AnarchoCyphertopian technologies (wasRE: [extropy-chat]Reccommendations for a mailing list)

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Feb 12, 2005 at 11:23:19PM -0600, Brian Atkins wrote:
> Mike Lorrey wrote:
> >You aren't looking at the opportunity cost. If yahoo didn't have so
> >much of its bandwidth (and disk space) soaked up by spam, it could

The bandwidth spam requires is negligible, ditto also applies for disk space.
I can easily get 0.19 EUR/GByte, for major providers with peering arrangement
traffic is effectively free.

Single hot spots (mail servers) is where it's at. Spam filtering is
crunch-intensive (even more so than scanning for malware), and hence should
be moved to the periphery.

> >afford to give me 10 gigs of disk space for free.

Do you think the system allocates 10 GBytes for every user, and it is just
sitting there idle, slowly filling up? That would be a lousy business
strategy.

I'm not sure people realize how far the prices in storage have fallen. Single
drives go up to half a terabyte in size these days:

$314	 - 	Serial ATA 400GB
$186	 - 	Serial ATA 300GB
$122	 - 	Serial ATA 250GB
$105	 - 	Serial ATA 200GB
$80	 - 	Serial ATA 160GB 

It doesn't have to be SCSI of FC these days.

> >
> 
> Hmm, no I think Yahoo would not have purchased all that "spare capacity" 
> in the first place if it hadn't been forced to by the spam.

There is no spare capacity. The systems are being purchased as the accounts
fill up.
 
> There may be viable financial reasons to offer 10 GB of free space, and 

I don't think Gmail is unprofitable. It's a just another canvas for
adwords, which is what gives Google these insane profits.

> if there are then Yahoo will do it. It isn't dependent on having spare 
> space sitting around, or if it is then they would have to sharply limit 
> the number of eventual users to prevent the business model from entering 
> an unprofitable mode.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20050213/dd2d8e64/attachment.bin>