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After the news hit about Time Warner Cable’s intent to charge different rates for tiers of monthly data transfer — and an enormous $1/GB fee for overages — it seems eminently sane to consider the competition.

In Rochester, that competition is Frontier DSL. For a long time, that basically meant there was no competition, I’m very sorry to say.

However, the changes to TWC’s fee structure may be so extreme that even that level of competition is good. While I don’t think our household monthly data transfer is excessive, I’m reasonably sure (based on what I’ve seen from the data I’ve collected from our broadband router) that we’ll blow right past the 5 GB/month tier and maybe the 10 GB/month one. We would have to — and by that I mean, I would have to, really — develop some more austere usage of the family Internet connection that we’re accustomed to. Thus, I’m examining the pro and con positions for Frontier’s high-speed Internet service.

Pro

With Frontier DSL, my family should:

• Not have to deal with the stress of the upcoming 5/10/40/100 GB-per-month tiers from TWC, which will reportedly take effect in Rochester in November 2009
• Get to send a clear message to TWC that metered Internet access is a terrible idea
• Get the peace of mind that unlimited, unmetered Internet access provides — but only if Frontier’s existing 5 GB-per-month transfer cap is eliminated
• Benefit from the refer-a-friend affiliate program — both parties get the $20 referral credit
• Be able to combine the billing with our Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS).

Con

However, there are some drawbacks to Frontier DSL. My family would be concerned about:

• A potential monthly DSL modem rental fee
• A two-year commitment with a $200-300 (I’ve see both figures!) early termination fee
• The 5 GB-per-month unenforced data transfer cap (but that cap may be dropped entirely in an effort to better compete with TWC)
• Blocking port 25 — while there are workarounds, this is just aggravating
• The unknown quantity of Frontier’s technical support, whereas TWC’s has been reasonably good over the years.

Anyway, while we’re mulling this over, the news is playing out on sites like StopTheCap and StopTWC! Meanwhile, I’m more than a little annoyed at the traditional news media avoiding some of the other angles surrounding this topic — the pricing change as a way to protect cable television revenues, the local monopoly (and how cable infrastructure compares to its telephone equivalent), the impact on increasingly Internet-dependent households during a recession, how this might change the habits of people (including employees working at home), and so on.

I got together with some folks to stand in line for the Leopard release on Friday evening; we went camping in Victor outside the Apple Store Eastview. I wanted to jot down a few observations of the outing, and I’ll do so in no particular order.

It was fun, both for the event itself and to spend time outside the home with friends. (Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately — Christen was stuck at home with Elijah.)

It’s perhaps not the best advertising in the world to have a line 200-some odd deep waiting to get into your store. It becomes a curiosity for others in the mall and a hassle for patrons who just wanted to saunter in but are turned away. Amplify this with a line that is predominantly composed of white males, aged 20 to 60 — and the store suddenly looks a lot less hip.

Those of you who’ve stood in lines for Apple conference or trade show keynote addresses know of what I speak. Though this crowd was less like WWDC’s and a little more eclectic like Macworld’s, it was still a turn-off for the teenage girl iPod demographic.

Speaking of which, some young girls walked up to others in the line behind us, asked what the line was for, and then rolled their eyes and stalked off in revulsion.

Unlike any other retailer I can think of in this situation — a captive audience of 200 people waiting to rush through your doors — Apple didn’t have any other promotions in force. Just a new operating system. They didn’t give anyone 5 or 10% off a new computer, or a discount on an iPod, or any other kind of bundling incentive, as far as I could tell.

Frankly, most of the people I saw walking in played with a computer for a few moments and walked out again with only their free t-shirts. And then a few jumped back at the end of the line for another t-shirt.

Did Apple even make any money on this, after staffing up, closing the store to prep, and then giving out the freebies? It looked like they wanted you to go in and out immediately … preferably with your copy of Leopard, sure, but they weren’t exactly encouraging anyone to get more than that.

The Eastview store has been totally reconfigured. I haven’t been there since its remodelling, but the Genius Bar is in the back now, where the checkout used to be. Now, there’s no obvious checkout so I assume they’ll be heavily using those hand scanners from now on. Overall, it was hard to get a feel for the changes since the Leopard checkout line was roped off through the center of the floor.

The iPod touch, which I saw in person for the first time, is really thin. The outer ring on its face is beveled in a black material, maybe metal, that appears similar in style to the sloping edges on the new iPod classics and nanos.

The store employee I chatted with about the Mac Pro didn’t have much help to offer me about the optional BTO RAID card. In fact, he was just looking up the details on the Apple Store Web site, thankyouverymuch. But, he was pleasant while he was performing that admirable service, and I’ll give him credit that he was genuinely trying to be helpful.

