The bandwidth overage fee for DataPro is a reasonable $10 for each extra gigabyte. Verizon and Sprint charge around $50 per extra gigabyte in overage fees. If you use more than 2 GB per month, you deserve to pay more than the rest of us who do not. Why is this hard to understand?
It's perfectly reasonable for heavy users to pay more than light users. But the same holds true for water, sewage, electricity, etc.
So why do we have such a complicated mess of data plan options? Why is 3G bandwidth not just a simple metered service where everybody pays the same rate?
Why is 3G bandwidth not just a simple metered service where everybody pays the same rate?
Because the vast majority of people don't use enough bandwidth to make that option more profitable for the telcos than their current setup, where people buy much more bandwidth (if you measure it as being the maximum throughput times the amount of time in a month) than they need.
People like to know how much they're paying every month and not have to worry about every kilobyte transferred, one of the reasons that many people prefer postpaid plans that include a certain number of minutes per month rather than prepaid ones where you have to keep track of how much you're using. It's stressful!
How are pre-paid plans any different than making sure that your car has enough fuel in the tank? People don't by gasoline on post-paid plans. The real issue here is that there is no standard/easy way of knowing how many minutes you have left (i.e. fuel gauge). People have a good handle on how long a minute is, and they could easily read a countdown ticker on their phone. People go for unlimited because, "if $10 for 250 minutes is a good deal, then $30 for infinity minutes is a better deal!" You also have to add in the laziness factor (i.e. If I have unlimited minutes, then I don't have to worry about buying more minutes if I ever need to use more minutes in a given month).
Data is different because many people have no idea what a kilobyte or a megabyte is, let alone how much bandwidth each site they visit uses, and that's not counting all of the background communication from Apps or Ajax requests from web pages.
People know how to cut back on water usage. People know how to cut back on electricity usage. People know how to cut back on phone usage. A lot of people haven't the faintest clue on how to cut back on data usage other than maybe, "use the web less," but they don't know which things use bandwidth and which don't, or which things use more bandwidth than others.
Setting off a massive explosion with the well at the center. Massive enough to move sufficient amount of material towards the well to essentially clamp it shut.
Of course, the oil would probably start leaking through the sand/rubble after a few days.
This could be trivially solved by applying nuclear explosives to weld everything shut, with the added benefit that local fishermen could stop to worry whether they'll have a job again soon. </sarcasm>
As far as I know nuclear devices tend to create massive holes rather than welding. Perhaps it would be better to use our nuclear capacity for energy generation and our petroleum for explosives, rather than vice versa.
At least if they use the nuke method no one will care about the oil spill anymore whether it works or not.
Bonus: Watch American TV on Hulu and Listen to music on Last.fm / Pandora even if you don't live in the US
From a user point of view, I think that's pretty cool. However, are you sure it's legal? I'd think it's greyish at best (but IANAL), and you might get a lot of unwanted attention from the big media companies for advertising this so openly. Are you sure you have the pockets to stand up to them in court even if you are sure that it's legal?
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Bonus: Watch American TV on Hulu and Listen to music on Last.fm / Pandora even if you don't live in the US"
I almost left the site, then it clicked features. Meh. Then I saw those lines and thought WOW, s/he's got something going here.
Take away: Stop listing features and start listing benefits. Otherwise lot of users will miss out on a great app, and you may miss out on your opportunity.
I'm not sure I understand...isn't being able to watch online American TV / listen to American radio a benefit? or do you mean we should replace the features page with "benefits" such as being able to browse US-only websites?
We have had many combined years of experience in this field and have decided to push our own offering to simplify ones experience. Regarding the IANAL aspect you can see here http://tinyurl.com/2bd45en where the #1 act in the world understand the stakes and where the true money is made. As for the pockets to stand up to them in Court, I would imagine there aren't many folks that do. We have quality legal minds on staff that are available 24hrs a day
Regarding the IANAL aspect you can see here http://tinyurl.com/2bd45en where the #1 act in the world understand the stakes and where the true money is made.
Oh, I don't doubt that many artists would welcome your service if it leads to a broader, more international audience. Yet I somehow doubt that the labels and their lawyers are necessarily going to be of the same opinion.
Anyway, if I may digress, if you happen to be offering the reverse service at some point, I'd like to watch German RTL Formula One coverage from the US. RTL even offers an iPhone app for that, but they check the user's location and block viewers not residing in Germany... :-(
These arbitrary "market segmentations" are really annoying and not the least in the interest in the viewer (who, sadly, is not the customer...). Good luck toppling them, I'll root for you.
That would be notepad.exe. No, I'm not kidding. I learned Java using nothing but notepad.exe and javac on a Win98 box.
Syntax highlighting seemed quite magical back then. ;-)
Fully agree. I gave up after four stories that I all disliked. Two were totally out of my area of interest (celebrities and horse racing, huh?), and two were tech stories that didn't cross the "marginal curiosity" threshold.
Could work, but you'd have to get me hooked more quickly.
Agreed. My recommendation algorithms do well but need lots of data about you. This is an experiment to see if I can bootstrap with no user data by playing 20 questions at the start. How long are people willing to grant me?
In conclusion, given a traversal of an artificial graph with natural statistics, the graph database Neo4j is more optimal than the relational database MySQL.
I get what they mean, but "more optimal"? Please...
Maximal, minimal, optimal, and the corresponding verbs, require proof. Why not use "better", "improved", "shorter", "reduced", "faster" or "sped up" instead?
(AFAIK Gruber isn't a lawyer, so it's just an uneducated opinion)
That's a bit harsh; there's a large difference between an "uneducated opinion" and a "carefully researched assessment by a non-lawyer". Based on your criteria, no journalist could ever write about any topic but journalism.
Gruber: I’m not offended by their decision to obtain this unit and publish everything they were able to ascertain regarding it. [...] Second, publishing the name, photographs, and personal information of the Apple engineer who lost the phone is irrelevant to the story. It was the dick move to end all dick moves.
It seems to me that he made it pretty clear that he does not take offense with reporting about the prototype per se. Rather, he condemns the way that Gizmodo chose to handle the whole affair.
Vents? Seriously? Does it have a fan? Is it going to be noisy? Just imagine all the crap that can fall in there, all the stuff that can get caught on it.
I don't know about that... The current generation of ARM processors are pretty fast. And you can't beat their performance per watt, so an ARM tablet will get much better battery performance. So long as an ARM tablet can display video well (which will require a dedicated chip for either) does it matter how much faster the processor is? Especially when battery life is taken into consideration?
Ummm... laptops have had vents on them for quite awhile now and we've all survived alright. If this is your subtle way of saying this isn't an iPad, we knew that already :)
If there are vents you need to keep unobstructed, this has implications for using it in bed, say. I once fried a laptop's graphics card by leaving it on a bed. Modern components should have heat-triggered shutdown mechanisms, but your average consumer is completely ignorant of such things and will think it's broken when it suddenly blacks out.
It's perfectly reasonable for heavy users to pay more than light users. But the same holds true for water, sewage, electricity, etc.
So why do we have such a complicated mess of data plan options? Why is 3G bandwidth not just a simple metered service where everybody pays the same rate?