You can click the image for a bigger version.

This is actually making me suspect that I've been lurking in all the wrong corners of the web, because I have no idea when House became a meme. [Flickr via Ace of Spades HQ via Neatorama]

Update: As some of you have pointed out, this image is a collection of memes loved by the fantastic folks of reddit and created by the talented licenseplate as part of the reddit secret Santa gift exchange. Licenseplate actually emailed me to say that there is a "final version" of the poster coming soon (and it sounds like it'll include even more of the craziness adored by redditors as well as the rest of us.) So, we'll keep an eye out.

Oh, and it turns out that the poster next to Pedobear is Karmanaut, reddit's resident comment karma hog. I think I haven't been lurking over there enough if I missed that reference.

According to Time Warner, unless you have at least 7Mbps internet, you can't download music, or even "Windows Media Player software." And you need their most expensive plan for "Super Fast Shopping Concert Tickets & Online Auctions" and watching videos. No wonder I couldn't snag Momofuku Ko reservations when I still had Time Warner!

And then there's Cox. By being vague, they're a little less bad, but still perpetuating the idea you can't share photos or download music without at least a 10Mbps connection. And WTF is PowerBoost? (DOCSIS 3.0?) Update: Okay, it's not some marketing name for DOCSIS 3.0, but a tech Cox licenses from Comcast to give a little extra bandwidth for part of a download, if the tubes are clear.

Verizon is the least offensive here—while they still say you need at 7.1Mbps for streaming video, their other claims aren't totally unreasonable, and just below the chart they give you access to what the bandwidth translates to in real-world experience at each tier, like that a 50MB album would take over 6 minutes to download with their 1Mbps connection, so you see what you're paying for.

Here's AT&T's ridiculous chart again, which says you need at least 3Mbps to use Facebook, and at least 18Mbps to download movies.

Comcast doesn't merit going into the wall of shame, surprisingly, since they just show you how fast stuff downloads at different (theoretical) speeds, so there's no real fear-mongering involved.

The bottom line is that you have to know your own internet habits and what kind of speed you really need—don't let your prospective ISP scare you into you paying for more bandwidth you'd actually use. Personally, I'm pretty comfortable with around 20Mbps down, and 10 up. But six is definitely tolerable, and I'd wager for most people, unless you've got a bunch of people watching Netflix and downloading music and playing games all at once (like me).

Image via YsteJam Photography/Flickr

Just head on over to the live stream and use the virtual keyboard to play a song, something resembling a song or a random and hideous mashup of notes that ruins the holidays for everyone. The installation will be on display at the Brick Lane Studio in London through January. [Theopane via Switched via TechEBlog]

This chart for AT&T U-Verse internet makes no sense whatsoever. For one, what's the difference between "watching TV/video clips" and "streaming video" and why does one need just 12 measly megabits, while the other needs 18? Also, the numbers just don't work. Even full HD 1080p streaming video through Zune on Xbox Live just requires 10Mbps-12Mbps of bandwidth.

If anything, it's the internet gaming that needs 12Mbps, as I was sadly reminded while trying to download the entirety Left 4 Dead 2 over the 6Mbps AT&T DSL I've got in GA—the fastest internet AT&T will give me. I'd console myself with Hulu, but you know, it might not work. [AT&T, Thanks Slacker!]

By "taking the internet seriously," we mean, in one sense, getting more serious "the cloud," which is a digital yuppy euphemism for "stuff stored on honking servers out there somewhere that you access over the internet." A few things—a few acquisitions, really—make us think Apple is eyeballing the internet in a new way as means of service. And we don't mean in the sorta kinda way they run MobileMe, which has been, at first, a flop and now, decent if it were free like all the Google stuff is and not $100 a year.

