web & software

Internet Service in Hudson and the Surrounding Area – more about Mid-Hudson Cable

May 24, 2011
Internet Service in Hudson and the Surrounding Area – more about Mid-Hudson Cable

This offer from Mid-Hudson Cable showed up today in a bank statement from The Bank of Greene County. Mid-Hudson always gets my attention but almost never for good reasons. This ad is a continuation of their finger in your eye approach to customers. Note that it offers “DOUBLE” and “TRIPLE” your speed for Internet service without ever mentioning what it is that they are doubling or tripling. This is simply a further progression in making it hard to find out what exactly you are paying for or even what it is they are promising to provide. If you pop over to their website you can find this (my screen grab from today with added red arrow), that says that the regular residential service package provides “5 meg”. From other advertising I know that this is likely to mean 5 MegaBits/second (MB/sec) a meaningful identifier. Here is the rub. In almost two years of experience with Mid-Hudson I...

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Bloated Files at Conde Nast

May 15, 2011

Once the New Yorker came to it’s senses about offering subscribers access to the iPad digital version as part of their print subscription I downloaded the New Yorker app. After suffering through the klutzy registration process I settled in to see what it looked like to read one of my favorite magazines on an iPad. When I clicked on the download button I saw that the file was 117 MB. This is big enough for a short movie! What are they doing at Conde Nast? Are they sending me the PDF that they send to the printers? Even on my relatively fast cable Internet connection downloading a file this size is several minutes. Today, I downloaded the Wired Magazine app only to discover that the free issue was 320 MB! Unless I am grievously in error it is hard to understand how apps dedicated to delivering magazines to iPads...

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Mid-Hudson Cable and Internet Service in Hudson

May 9, 2011

Last week a story appeared in the Register Star, “Mid-Hudson turns down $3.5M in stimulus money“. This followed by two days Sam Pratt, always at the ready with in depth commentary, who wrote about the continuing failures of Mid-Hudson and the troubled life of a wannabe rural internet user in his blog posting, “MH Cable: Not tapping that grant after all“. Mid-Hudson Cable always gets a rise here. I posted the following comment at Sam’s article: I sympathize with the troubles of those just beyond the reach of high speed Internet. Clearly bringing high speed access to everyone in the county is an important issue. However, the troubles of Mid-Hudson as an Internet provider go beyond their sluggishness at extending service. I live right on Warren St, in the middle of MH’s most densely populated area, and their service level has been poor. They have never lived up to their...

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A Suite of Plugins to Enhance Your Web Reading Pleasures

November 12, 2010
A Suite of Plugins to Enhance Your Web Reading Pleasures

The other day I posted information about Readability, a great bookmarklet that strips away unwanted web garbage and presents text is a very reader friendly style. Since then I have come on two more web services that aid those interested in finding and reading some of the more interesting stuff on the web. The first, Instapaper,  adds to the ease of bookmarking interesting web material for later review. The second, LONGREADS, is a growing database of pieces on the web that are longer than the sound bite format that now dominates the spare real estate of web screens and the even sparer attention spans that seem to predominate these days. I have now put these three together on my web browsers and on my iPod Touch. These are my suite of web reading tools. Instapaper provides you with a tool to bookmark interesting web material that you would like to review later....

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Making the Web More Readable – the Readability Project at ARC90

November 5, 2010
Making the Web More Readable – the Readability Project at ARC90

I stumbled on this wonderful tool and want to share it. One of the frustrations of the Web is the enormous clutter of many web pages. This seems especially tru of the magazine and newspaper style sites which feel compelled to have blizzards of sidebars, advertisements, and all sorts of other junk. Worst of all are the sites where there are moving Flash animations constantly distratcing your eye from the content you might be trying to read. Along comes this great bookmarklet. Readability from ARC90. Rather than use a lot of words, here are a before and after screen grab. You can guess which is which.

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Internet Service, the New York Times and Choice in the World of Mono-Duo-poly Capitalism

April 8, 2010

What Planet is the Times Orbiting? Today’s New York Times editorial page included a piece titled “How Fast Is Your Broadband?“. It provides a reasonable review of the sad performance of the Internet service providers in the US. It is widely known that Internet service providers like Comcast, Time-Warner and locally Mid-Hudson Cable chronically provide significantly less than their advertising claims. Here in Hudson, NY Mid-Hudson claims “blazing speeds” of 5 MB/sec (download). Repeated measurements, now numbering over 280 in the last six months prove that they provide speeds 30% less than this mark. Service technicians from M-H have acknowledged that this is the typical service they provide. Worse is that the latency frequently reaches 2 seconds instead of being under the 100 milliseconds that is commonly accepted as OK latency on the Internet.. This means that after your click your mouse on a link in a browser, you...

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