From owner-freebsd-chat Fri Jul 24 15:28:10 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id PAA12173 for freebsd-chat-outgoing; Fri, 24 Jul 1998 15:28:10 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from localhost.my.domain (ppp1716.on.bellglobal.com [206.172.249.180]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA12142 for ; Fri, 24 Jul 1998 15:28:05 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ac199@hwcn.org) Received: from localhost (tim@localhost) by localhost.my.domain (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA16314; Fri, 24 Jul 1998 18:27:51 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from ac199@hwcn.org) X-Authentication-Warning: localhost.my.domain: tim owned process doing -bs Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1998 18:27:51 -0400 (EDT) From: Tim Vanderhoek X-Sender: tim@localhost Reply-To: ac199@hwcn.org To: patl@phoenix.volant.org cc: ac199@hwcn.org, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: My verdict on 2.2.7... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Fri, 24 Jul 1998 patl@phoenix.volant.org wrote: > > Local rates for a business is: zero cents @ minute. > > Where do you live? Who's the local phone company? Pac Bell [...] > Outside the US, I wouldn't even care to speculate. Bingo! > > That's 12cents an hour. That means a business will pay something > > on the order of $2.40 cents to download FreeBSD. > > Err. $25/200hrs == $2.50/20hrs. Exactly. No need to approximate. > (Remember, the original message stipulated 20 hours for the download.) Of course, I'm not very likely to need all 20h of download, either. > Assuming that you use up your entire time allotment for the month. > If that download was the only logon for the month, it cost $25. > If you go over the 200 hours, you need to amortize the total expense > over the total number of hours used. That really depends on your accounting practices. In my case the 20hours used to download everything would go to waste (since the (primary) purpose of my connection is not to download FreeBSD, and we come nowhere near using all 200h (even after using 20h to download data)). [Of course, this was in the context of a business] If that download was the only logon for the month, you should not have gone with the 200h Internet package and should have chosen another one instead. It's not downloading FreeBSD that cost $25 in that case, but the blunder you made calculating how much 'net time you needed that cost $25. > That is, indeed, an unfair advantage. There are various other > plans available from a variety of long distance carriers that > could net a user rates in the three-to-five cents a minute range. > But most of us won't qualify for them. I chose ten cents because > that seemed to be the lowest rate readily available to the average > consumer. I think one company here (Sprint?) is offering something (very) significantly lower, provided you're willing to restrict your calls to weekends (which I'd be more than happy to do in exchange for saving $60). [I don't pay particularly close attention to the various offers, since switching isn't an option for the same reason we get half off all our phone bills :-] > Yep, you probably can. But how much work will you have to put in, > and what are the trade-offs? (Don't bother answering, it was > a rhetorical question.) I was aiming at the general populace. > People who are happy with their current phone company; or who > want to stick with one of the big well known names. If they stay with a big well-known name when that costs them a hefty premium, spending $40-$60 (less on a subscript) every three months for a CD is probably not a big deal, anyways. -- This .sig is not innovative, witty, or profund. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message