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Why Is Less Than 99.9% Uptime Acceptable?
Ian Lamont writes "Telcos, ISPs, mobile phone companies and other communication service providers are known for their complex pricing plans and creative attempts to give less for more. But Larry Borsato asks why we as customers are willing to put up with anything less than 99.999% uptime? That's the gold standard, and one that we are used to thanks to regulated telephone service. When it comes to mobile phone service, cable TV, Internet access, service interruptions are the norm — and everyone seems willing to grin and bear it: 'We're so used cable and satellite television reception problems that we don't even notice them anymore. We know that many of our emails never reach their destination. Mobile phone companies compare who has the fewest dropped calls (after decades of mobile phones, why do we even still have dropped calls?) And the ubiquitous BlackBerry, which is a mission-critical device for millions, has experienced mass outages several times this month. All of these services are unregulated, which means there are no demands on reliability, other than what the marketplace demands.' So here's the question for you: Why does the marketplace demand so little when it comes to these services?"
The marketplace has been duped into believing that this is the best technology can provide. People don't have time to know, understand, or research history and find that technology really can be reliable.
I'll get modded troll, but I lay much of this at Microsoft's feet. I laughed them off when I first heard of them and their goal of taking over the industry. After all, I'd been working on systems that ran 24x7 with five-9 reliability for years, and DOS/Windows couldn't touch that.
One time I had an opportunity to visit Microsoft and have lunch with a friend there. I figured while there I'd take the opportunity. I asked them in hushed tones, "Just how do you configure Windows so that you don't have to reboot it all of the time?" They looked at me like I was crazy.
Technology can provide reliability. The general public is no longer even aware that it's possible.
Oh Zonk, I'm marking your story as "flamebait". :(
Complacent consumerism. "Hey, it's always been this way so they [service providers] must not be able to have 99.9% uptime. If they had the capability, they sure would provide it to us, their customers."
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
Probably because of the cost. I do network design for a fairly large telco, and let me tell you the cost goes up exponentially with the number of "9"s that the business asks for.
Basically, we don't rely so much on a single system that a brief outage can be tolerated because there are alternatives to choose from.
This is also the basis of Clayton Christensen's theories on disruptive innovation - that a consumer of something (technology, etc.) is willing to trade off some of these aspects, like reliability, for cost or performance benefits (however you wish to define those benefits...).
The last time I wrote code, it was Morse
Because every nine will cause a geometric increase in costs.
love is just extroverted narcissism
... after decades of mobile phones, why do we even still have dropped calls? It's a little thing called physics. When you're traveling while using your phone, you may transit into dead zones. We could solve this by cutting down all the trees and flattening the landscape, but that might make some people angry...512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
You can have one or the other.
We're not talking about software, we're talking about hardware and man-hours. Those will never be free.
Gone!
'five nines' of uptime is a ridiculous and exaggerated expectation for pretty much anything technological for anything that is not life threatening.
Whenever people talk about 99.999 uptime for a service delivered over the internet I laugh in their faces.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
It's not that customers will put up with it, it's that there are exactly zero providers willing to offer such a service. When every single vendor will simply tell the customer to go screw, what option is there? Let's say for the sake of argument that every single customer moves to another service when their existing provider has an outage. Since they're all having outages at the same rate, all it does is swirl the market about, accomplishing nothing. All the vendors will continue to have customers regardless of what they do as in almost all cases it's a situation of "where ya gonna go?" This business tactic failed for IBM in the 1980's, and is failing for Microsoft now, but where there's essentially a legal monopoly (like telecommunications) there's zero meaningful choice.
As consumers, we're made to feel helpless. The worst we can do (without litigation) to a company is complain or refuse to use their services, but what harm can that do to a giant conglomerate? And in situations in which one company has a monopoly in a certain area of the country, for example, consumers may not have the ability to switch or do without.
As a personal example, Comcast owes me a refund check for Internet services I canceled six months ago. If I, as a consumer, had allowed my debt to go unpaid for that long, my account would have been sent to collections long ago. But the problem is that most of the power--with the economics of the situation, with politicians, and so on--lies on one side of the table, and that power ain't with the consumer.
Not everybody is a member of the "I WANT IT NOW!" generation. Most of us are still not particularly bothered if we can't get to some particular piece of information right this second. Some of us still remember how to go to the library. And some of us actually have interests that do not include being online. I know, it's hard to understand, but I don't think I could talk any faster. I'm conditioned that way.
Are these kind of outages really so common? Mobiles phones I absolutely agree with. ON the other hand, I literally cannot remember the last time I lost cable or my internet. I've literally lost power more frequently than either of them (maybe 4 times in the past year) and lost water once. Emails not making it to their destination--again, does this really happen? In the decade plus I've been using internet email, I can't off the top of my head ever think of any "lost" email unless it was sent to a wrong address or something.
Cost shouldn't be an issue, look at what they charge us and cellular networks are cheaper to expand than hardwired cables thru the ground, I agree with "conditioned" most people don't know enough to know any better.
I will say we are headed for a world of hurt when all communications go via IP (phone/video/data) you want to talk about a "terrorist" wet dream that would be it.
the reliability of
The current network structure can't even come close to POT's (IMO).
Screw cost, they charged me 19$'s in 2001 now my bill is 49$'s for the *same exact service*....
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I think the answer is, "Because we are cheap." It would cost twice as much to increase reliability from 99% to 99.999%. And most of us just don't need those extra 9's. That being said, there is a market for 99.999. Upper-middle class and higher would pay for it. Businesses would pay for it. It just isn't as big a market, from what I've observed.
Also, no competition in many areas. Cable TV was mentioned. Internet access. I don't know about other countries, but most places in the USA, you get what they give you, and if you want more, you can lay your own fiber.
There is no honesty in advertisement. Some places will advertise 99.9 or higher, but will not deliver. You could probably get your money back. But you would have to spend a couple of hours on the phone every month, just to demand your money back. Eventually, the service provider might drop you as a customer.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
Even though Ma Bell was an evil monopoly, one thing the did set the standard for was uptime. The older generation never had a phone failure, that is why it's still expected of landlines at least.
If offered cell plans that cost $50/month with rare outages or $150 a month with extremely rare outages, which would most people take?
99.999% (5 nines) of reliability is achievable, but it's very expensive and hard to do. Everything has to be redundant, with no single point of failure, everything has to support fail-over seamlessly, the software has to be tested with extreme rigor, and upgrade procedures need to function nearly instantly and support rollback without loss of service.
I was treating this article seriously until I came to point where it claimed that "We know that many of our emails never reach their destination." Huh? When was the last time you had an email that failed to deliver? I know it's possible, and I've seen it once in awhile, but it's so rare nobody complains about it.
I suppose it depends on where you live, but the outages I've seen in other basic services (cable tv/internet, cellphone) over the last year and a half have been virtually nonexistent.
I feel like this is another clueless journalist trying to yank people's chains. Maybe he's just living in an entirely different universe. Maybe he's personally had outages recently that have driven him to write this rant.
To put it simply, it's the money stupid. It requires a lot more equipment and manpower to offer a high availability service. This extra cost results in higher prices. It can cost 1000% more a month for less than 1% more reliability. Think of a $400 a month T1 with a SLA versus a $40/month cable line. Being sheep has nothing to do with it.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
I've never had a huge issue with cell phone or email downtime, but I regularly bitch at my ISP for extended outages and have always been credited the paltry sum of downtime that I paid for. This works out to a little more than a dollar for every 24 hours of service outage and is really nothing more than a symbolic slap in the face from me to them. As a student I generally have enough free time to notice/care when my internet service isn't working. Calling help desks and being told to restart my system over and over has made me bitter. If I started having problems with other services I pay for and continually got the same useless advice rather than an honest explanation of what's going on and had the time, I would probably try to get money back on them too. How would anyone go about demanding infrastructure upgrades to ensure 99.999% uptime? Entry costs for a new business are prohibitive and most communications companies have their users by the balls.
