I doubt that Mr. Ray's 2.07 bytes per second made them LOSE any money, but as seen in the article they sure could have made a shitload off of it.
You're missing the point. Twice. First, he paid a flat $10 for all the texts. Second, it's not about data rate.
It's about interconnect charges. It costs his telco every time a message is passed to another network for delivery. Usually the assumption telcos make is that, on average, people will receive roughly as many texts as they send (the same goes for calls) so the interconnect charges even out. By sending tens of thousands of messages to other networks (the other network as it is in NZ) you can cost your telco hundreds or thousands of dollars. The question is, how many of the people in his phonebook are on the other network?
Nope. Take a bill out of your wallet and read what it says:
THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS PUBLIC AND PRIVATE.
They can give you incentives for using plastic, but they cannot refuse to accept cash.
Of course they can refuse to accept cash. We're not talking about debts, we're talking about sales. If you had a debt with a music vendor then sure, you could pay it in cash, but all they have to do to avoid that is avoid letting you run up a debt. What kind of a fool lets people run up debts without knowing who they are anyway? They need only require payment at the time of sale with a traceable card, which AFAIK they are well within their rights to do.
Some time in the future, they launch UHDTV with promises of ultra-crisp images. The broacasters realise they can multiplex channels, so they compress the fsck out of them and we end up with even more worse looking crap than we started with. It doesn't matter what the technology can do if the broadcasters go for quantity over quality and cram as much artifact-laden crap over the airwaves/fibre/whatever as they can (cf. digital TV vs. analog).
From the article, I gather these are merely SAN boxes with up to 64GB of DRAM, fiber channel output, and 3 hot-swappable hard drives that act as backup.
Both Bush and Blair strike me as shining examples of why Universal Suffrage doesn't work. Personally I think you should have to pass an exam before you can vote.
1. A few years later a majority of those who can still vote decide a minority of them are too stupid to vote, so they make the exams a bit harder.
The obvious answer is redundant, on-line, off-site backup.
It's even within the the reach of most of us (that's us, the cutting-edge Slashdot readership) - you can daily back up 1 or 2GB using ADSL, friends' PCs and a bit of scripting.
The future lies in duplication and redundancy. Data storage and bandwidth are getting so cheap that I think in a few years everyone will be using on-line, off-site backups. Some peering with friends, some with other businesses, some with specialist companies.
For full tranparency you need transparent ballot boxes. We see them used on the news* in various troubled nations where democracy is under threat, why not in the countires where is isn't?
* For any Americans watching: foreign affairs are a regular feature on the news in the civilised world.
You just can't get the staff these days. Those photo editors haven't even bothered changing their expressions. It's obvious that Steve's head was originally two feet lower.
It's not the little applets that make Windows a better desktop for the non-technical consumer, it's the fact that everything works through them. Sure, they're nice enough and the familiarity will make the transition easier, but Windows Explorer, Network Neighborhood etc. already have equivalents on most distributions that work pretty much the same way.
If this project can get, for example, every Linux VGA driver released in future to have a standardised control panel applet then great. But it won't.
The point of the Windows GUI is not that it looks nice, it's that you can do everything in it. If this project provided a functional Add/Remove Programs, Device Manager and Control Panel then that would be a good thing. But it doesn't. To be fair the authors didn't intend it to do anything but recreate the look, but I think that will be counterproductive. It will only serve to make the limitations of a GNU/Linux system in terms of ease of installation and configuration of hardware and software more obvious.
The day you put the driver or software CD into your machine, click "install" and it Just Works(tm) - your new printer appears with an icon along with the rest, your software appears in the menu, the control panel lets you configure your new graphics card - is the day ordinary folk will switch to Linux.
The project has set out what it intended to achieve - a Windows XP look-alike. So well done on that front. But I think the authors are wrong if they think the look of the GUI is what's stopping people adopting GNU/Linux for the desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the point. Twice. First, he paid a flat $10 for all the texts. Second, it's not about data rate.
It's about interconnect charges. It costs his telco every time a message is passed to another network for delivery. Usually the assumption telcos make is that, on average, people will receive roughly as many texts as they send (the same goes for calls) so the interconnect charges even out. By sending tens of thousands of messages to other networks (the other network as it is in NZ) you can cost your telco hundreds or thousands of dollars. The question is, how many of the people in his phonebook are on the other network?
THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS PUBLIC AND PRIVATE.
They can give you incentives for using plastic, but they cannot refuse to accept cash.
Of course they can refuse to accept cash. We're not talking about debts, we're talking about sales. If you had a debt with a music vendor then sure, you could pay it in cash, but all they have to do to avoid that is avoid letting you run up a debt. What kind of a fool lets people run up debts without knowing who they are anyway? They need only require payment at the time of sale with a traceable card, which AFAIK they are well within their rights to do.
Some time in the future, they launch UHDTV with promises of ultra-crisp images. The broacasters realise they can multiplex channels, so they compress the fsck out of them and we end up with even more worse looking crap than we started with. It doesn't matter what the technology can do if the broadcasters go for quantity over quality and cram as much artifact-laden crap over the airwaves/fibre/whatever as they can (cf. digital TV vs. analog).
apt-get install bind
Doesn't that give you the horn?
Laptops cook my sperm.
Are you a girl then? Do you fancy a shag?
Things have changed a bit since then!
We noticed.
TextPad
Eudora
Agent
Mozilla
WinZip
Porn
Porn
Porn
Porn
Porn
Porn
(I know that's 11, but I really like porn.)
Small European lander piggybacked on orbiter hurtles towards atmosphere of distant body and automagically turns itself on at just the right moment.
Why am I not very confident?
Pico, pico, pico!
The correct term is "liberate".
1. A few years later a majority of those who can still vote decide a minority of them are too stupid to vote, so they make the exams a bit harder.
Goto 1.
I'm constantly astounded at how badly some 20th and 30th generation immigrants speak English.
He went with Li-Ion, so he didn't need as many batteries as the original.
The author plans to run 10 miles, in 10 cities over the next 10 weeks and print out all the images.
If it was 8 miles in 16 cities over 32 weeks I might be interested. Decimal is so outdated...
The obvious answer is redundant, on-line, off-site backup.
It's even within the the reach of most of us (that's us, the cutting-edge Slashdot readership) - you can daily back up 1 or 2GB using ADSL, friends' PCs and a bit of scripting.
The future lies in duplication and redundancy. Data storage and bandwidth are getting so cheap that I think in a few years everyone will be using on-line, off-site backups. Some peering with friends, some with other businesses, some with specialist companies.
What I find most worrisome is this:
"BGP, configured without an MD5 key (as is usually the case)...."
To cut bandwidth costs?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those! Hours of parking time could be finished in minutes!
Is that why they have parallel parking as part of the driving test?
Sun have a backdoor too.
Just ask Microsoft's cock.
For full tranparency you need transparent ballot boxes. We see them used on the news* in various troubled nations where democracy is under threat, why not in the countires where is isn't? * For any Americans watching: foreign affairs are a regular feature on the news in the civilised world.
Microsoft can only buy that which can be bought.
You just can't get the staff these days. Those photo editors haven't even bothered changing their expressions. It's obvious that Steve's head was originally two feet lower.
A computer is a tool you should know how to use it. If find this diser to remain ignorant and not need to understand how things work pethetic.
Language is a tool too...
Well, I think you're missing my point :P
It's not the little applets that make Windows a better desktop for the non-technical consumer, it's the fact that everything works through them. Sure, they're nice enough and the familiarity will make the transition easier, but Windows Explorer, Network Neighborhood etc. already have equivalents on most distributions that work pretty much the same way.
If this project can get, for example, every Linux VGA driver released in future to have a standardised control panel applet then great. But it won't.
The point of the Windows GUI is not that it looks nice, it's that you can do everything in it. If this project provided a functional Add/Remove Programs, Device Manager and Control Panel then that would be a good thing. But it doesn't. To be fair the authors didn't intend it to do anything but recreate the look, but I think that will be counterproductive. It will only serve to make the limitations of a GNU/Linux system in terms of ease of installation and configuration of hardware and software more obvious.
The day you put the driver or software CD into your machine, click "install" and it Just Works(tm) - your new printer appears with an icon along with the rest, your software appears in the menu, the control panel lets you configure your new graphics card - is the day ordinary folk will switch to Linux.
The project has set out what it intended to achieve - a Windows XP look-alike. So well done on that front. But I think the authors are wrong if they think the look of the GUI is what's stopping people adopting GNU/Linux for the desktop.