I don't know why Slashdot didn't publish my submission about a Utah ISP offering 50Mbit Up/Down connections. It's faster than both comcast and FiOS, they undersell their bandwidth so I regularly peak over 50Mbit on uploads and downloads, and it only costs me $50/mo. But I guess it's news that Comcast is offering sub-par service for 3 times as much.
There is a 10^-40 chance that the collider produces a black hole that will destroy the earth. Just to show you what that looks like - it's a 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance. I'm not sure how small the chance has to be before you should be allowed to risk the future of the human race, but the odds are pretty good that we'll be safe. You're more likely to be killed by terrorists in a foreign country, struck by lightening twice at the same place, and then killed (yea, again) again by a rare disease that causes your organs to turn to bone than to create a earth-destroying black hole.
But, for the record - if it DID create a black hole that ate the earth:
It's incredible density causes it to fall through the ground like a bowling ball falling from the sky. It falls all the way to the center of the earth, consuming everything in its path, and continues moving until it reaches the other side. It will then change directions and do it all over again going the other way.
This will continue until it has consumed so much of the earth's mass into a very small point that it gets too heavy and sits right in the middle of the earth, eventually sucking everything else into its core. Life as we know it will be reduced into something slightly bigger than a single mathematical point. If you thought getting all those clowns in such a small car was impressive, wait until you see this! (Note, you probably won't see it since the light around you will be being sucked into the black hole. Also, your eyes will be being sucked into the black hole along with the rest of you).
So if it DOES happen - you better be comfortable with being VERY close with those around you.
I love how everyone is outraged about how people aren't "outraged enough." I haven't read a single person really defending Apple, but everyone automatically assumes that THAT will be the first reaction - and makes posts based on that assumption.
Well, hardly anyone is defending Apple - everyone is pissed, so let's go from there.
Just another example of how Microsoft doesn't "get it." They do great on things until real competition shows up - then they copy the competition and think it's good enough. Look at the Zune - they didn't do anything new or original with it (at least nothing big). Their search engine is the same - just a Google clone. They don't give people a reason to change.
Google won by bringing something new to the table. Exceptional search was only a part of it - but they did something else new on the net - they did it in a simple, clean way that focused on getting people the information they wanted.
Microsoft will never win by competing with Google. Microsoft will only win if they give Google something to compete with. Get it?
My 50Mbps full up/down fiber connection to my house only costs me $50/month! Yes, and it's even a public utility managed by the city and leased by the carriers. This does exist in the United States (and it's F${king awesome!).
The point is, it doesn't matter how much it will cost. Spread the cost over every city/county/state that does it, and then realize that the infrastructure cost is paid back by subscription costs. The cost of deployment is made back after a few years, and then you just have upkeep of the network to worry about.
I'm actually surprised that the number is so small.
No, it's not the same as making things up, it's just ballparked. I didn't feel like undertaking a massive study that would account for every penny - I just took the biggest pieces and made an approximation. If you wanted to go really in depth, you're more the welcome - but the margin of error on the high end is probably a couple of points.
If I wanted to make things up, I wouldn't have bothered with the math at all and I would have just said "text messages cost you billions of dollars more than any other form of data transmission!"
You could check rates across the board, account for everything, and SMS messages are still going to come out as unbelievably more expensive than anything else. You could send hard copies of data to the moon or to mars for less money then it would cost to send a few thousand songs over SMS. No matter what argument you can make about the carrier's actual cost, you're never going to reach a number that justifies the price they charge. and no, "because they can" is not a fair justification.
That question is a legitimate one. Who knows - maybe it does actually cost them 35 cents internally to transmit a single text message, and they're only making 5 cents on each one.
I can charge a million bucks for a car, and some people might even pay it. But the fact that people pay it doesn't make the price justified by the time, materials, and expertise I put into it. At least, not in the sense of the question I was asking.
Just saying "because they can" isn't a good answer at all.