Because 90% of stuff labeled 'mission critical' actually isn't. Think about it - for most of us, being able to receive or send cellphone calls or emails at any time seems super important, but the number of hours in any given month where it really *was* super important (the grant application was due in two hours; your mother was sick; your partner was about to go into labor; whatever) is generally pretty low - our real tolerance for occasional downtime is therefore quite high.
Well, my guess would be that many (but not all) people understand that being able to call an ambulance because Aunt Betty has fainted is a necessity, but being able to chat with Aunt Betty for an hour from your car isn't. Missing a rerun of Laverne and Shirley isn't critical, and neither is having to wait to post those vacation pictures to Flickr. Your coworkers will, in all probability, somehow muddle through if you can't send them email from your blackberry.
The telephone as we know it was the first genuinely instantaneous, worldwide communications medium that anyone could use, it was seen as a necessary component for national security during the cold war, and was built out as such. We've had over a century to perfect it, and vast amounts of money were spent doing so. Despite its origins at DARPA, the Internet as we know it today, although more useful, is by and large less of a basic need, is far more complex, and large portions of it are still built on top of the telephone infrastructure, besides.
I can't help but think that most people understand this sort of thing, and understand that bringing such modern conveniences up to five nines of reliability is difficult and expensive, and people have evidently decided that a certain tradeoff to make such things affordable isn't out of line.
The shorter, more pessimistic version of this is probably, "It's cheaper to suck."
"The marketplace has been duped into believing that this is the best technology can provide. People don't have time to know, understand, or research history and find that technology really can be reliable."
No. They believe it is the best the technology can provide at a given price. Why do people "put up" with cars that only give them X amount of protection in a car crash even though there is technology out there that would make them safer? Because they aren't willing to pay the marginal cost for the extra protection. Arguing about what is possible with technology is pointless. What matters is what a piece of technology can do at a given price.
Everything is a trade-off. The sooner Slashdot learns this the less we will have these stupid "Why don't consumers use the latest, greatest, most expensive technology? We need to force them somehow!" articles.
Creative Demolition
When Comtrash Internet dropped my speed from 6 Mbps to 1 Mbps but kept the rate at 6 times DSL, I dropped Comtrash and went with the 1.5 Mbps DSL from my local telco. I got 50% more than Comtrash was delivering at 1/6th the cost. No problem.
When Microsoft decided that I didn't own the rights to my own media and stopped me from being able to copy my own DVDs, I decided to drop them for my media development system and I switched to Linux and Apple. Microsoft doesn't want my business so I went with the people who do. No problem.
When my Long Distance company decided to charge over $1.00 per minute for International calls, I switched to AT&T and their 17 cents a minute program. No problem.
When Frigidaire washers charged extra for the warm water cycle but only give you 5 seconds of hot water and thus, never any, it was no problem to return the unit and buy a different brand. Sure, the salesman wasn't happy but, that is now his problem and not mine. I bought a different brand that did give me what they advertised and promised. No problem.
The list is endless and across all businesses and domains.
The point being is that there are alternatives but, many (or most) people are either too lazy to do anything about it or, like this article, they are too apathetic to do anything about it.
The choice is up to the consumer and, if the consumer would take action, the industry would have to adapt because the market demands it. So far, the market is willing to accept this and thus, the industry sees no reason to change. The less the consumer will accept for their dollar the less they will receive. That, is the problem.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Somehow its computers' fault. The PC was the first product sold where "it works sometimes" was acceptable - and people have been trained now to accept "it works sometimes" from anything tech-related.
This space available.
It's all about cost vs. the cost of downtime. You'll find in business lines such as the financial sector, customers are willing to pay for extremely high availability because time is indeed money. Business lines that have lower costs for downtime have to weigh availability vs. ROI.
Be careful to pick a provider that advertises "seven nines of reliability" instead of the more common "nine sevens of reliability".
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Because it is so hard to identify less than 99% uptime. If you cannot measure it, how can expect people to be able to consider it in their decision of what product to buy. That is why 'Consumer Reports' is considered such a good magazine, it measures all the attributes a consumer could not identify on their own.
The government didn't always regulate phone companies. That started in 1984 when AT&T became too powerful. But AT&T became so powerful because it did a hell of an awesome thing with its network because it realized that better service equals more customers and more revenue. I recall hearing a story from a Bell Labs alum that they had a goal of handling annual peak call volumes on the busiest day of the year (Mother's Day). The day was worth $24 Million dollars in phone charges to them. They spent $5 Million on each of 2 different hardware architecture projects to get the system up and running to support the day. The monolithic centralized architecture failed, but distributed architecture (spreading the communications through 10-15 national "hubs" worked. The system was a success, and AT&T got to enjoy their lunch by servicing their customers the way a business ought to.
For data networks, their is simply too much clutter and competition to be able to reign in 99.999% rates of performance. We should be happy to get 99.9% from the mismatch of hardware running the routers and OSes which power the internet.
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Engineering has always been about compromise. Any idiot can design a structure that is X feet tall but it would prove more useful it if wasn't a giant block of concrete -- if it had room for offices and the materials used to build it had minimal cost without sacrificing structural integrity.
The same applies to computer engineering. We would easily build a cell phone network that had so many redundancies that it would virtually never go down and would support for thousands of times the expected average load, but we would pay for it in terms of cost. Customers demand reliability. Customers demand affordable cost. What the customer is "willing to accept" is a balance between the two.
I was in a hurricane during which I lost power for two weeks and phone (landline. My cell was fine the whole time, oddly enough) for three days. In order for either of those companies have five 9s of reliability, they'd have to have nearly 4,000 years or 800 years respectively of uninterrupted uptime. So it's already too late.
Further, I've had phone interruptions of up to a day on multiple occasions, I was not living in the boonies, either, but a mostly urban area with a population of about 500,000. So it's already too late. I would not say that "the telcos" are achieving anywhere near 5 9s of uptime in the consumer market.
Further, it's much more important how long an outage is than the cumulative average length of an outage. A web site for instance could easily sustain hundreds of 1s outages a day transparently. Most users of the famed blackberries probably wouldn't even notice blocks of 5 minutes at a time (assuming it queues messages when service is unavailable like a well designed mobile communications device would). Even 911 could probably handle outages of a minute or so as long as they were spaced several "average call lengths" apart.
So, yeah, 5 9s would be nice, but acceptable results can be had by investing in response time, and the important bit is the total cost to achieve your goals.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I'm still waiting for people to scream about the rising gas prices and the record oil company profits. Seems like this would have a greater impact on the general populous than reliable cell phone service.
It's acceptable because, unless you have some kind of heroin-like addiction to YouTube, when your Internet connection goes down, nothing bad happens. Nobody dies. Nobody loses their job. Nobody loses money. You go outside for a bit and play with your dog.
Same for mobile phones, cable, and every other luxury communication service. If it goes down, it's no big deal. You go spend some quality time with people you love.
Circuit switching is the way that the phone companies went. This is why you either get the call through or do not get the call through. With circuit switching you are guaranteed a certain amount of bandwidth. Because of this, your call will be there until the call is ended and the circuit is released, even if you do not use all of your guaranteed bandwidth. You could call someone and not talk for an hour and still have the bandwidth locked up. This seemed a little inefficient to the Internet designers.
Packet switching does not lock up the resources like circuit switching does. Instead, the packets are sent on a best effort type system. If lots of people are using the bandwidth, each person gets a little bit less. With hundreds of calls, a single new flow of traffic does not make much of a difference. Unfortunately, there are problems when too many flows try to use the available resources, which can result in lost packets or data. Packet switching does waste a lot less than circuit switching, but provides no guarantees.
