Viewing by month: March 2008
Oooohhhh.... Turbo!
So I just got off the phone with a very nice service rep from Time Warner Cable named Dawn. Originally I called to remove some features from my account because I just lost my roommate and doubt that they're going to be used any more. I explained to her what was going on and she said "Let me see if I can save you some money." To which I responded "sure, thanks!" She came back with a quote that was about $30 less than I had been previously been paying. Half of that was the removal of HBO. I mentioned that I had been thinking about upgrading to RoadRunner Turbo (10mBit). She offered to check and see if the advertised speeds were actually being achieved in my neck of the woods. She said that they were, but at times they may be slower due to network congestion. This was the answer I was expecting.
I gave her the go-ahead and she began to click and type away. At the same time I was running back to back tests at speedtest.net. Within moments the download speed went from 5974 kb/s to 9896 kb/s and the upload went from 489 kb/s to 974 kb/s. Sweet! Oh yeah, and she cut the cost from $54.95 to $39.95.
Thanks, Dawn. You rock!
Lenovo ThinkPad X300 Eats MacBook Air for Lunch (from: Wired)
It seems that normally when Apple releases a cool new toy it takes the PC manufacturers a while to bring a competitive product to market. That is not the case this time. The Lenovo X300 looks to be the answer to the MacBook Air. It also does a good job of fixing some of the questionable decisions as far as included features that Lenovo/IBM had made in previous ultra-light laptop offerings. As an owner of a ThinkPad X41 I was a bit disappointed to not have an optical drive although I decided that it was a worthy sacrifice for the overall weight reduction.Kudos to Lenovo for the ThinkPad X300s plethora of ports (3 USB, a VGA and ethernet) as well as a DVD burner. Another nice addition for the student/business person on the go is the variety of wireless radios including Bluetooth, 802.11n, Verizon 3-G WWAN (w/ GPS) and WiMax. If you've got the coin (~$3,000), it may be worth looking into.
Link to article: Wired
Apple: Full of Hot Air?
If you're an IBM/Lenovo thinkpad owner like me, you may have gotten the above ad in your inbox this morning. I was reading through it and the last sentence really caught my eye. Looks like Lenovo wants to play hardball.