"The most common fallacy is mistaking the marginal cost of sending one SMS with the total cost. The marginal cost is basically zero, which is the point of the article. However, AT&T pays for a bunch of items that at a first approximation don't vary with the number of SMS sent through the network. There are many ways to account for these costs and there are entire university classes which deal with this type of calculations. However, when your network costs few billion dollars, a billion here, a billion there, soon we are talking about real money. The same applies to marketing costs, customer support, etc."
The point of the article is not what the provider's cost is, but what the consumer's price is. ISPs have operating costs too, but I wasn't looking to do an in-depth study and account for every penny.
The author conveniently forgets that there is also a termination fee that a provider pays when messages originating from one network (e.g. AT&T) are delivered to phones on a different network (e.g. T-Mobile). So, some messages cost more, raising the overall average. Same apply for roaming charges, if any.
It is true, I didn't mention (nor was I even aware) of carrier to carrier termination fees. But again, I'm not dealing with the costs on the carriers side. I'm dealing with strictly the cost of data compared to an ISP or TCP/USPS. The carrier's internal cost is irrelevant. Furthermore, asking how the carriers can justify such exorbitant prices was a legitimate, honest question (not rhetorical). You've provided a piece of the answer. But then again, we could ask how carriers can justify charging each other so much. I also do not have access to these figures.
The author also miscalculates the number of bytes necessary to send an SMS conveniently forgetting the envelope, i.e. phone number of the sender, subject, time, etc. I am sure that his ISP doesn't subtract overhead from the 500GB of data he pays for.
That is true. I didn't think of that. It probably wouldn't impact the final number much, but I fully encourage others to do the calculations for themselves. I'm sure someone much smarter than me could get closer to an accurate number. I'm not a math guy.
Also, the author takes an average of 80 characters for the cost of SMS and compares them with the max number of words/characters you can send via US mail. An unfair comparison.
Fair. I considered that as well. But to be fair, I was being very conservative in the estimation of how much data you could fit in a letter. I restricted it to a 256 character set, 12 point font, 250 words per page, no pictures, etc. You could easily fit 10x as much data printed out inside an envelope, or thousands of times more if it was on some sort of digital media. I also didn't forget to count the envelope this time. I could have gone either way with the numbers - calculating a stack of DVDs with the media mail rate, or a single sheet of paper in an overnight envelope. I figured the numbers I used would be a good average middle point.
Overall I wasn't trying to be terribly accurate with the numbers. Again, I'm no math guy but the ballpark figures still give you an idea.
You'll need to read the article, because that's not what it's saying at all. Even the summary makes it clear that it is comparing costs of bandwidth from an ISP vs. SMS over a cell provider. The cellular provider's actual costs are not taken into consideration, but as a previous poster pointed out, they are negligible.
Your argument is interesting and informative. However, you missed so much about the difference between vinyl and digital recordings that your argument falls to the ground. You can't only take a mathematical look at one aspect of the recording - the bit rate, and say that is is the end all be-all of audio quality. By that logic a 16 bit CD should sound the same as a 16 bit MP3 which should be the same as a 16 bit AAC, WMV, etc. etc. etc.
There is much more to consider - even beyond sample rates to how the sound is read from the media and reproduced.
All recording media is inherently flawed, because nothing we have now can truly reproduce a sound as it was originally made. All we can do is approximate it.
Also, lots of modern bands release albums on CD and Vinyl. You can't really make the argument that the record sound better because it was engineered differently when they were both engineered the same.
This is a great move. I applaud the developer for releasing the source once the game had run its course, so to speak. There are droves of mobile and embeded devices that can now benefit (legally) from this.
I only wish more software manufacturers would do this. When the game becomes old and they aren't making any serious money off of it, they could really be a benefit to the community by open sourcing it or at least releasing it for free. Look at all the great games from the 80s and 90s that you can't get anymore because they copyright owner isn't selling them and won't release them for free... The only option is to steal games like the Quest games, Zork, the early lucasarts games, etc.
Apple vs. Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Windows Mob, etc.
on
Origin of the iPhone
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· Score: 1
This is the difference between Apple and the other cell phone manufacturers and software makers. If this barely-working device had been produced at a board meeting at Palm, they would have patted themselves on the back and shipped it. If the Microsoft Windows mobile team had showed such a horrendous device - same story, it would have been on everyone's phone within a year. The bottom line for most companies is "is it good enough to make people buy."
