I work with some satellite based systems that cost less than the SMS rates AT&T is apparently charging. For example:
Iridium (yes, they are still around): $1.50/minute (prices vary). This buys you a 1200 bps link (they claim 2400 bps, but your actual throughput is closer to 1200). This means to send a megabyte of data would cost you (1048576 / 1200 / 60 * 1.5 == $21.85). According to the article a megabyte of SMS would cost you $1,497.97. Iridium was generally considered to be grossly expensive when it came out.
Now lets compare against a real (even more expensive) satellite connection. Inmarsat BGAN charges by the megabyte, a common plan is $7 for each modem/satellite hop, so in the worst case scenario you're sending modem to modem for $14/meg.
As other people have pointed out, it's a bunch of 1GB zip files. A lot of zip programs will actually crap themselves if you give them a zip file over 2GB.
Where did this $100/month contract meme come from? This is the second time it has been posted in this thread alone and I can't figure out where it came from. The only thing I know for sure is that it didn't come from reality. The basic iPhone plan (the one that almost everybody would get unless they're a salesguy or a teenage girl) is $60/month. Still kinda high, but with unlimited data (most cell data plans are pure rape) it's not completely unreasonable. The idea is if you plunking down the big bucks for the phone in the first place you can afford an extra $20/month on your phone bill over your existing non-data phone. It works out to a $240/year premium to own a phone that can hit google whenever you want. If that's not for you, don't get the iPhone.
That could well be an indication that the complexity of the program the Professor was asking you to write was a bit too much for the time and skill level of his students. The person who used Perl leveraged a lot of the built-in features of the language to cut his development time down unlike the C/C++/Java guys who were forced to implement their own. That's Perl's biggest virtue: the ability to quickly write programs that work. They won't be the fastest or the prettiest, but they'll tend to be done first and with fewer bugs in the 1.0 release.
I think targeting military targets vs. civilian targets might be a better distinction between a General and a Terrorist. By this reasoning many "Generals" throughout history are actually terrorists (firebombing Dresden is a good example), but it's probably accurate.
I see a lot of analogies to the uproar over Comic Books in the 50s. Older people think that they're all "kids stuff" and think that nobody over 12 actually plays video games, so when they see stuff like this they assume it's sex being marketed to children, and please won't somebody think of the children?!?
Pretty soon you have censorship or worse industry self-censorship (backed up by well meaning but grossly over broad laws, like the ones that gave legal authority to the Comics Code Authority in the 50s in many communities). It's bad laws that punish people who dare to tread beyond the narrow perception of those in authority. The CCA set back the US comics industry by at least 30 years, do we want to see the same thing happen to videogames?
Sure there is a lot of potential story in the universe, a well crafted universe has that. That does not necessarily mean that the story presented in the game is good.
You know, most of the complaints about Fox News aren't about their conservative bias, but rather their piss poor investigation and fact checking skills. Is it any wonder that people who get their news from Fox News continuously score at the bottom of polls trying to determine how well informed the average person is? The Internet is a better source for news than Fox News, and that's just scary. I mean it is their job to report on stuff, you think the least they could do is some basic journalism.
No. This is clearly talking about the -chan sites and a few other assorted internet misfits. Somehow I don't think it will be very effective though because the Church of Scientology isn't an emo kid on Myspace. They aren't going to post a picture of L. Ron crying because people called him names on the internet or made harassing phone calls.
Is this the same Anonymous that Joe Blow knows about thanks to Fox News? When asked to choose between a church and terrorists who want to blow up your van, which one do you think the public is going to go for?
For what it's worth, a lot of Asians look down on "American" MMOs for being too molly-coddling to the player. You can't really show off how dedicated you are in something like City of Heroes because there isn't epic bling for your character. As far as I know, the Asian release of CoH was a complete disaster, with virtually nobody signing up.
The problem is that Google isn't in a position to roll out radio towers all across the US. If they were to win the spectrum they would probably be forced to re-license it out to Verizon or somebody to get it to the actual consumer.
It's called the 2.4Ghz ISM band. One can argue that leaving it partially unregulated (there are power caps to avoid the problem described in the grandfather post) has been the biggest boon to personal radio use since the invention of the CB radio. Wireless internet as we know it today is all thanks to the FCC leaving a tiny sliver of spectrum open to whoever wants to use it (within reason).
