For some reason, I can't get that Chris Rock scene from "I'm Gonna Get You Sucka" out of my head now. The one where he's at the BBQ, just wants to buy one rib, only wants one sip of soda, and wants it in his hand instead of a cup, and then he asks if he can bread a $100 on them. "How much for one rib?"
OK, I'll accept that argument. You're saying the average user, on whom a Sprint could make a profit offering data-only services, wouldn't want the added hassle of setting up a VOIP app to do their voice communication. Thus, instead of an acceptable 10% of the data-only customers being heavy users, it'd be 90% (or something hard to bear like that).
You're probably right. If only more people were geeks, that'd solve everything, right?
Yeah, I wasn't complaining about AWS or GAE, more the overall companies.
There are, of course, other players, including some big ones. Oracle's got a Java-based cloud offering. SalesForce.com has a cloud platform offering as well, although I think it's based on their own proprietary technologies.
It's not so much AppEngine that I think is evil--I actually love it and use it for protoyping web app ideas because it's cheap and easy to use for that purpose. Rather, it's Google and Amazon the companies that I've soured on. Where Microsoft was once the evil empire, they're kind of beaten down and sad. I mean, they're still making bazillions of dollars, but I can't help but think that unless something crazy happens, they'll always be the company that was.
Google has just extended their tendrils too far, and I'm a little creeped out by them. I used to be an avid defender, but I don't believe the "don't be evil" credo quite so much anymore.
And Amazon, well again, I think their cloud service is awesome. Brilliant innovation to take their datacenter expertise and sell off those resources as a service. But their overall business model is, I think, predatory and shameful. They're like the Walmart of the on-line world. I've stopped shopping there, and I've asked my wife to do the same. If there's any way to support our local economy, even if it costs a bit more and requires driving and parking and going out of the house and stuff, I think it's important to do so. There's a high cost for convenience and low prices, and we just won't know what it is until it's too late.
Maybe it depends where you are. I remember my mother complaining that PacBell wanted a fee to be unlisted. This was back in the 80's after Mean Judge Green broke up AT&T. Poor guy. Anyone know if he lived long enough to see his signature work totally undone?
Land-line quality voice runs at about 56kbps. It's a 7KHz, 8-bit sample rate, for 56k. Add some overhead so you get a nice power of two and that's where you get, for example, single channel ISDN running at 64kbps. But let's go with 56k for the fun of it since I've already done the math.
If you assume zero compression below that (which is silly, as voice quality audio can be heavily compressed in a smart client like an i- or Android Phone), and if you were talking 24 hours per day, seven days per week for a month, you'd push a bit over 17 GB. I was going to double it for full duplex audio, but unless you and your conversation partner are constantly talking over each other, it's not going to be anywhere near double the total data flow.
So cut it in half for compression, cut it by another half because, really, who is making voice calls for more than six hours per day, and then cut it in half again because if you're that data-heavy, you're going to be using wifi at least some of the time. That leaves you with 2-3 GB of 3/4G data transfer per month on a three hour per day, 7 day per week quota. Sprint's unlimited data plan with 450 minutes for smart phones is $79.99. Their mobile data (e.g. for a computer) plans include a 6GB option for $49.99. They could easily do a data-only for phones option with 6GB for $65.
Of course, the phone makers would have to be on board. Apple in particular is, as I understand it, all about the full end-user experience, and they may prohibit selling non-phone accounts with iPhones.
(re: the New Relic stuff, I'm referring to.NET server-side monitoring. I'm pretty sure their client-side RUM system works regardless of the hosted platform.)
I wonder why Cogswell ignored Google's cloud services. They've got the Python- or Java-based AppEngine, and they've got a full virtual server service. There are a lot of other platforms, too, but as far as size and industry impact, I'd put Google on a similar level.
Funny, though, that out of the three of them, if I were to choose the least "evil" one, it'd be Microsoft.
Last, but not least, if you're using Azure, I'm pretty sure that New Relic has an agent that's compatible, for performance monitoring.
I was looking to see if anyone mentioned this. I don't think it's reasonable or anything, but it's not something new and crazy to be outraged about. It's really an opportunity, I think, for one of the majors or a new upstart to come along and offer total-privacy services. For example, a data-only service that allows you to use your choice of IP-based voice communication. Combine that with services like burner, you could have a lot of happy people buying data-only services. If T-Mobile or Sprint were to, say, offer flat-rate data-only services at $10-$20/month less than their voice+data services, I'd bet they'd get a FLOOD of Verizon (and AT&T for that matter) customers.
