It's the end of the world as we know it

Well, this is it: the end of Writ 1122.  I found this course interesting, but not entirely what I expected.  I liked the idea of following the news as it gets forwarded and countered.  This idea of news evolving and being shared was something I came into the class curious about, and I'm happy to know more about it.  I do want to keep on following the spread of ideas, even if I focus more on the concept of memes or not.

As for writing, I have never felt more confident in my ability to write.  I have struggled with writing before, and I'm happy that I can just sit down and write about 1500 words on Google Fiber just for fun.  I do not plan on abandoning this blog.  Writing may be less frequent when I don't have assignments for it, but I do not plan on letting this blog stop.  So stay tuned for more :)

Time Warner: Be Afraid... Be Very Afraid

I recently read an article that stated that Time Warner Cable is not afraid of Google Fiber.  For those of you who don't know, Google Fiber is an Internet service currently only available in Kansas City (both KS and MO) that offers 1Gbps Internet.  That's currently 50x faster than Time Warner's fastest service for most of America and 20x faster than those with Wideband.  Time Warner saying that this isn't a big deal is news because saying something that's 20x faster than your best offer isn't worthwhile sounds crazy on paper.  I decided to do a dollar-for-dollar comparison between Google Fiber, Time Warner Cable, and it's biggest competitor, AT&T U-verse.

Before I start, I want to clarify some terminology.  1 Gbps (Gigabits per second) is exactly 1000 Mbps (Megabits per second).  Since all the other offerings are measured in Mbps, I will use Mbps as the main unit.  One thing to clarify is that Mbps (Megabits Per Second) is not the same as MBps (MegaBYTES Per Second).  Specifically, 8 Mbps is equal to 1 MBps.  For reference, at 20 Mbps, a 2 GB file will take 13 minutes and 20 seconds to download.  I should also clarify that all prices listed by Time Warner Cable and AT&T are only guaranteed for a year.  After a year, they will usually negotiate a higher price, while it looks like Google won't (but only time will tell).

Google Fiber offers three plans.  The first is FREE 5 Mbps.  How could the competition compete with free?  Well, the free plan does not cover the installation cost of $300 (or $25 for 12 months).  Now we can see how long you can last for that much on equivalent plans.  Time Warner Cable does not offer a 5 Mbps plan, but does offer a 3 Mbps plan for $30 a month.  After only 10 months, you have reached the $300 and are now overpaying.  AT&T offers the same plan for the same price, but unlike TWC, offers a 6 Mbps plan at $35 dollars.  You spend $300 after only 8 and a half months.  After that point, you are paying $35 a month for 1 additional Mbps over Google's plan.

Now how about paid plans?  Google offers 1000 Mbps for $70 dollars a month.  I should add that this plan also includes a free 1 TB Google Drive plan that can be used to store Google Docs and personal files safely online.  So how do Time Warner and AT&T compare?  Well, if you live in select cities, you may be eligible for Time Warner Cable’s Wideband, a new connection standard that supports up to 50 Mbps.  The closest plans to Google Fiber are the 30 Mbps plan for $65 and the 50 Mbps plan for $75.  While still an improvement, it does not even come close to Google.  Even more upsetting, these are the numbers for Time Warner’s download speeds.  Both of Time Warner’s plans only have 5 Mbps upload, while Google promises 1000 Mbps both upload and download.  AT&T's plans do not cover anything close to Google's in price.  While their highest plan is only 24 Mbps for $55, we can compare how much "bang per buck" they both offer.  AT&T's highest plan is $2.30 per Mbps, but Google has an astounding $0.07 per Mbps.  Dollar for dollar, it's an obvious choice.

Google offers one last plan to boot, though.  For $120 dollars, you get the same plan as above PLUS HD Television w/ DVR.  This plan includes (for free) a TV box, a 2 TB Internet hard drive for both DVR recordings and personal storage, and a free Nexus 7 tablet (plus the 1 TB Google Drive).  According to their channel list, they offer about 150 national channels plus the local channels.  So how does this plan compare with the competitions’ available bundle plans?  Time Warner Cable's price was clear: for the same price (save two dollars per month), you can get their digital TV plan and the Turbo Internet plan (20 Mbps).  While TWC has more channels (Google lacks some big names like HBO), Their DVR stores much less, and while TWC's DVR can record 2 shows at once, Google's can record 8.  AT&T did not make it easy for me to try to compare.  AT&T does not provide TV service where I live, so I had to resort to trying random Google maps addresses to try to find a price.  Even after all that, I couldn't find a plan that worked well for this comparison.  Offering something like 8 different television plans to mix and match with the existing internet plans didn't lead to any equivalent prices because of the lack of fast internet options.  In the end, I resorted to seeing what plans they offered for the difference in prices between the two Google plans.  That put me between the U-family plan (130 channels) and the U200 plan (280 channels).  Again, while AT&T generally offers more channels, Google has more going with it with the DVR, and AT&T can still only record 4 shows at once.  While both Time Warner Cable and AT&T offer more plans with more channels (as does Google to a small degree), the question is: do you really need all of them?  For most people I know, they only use TV for sports and watching the few highly rated channels like Comedy Central and Fox (as examples).  The others are increasingly unnecessary given all the ways of getting the same content through the Internet.