• The biggest piece is Lala. It remains to be seen how radically Apple uses it to transform iTunes, but the potential for a complete upheaval of the current iTunes model is enormous. Right now, you buy stuff on iTunes, download it to your hard drive, and sync it to your iThing through a rubbery white cable. A LalaTunes would be re-oriented around the web: You buy and manage songs over the web, and could stream your library anywhere, like to other computers, to your phone, directly. You can buy the streaming rights to a song forever, for 10 cents (well, that's what Lala sells 'em for now, anyway), rather than download it. And if this new, de-centralized iTunes is indeed embedded all over the web, it would become the de facto way to listen to music on internet, the same way Google is just how your search.

• Apple tried to buy AdMob, before Google did. AdMob is a mobile advertising company, formerly, one of the biggest. The sell ads, on the internet, for mobile phones. Apple might've wanted it as a defensive move to keep it away from Google, but just as likely, Apple wanted a slice of the mobile advertising revenue that's simply going to explode over the next couple of years, much of which is being sold for the iPhone.

• A somewhat shakier rumor is that Apple's is thinking about buying iCall, not for the name, but because they're a VoIP company. If Apple's really diving into the internet stuff, an internet calling service makes some sense. Also, though unrelated, it's interesting that after Apple blocked the app Podcaster for being iTunesy, it later released the functionality it provided, and Apple's complaint about Google Voice and other GV apps, were that they "duplicated" functionality.

• Update: Oops, forgot all about the massive, 500,000 square-foot data center Apple's supposedly building that would be one of the largest in the world

Again, Apple's dabbled in internet services for a long time—you know, .Mac and MobileMe, with its storage and syncing and photo services—but in the future, you'll probably mark the iPhone as when the internet really started to matter. It's a relatively modest piece of hardware compared to a real computer—when Ballmer said "the internet is not designed for iPhone," truthfully, he wasn't horribly off-base since a ton of non-game apps really are particular means displaying stuff from the internet. Remember how limited the iPhone felt before apps? Before it became a real internet thing?

The defining conflict of personal computing for the last two decades has been Apple vs. Microsoft, Mac vs. PC. Today, it's a three-way battle: Apple vs. Microsoft vs. Google. Steve Ballmer's been mocked for years over his obsession with Google, manifested through their Microsoft's blind pursuit of search marketshare, but his single-mindedness looks far less loony today. It's funny, actually, that Microsoft has been entirely absent from Apple's recent collisions, which have all been with Google: Maps, voice, mobile advertising, music, executives, phones, etc. Microsoft doesn't even enter the picture here, at least from Apple's perspective. And these fights are all about the internet or mobile services.

Which is illuminating. Microsoft has had their lunch chewed, swallowed and spit back into their faces on mobile, on digital music and on, um, the internet. They let all of those things, which they were in a serious position to dominate, pass them by. Windows Mobile is hosed. Zune HD is amazing, but far too late. Google owns over 70 percent of the search market, and people are still abandoning Internet Explorer in droves after Microsoft let it rot for years. Microsoft, with its OS on 90 percent of the world's computers, obviously has much more to lose than Apple if the OS becomes truly irrelevant.

Apple probably doesn't want to be Microsoft. Complacency breeds extinction. And it's clear that things are continually shifting away from the traditional desktop (or laptop), to the internet. I'm not saying Apple's abandoning OS X and MacBooks and we're going to all wake up in the puffy cloud tomorrow, but anybody who thinks things aren't going in this new terminal-client direction, where OSes and hardware doesn't matter is blind or stupid or in denial. I mean, it's already here in some ways. (Uh, just look at Google.) A model that stays tethered to the traditional desktop is like tying a weight around your ankle and trying to fly by flapping your arms.

An Apple that's seriously focused on the internet could be a curious thing. Apple's all about ecosystems that flow and work together. Would it be a walled garden in the clouds? Or would it be open, you know like people seem to think the internet should be? (I think of how Nintendo transitioned Mario from 2D to 3D with Super Mario 64. It was totally Mario, but something completely new.)

