3D in my browser, rendered by my browser? I gotta get this.

At least that part of the Internet doesn’t include Twitter.

via TechCrunch

I ran into this puzzling CAPTCHA today. Although I clicked the refresh button to get a new image, I’ve been wondering whether I should have just typed in

\sum\limits^\infty_{m=1} \text{Itithe}

For those of you unfamiliar with LaTeX: that code is rendered as

Posted via email from Frederick’s posterous

Any tier

Yesterday, I got an ad in the mail from them for their digital cable service, offering a free HD receiver. On the reverse side of the ad, it says that I can sign up for “any tier” of their high speed Internet or phone service to get an HD personal video recorder for free.

Sign up for any tier ... get an HD PVR for free.

Apparently, the fine print specifies that “any tier” really means “Rogers Hi-Speed Internet Lite and above”, which excludes the Ultra-Lite tier valued at $27.99/month.

Hi-Speed Internet Lite tier or above also required

I don’t think I’m the only one who would find this a little bit misleading.

While it doesn’t really look good on paper to say “sign up for Lite or above” in the big bullet, it would be a lot more honest than defining “any tier” as “not any tier but this one and above”.

And while I would certainly die of broadband withdrawal if I had the Ultra-Lite package, I still think there are people who will probably sign up for the cheapest tier and discover that they do not, in fact, get a free HD PVR.

Here’s the entire scan; click on the image to view in full size.

Get a free HD PVR!

(As of more than a year ago, I no longer use Rogers cable Internet because there’s something cheaper out there.)

What are the tiers?

On a semi-related note, Rogers seems to be doing a great job at market segmentation. Instead of providing consumers with economical plans comparable to those in France (20-30Mbps connections, VoIP service, and HDTV with a DVR included for just $45 a month), Rogers Communications has decided to split a service as important as cable Internet into… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 different plans.

1. Ultra-lite @ $27.99/month; 500 kbps down, 2 GB limit
2. Lite @ $35.99/month; 3 Mbps down, 25 GB limit
3. Express @ $46.99/month; 10 Mbps down, 60 GB limit
   This used to be the highest plan back when it was only 5 Mbps.
4. Extreme @ $59.99/month; 10 Mbps down, 95 GB limit
   This means $13 extra for 35 GB of transfer.
5. (new) Extreme Plus @ $69.99/month; 25 Mbps down, 125 GB limit
6. (new) Ultimate @ $99.99/month; 50 Mbps down, 175 GB limit

(all plan information current as of April 7, 2010)

Theoretically, creating these tiers of service maximizes revenue by differentiating between groups of consumers with dissimilar willingness to pay for Internet. (There’s also a supposed benefit to charging more for faster speeds and more bandwidth: curb torrenting and illegal file sharing. That’s a more reasonable justification.)

In reality, it just makes consumers jealous of users who can afford $100/month Internet. In addition, I’m rather wary of a company that has the capability to offer faster speeds overall to match the top countries (South Korea has average broadband of 14.6 Mbps, and Japan has an average of 7.9 Mbps), but which suppresses broadband for its corporate gain at the cost of consumer benefit.

This is probably one of many reasons why consumers, particularly Canadian iPhone users (albeit not for cable Internet), despise Rogers. It plays like it dominates the market. After all, broadband Internet in Canada is an oligopoly; Bell, Rogers, and Shaw are essentially the only big players in the market (and Shaw isn’t even available here). We don’t have much choice.

My conclusion

My personal perspective of Rogers, from a consumer view, is that they don’t deserve most of our business.

What happened? Why do I feel like the Internet is collapsing? Aiya!

I’m really disappointed. I’d always had uptime of over 99.96% with the first company and amazing pricing (okay, now that they’re shutting down I can reveal that I’ve been using ResellerScene). I used their reseller services to host over a dozen web sites on independent cPanel accounts.

