Billing by usage for a modern information service should be a matter of turning on an option in some software you already bought, and hooking that up to your automatic report generator. A little bit of setup cost, and almost not cost from there on.
Well, you're talking "should be". Maybe if you buy your billing servers and routing/monitoring gear all from the same place and keep their versions up to date and in sync with each other. Also, now that one vendor owns you, they can extract all kinds of future costs at their whim. On the other hand, I'm talking about how the real world actually works, or more like, doesn't work.
Also, I think you might be aiming a little simplistically. Yes, once you enable SNMP access you're all done, so whats the big deal. However, the rest of the company gets turned upside down and inside out. Even the simplest next step of analysis, where you analyze the problems with connecting a billing server full of CC numbers to a public production network, now means all manner of documentation, procedures, headaches, testing, failure modes, and risks. Including dealing with people whom don't understand the risks at all, yet have very strong and authoritative opinions. Changing your whole business model is never, just flip a switch and its all good.
Flippantly, all you gotta do to get the star trek thing going, is tell your techies to make a warp field using gear the salesmen already sold you, and you're all done. Sure, its a little effort at first, but no problemo from there on.
there's not really a cell phone free market in the US.
I *don't* think there should be more regulation,
If, as you correctly observe, the market is unfree, why wouldn't you want it to be regulated to be fairer? There seems to be no other valid justification for regulation, so why apply it?
Flat rate per month with no roaming nor long-distance charges.
Your jitterbug is OK. The marketing, last time I was unable to DVR FF past it, was aimed at the gray/white haired crowd. If you could hold your nose and buy it despite its marketing, you could probably hold your nose and buy a virginmobile phone, which has different, yet equally offensive marketing. And it is something like a quarter per minute prepay, unused balance zeros after a couple months. Which is psuedo-flat rate at ultra low usage, but in practice runs single digit dollars per month. You may save money on a $X buys you X minutes plan, even with expiration.
The confuse-opoly of it is so annoying. If only there was a way around the (un)free market.
Metering a connection doesn't cost anything at all.
Well, that would truly be a miracle. It costs a heck of a lot more to bill on a meter rather than flat per month.
You can't seriously claim there will never be a cost in capital or labor when connecting operational gear with the financial servers? Never an opportunity cost or labor cost when scheduling maintenance? Whats that, we'll make it all quadruple redundant? No problem open the wallet wide... Never a customer support call to complain about overcharges? Now that operational logs are "valuable" they won't have to be stored more carefully? Never be an outage of the logging system that "costs the telco millions, in aggregate"? Never a cost of "fraud" where someone steals service, no matter how cheap? Never a cost of anti-fraud measures? Never a cost of internal employee monitoring to make sure they do not "correct" their own bills, and then the costs of firing and replacing them? Never a cost of auditing to prove its all honest, or alternatively the cost of dishonest auditing to cover it all up? No cost of all the personnel training / education / R+D for all levels from the router jockeys to the customer service team and all the way up the management chain? What about the cost of storing all metered data for months or maybe years to handle billing corrections?
In comparison, billing by month has the unexpected cost of...... um... Ah yes, prorated service upon cancellation. Of course you could "get rid" of prorated service contractually, a couple different ways, ranging from being nicely generous to being total stingy bastards. Hmm, gullibility test, I wonder if mobile phone operators would be generous or stingy... Anyway, that leaves us with the cost of monthly billing being... uh.. yea thats it, exactly nothing. Going to be hard to either match or lower that cost with metered.
These customers would normally have been billed at the standard rate of $1.99 per megabyte for any data they chose to access from their phones.
Meant to say, "... standard obscene rate of..." Thats oligopoly cartel price gouging at its finest.
I work in the telecom industry (not mobile phones). Over my career all the costs of landline long distance service have collapsed except for the cost of billing. Thus most of the "whatever cents per minute" cost is the cost of detailed billing, auditing, handling complaints. Finally the industry moved to "all you can eat" billing and everyone benefits.
I have no interest at all in owning a "smart phone" or whatever until per meg billing is abolished. I'm guessing out of the $2/meg they blow about $1 on customer support / complaints / legal / billing clerks time / software costs in support of the billing process itself and stash about $1 in pure profit.
