Though as others have comment - I suspect he's confused warranty with "refund for any reason", in which case they weren't doing him any favours.
Indeed, I'd consider it rather poor customer service that they tried to pretend it was too late to replace it.
(Can anyone else confirm - do Macs really only have a 14 day warranty, or not?)
Like most machines Macs have a 1-year warranty by default with the option to purchase an extended warranty. But you don't seem to understand warranty repairs. When you bring a machine in for service, they don't just grab a new one out of retail stock and give it to you. That's only possible during the "refund for any reason" period. For a warranty repair (which is what you have to do outside the refund window) you give it to a service tech, they diagnose which component has failed and they replace that. Often you have to wait a day or two for your repair. More if parts are backordered.
So yes, the Apple store employee bent the rules in order to make sure that a customer had a better experience than he or she would have if Apple had enforced the rules to the letter. That's good customer service.
Did you see my links? Companies are returning code for both the BSD-licensed OpenSSH and the GPL-licensed gcc. Theo is not complaining about that form of return. He's complaining about not getting money. The GPL still doesn't help him there.
Really? You mean you've got all of these companies, like Apple, to give you their modified version of the OpenBSD code, which is the very thing Theo seems to be complaining about? How about you go tell him that he must be mistaken because "the code is there forever" and one "cannot steal it". For us "the GPL monkeys" it looks very much like Apple and SCO are selling the OpenBSD code back to the OpenBSD people.
RTFA. Source code is not "the very thing Theo seems to be complaining about." It's money. The project needs money and he'd like some of the vendors that profit from the project to ante up with some support. The GPL would not make any difference here. Apple uses gcc. SCO uses gcc, Linux and thousands of other GPL'd packages.
Huh. Business objects buying the crystal reports line slipped completely beneath my radar. Having used Jasper Reports, Crystal Reports, and what is now (I think) Business Objects Enterprise, I'd rank costs something like this:
If you have developers handling your reporting anyway, the open source solutions are hands down cheaper. You'll get reports better tailored to your needs for comparable levels of effort with lower up-front costs.
If you have non-developers handling your reporting, Crystal Reports is a false economy. Take either option 1 or option 3. You'll get more useful reports at lower effort.
If you have non-developers handling your reporting with good DBA support, Business Objects enterprise is fantastic. Though the up-front costs seem insane compared to the alternatives, BO enterprise actually allows a moderately tech-savvy business analyst to create reports herself, at least on a one-off basis, without an immense effort. She'll get exactly the data she needs for her analysis without custom development. But you have to just get over the up front costs.
So to summarize my memory of the costs:
(OSS) $0 up-front costs, 3x developer effort, 1x business analyst effort, business analysts might get exactly what they need.
(Crystal) $700/seat up-front, 2x developer effort, 2x business analyst effort, business analysts might get exactly what they need.
(BO Enterprise) $1500 up-front, 0x develoepr effort, 1x DBA effort, 1x business analyst effort, business analysts definitely get exactly what they need.
My knowledge of these products is admittedly a bit dated, but that's my recollection. If your management is clueful enough to buy Business Objects Enterprise, the savings in the end more than cover the up-front costs if you have good Business Analysts and good DBAs. Of course, for any of this to matter the reports have to actually be important and useful. If the measurements you're reporting on are BS anyway you should always go with option 1 so that maximum savings can be realized by scuttling the reports.
That worked. There was also a simpler work-around known as guard time. Basically, the modem would expect a counfigurable amount of DTE silence on either side of the escape sequence. This technique was patented by Hayes, who charged a healthy fee for it. So most budget modems suffered from the problem. Zyxel was one of the exceptions... they had some alternative technique that allowed them to avoid licensing the patent but still not suffer from this problem.
Unlikely. DJB is on sabbatical right now, and I think UIC has "spring", "summer" and "fall" terms, not "winter" which would indicate a school that uses the quarter system.
FWIW, I believe all 3 of your assertions about his UNIX security assignment are incorrect. The assignment didn't look at all impossible. Consider *all* the software on sourceforge. 10 bugs is not a lot to find over an academic term, given such a mass to work off. It does not constitute "severe ramifications" or "callous disrespect" (especially in an elective course) to lay out expectations for students and then grade them according to the standards you set at the beginning of the term.
