Time Warner Caps Your Bandwidth

Well, sort of.

In Beaumont, Tx. only, for now:

40GB For $55 per month: Time Warner Bandwidth Caps Arrive

By Ryan Paul | Published: June 03, 2008 - 09:18AM CT

Time Warner Cable will launch a trial program on Thursday which will impose monthly Internet consumption caps on new subscribers in Beaumont, Texas. Following a two-month grace period, cable users will pay $1 for each additional gigabyte consumed beyond the cap.

They claim 5% of the users are 'using up' 50% of the available bandwidth.

First, I'd ask: and how much capacity is actually still unused? If it's less than 100%, isn't that just efficient use of resources by your users? As long as it' not causing overcapacity issues (and they have never said that it is), why is this an issue?

Second, they imply that only the bad guys (those wretched Bittorrent users stealing music and movies) are the ones at fault.

Not so. The article goes on to say:

Time Warner's bandwidth caps might seem like acceptable limitations at first glance, but they look a lot less attractive when one considers the growing number of important services we use that soak up lots of bandwidth. The Internet is increasingly being used as a vector for distributing software and digital video content and also facilitates multiplayer gaming, video conferencing, real-time collaboration, interactive remote desktop access, file backups, and many other bandwidth intensive activities.

The average user using Pandora to listen to streaming music for a few hours a day while working at home, then watching Hulu.com TV shows for a few hours after dinner then playing WoW or SoCom a few nights a week for a few hours can easily hit this limit.

Add in a spouse and 2 or 3 kids with their own computers, and it gets stupid expensive at $1 per GB past the 40 alloted pretty damned fast.

It never ceases to amaze me how bigco's can shoot themselves in the foot.

I'll bet the DSL providers out there (who have alot of POTS and Internet business taken from them in the last 10 years by CableCo's like Time Warner) are rubbing their hands with glee hoping all the Cable Guys get on this boat. This won't hurt the WiMax guy's proforma either.

Our CableCo, Comcast, hasn't jumped in yet, but I'm still calling Qwest about that 20MB pipe they're selling into homes now first thing tomorrow.

The Trouble with Venture Lawyers

Jason Mendleson over at Foundry Partners (he's the guy on the far right) has an excellent post up on his frustration with venture lawyers.

His analysis is better given that, before he became a VC, he was a lawyer.

His two primary points are cost and execution.

The first point on cost resonated strongly. He compared the average VC deal in 1998 to 2008 and concluded that the amount of the deal had gone up about 11%. The salary of a starting venture lawyer, during that same time, went up 114%.

We've felt the pain. Before we call, or even email, our lawyer, we ask ourselves long and hard: do we really need this? The minimum billing for a startup lawyer is 1/6th of an hour. 10 minutes. At the low end, that's $50.

Fifty bucks to send an email asking them to change something on our yearly Delaware filing paperwork. Minimum. More likely $150. They have to read the email (10 min charge- 1 minute of reading time), go do something else, come back and make the changes to the document (10 min charge... 2 minutes of work), go do something else, then come back and put the paperwork in an envelop (10 minutes charge- 1 minute of work).

$150.00

God help you if you want an actual contract reviewed, which comes to the second point re: execution.

We had a large contract with a big company that our then CEO 'ran by the lawyers'. $25,000.00 later, we had a passable contract. Chances are it would have been more if our CEO at the time hadn't left the company. To this day I'm not clear how we spent that much money on a simple contract with pretty clear terms to start with.

Even at $500 an hour, that's 50 hours. I'm wondering if that's really possible. Does it really take 50 billable hours of a partners time to 'review' a contract?

There's definitely an execution problem there. I have no idea if it was on our side or the law firms, but at $500 an hour, it's pretty easy to lay at least part of the blame on the law firms doorstep.

So, I couldn't agree more with Jason's take on venture lawyers.

I do know this: If I wasn't paying $500 an hour for the advice, I'd ask for alot more of it, and I'd count the lawyer as more of a partner in my business than a hideously expensive last resort 'check' to keep us from getting nuked when dealing with a big company or a litigious partner.

It's a little like health insurance costs: You skip getting the health insurance because it's just too damned expensive and pray you don't get sick.

Powers of Ten

I first saw this film in 1988 when I was working at Apple. It was supposed to knock out our assumptions about how to think of scale and how to 'think different' in addressing new problems.



I know this is old hat for many of you (it's been around forever), but it's still worth watching every year or two just to put things into perspective.