(Begin nerdy section)
Earlier this month, they moved to new server setups; apparently the new servers are virtualized—it’s pretty obvious when WHM says the server runs on Xen. Code that had worked for years broke down because of new PHP security settings, misconfiguration of PHP as an Apache module, and file permission errors. Their help desk was really helpful because they quickly moved to PHP-CGI, which helped with permission errors and custom configuration, but which broke more things as a result of php_flag and php_value declarations in .htaccess files.
(End nerdy section)

Those were the first signs of trouble.

I didn’t immediately switch hosts. I had been a customer for more than 2 years and support was always quick and helpful. Then there were the awesome discounts I’ve been enjoying because I signed up as customer #6, before prices went up.

Today, I got a sad e-mail which began as follows:

I regret to inform you that due to financial instability, ResellerScene LLC will be going out of business. Due to the economic downturn, ResellerScene operations have greatly slowed down and it no longer seems viable for ResellerScene to continue.

I now have just over a month to migrate my dozen sites (and client sites) to some new host. Some I can move to DreamHost, but I’ll need to find another cPanel reseller service for some of the client sites.

*sigh*. Life sucks.

As for DreamHost, their services are awesome: great balance of features and price. Over the past year, I’ve been able to set up my custom-compiled PHP installation, use up gigabytes of storage and run important sites without much downtime. It’s a service I’d recommend to anyone… seriously! But I can’t get over the fact that they’ve had so many network failures in the past few days.

It’s not like DreamHost’s shutting down. Yet. But the downtime makes me wary of migrating my old sites to DreamHost, at least until they resolve these issues.

Now I have a headache. Thinking about migrating a dozen sites without breaking anything. Gotta go drink some tea… listen to some music… relax. Relax, relax, relax!

What do I do?!

I need your input. Let me know (@FrederickDing) of any (reliable!) and reasonably-priced web hosts with good reputations. Most importantly, I need to find a place where I can host client sites and provide them with control panel access.

I’ll be giving scores based on these factors:

• Web site design / usability
• Compatibility
• Converted appearance
• Embeds

In case you’re wondering, these 4 document publishing services are Docstoc, edocr, Issuu and Scribd. Of these, Scribd and Docstoc are likely the best known and the best established.

I should give a warning for those on low bandwidth connections: this is a screenshot/media-heavy post.

Web site

First impressions really matter (see Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell), so I find the appearance of the home page of such a site very important. In addition to these first impressions, I want a site that is navigable on which I can do common actions (uploading, viewing, sharing) without hunting for those functions.

edocr has, to be honest, a rather ugly start page. It doesn’t have a modern, Web 2.0 feel, nor does it feel even minutely ‘slick’. If I didn’t know that it was a document publishing site, visiting the site doesn’t make it immediately obvious. Examples of documents are hidden below the fold. The home page seems, to be honest, very hideous.

edocr

At least the document viewing page is usable.

Rating:

Scribd has a well designed and uncluttered site. The home page makes it clear what the service is all about, and the document viewing page is neatly laid out. The common actions I would want to take on a document (sharing, viewing, commenting) are easily accessible. The only concern I have is that the area allotted to the document file itself is too small.

Scribd's beautiful home page

Rating:

Docstoc has a clean site that, although not as intuitive as Scribd’s, is still very navigable and usable. If Scribd is the YouTube of documents, then Docstoc would be blip.tv; it targets professionals and business documents as opposed to files from everyone (not that the common person can’t use it). Hence, there are links all over the site for “Premier Documents”, “Docstore”, and making money from documents.

Docstoc

What I love most about this site is the much larger reading area on any document viewing page. Docstoc seems to be less focused on user interaction (as in comments) and much more on the original content itself, but it is exactly this that makes it easy to download files and actually use the content.

Docstoc

Rating:

Issuu takes a completely different approach, one that targets magazines and professional publications; its site reflects this niche. That’s why its site is so breathtakingly beautiful! I’ve been very impressed by Issuu’s clean, aesthetics-oriented look, and viewing a document is such an intuitive experience that this service deserves a 5/5 for its site.

Issuu has a breathtaking home page

Viewing a document on Issuu feels like flipping pages; it

Issuu deserves to win in this category.