So, is Time Warner wrong in their statement?  Well, not completely.  Time Warner Cable and AT&T still have one thing over Google outside of just coverage area: versatility.  While Google only offers the two ends of the spectrum (free and $70), Time Warner Cable offers many more plans in between.  Their most popular plans are the Standard plan (15 Mbps) and the Turbo plan (20 Mbps) for $50 and $55 dollars respectively.  It begs the question why Google didn't have any halfway plans, especially since Wi-Fi doesn't even come close to providing 1000 Mbps.  Time Warner is right in that most people don't need 1000 Mbps now, and the cheaper plans from them might still be fine for now.  A 1080p30 h.264 stream (a popular HD streaming standard) still only requires about 10 to 12 Mbps, and the 13 minutes to download 2 GB is still adequately fast enough for considering the rarity of downloads that large.  On top of that, most Internet services can't even come close to 1000 Mbps to actually connect you at that speed.  Most tests I saw online never went too far above 100 Mbps, just 1/10 the possible speed.

There are, however, four things going against Time Warner's statement.  Firstly, everything mentioned above is measured in TOP speeds.  While 15 Mbps sounds good on paper, the actual speeds you would get from that plan may not be as good.  Secondly, the demand for more bandwidth is increasing rapidly.  HD video takes a lot of bandwidth already, and the better you try to make that image, the more it needs.  One of the biggest demands for Internet right now is online gaming.  Games keep pushing for more low-latency bandwidth to work without lag, and the demand from games is growing.  Thirdly, many households demand multiple connects.  While 15 Mbps could work for one person, it is pushing it for a household.  While I am playing online games, my mother may be streaming Netflix while cooking dinner while my father is on a video chat for work upstairs.  The need for Internet for more than one person and device is the largest driving force behind requiring more bandwidth.

Lastly, but most of all, the statement from Time Warner Cable shows the level of arrogance in the industry.  Having not had any major competition in most areas for a long time, the industry has become stagnate and arrogant.  With no need to drive innovation, these companies are more than happy to give us the same horrible Internet for large prices because it's in their best interests to go against our interests.  Of course there's "no necessity for gigabit Internet," they drove the market to the ground making sure there couldn't be.  In addition, Time Warner Cable is infamous for terrible customer service.  I have more than one horror story about how they messed up serving my family, but we haven't had anywhere we could turn for better Internet and service.  This is where Google is stepping in.  You can argue endlessly about their policy on using personal information to target advertisements, but it can't be said that they stop innovation or have bad customer relations.  If there is any company that can knock these tech giants off their pedestal, it's Google.  So continue on, Google.  You are the beacon of hope in this world of dull grey commercialist monotony.

EDIT: wow.  Almost exactly one month after writing this, I get the news that Google Fiber is coming to my hometown, Austin.  Yay!  To celebrate, I made a few edits to this to fix some typos and to make sure it's easy to understand.  Hooray for Google Fiber!

Truth or Fail?

When thinking about what I wanted to say, I felt kind of confused about it.  Unlike the last post, I actually understood the article; I just couldn't decide if I agreed with it.  In the end, I decided that it was accurate, but misguided.  Sort of like rolling a strike in the wrong lane.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire by Errol Morris makes a bold claim.  The first two sentences sums up his view very well.

Pictures are supposed to be worth a thousand words. But a picture unaccompanied by words may not mean anything at all.

He goes on and talks about how pictures cannot be true or false themselves, and must be put into context to make any sense.  While nothing that he says in the article is incorrect, I don't feel like it accurately portrays photography (or any still images) as a medium.  Take a look at the following image.  Is it true or false?

Even if you want to believe in fairies, you have to admit this photo is fake.  This is, in fact, one of the first fake photos ever taken.  Two girls borrowed a camera form one of their fathers, and took this photo with painted cardboard.  This photo was taken with a specific intent (to "prove" fairies existed to their parents) and uses fallacious means of doing it.  I believe that this photo can be called false (even though fake works better).

Despite that, I do believe that she was right in a lot of ways.  It is true that looking at an image of The Lusitania without any context doesn't tell the whole story.  In fact, most modern images gets it's context from society.  80 years down the line, somebody's going to look at a LOL cat and will have to have it explained to them because the same social constructions wouldn't exist.  That being said, writing isn't the only way to convey a message.  No one medium (especially images) is exempt from great story telling.

"Approach but never reach" -Zeno

When I sat down to write this blog post, I had a hard time actually starting.  Of all of Harris' weird ideas, this one is the most difficult to follow.  It might be that he tries to make a contrast between creative works and intellectual works.  I kind of lost him for a while after that point.  