Wow, Apple bought the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS) back in February, and the announcement has just come out. (I have to wonder why the delay … perhaps it has something to do with Leopard?) The software continues to be licensed under its regular terms.

Michael Sweet, one of the principals behind Easy Software Products and developer of CUPS, is now an Apple employee.

I’m sure this all means something.

The latest pre-release version of LaunchBar, my application launcher of choice on Mac OS X, has broken through a barrier that has bothered me for a few months.

Being surrounded by Quicksilver fanatics, since students naturally gravitate to free software, I had tried out Quicksilver for a month or two last spring, and found it okay. It certainly has a novel take on the application launcher genre.

If I were to compare its chief vocabulary difference most succinctly to LaunchBar, I would say that Quicksilver puts the data or object first, while LaunchBar puts the action or verb first. For this reason, and perhaps because the data and actions can be chained together more visually in Quicksilver, it is probably more suitable to those who want to actually chain together actions. LaunchBar works for me because I use the rest of the operating system to chain together actions, and LaunchBar is used for quick, distinct tasks.

One feature I’d grown to love in Quicksilver was the free-form ability to display any random Large Text on the screen. This was so cool that I used it over and over to send oversized messages from my screen to those within visual range. (Type too much text, however, and the display got small enough that you had to be very close to read it.) Used discreetly, it was exceedingly powerful in much the same way—with similar useful yet potentially subversive qualities—that instant messaging or text messaging is. In fact, it was very much like a visual channel for instant messaging.

However, the way that Quicksilver works—although liberating in the same manner that any application launcher on Mac OS X is, including Spotlight—just didn’t suit my style. In the past, I’d dinged it for an inability to search with the ease that LaunchBar’s AASv4 algorithm can; that is no longer the case. I don’t think I can quite put my finger on why I switched away. Certainly, some of my unease was simply that I’d already bought LaunchBar. The admitted fact that the authors of Quicksilver had set out to clone LaunchBar but make their version free let a strong and sour taste in my mouth. Overall, I longed to return to the land of LaunchBar.

Just one thing held me back: Large Text.

Now, version LaunchBar 4.2 beta 2 offers this, and with a vengeance. The new beta of LaunchBar not only implements Large Text for phone numbers and addresses associated with contacts (something previous versions had done), but it can also supports the display of free-form text in the same kind of dark, semi-transparent bezel display used elsewhere throughout Mac OS X. The shadowed text itself can have two sizes and specified line breaks, as well, which is neat. (Quicksilver has some more customization options regarding the appearance, but I actually like LaunchBar’s fit-in strategy more.)

Beyond that—and here is where I start to develop some concerns—several functions are now accessible via a new x-launchbar: URL scheme. In one sense, this is a benefit because you can:

• have a link in a Web page that, when clicked, uses LaunchBar 4.2 to display a message in large text on your screen
• save those links into a local Web page, to collect common phrases in one handy location
• put individual links in URL clippings files, or Internet location files, which could be stored in the filesystem and indexed by LaunchBar for quick access
• display large text from the command line or a script by wrapping the Large Text URL action in quotes, and invoking it using /usr/bin/open.

Already, just because of these discoveries, my coworkers are looking at ways to do interesting new stuff even with Quicksilver’s Large Text feature. I can imagine that it won’t be long before Quicksilver itself uses URLs in similar ways.

However, the ties between actions and URLs also a drawback for many of the same reasons, all of which boil down to the fact that URLs can be called by any random Web page in your browser, without your knowledge or consent. Several different techniques allow this. Can you image a META REFRESH or a pop-up window or an embedded script having this sort of effect on your application launcher? It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, even though LaunchBar is by no means on every Mac and Mac OS X is by no means one everyone’s desk. I guess I’m grumpy mostly because it affects me, but if it also affects Quicksilver users because of the arms race between these applications, that could start to snowball into something very bad.

At least it doesn’t look like this trick works when LaunchBar is not already running. But for me, it’s always running. Therefore, without more controls and protections and assurances in place, I distrust this. After all, all software has bugs and many bugs are just a tiny step away from an exploit.

I should also admit that we did come across another way to bring up Large Text—or I should say, “Large Type.” There is a LargeType Service for Mac OS X from Cold Pizza Software that takes any text input to the service and presents it in transparent bezel. Barring the use of either Quicksilver or LaunchBar, and having on Services to depend upon, this is a decent choice that I didn’t know was available. Thanks to Steve L for pointing it out.