Setting up a large-scale VoIP provider with a $1 billion budget would be a trivial enterprise. Microsoft already had a Messenger app. Microsoft's problem isn't "branding": they already have a highly recognizable brand. If you spent $1 billion building a VoIP provider from the ground up that was part of Microsoft's existing Messenger platform, that'd still leave over $5 billion for marketing.
To put that in perspective, you could probably mail anybody who used Skype once ever in their lifetime a crisp dollar bill and STILL have billions left over.
I'm sorry, there's no "brand" that is worth that kind of money, because with a fraction of that budget you could build that brand literally overnight.
I think you missed the point. This was about marketing, not advertising (advertising is just one small part of marketing).
So you're blocking advertising, great. But what if the fact you have an adblocker installed on your machine (which is generically trivial to detect, BTW) means you automatically pay 10% more for everything? That's the world the author of the original study is warning us of. That the data collected via widespread tracking can be used to penalize one class of customers for fuck-all reasons.
This sort of "different pricing for different people" is already somewhat pervasive in society, even in B&Ms. As a member of a particular grocery chain's frequent shopper program I get special coupons every three months in the mail. Those coupons are custom-printed for me, and are different than the coupons somebody else on the same program would get, because they're based on my shopping habits and demographics. At what point does that start heading into becoming discrimination and/or "unfair"?
I think it's a valid criticism that needs to be raised. After all, people would get burned if they aren't aware of this. If Bitcoin gets burned by this, then maybe someone will fork the project and improve upon it based on what was learned.
Or, more importantly, the first time some 90-year-old grandma gets flim-flammed by some Bitcoin criminal, the general public will demand (and politicians will be happy to comply) that Something Be Done About It. If history is our guide, that "something" will be to make Bitcoin illegal.
That's one of the flaws (no, that isn't a "feature") of the system. By making the system inherently 'unreversable', they have sown the seeds of their own destruction.
We need multi-site, and we needed encrypted communications, and we also needed the ability for some users to make phone calls. iDEN was ideal and worked perfectly. It's a shame that there is nothing to replace it.. doubly so because the existence of iDEN basically drove most of the SMDR systems off the grid.
A straight UHF repeater may be what we use next year, but we won't have the secure comms, the talk group capability, or the ability to allow users to make conventional phone calls, too...
I work as a telecommunications coordinator for a pretty large convention in the Pacific Northwest. We have traditionally used Nextel iDEN phones for our comms, and as a general rule worked without any major hiccups.
This year, we were forced to move off of iDEN (with the Nextel shutdown) to Sprint's more conventional network's push-to-talk service. It was a complete and total disaster. In addition to the fact that Sprint's building penetration is extremely poor, their network in downtown Seattle is overloaded, and the phones would regularly just put the data connection to sleep and simply lose alerts and PTT calls. Add to that: many of the group calling features we had with Nextel weren't even available. We couldn't build talk groups and have users join talk groups arbitrarily as they needed people in a particular department.
We will not be depending on Sprint for 2014, or for that matter, ever again.
There's a reason for the growing distrust of medicine.
I generally trust my doctors. However, since they are human beings, they are as subject to confirmation bias as anyone else. Probably like more than a few people here ln/., I'm "obese" and have "metabolic syndrome." However, my cholesterol levels are where they should be, and historically always have.. even after 20 years of Type II diabetes.
However, my doctor wants to test my cholesterol every six months (even though there's absolutely no diagnostic value in doing so). Why? The logical side of me wants to just chalk it up to that "confirmation bias": I MUST have high cholesterol because I fit the profile, so the last 10 years of good cholesterol numbers don't mean anything. Additionally, my work provides free yearly cholesterol screenings as part of our corporate wellness program.. so even when I provide those lab results to the clinician he still orders a cholesterol screening.
The cynical side of me walks into the doctors office and sees freebies (pens, clipboards, etc.) advertising Lipitor and it's real hard to begin to wonder if the doctor works for me or the drug company. Somebody who's a bit more paranoid is going to see the correlation between all these cholesterol screenings and the statin drug freebies and go all Jenny McCarthy.