To complicate things a bit more, mobile phones are unable to have a wire connecting them to the network. This means that multiple wireless devices use the same air space. If too many people are talking at the same time, this results in collisions in the air. Packets that would have only been lost due to congestions and other things like that now have to deal with actual physical transmission collisions. This makes things even more complex if you want a few extra 9's.
Wireless service providers have to balance over-provisioning the network with trying to use the resources they have already invested as efficiently as possible. It basically means that the more 9's you want, the more you have to over-provision the networks, the more money and resources that are actually wasted.
If you are having frequent issues, such as dropped calls and undelivered emails, I have some bad news for you. People are hanging up on you, and people are telling you that your email never arrived. While there are dead zones where cellular telephones lose reception, if you experience dropped calls regardless of geographic area or provider, it's not your phone that is the problem. Your problem is the other party can terminate the call with a push of the button and tell you that they lost signal.
Emails almost always reach their destination too. Maybe you write like a spammer ? Maybe some people set up filters so that your email never reaches their eyes, for any number of reasons. Who knows, but a more reliable delivery system won't fix any of those problems, let alone those that just say they never got it because they just don't care.
Because average consumers don't pay for more.
When you sign up with us, you can get a residential connection that will typically offer you 99.9% availability. If you want more, we can provide, but it'll cost you more. Why? Because we cannot afford to put a sufficiently large UPS in each of our locations when we serve on average around 50 residential customers per location. It's not economically viable with our residential pricing, and it never will be.
99.9% availability is something most would consider excellent on a symmetrical 25Mbps link for $50/month. If you expect five nines, I hope you're smarter than to go with residential products for your connectivity needs.
You make a good point.
Let's talk about home internet service via cable. The providers would love to charge you a great deal more to 'promise' that some packets will arrive more reliably for time sensitive packets such as VoIP or streaming media, but the reality is that the way things are these matters normally just work. So why would the customer want to pay more for a service that they are already getting.
It is true that sometimes things fail for various reasons, but it is also true that if you were to pay more, what you would likely get is QoS for the connections that you are using. The reality of this is that it would only save your skin if the problem was on your ISP and the problem was directly related to a shortage of bandwidth at some point on this network, hence your VoIP would lose out to someone else attempt to download the CNN page. It would do nothing to correct a temporary routing problem, or a failed handoff with another provider, thus many of the issues that you have would still exist despite the higher cost.
So the question becomes, how do you get someone to spend more when what they currently get is good enough?
We know that many of our emails never reach their destination.
Seriously? I can't say I've ever experienced an email simply getting lodged in a tube and never reaching its destination.
Not including the usual "Why yes, professor, I emailed you that homework assignment last week. What do you mean you didn't get it?", of course.
Anyway, I've never really thought about it, but POTS does seem to be exceptionally reliable - I can't think of a single other utility/service that can match it. Power, water, cable, etc all go up and down more than the drawers of an indecisive prostitute. Hell, has anyone looked at the "uptime" of public transportation recently?
So, why do we "put up" with a few hours of downtime per year? Because we are not being ridiculous.
sic transit gloria mundi
I stumbled my way into getting on Sprint's global cellular outage/resolution mailing list.
It's staggering. Especially when you pull out all the little issues and just focus on total service outages for entire markets. I couldn't believe how much they're down in certain markets. Always seems fine to me, but then again, I'm not on the phone "Five-Nines" of the time.
I think that has a lot to do with it, if you're looking for hosting for some site, 5-nines is really necessary, or close to, with kick-em-in-the-teeth if they don't deliver SLA's, since that site needs to be up all the time and can be hit by anyone, anytime. My cellphone? Not so much. It needs to work when I need it to work, and if there's a 3 minute outage sometime during my day, I probably won't ever notice it.
I like music
99.9% uptime is 364+ days a year. When services like Comcast and Blackberry go down for 3-4 days every year, they have rightfully generated the level of news that is given to them. This costs businesses Millions and drops their annual performance to the 99% range. *THIS* is the range that consumers should be up in arms about. 99.9% is actually pretty good for anything that IS NOT A RISK TO HUMAN LIFE.
Now, if the performance dropped to 90%, the services would be down 3-4 days every MONTH and customers would get pissed off enough to laugh entire companies out of existence. Imagine if Windows Update occurred during the second Tuesday of every month and knocked out your company network until the following Monday? Linux would be adopted pretty damned quickly...
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Without loads of fine print written into the contract. I have worked with HP over the years and 99.999 was only supported for Machines in a ServiceGuard Configuration, and you still had to take 1/2 of the machine down for regular patch intervals. My favorite was the soft failure of a CPU up to 2001, it still caused an HPMC although they sold managers on the fact that the CPU would just be soft removed.
1) It requires getting up off your ass and at least writing a letter
2) It requires being able to contact other people to get the word out, meet other like-minded folks, and to organize a group of people to follow some particular action (good luck). This generally means you have to post/appear somewhere that matters-- for example, Slashdot is a bad example, their editors are arbitrary and capricious assholes, it is rare that anyone actually is able to submit anything to Slashdot and get it posted. Newspapers, Magazines, TV, etc are even harder, though you can probably get the occasional letter-to-the-editor published in your hometown newspaper.
3) In order to back up your words (assuming you got past items #1 & #2) you have to figure out what other providers there are that are better (good luck there too) and get your group to agree to transfer services there (or at least threaten to) as a block. Individual people aren't likely to have much luck here-- the telcos today have so many subscribers they don't really give a rat's ass about any few of them.
4) It helps if you can whip up some media attention (as in step #2) but good luck there too since most of the reporter types I've met are generally jaded assholes too (but there are exceptions now and again). It helps a lot if you can points to gallons of blood gushing from a router or something like that. Reporters like blood (unless its their own), it sells papers. You can also use a cute animal like a puppy or a kitten. Reporters are suckers for puppies and kittens. And just think of the publicity you could drum up with a BLOODY puppy or kitten! And for extra credit its good to get a celebrity figure like maybe Charleton Heston or Ted Nugent-- they could probably help you with the bloody puppies and kittens too.
5) Then you need to figure out some way to get your ISP to care-- like taking your reporter to the back of their building to show them the pipe spewing bloody puppies and kittens might be a good way to start-- companies don't like that sort of negative publicity-- but they'll deny it was them in any case and hire lawyers and PR people to smile and deny it on camera and sue anybody who doesn't believe them.
but it costs an arm and a leg, consumers want cheap, they get what they pay for.
I was born in 1964. I have no recollection of POTS telephone service ever being unavailable.
Electricity was expected to drop out a few times every summer, and until someone figures out how to tell lightning where to go, I expect it will continue to happen. In my part of Canada, however, power is continuously available from October to April no matter what. Even if you don't pay your bill. The only winter power outage of note I can think of offhand was the great Ice Storm of 1998, one of the most spectacular cases of force majeure I've witnessed in my life.
In my part of the world, at least, power and telephone were life-and-death services and legislation mandated their reliability.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Since, unless my maths is hideously wrong, 0.00001% of a year (to use an arbitrary time period) is, in seconds, 60 (seconds) * 60 (minutes) * 24 (hours) * 365 (days) = 31536000seconds; 0.00001% of a year is: 315.36seconds or 5.256minutes.
Five and a quarter minutes loss of one's mobile phone or internet, per year, isn't going to hurt that much. Even for the Slashdot F5-monkeys (of which group I'm proud to be a member!). For a pacemaker or life-support machine it's not good enough, I agree; but for a utility communication?
Because there is a difference between spending the time and effort to build a computer that never crashes verses the time/effort to just reboot one.
