but below the revenue estimate of $11.1 billion.

An alternative title should be, "Global Warming creates threats of war". Now that the ice is melting up north, there are new resources to exploit. It’s easier to get to oil and gas. So now what was once unreachable, is now a mad rush to claim territory that is in international waters. Russia is leading the way in claims, and now exploration. This will only escalate as more natural resources are found under the former ice.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Russian subs near Arctic target Submarines accompanying a Russian naval mission aimed at boosting Moscow’s claim to Arctic territory are shortly expected to dive below the North Pole. The two Mir submarines plan to dive to the ocean floor, 4,200m (14,000ft) below the pole, to carry out tests and plant a capsule with a Russian flag. A Russian official said the "risky and heroic" mission was comparable to "putting a flag on the Moon". Melting polar ice has led to competing claims over access to Arctic resources. Russia’s claim to a vast swathe of territory in the Arctic, thought to contain oil, gas and mineral reserves, has been challenged by other powers, including the US.

This is why stronger oversight by the SEC is warranted. Probably a division that does unbiased analysis, where executives have to participate with the analyst. Just like quarterly filings, then do a Q&A with an independent, government analyst. Draconian? No, I don’t think so.

San Jose Mercury News – New study shows analysts getting favors WASHINGTON—Conflicts of interest may still be rampant on Wall Street, with a new study showing that nearly two-thirds of investment-firm analysts received favors from executives of companies they cover and suggesting that the companies get favorable ratings in return. The academic study published Friday outlines a culture of blatant back-scratching on Wall Street as company executives bestow professional and personal favors on analysts—putting them in touch with top executives of other companies, recommending them for a job—and their companies receive positive ratings and evade stock downgrades. At the same time, executives punish analysts for negative reports by refusing to answer their phone calls or their questions. For their study, management professor James Westphal of the University of Michigan and accounting professor Michael Clement at the University of Texas sent 4,500 questionnaires to financial analysts between 2001 and 2003 and follow-up surveys to hundreds of executives at the large and mid-size public companies covered by the analysts. The 51-page study, to be presented at the Academy of Management’s annual meeting next month, found that the more a company’s earnings slipped below analysts’ consensus forecasts, the more favors the company’s executives showered on the analysts covering it—especially at big investment firms.