Yeah it goes both ways. The users who barely use their internet connection, such as grandmas that check their email and look up a recipe a few times a week, are subsidizing the users who are streaming Netflix in high def for 3 hours a night.
I'll pick on at&t uverse since that's what I've got, and since they're the latest to join the transfer cap party.
Those grandmas are not paying $65/mo for the top service tier. They are paying $35/mo for 3Mbit/s lowest-tier uverse service, and they still get a transfer cap of 250GB.
Streaming netflix users, who are pretty much all going to be in the top tier or two of service (24Mbit/s or 18Mbit/s) get pinched by the same cap. 250GB is 3.2% utilization of an 24Mbit/s download link, over a month, btw.
Even in some alternate universe where caps make sense, the least AT&T could do is grade the caps by line speed. It seems to me like I'm subsidizing grannie's transfer allowance, even if she doesn't fully use it.
Since the primary issue is traffic congestion at peak usage times, the obvious solution is to rate limit heavy users, rather than punishing them with hard caps which indiscriminately targets users who transfer lots of data in off hours.
Given all that, why does AT&T cap all uverse tiers the same? The first explanation that comes to mind is that they know if they drop the caps too much for lower tiers, because despite what they claim 250GB really isn't that much, they'll start cutting into too many grannies' modest internet usage. They want to keep their low-end customers from being hurt by lower caps, but they want to gouge their higher-end customers for going over the same caps.
And why do they cap instead of rate limiting heavy users? Rate limiting doesn't make them money. Caps might (though they will lose some customers over this outrage, and others will cut back usage or service tiers, so AT&T might even lose money overall).
If you're looking for a more DIY solution, I found a tool call iOS Beta Builder helpful. It prepares the XML manifest and creates a nice HTML page, so your testers just need to click to install. (you need their UDIDs first). The process is:
- "build and archive" from Xcode
- save the ipa
- drag it into beta builder
- publish output to a your website
- send URL to beta testers
The browser defaults for outline are ugly, that's why so many people set outline to none. So, some visual examples that show sexy outline stylings seems a more reasonable approach.
The author dismisses all aesthetic concerns and loses credibility with the aesthetically minded people he's trying to convince.
The killer feature is that you know when the message was opened. With SMS/text-messaging you have no idea if it was received by anyone - since it might have been sent to a landline #.
It's interesting that in North America it was an intentional decision to make land and mobile #'s indistinguishable, yet we are now supposed to keep track. I'm probably a bit sloppy with my contact list, but still people forward calls to their mobiles or transfer numbers. I've definitely sent SMS messages to the wrong place before - also because people change their mobile numbers frequently.
I'm also surprised that the funding source requirement somehow makes this discrimination arms-reach and hence legal. If i was a millionaire homophobe, could i create a fund for positions that specified "no gays"?
Well, the harder question to answer is if you have some money, why is giving it solely to certain groups offensive and certain other groups not? Why would no one get angry if, say, the applications were limited to professors from the area? Or professors above a certain age? If I choose to never give my money to strangers, should strangers be offended? Should they be allowed to legally retaliate?
I understand that in a situation like "no gays" it offends that certain group of people and is discriminatory, but on the other hand, why does the government get to say at all who you should or shouldn't give your money to? It seems like if person X owns thing Y, then they should decide what to do with it, and no one else is entitled to Y (or a chance at getting Y) other than X.
I guess the same goes for employment too. I think discrimination is stupid and the hiring process should be a meritocracy. On the other hand, if I own a business, what business is it of others telling me who I should and should not hire?
I'm genuinely in a moral dilemma here, and I don't know the answer. Any thoughts?
Rand Paul has brought up analogous points. As a matter of intellectual discussion, of course, it's all fair game. As a matter of current, on-the-books law in the US, it's almost impossible to discuss discrimination without bringing up the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII is, in particular, relevant to why an employer cannot discriminate ad lib.
[1] Yes, to be pedantic, this is not the percentage of male computer science professors, but instead the percentage of CS Ph.D. recipients in 08-09. It still does a bang-up job of indicating a discrepancy.
True. And speaking of GoDaddy a client recently mentioned that they registered two new domains with godaddy. Total cost (with all the ridiculous, unneeded extras): $138
Misleading and intentionally confusing UX can be very good for business.
Are you opposed to a lightweight framework? Or a templating tool like Smarty? Ideally, a good framework would make a cleaner, more coherent codebase. If you restrict frameworks, I have a feeling most devs will just roll their own.
I think that plenty of people are going to 'drop' this in to their existing site as a nice to have module in the back-office or intranet. That means they'll have to do customization, any kind of dependency is going to make that much harder.
So even a 'lightweight' framework will likely complicate things, for instance it is possible that another framework is already present.