When you get into the 99.999% or more range, you're basically doing everything you can to keep faults from happening in the first place -- and this is almost exactly the opposite of the Internet design philosophy, which assumes lost packets will be retransmitted, censorship/damage will be routed around, etc. It's a consumer technology -- cheap, low-cost, disposable (i.e. retransmit lost data, retry, reboot, etc.) -- which is why it has been successful in the consumer market. It is a "if something goes wrong, we'll kick it and try again" approach.
The alternative, making sure nothing goes wrong in the first place, starts getting into things like resource reservation. ("Hey, before I send this data over there, let's make sure there's room first, and reserve it, so I know my data will not get blocked/lost." vs. "I'll just send my data packets -- if I don't get a response, I'll just keep retransmitting until I do.")
People like the consumer approach because it lets them be lazy as well as cheap. The other approach scares people off because it starts sounding like a closed network/system, not to mention it puts responsibility on the users, which also scares them off.
(Hey, you want 99.999% uptime? Stop supporting a flat-rate bandwidth model, and start paying by data throughput. The old telecom industry *had* to keep the network up, because they were paid by the minute only while the calls could get through. Right now, if you pay an ISP $30 a month flat rate, it doesn't matter if the network is down for a day, the ISP still gets it's $1/day. Oh, you might get your $1 back if you get down and fight for a refund, but... If you paid per amount of data that got exchanged, and the ISP goes down for a day, it's lost a day of revenue the ISP never gets. Look at the market incentives the current pricing models put on the network providers and how it drives their focus. If you want cheap, flat-rate access, don't be surprised that you get cheap service, flat-rate customer service (i.e. business hours only, not on-call, on-demand, etc.).)
Sure, everyone thinks they have a choice but the game is rigged.
Some, know it's rigged and scream for 'transpancy'. Idiots!
Be it poker, business, or foreign policy, the transparent hand is the losing hand.
The majority walks around in a daze.
The rest, knowing it's a rigged game, either strive become a benefiting player or drop out, grow a little pakalolo, and go surf.
Lets say that you are a discerning customer who is willing to pay more for better service (or better equipment, or whatever). It's not even possible!
Sure there are absurdly expensive cell phone plans (and phones) targeted to the wealthy, but they don't offer any improved performance or reliability on a technical level. There are fancier and more expensive computers, but fundamentally you're still at the mercy of the quality control of a given Chinese manufacturer who churns out the competing brand the next assembly line over.
There seem to be a lot of areas, especially as relates to technology or mechanical products, where there just simply is no way to get a better, more reliable product regardless of the money you spend. And what is the consumer supposed to do about that?
Some of the reason we get crappy service is cost, but more of it is culture: as life has gotten "faster" over the last few decades, there's less time to think about how to do things well. In that environment, "crap in a hurry" always beats "thoughtfully designed but later".
Once upon a time, the phone company (Bell Telephone, then AT&T) was led by men with a vision of public service. To be sure, it was a about profit in the provision of public service, but good service was the goal, and profit was a side-effect. Indeed, Theodore Vail embraced regulation because he knew that was how to ensure that AT&T could remain profitable while pursuing that goal. And, yes, regulation had the valuable side-benefit of eliminating most competitors, but that really was a side-effect rather than the goal in those less cynical times. The bad result was that regulation inhibited a great deal of innovation--although, hey, inventing the transistor AND licensing it on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms was just one of many innovative achievements that came out of that regime. I suppose we might count UNIX in there as well.
Today, the telephone companies have completely lost that vision. The modern AT&T has no more relationship to its forebears than any of the other telcos; it's just a wretched creation of Ed Whitacre, and there is no more Bell Labs. Theodore Vail is probably be spinning in his grave, witnessing the current travesty that's called telephone service.
Heck, I wish I got even 99% reliability from modern technology.
One in ten cellphone calls I make or receive is dropped in mid-call--and often not because of traveling though a dead zone (frequently, both participants are stationary). Network congestion? Martians? Who knows. A similar percentage just don't go through to start. The audio quality on half of them is worse than 1950's-era transatlantic cable calls, and they're all only a poor imitation of full duplex.
My ISP has an outage of an hour or more about once every week (OK, maybe that's 99.5%). Their DNS service goes dark more often (but for less time). Their e-mail was sufficiently unreliable (access to servers, not delivery per se) that I moved it all to 1&1.
For me, at least one in ten new e-mail correspondence relationships goes awry in some manner (misspelled, but undiagnosed addresses; aggressive spam filters; mysterious network delays; deleted attachments; etc.). These usually require some telephone calls to fix. Once we figure out how to avoid whatever the problem was, each of those relationships becomes more reliable, but I have to request re-transmission often enough that I doubt it approaches 99.9%.
At least my wireline phone service works reliably. Calls are never dropped; calls to other wired phones are clear, quiet, and intelligible; calls always go through (maybe 1 in 500 fail); and service never goes away. To paraphrase Crocodile Dundee, THAT'S a utility!
I dread fiber-to-the-home. More complexity, more customer premises equipment, more battery backup to wear out, more complex finger-pointing for service relationships. Ooh, I can hardly wait.
Theodore Vail, please come back!
Of course, when you don't have transmitters with overlapping coverage, this doesn't work.
Tandem guys are laughing at this thread.
With wireless services, you're fighting with the laws of physics. You can probably still get all those 9s, but you'd be doing things like using multiple frequency bands and paths. Your phone would get heavier and draw more power and cost a lot more, as would service, but you could do it. Wireline services just don't have to deal with the same kind of problems; barring equipment failure (or software failure, if anyone remembers the outages associated with the SS7 upgrade), your call will go through. Satellite, same thing. Want more nines? Use more satellites and frequencies simultaneously. Cable TV is a fairer comparison. The issue here is no one cares. It's just not worth the extra cost to do; it's just TV. Internet? You can get as much reliability as you're willing to pay for.
I really hope the poster wasn't advocating more governmental control.
Part of the reason 99.9 is acceptable, is because it is.. Most services don't really *need* 99.9% uptime anyway. Another reason, is people are used to downtime now in all aspects of their life, so the extra % really doesn't matter to people for the most part.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This has everything to do with cost and nothing to do with Microsoft. Consider VoIP... people are deliberately choosing telephony services that are less reliable and lower quality than POTS, because VoIP is cheaper. If you want 99.999% uptime, that's fine -- but you're going to pay for it. High availability services require better equipment, redundant equipment that doesn't come cheap and more, higher quality staff to operate it. So it costs more.
I've been in the technology services business for a long time, and with few exceptions, 80%+ customers want their services are delivered as cheaply as possible. Most hospital systems don't even have a 99.999% availability requirement. The 20% the want varying levels of higher than normal availability usually have a government regulation, SLA or other mandate requiring that they do so.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The answer is in TFA IMHO. The phone service has been categorized as important and service providers have been obligated to report service outages longer than two minutes. All other thinks are a consequence of this. I remember that telecom equipment manufactures competed on the reliability of their wares bragging about the total number of minutes the phone service was out in the whole US in a year. And I mean minutes. Thus the manufacturers strived to offer extremely reliable equipment because the service providers made their purchase decisions based on it. I think FCC is not going to require the TV cable industry to report outages for a practical reason, and I doubt congress will make cable an important service. As to cell service the medium itself is not reliable and you could be without service even if there is no outage. I am not sure but I bet the cell providers report their outages to FCC. It does not mean that I do not care for the reliability of other services. I do. I used to have ADSL service from Verizon and it was actually good and I was happy. In the same place I tried Comcast and its service was absolutely horrible. But I have moved and the DSL provider here is not good at all. The service is reliable but they throttle the throughput based on TOD.
You seem to make the mistake of thinking that paying for something through taxes and loss of choice isn't paying for something.