I bet Apple did engineer proper interfaces for Quicktime, but then a requirement for DRM came along (which is a technical nightmare when you think about it, it's encryption where the person entitled to the content is also the one who must be blocked from accessing it) and Apple was forced to hack up the interface to support it.
Just look at the penalty you pay for on Vista to get all of the DRM. It's insane.
Is there really a need for a "free speech zone" in this case? Why not just make a "don't be a dick" rule that says if you're disturbing classes then campus security (or cops) can haul you away. The restriction of free speech across the entire campus (save the parking lot behind the cheap bleachers on the far side of the campus) seems like gross overkill for the problem.
Could that be because Outlook sucks? I hate participating on internet mailing lists with my company client (but I have to in order to stay current) because it's a lot of work to not topquote with Outlook, not to mention how much slower it is than our old mail system (some IMAP thing we ran Netscape's mail client on).
The ability to swap batteries on the plane may be moot if you can't bring them on at all. This recent TSA ruling puts a lot of limitations on loose batteries.
It was a tough year for game awards with so many great releases. I've heard people comparing 2007 to 1939 in films where the Oscar choices included Gone with the Wind, the Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and other classics.
I think the point is that he's supposed to talk up his love for everybody, but in secret only loves the ones that suck up to him. That's why animals have such a rough go of it, they aren't smart enough to brown nose the one way that really counts.
I think the advantage is supposed to be cost and speed. eSATA is faster than USB and Firewire (I think, dunno about the latest Firewire) and requires absolutely _no_ on board logic to work. With this new spec an external eSATA case is literally a metal box with a hole in it, maybe a passthrough connector if they're feeling swanky. They don't even need the transformer anymore. That makes it cheaper than USB and especially firewire.
I have to agree with you on this. Even the internal cables feel pretty loose to me and will come off with the slightest tug. Sometimes I find a nice cable and a compatible drive and they'll click together nice and solid, but for the most part they just don't have the holding power I would like. Even if they don't fall off, they're probably the flimsiest connector you're likely to use on an external connection of any sort on your computer these days. I have a few that have metal reinforcement on them, but they are an exception.
Slashdot Mirror
I work with some satellite based systems that cost less than the SMS rates AT&T is apparently charging. For example:
Iridium (yes, they are still around): $1.50/minute (prices vary). This buys you a 1200 bps link (they claim 2400 bps, but your actual throughput is closer to 1200). This means to send a megabyte of data would cost you (1048576 / 1200 / 60 * 1.5 == $21.85). According to the article a megabyte of SMS would cost you $1,497.97. Iridium was generally considered to be grossly expensive when it came out.
Now lets compare against a real (even more expensive) satellite connection. Inmarsat BGAN charges by the megabyte, a common plan is $7 for each modem/satellite hop, so in the worst case scenario you're sending modem to modem for $14/meg.
As other people have pointed out, it's a bunch of 1GB zip files. A lot of zip programs will actually crap themselves if you give them a zip file over 2GB.
Yes, I'm sure he programmed it in the easiest way possible just to avoid child porn charges... That's defiantly the most plausible explanation.
Where did this $100/month contract meme come from? This is the second time it has been posted in this thread alone and I can't figure out where it came from. The only thing I know for sure is that it didn't come from reality. The basic iPhone plan (the one that almost everybody would get unless they're a salesguy or a teenage girl) is $60/month. Still kinda high, but with unlimited data (most cell data plans are pure rape) it's not completely unreasonable. The idea is if you plunking down the big bucks for the phone in the first place you can afford an extra $20/month on your phone bill over your existing non-data phone. It works out to a $240/year premium to own a phone that can hit google whenever you want. If that's not for you, don't get the iPhone.
Ironically, Larry Wall once said that part of the reason he wrote Perl is because he was scared of Awk's parser.
That could well be an indication that the complexity of the program the Professor was asking you to write was a bit too much for the time and skill level of his students. The person who used Perl leveraged a lot of the built-in features of the language to cut his development time down unlike the C/C++/Java guys who were forced to implement their own. That's Perl's biggest virtue: the ability to quickly write programs that work. They won't be the fastest or the prettiest, but they'll tend to be done first and with fewer bugs in the 1.0 release.
I think targeting military targets vs. civilian targets might be a better distinction between a General and a Terrorist. By this reasoning many "Generals" throughout history are actually terrorists (firebombing Dresden is a good example), but it's probably accurate.
I see a lot of analogies to the uproar over Comic Books in the 50s. Older people think that they're all "kids stuff" and think that nobody over 12 actually plays video games, so when they see stuff like this they assume it's sex being marketed to children, and please won't somebody think of the children?!?