But what is more important to a home user? His or her own personal files, or a bunch of system files? I can answer that question for you: the pictures of little Johnny's first day of school mean a whole lot more to a user than the system files that keep the system running.
Sure poor computing practice by the user that owns the files could result in their destruction. Nothing gained versus Windows there. But in a family computer scenario, more is gained than the author admits. On Windows systems, many programs are (mis-)designed to require administrator rights even just to run them. This is not generally the case on UNIX-derived systems. As a result, accounts for family members will often be in the local admin group. So on a family computer if you give Little Johnny an account to run his software and play games, and he goes and downloads the latest malware and runs it, it can nuke your data as well as his.
Under a typical scenario under a UNIX-like system he can only destroy his homework and saved games, not your pictures of his first day of school along with them.
That's got to be a non-negligible benefit to the family user that the author completely discards.
Or metalab. Or sunsite, if you remember those names and haven't kept up with the changes. (I liked the metalab name best of the three...)
Anyway, these guys have been around and hosting things like this for at least 10 years. Talk to them. You may need to host bug tracking and forums at a different site, but they can definitely handle a distro-sized download. Ask them about the stuff you want; I think they'll consider making pretty much any open tool available for you.
And how would open sourcing Mac IE help this? The ActiveX-based sites in question do not work with Mac IE. Although it does contain a half-baked version of the ActiveX API, no one ever used it. Why not? No ActiveX controls that these ActiveX sites depend on are available for the Mac.
So while you may argue the need to access ActiveX sites as justification for using IE on Windows, that doesn't hold true for Mac IE.
Not really. Of the three examples Google maps is the only one that uses AJAX in a manner that provides major benefits over a traditional implementation.
Have you used gmail? Have you used any other web mail applications? I've used gmail, hotmail (the old, pre-ajax one), yahoo mail (the old, pre-ajax one), hushmail, squirrel mail, open webmail and outlook web access all fairly heavily at one time or another. gmail and OWA really stand out from that crowd. gmail uses AJAX, and OWA is conceptually very similar.
I haven't used digg enough to comment.
Your point (that developers need to ask themselves whether technology X provides any real benefit to their application) is sound, but I haven't noticed applications where, as you claim, AJAX detracts from the experience compared to other techniques. Could you point to a few examples where the AJAX implementation of an app sucks compared to the non-AJAX implementation?
Much beyond that, on networks where I've been responsible for the DHCP server, anyway, there was really no benefit to keeping them.
...Except to protect your ass in court when one of your users is logged on another system doing something illegal? Like defacing a US government website per se? And the cops come and haul your systems off to track down the perpetrator?
(IANAL. TINLA.) As I understand it, you're protecting your ass in court in as long as you're following your standard practices for log retention. If they don't ask for the logs within your normal retention period and you no longer have them, you've done nothing wrong. In any case, the cops are likely to haul off your systems whether you have logs to give them or not... that's not a particular disadvantage of a short log retention policy.
If you have the logs, they can only ask you more questions, as far as I can tell... There's no faster end to questioning than "There are no logs. They're rotated out every week. See, here's the crontab and the script."
Did you really keep DHCP logs for more than a week or so, though? Much beyond that, on networks where I've been responsible for the DHCP server, anyway, there was really no benefit to keeping them.
The possibility that our weapons might prove a threat to a culture capable of mere interstellar travel (let alone "intergalactic") is about the same as an ant colony against the U.S. Army.
I disagree. More like a bacteria colony against the U.S. Army. The vast majority would be incapable of harm. Most of those that were capable of harm would kill themselves off before making a dent. Some could be deadly while thriving. What kind of bacteria would we be? Who knows.
One thing's right whether you think of us as ants or bacteria in that scenario: our possibilities of diplomacy are nil.
As someone else has mentioned, the ars system guides are excellent. They build several different types of system and explain the trade-offs they make very nicely.
I also happen to really like Dan Bernstein's advice, especially for a good *BSD desktop box. Like Ars, Dan does an excellent job explaining why he chose what he did.
The ars guides are usually almost current. DJB's is not as current. But look at them for the explanations, even if you want newer components. You can apply their advice to the in depth discussions of particular components you'll find at places like Tom's, HardOCP, AnandTech, etc.