Creative Demolition
It'll just cost you more. If your ability to download movies, music and porn at home is so mission critical that anything less than %99.999 uptime is acceptable, you can always procure internet service from multiple providers. Get the local cable and/or DSL if it's available, bring in a T1 line or two from different POP's. Sure, it'll cost a small fortune, but you can be virtually guaranteed to never lose internet access.
What if your power goes out. Well, that's pretty simple, you need a large battery backup on your home grid to cover the downtime. Throw in a few windmills, a 10000 watt gasoline generator, and $20K worth of solar panels. Don't forget a UPS or two. That ought to keep your computers running.
Gas goes out? well, luckily for you, you can purchase electric equivalents to any product that is powered by gas. You can purchase electric stoves, electric hot water heaters, electric dryers and electric furnaces. You need to make sure you have both a gas AND electric backup in your house for each of these things.... just in case. Of course, as mentioned before, you'll have a suitable emergency electric backup plan to cover those rare instances when both the gas AND the power goes out. You can also purchase a propane tank as an emergency gas backup. Of course, not all gas appliances work with both propane AND natural gas, but I'm sure you can figure something out.
As for phone.... well... wait, we don't need to worry about phones. As you said, we already get 5 9's on the phone service.
Long story short, if you DEMAND that level of uptime, you CAN have it. You just have to be willing to pay for it.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
My electricity isn't 99.999% uptime (that's 30 seconds in a year) which would require me to get an UPS
My consumer grade equipment isn't 99.999% uptime (with luck, maybe I guess but there's no ECC, redundant power etc).
My software isn't 99.999% uptime (ok, so the kernel is stable. When X crashes, so does everything of importance on a desktop)
If there's something urgent, you CALL me anyway.
I'd rather take a line with 99.5% uptime (that's two days without internet per year) that's 10x faster and costs 10x less. Which doesn't include that I have Internet at work, or via my cellphone, or via a webcafe or any number of other easily available sources. The only real killer I can think of is if you only telecommute and can't go to work, but even then I figure the nearest Starbucks will let you occupy a corner with some purchases.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Most people I know are just the opposite, they expect everything to be as reliable as their landline telephone service, and they complain like hell when it isn't.
But I agree with most of the comments that I've read. When given a choice between price and reliability, many people choose price. If you really want 99.999% uptime, buy a T1.
Partly correct. What they did was to mass introduce the GUI. 1.0 was a joke as far as usability went. At the same time the 386 was out and the talks of multiprocessing was promising new and exciting computing in the near future.
I don't think they measured squat. Just did their best. Only thing was that there were nobody who could properly design an O/S and complexity, instead of simplicity, ruled the day.
What we are seeing is the very best they as group are able to produce.
They have never been great at marketing either. But they were really the first to push the GUI with success. Don't forget Apple became a very closed platform. They did not attract masses the way the open IBM PC did.
Right there history shows how important open standards are to success. Apple was considered this fantastic success story but in reality they cut it short and did not buy the masses the way the Johnny came lately IBM PC did. But we are slow when it comes to learning from history.
What they have been good at is market lock-in, vender lock-in and many other types of lock-in. (The problem really is that they had never heard about duty and were only interested in money.) We all thought they would get it right sooner or later and deliver a good platform that would allow happy computing. The fact that they specialized in adopting good standards and then corrupt them so that you got locked in was a very calculated development.
At one point Gates himself said that Unix was the way to go. Then he decided to do it better but clearly never understood what made Unix so good (simplicity). Torvald on the other hand was ONLY looking for simplicity. Which is why it fit so well into the general Unix design.
Look at windows, it is filled with arbitrary complexities and is horribly inefficient. Never mind when upper management throws fits and yell at staff, I've never found that conducive to good programming, or business.
Gates cheated his way into O/S design, used people from VAX who's memory management problem were dragged over to windows. Built a kernel in BASIC! Haha! And got away with it for years!
Someone who knew more about systems picked the Unix design and rewrote history based on technology, and was not motivated by money. Interesting to see how much we like to be able to just do what we need. Imagine if IBM had released Linux. With all the corporate support for let's say $100. Then opened it up with a GPL license.
Microsoft would not be sitting pretty at all. The O/S2 collaboration would not have happened and Gates would not have learned his lessons from that. For all their success I've never considered them much of a success where it really matters. Integrity in product and care for customers. I have people send me Brandy, fine wines and other tokens of their appreciation after sales. Because I believe in treating other people the way I like to be treated, and I really care about my clients.
There are computers behind all services, they know about Windows (most should think its behind all those computers too) and they know that BSOD happens. IS oversimplification of the problem, but once you reach that point you dont need to go further.
... in getting the full bandwidth specified on pricing plans.
> Why does the marketplace demand so little when it comes to these services?
Because, despite your loud protestations and demands for government action, you don't actually care, any more than you actually care about overcrowded airliners with bad service or appalling terms and conditions in ISP and Web service agreements. You just grab whatever is cheapest and/or most convenient and then bitch without changing your behavior.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Ian Lamont doesn't seem to understand the law...of diminishing returns.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns
It's applicable to all economies, capitalist or otherwise.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
The moment my Internet goes out (After power cycling my modem, and rebooting my router) I am on the phone with my ISP asking them to fix it. Same goes for my Cable TV. It goes out, I am on the phone within a couple of minutes asking them what is going on, and when it will be fixed.
The N-nines model is a fast and easy way to compare order-of-magnitude differences between existing networks, but it says almost nothing meaningful about actual usage or the perception of uptime from a user's perspective.
.. nobody cares if an incoming piece of email got delayed by 30 seconds at the MTU, but they do get testy if they can't load their webpages. But web surfing only uses 1-2 seconds of bandwidth per minute anyway.
.. who cares about a half hour of downtime from 0300 to 0330 when no one in your company is actually in the building and using the network?
Let's look at the numbers: 99.9% uptime translates to about 9 hours of unscheduled downtime a year. That can be one 9-hour block once a year, 36 minutes per day, 1.5 minutes per hour, 1.5 seconds per minute, or one dropped packet per thousand. Sure, it's easy to spot a 9-hour blackout, but as the slices of downtime get thinner, they get harder to notice at all, or to identify as USD specifically.
99.999% uptime translates to about 5 minutes of USD per year, and is of questionable value. You can't identify a network outage, call in a complaint, and get the issue resolved in the given timeframe. 99.9999%? It is to laugh. You can't even look up the tech support phone number without blowing your downtime budget for the year. Get hit by a rolling blackout for an hour? Kiss your downtime budget goodbye for the next 120 years.
Getting back to 99.9% uptime, let's move on to standard utilization patterns. USD really only becomes an issue if people notice it
If we have 2 seconds of usage and 2 seconds of downtime per minute, the odds of a collision are around 15:1 with an average overlap of 1 second when a collision does happen. Simply interleaving usage and downtime that way increases the perceived uptime by an order of magnitude since 90% of the outages happen when no one is actually using the network. And larger blocks of downtime get lost in larger blocks of non-utilization exactly the same way
Granted, if you have higher utilization you'll have a better chance of hitting a chunk of downtime, but you'll also have higher chances of queuing latency within your own use patterns. If you're already using 99% of your bandwidth, you can't just plunk in one more job and expect it to run immediately. It has to wait for that 1% of space no one else is currently using. And when you get to that point, it's really time to consider buying a bigger pipe anyway.
And that brings us to the main point: People don't buy network connectivity in absolute terms. They buy capacity, and the capacity they buy is scaled to what they think of as acceptable peak usage. "Acceptable peak usage" is a subjective thing, and nobody makes subjective judgements with 99.999% precision.
I think our expectations on today's technology are too HIGH, not too low. My car doesn't have 99.9% uptime, and I paid a lot more for it than by blackberry.