If I'm going to pay money to get screwed, the scenario is not going to revolve around cell phone billing. F that whole industry and the shills and crooks that run it.
Try it before declaring its "alive" or "dead". Its "schrodingers cat" until you actually try it. I tried using the numerous torrent to apt interfaces about two months ago, only got one working, forget which. Best case scenario was finding single digit seeders with performance roughly equal to ye olden dialup days. Needless to say after a couple days I dropped it, which I'm sure further lowered the network performance by a significant fraction.
The "problem" is Debian has hundreds of very fast mirrors. So any new system has an extremely high performance bar to exceed before its better than the current solution. Either you need the power of Slashdot to get many new users (like what happened to bitcoin, or to a lesser extent I2P) or you need the entire global mirror network to (temporarily?) fail and this to be the only alternative.
It is hard to build a new PC for less than the price of a new complete (albeit crappy) PC preloaded with malware and trialware. Just the cost of a good motherboard and decent i5 or lower end i7 will be about the same as the price of a brand new PC from a big box store.
Making the staggeringly huge assumption that the big box pc has a "good motherboard" as you say. Sure, it technically "runs windows" but its an integrated memory unaccelerated graphics card, with like 256 MB of memory, a 80 gig 5400 rpm hard disk, all the fans are little 1 inch diameter things running at 40k rpm and sound like a small learjet starting up, one available USB port... I much prefer my own. And running linux, I tend to buy from the list of things that works on linux, not "whatever the big box mfgr could buy at the cheapest price"
I agree Materia Magica is cool. I have/had a character there but haven't logged in for probably 5 to 7 years.
The problem is 14 years ago is WAY post www. That would be very late 96ish more like 97ish. I installed that strange "Mosaic" thing, probably the only excuse for running X-windows on an early linux box, the fall of 93. On the Sun and HP boxes at school, this new fangled "Mosaic" thing was available somewhat before the spring of 93 and I distinctly remember demoing it to my father to our amazement. The most interesting thing to see was this webcam pointed at a coffee maker (I believe in the UK).
Isn't 97 so post WWW that it was well into the artsy movie era of "the internet is like psychedelic drugs" where it was all stupid animations and stuff?
Unison is better for two-way sync (even with more machines, as long as you sync pairs: AB, BC).
I use a hub -n- spoke topology.
For small text-y stuff with lots of files I use git. For individual config files I tend to use Puppet. For big multimedia collections its unison time. And to "do it all" on request, I have a script that takes care of it. Distributed in git of course.
For big fun, roughly "once per debian stable release" unison changes its online format. So default unison from lenny is not going to sync with squeeze. For civilized OSes, backports are available for mostly seamless interoperation. On the other hand, for windows, I don't know.
All the main sites I use have either memerable URLs or can be found reliably in quick one or two word Google search.
Which is exactly why I don't bookmark "bankofamerica.com"
On the other hand I do bookmark apparently the only source of drivers for an obscure Taiwanese settop PC video card which I found on a link from a link from a link from a link etc, and I can't even google for it because I don't speak Chinese so I wouldn't know what to type, probably a screen full of UTF-8. From memory its a via micro ITX from about 2005 with a strange on board video card, but thats probably not even the right manufacturer much less something I can google for, and I don't even remember the motherboard model. There's another web page I have linked for it, I believe to a Japanese gentleman's blog whom figured out how to enable Xwindows to output to the integrated composite video output. In the bad old days, thats what we had to do to make tiny, fanless, ultra low power (5 to 10 watts) mythtv frontends. Now a days it is much simpler.
On a long enough scale, we're all going out of business...
Some worthless bank in a commodity market (banking) almost goes out of business, its "too big to fail" so the govt takes our money to bail out the failed management, whom promptly award themselves bonuses.
On the other hand, a genuinely useful non-commodity service goes out of business, and its tough luck charlie.
Just curious, does Firefox sync addon support syncing to your own server somehow?
I see no mention of such a feature on the plugin webpage, but you mention "so even if you sync to their servers" which implies the option.
