After 31 years of doing this column pretty much without a break, I’m finally back from a family crisis and moving into a new house, which sadly are not the same things. Why don’t I feel rested? I have a big column coming tomorrow but wanted to take this moment to just cover a few things that I’ve noticed during our move.
We have become cable cutters. Before the fire we had satellite TV (Dish) and could have kept it, but I wanted to try finding our video entertainment strictly over the Internet. It’s been an interesting experience so far and has taught us all a few lessons about what I expect will be an upcoming crisis of people blowing past their bandwidth caps.
When we were still up on the hill the only Internet available was six megabit-per-second (mbps) fixed wireless, which was incredibly reliable, if puny. We had the satellite for TV and DVR yet were still able to handle a Netflix account, though to avoid excessive buffering we had to drop the quality to standard definition (480p). Understand this was about data rates, not total usage. Our wireless connection, while slow, was uncapped.
Not so our new Comcast connection here in the burbs. We have 250 mbps, though most of the connections are through WiFi and seem to peak-out about 90 mbps. Still, that’s plenty for anything we would ever do, right up through 4K video. And that’s the problem.
Replacing our satellite connection, I added Hulu and Amazon Prime Video to Netflix and then started doing free trials of the live Internet TV services like Sling TV, YouTube TV, Hulu’s live service, etc. It doesn’t take a week to know what doesn’t work well, which is why I ditched Sling and Hulu immediately. Sling was just plain unreliable, while Hulu worked well but wouldn’t allow us to change our geographic location, saying it violated terms of service even if we were just going to a different AirBnB across our little town. Though I only spent a couple days on the Sling TV free trial, which I then canceled, Sling TV is still trying to charge me. Beware.
So we settled on YouTube TV, which does the job of giving me George Stephanopoulos in the morning. $40 per month is a lot mainly to get little George, but selfish habits don’t want to die.
In short, I would prefer a skinnier bundle of channels for less money.
As it is, we’re now paying a total of $64 per month for video content, which is significantly less than we were paying before for Dish, except no HBO.
Comcast was only mildly irritated that I wanted neither their TV service nor their cable modem (I bought one for $30 at Walmart instead of renting). I think they are running into people like me more and more. Maybe they expect me to come back after I incur too many bandwidth overages. And they could be right.
Download caps were never an issue of Net Neutrality; under both Obama and Trump my Comcast account would have still been limited to 1024 gigabytes per month. While that sounds like a lot of data, it took us only 20 days to exceed it, with each successive 50 gigs costing $10 extra per month. Comcast gave us a grace period of two months to get our act together, so we haven’t actually paid any overages yet, but if we were paying it would have doubled our Internet bill.
To be fair, Comcast does offer an unlimited download service for an extra $50 per month.
I did an analysis of our data usage and found it was 70 percent video. So the answer, just as it had been up on the hill, was to reduce display resolution going to our two big-screen TVs and make sure boys don’t fall asleep leaving the TV on. The first was easy while the second is a work in progress.
The way to change your video resolution to save bandwidth is NOT by adjusting the settings in Hulu, Netflix, or YouTube. Leave those on auto. Change the settings in your set-top box, instead. I have a Roku on one TV and an Amazon Fire TV on the other and they both function the same in this regard, so I set them on 720p, which ought to still look pretty darned good.
Just how good it looks is surprising, because both of our TVs (one 1080p and one 4K) are upscaling and the 4K model really does look better. In fact, this is maybe the best argument I can think of for getting a new 4K TV, because it will pay for itself very quickly in bandwidth savings as the chart below suggests. With 4K TVs so cheap to buy until the tariffs kick-in, I’d say the payback simply based on bandwidth savings is no more than six months.
It will be interesting to see how the 4K set with a 480p input compares with the 1080p set at 720p. I suspect they will be very similar.
The kids have yet to even notice, by the way.
