The Wisdom of Crowds

I had a great time presenting to a crowd of about 200 people on Friday, Sept 28 on a topic I’m really in love with known as “The Wisdom of Crowds”
“The Wisdom of Crowds” Based on the Book by James Surowiecki
that basically says you can setup a method of getting input from people in such a way that the result is nearly always the right answer.

You can download the slide deck here. Enjoy!

psst! Double your upload speed with Road Runner right now

I got the inside scoop. Oceanic Time Warner just doubled the upload speed of their Road Runner High Speed Online service from 512kb to 1mb. For those of us doing online backups, bitTorrent downloads, and video/audio uploads, it’s HUGE.

I did this myself just now and have the screen shots below. I am running Mozy online backups on my computer. The 358kb upload is about the average speed I’ve been getting for the past few months.

I took a screenshot of that window just before I performed the fix. As Mozy was running, I did the fix, then took a screenshot immediately after. I didn’t restart my computer or the software.

This has got to be the coolest, quickest, easiest speed boost I’ve ever seen.

Before “the fix”
Before the upload

After “the fix”
After the fix

What’s the secret?

Just reset your modem. I unplugged mine from power and plugged it back in again. In one minute I had a 162% upload speed increase.

Now this might not be a big deal for everyone, but for those of us that do any of the above geeky stuffs, this is just a godsend. My backups will take 1/2 the time. I’m going to be curious to see what this does to BitTorrent.

Tell them Peter Kay sent you. Enjoy!