I deal with it the same way every time. When I go to the lab to have the actual lab work done, I decline the cholesterol test, give them a photocopy of my most recent screening from work, and ask that they add it to my chart for me.
Because the VPN service is cheap (it's bundled with the Usenet service I use) and doesn't require me to open my home firewall. Also, my home internet connection is metered (well, "capped" is more accurate), as is the place I host my website.
It's not always "cheaper" to build something yourself.
My primary reason for using it is that many "open" hotspots have filters. These filters often filter out content that is merely "politically inconvenient", usually to the Religious Right. Since a lot of the web filtering software has ties to these self-appointed censors, they tend to be very aggressive on what they filter.
VyprVPN allows me to access these sites even from behind this restrictive filtering.
Savings accounts, by Federal banking regulations, are restricted in how many withdrawals you can make in a 30-day period. I believe the number is less than 10.
I don't care if the user is informed they are getting filtered Internet. It's about notification and consent. If your users are aware of it, and it is mandated by a clearly defined company policy, great and carry on.
Not just the people, but yes, static electricity is the primary concern. Also, I'm told by the people that manage these sorts of things that a "too dry" environment also makes air cooling less effective. Something to do with the fact that a little bit of moisture actually allows the air to carry more heat than if it was 100% dry.
Only on the western third. Prineville is, in fact, on the northwestern edge of the Great Basin Desert, and in fact gets about 11 inches a year of rainfall.
I work for another data center operator in Central Oregon. We also use ambient air cooling. I don't know if we use the same system Facebook does, to be honest.
Central Oregon is the northwestern edge of the Great Basin desert. Summers here are bone dry. Our data center gets so dry we actually have the opposite problem: it gets TOO dry.
Ok, I work for a data center operator. In Central Oregon.
Our data center is so damn dry that most of the time in the summer we're getting alerts about the humidity being too low. How did Facebook fuck this one up?
It's technically Ethernet that requires repeaters every 100 meters, regardless of whether it's classic 10 megabit over Cat3 (which is within specification, by the way) or GigE over Cat6.
Other networking technologies can get further distances over the same quality cable (DSL being a prime example: it technically only requires "Cat3", often works over cabling that technically isn't even that, and has the ability to span distances of over 1,000 meters).
The corner bakery doesn't care about latency. They need "the Internet" to process credit cards.
The convenience store doesn't care about latency. They need "the Internet" to order stuff from their central commissary, which is often done automatically based upon sales and to process credit cards..
The McDonald's doesn't care about latency. They need "the Internet" to order stuff from their central commissary (which is often done automatically based upon sales), to process credit and gift cards, and to provide customers with the ability to browse the web via their hotspot.
That's the point. The vast majority of Main Street doesn't need a quick connection, or even a fat one. Up until recently, they did most of the above with a dial-up modem (or, in a few cases, and ISDN 128k BRI). When most of the data you send is a few hundred bytes to get approval for a credit card.. or a 1 megabyte order form.. a DOCSIS 2.0 cable modem, HSPA wireless connection, or HughesNet satellite connection doesn't seem that much slower than a 100M fiber circuit. And perhaps most importantly, is a hell of a lot cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
ISPs shut of Usenet servers because it cost a fortune to maintain, and nobody used it. A full newsfeed now consumes terabytes (!) of bandwidth a day.
I work for a regional ISP. We have around 40,000 users. We shut our Usenet feed off in 2009. We had exactly three complaints.
Who spends $8 billion on a product?
Setting up a large-scale VoIP provider with a $1 billion budget would be a trivial enterprise. Microsoft already had a Messenger app. Microsoft's problem isn't "branding": they already have a highly recognizable brand. If you spent $1 billion building a VoIP provider from the ground up that was part of Microsoft's existing Messenger platform, that'd still leave over $5 billion for marketing.
To put that in perspective, you could probably mail anybody who used Skype once ever in their lifetime a crisp dollar bill and STILL have billions left over.
