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MrAnnoyanceToYou (654053)

MrAnnoyanceToYou
  dylan@dylanbrPERIODams.com minus punct
http://www.dylanbrams.com/
After somewhere between 24 and 29 years of being an arrogant prick, I may have learned a little humility. I'm not sure whether it made an impression, but it bloody hurt. Now I blow glass and work for a tiny web company that supplies web ticketing services to local and community theatres. We're growing. It would be nice to have people not having to pay Ticketmaster or Fastixx such crazy prices, so I'm working on that, and maybe I'll eventually get a little wealthy in the process. Here's to luck and hard work making me look like I know what I'm doing.

MrAnnoyanceToYou (654053)

by suso on Wednesday July 02, @11:03AM (#24029231)
Attached to: OMG Did U C What U R Paying 4 Texting?

I was recently reading about the whole George Vaccaro fiasco and did some calculations on how much the cost of transfer is over a T1 line vs. what companies like Verizon charge for data transfer. Its astonishing that people put up with this:

  • Cost of a T1 line: $600 (Verizon's cost would be less and they probably have higher capacity lines in many places.)
  • Monthly bandwidth capacity of a T1: 40,687,488,000 Kilobytes (86,400 sec. * 30.41 avg days * 197 KB/sec)
  • Cost per KB over a T1 line: 60,000 cents / 40,687,488,000 KB = 0.0001159190 cents per KB = $0.000001159190 (for all those Verizon reps out there)
  • Verizon's charge per KB to the customer: $0.02
  • Verizon's markup on data transfer: x 17,253!!!!!
  • Screwing generation Y & Z: Priceless

Why do people put up with this? Some people might say I'm comparing apples to oranges, but Apples dont' cost 17,000 times more than oranges. There should be a class action suit over this.

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 [+] comment

  BitTorrent Video Download Store Falls Flat 2007-02-28 14:58

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday February 28 2007, @02:58PM
from the working-as-intended dept.
seriously writes "We've all heard about BitTorrent going legit this week with legal movie and TV show downloads. Ars Technica took a look at the service to see how usable it was and ran into a few snags, including not being able to download or even open the video files on some computers. However, the ones that they did manage to open varied a lot in quality. Overall, they blame DRM: 'Without knowing whether browser compatibility and dysfunctional video files are a rare occurrence or not, it's hard to say whether BitTorrent's service is a good one overall. Our initial experiences have been disappointing and frustrating, and guess what the culprit is once again? DRM. Why the DRM failed to work on 50% of our purchases is not clear, but whatever the cause, it's simply unacceptable.'"
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 [+] story, movies, internet, technology, drm, haha

  Apple: Father of MPEG Replies To Jobs On DRM 2007-02-10 14:00

Posted by kdawson on Saturday February 10 2007, @02:00PM
from the way-forward dept.
marco_marcelli writes with a link to the founder and chairman of MPEG, Leonardo Chiariglione, replying to Steve Jobs on DRM and TPM. After laying the groundwork by distinguishing DRM from digital rights protection, Chiariglione suggests we look to GSM as a model of how a fully open and standardized DRM stack enabled rapid worldwide adoption. He gently reminds Jobs (and us) that there exists a reference implementation of such a DRM stack — Chillout — that would be suitable for use in the music business.
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 [+] story, apple, music, drm,

  Games: EVE Devs Admit To Misconduct 2007-02-09 17:23

Posted by Zonk on Friday February 09 2007, @05:23PM
from the jumpgate-is-a-great-name dept.
RidinThoraxes writes "The Escapist has published a complete investigation of what they're calling Jumpgate. The ongoing scandal of dev-backed cheating in the game world is fully explored, complete with a confession from the offending developer, emails from their community managers, and an interview with the enterprising player who uncovered it all."
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 [+] story, games, rpg,

  Gates Foundation Revokes Pledge to Review Portfolio 2007-01-12 14:13

Posted by Zonk on Friday January 12 2007, @02:13PM
from the no-pledge-no-problem dept.
NewsCloud writes "After the LA Times reported that the Gates Foundation often invests in companies hurting the very communities Bill and Melinda want to help, the Seattle Times reported the foundation planned 'a systematic review of its investments to determine whether it should pull its money out of companies that are doing harm to society'. Shortly after that interview, the Gates Foundation took down their public statement on this and replaced it with a significantly altered version which seems to say that investing responsibly would just be too complex for them and that they need to focus on their core mission: 'There are dozens of factors that could be considered, almost all of which are outside the foundation's areas of expertise. The issues involved are quite complex...Which social and political issues should be on the list? ... Many of the companies mentioned in the Los Angeles Times articles, such as Ford, Kraft, Fannie Mae, Nestle, and General Electric, do a lot of work that some people like, as well as work that some people do not like. Some activities might even be viewed positively by some people and negatively by others.'"
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 [+] story, microsoft, money, bastards, copout, reasonable

  Developers: Is the One-Size-Fits-All Database Dead? 2007-01-09 22:50

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 09 2007, @10:50PM
from the specialized-and-optimized dept.
jlbrown writes "In a new benchmarking paper, MIT professor Mike Stonebraker and colleagues demonstrate that specialized databases can have dramatic performance advantages over traditional databases (PDF) in four areas: text processing, data warehousing, stream processing, and scientific and intelligence applications. The advantage can be a factor of 10 or higher. The paper includes some interesting 'apples to apples' performance comparisons between commercial implementations of specialized architectures and relational databases in two areas: data warehousing and stream processing." From the paper: "A single code line will succeed whenever the intended customer base is reasonably uniform in their feature and query requirements. One can easily argue this uniformity for business data processing. However, in the last quarter century, a collection of new markets with new requirements has arisen. In addition, the relentless advance of technology has a tendency to change the optimization tactics from time to time."
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 [+] story, developers, database, maybe, databases, duh, oldnews

