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Year: 2013

Cable Companies: Monopolizing Progress Prohibitors

imagesA good read about how the cable industry in the U.S. is getting away with highway robbery, monopolization, and stifling progress. This really needs to change.

“If you’ve got a commodity that everybody needs as an input into their businesses, like take railroads for example, and it costs a lot to initially build that network so it’s hard for someone else to enter, and you can cooperate with your colleagues who are also providing that service, and you can divide up markets, you’ve got a monopoly business,” Crawford explained. “We’ve seen this happen with wired Internet access in the United States.”

Most of us don’t even know how bad we have it. We lag behind most other modern nations in broadband permeation, cost, access, and options.

“If you move into an apartment in Seoul [South Korea], you have a choice of three different providers, they show up in a day because there’s so much competition, and they charge you $30 for TV and everything. Koreans when they come to the United States… actually laugh at us for how expensive and how slow [American Internet service] is.”

Don’t we deserve this?

Carbonite for Mac Eats Up CPU

If you use the Carbonite cloud-based backup tool for Mac, you may notice that your computer’s fans are running loud and often, and that the Carbonite daemon is running at 80-120%. This gets really, really annoying after not too long.

I’ve dealt with it for two years by pausing backups while I’m working on my computer, hoping that Carbonite would release a new version that fixed the problem soon. That has not happened yet, and I grew tired of trying numerous fixes mentioned around the Internet, only to have the problem continue.

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Finally, I saw that someone used a different backup tool called CrashPlan. I am on their 30 day free trial and am really digging it so far. The pricing is at or below that of Carbonite (depending how much space you need) and it seems to be running quite smoothly so far.

I really like the extra configuration and security settings that you just don’t get with Carbonite. It allows you to set schedules for CPU and bandwidth usage so that you can maximize your time efficiently. You can even choose what type of encryption you want to use on your stored backups, and if you set a password, your backups will be protected by that as well.

There doesn’t seem to be any restriction on file types, either. I remember Carbonite had a thing for a while where they wouldn’t let you back up video files, which just seemed dumb. They might still have that stipulation. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, because I’m ditching Carbonite for good now.

What do you use to back up your system and how well does it work for you?