Because you're googleing for "firefox sync own server" or something like that. The product went thru a name change, during R+D it was called "WEAVE". So google for something like "firefox weave support own servers" and eventually you find detailed descriptions of exactly what to do to set up your own sync server.
Yes, because telling everyone you're closing down and then waiting a couple of days to see them move to alternatives before announcing your clever plan works - way better than just coming out with the news "sorry guys, the only way we can survive is by charging a fee"
I have one machine left to convert from xmarks to firefox sync... This is killing them. I'm not about to convert back and chip in some cash. I probably would have been OK with chipping in some cash.
Back when no-ip.com suddenly started charging for no-ip.com domains, I coughed up some dough because I liked it, they had served me well for years with NO service complaints, and it wasn't much dough. Very much like xmarks. If they had pulled a xmarks and reported their own closure, I'd have simply moved to a new dyndns provider.
The other problem xmarks has/had was reportedly making business decisions based on the comments on their own web forum. Who the hell frequents their web browser synchronization service web support forum on a regular basis, and even posts to it? Uh, hold on, while I check the user support web forum for my CAT-5 patch cables and the support forum for my trackball.
Microsoft is purchasing this in anticipation of starting a virtual brothel in Xbox Live. Subscribers will be able to pay real money to participate in virtual (fake) sex acts with complete strangers.
Sure that would be new? As an outsider, I though the xbox FPS scene was all about the teabagging. That and using weed inspired names. And acting like spoiled 10 year old boys, even if they're 40 yrs old and living in moms basement. Other than that, yeah.
Ummm...I see where you are coming from, but I don't think your analogy is quite accurate.
How bout the standard slashdot car analogy... if the original (wrong) interpretation were correct, then the cop would not need to "point" the radar gun at your car, since everything that hits the dish would come into the focus.
Now with my luck someone will point out that cops radar guns use high gain horn antennas. So use an airport radar tower vs the airplane situation. Which unfortunately is not a car analogy.
I recall ye olden days when second life was first released, it was the first software I was aware of that required something "more than W98". I believe it required W2K or higher, in an era when "all" games etc worked just fine on W98. So I didn't bother using SL for a few years.
Possibly the idea is to hack up SL until it wont work on anything except vista or something post-vista... Otherwise why would anyone upgrade their OS, other than the usual monopoly market manipulations...
Since the building is basically parabolic, won't the spot stay mostly stationary? I mean, isn't that the whole point of parabolic focusers?
Try it some time and be surprised. Moving the sun with respect to the parabola is equivalent to moving the parabola with respect to the sun. And there is a strong microwave analogy. So, if the spot never moved, that would make radar systems rather hard to build (you'd have to use 80s era phased arrays instead of 40s era rotating dishes)
I don't play games very often anymore, but I've found the easiest way to get an honest opinion of a game is to do the following:
* Wait for a few months after the game is released (initial or pre-release reviews are always too positive)
* Go to a game review aggregator site (metacritic, gamerankings, etc)
* Start reading from the lowest-scoring review, up
That works well.
Somewhat earlier in the release cycle, I've found torrent seeder/peer counts and especially torrent site comments help separate the wheat from the chaff. P2P sharers are brutally honest, especially if the software isn't even worth stealing or simply doesn't do what its supposed to. I have in fact purchased and paid for software on this basis.
Slashdot Mirror
Billing by usage for a modern information service should be a matter of turning on an option in some software you already bought, and hooking that up to your automatic report generator. A little bit of setup cost, and almost not cost from there on.
Well, you're talking "should be". Maybe if you buy your billing servers and routing/monitoring gear all from the same place and keep their versions up to date and in sync with each other. Also, now that one vendor owns you, they can extract all kinds of future costs at their whim. On the other hand, I'm talking about how the real world actually works, or more like, doesn't work.
Also, I think you might be aiming a little simplistically. Yes, once you enable SNMP access you're all done, so whats the big deal. However, the rest of the company gets turned upside down and inside out. Even the simplest next step of analysis, where you analyze the problems with connecting a billing server full of CC numbers to a public production network, now means all manner of documentation, procedures, headaches, testing, failure modes, and risks. Including dealing with people whom don't understand the risks at all, yet have very strong and authoritative opinions. Changing your whole business model is never, just flip a switch and its all good.