Honestly, from my perspective, Windows is already free. Free as in "comes with the laptop I ordered". Today, when I get a laptop with Windows on it, the first thing I do is erase Windows and replace it with an OS where I am more productive. The only way I'd use an ad-supported version is if they were to pay me to do so, i.e. funnel some of the advertiser $$ they collect from my usage back to me. Even then, the amount they'd have to pay would need to make up for the productivity loss using Windows would impose.
Deja is my mainstay as a coding resource. I never feel like I am slumming when I search there. Did I miss something?
Yes. As ISPs drop usenet services, programmers will stop using the Usenet to ask and answer questions. Deja will not have any new info and it will become less valuable as a coding resource over time if people stop posting to Usenet.
'Course, this is but one of many requiems for Usenet. Remember when AOL installed their Usenet gateway? That was the end of Usenet too. As long as good ISPs don't follow Rogers lead, Usenet will be fine. Short a few Canadians, perhaps, but fine.
Even symantec admits that this report is a steaming pile of crap.
From TFA:
Symantec counts only those security flaws that have been confirmed by the vendor. According to security monitoring company Secunia, there are 19 security issues that Microsoft still has to deal with for Internet Explorer, while there are only three for Firefox.
Nice. So in terms of checking off the reported vulnerabilities and counting each one equally, if the report would be honest, IE would have 32 issues and Firefox would have 29. For the sake of this report, all vulnerabilities are equally bad, right? Well, not according to TFA:
Symantec admitted that "at the time of writing, no widespread exploitation of any browser except Microsoft Internet Explorer has occurred," but added that it "expects this to change as alternative browsers become increasingly widely deployed."
So the IE vulnerabilities result in widespread exploitation and the Firefox ones don't, but firefox is somehow worse? I think the only way in which firefox is worse, from Symantec's perspective, is that the constantly malware-infested machines (where IE is the main infestation vector) inflate demand for the crap that Symantec peddles, and they're afraid that if people aren't constantly suffering from the pain of these infections this demand will evaporate.
Feh. Maybe I'm a cynic, but this looks like marketing poorly disguised as research to me...
Um... if what you say is true (you'd be out thousands of dollars if you got linked from a busy site), you've chosen a bad webhost. From my webhost (not linked here) a serious slashdotting usually costa about $10. And best of all, if whatever amount I've chosen is exceeded, they just shut the site off rather than charging me.
(I still think what Fuddruckers did is wrong, but not for the reason you give.)
By your logic, if I were to go and shoot a member of the I.R.A. for crimes their "terrorist" group commited, then Osama bin Laden will "get the message" that I can hunt him down any time I want, so he better beware.
No. My logic has nothing to do with "terrorists". Please argue the point, not some strained analogy. If you absolutely must have an analogy, though, think of police out on a city street, ticketing jaywalking left and right. Not many drug deals will go down there, will they?
Suing a BT user doesn't send any message to the head of a major pirating organization.
Sure it does. It sends a message that "this arena is policed." There's someone watching, and they prosecute violations. Now, obviously, the message fails completely if you don't additionally go after actual pirates when you see them. But provided you prosecute actual piracy, prosecuting more minor violations as well sends a message to potential "heads of major pirating organizations". The reason the signal is useful is simply that there are so many more BT users than real pirates, so it's easier to keep your name in the news everyday (and thus send an effective signal) with the BT users.
It's a messaging thing, pure and simple. From the copyright owner's perspective, if you're willing to sue even the most minor violators, the major violators have more to fear from you. So since you can find and harm the minor violators, imagine what the real pirates have to fear.
If you see it in the context of sending a signal to the major violators, it's easier to understand, IMO.
Fair enough. My sample of people who chose half the space and less than 1/4 the commute includes 3 single guys, 2 couples with no kids, and 1 couple with 1 kid. My sample of people who chose twice the space and 4x the commute includes 1 single guy, 1 couple with no kids and 1 couple with 2 kids.
Whatever the reason, though, I was only implying that people decide what they value based on personal situations, not implying that my valuation wouldn't change if I went from a couple with no kids to a couple with 4. Though I do (since we don't have kids yet) maintain that the difference is mainly "stuff" and that kids who share bedrooms (as would be the case if we went down that path with our current living quarters) don't suffer major quality of life issues. That's likely just a frame of reference thing, I suppose:-)
At the end of it all, though, what I'm really saying is that I have a hard time imagining myself in a situation where a >4h/day commute beats out a 30m/day commute based on expanded living space. Not an impossible time, but it seems like a stretch given my personal values.
