January 18, 2008 – 4:30 pm
Time Warner is looking to rape its customers for money for internet usage. According to a company spokesperson, they will be charging customers based on how much data they download starting later this year. It will be a tiered setup based on how much bandwidth you use per month. It will start as a trial run in Beaumont, Texas, after which the company will decide how and when to roll the program out nationwide.
Personally, I find this to be very shitty. With everything going the way of the download, bandwidth usage is on an exponential rise across the board. With Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, and Amazon all offering movie rental downloads (and some in HD), this will only drive bandwidth needs further for the general public. Online media, from music to movies to games, has grown immensely in the past decade and will only continue to grow at a very fast pace. Time Warner looks to be exploiting that and trying to make a buck on Joe Customer.
They haven’t announced what the bandwidth tiers will be, but I’m expecting the one that falls in line with current pricing won’t be that big. For those of us who game online a lot, download demos and trailers daily and weekly, and rent HD movies online, we can probably expect to see a modest increase in our internet bills in the coming year or so. It’s a pity, really. Other countries see 100Mbps unlimited connections for much less than what we pay for 5-10Mbps.
[via Wired]
January 14, 2008 – 3:15 pm
Ever wanted to play Crysis or even Halo 2 on your PS3? Now you can. Yes, you read that right. You can play Halo 2 on your PS3. StreamMyGame has released a client application to stream PC games over the LAN. You can play on PCs running Windows XP or Vista and also PS3 running Linux.
The free StreamMyGame Server enables PC games to be played remotely by converting the game’s video and audio into a Game Stream and sending it over a home network to a second computer where you can view and play the game with the free StreamMyGame Player. The second computer can be a PC, laptop, PS3 or Linux device. The game can be played on the second computer without any lag and the second computer does not need to have the game installed.
The player is available free from StreamMyGame, but you will have to pay to get HD resolutions for streaming. If you have a wireless network, it may not work that great either since it requires a decent amount of bandwidth. I currently don’t have Linux installed on my PS3, but if you do, try this out and let us know how it goes.
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Major Nelson dropped some cool stats about the Halo 3 beta that just ended.
Microsoft and Bungie collected endless amounts of data to help tweak the game, but here’s some interesting stats about how many people actually played:
There were around 820,000 unique participants with more than 12 million hours of online gameplay. That’s a LOT for a beta! Also, the game racked up 350 Terabytes of data downloaded from the Live servers. That’s gotta a fun bandwidth bill.
This is definitely an indication of how many units Halo 3 is going to sell… could honestly put the console war out of reach for Sony and Nintendo.
So I took a break from my taxes today to take a peak at some stuff online. Everything seemed to be moving a bit faster, but it didn’t completely hit me until I went to upload some files to one of my web servers. I would normally upload at around 45KB/sec (on paper I was getting 384Kbps). I was confused for a quick second when my upload speeds were topping 120KB/sec, then I remembered what I had heard a while back about Time Warner / Road Runner increasing bandwidth speeds. A quick trip to speedtest.net confirmed my thoughts. I’m now getting 10Mbps download and 1Mbps upload. Giddy the hell up! I knew download speeds would hit 10Mbps, but there was no official word on upload speeds. My ping times are now much faster as well.
Kudos, Time Warner! Keep up the good work!
(For the record, I’m in the Albany, NY region for Time Warner. No official word on nationwide increases yet)
February 26, 2007 – 3:10 pm
I’ve been downloading the MLB 2K7 demo for literally more than 3 hours now, and I’m only at 67%. I’ve tried cancelling and restarting, rebooting modem and router, but no luck. The 360 shows 4 bars of wireless signal, the router is showing 54Mbps transmit rate (as confirmed on my laptop). I did a bandwidth speedtest and I’m getting 5Mbit download, which is my cap from Road Runner. So it’s not on my end.
Microsoft needs to either not cap downloads (if that’s what’s going on), or get some more bandwidth for the marketplace servers.
[Update] I’ve been downloading the MLB 2K7 demo now for over 5.5 hours. I’m sitting at 86%. This is some grade A bullshit here. Microsoft needs to do something about these servers.