In some cases, I'm sure that the actual account-holder thinks it's a good idea to add followers because then people will think he/she is important enough to follow. And I'm sure, to some degree, it works. Whether it's worth it or not is a secondary question.
In other cases, such as the alleged purchase of followers by the Romney campaign, I'm sure it went instead something like this:
Campaign Social Media Adviser: We need to leverage social media.
Campaign Manager: He's right! We need to harness the power of the Internet!
Romney: Yes, let's use the complex series of tubes to get the message out! Make it so.
Campaign Manager: Make it so!
Social Media Adviser: Uh, it takes more than "make it so" to make it so.
Campaign Manager: MAKE IT SO! Get me followers or lose your job!
Social Media Adviser: Gotcha! (purchases followers, keeps job for now)
For a brush with a finer tip, check out Asymco. They outline how it *could* be true based on recently-published numbers. They also underscore that they think the numbers are dubious, but overall, I think it's a pretty fair assessment.
Maybe not completely irrelevant. Perhaps, in a given population of a species of tree, there is not only cross-pollination, but also cross-grafting. Maybe insects or higher animals move leaves or seeds from tree to tree, and for some reason, this species is more likely to accept the new introduction without complex grafting techniques.
To wit: Tree A spawns tree B through pollination with tree C, so B is indeed genetically unique. B is close to A, though, and a bird gathering shoots for its nest brings over something viable from B to A and sticks it in the crook of a branch and it grafts. B' is born, effectively a grandchild AND parasite of A.
I'm just letting my imagination wander here, but it certainly would be interesting if that were the case.
Also, the article kind of ignores the "shipped" vs. "sold" question. The word "sold" doesn't show up once in the article.
Apple sells basically every item that's shipped. Nobody really knows with Samsung how many of those shipped devices end up gathering dust until they're sent back.
Herman Cain was, first and foremost, a joke. Secondly, with regards to the sex scandal stuff, no Chicago machine did anything; he had a long history of dodgy behavior that came out. Even if you only believe the stuff he admitted to--giving money to that blondie on an ongoing basis for years and years without telling his wife about it--you have to admit it's questionable. But most men don't just give thousands and thousands of dollars to some random woman because she needs it--especially without telling the wife--unless there's something else going on.
And as far as Obama not being African American, well, his father was African, his mother was American. I think that does actually make him African American. Having no slave ancestry doesn't mean that he didn't deal with racism as he was growing up.
As far as the other stuff, we're getting into silly season. I shudder to think who has enough mod points to give you an "insightful" rating on this comment.
Oh, it's intentional and overt. Not by everyone, I'm sure, but there are all sorts of examples, including the ever popular "Don't Re-Nig in 2012" bumper stickers, all the way to Romney's campaign advisor talking about how Romney understands the US's anglo-saxon heritage better than the current administration.
I'm not suggesting all tea partiers--and certainly not all republicans--are racist, but a goodly chunk of the electorate hated Obama from the word go. They profess doubt his birth locale; they emphasize his foreign-sounding middle name; they claim that he hates white people, for goodness sake. Majority or not, a lot of people come off as hating him for clearly xenophobic/racist reasons.
What's disingenuous (per the GP's post) is to suddenly decide that race isn't an issue just because a man with an African father was elected president. I look forward to the day when it's so rare as to be noise-level, when we can brush off incidents as if they were nothing. But that's not where we are; we're still in a place where we have to shine a light on it. When someone starts waving around nooses, you can't just say he's got hang-ups; you have to take the offered symbolism in the context in which it was created and intended.
Disagreement, schmisagreement. Obama just isn't that far off to the left. He's like Reagan for christ's sake. So when poor white southerners are suggesting it's time for a revolution if he get's re-elected, there's really only one believable reason for that sort of vitriol.
Slashdot Mirror
For some reason, I can't get that Chris Rock scene from "I'm Gonna Get You Sucka" out of my head now. The one where he's at the BBQ, just wants to buy one rib, only wants one sip of soda, and wants it in his hand instead of a cup, and then he asks if he can bread a $100 on them. "How much for one rib?"