Eh. I prefer to live in half the space (not in disrepair though) for the same money, close to the city and my office rather than spend an extra 20 hours a week polluting the environment from my car. I'd just fill the extra space with more stuff anyway...
To each his own, though. I know many people who'd rather have the extra space and stuff than the extra time. We all make our own trade-offs, I suppose.
Here's another ringing endorsement for nearlyfreespeech. They've been fantastic. Their pricing is very hard to beat, especially for a smallish site. Running a lightly used download site (hosting some of my experiental builds for an open source project... 20MB or so a pop, semi-regularly posted to busy user forums to get users to test features), a blog, a bookmark sync app, and a photo album has cost me just under $3.00 for the past 9 months. Support has been fantastic. If you don't need SSL for your site, and you don't know you'll transfer hundreds of gigabytes every month, they're very hard to beat. If you know you'll be transferring a ton very regularly, a package deal may work out better for you.
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Like most machines Macs have a 1-year warranty by default with the option to purchase an extended warranty. But you don't seem to understand warranty repairs. When you bring a machine in for service, they don't just grab a new one out of retail stock and give it to you. That's only possible during the "refund for any reason" period. For a warranty repair (which is what you have to do outside the refund window) you give it to a service tech, they diagnose which component has failed and they replace that. Often you have to wait a day or two for your repair. More if parts are backordered.
So yes, the Apple store employee bent the rules in order to make sure that a customer had a better experience than he or she would have if Apple had enforced the rules to the letter. That's good customer service.
Did you see my links? Companies are returning code for both the BSD-licensed OpenSSH and the GPL-licensed gcc. Theo is not complaining about that form of return. He's complaining about not getting money. The GPL still doesn't help him there.
Really? You mean you've got all of these companies, like Apple, to give you their modified version of the OpenBSD code, which is the very thing Theo seems to be complaining about? How about you go tell him that he must be mistaken because "the code is there forever" and one "cannot steal it". For us "the GPL monkeys" it looks very much like Apple and SCO are selling the OpenBSD code back to the OpenBSD people.
RTFA. Source code is not "the very thing Theo seems to be complaining about." It's money. The project needs money and he'd like some of the vendors that profit from the project to ante up with some support. The GPL would not make any difference here. Apple uses gcc. SCO uses gcc, Linux and thousands of other GPL'd packages.
The GPL makes no difference in Apple's behavior:
Apple OpenSSH code
Apple GCC code
So how would the GPL help the project?
So to summarize my memory of the costs:
My knowledge of these products is admittedly a bit dated, but that's my recollection. If your management is clueful enough to buy Business Objects Enterprise, the savings in the end more than cover the up-front costs if you have good Business Analysts and good DBAs. Of course, for any of this to matter the reports have to actually be important and useful. If the measurements you're reporting on are BS anyway you should always go with option 1 so that maximum savings can be realized by scuttling the reports.
That worked. There was also a simpler work-around known as guard time. Basically, the modem would expect a counfigurable amount of DTE silence on either side of the escape sequence. This technique was patented by Hayes, who charged a healthy fee for it. So most budget modems suffered from the problem. Zyxel was one of the exceptions... they had some alternative technique that allowed them to avoid licensing the patent but still not suffer from this problem.
People just don't learn very well from past mistakes...
Unlikely. DJB is on sabbatical right now, and I think UIC has "spring", "summer" and "fall" terms, not "winter" which would indicate a school that uses the quarter system.
FWIW, I believe all 3 of your assertions about his UNIX security assignment are incorrect. The assignment didn't look at all impossible. Consider *all* the software on sourceforge. 10 bugs is not a lot to find over an academic term, given such a mass to work off. It does not constitute "severe ramifications" or "callous disrespect" (especially in an elective course) to lay out expectations for students and then grade them according to the standards you set at the beginning of the term.
But what is more important to a home user? His or her own personal files, or a bunch of system files? I can answer that question for you: the pictures of little Johnny's first day of school mean a whole lot more to a user than the system files that keep the system running.
Sure poor computing practice by the user that owns the files could result in their destruction. Nothing gained versus Windows there. But in a family computer scenario, more is gained than the author admits. On Windows systems, many programs are (mis-)designed to require administrator rights even just to run them. This is not generally the case on UNIX-derived systems. As a result, accounts for family members will often be in the local admin group. So on a family computer if you give Little Johnny an account to run his software and play games, and he goes and downloads the latest malware and runs it, it can nuke your data as well as his.