This is the difference between a good, revolutionary CEO and an average one when it comes to running a technology company. All a CEO has to do to become good is say "no" to the first several iterations of whatever it is they're working on. Steve says no and demands greatness. It's not that greatness is impossible, people just need to be pushed to achieve it.
The interesting thing is that it was probably your brain that rewired, not your mis-wired hand.
This reminds me of the experiment they did where they had people wear goggles that made the world look upside-down. Subjects wore the goggles for several days, and eventually the brain "righted" itself. The subjects then saw through the goggles the right-side-up world.
And then guess what happened when they took the goggles off?:)
I agree that we will probably see at some point a virtual world overlaid on the real one. You will wear something that let's you see the virtual layer, and by so doing allow the virtual layer to see you. People will be able to walk through the city from their computers (or whatever they have) and interact with other virtual people or with real life people who are wearing the device that lets them see the virtual world.
Everybody will absolutely be connected to everything at all times. You think the cell phone is neat? You think it's cool that I can hop on my phone and access the internet? This is only the beginning. Connectivity will become as ubiquitous as air. Information that is at our fingertips today will be readily and instantly accessible by our brains in the future.
See, Nintendo's position here makes perfect sense. The problem this year was that Christmas wasn't announced until after their 5 month window to prepare for it had started. They weren't given enough time with that late announcement that we were doing the Christmas thing for once this year.
Next time we do Christmas, let's just plan ahead a little and give some notice, m'kay?
Slashdot Mirror
Yea, those look exactly the same.
It's like saying we already have jetpacks then pointing at a trampoline.
Yes, I am made of meat. And in the jungle, I would be eaten by a Lion or a Bear or some other animal. Therefore, I was designed to be eaten.
I don't know why Slashdot didn't publish my submission about a Utah ISP offering 50Mbit Up/Down connections. It's faster than both comcast and FiOS, they undersell their bandwidth so I regularly peak over 50Mbit on uploads and downloads, and it only costs me $50/mo. But I guess it's news that Comcast is offering sub-par service for 3 times as much.
This is what COULD happen:
There is a 10^-40 chance that the collider produces a black hole that will destroy the earth. Just to show you what that looks like - it's a 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance. I'm not sure how small the chance has to be before you should be allowed to risk the future of the human race, but the odds are pretty good that we'll be safe. You're more likely to be killed by terrorists in a foreign country, struck by lightening twice at the same place, and then killed (yea, again) again by a rare disease that causes your organs to turn to bone than to create a earth-destroying black hole.
But, for the record - if it DID create a black hole that ate the earth:
It's incredible density causes it to fall through the ground like a bowling ball falling from the sky. It falls all the way to the center of the earth, consuming everything in its path, and continues moving until it reaches the other side. It will then change directions and do it all over again going the other way.
This will continue until it has consumed so much of the earth's mass into a very small point that it gets too heavy and sits right in the middle of the earth, eventually sucking everything else into its core. Life as we know it will be reduced into something slightly bigger than a single mathematical point. If you thought getting all those clowns in such a small car was impressive, wait until you see this! (Note, you probably won't see it since the light around you will be being sucked into the black hole. Also, your eyes will be being sucked into the black hole along with the rest of you).
So if it DOES happen - you better be comfortable with being VERY close with those around you.
I love how everyone is outraged about how people aren't "outraged enough." I haven't read a single person really defending Apple, but everyone automatically assumes that THAT will be the first reaction - and makes posts based on that assumption.
Well, hardly anyone is defending Apple - everyone is pissed, so let's go from there.
I bet they don't hate the oil companies when they're getting those subsidy checks every so often just because they live in Alaska.
All they had to do was shut down the safety systems and manually reinsert the control rods.
Amateurs.
You both must be new here...
Just another example of how Microsoft doesn't "get it." They do great on things until real competition shows up - then they copy the competition and think it's good enough. Look at the Zune - they didn't do anything new or original with it (at least nothing big). Their search engine is the same - just a Google clone. They don't give people a reason to change.
