Comcast has confirmed that all residential customers will be subject to a 250 gigabyte per month data limit starting October 1. ‘This is the same system we have in place today,’ Comcast wrote in an amendment to its acceptable use policy. ‘The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted.’ The cable provider insisted that 250 GB is “an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. … As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage,’ Comcast said Thursday. ‘If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,’ according to the AUP.

What the heck? 250GB a month? Yes, for a typical, non-technological household, then the 250GB seems okay. What about my house? I have 3 PCs, 2 Laptops, 2 iPhones, and one xBox 360. I work full-time from my home and I am a software engineer. I manage dozens of large web servers and many of them make backups to my “backup server” weekly. Anywhere from 10-20 GBs will be sent to my pc every week. Thats 80-100GB a month. I also stream movies, music, tv, and many other things daily. I download games on Steam and my xBox, and download legal things via BitTorrents.

I can see myself easily going over the 250GB a month limit, several months in a row! I’ve already felt internet throttling when ever I download legal content via BitTorrent from Comcast. The last few weeks I’ve had days where my Internet just seems to stop. But my biggest gripe I’ve ever had with Comcast is this….

When I request business class internet, Comcast tells me I can’t, because I live at a residential address. Thats right, I can’t get higher speeds, or static IP addresses, or a better service level agreement because I work from home. When I asked why, I was told that if I really was a big business, I should get an office. Oh yeah? I want to spend $1000 dollars more a month to have an “okay” office, have to spend money driving to work, only so I can have a “business” internet connect? Oh yeah Comcast, I love the idea! You are so in touch with the home office.

Ugh, I’m tired of Comcast, but my only other internet option is DSL, which in my old neighborhood can only get speeds of 256K…. which is slightly faster than my phone.

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First, Yahoo Music users can transfer their account to Rhapsody. I believe this also transfers their purchased music. Now, if your account has lapsed, I don’t know exactly how it works. I still think there are lots of Yahoo Music users will get the short end of the deal, and some lose all their purchased music. I know there are worse things in the world, but here are my thought on DRM.They

Digital Rights Management – Good Intentions, Horrible Execution

DRM at heart really has good intentions. It just wants to make sure that people listen to music that they are have bought or subscribed to. In a perfect world, DRM could help the user. If I bought a song, and that song could follow me across all computers, all devices, and I would never lose it. If my computer blew up, I could buy a new one and “hey! There is my song!” My mp3 player, my phone, my laptop, my computer, and anything else all that could play the song. I could burn it to a CD when ever I wanted, and I could use it all this way 100% legally.

But whose rights are being managed? They are not the user’s rights. The scenario above is when the user’s rights are being managed. DRM in its current state doesn’t manage the user’s rights, but the publishers rights. This isn’t a bad thing in theory if both publishers and users rights are managed. But whose rights are being managed? The publisher’s right solely.

DRM in its current state has this philosophy: If there is any possible way that any user could might share a song with someone else who doesn’t own the rights to listen. Unfortunately, this philosophy leads to buying music with DRM into an extremely restricted environment. What would it take to make DRM work?

1) One Universal DRM System – For my music to work everywhere, there only has to be one. I doubt this will ever happen. If there are more than one system, they have to work together seamlessly. This in my opinion is an impossible dream. Why can there only be one? For all Computers, Devices, etc. to work with DRM music, there should only be one system. When there is more, it undoubtably will happen that one device will only support one and not two. Our classic example now is Apple’s technology vs. Windows Based (WMA’s) systems. iPods and iPhone can play apple’s music. Zunes, Sansas, etc can play protected WMAs. There is no way to switch the two. It just doesn’t work.

2) Easier for the User – The reason why all DRM systems have been so locked down is the mentality of “don’t trust the user!” Isn’t that the whole reason why we have DRM? I believe DRM would work a great deal better if it made life easier for a user. I’ll give an example where this indeed has happened with DRM later in this blog post.

3) Don’t Punish the User – Currently, if you slightly fall out of a DRM’s system or model, you lose your music. It is frustrating for users and my biggest fear of buying DRM music is I’ll somehow lose the license, crash my computer, etc. and I will have to re-buy the song. Once 6-7 years ago a hotel maid threw away my plane ticket on accident. It was with Southwest and when I got to the airport I had my driver’s license to prove it was me. I told them my last name of “Carmony” and she asked me if I was Justin and I said yes. They then told me without the ticket I had to buy another one. I was infuriated! They knew it was me. They knew I had bought a ticket. But because of some maid I had to re-buy my ticket. I get the same feeling with DRM. Why can’t I re-download music I purchased? You know I bought it. You know I signed in just fine. So force me to re-buy what I already should own? Just because my computer blew up, or was stolen, or any other number of reasons I would imagine DRM would protect me in this case, not hurt me.

