Comcast Admits Delaying Some Traffic

EW YORK (AP) -- Comcast Corp. on Tuesday acknowledged "delaying" some subscriber Internet traffic, but said any roadblocks it puts up are temporary and intended to improve surfing for other users.

The statement was a response to an Associated Press report last week that detailed how the nation's largest cable company was interfering with file sharing by some of its Internet subscribers. The AP also found that Comcast's computers masqueraded as those of its users to interrupt file-sharing connections.

Internet watchdog groups denounced Comcast's actions, calling it an example of the kind of abuse that could be curbed with so-called "Net Neutrality" legislation. It would require Internet providers to treat all traffic equally - as has largely been the case historically.

Comcast has repeatedly denied blocking any Internet application, including "peer-to-peer" file-sharing programs like BitTorrent, which the AP used in its nationwide tests.

On Tuesday, Mitch Bowling, senior vice president of Comcast Online Services, added a nuance to that statement, saying that while Comcast may block initial connection attempts between two computers, it eventually lets the traffic through if the computers keep trying.

How nice of them.

ION, how insane will Apple stores be tomorrow when Leopard comes out?

They handled the lines for the iPhone pretty efficiently. The wait wasn't as long as some people thought it would be.

This is probably a really dumb question but here it is:

My work computer is a 4-year-old Dell laptop hooked up to a dock and a monitor. It's getting to the retirement age but the work people are as usual too cheap to replace the damn thing. (I think it has only 256 MB RAM.) In the last couple of months, *everything* has slowed down to a crawl speed. Right now, I only have three applications open -- outlook, mozilla and powerpoint and just switching windows take 5+ seconds. The campus network system keeps up-to-date antivirus definitions, plus I've defrag'd the hard drive a couple of weeks ago and ran a spy ware program. Short of getting a new hard drive or more RAM, is there anything else I can do to get it to perform a little better as a temporizing tactic?

The first thing to do is open task manager and see what's eating up all the CPU and/or memory.

The first thing to do is open task manager and see what's eating up all the CPU and/or memory.

Just for entertainment, what are the odds that it is the latest Microsoft update?

For CPU, the biggest gobbler is something called "System Idle Process" even though it's using only 16K of memory. Other than that, there is "Rtvscan.exe" (whatever that is) and Firefox for CPU, and firefox, Rtvscan, WINWORD (even though I don't have WORD open), svchost and explorer. It's using about 30 - 60% of CPU in average.

Winword shouldn't be in your process list if you're not running Word. You've rebooted recently?

"Rtvscan.exe" is your virus-checker, and I'm unsurprised that it's resource-heavy.

"System Idle Process" is when your CPU isn't doing anything.

And the idle process is generally the biggest cpu consumer, because it use otherwise unused cycles to take care of the routine stuff that keeps your computer running.

I thought the "system idle process" is just what's left over when all the other CPU activity is subtracted from 100% - i.e. your CPU is really doing nothing. So it's really doing stuff then?

eta: from wikipedia:

In Windows NT-based operating systems, the System Idle Process is the system idle task: it tracks how much of the CPU's time is being utilized and issues the HLT instruction to cut the processor's power usage. The percentage of time spent in idle can be seen in the Windows Task Manager.

The process "runs" at a thread priority of 0, ensuring that everything else running on the system has a higher priority and will be able to preempt it.

So I guess it depends on how you look at it.