Google won by bringing something new to the table. Exceptional search was only a part of it - but they did something else new on the net - they did it in a simple, clean way that focused on getting people the information they wanted.
Microsoft will never win by competing with Google. Microsoft will only win if they give Google something to compete with. Get it?
My 50Mbps full up/down fiber connection to my house only costs me $50/month! Yes, and it's even a public utility managed by the city and leased by the carriers. This does exist in the United States (and it's F${king awesome!).
The point is, it doesn't matter how much it will cost. Spread the cost over every city/county/state that does it, and then realize that the infrastructure cost is paid back by subscription costs. The cost of deployment is made back after a few years, and then you just have upkeep of the network to worry about.
I'm actually surprised that the number is so small.
No, it's not the same as making things up, it's just ballparked. I didn't feel like undertaking a massive study that would account for every penny - I just took the biggest pieces and made an approximation. If you wanted to go really in depth, you're more the welcome - but the margin of error on the high end is probably a couple of points.
If I wanted to make things up, I wouldn't have bothered with the math at all and I would have just said "text messages cost you billions of dollars more than any other form of data transmission!"
You could check rates across the board, account for everything, and SMS messages are still going to come out as unbelievably more expensive than anything else. You could send hard copies of data to the moon or to mars for less money then it would cost to send a few thousand songs over SMS. No matter what argument you can make about the carrier's actual cost, you're never going to reach a number that justifies the price they charge. and no, "because they can" is not a fair justification.
That question is a legitimate one. Who knows - maybe it does actually cost them 35 cents internally to transmit a single text message, and they're only making 5 cents on each one.
I can charge a million bucks for a car, and some people might even pay it. But the fact that people pay it doesn't make the price justified by the time, materials, and expertise I put into it. At least, not in the sense of the question I was asking.
Just saying "because they can" isn't a good answer at all.
As mentioned in the article, 2560 MP3's was chosen because it works out to $1 of bandwidth from the ISP. This makes an easy benchmark.
"The most common fallacy is mistaking the marginal cost of sending one SMS with the total cost. The marginal cost is basically zero, which is the point of the article. However, AT&T pays for a bunch of items that at a first approximation don't vary with the number of SMS sent through the network. There are many ways to account for these costs and there are entire university classes which deal with this type of calculations. However, when your network costs few billion dollars, a billion here, a billion there, soon we are talking about real money. The same applies to marketing costs, customer support, etc."
The point of the article is not what the provider's cost is, but what the consumer's price is. ISPs have operating costs too, but I wasn't looking to do an in-depth study and account for every penny.
The author conveniently forgets that there is also a termination fee that a provider pays when messages originating from one network (e.g. AT&T) are delivered to phones on a different network (e.g. T-Mobile). So, some messages cost more, raising the overall average. Same apply for roaming charges, if any.
It is true, I didn't mention (nor was I even aware) of carrier to carrier termination fees. But again, I'm not dealing with the costs on the carriers side. I'm dealing with strictly the cost of data compared to an ISP or TCP/USPS. The carrier's internal cost is irrelevant. Furthermore, asking how the carriers can justify such exorbitant prices was a legitimate, honest question (not rhetorical). You've provided a piece of the answer. But then again, we could ask how carriers can justify charging each other so much. I also do not have access to these figures.
The author also miscalculates the number of bytes necessary to send an SMS conveniently forgetting the envelope, i.e. phone number of the sender, subject, time, etc. I am sure that his ISP doesn't subtract overhead from the 500GB of data he pays for.
That is true. I didn't think of that. It probably wouldn't impact the final number much, but I fully encourage others to do the calculations for themselves. I'm sure someone much smarter than me could get closer to an accurate number. I'm not a math guy.
Also, the author takes an average of 80 characters for the cost of SMS and compares them with the max number of words/characters you can send via US mail. An unfair comparison.