When Digital Rights Management is Good

I think the current DRM model is mostly good for one scenario: music subscriptions. I loved my Yahoo Music account and now my Rhapsody. I love the fact that I can pay a subscription to listen to millions of songs. The key in understanding why I pay money to subscribe is one simple reason: it is more convenient than other illegal alternatives. I used to download music illegally when I was younger. The good old Napster days when it took 30 minutes to download one song over dial-up. Now a person can download an entire discography of a band in under 30 minutes.

DRM makes sense for subscription services. It makes good sense to protect “borrowed” music. People would be able to steal music insanely easy without protecting that music. Besides, they are renting it, not purchasing it. DRM has enabled a new business model that couldn’t exist without it. The only issue is that I can’t use subscription music on any device. Once again, the problem of not having a universal system.

When Digital Rights Management is Bad

Purchasing Music. That sums it up right there. While subscribing to music works well because you can re-download it when needed, buying music with DRM is a huge hassle. It makes it such a big hassle that it is a lot easier to download music illegally than buy it legally. Any current DRM system ties users to specific computers, devices, and rules. If those rules are broken, the music won’t work, and even lost forever. However, instead of coming up with more lenient DRM systems, companies have been doing the sane thing: throwing it out the window.

Amazon, Rhapsody, and many others are allowing people to buy MP3s on their site. This allows people to legally buy their music and do whatever they want with it. It is the same as buying a CD. No worries about what devices it will work on, or if you can burn it to a CD. If you lose it, its your own fault and you can’t blame anyone but yourself.

Once again, if DRM made my life better, I would love to have DRM. However, when DRM is such a restrictive technology, it only hurts honest paying customers and doesn’t stop illegal users. It would be different if acquiring illegal is was hard. But many times it is so much easier to get it illegally on the internet than legally. Once again, I can never say this enough times, if DRM made the consumer’s life better, it would be welcomed with open arms. But since it is such a pain in the butt, we all hate it.

I look forward to the day where either the DRM towel is thrown in and it is only used for subscription based technologies. Or I’ll even look forward to the day when DRM helps my life by just working exactly how I would have want to work. But until then, I will never buy music if I’m bound down by it.

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Every week she has a blog challenge, and to make sure I keep up my blogging I thought this week’s challenge was appropriate for my blog. She challenged to blog about your computer setup, now and then. First lets talk about my setup back in the day.

Quite simply, it was the family computer.

My family has always had 2 or 3 computers around the house. Having a technology business father always meant we had new stuff around the house, and usually the kids got the old used left overs. So there was always a “family” computer used to do homework and play games. I can remember a few of them: the Compaq Presario, the Dell Insperon, the Totally Awesome Computer (not a joke, there used to be a company called that here in Utah), and finally I built my own from there on out. The computer was always in the kitchen/family room area where everyone could see what we were up to. It had only one monitor, keyboard, mouse, and usually a joystick.

Boy have I come a long way from that:

We just moved into our new house, so things are a mess still, but that is basically my computer layout, in all of it’s grandeur. Thats right, you see 4 monitors. Well, its really three monitors and a laptop. You have my trusty chair which has always served me well, although my wife tells me it leans way to far back (she is probably right).

My computer is a custom built, about $2,000 machine. For how much I use it, its worth every penny. I’ll get into the specs another day.

Its a full tower, and it is super heavy.

And it is kind of a mess in there. I feel some what naked showing the insides of my PC to the world…

Then you have my three trusted monitors. My primary 24″ Gateway:

Then my secondary 21″ sceptre:

and then my third, old school CRT monitor:

That CRT is really nice to have around, being able to change resolutions to see what I want is really nice. So when I do a screencast I usually screencast from that monitor because I can scale it down without it looking like crap.

Then I have my new MacBook Pro:

I like it a lot, and I switch between my Mac and PC with my wonderful KVM:

I couldn’t recommend a better USB KVM. It works flawlessly. Then you have my killer G5 mouse with… a Rocketfish mouse pad!

There are tons of gamers who swear by their lives about the Icemat or Steelmat gamer mouse pads. I’ve had and tried both, and I much prefer this generic brand mouse pad found at any BestBuy location. Its bigger, lighter, thinner, and feels a lot better. I hate my Icemat now compared to this.

As you probably noticed, my desk is just an old school fold out desk. Hey, it might not look like much, but it works well for me!

Hope this works for ya Lorelle!

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