Pretty soon you have censorship or worse industry self-censorship (backed up by well meaning but grossly over broad laws, like the ones that gave legal authority to the Comics Code Authority in the 50s in many communities). It's bad laws that punish people who dare to tread beyond the narrow perception of those in authority. The CCA set back the US comics industry by at least 30 years, do we want to see the same thing happen to videogames?
Sure there is a lot of potential story in the universe, a well crafted universe has that. That does not necessarily mean that the story presented in the game is good.
You know, most of the complaints about Fox News aren't about their conservative bias, but rather their piss poor investigation and fact checking skills. Is it any wonder that people who get their news from Fox News continuously score at the bottom of polls trying to determine how well informed the average person is? The Internet is a better source for news than Fox News, and that's just scary. I mean it is their job to report on stuff, you think the least they could do is some basic journalism.
No. This is clearly talking about the -chan sites and a few other assorted internet misfits. Somehow I don't think it will be very effective though because the Church of Scientology isn't an emo kid on Myspace. They aren't going to post a picture of L. Ron crying because people called him names on the internet or made harassing phone calls.
Is this the same Anonymous that Joe Blow knows about thanks to Fox News? When asked to choose between a church and terrorists who want to blow up your van, which one do you think the public is going to go for?
For what it's worth, a lot of Asians look down on "American" MMOs for being too molly-coddling to the player. You can't really show off how dedicated you are in something like City of Heroes because there isn't epic bling for your character. As far as I know, the Asian release of CoH was a complete disaster, with virtually nobody signing up.
The problem is that Google isn't in a position to roll out radio towers all across the US. If they were to win the spectrum they would probably be forced to re-license it out to Verizon or somebody to get it to the actual consumer.
It's called the 2.4Ghz ISM band. One can argue that leaving it partially unregulated (there are power caps to avoid the problem described in the grandfather post) has been the biggest boon to personal radio use since the invention of the CB radio. Wireless internet as we know it today is all thanks to the FCC leaving a tiny sliver of spectrum open to whoever wants to use it (within reason).
Yeah, but that's a boring grindfest, the perfect game for Asians (and especially Koreans) it seems.
I bet Apple did engineer proper interfaces for Quicktime, but then a requirement for DRM came along (which is a technical nightmare when you think about it, it's encryption where the person entitled to the content is also the one who must be blocked from accessing it) and Apple was forced to hack up the interface to support it.
Just look at the penalty you pay for on Vista to get all of the DRM. It's insane.
Is there really a need for a "free speech zone" in this case? Why not just make a "don't be a dick" rule that says if you're disturbing classes then campus security (or cops) can haul you away. The restriction of free speech across the entire campus (save the parking lot behind the cheap bleachers on the far side of the campus) seems like gross overkill for the problem.
Could that be because Outlook sucks? I hate participating on internet mailing lists with my company client (but I have to in order to stay current) because it's a lot of work to not topquote with Outlook, not to mention how much slower it is than our old mail system (some IMAP thing we ran Netscape's mail client on).
The ability to swap batteries on the plane may be moot if you can't bring them on at all. This recent TSA ruling puts a lot of limitations on loose batteries.
I really hope nobody actually has the email address foo@bar.com, if so I'm very sorry for getting you on all sorts of spam lists over the years.
It was a tough year for game awards with so many great releases. I've heard people comparing 2007 to 1939 in films where the Oscar choices included Gone with the Wind, the Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and other classics.
I think the point is that he's supposed to talk up his love for everybody, but in secret only loves the ones that suck up to him. That's why animals have such a rough go of it, they aren't smart enough to brown nose the one way that really counts.
I think the advantage is supposed to be cost and speed. eSATA is faster than USB and Firewire (I think, dunno about the latest Firewire) and requires absolutely _no_ on board logic to work. With this new spec an external eSATA case is literally a metal box with a hole in it, maybe a passthrough connector if they're feeling swanky. They don't even need the transformer anymore. That makes it cheaper than USB and especially firewire.
I have to agree with you on this. Even the internal cables feel pretty loose to me and will come off with the slightest tug. Sometimes I find a nice cable and a compatible drive and they'll click together nice and solid, but for the most part they just don't have the holding power I would like. Even if they don't fall off, they're probably the flimsiest connector you're likely to use on an external connection of any sort on your computer these days. I have a few that have metal reinforcement on them, but they are an exception.