Under a typical scenario under a UNIX-like system he can only destroy his homework and saved games, not your pictures of his first day of school along with them.
That's got to be a non-negligible benefit to the family user that the author completely discards.
Or metalab. Or sunsite, if you remember those names and haven't kept up with the changes. (I liked the metalab name best of the three...)
Anyway, these guys have been around and hosting things like this for at least 10 years. Talk to them. You may need to host bug tracking and forums at a different site, but they can definitely handle a distro-sized download. Ask them about the stuff you want; I think they'll consider making pretty much any open tool available for you.
They don't carry binaries. [WARNING: link to pornographic stories follows. NSFW!]They do carry text that most people would consider pornographic. They also carry groups that contain information used to pirate software, which could be a different kind of risk.
I agree with your sentiment, though, that the value of the archive as a technical resource should outweigh the risk of misuse in most IT environments.
And how would open sourcing Mac IE help this? The ActiveX-based sites in question do not work with Mac IE. Although it does contain a half-baked version of the ActiveX API, no one ever used it. Why not? No ActiveX controls that these ActiveX sites depend on are available for the Mac.
So while you may argue the need to access ActiveX sites as justification for using IE on Windows, that doesn't hold true for Mac IE.
Have you used gmail? Have you used any other web mail applications? I've used gmail, hotmail (the old, pre-ajax one), yahoo mail (the old, pre-ajax one), hushmail, squirrel mail, open webmail and outlook web access all fairly heavily at one time or another. gmail and OWA really stand out from that crowd. gmail uses AJAX, and OWA is conceptually very similar.
I haven't used digg enough to comment.
Your point (that developers need to ask themselves whether technology X provides any real benefit to their application) is sound, but I haven't noticed applications where, as you claim, AJAX detracts from the experience compared to other techniques. Could you point to a few examples where the AJAX implementation of an app sucks compared to the non-AJAX implementation?
(IANAL. TINLA.) As I understand it, you're protecting your ass in court in as long as you're following your standard practices for log retention. If they don't ask for the logs within your normal retention period and you no longer have them, you've done nothing wrong. In any case, the cops are likely to haul off your systems whether you have logs to give them or not... that's not a particular disadvantage of a short log retention policy.
If you have the logs, they can only ask you more questions, as far as I can tell... There's no faster end to questioning than "There are no logs. They're rotated out every week. See, here's the crontab and the script."
Did you really keep DHCP logs for more than a week or so, though? Much beyond that, on networks where I've been responsible for the DHCP server, anyway, there was really no benefit to keeping them.
I disagree. More like a bacteria colony against the U.S. Army. The vast majority would be incapable of harm. Most of those that were capable of harm would kill themselves off before making a dent. Some could be deadly while thriving. What kind of bacteria would we be? Who knows.
One thing's right whether you think of us as ants or bacteria in that scenario: our possibilities of diplomacy are nil.
As someone else has mentioned, the ars system guides are excellent. They build several different types of system and explain the trade-offs they make very nicely.
I also happen to really like Dan Bernstein's advice, especially for a good *BSD desktop box. Like Ars, Dan does an excellent job explaining why he chose what he did.
The ars guides are usually almost current. DJB's is not as current. But look at them for the explanations, even if you want newer components. You can apply their advice to the in depth discussions of particular components you'll find at places like Tom's, HardOCP, AnandTech, etc.
Honestly, from my perspective, Windows is already free. Free as in "comes with the laptop I ordered". Today, when I get a laptop with Windows on it, the first thing I do is erase Windows and replace it with an OS where I am more productive. The only way I'd use an ad-supported version is if they were to pay me to do so, i.e. funnel some of the advertiser $$ they collect from my usage back to me. Even then, the amount they'd have to pay would need to make up for the productivity loss using Windows would impose.
Yes. As ISPs drop usenet services, programmers will stop using the Usenet to ask and answer questions. Deja will not have any new info and it will become less valuable as a coding resource over time if people stop posting to Usenet.
'Course, this is but one of many requiems for Usenet. Remember when AOL installed their Usenet gateway? That was the end of Usenet too. As long as good ISPs don't follow Rogers lead, Usenet will be fine. Short a few Canadians, perhaps, but fine.
