I really don't think you've worked in a telco that big and specially with a pre-paid system, which is the most adopted in my country.

There's strict regulations for this kind of system:

- once the costumer charges credit for the phone, it must be available for use in less then 3 minutes;
- when a costumer makes a call (or sends an sms, mms, uses the data network etc), the amount of credit available must be validated in less than half a second, no calls should be dropped because of inability of the system to validate credit;
- and there's the DW, which has to show graphics in real time (and I mean, if someone wants to know how many calls where issued in the last 30 minutes, this information must be available); - and many other stuff, I won't write it all down in a post at /. :P

Do you have any idea how many charges a day this specific telco receives? How many calls? The amount of transactions in the databases is at the very least one or two orders of magnitude higher than the amount twitter has to deal with.

Any telecom does way more than that.

I've worked in a big telecom with 40mi+ clients and I've seen an 8 nodes Oracle RAC responsible for the whole pre-paid client database handle far, far more transactions and queries than Twitter says it does.

Each regional server responsible for authorizing the calls has a 2 node Oracle RAC and it too handles far more transactions and queries than Twitter.

So, there you go... The excuse to use NoSQL was that it is quicker in some cases. It's not, time to move back to RDBMS.

I used to like the Marvel "Ultiverse", but it's amazing how they've managed to screw it up in a matter of months. A few new writers and it's just ruined. The Ultiverse should be a complete reboot of the traditional Marvel Universe, away from the continuity problems, but there you go.

Venezuela's defense spending is just over $2B/year. Their oft-foe, Colombia, spends about $6B/year. And the US spends over $400B/year.

IF those numbers are true, and I think those $2B/year spent on Venezuela is quite low, Colombia spends that much per year because they're fighting narco-terrorists (FARC). Terroristst with wich Chavez has friendship, terrorists who received same bazoocas and a few dozen rockets from Venezuela's army.

And, FYI, your "peaceful marches" involved a freaking coup.

Even those made by high school studants in the last couple of years?

it's not ethanol itself, it's just the way US produce it... none of those arguments would apply to sugar cane. about the engines, brazil is using pure ethanol for quite sometime and it just doesn't destroy the engines the way tfa implies. if it's happening on US, maybe you should take another look at the auto industries.

In Brazil, the movie "Tropa de Elite" was leaked many weeks before it was released and it was still a huge success, because the film was good.

Dude am I the only one who has noticed a "Scientology Get the Facts Video Channel" add on Slashdot?!

I do have a screen shot of that :|

It points out straight to scientology.org