Rating:

I understand that you didn’t come here for a review of their respective Web sites, so let’s move on to document compatibility.

Compatibility

Each service here is at a different level of compatibility.

edocr, regrettably, supports only “.txt, .doc and .pdf formats”. This severely limits its scope. However, nearly everyone nowadays, even those without Adobe Acrobat, can make a PDF out of their documents. OpenOffice.org contains integrated PDF capabilities, as does Office 2007, and free tools like PrimoPDF exist. I suppose that if you have this capability of producing PDF documents, these limited file formats might not be an issue.

Rating:

Scribd seems to be compatible with the most formats. Their support page says that the service supports PDFs, PostScript (wow, for all those publishers), Microsoft Office files (pre-2007 .doc/.xls/.ppt as well as the newer Office XML .docx/.xlsx/.pptx), all of the OpenDocument formats, in addition to plain text and RTF files. Just about any kind of file I would think of uploading is supported.

Rating:

Docstoc, unfortunately, seems to be very Microsoft Office-centric. It supports “doc, xls, ppt, pps, pdf, rtf, txt, docx, xlsx, ppts”, but none of the OpenDocument formats. That’s not so great.

Rating:

Issuu seems to support the common formats. PDF files, “DOC, PPT, ODT, WPD, SXW, RTF, ODP, and SXI” are allowed; these encompass the common word processing formats from Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, StarOffice and WordPerfect in addition to the slideshows. This is not much better than Docstoc, of course, but the 100 MB limit is simply awesome; it allows for professional magazines and publications that contain a lot of high quality images.

Rating:

In any case, Scribd wins hands down in this category; no other service accepts as many formats for documents — not to mention the remarkable spreadsheet and slideshow support.

Converted Appearance

The only way to evaluate this is to upload the same file to all of the four sites and qualitatively rank the conversions. (To make this easier for you to compare, I’ve embedded a file from each service in the Embeds section following this one.) For diversity, I tried a Microsoft Word document and a PDF document with each service.

The Word document that all of the services had trouble with

I thought that this document would convert well, but it seems fonts are an issue. The formula sheet is below.

The formula sheet PDF file

The PDF (a formula sheet with equations) was converted nearly perfectly with every service. After all, that is what the format was designed to do: preserve appearance and reproducibility for converting to other media (i.e. print).

edocr apparently uses Macromedia/Adobe FlashPaper, which is a versatile format that preserves appearance in a portable Flash (.swf) file. (Actually, all of the sites use Flash, but only FlashPaper can be saved locally or relocated to your own server.) Since it’s generated usually by printing to the software, the appearance of a document is preserved just as it would be if one printed a file to a PDF driver.

The conversions from edocr preserve the original appearance to a reasonable extent.

Rating:

Scribd uses its own iPaper format, and converted the PDF perfectly (as expected) but fumbled with the Word document. I suppose that this comes only from the fact that I used a non-standard font (Adobe Garamond) in the file; embedding it also didn’t help. Aside from the fact that the typeface was switched to what looks like Bitstream Vera (or DejaVu) Sans, the overall formatting was preserved. (Take a look here.) 5/5 for the PDF and 2.5/5 for the Word document makes…

Rating:

Issuu took a long time to convert my files, but the results were beautiful. Although it didn’t use the embedded font in the Word document, it at least recognized that the font was a serif typeface, and substituted something that looks like Times. The result still stays on one page. The formula sheet was beautiful, too.

Rating:

Docstoc took an unreasonable amount of time to do a little amount of work, and the result doesn’t look all that amazing. It’s okay for usual business documents (letters, contracts, and the sort) but I don’t recommend using it for anything that is more complex.

Rating:

The winner, by a close call, is Issuu. It simply produces beautiful documents.

Embeds

This isn’t an area in which I want to give ratings (for appearance), because the embedded player could change at any time. However, some are easier to embed than others (I have written a plugin for embedding Scribd documents, and WordPress 2.9 will support automatic embeds from some sources) and some make the process complicated. In any case, I’ll let you judge for yourself.