The Arris cable modem I bought included dual-channel WiFi, but service was still spotty around the house so I eventually dug out my three first-generation eero units. This mesh networking solution was never very good at the old house so I eventually put it away in storage, which is the only reason why we still have it (along with furniture we never really liked).
What’s great about eero is they frequently (and automagically!) update their firmware. Ours was two years behind, so once it updated all around both the features and performance were dramatically improved.
My friend Dave Taht told me eero now has a buffer bloat solution and it’s true. This does not save any bandwidth, by the way, but it certainly makes viewing more pleasant. But SQM, as they call it, is by default set in the OFF position, so remember to turn it on.
Now I just have to get the eero to recognize my Raspberry Pi local DNS and proxy servers.
As I said, a real column comes tomorrow…
IBT Mineserver compainers…
It’s not QMS, Bob – it’s SQM, Smart Queue Management, and you find it in the eeroLabs beta section.
But I didn’t even know eero had issued a bufferbloat fix, so THANKS!
As soon as I can jump away from Comcast, I’ll do it. For the last few years, service has been terrible. It was terrible before, but after days of working with them, my service improved dramatically when the technician on a pole noticed the switching box was rusted out and replaced it. The alternative is DSL with a speed is under 3 mbps. Even with doubling of service, I still might only get 3 mbps. The ISP would be ATT and that’s worse than Comcast. I am hoping for a third party ISP like Sonic to come along and rescue me with 1 GBPS speeds and no metering. Or a wireless ISP like Monkeybrains to have service in my area. I live a few blocks from the old AskJeeves headquarters and I know that street is filled with dark fiber because I also live a block from an old Level 3 network center.
George S. is on ABC, which is not a premium channel. You could simplify your TV life a great deal by simply paying $100/mo for cable TV (not counting internet access, which no longer has to be fast). Sure, you’ll also get a million channels you don’t want, but you’re free to ignore them. No buffering, no bandwidth caps, no boxes other than a DVR like TiVo, no apps, no app subscriptions. I know, it takes the fun out of being a tech journalist. On those rare occasions when you want to watch an internet-only thing, your TV and DVR has an app for that. For most of the 21st century my bandwidth speed was limited to 1.5 mbps, yet I had no problem with free trials of the few app-only programs I wanted to watch.
Is it possible for you to get Good Morning America (CBS) with George Stephanopoulos via a digital antenna?
I get about about 39 channels (Buffalo, Erie, Toronto and Hamilton) living north of Buffalo NY with an antenna on my roof.
I agree with the OTA solution. I get about 50 channels in the Tampa Bay region. Tower farm is just shy of 50 miles away. A wide array of antennas available at affordable rates and no monthly bill. Quite a few are 1080 signals with Dolby quality sound. I felt they actually look better than the cable signal. Less loss and all that.
Get the lava 8008 antenna. You’ll get ota all nets work’s abc cbs nbc fox etc
That image was taken from: https://www.howtogeek.com/338983/how-much-data-does-netflix-use/
And was based on netflix usage in Australia. US / Other locales may differ. Please cite the image.
Welcome back Bob. I’ve missed you.
Glad to hear you have a new house.
Consider adding this to your new setup… https://www.silicondust.com/product/hdhomerun-extend/
John
Welcome back – good to think getting back on feet!
Comcast wants you to use their cable modem and router because they can then use it to provide hotspots.
I cut the cable and popped an antenna on the roof. Works great, and there are now a bunch of extra channels (besides network and PBS) (I love Svengoolie on METV). For internet, I have Spectrum (formerly Time Warner). It’s over priced, never gets anywhere near the mbps they claim you can get up too, but at least no caps.
Sounds as if you’re living in a third world country.
The internet is so much cheaper in Israel! I can get internet TV, plus relatively unlimited bandwidth with 100MBPS (I think) for around 47$ (Cellcom TV)
> Yaron Kaplan
Yes, the Bay Area is a third world country when it comes to internet access. When I first got DSL in San Francisco in 1997 it was far cheaper and far faster than anything you could get in Europe. Then the FCC changed the rules and the big guys drove all the completion out of business and within a few years you only had a choice among several very expensive very slow speed monopoly suppliers.