Fair. I considered that as well. But to be fair, I was being very conservative in the estimation of how much data you could fit in a letter. I restricted it to a 256 character set, 12 point font, 250 words per page, no pictures, etc. You could easily fit 10x as much data printed out inside an envelope, or thousands of times more if it was on some sort of digital media. I also didn't forget to count the envelope this time. I could have gone either way with the numbers - calculating a stack of DVDs with the media mail rate, or a single sheet of paper in an overnight envelope. I figured the numbers I used would be a good average middle point.
Overall I wasn't trying to be terribly accurate with the numbers. Again, I'm no math guy but the ballpark figures still give you an idea.
Yea, I made up TCP/SMS - it's sort-of tongue in cheek. People with no sense of humor don't get to pick the most retarded comments of the year.
You'll need to read the article, because that's not what it's saying at all. Even the summary makes it clear that it is comparing costs of bandwidth from an ISP vs. SMS over a cell provider. The cellular provider's actual costs are not taken into consideration, but as a previous poster pointed out, they are negligible.
Your argument is interesting and informative. However, you missed so much about the difference between vinyl and digital recordings that your argument falls to the ground. You can't only take a mathematical look at one aspect of the recording - the bit rate, and say that is is the end all be-all of audio quality. By that logic a 16 bit CD should sound the same as a 16 bit MP3 which should be the same as a 16 bit AAC, WMV, etc. etc. etc.
There is much more to consider - even beyond sample rates to how the sound is read from the media and reproduced.
All recording media is inherently flawed, because nothing we have now can truly reproduce a sound as it was originally made. All we can do is approximate it.
Also, lots of modern bands release albums on CD and Vinyl. You can't really make the argument that the record sound better because it was engineered differently when they were both engineered the same.
This is a great move. I applaud the developer for releasing the source once the game had run its course, so to speak. There are droves of mobile and embeded devices that can now benefit (legally) from this.
I only wish more software manufacturers would do this. When the game becomes old and they aren't making any serious money off of it, they could really be a benefit to the community by open sourcing it or at least releasing it for free. Look at all the great games from the 80s and 90s that you can't get anymore because they copyright owner isn't selling them and won't release them for free... The only option is to steal games like the Quest games, Zork, the early lucasarts games, etc.
This is the difference between Apple and the other cell phone manufacturers and software makers. If this barely-working device had been produced at a board meeting at Palm, they would have patted themselves on the back and shipped it. If the Microsoft Windows mobile team had showed such a horrendous device - same story, it would have been on everyone's phone within a year. The bottom line for most companies is "is it good enough to make people buy."
This is the difference between a good, revolutionary CEO and an average one when it comes to running a technology company. All a CEO has to do to become good is say "no" to the first several iterations of whatever it is they're working on. Steve says no and demands greatness. It's not that greatness is impossible, people just need to be pushed to achieve it.
The interesting thing is that it was probably your brain that rewired, not your mis-wired hand.
:)
This reminds me of the experiment they did where they had people wear goggles that made the world look upside-down. Subjects wore the goggles for several days, and eventually the brain "righted" itself. The subjects then saw through the goggles the right-side-up world.
And then guess what happened when they took the goggles off?
The brain is truly an amazing organ.
That's what the focus adjustment is for.
I haven't seen so much penetration take place on so many desktops since Brittany Spears!
rimshot!
I agree that we will probably see at some point a virtual world overlaid on the real one. You will wear something that let's you see the virtual layer, and by so doing allow the virtual layer to see you. People will be able to walk through the city from their computers (or whatever they have) and interact with other virtual people or with real life people who are wearing the device that lets them see the virtual world.
Everybody will absolutely be connected to everything at all times. You think the cell phone is neat? You think it's cool that I can hop on my phone and access the internet? This is only the beginning. Connectivity will become as ubiquitous as air. Information that is at our fingertips today will be readily and instantly accessible by our brains in the future.
If we don't blow ourselves up by then.
ZOMG this is going to lead to some absolutely heinous lan parties!
See, Nintendo's position here makes perfect sense. The problem this year was that Christmas wasn't announced until after their 5 month window to prepare for it had started. They weren't given enough time with that late announcement that we were doing the Christmas thing for once this year.
Next time we do Christmas, let's just plan ahead a little and give some notice, m'kay?