Edocr has a standard FlashPaper look. It looks like this:

Docstoc has its own look, which seems professional enough.

Scribd has changed their embedded player over the years; originally they used FlashPaper as well, but since then there have been at least two generations of new designs.

Issuu has to be my personal favourite because the player is so beautiful. There are also various styles of embeds, and the one below is a non-traditional, nearly chrome-less interface.

I personally prefer Issuu’s look, followed by Scribd, but this is a matter of personal opinion. If your main intention is use on a professional site, such as for a business organization, any of the embeds will do.

Conclusion

My top two favourites are Issuu and Scribd. For general business use, Scribd is likely the best choice, since a huge variety of formats are supported (don’t waste time converting to an intermediate format) for upload and the conversion process takes seconds.

Any comments or alternative sites that I haven’t explored?

(As a side note, I think the links or ads on the high traffic and high ranking site are generally more valuable to me than the custom banner design. But then again, those are only for 30 days… so I’ll stick with this valuable prize.)

Now I have to decide: what do I want to promote with the banners that will be designed? Should it be one of my sites (for instance, this blog?), an affiliate product or service, or… perhaps… a social/political cause?

Help me choose.

It used to be that these splogs would just quote the content word-for-word and add a link to the original source. As time went on, search engines and other tools became aware of them, and these sites were short-lived, as many of them made it onto blacklists.

Yesterday I posted about the Mercedes GLK, a sponsored blog post that was quickly and automatically copied by a splog.

I noticed something new. Instead of simply copying the original text, this splog uses computer intelligence to replace words with synonyms, evading duplicate content detection and content theft tools.

The first screenshot is my original post from yesterday. The lower screenshot is from the splog.

Original content from my blog

Splog's stolen content

Now what? What will we see next from Webmasters who attempt to profit from scraping content?

All you have to do is create a Twitter account and click the follow button under my name. You’ll be alerted of all of my future tweets (only about one message a day or less) and you can post your own 140-character messages as well.

Go on, see what I’ve been posting on Twitter.

• Web site design
• Compatibility
• Slideshow appearance
• Embeddable player

Web Site Design

This is perhaps the most trivial part of the comparison. In terms of web site design, SlideBoom’s site is much more modern-looking than the SlideShare site. SlideBoom has the Web 2.0-style feel, while SlideShare’s site doesn’t have the gradients that users of modern sites are accustomed to.

Rating:

Hint: click on the image to see a larger screenshot in an overlay.

Rating:

The winner in this category has to be SlideBoom, at least the way I see it.

Compatibility

For most people, SlideShare and SlideBoom will be about equal in compatibility.

However, SlideBoom only supports PowerPoint files (.pps or .ppt), unless you install their iSpring Free add-on for PowerPoint, which does a bit of local conversion and works with Office 2007. (They also have a paid iSpring Pro with more features.) With or without the software, SlideBoom is going to satisfy most people, since PowerPoint is a dominant piece of software.

SlideShare supports, in addition to PowerPoint formats, the PDF and OpenOffice formats. It also has a larger maximum size (50 MB), which makes it possible to upload longer or more complex slideshows.

Both support sound.

SlideBoom is marked down for only supporting the proprietary format, but its advanced and feature-packed add-on is a great feature for PowerPoint users.

Rating:

Props to SlideShare for supporting open formats.

Rating:

There’s no clear winner in this category.

Slideshow Appearance

I can leave it up to you to judge; the same PowerPoint file uploaded to SlideBoom and SlideShare results in very different outputs. The main reason is the font used.

SlideBoom does a great job, not only with the fonts (thanks to local conversion), but also with images and transparency. I’ll let you judge for yourself.

Rating:

SlideShare, on the other hand, fumbled with the same file.

Rating:

SlideBoom is definitely the winner.

Back in 2006, TechCrunch discovered SlideShare and started using it for all of the PowerPoint things they embedded on their site, but I certainly won’t be using SlideShare.