So by 2005 you could get far faster and far cheaper internet even in deepest rural France than you could in San Francisco and the Valley. Now, more than ten years later I can get far faster internet on my cell phone in most parts of rural western Europe, uncapped, for a flat rate of 20 euro a month in the home country, than I can get fixed line in most parts of San Francisco. Yes, you can get line speeds in SF equal (actual not advertised) to what I get on my cell phone in rural Europe. But it will be four times the cost and data capped. Mobile data plans and real world speed and bandwidth in SF, forget it. Hugely expensive and reception is terrible.
But until the cities are removed from regulated cable companies and the California PUC is shutdown and reformed internet access in California will remain very slow, very expensive and very very flaky. So the Third-World-ification of California progresses unrelentingly .
As a swede this column seems bizarre. You mean that in the USA, the home of the Internet, you have caps on how much you can use your landline Internet? That is unheard in my country. Here you just decide on how fast the internet connections should be and then you are on your way.
If an ISP in Sweden but caps on the usage they would be out of business fast.
Mats, yeah that’s what happens when your cable provider has a monopoly on the coax cable jack that provides cable TV to every home. That means they can provide the best bandwidth at the lowest prices, drive all competitors out of business, and start introducing caps and raising the price once they’ve got you locked down.
We live in a rural area in Ontario. The nearest cable drop is 10km away but there is a small LTE-based ISP with no cap but 8 Mbps download (maximal).
“maybe the best argument I can think of for getting a new 4K TV, because it will pay for itself very quickly in bandwidth savings”. What am I not getting here? Using 2-5 times the stream rate will save bandwidth?
As you said, “a new column comes tomorrow”. Based on your constant track record of never meeting a delivery commitment, I’ll look for it in about a month (or next year).
This video clip represents Bob’s blog so well I couldn’t help but laugh and share: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v196bt5kTU . I’m not sure which side is Dash vs. Violet (KS vs. Bob Loyalists), but to quote Elastigirl – “Bob, it’s time to engage! Do something, don’t just stand there! I need you to…intervene!” End this madness!
May 21, 2018: “Finally, let’s face this Mineserver issue. I’ll do this in more detail in an upcoming column…”
.
I guess this ain’t that.
I do hope more folk take the minute it requires to enable sqm on the commercial products that now support it. It’s long been available in the aftermarket firmwares (openwrt/dd-wrt/etc) and in “gaming routers” under various trade names, all forms of linux and BSD, and now, eero… but ISPs like comcast have been slow to pick it up. It makes a world of difference for a family or small business sharing Internet.
sqm: https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/cerowrt/wiki/Smart_Queue_Management/
As good as fq_codel is (see RFC8290 for gory tech details)… orders of magnitude improvement on the cable uplink… orders of magnitude latency improvements on the wifi ( https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc17/atc17-hoiland-jorgensen.pdf ) (which eero also supports natively now)…
The lastest output of the bufferbloat effort, “sch_cake” has just entered the next linux kernel (4.19) and has backports as far back as Linux 3.10. It’s SQM on steroids, with a mode that rocks on docsis (cable modems) and I hope to see rapid adoption by users, vendors, and isps that care.
$100 is still $60 more than $40, Ronc, so I don’t get your point. I could use a digital antenna, too, and get ABC over the air, except I am 60+ miles from the tower and my neighbors tell me not to bother trying. Though I may anyway since all the San Francisco stations are on that same Mt. Sutro tower so aiming should be easy.
But there’s more to this solution than I first realized. YouTube TV is expensive, but it effectively allows for six separate accounts which can be anywhere. So find a friend who has it and ask him to adopt you. My six are taken, by the way. Also, we have an unlimited T-Mobile hotspot with a high-gain antenna in our old RV and it works remarkably well with the same accounts. Video is network-limited to 480p but we’re able to drive two TVs at the same time while going down the highway. That used to require a $1200+ satellite receiver so yet another industry has been disintermediated.
