Nov 14
On my personal list of the best new gadgets of the past five years, Amazon’s Kindle is unquestionably near the top. Though it wasn’t the first eReader available, it was the first to blend a usable form factor, acceptable title selection, and no-PC-required content distribution in a way that made it a viable choice for avid readers.
Quite honestly, I love the thing.
But as smitten as I am with the Kindle (specifically the Kindle 2), I’m becoming an increasingly harsh critic of its ecosystem. And if Amazon wants Kindle to become the phenomenon it deserves to be, two changes must be made.
Problem 1: Kindle Book Prices
The idea of being able to download and begin reading a book in seconds for a reasonable price is an attractive one, even for casual readers. And this was the promise made when Amazon began shipping the original Kindle in 2007.
Over the past two years, however, the $9.99 price ceiling has begun to shatter.
Nov 11
Yesterday I was helping a friend with his computer after a clean install of Windows 7. After each reboot, the Network and Sharing Center showed two active networks: the Work network – a wired LAN connection which was supposed to be listed – and an Unidentified Public network, which was not. The result of having these two networks was limited access, i.e. no Internet connection.
To temporarily resolve the problem, I could disable and re-enable the LAN card after each reboot in the Device Manager, which would cause the unidentified network disappear and the Internet connection to be restored. But the problem reappeared after each reboot.
The problem (I discovered after half an hour of Google-aided research) seems to be a secondary Default Gateway value of 0.0.0.0, which was showing up in the IPCONFIG readout before each re-enabling of the LAN card. I do not know the cause of this error, but it appears many users are reporting experiencing this problem in Windows 7 with several types of LAN cards and routers.
I was able to correct the problem on his Windows 7 PC with the following solution:
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Nov 09
If you follow tech news, chances are you’ve heard at least something about the Net Neutrality debate. For those whose interests aren’t as peculiar as my own, Net Neutrality is, in a nutshell, a principle which states that all data moving along an Internet connection should be equal. It would forbid Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from differentiating between types of data and limiting or blocking services the provider deems undesirable for whatever reason.
Largely a philosophical exercise for most of its history, Net Neutrality has grown increasingly relevant as the Internet has become a more powerful tool. In 2007, for example, Comcast began quietly interfering with its customers’ use of BitTorrent. This raised a real-world question: does an ISP have the right to limit its customers’ access to Internet services, technologies, web sites, software, video, etc.?