Sometimes facts are stranger than fiction (go read some quantum theory and you’ll know what I mean) and scientists at the University of Washington are out to discover if the universe we live in is really nothing more than a computer simulation from the future.
FCC releases Internet speed test tool
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Thursday launched a broadband test service to help consumers clock the speed of their Internet.
Located at the site www.broadband.gov, the test is aimed at allowing consumers to compare their actual speeds with the speeds advertised by their providers. The FCC release follows an FCC meeting in September where officials said that actual speeds were estimated to lag by as much as 50 percent during busy hours. “The FCC’s new digital tools will arm users with real-time information about their broadband connection and the agency with useful data about service across the country,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a statement.
The FCC is also collecting information about where broadband is not available. Consumers can email the FCC at fccinfo@fcc.gov or call the FCC.
3 Free Apps to Check the Speed of Your USB Flash Drive
Data transfer rates (reading and writing) among flash devices can vary wildly and often the cost of a drive can be based on the read/write speed of the device (among other things like built in encryption, etc). So how do we go about checking the speed of USB flash drives to see if you’ve gotten the bang for your buck? The three tools below are free utilities that help you benchmark your USB flash drive performance.
Checkflash
The Check Flash website is in Cyrillic (there is an English option too) but it shouldn’t stop anyone from downloading this light and free USB flash drive speed testing and error checking software.
With Check Flash you can test, manage and format your USB flash drive. You can also run a read-write cycle on your USB flash drive, which returns not only the speed but also any errors (read/write or physical) in your USB drive. The software does not rectify the problem but merely reports it.
Check Flash v1.07 runs as an 812KB sized executable and does not require an installation. Snag Checkflash from MikeLab.
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Online ping test – JustPing
just-ping.com is a really useful site for pinging Internet hosts. The service tries to ping a given systems from 34 points all over the world, and gives you a nice web view of the results.
It’s pretty interesting to see the ping times from around the world. For instance, Johannesburg, South Africa returns an average ping result of 343.5, whereas Chicago, USA returns an average ping result of 57.1. That of course makes sense given that I use a US based host, but still interesting.
The same people who provide just-ping.com also provide just-traceroute.com which provides tracert functionality from 4 locations worldwide. It’s not quite as fancy as the visual traceroute tools on the net but it does provide traceroute visibility from 4 distinct places around the world.