Interestingly, the version we saw didn't say anywhere that it was made for IBM. This is the first time I've seen that bit of info. I'm betting, back then, when IBM was still a real competitor to Apple, we'd have seen it was originally made for IBM and either ignored it, or it would have scared the hell out of us.

Sometimes it's just better not to know.

Selling Macintosh Trash

I'm almost (but not quite) speechless.

Someone is actually selling empty Macintosh computer boxes on Craiglist.

We have fourteen 24" iMac boxes in like new condition with styrofoam inserts available.



Best offer...

Only $100, or, as noted, 'best offer'. And styrofoam inserts 'available' (I wonder, is that extra?)

Can you imagine someone doing this with Dell boxes? I don't know what I find more outrageous, someone posting this or the thought that someone might actually buy these off of them.

No wonder Apple's so arrogant.

Fight Club in Silicon Valley

This is pretty amazing. A real fight club in Silicon Valley that pre-dated the movie.



Wonder if we'll get one of these in happening in politically correct Boulder.

My friend, Jon Henderson

We lost a friend last night. Jon Henderson passed away after a 9 year battle with cancer.

I met Jon through boulder free radio where he and his brother David played some fantastic hippie shit music and blues. I saw him many times over the last several years playing gigs, at Conners and, the last time, with he and David at the Boulder Theater a few weeks ago.

He was happy, and he never ever complained, although we sometimes gave him a hard time about how his hair grew back all curly after particularly onerous cancer treatments.

The last thing he did on this earth was visit Conners for a few beers with friends, something he dearly loved to do.

These last words from Jon:

"Oh well, I was lucky to have made it this far. And, I put up a pretty damn good fight. No crying....."

And then in his own writing:

"Enjoy Life"

You will be sorely missed Jon.

OLPRC One Laptop Per (Rich) Child

Hells Bells.

Saw this in today's The Inquirer (no, that not that one). Seems Negroponte, the visionary behind the One Laptop Per Child project is going Windows on the OLPC.

IN A SOMEWHAT shocking revelation, One Laptop Per Child has said that they might dump Linux from their XO laptops in favour of the Vole’s Windows XP. The seeming surrender to the evil corporate world comes just a day after the company’s president tendered his resignation.

OLPC, the educational project which purportedly aims to provide small, cheap laptops for kids has, since its inception, been running its home-made Sugar application, run on Linux, but on Tuesday, OLPC chairman and founder, Nicholas Negroponte, told AP that this was all about to change.

In an attack on pro open saucers, Negroponte slammed “the fundamentalism in some of the open-source community" and reckoned that by pushing the free, open-sauce software on OLPC XOs, the company was scaring people away. "One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist" he snarled.

I completely get his comment on open-source fundamentalism. The pure Linux crowd can get a little overbearing at times, but dumping it? I'm not sure that makes much sense.

Putting Windows XP on the OLPC means they'll have to at least double the 1GB of disk space to 2GB (minimum). Not much, granted, but it's going to up the price of the $100 (umm.. I mean.. $200) laptop even more. Keeping a Linux based machine allows them flexibility in their pricing they'll lose with an XP only OLPC.

I have nothing against XP. I have it running on all my computers (PC's and Mac's) along side Linux (yes, I do indeed triple boot all my personal machines). I like the option of using different OS's for different things and XP is, by all accounts, stable and ubiquitous. Good traits in an OS.

But dumping Linux because of perceived fundamentalism is a mistake. Maybe he'll shake out the Linux bigots from the OLPC project (their president and head of software just quit.. most likely because Nick wants to add XP to the mix), and that may be a good strategic move, but I sure as hell wouldn't dump Linux outright.

Even Dell gives the option of a Linux install on their PC's.

I'm sorry to say that the OLPC project may well be on it's last legs. They have raised the awareness of the need (and market) for low end PC's. Intel's Classroom PC, the ASUS notebook and others would most likely never have come about had it not been for the OLPC vision, but the original, as is often the case, is likely to lose in this battle.

Negroponte, an academic by training and nature, just doesn't understand the world of business (and as much as he'd like this to be solely a 'movement' and not a business.. it's sure as hell a business). Anything that threatens the markets of, be they existing or new greenfields, the existing PC and OS makers is going to be viewed by them as a business. Too bad Negroponte can't seem to adapt to that reality.

That said, I've got a used Linux based OLPC for sale.

Anyone interested? Anyone? Hello?