On 2007-05-21 at 13:19 +1000, Matt McLeod wrote: > Anyone using SMS for anything genuinely critical is an idiot. It may > be that your machines keeling over isn't critical enough for it to > matter
It may be that it matters but we're not daft enough to trust any external system to successfully do what it's sold to do and so there's stuff in place to escalate in the event of non-response. And yes, the pager may be guaranteed in the face of network overload and it's good that there are people in the system (like me) who have pagers for reliable messaging. The fact that the SMSes are, in practice, more timely and reliable doesn't mean we should just be using SMSes. It _should_ be a cause of embarrassment to the pager network operators. It does mean that the sneering at SMSes is based on a utopia, such as equally scaled networks, instead of recognising that in the real world the mobile networks have been frantically expanding (that competition thingy) and have more reliable coverage and more timely delivery. I do hear echoes of the Multics crowd complaining, justifiably at times, about the problems of Unix. -Phil