Whatever the case, it's hard to imagine Apple not taking the internet and internet-based services more seriously than ever—butting heads again and again with Google, the new Microsoft (of the internet) shows at least that much. We'll have to wait and see what that really means, though.

Many attribute the technical difficulties involved with communicating under large bodies of water as being one of the major reasons why our knowledge of the depths is so limited. Neptune will change all that using a 497-mile ring of fiber-optic cable sitting off the coast of Canada. The ring has five nodes that will stream data from hundreds of undersea devices directly to the internet. Wally, the robot pictured above, is an example of one of those devices. He just happens to be the world's first internet-operated deep-sea crawler.

"It's revolutionary in that it brings two new components into the ocean environment, which are power and high-bandwidth Internet," says Project Director Chris Barnes, from the project's offices at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. "We're really on the verge of wiring the oceans."

Outside of the scientific community, I'm willing to bet that the military would be interested in this kind of technology as well. Check out Scientific American for a full gallery of images. [Scientific American via PopSci]

But! It's "going to get fixed." He promises. (As AT&T has for over a year.) Besides, part of it's in your head—AT&T says they have a national dropped call rate of 1.32 percent, which is within two-tenths of one percent below the "highest-scoring provider." (Though it's, um, higher in NY on some phones, according to some people.)

Disconcertingly, he made reference to AT&T's favorite stat, that 3 percent of smartphone customers push 40 percent of data, and that they're looking at incentives—as the WSJ put it—that'll get those people to cut back, "in a way that's consistent with net-neutrality and FCC regulations." These FCC regulations. Meaning pay-per-byte data.

But you know what? If I could get data 100 percent of the time, sure, I'll pay more for it, Ralphie. [WSJ]

[Online Education]

Oh wait. It's a balloon, too? A man-shaped balloon with strange thumbs who is owned by 50 Cent? Maybe this video didn't make me understand the Internet after all.

Rafael Rivera discovered that there was only a shortcut to the feature that was disabled; the feature itself is still there. All you have to do is type "adhoc" into the Windows search bar in the Start Menu and it'll show up, as illustrated above. Done and done.

You know what else is taken out of Windows 7 Starter? Their screenshot snipping tool. Yeah. They were too cheap to let netbook users have a SNIPPING TOOL. Thankfully the printscreen button combined with Paint (they didn't take that out!) still works. [Within Windows via Neowin]

While Google's always delivered customized search results to people logged into their Google account—that is, search results tailored to you, based on your web history (yes, even outside of Google, like Gizmodo), past searches and previous results you've clicked on—it's now going to be doing that for everybody. Even if you're not logged in, you're going to get personalized results and yes, more targeted ads, based on past searches, tracked by an anonymous cookie that stays on your computer for 180 days. (BTW, it's not like Google's just started keeping track of your searches, it's just now Google's using that info more directly, that's all.)

You can turn it off here, though I'm guessing that won't turn off the dirty feeling you've got right now.

[Google via Bits]

What do you think the future will hold (i.e.will Google end up creating sentient robots hell bent on destroying mankind)? [Image via BustedTees]

With the debate on net neutrality in full swing in the US, we've been hearing about Bandwidth Hogs again. 'Bandwidth Hog' is a sound bite that conveys a strong emotion: you can virtually see the fat pig chomping on the bandwidth, pushing back all the other animals in the barnyard with his fat pig shoulders all the while scrutinizing with his shiny piggy eyes to see if the farmer isn't around...

The image is so powerful that everyone thinks they understand what the term means , no one questions if the analogy is correct. In discussing this issue, Herman and I realised we had serious doubts about the existence of that potentially mythical beast. In fact, we are not sure even the telcos know what a bandwidth hog is and does.

But it makes great headlines: "Net Neutrality will force the telco's to give The Internet away to Bandwidth Hogs". They claim that bandwidth hogs steal all the bandwidth and cause network congestion, and therefore their behaviour harms all the other regular and peaceful law-abiding users. And to add insult to injury they pay the same price as the others! No, policing and rationing must be applied by the benevolent telco to protect the innocent.

Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, the way that telcos identify the Bandwidth Hogs is not by monitoring if they cause unfair traffic congestion for other users. No, they just measure the total data downloaded per user, list the top 5% and call them hogs.

For those service providers with data caps, these are usually set around 50 Gbyte and go up to 150 Gbyte a month. This is therefore a good indication of the level of bandwidth at which you start being considered a "hog". But wait: 50 Gbyte a month is… 150 kbps average (0,15 Mbps), 150 Gbyte a month is 450 kbps on average. If you have a 10 Mbps link, that's only 1,5 % or 4,5 % of its maximum advertised speed!

And that would be "hogging"?

The fact is that what most telcos call hogs are simply people who overall and on average download more than others. Blaming them for network congestion is actually an admission that telcos are uncomfortable with the 'all you can eat' broadband schemes that they themselves introduced on the market to get people to subscribe. In other words, the marketing push to get people to subscribe to broadband worked, but now the telcos see a missed opportunity at price discrimination...

As Herman explains in his post, TCP/IP is by definition an egalitarian protocol. Implemented well, it should result in an equal distribution of available bandwidth in the operator's network between end-users; so the concept of a bandwidth hog is by definition an impossibility. An end-user can download all his access line will sustain when the network is comparatively empty, but as soon as it fills up from other users' traffic, his own download (or upload) rate will diminish until it's no bigger than what anyone else gets.

Now I'm pretty sure that many telcos will disagree with our assessment of this. So here's a challenge for them: in the next few days, I will specify on this blog a standard dataset that would enable me to do an in-depth data analysis into network usage by individual users. Any telco willing to actually understand what's happening there and to answer the question on the existence of hogs once and for all can extract that data and send it over to me, I will analyse it for free, on my spare time. All I ask is that they let me publish the results of said research (even though their names need not be mentioned if they don't wish it to be). Of course, if I find myself to be wrong and if indeed I manage to identify users that systematically degrade the experience for other users, I will say so publicly. If, as I suspect, there are no such users, I will also say so publicly. The data will back either of these assertions.

Please email me if you're interested. And please publicise this offer if you're not in a position to extract such a dataset but are still interested in the answer. This is a much more important question than knowing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin!

Reprinted with permission from Fiberevolution; written in collaboration with Dadamotive. Megahog source image from the AP via TheAge

Whenever a Google has a hiccup, even if it's not search, our tiplines are flooded. Twitter becomes an unreadable stream of complaining. The world, online, stops. Bing? Despite capturing about 10% of the search market, not so much. We got a couple pings in our tips page, and exactly zero emails. Which is odd! So let's theorize:

1. Bing users don't report outages to tech blogs, because they don't read tech blogs. They're using Bing because that's what Internet Explorer tells them to use
2. Bing users don't bother complaining; they just use Google for a half an hour. They're natural switchers anyway—they switched to Bing, right?—so it's not a big deal to shake things up for a bit. Google users, they're stubborn.
3. People don't feel so bonded with Bing, because it doesn't seem as central to their lives online as Google. Google apps—Mail, Maps Docs, Calendar, whatever—all live under the same umbrella, in the same rough interface, and under the same branding. Bing feels like its own thing to a certain extent
4. Shut up you jerk, I was utterly beside myself between the minutes of 9:24 and 10:07 PM EST last night, because of the lack of Bing.

Now you go! What will it take before Bing starts to feel, as depressingly as Google, like some kind of digital phantom limb? Will it ever?

Though I'll probably keep doing what I usually do, and just plug words into my browser's search bar when I wanna know what it means—why bother going to a separate dictionary site? [Google via LA Times]

Oh, and man, OpenDNS is so, so screwed. Google eats everything it touches. [Google]