  IT: Hackers Disagree On How, When To Disclose Bugs 2007-01-04 16:50

Posted by Zonk on Thursday January 04 2007, @04:50PM
from the bugs-under-your-hat dept.
darkreadingman writes to mention a post to the Dark Reading site on the debate over bug disclosure. The Month of Apple Bugs (and recent similar efforts) is drawing a lot of frustration from security researchers. Though the idea is to get these issues out into the open, commentators seem to feel that in the long run these projects are doing more bad than good. From the article: "'I've never found it to be a good thing to release bugs or exploits without giving a vendor a chance to patch it and do the right thing,' says Marc Maiffret, CTO of eEye Security Research, a former script kiddie who co-founded the security firm. 'There are rare exceptions where if a vendor is completely lacking any care for doing the right thing that you might need to release a bug without a patch -- to make the vendor pay attention and do something.'"
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 [+] story, it, security, duh

  Researchers Create Selfish BitTorrent Client 2007-01-03 11:43

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday January 03 2007, @11:43AM
from the surprised-it-took-this-long dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from the computer science department at the University of Washington have released BitTyrant, a new BitTorrent client that is designed to improve download performance via strategic selection of peers and upload rates. Their results call into question the effectiveness of BitTorrent's tit-for-tat reciprocation strategy which was designed to discourage selfish users. Clients are available for Windows, OS X, and Linux."

  Hardware: Zune Sales Continue to Weaken 2006-12-18 11:36

Posted by Hemos on Monday December 18 2006, @11:36AM
from the slip-sliding-away dept.
Dak RIT writes "Market share data for the first month of Microsoft's Zune sales is now available, and appears to confirm that after the initial hype, sales have fallen off dramatically. Microsoft came in fourth for sales during the month of November with only 1.9% of the market. Apple remained unchanged at 62.2%, and SanDisk even managed to increase to 18.4% (looks like the Zune might not even be able to compete with the rest of the market, let alone the iPod). The one surprise though is that the brown Zune is apparently not only being bought, but more popular than the white model."
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 [+] story, hardware, microsoft, haha, zune, brown, defectivebydesign, spin

  Apple: iTunes Sales Not 'Collapsing' After All 2006-12-14 22:15

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday December 14 2006, @10:15PM
from the looking-at-the-bigger-picture dept.
john82 writes "Earlier this month we had a report from Forrester, based on a random sampling of 2,000 credit card accounts, that purported to show that iTunes sales were crashing. Now comes another survey from Reston, VA-based ComScore which indicates the exact opposite. ComScore's report which is based on actual iTunes sales shows a 84% increase during the first nine months of this year compared to the same period last year. Meanwhile the author of the Forrester report, Josh Bernoff, noted in his blog yesterday that they shouldn't be pummeled just because everyone took what he wrote and ran with it."
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 [+] story, apple, media, itunes, haha, noshit, forrester

  Science: NASA Finds Evidence of Recent Flowing Water on Mars 2006-12-06 17:11

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday December 06 2006, @05:11PM
from the some-bound-to-claim-theory-is-all-wet dept.
SonicSpike writes to mention that Scientists are claiming that they have evidence of water flowing on Mars within the last five years. From the article: "Subsurface aquifers or melting ground ice were floated as possible sources of the water. One of the springs even appears at a fault line, according to Malin, just as they often do on Earth. The shortness of the gulleys, which seem to flow for but a few hundred yards, might be accounted for by a process similar to a volcano's eruption on Earth, with water instead of magma building up underground, and ice, instead of fire, characterizing the resulting flow."
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 [+] story, science, nasa, mars, space, co2, wateronmars

  Linux: Dvorak on Microsoft/Novell Deal 2006-11-08 12:55

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday November 08 2006, @12:55PM
from the they-all-wear-party-hats dept.
zaxios writes "John C. Dvorak has weighed in on the recent Novell-Microsoft pact. Among his insights: "Microsoft has been leery of doing too much with Linux because of all the weirdness with the licenses and the possibility that one false move would make a Microsoft product public domain at worst, or subject to the GPL at best." But now, "the idea is to create some sort of code that is jammed into Linux and whose sole purpose is to let some proprietary code run under Linux without actually 'touching' Linux in any way that would subject the proprietary code to the GPL." According to Dvorak, it's only a matter of time before Linux is "cracked" by Microsoft, meaning Microsoft figures out a way to run proprietary code on it."
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 [+] story, linux, linuxbusiness, gpl, microsoft, novell, dvorak

  Ask Slashdot: Is An Uninformed Vote Better Than No Vote? 2006-11-07 18:15

Posted by Cliff on Tuesday November 07 2006, @06:15PM
from the voter-responsibility dept.
ras_b asks: "I don't pay attention to politics at all, and so I will not be voting in today's elections. My family has been telling me that this is a mistake and I should vote anyway, partly because I have slightly conservative views which agrees with their political outlook. My reasoning is that since I am totally uninformed, I shouldn't vote. I don't want to vote Republican or Democrat, only to find out later I totally disagree with something a candidate stands for. So, here's my dilemma and my question: Is an uninformed vote better than no vote?"
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 [+] story, askslashdot, republicans, voting, election, maybe, !itsatrap, hanwillhavethatshielddown

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