July 26th, 2010 |
Published in
Apple, Games
Blizzard, you almost had your Downloader for Starcraft II correct. Fortunately, you are one of the companies smart enough to use bittorrent to distribute your installers and patches. This is a fact that I love as it typically leads to faster downloads and I am more than happy to contribute most of my upload bandwidth towards allowing others to download from me, which eases to burden on your servers and allows more people to gain access at one time. Please note, though, that I said SOME of my upload bandwidth. For a reason that I cannot fathom, other than laziness on your part, you have failed to include explicit upload/download rate controls in your Starcraft II Downloader. After 3 hours of downloading and having issues with websurfing (due to your program saturating my upload bandwidth), I finally had to disable peer-to-peer downloading and instead burden your server with the full download of Starcraft II. I may decide to turn on peer-to -peer connections when I go to bed in a few hours, but seeing as my download is progressing at the exact same speed either way, I really don’t care. Please, for the love of god and all that is holy, IMPLEMENT throttling in your downloaders from now on! Every bittorrent client I have ever used has this ability, except for yours!
As a sidenote while I am at it, Apple, IMPLEMENT TORRENTING SUPPORT AND THROTTLING IN ITUNES!!! I am sick of large podcast downloads making my internet unusable for half an hour or more at a time!
June 2nd, 2010 |
Published in
Apple, Apps, iPhone, YouTube
YouTube and Apple really need to fix the YouTube app on the iPad. I have been trying to watch a music video on YouTube that is available in 360p, 480p, 720p, and 1080p. When I attempt to watch the video over my home wireless connection the application insist on choosing the 1080p stream, which is too large for my 3Mbps internet connection to smoothly stream. While I am waiting on the video to cache, the iPad will usually go to sleep since I can’t do anything else on the iPad while the video caches. So, I figured I would try the 3G connection since I know that via the 3G connection the iPad will use a lower quality video stream. Well, the video did load completely in about 10 seconds via 3G, but the video quality was so bad that it wasn’t worth watching. All of this could be solved by having a tiny little option that allows me to choose what video quality I want to use over WiFi. My home internet connection typically streams 720p YouTube videos with few issues.
Now for the second issue. AT&T has apparently announced that they are doing away with their unlimited data plan for both iPhone and iPad (http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9G30GCG0.htm). They are replacing it with a 200MB/month for $15/month plan and a 2GB/month for $25/month plan. Apparently current iPhone subscribers can keep their unlimited plan at the current rate, but new users have to choose the lesser plans. Also, for iPad 3G users, if you currently have the $30/month unlimited data plan and CONTINUOUSLY pay for it every month from now on, you get to keep the unlimited plan. However, if you ever don’t renew, you only options become the 200MB/month and 2GB/month plans. In my opinion AT&T intentionally mislead thousands of people who bought iPad 3Gs by initially promoting the “unlimited $30/month, activate and deactivate as needed” plan a few months ago. This seemed like a great deal to users who only traveled every now and then and wanted to have the option of unlimited 3G only when on the road. AT&T, this is a dick move and you know it. I truly hope that there is a class-action lawsuit started over this bait-and-switch advertising. I do not believe for a second that AT&T didn’t plan this out as “let’s entice users to buy the 3G model by advertising a great data plan for iPad but then after enough are sold, we’ll do away with that plan and royally fuck them over on their purchase.”
Anyways, I trust that Apple and YouTube can at least easily fix my first complaint. Too AT&T though, FUCK YOU!
January 27th, 2010 |
Published in
Technology
As soon as I heard “iPad,” my initial reaction was to dislike the name. However, after seeing the device, I wonder how much the iPad name was influenced by the “PADD”s in Star Trek TNG and DS9.
Regardless of possible name influences, it is nice to see more technology go from Star Trek to reality. Now, bring on the Holodecks!