Welcome back Bob! Glad to hear that you’re a survivor!
My ISP, Telus (in Canada) tried to impose a bandwidth cap on my account. These caps are in essence a double-dipping, akin to charging some little old lady a penalty for watching too many hours of Matlock re-runs on her 1985 Sanyo TV set.
When I discussed this, Telus agreed that they do not limit the number of hours of TV that a customer can watch and my account has been configured to never have any bandwidth caps or overage charges.
@MikeN – Comcast not only wants you to use their modem for hotspot connectivity, but also because it is a significant source of income. They charge a modem rental fee monthly, so over time (assuming you keep the modem for a couple of years) you end up paying 3-4 times what the modem cost retail. Comcast is certainly not paying retail for the modem, so the one Bob bought for $30 is more like $15 for them, and at $5 per month rental…well, you do the math.
I have Comcast Business, so no data caps. But then, I pay a lot more per month than home service. Still, I get 4 hour turnaround time on any outage, so I guess that’s something. I just wish they would stop the deceptive practice of how they sell the connection speed. I pay for a 100 mbps connection but in practice it is more like 70 mbps with occasional bursts to 90-95 mbps. ISP’s should be forced to sell on average speed, not on a theoretical maximum that hardly anyone ever sees…
“I have a big column coming tomorrow”
.
Another posted deadline missed. Bob, you are a mess. Why do you consistently make promises only to let your fans down? This is about 5+ times in a row where you promise something with a fairly defined deadline and just miss it altogether. Stop doing this to yourself, you’re ruining your credibility!
“After 31 years of doing this column pretty much without a break”
—
The man is delusional. One column a month at 30 minutes of work each. 30 minutes is a generous estimate. Most of what he writes is obsolete or a lame prediction any kid could do.
@Frank We’re all suckers for thinking he’d ever follow through with one of his posted deadlines. Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me over…and over…and over again and I must be following Bob’s blog because what a joke! If this isn’t some social experiment where he says “gotcha ya” in a few years and lays out his data discoveries, then I don’t know what his problem is…
As a Santa Rosa-area resident, hometown of Sonic.net, are you not in their service area?
Maybe his new home burned down.
@Frank – @Steve Nicks – Mark isn’t just playing the readers of this column for suckers. His columns are his form of a Potemkin Village ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village ) where he can pretend everything he does is perfect. He knows full well that any potential consulting customers, investors, etc will probably only read the column content and he can make the positive impression that he wants to make.
@Mineserver — that would certainly explain why he seems to only mention the Mineserver project in comments…
Was looking forward to a new column today… 🙁
As always, an excellent column with interesting and though provoking ideas from Bob and many of the commenters. What a shame some of these others feel that we need to read their verbal vomit – but still, the columns are worth ignoring those babies.
Dave, I found it was $3 a month, and the modems burn out, at least the ones I bought.
July 16th, 2018
“I have a big column coming tomorrow”
I have to ask, what time are you on?
Try putting a timer on your router or it may have a reboot option to kick the kids off after hours.
Bob, no disrespect, been following you for years and love the articles, but get your shit together! You keep promising deadlines and not following through. Usually they are genericdeclarations, so there is wiggle room with the interpretation of time but when you essentially say “come back tomorrow” and we’re at 4 days later at this point, it feels like a big “F you” to your readers, KickStarter fiasco be damned. Don’t make us suffer because of that.
TVFool.com is the resource for checking the viability of OTA reception. It’s the only place where the actual transmitting facility characteristics and terrain profile are used in calculating signal strength predictions.
I’ve wondered for quite some time if Mr. Cringely has ever been screened for depression. Speaking from my own experience, much of what has happened the last few years is characteristic of someone suffering from clinical depression. Talk with your physician; Effexor has done wonders for my son. We had several false starts. Prozac and Wellbutrin left him groggy. I believe Effexor helped him sufficiently to graduate high school. In fact, I’m annoyed that his current therapist has taken him off Effexor. I’m hoping I can convince her to wean him off his current panel of meds, all of which make him drowsy and dizzy, and try him on Effexor alone. Good luck!