I'm sorry, there's no "brand" that is worth that kind of money, because with a fraction of that budget you could build that brand literally overnight.
I think you missed the point. This was about marketing, not advertising (advertising is just one small part of marketing).
So you're blocking advertising, great. But what if the fact you have an adblocker installed on your machine (which is generically trivial to detect, BTW) means you automatically pay 10% more for everything? That's the world the author of the original study is warning us of. That the data collected via widespread tracking can be used to penalize one class of customers for fuck-all reasons.
It's already begun. There have been cases of Orbitz presenting higher prices to Mac users. Or some of the pricing slipperiness Amazon has engaged in.
This sort of "different pricing for different people" is already somewhat pervasive in society, even in B&Ms. As a member of a particular grocery chain's frequent shopper program I get special coupons every three months in the mail. Those coupons are custom-printed for me, and are different than the coupons somebody else on the same program would get, because they're based on my shopping habits and demographics. At what point does that start heading into becoming discrimination and/or "unfair"?
I think it's a valid criticism that needs to be raised. After all, people would get burned if they aren't aware of this. If Bitcoin gets burned by this, then maybe someone will fork the project and improve upon it based on what was learned.
Or, more importantly, the first time some 90-year-old grandma gets flim-flammed by some Bitcoin criminal, the general public will demand (and politicians will be happy to comply) that Something Be Done About It. If history is our guide, that "something" will be to make Bitcoin illegal.
That's one of the flaws (no, that isn't a "feature") of the system. By making the system inherently 'unreversable', they have sown the seeds of their own destruction.
* autocorrect corrected "bitcoin" to "buffoon". Does the machine know something?.
Undoubtedly.
"As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!"
We need multi-site, and we needed encrypted communications, and we also needed the ability for some users to make phone calls. iDEN was ideal and worked perfectly. It's a shame that there is nothing to replace it.. doubly so because the existence of iDEN basically drove most of the SMDR systems off the grid.
A straight UHF repeater may be what we use next year, but we won't have the secure comms, the talk group capability, or the ability to allow users to make conventional phone calls, too...
I work as a telecommunications coordinator for a pretty large convention in the Pacific Northwest. We have traditionally used Nextel iDEN phones for our comms, and as a general rule worked without any major hiccups.
This year, we were forced to move off of iDEN (with the Nextel shutdown) to Sprint's more conventional network's push-to-talk service. It was a complete and total disaster. In addition to the fact that Sprint's building penetration is extremely poor, their network in downtown Seattle is overloaded, and the phones would regularly just put the data connection to sleep and simply lose alerts and PTT calls. Add to that: many of the group calling features we had with Nextel weren't even available. We couldn't build talk groups and have users join talk groups arbitrarily as they needed people in a particular department.
We will not be depending on Sprint for 2014, or for that matter, ever again.
There's a reason for the growing distrust of medicine.
I generally trust my doctors. However, since they are human beings, they are as subject to confirmation bias as anyone else. Probably like more than a few people here ln /., I'm "obese" and have "metabolic syndrome." However, my cholesterol levels are where they should be, and historically always have.. even after 20 years of Type II diabetes.
However, my doctor wants to test my cholesterol every six months (even though there's absolutely no diagnostic value in doing so). Why? The logical side of me wants to just chalk it up to that "confirmation bias": I MUST have high cholesterol because I fit the profile, so the last 10 years of good cholesterol numbers don't mean anything. Additionally, my work provides free yearly cholesterol screenings as part of our corporate wellness program.. so even when I provide those lab results to the clinician he still orders a cholesterol screening.
The cynical side of me walks into the doctors office and sees freebies (pens, clipboards, etc.) advertising Lipitor and it's real hard to begin to wonder if the doctor works for me or the drug company. Somebody who's a bit more paranoid is going to see the correlation between all these cholesterol screenings and the statin drug freebies and go all Jenny McCarthy.
