5 posts tagged “jq”
Time Warner was unable to deliver the Fox channel in high definition during the Super Bowl Sunday night in one of its biggest and most lucrative markets, New York, home of the New York Giants.
Flooded with complaints, the cable provider was unable to resolve a long-standing problem with its HD service. Customers who jammed the company's technical support lines were not offered a refund or credit. Instead, the cable provider lamely offered those who hung on for over 30-minutes on the phone a free premimum channel for one month. (And the problem with Fox persisted.)
No word yet on lost revenues due to the outage with the biggest, most expensive advertisements of the entire year on the line. However, doubtless Fox's Murdoch will be looking for some payback from the collapsing cable firm. As for customers of Time Warner, they have endured outages on the cable company's HD service for at least 8 months, yet Time Warner has been unwilling or unable to correct the problems.
Such technical imcompetence on the part of Time Warner calls into question the company's ability to deliver everything from digital phone service to high-speed Internet service. If it can't even deliver a televison picture, one wonders how on earth the company can ever hope to hijack the Internet and defeat the net neutrality movement.
No word on how many New York Super Bowl parties were blown out by Time Warner's fumble.
PS: Time Warner's HD service for the Super Bowl also reportedly crashed in the Cleveland area.
PPS: Time Warner also reportedly botched the Super Bowl in the California towns of Twentynine Palms , Yucca Valley, and Barstow.
FOR MORE OF JQ'S NEWS AND REVIEWS, VISIT J-Q.COM
Technology is like Taoism: It reveals the interconnectedness of things.
Okay, maybe not. But it's a good excuse for a rambling discussion of technological trends, issues, and advice. Such was the case on Ron Morris' show, The American Entrepreneur, on Saturday, January 26th, 2008. From Comcast and the future of digital phone service to maglev technology, we covered the gamut on Ron's radio program, which airs on AM Newstalk 1360 in Philadelphia.
Of course, it's also available as a free podcast from iTunes. Just search on "Ron Morris" under podcasts and download the January 26th show.
FOR MORE OF JQ'S NEWS AND REVIEWS, VISIT J-Q.COM
There's nothing like consumer electronics to get you into the holiday spirit. So to get into the mood I did a couple of segments on LIVE with Regis & Kelly on Tuesday (December 4).
Running through 20 different gift ideas from HD TVs to remote controls on a live show with a studio audience is a challenge. But the whole crew--including about 20 stage hands moving sets and equipment around--was great. From a state-of-the-art Pioneer plasma to MTV Games' Rock Band, Regis & Kelly played along. Even though I had to follow Ben Affleck and the shirtless Mario Lopez...
For folks looking for a complete rundown on the products and gift ideas, I'll be posting a complete list at J-Q.com this week, including items we missed because the show was heavy (Turtle Beach Ear Force headphones that Kelly really liked and Guitar Hero III, which I was going to play for them, honest).
To kick out the show, the R, K, and JQ trio played "Mississippi Queen" on Rock Band with Regis on drums, Kelly on vocals (she knows all the lyrics!), and your's truly on lead guitar. I was the one who didn't need a wig.
FOR MORE OF JQ'S NEWS AND REVIEWS, VISIT J-Q.COM
Google, whose corporate creed includes the motto "You can make money without doing evil," has announced that it will retain personal data on individual Web surfers' searches for only 2 years. And in an another amazing example of TP (technological prevaricaton--see article below), some reporters actually bought the marketing spin that this would somehow help protect people's privacy.
Quick background: When you use Google to search for, say, "Clinton," "Clap Your Hands," or "Britney naked" (not that anyone I know would do that), the search engine pegs your search to your IP address--and then stores a record of it. Thus, if someone in the future wanted to know what subversive activities JQ had been up to, they wouldn't have to hack into my computers. All they would need to do is look through the Google records. Indeed, they could in theory go further, since Google not only tracks all of your searches, it also looks at cookies on your system, cookies which may tell them what you ordered online, what bank you use, your daughter's name,...well, you get the idea.
Does Google warn you with a pop-up box every time you enter a search term that you are being tracked. No. Does the company tell you that every search you conduct on its site could be used against you in a court of law? No. Does the company say, "This search could be used against you in your upcoming messy divorce/fraud/terrorist legal battle." Uh, no.
Is Google's retention of such information a standard practice in the industry? No. Try Microsoft or AOL searches and you'll find they toss out the data almost immediately.There are also several search engines that explicitly don't track your searches, including one called Scroogle that submits your query anonymously to (you guessed it) Google.
The only reason Google tracks and stores all this personal data is for money. Spying on you is just incidental to the process. However, if Google really cared about people, as it professes, then it would give each of us a cut of the profit it makes from harvesting our personal information--and quit trying to trick us about how it's protecting people's privacy.
FOR MORE OF JQ'S NEWS AND REVIEWS, VISIT J-Q.COM