Yes, except I don't think he was joking, where the GP poster, I am fairly certain, was.
OK, I'll accept that argument. You're saying the average user, on whom a Sprint could make a profit offering data-only services, wouldn't want the added hassle of setting up a VOIP app to do their voice communication. Thus, instead of an acceptable 10% of the data-only customers being heavy users, it'd be 90% (or something hard to bear like that).
You're probably right. If only more people were geeks, that'd solve everything, right?
Yeah, I wasn't complaining about AWS or GAE, more the overall companies.
There are, of course, other players, including some big ones. Oracle's got a Java-based cloud offering. SalesForce.com has a cloud platform offering as well, although I think it's based on their own proprietary technologies.
It's not so much AppEngine that I think is evil--I actually love it and use it for protoyping web app ideas because it's cheap and easy to use for that purpose. Rather, it's Google and Amazon the companies that I've soured on. Where Microsoft was once the evil empire, they're kind of beaten down and sad. I mean, they're still making bazillions of dollars, but I can't help but think that unless something crazy happens, they'll always be the company that was.
Google has just extended their tendrils too far, and I'm a little creeped out by them. I used to be an avid defender, but I don't believe the "don't be evil" credo quite so much anymore.
And Amazon, well again, I think their cloud service is awesome. Brilliant innovation to take their datacenter expertise and sell off those resources as a service. But their overall business model is, I think, predatory and shameful. They're like the Walmart of the on-line world. I've stopped shopping there, and I've asked my wife to do the same. If there's any way to support our local economy, even if it costs a bit more and requires driving and parking and going out of the house and stuff, I think it's important to do so. There's a high cost for convenience and low prices, and we just won't know what it is until it's too late.
Maybe it depends where you are. I remember my mother complaining that PacBell wanted a fee to be unlisted. This was back in the 80's after Mean Judge Green broke up AT&T. Poor guy. Anyone know if he lived long enough to see his signature work totally undone?
Land-line quality voice runs at about 56kbps. It's a 7KHz, 8-bit sample rate, for 56k. Add some overhead so you get a nice power of two and that's where you get, for example, single channel ISDN running at 64kbps. But let's go with 56k for the fun of it since I've already done the math.
If you assume zero compression below that (which is silly, as voice quality audio can be heavily compressed in a smart client like an i- or Android Phone), and if you were talking 24 hours per day, seven days per week for a month, you'd push a bit over 17 GB. I was going to double it for full duplex audio, but unless you and your conversation partner are constantly talking over each other, it's not going to be anywhere near double the total data flow.
So cut it in half for compression, cut it by another half because, really, who is making voice calls for more than six hours per day, and then cut it in half again because if you're that data-heavy, you're going to be using wifi at least some of the time. That leaves you with 2-3 GB of 3/4G data transfer per month on a three hour per day, 7 day per week quota. Sprint's unlimited data plan with 450 minutes for smart phones is $79.99. Their mobile data (e.g. for a computer) plans include a 6GB option for $49.99. They could easily do a data-only for phones option with 6GB for $65.
Of course, the phone makers would have to be on board. Apple in particular is, as I understand it, all about the full end-user experience, and they may prohibit selling non-phone accounts with iPhones.
(re: the New Relic stuff, I'm referring to .NET server-side monitoring. I'm pretty sure their client-side RUM system works regardless of the hosted platform.)
I wonder why Cogswell ignored Google's cloud services. They've got the Python- or Java-based AppEngine, and they've got a full virtual server service. There are a lot of other platforms, too, but as far as size and industry impact, I'd put Google on a similar level.
Funny, though, that out of the three of them, if I were to choose the least "evil" one, it'd be Microsoft.
Last, but not least, if you're using Azure, I'm pretty sure that New Relic has an agent that's compatible, for performance monitoring.
I was looking to see if anyone mentioned this. I don't think it's reasonable or anything, but it's not something new and crazy to be outraged about. It's really an opportunity, I think, for one of the majors or a new upstart to come along and offer total-privacy services. For example, a data-only service that allows you to use your choice of IP-based voice communication. Combine that with services like burner, you could have a lot of happy people buying data-only services. If T-Mobile or Sprint were to, say, offer flat-rate data-only services at $10-$20/month less than their voice+data services, I'd bet they'd get a FLOOD of Verizon (and AT&T for that matter) customers.