Embeddable Player

Both services have embeddable players (Flash-based), as you can see above. There are solutions for both services for easy embedding in WordPress blogs, and HTML embedding code is provided.

Scaling isn’t an issue for either, since Flash is all vector-based, even though full screen seems to look better with SlideBoom, thanks to its better handling of certain PowerPoint elements such as transparent images.

Although both embeddable players are intuitive, SlideShare’s player is simple (perhaps too simple), while SlideBoom’s player provides enhanced functionality.

SlideBoom has some intuitive functionality, AND looks better in full screen.

Rating:

SlideShare’s player is simple and easy to use.

Rating:

Once again, SlideBoom wins.

Conclusion

SlideBoom is superior to SlideShare in almost every way, except that SlideShare is older and has an established user base. Feature-wise, I think you’ll agree that SlideBoom is better, and that’s why I will prefer to use SlideBoom in the future.

However, what beats both of these solutions is the iSpring product from the company that makes SlideBoom, since it is capable of generating a Flash player that isn’t hosted on either of those sites. The paid version of iSpring (which I received for free, thanks to Giveaway of the Day) allows for the removal of branding from the player.

SlideBoom is the clear winner.

One of the amazing things that the Internet has led to is the ease of publishing to the World Wide Web. No longer do you have to be a large media outlet to get the word out and to publish content.

Blogging has capitalized on this freedom on the Internet, allowing (literally) hundreds of millions of people to create their individual online presences. That’s why there’s so much content that can be accessed, and one of the reasons why Google has billions of pages in its index.

Does it cost you a cent to read a blog?

I think it’s an interesting question. Sure, you (probably) have to pay a monthly fee to get your Internet access, but you’re usually not charged by the blogger to read his or her content. In other words, posts on blogs are valuable content given away for free.

There are many free services like WordPress.com and Blogger which let you easily get your site on the Web. That means that a good portion of those “hundreds of millions of people” don’t have to pay anything to get their site on the Web.

Of course, those free services aren’t without costs to operate; they need some sort of return on their investment on the infrastructure to keep the service going. That’s exactly why WordPress.com offers upgrades (eg. CSS customization, domain names, storage upgrades, etc).

In other words, it doesn’t cost you or the blogger to read a blog that is hosted for free by these services.

Then let’s take a look at people who need to pay for shared hosting or those who have dedicated servers to run their blogs. This blog, for instance, depends on paid hosting.

Most of the blogs like Frederick’s Timelog don’t charge the end-users to read or access their content.

Most of us need to support our hosting, too; that’s why we often need advertisers and sponsors to keep the blogs on the Web.

In other words, it doesn’t cost you to read a blog that needs paid hosting, and the cost incurred by offering this FREE content to you is recovered through a third party – the advertiser.

Blogging is an amazing way of getting content on the Web and also a great way for ordinary non-bloggers to read free content. The non-bloggers are getting the content without having to pay the bloggers, even though they’re driving up costs. The bloggers act as an intermediary between the cost-incurring readers (you) and the cost-paying advertisers.

The advertisers aren’t just losing their money for no reason, though; they either promote their image or entice you to take action (ie. sign up or purchase something).

Thus, in this case, free stuff (or what appears to be “free”) is good for all parties.

Does it cost you to listen to a podcast?

Most of the time, podcasts are offered for free. This also means that you, the person on one end of the complex relationship, are getting FREE content.

Surely it costs something to run a podcast. Let’s take a look at two scenarios.

First scenario — the podcaster hosts their content on free services like Blip.tv that provide the bandwidth. Sometimes, such services may inject advertising; at other times, such as with Blip.tv, that’s not the case.

In this case, neither the podcast, nor the listeners, are paying for the content or bandwidth. The free service is, and they usually recover their cost through advertising or through other revenue.

Once again, you are getting free content that doesn’t necessarily cost the podcaster to produce.

Second scenario — the podcast pays for a service like LibSyn to host their media. The podcaster is spending money, and you are still getting free content.