I deal with it the same way every time. When I go to the lab to have the actual lab work done, I decline the cholesterol test, give them a photocopy of my most recent screening from work, and ask that they add it to my chart for me.
You got me. I'm about as un-American as they get: I'm a Native/Tribal American.
These damn kids came on my lawn in 1492 and they just won't f#@$ing leave.
Because the VPN service is cheap (it's bundled with the Usenet service I use) and doesn't require me to open my home firewall. Also, my home internet connection is metered (well, "capped" is more accurate), as is the place I host my website.
It's not always "cheaper" to build something yourself.
I live in a place that has bandwidth caps on home Internet usage. I don't want to use 2 bytes for every byte sent over my home cable modem.
I use a VPN service (VyprVPN). I'm a USian.
My primary reason for using it is that many "open" hotspots have filters. These filters often filter out content that is merely "politically inconvenient", usually to the Religious Right. Since a lot of the web filtering software has ties to these self-appointed censors, they tend to be very aggressive on what they filter.
VyprVPN allows me to access these sites even from behind this restrictive filtering.
Savings accounts, by Federal banking regulations, are restricted in how many withdrawals you can make in a 30-day period. I believe the number is less than 10.
WA is the abbreviation typically associated with Washington State, not the city of Washington, D.C.
Wash. Post is the more commonly accepted abbreviation of the newspaper based in Washington, D.C.
I don't care if the user is informed they are getting filtered Internet. It's about notification and consent. If your users are aware of it, and it is mandated by a clearly defined company policy, great and carry on.
If you are doing this without the knowledge and consent of the user you are almost as bad as what you are fighting.
Actually, there are a few Barnes and Noble stores with full Starbucks locations. Tanasbourne, Oregon is one such example.
OK, wiseguy, riddle me this.
There are people carrying government issued IDs out there with "I", "D", and "2" on them. What gender are they?
Not just the people, but yes, static electricity is the primary concern. Also, I'm told by the people that manage these sorts of things that a "too dry" environment also makes air cooling less effective. Something to do with the fact that a little bit of moisture actually allows the air to carry more heat than if it was 100% dry.
Only on the western third. Prineville is, in fact, on the northwestern edge of the Great Basin Desert, and in fact gets about 11 inches a year of rainfall.
By comparison, Phoenix, Arizona, gets 9.
I work for another data center operator in Central Oregon. We also use ambient air cooling. I don't know if we use the same system Facebook does, to be honest.
Central Oregon is the northwestern edge of the Great Basin desert. Summers here are bone dry. Our data center gets so dry we actually have the opposite problem: it gets TOO dry.
Ok, I work for a data center operator. In Central Oregon.
Our data center is so damn dry that most of the time in the summer we're getting alerts about the humidity being too low. How did Facebook fuck this one up?
Point of order:
It's technically Ethernet that requires repeaters every 100 meters, regardless of whether it's classic 10 megabit over Cat3 (which is within specification, by the way) or GigE over Cat6.
Other networking technologies can get further distances over the same quality cable (DSL being a prime example: it technically only requires "Cat3", often works over cabling that technically isn't even that, and has the ability to span distances of over 1,000 meters).
The corner bakery doesn't care about latency. They need "the Internet" to process credit cards.
The convenience store doesn't care about latency. They need "the Internet" to order stuff from their central commissary, which is often done automatically based upon sales and to process credit cards..
The McDonald's doesn't care about latency. They need "the Internet" to order stuff from their central commissary (which is often done automatically based upon sales), to process credit and gift cards, and to provide customers with the ability to browse the web via their hotspot.
That's the point. The vast majority of Main Street doesn't need a quick connection, or even a fat one. Up until recently, they did most of the above with a dial-up modem (or, in a few cases, and ISDN 128k BRI). When most of the data you send is a few hundred bytes to get approval for a credit card.. or a 1 megabyte order form.. a DOCSIS 2.0 cable modem, HSPA wireless connection, or HughesNet satellite connection doesn't seem that much slower than a 100M fiber circuit. And perhaps most importantly, is a hell of a lot cheaper.