Flippantly, all you gotta do to get the star trek thing going, is tell your techies to make a warp field using gear the salesmen already sold you, and you're all done. Sure, its a little effort at first, but no problemo from there on.
there's not really a cell phone free market in the US.
I *don't* think there should be more regulation,
If, as you correctly observe, the market is unfree, why wouldn't you want it to be regulated to be fairer? There seems to be no other valid justification for regulation, so why apply it?
Although, to be fair, most computers would be free.
But most of the features would be disabled by the ISP "to reduce their support costs".
Flat rate per month with no roaming nor long-distance charges.
Your jitterbug is OK. The marketing, last time I was unable to DVR FF past it, was aimed at the gray/white haired crowd. If you could hold your nose and buy it despite its marketing, you could probably hold your nose and buy a virginmobile phone, which has different, yet equally offensive marketing. And it is something like a quarter per minute prepay, unused balance zeros after a couple months. Which is psuedo-flat rate at ultra low usage, but in practice runs single digit dollars per month. You may save money on a $X buys you X minutes plan, even with expiration.
The confuse-opoly of it is so annoying. If only there was a way around the (un)free market.
Metering a connection doesn't cost anything at all.
Well, that would truly be a miracle. It costs a heck of a lot more to bill on a meter rather than flat per month.
You can't seriously claim there will never be a cost in capital or labor when connecting operational gear with the financial servers? Never an opportunity cost or labor cost when scheduling maintenance? Whats that, we'll make it all quadruple redundant? No problem open the wallet wide... Never a customer support call to complain about overcharges? Now that operational logs are "valuable" they won't have to be stored more carefully? Never be an outage of the logging system that "costs the telco millions, in aggregate"? Never a cost of "fraud" where someone steals service, no matter how cheap? Never a cost of anti-fraud measures? Never a cost of internal employee monitoring to make sure they do not "correct" their own bills, and then the costs of firing and replacing them? Never a cost of auditing to prove its all honest, or alternatively the cost of dishonest auditing to cover it all up? No cost of all the personnel training / education / R+D for all levels from the router jockeys to the customer service team and all the way up the management chain? What about the cost of storing all metered data for months or maybe years to handle billing corrections?
In comparison, billing by month has the unexpected cost of ... ... um ... Ah yes, prorated service upon cancellation. Of course you could "get rid" of prorated service contractually, a couple different ways, ranging from being nicely generous to being total stingy bastards. Hmm, gullibility test, I wonder if mobile phone operators would be generous or stingy... Anyway, that leaves us with the cost of monthly billing being ... uh .. yea thats it, exactly nothing. Going to be hard to either match or lower that cost with metered.
These customers would normally have been billed at the standard rate of $1.99 per megabyte for any data they chose to access from their phones.
Meant to say, "... standard obscene rate of ..." Thats oligopoly cartel price gouging at its finest.
I work in the telecom industry (not mobile phones). Over my career all the costs of landline long distance service have collapsed except for the cost of billing. Thus most of the "whatever cents per minute" cost is the cost of detailed billing, auditing, handling complaints. Finally the industry moved to "all you can eat" billing and everyone benefits.
I have no interest at all in owning a "smart phone" or whatever until per meg billing is abolished. I'm guessing out of the $2/meg they blow about $1 on customer support / complaints / legal / billing clerks time / software costs in support of the billing process itself and stash about $1 in pure profit.
If I'm going to pay money to get screwed, the scenario is not going to revolve around cell phone billing. F that whole industry and the shills and crooks that run it.
There are sooo many balloon launches, that on the same weekend there was a separate successful launch in Illinois, the iHAB2 launch.
http://www.w0otm.com/iHAB/iHAB-2/MissionControl.php
http://forums.qrz.com/showthread.php?p=2055228
The iHAB had a cooler "science pack" including all kinds of radio gear, in addition to the seemingly obligatory cell phone.