A topic which wouldn’t be out of place grazing the pages of the local redneck newspaper isn’t really the bursting through the doors square jawed air punching act a decent Cringely reboot requires. Like who, seriously, under the age of 60 watches television? The branding of internet equivalents is cool and everything but still living vicariously down a wirewhile almost every tech and lifestyle site is flipping past while Cringely keeps his spreading ass wedged in the chair.
Re big column. He did not say it would be ‘here’. I assume Bob does not give all his work away for free and that he gets paid by various publications for the more substantial efforts.
Gnarfle, you are either completely ignorant and clueless, or a complete ass.
Anyone who loses a child never gets over that.
As we age, we of course have further tragedies heaped upon us, and Mark has had several in fairly rapid succession, culminating in losing a large part of his personal items from 40 years in Tech.
We are all eagerly awaiting word on the infamous Kickstarter project, and to hear how he and his family have coped since the fire, and to hear what he will next prognosticate about.
Don’t go spouting your armchair diagnosis without knowing some history.
MrWindows,
Thank you for sharing that with me.
According to my son, I’m all three.
The steady state of human nature is arrogant self- righteousness.
Just ask the apostle Paul.
We’ve all lost someone about whom we care. You don’t get over it; you make room for it. It is appointed unto men once to die.
It is no more absurd to die at 18 as it is to die at 80; both are but moments in time.
Vaya Con Dios.
RE: Cringely not giving away his best work for free and being paid by other publications.
Who would these be and when? Cringely said he retired. If he has reversed this decision he hasn’t announced it on this blog. it also assumes a publisher, any publisher, wants to buy his stuff. I noticed a brief flicker of Cringely being cited on Slashdot due to anonymous topic submissions. (Cringely himself trying to promote his own work?) This didn’t generate a huge wave of excitement. Mind you, Slashdot passed its peak a few years ago too.
We’re still waiting for this BIG COLUMN with Cringley giving a triumphant AIR PUNCH followed by a jig on the spot and FIST PUMPING and HIP THRUSTING finished off with a HIGH FIVE and “FUCK, YEAH”. Instead we’re stuck sucking on the now dry bone of redneck television.
Gnarfle
It is true that both 18 years and 80 are moments in time. The sting left behind with loved ones is different. In the case of Chase Cringely – two months old – the agony is uniqe and acute in its own way.
https://www.cringely.com/tag/sids/
While your point may well be correct (i can’t say, we can only speculate), and your advice may be well-meant … I’ll encourage wading gently into these waters.
Acknowledged.
Perhaps he’s just gone “Plane Crazy”
It’s hilarious that people are still surprised at him failing to deliver “content” when promised.
I read him, because it’s occasionally interesting. But in no way would I ever count on Bob for much of anything at this point.
tell your goofy kid to sit farther away from the tv
If Cringely is oout of ideas because the world has moved on and the big names he used to stand in the light of have retired or taken their own product descriptions of being the thinnest and lightest to its ultimate conclusion maybe he needs to get out more?
I meet loads of interesting people in my job. Only a while ago my last client, while he was busy snogging me and feeling me up revealed how he was into standard compliance. I think this is another reason why Cringely need to rethink his career and get onto riding cock. It also pays well which will help cover all the Mineserver refunds he owes everybody.
Bob,
I did the research on all of this and found the optimal package to be thus:
We have 4-5 Roku devices around the home.
We have Sony PSVue (which also works on PS3/PS4 if your kids have or want one of those).
PSVue is our new cable.
Roku takes care of Netflix, Hulu, etc.
We pay $75 a month for a “full” package including HBO, Showtime, and Sports channels. $81 something with tax and fees.