Why? Because the podcaster has often accepted advertising deals to recover the cost of bandwidth (or even to make profits). Still, the advertisers are getting something — new users, subscribers, or customers. Still, the podcasters are gaining something — listeners/subscribers, possibly money. And you are getting something — valuable content.

Do you see why I like free stuff now?

Free content benefits the end-user most

You, as the “end-user” (as we geeks sometimes say), are gaining the most out of this deal. A single cent never leaves your pocket/wallet/bank account/PayPal account/credit card. Free content is exactly what it sounds and seems like to you — free, which means no conditions, no trial periods, simply free content.

Often, the intermediary, which is the blogger or podcaster, will need to have funds exchange hands. From them to the hosting services. To them from the advertisers.

But it’s all hassle free for you.

Now do you understand?

I believe I’ve made my point clear. I like free stuff… and you should, too!

You can see this amazing feat animated by Ned Batchelder using jquery, and recorded for your viewing pleasure below. Or, you can download it as a compact (947 KB) QuickTime file.

I believe it is, at the moment, “All impossible failures, will happen at the test site.”

Some of my favourites:

• If mathematically you end up with the incorrect answer, try multiplying by the page number.
• If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
• When all else fails, read the instructions.

Find them here.

• Security Now! with Steve Gibson
• net@night with Amber MacArthur from Toronto, ON, Canada
• FLOSS Weekly with Randal Schwartz
• LSAT Logic in Everyday Life with Andrew Brody
• Tech5 with John C. Dvorak
• commandN with Amber MacArthur
• Make It So explicit!
• and a few New York Times podcasts

Let’s start with Security Now!. This is an excellent podcast discussing security and privacy and all relevant matters to these subjects. I’ve learned a lot about encryption from this podcast. Additionally, it’s always interesting when they talk about how insecure and buggy Windows is.

net@night notes web sites (mostly Web 2.0 social networks) of interest. I first learned about blip.tv from net@night. Unfortunately, Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte are both users of Facebook, with Leo Laporte at about 5000 “friends”. Anyhow, some of the sites they talk about really do pose great benefits to the users, including blip.tv.

FLOSS Weekly isn’t about dentistry, but rather about Free/Libre/Open Source Software. They discuss open source in great detail, with every week bringing a new topic. Sometimes, they have guests. Most of the time, I fall asleep listening to the guests.

LSAT Logic in Everyday Life is a great podcast which analyzes current issues and talks about logic. I love it because of the logic as well as the LSAT aspects. But mostly, I like this podcast because common logical flaws that go unchallenged are addressed by the host. Not to mention that he achieved a perfect 180 score on the LSAT.

Tech5 is a short, brief overview of every day’s technological news. What I like about it is the amount of current news that I can get from listening to one episode. What I don’t like: the host’s cranky attitude; the host’s incomplete understanding of many tech subjects, leading to misleading criticism; and the excessive amount of opinion as opposed to news. He almost reminds me of Lou Dobbs, except that he isn’t pretending to be patriotic, and he actually recognizes: the good anti-trust legislators in the EU; the good broadcasting (by the CBC) in Canada; and that the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal probably won’t go through as a result of the EU. Besides, he hates Windows and Microsoft almost as much as me.

commandN is also a podcast of recent tech news, except that it is done in a video format, and produced by Canadians. The quality of the video is actually very good — I download the H.264 videos. Watch one or two episodes yourself to gain an understanding of this podcast.

Make It So is a podcast by British people, talking about Star Trek. Recently, one of the hosts suddenly disappeared from the show and their network (Simply Syndicated) without explanation. Now they have another guy who isn’t nearly as familiar with Star Trek. And they are now starting to repeat themselves, talking about subjects they’ve previously recorded. Don’t listen to this podcast if you really cannot tolerate profanity.

I also subscribe to the New York Times’ Front Page podcast, which provides me with a daily update on recent news. It’s a good way to get an overview of the day’s news, without having to read Google News. Excellent when you’ve missed out on the day’s events — or yesterday’s events — and this podcast will provide you with just the right amount of information whenever you want to listen to it.

That’s it for today.