Things break. Unforseen happens. Murphy Always Wins. Get used to it. Don't expect the world to provide you with perfect services.
I think it's fair to say to cut your downtime in half requires you to double your budget. Each time you cut it in half. I don't want to pay $400/mo for my internet service just to make sure I'm down less than 2 minutes per year.
Also with ISPs, they are better off PROMISING you 100% uptime, and then crediting you a month of service if you catch then down for 5 minutes at 4am one day of the year. Much cheaper all around isn't it?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I track the reliability of my Internet access (15 second interval measurements). My cable company (Cablevision/Optonline) recently made some change, that took the good reliability (99.9) and made it much better (approaching 99.999). This is very obvious when the data is charted.
I wonder if they have been getting feedback that the reliability is not acceptable, especially for services like VoIP?
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
I don't think I've ever had a dropped call apart from when going out of range of the signal with my phone. Certainly never had a problem in the city. I had satellite TV for a couple of years and I never had any downtime. Picture breakup happened on rare occasions. Cable is equally good. Even terrestrial digital works very reliably providing you have a good aerial.
It doesn't. The cost of greater than 99.999% uptime is usually too great. Consider that 99.999% uptime means less than one hour downtime over an entire year. That's really not that much in most circumstances. Inconvenient? Sometimes. The cost would probably double to make that 99.9999% uptime. I just ain't willing to pay it.
[citation needed] I call bullshit on that one.
And I call BS on your BS. Clearly you're not familiar with the state-of-the-art as far as email goes. You've certainly not had to set up and run a private email server.
Here's one good reference. It mostly mirrors my experience, except that it's been going on longer than the writer has observed.
The basic problem is that Yahoo, Hotmail, ATT and other large email providers, or ISPs, simply refuse to honor the standards which have been published (DKIM, et. al.). Google is great. But it's gotten so bad with the others that I simply don't bother communicating with anyone who has a Hotmail, Yahoo, or ATT account. If they are someone important, I'll tell them once (via a different band) of the situation. And let them know that unless they change their email provider, I won't be responding to any future email from them.
Usually I just refer them to gmail, because google seems to be the only large email provider with a technical clue.
The other interesting thing is that all of these large companies will treat unsigned email from an Exchange server as more verified than a DKIM email, but I digress.
Supposedly the excuse is that it's due to spam. I'm certain that is part of the problem. But the other part is that there's definite incentive for the big boys to eliminate the small independent websites and drive all of the business into their arms.
So, yes, the OP's statement about many email messages not reaching their destination is quite true. Most? No. But anything that doesn't use the technology offered by the big commercial joints (including Microsoft server technology) is shut off from communicating with a large part of the internet.
Blackberry is not a mission critical service. The people who use it as such are naive.
Heh. Well, many PHBs would disagree, but your point is valid.
For your amusement, the Blackberry email servers are provided by a company called Mirapoint (mirapoint.com), and they are Linux based. From what I've heard, they cut over about 2 years ago from BSD to Linux, for various reasons. I'm also told that the CEO is a complete airhead who has difficulty managing a secretary, let alone a company. But that the mid-level managers and engineers in the U.S. are first rate. I imagine that they could indeed improve the uptime of the email servers, but those servers are quite good already.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
When it comes to the 9's of reliability, the first 9 costs 9^0, the second is 9^1 as expensive, the third is 9^2 as expensive, et cetera.
Most people are more than willing to pay for 99% availability, but the full five 9s... That's way beyond what most people consider "economically viable".
A better question is why the submitter thinks everyone should be footing a bill that huge for something that barely affects their quality of life at all.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
Man, if you assume the world can / could be perfect all of the time, you must be disappointed a lot. Why is this even a relevant question? The world is not perfect and will never be perfect. No service is perfect. Things can and do break. Things will always break, at some level or another.
Put simply, it's expensive to provide 99.999%. You can buy it from quite a few places; it's not as if the market doesn't offer heavy duty hosting. Indeed, the gold standard isn't three nines, it's nine nines, something which is actually quite possible with site replication. If you want hosting like that, look for "carrier grade" hosting. It's quite easy to purchase in most parts of the country, and if you don't care whether or not it's local, it's no problem. I own a small piece of carrier grade in Boise, ID, and if you can get it in Boise, which isn't big enough to have an IKEA, a roller coaster or a professional sports team, then you can get it pretty much anywhere.
The fundamental premise of the article is based on the wrong-headed idea that you can't purchase this stuff. You can; you just have to be willing to pay for it. You have to have a lot of staff on-site to provide that kind of uptime. You have to have a very well developed infrastructure. You have to have redundant uplinks, redundant power generation, redundant location. You have to run a lot of complex software to deal with distributed statistics gathering, clustered database updates, idempotent change requests, safe synchronized calls. These things are famously difficult to implement and debug. That's a lot of engineer hours. It takes time. It takes hardware. It takes money.
That money has to come from somewhere. You want nine nines, you're paying through the nose to AT&T or Sprint. You want five nines, you're paying pretty steep into places like Pair and Akamai. You want three nines, you come to a dedicated or high-end VPS provider. You want one nine, you go to a large shared host.
Why is less than 99.9% uptime acceptable? Because some people don't care if their highschool writing portfolio goes down for ten minutes a day, and prefer only to pay five or ten dollars a month. Why is less than 99.9% uptime acceptable? Because not all problems need high end hosting. This is why people put up with free web page hosts and their ridiculous limitations and horrid advertising schemes.
Not everything needs the investments required to make reliability happen. Just do a little shopping; you'll see a gradient of quality, pricing, features and insurance. That gradient exists because not everyone needs the same thing, and not everyone wants to invest in telco-level uptime. Some people are more interested in provisioning. Some people are more interested in value. Some people are more interested in ease of maintenance. Some people are more interested in security. And, frankly, a whole lot of people just don't care.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
It takes longer than .01% of your time to switch providers.
Also, because the EULA came into existence, product warranties effectively vanished, as well as actions the consumer could take via product liability claims, in court..
After all, liability plays a large part in defining QA policies. If software companies were held to the same liability standards most product manufacturers face, I'd bet software development would be more of the engineering practice it should be.
To quote part of Microsoft's EULA for Windows XP.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/eula.mspx
ALSO, THERE IS NO WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF TITLE, QUIET ENJOYMENT, QUIET POSSESSION, CORRESPONDENCE TO DESCRIPTION OR NON-INFRINGEMENT WITH REGARD TO THE SOFTWARE.
This reminds me of why Bruce Schneier's dream of legislating liability for software defects is misguided. Sure, statutory liability would make software more reliable, but it would mean that the many who don't need the additional reliability (and currently aren't willing to pay for it) would be forced to subsidize the handful who do. It would also likely claim volunteer-developed software as a casualty.
http://outcampaign.org/
why i hear you ask? because online shops lose money when your not up. all he is doing here is mouthing off over imaginary numbers.
personally i'd MUCH prefer my host installs the latest kernel patches then has 99.999% uptime.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
If we wanted better uptime we could have it. We would just have to pay more for, and look at, a whole lot of redundant systems. Personally, I'm happier to keep paying less and only have one power line coming into my house, with the nearest plant many miles away. The same goes for cable and telephone service. And my cellular service does work about 99.9% of the time.
when my employers blackberries failed earlier this month they fell back to laptops with a bluetooth tethered phone and outlook/exchange. redundancy is built into the mindset. No messages were lost
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
do some slashdot articles sound like straight out of a little boys discussion? "Wouldn't it be great if there where a candy shop on every street corner EXCEPT the candy wouldn't cost anything!?"
/SO MUCH/!
There are two lessons here: comparing technologies that are only a decade available to the mainstream against one that is over a hundred years old is completely useless. The second one is: "marginal value". Look it up, learn it, love it: it explains
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
The telephone companies never acheive it and if you believe that they do then you have been brainwashed. They constantly fudge the numbers to show such uptimes when in reality they are not acheived.