My mother does not have HBO and Showtime and she pays $59.99. She still wants the sports channels. If you just want the basics, you can spend as little as $34.99, I think. She is not tech savvy at all, but has managed to use the PSVue just fine, she just missed the cable channel “numbers” and TV Guide for a time.
Our “base” Internet is $80 a month for Gigabit Ethernet (I’m a developer/architect), and then we pay another $29 a month for a “basic cable” package on AT&T U-Verse, which gets rid of the streaming limits for my account. (We don’t even have the cable box hooked up.)
So, take a look at PSVue, we LOVE IT! It is geography bound for Roku devices, but you can also stream from your phone or tables outside your geography. We go to hotels and use our PSVue.
Hulu has been our “problem child” because someone at our house signed us up, and we’re getting charged for it, even though we don’t use it. I’m about to fix that. I really don’t like that Roku requires a card for signup. It’s a license for a subscriber channel to charge us, that needs to be fixed by Roku.
Roku needs to improve its billing, but the set top box is “spot on”. We have had some issues with Roku charging us for things when “someone signed up” for us, but we don’t know who. Customer support has been good. They reversed the charges. Our media room has the Roku Ultra with outputs into our Denon Receiver and 7/2 surround sound.
We have a gigabit switch, so every port in the house which needs Gigabit has gigabit, especially for media streaming. I even joked to my wife that I was going to turn her office into a “server room”. She says “no bueno”… We have cloud for that anyway…
As for speeds, we discovered a long time ago that most places that serve up content cannot do so above about 90mb a second. Also, most laptops cannot stream above about 100mb/sec, and even our gaming machines with dedicated Ethernet only got to 947mb/sec. Even when I worked at IBM, the best I got wired was probably 200mb/sec. I run my laptop without Ethernet, just wireless and get 100mb/sec, and I can live with that.
So, try signing up for a minimalist cable package and see if your usage get waived, that’s my trick.
Almost forgot, get you a premium Wifi router (like a Netgear Nighthawk) , spend $200. Put it “high” in the center of your home for maximum coverage. It works like an “umbrella” above and around the router. That will give you max coverage. Ours is on the top shelf of a homework station and covers the entire 4300 sq. ft. of our home.
Come to think of it, we did the cable cutting about 18 months ago now. We used Tom’s Hardware as our guide, which gave us great advice on streaming choices. Our Cable/Internet was $300 with gigabit and the U-Verse 400 (HBO and everything), and now we’re below $200 with the same packages and gigabit.
I do think that you’re not keeping up with Tech, and I really just check your site about once a month (or less) now. So, I’ll check back in a month or so for your next article. Until then… you know where to find me if you need help with cable cutting, or setting up Internet firewalls for Mineservers.
Has Crinely turned full blown incel blowing machine gun snot bubbles into his chair cushion or are we still getting a new topic soon?
Recently dropped Verizon for TV and phone and just have Verizon 50 for internet. Then got Google Wifi to get a consistent strong signal for streaming. I recommend the Google Wifi. Already had a Firestick in the Family Room for Netflix and Amazon streaming, but those used to get hung up at times before the Google Wifi.
Problem was the stream provider I liked best and got is Youtube TV. Since Amazon and Google don’t play nice together the Firestick is not supported on Youtube TV. Too bad, I like the Firestick remote. So I got an Apple TV for the Family Room but HATED the remote (also hated the remote on an older Apple TV). Apple TV remote is all form over function. I know – Apple would be happy with you just using your iPhone and Airplay as the remote, but I like to have a dedicated remote.
Bedroom TV has a roku. This remote is old school and is all function over form, but works fine.
Returned the Apple TV. On a trial week now with Direct TV Now. Seems a little unfinished but works. May also trial Hulu. Both of these will work with the existing Firestick so no new hardware to buy if I am happy with one of these streaming services.
“a real column comes tomorrow”
I don’t think that means what you think it means…
It’s OK. I’ll happily read your next post whenever it shows up. I just think it’s funny that not one time you’ve said, “tomorrow”, has it actually been, tomorrow. Or the day after that, even.