My understanding of "taking an approach" is basically forwarding, but with the style than the content.  The idea being that if you like an authors style or taste, you would make a piece trying to write it as if it was him/her doing it.  Maybe here would be a better place to define a parody.  This seems to be enforced by the line "And what you listen for in a good cover is not an imitation of the original... but a new rendering of it."  

But again, it's when he tries to define writing in this that I start having problems with it.  "But while creative artists often reshape plots or images that strike them as somehow troubling or flawed... academic writers tend to make a more generous and sympathetic us of their influences."  First of all, artists don't make covers (or parodies for that mater) because they don't like them.  Jonathan Coulton's cover of Sir Mix-A-Lot's Baby Got Back is very different, but has gone on record saying that he liked the original, but wanted to try something new.  Not all artistic "approaches" have to be out of any sort of disapproval.  Also, why must "academic" writers be so different from artistic writers?  While writing for, say, school does require a different writing style, it does not mean that it has to approach the work from completely different directions.  In fact, I feel that the best academic papers are the ones that have a lot of artistic voice in them.  

But that's just my thoughts on it.  If you read this, please comment.  It's how I judge how well my blog posts do :P.

This Title Is a Lie

Before I start this post, I would just like to mention something I put in my extended essay.  In it, I mentioned Tangental Learning, or the idea that if you present somebody with something, they will research it themselves.  I experienced tangental learning when I read the Monty Python quote in the start of the chapter, as I googled the skit and watched it on YouTube.

Joseph Harris invents many words in his book Rewriting, but "countering" might be the one I like the best as a concept.  Countering means to create a new line of thinking from what the author originally wrote.  This could be from taking the complete opposite opinion from the author to testing the limits of the position that the author originally took.  For an example of rewriting, but I noticed my earlier blog post on Hadges fits the description well (I realize it's kind of egotistical to pick one of my own writings, but it's a post I know well).  Much like Harris' essay he mentions at the beginning of the chapter, I went in to the blog post with the intention of arguing a number of his main points he said in the article.  While not all countering is strait disagreement, it is the easiest way of presenting it.  Countering is an important part of critical analysis.  If you read something that you don't like and can't counter it, then you really need to work on that skill.  You need to be able to not take everything at face value, and figure out all the details that go into it.

Countering and Forwarding go hand in hand to me.  Forwarding is kind of the opposite (forwarding emphasizes what the author wrote while countering negates parts of it), but they are related in that they have the same goal: to work off of the previous work and expand it for it audience.  While countering my change the views on the writing, it is sometimes important to let your own ideas take control of your paper.

Re: Re: Fwd: Re: Amazing Blog Post

In his book Rewriting, Joseph Harris coins the term "forwarding."  He defines it as taking a work, and rewriting it for a new audience.  At the beginning of the chapter, he quotes Kenneth Burke talking about a conversation that continuously gains new people in the middle and compares it to academic writing.  My first thought when I read this was that it sounded a lot like myths.  The old "classic" tales get retold over and over again until the original story almost disappears into it.

When thinking about forwarding, only one thing really came to mind.  I realized a good modern example of forwarding is the entire concept of a meme.  For example, the YouTuber known as saraj00n forwarded two pieces of work by Chris Torres and Daniwell-P when he created the video we know today as Nyan Cat [cite].  The idea of a meme directly relate to forwarding.  When someone likes something, and then does something with it, such as reposting, covering, parodying, revamping, adding/changing audio, remixing, or even just recaptioning (as is the case with advice animals), they are forwarding it to their own audience.  When a lot of people forward a piece (and the people who saw the forwarding forwards and so forth), it becomes a part of the culture (or in other words, a meme).  

Random fact of the day: the word "meme" comes from the Ancient Greek word "mimeme" meaning "something imitated."  Maybe an argument to make is that imitation is a form of forwarding.

Another random fact: the word "nya" (the word nyan comes from) is japanese for the onomonopia "meow"

Newsy Type Stuff

In his article The press becomes the press-sphere, Jarvis discusses how news reporting has changed because of the internet.  He explains how news changed from a linear system (story to journalist to writer to editor to print) to a large interconnected system he calls the "press sphere."  The press sphere is affected by many different factors including companies, readers, external news sources, and comments. They're all connected... like some sort of WEB that spans the entire WIDE WORLD or something.  All kidding aside, I actually agree with pretty much everything that he said.  I am a firm believer that the internet will replace all other media as the main source of news and entertainment in 10 to 20 years (at least it will if the FCC and Google can actually make this free internet thing work).  All these people connected to such a collaborative medium as the internet, we're going to see a huge shift from larger organizations (such as news channels) being the main source of information to individuals and small collections of people.  Heck, there are already great examples of this.  The already viral nature of how media is being shared on the internet holds the key to fast and accurate news reporting from every possible angle.  Much like the videos from the numerous revolutions in the middle east helped actually present the news to the world, the future of news will center around people with their smart phones (or whatever) capturing the news as it happens.  It is much harder to miss a story when everybody can report, not just a select part of the population.  

Anyways... Yeah.  Go Internet!