Who is this ijit? It's all about the cost. Is it THAT hard to learn some economics before making a fool of yourself?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
It's really difficult to design good software that's complex and yet can run in parallel across different data centers (not just servers). Something always goes wrong, OS failures, SAN failures, software failures, power failures, facility failures. You can build redundancy all you want, something will go wrong at some point and redundancy will fail or it won't be enough. For example, the OS could screw up writing to disk ruining your data, there go your redundant SANs replicating errors across different locations in the same manner. Gotta restore from backup, there goes your 99.9% (no way you can restore hundreds of gigabytes of data in less than a couple of hours) availability for the year. Think it hasn't happened? Ask IBM AIX support, this is not a made up example.
It costs more than it's worth to me.
Really, I mean, where's the hard part in understanding this? Reliability on a small scale is easy. Reliability on a large scale rapidly becomes much, much, more expensive.
Is it worth twice as much to me to have 99% instead of 95%? Is it worth 10x as much to me to have 99.5% instead of 99%?
Sooner or later, the answer is "no". The cost of those last bits of reliability quickly gets ludicrous, while their impact decays rapidly.
My phone probably fails-to-call one or two times in a hundred. I hit redial and I'm done. No, it would not be worth it to me to have a phone and phone service which cost twice as much to not have to hit that redial button.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I'm at home (and awake) 20% of the time.
My landline is up 99.999% meaning my phone is available to me when I need it 19.998% of the time.
I'm out and about (and coherent) 40% of the time.
My cell phone works 90% of the time meaning it is available to me when I need it 36% of the time.
Clear winner, cell phone.
Sometimes we lose site of reality while studying statistics.
I was a Comcast customer in Tallahassee, Florida for cable internet and television. I'm just a college student, so I tried to save myself from needing a phone line for DSL to minimize expenses. Comcast essentially has a "contracted monopoly" (they are the sole managers for all of the cable in Tallahassee). If you live in Tallahassee, you are well aware of total weekend internet outages and service slowdowns in the afternoons. As a student in computer science, I simply couldn't stand it. I switched to DSL, which is slower and more expensive since I wasn't paying for a phone line before. But, so far *knock on wood* I haven't had any outages. My theory why this practice is "acceptable" for Comcast in Tallahassee, other than the monopoly on cable, is that no one actually calls to complain. I'll talk with friends about it the next day before class, but no one actually tries to do anything about it (other than reset their cable modem and cross fingers). I've encouraged friends to give the finger to Comcast and leave it, but most simply can't afford switching.
"We know that many of our emails never reach their destination."
Um.... Bullshit. "We" know no such thing. I have had so few not reach their destination, I cannot remember when last that happened.
Because parents today teach their kids to bitch, complain, and wallow is self-pity with absolute mastery, while at the same time instilling the absolute belief that there is nothing anybody can do about anything.
As Joel Spolsky pointed out on his blog JoelOnSoftware, 99.999% is pretty much fictional.
99.999% over a year is 31.526 seconds.
No matter how good your staff, no matter how many people you have on site, no matter how robust your systems, no matter how many failsafes you have standing by, ready to be plugged in...
IF something does go down, even the fastest tech on earth is unlikely to identify, pull out, replace and have fired back up whatever the faulty item is in under 30 seconds.
99.999% uptime is essentially fictional. It's simply an impressive sounding number that says, "We'll do everything realistically possible to keep you up 100% of the time. In a typical year, you won't see anything bring you down. You can now tell your investors/clients this and make them feel warm and fuzzy."
It ignores the second part, "But, honestly, if it does go down, we won't have it back within 30 seconds, 100% of the time. Sorry, but welcome to reality. But, for what it's worth, our board's happy to pay you outage fees because it's a small enough risk and the amounts are capped enough, that we're happy to take the risk and costs in exchange for advertising a service we know no one can deliver."
Let's look at regulated phone service, the example in the original post. Can anyone point to a major carrier that hasn't had a major outage at some point? Be it an idiot in a switch room, a power outage affecting a whole side of the country, an anchor ripping up an undersea cable? And how many of them have actually been back within the mandated 30 seconds?
It doesn't happen. That two hour outage is going to take quarter of a millenium of absolutely no more faults to earn back at 30 seconds/year. With luck, it only hit one in 250 customers so you can pretend you're well within your 99.999% uptime but that 1 in 250 isn't really going to agree they got 99.999% after they were down for 1:59:30 more than their contract said they would be.
So, no, 99.999% doesn't exist. It's just a really cool story we tell ourselves whilst being willing to pay whatever the penalties are for missing it, on rare occasions, in exchange for great advertising.
You can't take the sky from me...
Rebooting usually fixes the symptoms of a problem, unless it is a problem that shows up at startup. This is usually true regardless of the OS.
Fixing the problem is different. Rebooting usually never actually fixes the problem, unless something in startup/shutdown changes the configuration. If it is very rare that the problem would show up, then rebooting would make it seem like you fixed it.
It is just that you are much more likely to be able to fix the problem in Linux due to the greater control/access you have to critical system components.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
This is an entirely uncomplicated issue which can be neatly and completely resolved by (insert alleged simple solution here).
It's not that we don't demand reliability, it's that the provider doesn't give it to us. I can't speak for other countries but I think part of this problem is the presence of monopolies and oligopolies in the United States. Because there is less competition, the vendors/providers don't care about the customer so quality declines.
Ahh, yes. Another exciting episode of "Regulation will make everything perfect!"
So, the hardwire phone system supposedly has a 99.999% uptime performance. We also see that the government has demanded a 99.999% uptime performance. Therefore, the phone system must be good *because* of the government demands!
Well, no. Who do you think helped write those regulations? Yes, that's right. Ma Bell. What do you think they wrote into those regulations? That's right.. a goal that was easy for them to reach, and in fact one they had already reached - but the smaller companies couldn't guarantee. The phone system was a government-dictated monopoly for many decades, which means it was essentially a branch of the government.
If their service has, in fact, performed at 5-9's uptime then the first conclusion should be that 5-9's is the most basic level of competence for that service, not an outstanding achievement.
One man's religion is another man's belly-laugh. - LL
Why is this only an issue with cable and DSL and such? My cable service has MUCH better uptime than my electricity. And it's _comcast_. Hell, I've managed to get internet (via a battery on the modem and a laptop) even while the power to my house was out. I get about three extended power outages a year (more than an hour or two), and probably a hundred or so short cut-outs. Meanwhile, the last time my internet or phone dropped out was...well, other than problems with my modem, never.
.... barely over 5 minutes per year ?
I spend that much time every day with my finger up my nose
It turns out that most everything that people whine about needing something more reliable, they can already get. You want a database server that never, ever crashes? No problem, go talk to IBM, they can hook you up. You'll just discover a few things:
1) You can't have it right now. You aren't just going tob e able to walk down to the store and pick it up. Time is going to have to be spent testing everything to make sure nothing interferes with anything else. Only once they've tested everything for your situation will you be able to get your server.
2) It won't be cheap. Because of the individual testing, because of the greater level of hardware redundancy and such you are going to pay a hell of a lot more than you do for some random solution from a normal store.
3) You can't mess with it. It'll be set up to do the agreed upon tasks, and that's it. You can't go and install new software on it or change its configuration. That could ruin the stability. It'll do what it was configured to do and nothing more.
Well, turn out those things are unacceptable to most people. They want something cheaper, faster, more flexible, and thus that is what the mass market is composed of. No surprise either, because it is good enough (turns out we really can live without Internet for an hour) and it often proves to be a case of "add another 9 of reliability, double (or more) the price".