Even symantec admits that this report is a steaming pile of crap.
From TFA:
Symantec counts only those security flaws that have been confirmed by the vendor. According to security monitoring company Secunia, there are 19 security issues that Microsoft still has to deal with for Internet Explorer, while there are only three for Firefox.
Nice. So in terms of checking off the reported vulnerabilities and counting each one equally, if the report would be honest, IE would have 32 issues and Firefox would have 29. For the sake of this report, all vulnerabilities are equally bad, right? Well, not according to TFA:
Symantec admitted that "at the time of writing, no widespread exploitation of any browser except Microsoft Internet Explorer has occurred," but added that it "expects this to change as alternative browsers become increasingly widely deployed."
So the IE vulnerabilities result in widespread exploitation and the Firefox ones don't, but firefox is somehow worse? I think the only way in which firefox is worse, from Symantec's perspective, is that the constantly malware-infested machines (where IE is the main infestation vector) inflate demand for the crap that Symantec peddles, and they're afraid that if people aren't constantly suffering from the pain of these infections this demand will evaporate.
Feh. Maybe I'm a cynic, but this looks like marketing poorly disguised as research to me...
Um... if what you say is true (you'd be out thousands of dollars if you got linked from a busy site), you've chosen a bad webhost. From my webhost (not linked here) a serious slashdotting usually costa about $10. And best of all, if whatever amount I've chosen is exceeded, they just shut the site off rather than charging me.
(I still think what Fuddruckers did is wrong, but not for the reason you give.)
No. My logic has nothing to do with "terrorists". Please argue the point, not some strained analogy. If you absolutely must have an analogy, though, think of police out on a city street, ticketing jaywalking left and right. Not many drug deals will go down there, will they?
Sure it does. It sends a message that "this arena is policed." There's someone watching, and they prosecute violations. Now, obviously, the message fails completely if you don't additionally go after actual pirates when you see them. But provided you prosecute actual piracy, prosecuting more minor violations as well sends a message to potential "heads of major pirating organizations". The reason the signal is useful is simply that there are so many more BT users than real pirates, so it's easier to keep your name in the news everyday (and thus send an effective signal) with the BT users.
It's a messaging thing, pure and simple. From the copyright owner's perspective, if you're willing to sue even the most minor violators, the major violators have more to fear from you. So since you can find and harm the minor violators, imagine what the real pirates have to fear.
If you see it in the context of sending a signal to the major violators, it's easier to understand, IMO.
Fair enough. My sample of people who chose half the space and less than 1/4 the commute includes 3 single guys, 2 couples with no kids, and 1 couple with 1 kid. My sample of people who chose twice the space and 4x the commute includes 1 single guy, 1 couple with no kids and 1 couple with 2 kids.
:-)
Whatever the reason, though, I was only implying that people decide what they value based on personal situations, not implying that my valuation wouldn't change if I went from a couple with no kids to a couple with 4. Though I do (since we don't have kids yet) maintain that the difference is mainly "stuff" and that kids who share bedrooms (as would be the case if we went down that path with our current living quarters) don't suffer major quality of life issues. That's likely just a frame of reference thing, I suppose
At the end of it all, though, what I'm really saying is that I have a hard time imagining myself in a situation where a >4h/day commute beats out a 30m/day commute based on expanded living space. Not an impossible time, but it seems like a stretch given my personal values.
Eh. I prefer to live in half the space (not in disrepair though) for the same money, close to the city and my office rather than spend an extra 20 hours a week polluting the environment from my car. I'd just fill the extra space with more stuff anyway...
To each his own, though. I know many people who'd rather have the extra space and stuff than the extra time. We all make our own trade-offs, I suppose.
Here's another ringing endorsement for nearlyfreespeech. They've been fantastic. Their pricing is very hard to beat, especially for a smallish site. Running a lightly used download site (hosting some of my experiental builds for an open source project... 20MB or so a pop, semi-regularly posted to busy user forums to get users to test features), a blog, a bookmark sync app, and a photo album has cost me just under $3.00 for the past 9 months. Support has been fantastic. If you don't need SSL for your site, and you don't know you'll transfer hundreds of gigabytes every month, they're very hard to beat. If you know you'll be transferring a ton very regularly, a package deal may work out better for you.