It’s almost always a mistake to assume that your perception of reality is the same as everyone else’s.
Where would we be without Job’s reality distortion field?
I told my son there’s a shared delusion that we are civilzed when in “reality” we are sophisticated savages.
And so it goes.
And in my reality civilized is spelled civilzed.
IF I had to see G. Stephanopoulous every morning, you would have to pay me $40 a month!
Thanks for the Internet America! Fibre connection, no caps and bittorrent works great! Glad I am not living there.
The Steve Gibson of blogging.
The Steve Gibson of blogging? omg yes. This explains everything. I think I just had a brain orgasm.
As tends to be the case when once-active fora die, this place has become something of a fool’s gallery where each person repeatedly plays their expected part. Roger has already established his role as the Knight Who Says Mineserver, but I can’t help but welcome the relatively recent addition of trashtalk, who turns nearly everything into a sexual reference. Perhaps with enough time and diligence, we can build a true troll’s theater where the Internet equivalent of a sitcom develops around the Newtonian effects of different personalities constantly reacting off each other. I must confess that I still read this site more for the comments than for the actual articles, so I must once again offer my thanks to you folks for a bit of levity in what would otherwise be a boring day.
Re: “Sqrl August 1, 2018 at 6:51 am The Steve Gibson of blogging.” I don’t get the connection. Who’s the Steve Gibson of blogging and why?. I’ve been listening to Steve’s podcast since episode 1/999 (now up to ep 674/999). I even get the “Sqrl” name.
Ronc,
You get what SQRL is and you can’t figure out my comment? 2+ weeks after RXC said he was going to publish a big column tomorrow and it’s still vaporware.
Search Google for “Steve Gibson Vaporware” and once you get past his paid results you might find a hint or two.
He’s been building SQRL for about 4 years as far as I remember (it may be 5 or 6 by now) and over the past 2 or 3 years he has talked about it almost being done numerous times and yet here we are and it’s neck and neck with the “next big column”.
Don’t even get me started on 4+ years of talking about updating SpinRite so that it will work in less than forever on disk drives that are more than a few hundred GBs. Several years ago I read a theory that he cooked up SQRL right after he boasted about how great SpinRite 6.1 was going to be because I figured out that he can’t actually do what he has claimed he can do with SpinRite. I thought that was BS when I read it but every day it seems more plausible.
Maybe RXC’s next big column is about SQRL?
If you are still clueless, RXC is the Steve Gibson of blogging. Now go have a brain orgasm.
I get it. You meant “RXC is the Steve Gibson of blogging” with respect to projects that never seem to finish. Steve is different in that he doesn’t set deadlines, and has completed enough projects that his credibility is not in question. Also he hasn’t taken money from anyone, without giving them a finished product. All of his many free projects still work, including ShieldsUp and the spectre/meltdown app, which have also been updated for free.
As long as Shields Up! continues to work, Steve Gibson is fine by me. I could care less about Spinrite as, to quote somebory’s president, its old news and totally unnecessary. I been running Fedora Linux as my only OS for the last 15 years: its filing system needs no crutches.
Re: “its filing system needs no crutches”. Spinrite has nothing to do with the filing system. It doesn’t come with any hardware, so it boots up the computer itself, communicating with the hard drive through the computer’s BIOS. Unlike any built-in utilities, it tries to read every bit of data on every sector, never giving up until it succeeds. Then it moves the hard to read data to new sectors, marking the bad ones, so they won’t be used again. https://www.grc.com/sranalysis.htm
Ronc,
Are you the president of the Steve Gibson fan club, or is Ronc an alias for Steve? I appreciate all of his free tools and services and have been listening to him and reading him for as long as I can remember. I think it’s sad that he lets all of the free stuff get in the way of dealing with the program that many people have paid for and can no longer use in a reasonable way. I own SpinRite, which if you are the least bit honest you know is useless on modern hard drives/systems. I listen to Security Now, which is a painful way to stay current on IT security since he’s pretty long winded, often confusing and mostly just reads other people’s articles, but it helps my wife sleep in the car on long trips.