What they're doing is cool, but make no mistake, they are neither pioneers, nor working alone.
Try it before declaring its "alive" or "dead". Its "schrodingers cat" until you actually try it. I tried using the numerous torrent to apt interfaces about two months ago, only got one working, forget which. Best case scenario was finding single digit seeders with performance roughly equal to ye olden dialup days. Needless to say after a couple days I dropped it, which I'm sure further lowered the network performance by a significant fraction.
The "problem" is Debian has hundreds of very fast mirrors. So any new system has an extremely high performance bar to exceed before its better than the current solution. Either you need the power of Slashdot to get many new users (like what happened to bitcoin, or to a lesser extent I2P) or you need the entire global mirror network to (temporarily?) fail and this to be the only alternative.
Maybe graduates from the IBM tech high school are managing the Slashdot front-page . .. ?
Unlikely since IBM has been shrinking its US workforce and expanding its India workforce for decades.
It is hard to build a new PC for less than the price of a new complete (albeit crappy) PC preloaded with malware and trialware. Just the cost of a good motherboard and decent i5 or lower end i7 will be about the same as the price of a brand new PC from a big box store.
Making the staggeringly huge assumption that the big box pc has a "good motherboard" as you say. Sure, it technically "runs windows" but its an integrated memory unaccelerated graphics card, with like 256 MB of memory, a 80 gig 5400 rpm hard disk, all the fans are little 1 inch diameter things running at 40k rpm and sound like a small learjet starting up, one available USB port... I much prefer my own. And running linux, I tend to buy from the list of things that works on linux, not "whatever the big box mfgr could buy at the cheapest price"
Online for over fourteen years,
I agree Materia Magica is cool. I have/had a character there but haven't logged in for probably 5 to 7 years.
The problem is 14 years ago is WAY post www. That would be very late 96ish more like 97ish. I installed that strange "Mosaic" thing, probably the only excuse for running X-windows on an early linux box, the fall of 93. On the Sun and HP boxes at school, this new fangled "Mosaic" thing was available somewhat before the spring of 93 and I distinctly remember demoing it to my father to our amazement. The most interesting thing to see was this webcam pointed at a coffee maker (I believe in the UK).
Isn't 97 so post WWW that it was well into the artsy movie era of "the internet is like psychedelic drugs" where it was all stupid animations and stuff?
Lynx is the proper protection tool for that problem. Doesn't rely on url shorteners either.
Unison is better for two-way sync (even with more machines, as long as you sync pairs: AB, BC).
I use a hub -n- spoke topology.
For small text-y stuff with lots of files I use git. For individual config files I tend to use Puppet. For big multimedia collections its unison time. And to "do it all" on request, I have a script that takes care of it. Distributed in git of course.
For big fun, roughly "once per debian stable release" unison changes its online format. So default unison from lenny is not going to sync with squeeze. For civilized OSes, backports are available for mostly seamless interoperation. On the other hand, for windows, I don't know.
All the main sites I use have either memerable URLs or can be found reliably in quick one or two word Google search.
Which is exactly why I don't bookmark "bankofamerica.com"
On the other hand I do bookmark apparently the only source of drivers for an obscure Taiwanese settop PC video card which I found on a link from a link from a link from a link etc, and I can't even google for it because I don't speak Chinese so I wouldn't know what to type, probably a screen full of UTF-8. From memory its a via micro ITX from about 2005 with a strange on board video card, but thats probably not even the right manufacturer much less something I can google for, and I don't even remember the motherboard model. There's another web page I have linked for it, I believe to a Japanese gentleman's blog whom figured out how to enable Xwindows to output to the integrated composite video output. In the bad old days, thats what we had to do to make tiny, fanless, ultra low power (5 to 10 watts) mythtv frontends. Now a days it is much simpler.
On a long enough scale, we're all going out of business...
Some worthless bank in a commodity market (banking) almost goes out of business, its "too big to fail" so the govt takes our money to bail out the failed management, whom promptly award themselves bonuses.
On the other hand, a genuinely useful non-commodity service goes out of business, and its tough luck charlie.
