Hard to believe it’s been over half a year since Comcast announced their Protocol-agnostic throttling method, and nearly half since they set a hard cap at 250GB/Month, eh? There’s at least one TNMS Employee that’s surprised he (and his 2 roommates none the less) hasn’t hit the cap once. Maybe we’ve been slacking…

Well bad news has just been released for the subscribers of Cox Cable, the third largest cable company in the U.S. of A… They are currently testing a “Time Sensitive” Bandwidth throttling method in Kansas and Arkansas. Read more after the jump.

As spotted on Lifehacker, The AP reports that this new method will give priority to data like Webpages, streaming video and online games. Regular file downloads and of course torrents will take the fall for the network congestion woes.

Now for anyone who isn’t a closet collector of everything digital, this may seem like a happy medium. As a semi-retired online gamer, I can’t tell you how much I screamed bloody murder over lag (Corey can attest to this in person), and I also just got Netflix working on the XBox earlier this month.. and it IS worth every penny.

But anyone who keeps up to date with torrents, sends or received large files for work while at home, or is patching their favorite games and software,  may finding themselves waiting a while longer for your needs to be fulfilled.

But as Lifehacker states, the worst part about this announcement is that there’s no definition of “network congestion,” so who knows when or why you might end up getting the throttle shaft. Check out the Lifehacker post for more details, and for you Torrent hogs, information from TorrentFreak‘s point of view.

Thanks Lifehacker (via AP)

Any of you mobile-video fanatics are probably drooling at the notion that Apple is now releasing HD TV show Episodes on their new iTunes 8, and what’s probably not as surprising as the fact I will probably finish this sentence without bashing the them is the other fact that the video quality isn’t really as “HD” as one would think. Yes, that is all 1 sentence.

The good people over at Gizmodo, with a little help of my main man George Oh of ZDNet (ooooo OOOOOHHHHHHHH!!!!! …yeah I never spoke to the guy), have wrote up a very detailed and knowledgeable comparison between Blu-Ray DVD quality all the way down to HD Online downloads, including Apple’s new HD videos.

To spoil your HD dinner, Apple’s HD episodes (which cost $2.99 compared to their $1.99 Standard Def brethren) are actually worse than DVD quality video. Their comparison is based on the Bit-rate, which is the amount of megabits of data per second used to create image. This is the same as MP3 Bit-rate, only it is much more noticeable to see grainy video then it is to notice subtle differences in sound quality.

If you really want to know what you spend your money on, I really suggest this read. It’s very informative and maybe, just maybe, it will make you hate Apple as much as I do. If not, there’s always the $9.99 FIRMWARE UPDATES. Are you as unsurprised as I am?

As I had posted before, Firefox has made the Guinness Book of World Records for the most downloads in a single day, over 8 million! What makes Firefox 3.0 so special? Tom’s Hardware has a short video about just some of the new features.

In addition to Tom’s video, hit the bump for a few screenshots of what my modified Firefox browser looks like as well as a list of addons and why I have installed them. Also, if you are interested in downloading Firefox 3.0, check the link on the right column with the cute little Foxkeh!

Here, we have my browser. Since I am on my work laptop, my screen resolution isn’t the best but it works for me for now… Anyways, you can see many differences between Internet Explorer and Firefox. Besides the “Vista Aero” theme that I have added, a lot of the major differences are subtle, but provide the user with powerful tools that can increase productivity.

• Delicious Bookmarks (A) – del.icio.us is a Yahoo! website that allows users who register to keep track of bookmarks where ever you go and you can access them from any computer with internet access. As you can see in the picture above (left most window), I have over 175 bookmarked sites that I can access anywhere. You can even see them at del.icio.us/pacozorro.
• Adblock Plus (B) – Adblock will block those annoying picture ads on all those websites. Oh will it save you the hassle of not looking at senseless dribble that really doesn’t pertain to the website (unless of course its our site and in which case our ads are all tech driven).
• Forcastfox (C) – Weather that takes up little to no room on your browser. Its always helpful and it even has radar (green orb to the left)
• Greasemonkey (D) – Using little bits of Javascript code (a lot of codes can be found here), you can make small tweaks to different websites or actions that you may use on a daily basis.
• Download StatusBar (not shown) – Adds a downloads status bar to the right of the “Done” status
• Finally, this isn’t an addon, but I love adding my most favorite sites on a bar (E) that can be accessed so easily.

Hopefully, this has given you a small sample of what Firefox can really do with little modifications.  Mozilla has a great support team and many people who can help you within their forums.  Check it out!