Author: Zealus

Categories
blog

Quick Friday Recap

One thing that truly amazes me is what people search on this blog. A lot of spam-beloved words, the reason why – escapes me.

From the outside world this blog is being bombarded by queries like “outlook 2007 to thunderbird” or “outlook 2007 thunderbird” or “export outlook 2007 to thunderbird” (all within top 10 of queries). The answer is here: Outlook 2007 to Mozilla Thunderbird conversion.

Another big bunch of people are searching for SitcomTV.com domain. Well, it is for sale if the price is right. Click here to contact me. Alternatively, you can offer a donation that would make the web site (about sitcoms) up and running. Either way – we all win.

Last, but not least bunch is divided by two interests – HTC Advantage 7501 (truly amazing device, but a bit too bulky for every day use – learned it the hard way) and people who are looking to install Pandora on Windows Mobile devices (an amazing service, pretty much the only radio I would like to listen all the time). Preferably for free.

Newcomers this week are attracted by new posts dedicated to .NET technology that I’ve been using for a lot of time now. Since this seems like a great interest – there’s more where it came from. Stay tuned.

Categories
annoyances programming

Char Array to String in VB.NET 2.0

You will be surprised, but the obvious

Dim arrChars(10) As Char
Dim strString As String
strString = "ABCDEFGHIK"
arrChars = strString.ToCharArray
strString = arrChars.ToString

Will not yield the same string as there was before. It will, rather, return “Char[]” response. To get your string back from Char Array (at least in VB.NET 2.0) you will need to call CStr on array:

Dim arrChars(10) As Char
Dim strString As String
strString = "ABCDEFGHIK"
arrChars = strString.ToCharArray
strString = Cstr(arrChars)

Funny, isn’t it? And totally counter-intuitive 🙂

Categories
business internet services technology

Bandwidth Caps Are Bad, Speed Caps Are Better

Bandwidth Caps Are Bad, Speed Caps Better - iStudioWeb With the latest craze about Time Warner and AT&T introducing download caps for their subscribers, it doesn’t seem like companies care for anything but the short term profit, if that. Price-conscious consumers won’t buy into this game again, like we did with cell phones and limited minutes. Anyone who ever overused their cell phone plan knows how hard it was to pay off skyrocketed bill. Personally I had that experience only once – I was consulting some really large project over the phone and my phone bill went from regular $120/month to $653. Of course, it was a justified business expense, but still – it would have been just $240 if I had two separate plans. If you ask me today – I would go to any lengths available to keep my costs down these days. But I digress.

What beats me in the whole capped broadband picture is that ISPs are trying to implement a restaurant pricing. While at the same time forgetting that they are anything but. My cable provider claims that he provides speeds up to 15Mbps. My dedicated servers are on 10Mbps lines burstable to 100Mbps and I am yet to see speeds above 1 megabit. Between themselves servers swap stuff at very least at full 10Mbps which makes it painfully obvious that my cable provider lies is something like McDonalds – at best.

What is obvious to me is that download cap pricing structure is a loose-loose situation for everyone. Once consumers will get a feeling of what their limit will give them, most of those who, supposedly, would be a cash cow for ISP will leave for something else. Or keep their usage under strict control. Either way, ISPs will loose money. Or, rather, will earn less than they do now – just because they have caps. Wouldn’t you talk on your phone more if it was unlimited calls? Sure. Are you postponing calls to your friends until it’s “unlimited nights and weekends”? Most likely – yes. See the pattern?

If provider companies are so inclined to slice their services in tiers – why not turn the situation into a win-win? How could they do it? TIER THE SPEEDS, NOT THE DOWNLOADS. Some “old parents” setting wouldn’t need more than occasional e-mail checking, downloading pictures of their grandchildren and maybe a video or two. That would be a slowest and cheapest tier. A mom-pop-kids shop would probably need some more advanced tier – videos, music, iTunes for kids, heavy MySpace/Facebook and YouTube. And geeks, gamers and internet business owners would appreciate the fastest speeds and the lowest pings out there at the premium. Basically, companies would milk the same bunch of people, only do it so much different that it would make everyone happy.