In some cases, I'm sure that the actual account-holder thinks it's a good idea to add followers because then people will think he/she is important enough to follow. And I'm sure, to some degree, it works. Whether it's worth it or not is a secondary question.
In other cases, such as the alleged purchase of followers by the Romney campaign, I'm sure it went instead something like this:
Campaign Social Media Adviser: We need to leverage social media.
Campaign Manager: He's right! We need to harness the power of the Internet!
Romney: Yes, let's use the complex series of tubes to get the message out! Make it so.
Campaign Manager: Make it so!
Social Media Adviser: Uh, it takes more than "make it so" to make it so.
Campaign Manager: MAKE IT SO! Get me followers or lose your job!
Social Media Adviser: Gotcha! (purchases followers, keeps job for now)
For a brush with a finer tip, check out Asymco. They outline how it *could* be true based on recently-published numbers. They also underscore that they think the numbers are dubious, but overall, I think it's a pretty fair assessment.
It's entirely possible that 20 million are, Mr. or Ms. AC.
Maybe not completely irrelevant. Perhaps, in a given population of a species of tree, there is not only cross-pollination, but also cross-grafting. Maybe insects or higher animals move leaves or seeds from tree to tree, and for some reason, this species is more likely to accept the new introduction without complex grafting techniques.
To wit: Tree A spawns tree B through pollination with tree C, so B is indeed genetically unique. B is close to A, though, and a bird gathering shoots for its nest brings over something viable from B to A and sticks it in the crook of a branch and it grafts. B' is born, effectively a grandchild AND parasite of A.
I'm just letting my imagination wander here, but it certainly would be interesting if that were the case.
Also, the article kind of ignores the "shipped" vs. "sold" question. The word "sold" doesn't show up once in the article.
Apple sells basically every item that's shipped. Nobody really knows with Samsung how many of those shipped devices end up gathering dust until they're sent back.
Herman Cain was, first and foremost, a joke. Secondly, with regards to the sex scandal stuff, no Chicago machine did anything; he had a long history of dodgy behavior that came out. Even if you only believe the stuff he admitted to--giving money to that blondie on an ongoing basis for years and years without telling his wife about it--you have to admit it's questionable. But most men don't just give thousands and thousands of dollars to some random woman because she needs it--especially without telling the wife--unless there's something else going on.
And as far as Obama not being African American, well, his father was African, his mother was American. I think that does actually make him African American. Having no slave ancestry doesn't mean that he didn't deal with racism as he was growing up.
As far as the other stuff, we're getting into silly season. I shudder to think who has enough mod points to give you an "insightful" rating on this comment.
Oh, it's intentional and overt. Not by everyone, I'm sure, but there are all sorts of examples, including the ever popular "Don't Re-Nig in 2012" bumper stickers, all the way to Romney's campaign advisor talking about how Romney understands the US's anglo-saxon heritage better than the current administration.
I'm not suggesting all tea partiers--and certainly not all republicans--are racist, but a goodly chunk of the electorate hated Obama from the word go. They profess doubt his birth locale; they emphasize his foreign-sounding middle name; they claim that he hates white people, for goodness sake. Majority or not, a lot of people come off as hating him for clearly xenophobic/racist reasons.
What's disingenuous (per the GP's post) is to suddenly decide that race isn't an issue just because a man with an African father was elected president. I look forward to the day when it's so rare as to be noise-level, when we can brush off incidents as if they were nothing. But that's not where we are; we're still in a place where we have to shine a light on it. When someone starts waving around nooses, you can't just say he's got hang-ups; you have to take the offered symbolism in the context in which it was created and intended.
Disagreement, schmisagreement. Obama just isn't that far off to the left. He's like Reagan for christ's sake. So when poor white southerners are suggesting it's time for a revolution if he get's re-elected, there's really only one believable reason for that sort of vitriol.
I bow to you. Good pull.
ALL OF THEM!! HAHAHAHAH!!!1!
Funny. I've just never tried because if I had designed /., that's one of the first things I'd filter out. After, y'know, SQL injections and the like.
Mmmmmm... ebola...
Purity
Clearly I've been watching too much Breaking Bad.
...I might get some good karma!
...trying to brainwash us into teaching our kids languages other than American!