Just curious, does Firefox sync addon support syncing to your own server somehow?
I see no mention of such a feature on the plugin webpage, but you mention "so even if you sync to their servers" which implies the option.
Because you're googleing for "firefox sync own server" or something like that. The product went thru a name change, during R+D it was called "WEAVE". So google for something like "firefox weave support own servers" and eventually you find detailed descriptions of exactly what to do to set up your own sync server.
Such as:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Sync/1.0/Setup
Yes, because telling everyone you're closing down and then waiting a couple of days to see them move to alternatives before announcing your clever plan works - way better than just coming out with the news "sorry guys, the only way we can survive is by charging a fee"
I have one machine left to convert from xmarks to firefox sync... This is killing them. I'm not about to convert back and chip in some cash. I probably would have been OK with chipping in some cash.
Back when no-ip.com suddenly started charging for no-ip.com domains, I coughed up some dough because I liked it, they had served me well for years with NO service complaints, and it wasn't much dough. Very much like xmarks. If they had pulled a xmarks and reported their own closure, I'd have simply moved to a new dyndns provider.
The other problem xmarks has/had was reportedly making business decisions based on the comments on their own web forum. Who the hell frequents their web browser synchronization service web support forum on a regular basis, and even posts to it? Uh, hold on, while I check the user support web forum for my CAT-5 patch cables and the support forum for my trackball.
Microsoft is purchasing this in anticipation of starting a virtual brothel in Xbox Live. Subscribers will be able to pay real money to participate in virtual (fake) sex acts with complete strangers.
Sure that would be new? As an outsider, I though the xbox FPS scene was all about the teabagging. That and using weed inspired names. And acting like spoiled 10 year old boys, even if they're 40 yrs old and living in moms basement. Other than that, yeah.
Ummm...I see where you are coming from, but I don't think your analogy is quite accurate.
How bout the standard slashdot car analogy... if the original (wrong) interpretation were correct, then the cop would not need to "point" the radar gun at your car, since everything that hits the dish would come into the focus.
Now with my luck someone will point out that cops radar guns use high gain horn antennas. So use an airport radar tower vs the airplane situation. Which unfortunately is not a car analogy.
You mean, Jedzia... You can have "the old man" aka the pre-Jedzia host. And the post-Jedzia host wasn't nearly as hot.
I recall ye olden days when second life was first released, it was the first software I was aware of that required something "more than W98". I believe it required W2K or higher, in an era when "all" games etc worked just fine on W98. So I didn't bother using SL for a few years.
Possibly the idea is to hack up SL until it wont work on anything except vista or something post-vista... Otherwise why would anyone upgrade their OS, other than the usual monopoly market manipulations...
Why would they design a parabolic concave building? This is a huge architecture fail.
Well, convex ones are invariably going to be compared to female body parts, which probably embarrasses architects, so...
Since the building is basically parabolic, won't the spot stay mostly stationary? I mean, isn't that the whole point of parabolic focusers?
Try it some time and be surprised. Moving the sun with respect to the parabola is equivalent to moving the parabola with respect to the sun. And there is a strong microwave analogy. So, if the spot never moved, that would make radar systems rather hard to build (you'd have to use 80s era phased arrays instead of 40s era rotating dishes)
I don't play games very often anymore, but I've found the easiest way to get an honest opinion of a game is to do the following:
* Wait for a few months after the game is released (initial or pre-release reviews are always too positive)
* Go to a game review aggregator site (metacritic, gamerankings, etc)
* Start reading from the lowest-scoring review, up
That works well.
Somewhat earlier in the release cycle, I've found torrent seeder/peer counts and especially torrent site comments help separate the wheat from the chaff. P2P sharers are brutally honest, especially if the software isn't even worth stealing or simply doesn't do what its supposed to. I have in fact purchased and paid for software on this basis.
Or rancid, rotting meat mixed with spent shell casings, teeth, broken glasses and dog tags ...
So, are you trying to say McDonalds, or Taco Bell? (That editorial "food" review is probably not going to get me a new ipod...)
In comparison, what do slashdot book reviewers get? About the same?