SpinRite 6 was released in 2004 when a 2 GB disk was the largest available. SpinRite would work fine on that disk. Since most hard drives are 500 times bigger than that now they take a lot longer to scan. A 1 TB disk takes 500 times longer to scan than the largest disk available in 2004. It took a couple of days for me to scan a new m.2 1 TB SSD. It also has a lot of trouble with very large disks and modern BIOSs so until he makes it very clear on his website that this program is no recommended for large disk (> 100 GB ?) and may not work on a somewhat recent BIOS, your comment “Also he hasn’t taken money from anyone, without giving them a finished product.” may be technically true but he’s been selling barely functional product for the last 10 years.
Last weeks SpinRite story was about saving an ATM. Probably running on a very small hard disk with XP. The testimonial on his website is about an 80 GB drive that took 22 hours to run at level 2 (the fast level).
He’ll never read my story on the air. I’ve run it on dozens of disks and it’s never recovered any of the bad disks. Many of the disks were not bad, I was running maintenance on them (when they were small enough that it made sense). Any disk that ever got stuck on a bad spot spent days and days and never got past the bad spot.
By the way, every Linux distribution comes with a simple tool that would probably fix 90% + of the disks that SpinRite can fix and anyone can download a live distribution for free.
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=4M (assuming the disk you want to test is sda).
This will work on any disk on any PC nondestructively and as Steve says the disk will correct the errors as long as you scan the entire disk. Of course you won’t be able to stare at the fancy DOS graphics while it runs. Opening a second terminal allows you to monitor progress with this commend:
watch -n15 “kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd)”
Open Source SpinRite wit no Yabba Dabba Doo.
I’m looking forward to SpinRite 6.1 and hope I live long enough to get it. Until then he’s selling crapware.
Just to let you know what it is like this side of the pond, I’m paying around £45 / month (~$60) for Internet and land-line (that includes our call charges, so it varies a bit). For that we get unlimited 75Mbps. We don’t bother subscribing to streaming services because free-to-air terrestrial broadcast TV includes all the BBC channels plus tons of others, so we just record the ones we want on a PVR and watch them whenever, but we can use catch-up services like BBC iPlayer if we need them. Our son spends his spare time alternating between streaming films and playing games. I don’t know what our monthly usage is because I just don’t have to care.
@SQRL, Re: “Ronc, Are you the president of the Steve Gibson fan club, or is Ronc an alias for Steve?” No to both. I agree 100% with everything you said about Steve in your last comment. I was merely having a hard time understanding the one before that comparing him to Bob, until you explained you were referring to product delays.
I find it interesting that Steve makes his living from repairing hard drives, which has absolutely nothing to do with his primary interest, security. I suppose they do compliment each other, since hiding your data from others is different from re-enabling your own access to it.
Paul – However, IIRC, you also have an annual Television tax, which pays for those BBC channels, isn’t that correct? How much is it and how often is it paid? I thought I read somewhere it was £25.
What’s a television? I gave up on television ages ago. I hated to part with my Sony Trinitron but it was gathering dust and nobody wanted it so into the bin it went with a crunch and a boing as something gave way inside. It was so sad and a waste.
So where’s Cringely? He must be hating his job because we haven’t seen him for ages. In the meantime I had one client who was an extremely fit ex soldier with a cock to die for on him getting up me and wow did he make a noise when he came. His orgasm certainly lasted.It was really nice feeling him pull back then drill me as he felt the aftershocks of his orgasm. Sex like this is definately a leg spreader I’ll just say this. In the meantime we’re still waiting for the big article promised for the next day.
MrWindows – The “license fee” (i.e. television tax) in the UK is £150 / year = £12.50 / month. This is pretty much obligatory unless you don’t have a TV and don’t watch any BBC material over the Internet (or you lie to the pop-up dialog asking if you have a license).
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