"After more than two weeks of dismemberment, disembowelment, and all-around good family fun, this year’s Worst Company In America tournament nears its finale, with only four contenders remaining with a chance at claiming the ultimate victory and clutching the Golden Poo," proclaims the Consumerist website. The site's Worst Company in America award has come down to Comcast, Ticketmaster, EA, and Bank of America. For the second year running, AT&T has caught a break by being matched up against the even-more-disliked EA, who could be propelled to victory this year on the back of their SimCity DRM launch debacle. AT&T's decision to hang up on DSL users and con several states into becoming broadband backwaters apparently isn't quite the same headline grabber as crappy game DRM and obnoxious in-game microtransactions.
Around a thousand people submitted this mock ad for "the first honest cable company" to our news queue, and if you haven't seen it yet it's rather amusing. There is some not-safe-for-work-or-kids-or-the-easily-offended language in it, so if you're averse to a little swearing please just keep on walking.
If you saw my article on DIY Linux routers, you might want some of those advanced features and extra stability it provides, but don’t want to jump to a full-blown dedicated Linux router, or maybe you just want something that uses a little less power. At any rate, replacing the stock firmware of your consumer router with a third party one will give you more control over your network through advanced settings while also providing more stability than the stock firmware.
"The Internet's completely over," complains Prince in his first interview in ten years to British newspaper The Daily Mirror. According to Prince, he's absolutely refusing to embrace broadband and digital distribution of his music (be it YouTube or iTunes), he's shut down his website, and declares all digital gadgets to be no good because "they just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you." Prince has waged a fairly comprehensive war on piracy as well, and insists he's only going to distribute his new album (20TEN) for free via Daily Mirror newspaper. Of course ignoring digital distribution won't accomplish anything, other than to enoucrage people to digitally distribute his content for him -- without him seeing a dime. But hey -- when you're Prince, apparently you don't have to care what's real.
Responding of course to Topeka's decision to rename itself Google temporarily in the hopes of being selected for Google's 1 Gbps fiber trials, Google has taken this April first opportunity to rename itself "Topeka." According to the Google website, the change "will have no bearing on which municipalities are chosen to participate in our experimental ultra-high-speed broadband project." No, they're not talking about Google TISP. Meanwhile, the UK's Telegraph informs readers that "specially trained ferrets" are now being used to deliver broadband service to rural UK residents, while Verizon is busily tweeting they've signed Owen Wilson to counter AT&T's deal with brother Luke. Drop your favorite April 1 gags into our comment section below.
Not news but somewhat entertaining: staff member and modem killer cabana notes just how helpful AT&T's technical support website can be. In an exploration of how to diagnose a troubled modem, AT&T feels it necessary to inform users that modems may not work if they're "smoking," "melted and misshapen," or my personal favorite: "smashed into bits and pieces." You should be aware that modems may also not work when submerged in maple syrup, while embedded in an animal's digestive tract, or immediately following nuclear impact.
Update: Looks like AT&T read our report and removed all references to modems that are smashed to bits and pieces not working effectively. Customers with their modems in bits may now be forever confused as to why the device doesn't seem to work when plugged in.
The European Satellite Navigation Competition recently saw a winner in a product called the eye-phone which uses a combination of satellite navigation technology and Internet information to provide users with an education in the items that surround them. For example, let’s say that you were at The Eiffel Tower and wanted to know more about it.
The Consumerist ran a poll this week asking users which service was better: Comcast or Verizon FiOS. Apparently Comcast really thought this was important, as they sent out an e-mail to employees urging that they stuff the ballot box. The push apparently didn't work, as Verizon FiOS still took 73% of the vote (damn you, unimpeded, symmetrical bandwidth!).
"Now, we're definitely more amused than this than anything else, but it certainly was odd," opines the Consumerist's Ben Popken. "Why would Comcast want to interfere with the torrents of peer to peer opinion sharing?"
After the recent brouhaha over Comcast's traffic shaping practices, Maximum PC has some fun at the cable giant's expense. The magazine has penned a fantastic fake internal Comcast memo, outlining their plans to nickle and dime their way to broadband domination.
Need to know where your co-workers and friends are at all the time? Want to be able to easily text your latest news to everyone you know? Or would you rather be lazy and let GPS do it for you? With the new services for your phone that leave you always connected to your social network, these are all options.
There’s Twitter which lets you post microblogs to your phone which are then sent to the phones of your contacts and the Twitter website. There’s Groovr which allows the same thing but also lets you input your location and photos. And then there’s Loopt which uses built-in GPS to regularly update your contacts as to your current location.
Do you really want people to be able to find you all of the time?!
Let’s date ourselves for a moment; what did computer education look like when you were in elementary school? Perhaps you’re of the “learn to type” generation. Or maybe you’re from the “Oregon Trail” days. It’s not quite the same for today’s kids, of course. Just one example is “JumpStart World Kindergarten”, a preschooler’s software program which makes use of broadband Internet access to send information to the Internet during the child’s game, tracking their progress and automatically receiving new content based on that progress. And it even has built-in recess.
In the interest of driving online gamers to their Blue Room site, AT&T has signed a deal with Vivendi games to offer free two-week trials of World of Warcraft to new users. Blue Room is not just a gaming portal, it’s “a marketing portal for AT&T's branded high-speed Internet, wireless, voice and digital video services”. The hope for Vivendi is that new gamers will get hooked on the multi-player online game while the hope for AT&T is that Blue Room users will buy more of the company’s broadband products. And gamers get a couple of free weeks of playtime, so everyone wins, right?
While a wealth of technical expertise resides in the Site FAQ's and site forums, there are unrecognized gems of enlightened knowledge, keen insight, and unique perspective in forum posts. Several of these gems have been culled from postings of previous years, and are presented here as a public service.
U.S. News & World Report takes a look today at the differences in mobile phone use in three different areas of the world, starting with simply what we call our cell phones and moving on to their most common use in each area.
It’s mid-March, and if you’re from the kind of college-sports-frenzied town that I’m originally from, that means only one thing: NCAA March Madness. YouTube company heads must be from that kind of town because they have just announced that they are joining forces with the NCAA, CBS Sports and Pontiac to bring the basketball championship games to the site. YouTube NCAA offerings will include near-real-time clips and game highlights, press conference footage and other “various video”. Reported to be highly user-friendly, the clips are easily linked back to the real footage; combined with CBS online viewing, you don’t have to miss a single shot.
Cingular has teamed up with World Wrestling Entertainment to bring the world of wrestling to your mobile phone. Cingular customers who already use the company’s existing media service plan will soon be able to access WWE videos as part of that package. For additional fees, WWE fans can get WrestleMania highlights, video of weekly matches and annual tournaments, high speed web links and even ring tones featuring the voices of famous wrestlers. Details at Yahoo! News.