So if you have something that you want extremely high availability on, well then go out and get it. In basically every case I can think of, it is available. However, don't bitch when it costs a lot of money. For example suppose you want 99.999% uptime on power. Sure, you can have that, however you are going to need to buy a battery system sufficient to power your house for long enough for a generator to come up. Further, you'll need not 1 but 2 generators (in case one fails) and you'll need to test and service them regularly.
What, that's too much money/hassle? Ok fine, but then don't bitch that power goes out occasionally. The more reliability you want, the most it'll cost. That's just life.
But only with redundant systems. What happens is when something goes down, techs aren't getting it back up in 30 seconds, rather it is instantaneously failing over to another system. You have enough redundancy, you can keep operating even in the face of multiple simultaneous failures.
The problem is, of course, going for that can be really expensive. Not only does the system itself have to have a bunch of redundancy, but so does everything supporting it. For example in the case of a web server you'd not only have to have multiple boxes running that, but multiple power connections, generators, network connections, ISPs, etc.
Doing something like that, you can offer essentially 100% uptime, barring a catastrophic event (and face it, and amount of uptime can be ruined by a sufficiently large event). However it is extremely costly, and of course everything has to be well designed because, as you noted, you fuck up anywhere, you got 30 seconds to fix it.
Or you can just do what the voice guys like to do: Change the rules. For them, the system is "up" so long as there is at least one phone line that can place a call to at least one other phone line. By that standard, the voice switch on campus has never been down. Of course that isn't a particularly useful standard, if you asked me.
I've had land-line phones for around 4 decades now, in a number of different towns in several states, and I've never had one that even got close to 99% uptime, much less 99.999%. Lost connections and connections so bad as to be unusable have always been expected problems that you "just live with" everywhere I've lived. And this is in the US, where people make the absurd claim of near-perfect uptime for land lines.
;-)
As for cell phones, how is a customer supposed to go about "choosing" a reliable one? Where I live, they all have about the same poor reliability, and the same crappy contracts. My only "choice" is to not have a cell phone. So the vaunted "market" can't choose among them and can't get any messages at all across to them. In my experience, this is in fact how "the market" usually works.
So what planet do you live on where things work better? Can I move there? (Do you have an oxygen atmosphere that I can breathe?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
In the entire history of electromechanical switching in the Bell System no central office was ever out of action for more than thirty minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster. On the other hand, step-by-step (Strowgear) switches failed to connect about 1% of calls correctly, and crossbar reduced that to about 0.1%. With electronic switching, the failure rate is higher but the error rate is much lower.
This reflects the fact that, in the electromechanical era, the hardware reliability was low enough that the system had to be designed to have a higher reliability than any of its individual units. In the computer era, the component reliability is so high that good error rates can be achieved without redundancy. This is why computer-based networks tend to have common mode failures.
If you're involved in designing highly reliable systems, it's worth understanding how Number 5 Crossbar worked. Here's an oversimplified version.
The biggest component of Number 5 crossbar were the crossbar switches themselves. Think of them as 10x10 matrices of contacts which could be X/Y addressed and set or cleared. Failure of one crossbar switch could take down only a few lines, and they usually failed one row or column at a time, taking down at most one line.
The crossbars had no smarts of their own; they were told what to do by "markers", the smart part of the central office. Each marker could set up or tear down a call in about 100ms. Markers were duplicated, with half of the marker checking the other half. If the halves disagreed, the transaction aborted. Each central office had multiple markers (not that many, maybe ten in an office with 10,000 lines), and markers were assigned randomly to process calls.
When a phone went off hook, a marker was notified, and set up a "call" to some free "originating register", the unit that understood dial pulses and provided dial tone. The marker was then released, while the user dialed. The originating register received the input dial info, and when its logic detected a complete number, it requested a random marker, and sent the number. The marker set up the call, set and locked in the correct contacts in the crossbars, and was released to do other work.
If the marker failed to set up the call successfully (there was a timeout around 500ms), the originating register got back a fail, and retried, once. One retry is a huge win; if there's a 1% fail rate on the first try, there's an 0.01% fail rate with two tries. This little trick alone made crossbar systems appear very reliable. There's much to be said for doing one retry on anything which might fail transiently. If the second retry fails, unit level retry as a strategy probably isn't working and the problem needs to be kicked up a level.
The pattern of requesting resources from a pool at random was continued throughout the system. Trunks (to other central offices), senders (for sending call data to the next switch), translators (for converting phone numbers into routes), billing punches (for logging call data), and trouble punches (for logging faults) were all assigned on a random, or in some cases a cyclic rotation basis. Units that were busy, faulted, or physically removed for maintenance were just skipped.
That's how the Bell System achieved such good reliability with devices that had moving parts.
Note that this isn't a "switch to backup" strategy. The distribution of work amongst units is part of normal operation, constantly being exercised. So handling a failure doesn't involve special cases. Failures cost you some system capacity, but don't take the whole system down.
We need more of that in the Internet. Some (not all) load balancers for web sites work like this. Some (but not all) packet switches work like this. Think about how you can use that pattern in your own work. It worked for more than half a century for the Bell System.
The reason consumers put up with it is because there is no competition in the market. You pay the same high rates for bad service regardless of carrier. How did this happen?
Former FCC Chairman, Republican Michael Powell -- son of the man who lied to the U.N. for approval to start the Republican's occupation of Iraq -- disposed of all competition by eliminating the former requirement that telecoms must resell their service to retail competitors at wholesale prices. The current FCC chairman, Republican Kevin Martin, is also a foe of competition and has worked to help the telecom mafia maintain high rates, low service, and not answer for their illegal activity.
So long as telecoms are allowed to conspire to fix prices and service, consumers will have no choice and continue to pay higher rates for lesser service than anywhere else in the world. The important thing about representative democracies is that the people get exactly the kind of government they deserve.
Maybe it's just me, but most of my downtime from my internet, cell phone, or satellite TV is not the provider's fault.
I get dropped cell calls only when I go somewhere with bad reception.
I loose my internet only when my router needs to be reset.
My satellite looses signal only on heavy wind and/or rain storms, or if snow builds up on the dish.
Are any of these things under the control of the provider? No. From my point of view, they do a fairly good job. And if they didn't, I wouldn't use them.
And no, I did not RTFA.
--Pathway
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
The discussion here is fascinating, especially that so many respondents seem to be happy with not-so-good reliability of the service they receive. Is something wrong to ask for a better quality? It not necessary must be more expensive and if nobody does anything nothing is going to change. I would expect more calls for action. Fascinating.
>The reasons why Microsoft were so successful (in a business sense) are manifold, but
>one is not that their products were great, but that they were good enough.
Yes... and the competitors products were not good enough. Apple had a shot at the desktop market for a while, but they failed to measure up to windows 95, which while sucky by todays standards was vastly technically superior to macos of the time which lacked virtual memory and preemptive multitasking that win 95 offered. Linux had a shot for a while on the desktop during the win 3.1 through ME period due to stability issues, but then they failed to address usability issues, meanwhile windows XP was introduced. Now those wars are over and done with, but the losers can't get over their bitterness and the deep seated feeling that their opponent somehow cheated.
And what's the charge that gets leveled against Microsoft? That they have a monopoly? That they use "unfair" business practices. That's like suing a competitor for being *too* successful, and for being a better businessman than you.
Next question?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Government regulation takes as much as it gives, and is only a good hammer on Nailworld.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
My company has 99.95% connectivity guaranteed by service level agreements. It involves multiple leased lines taking diverse routes into the building and costs a good deal more than a home internet connection.
But, people aren't willing to pay the price (either in money or in the other costs that would be incurred by covering the landscape with electrical wires. People accept the occasional outage in exchange for not building massive amounts of redundant excessive architecture.
In terms of uptime, each additional 9 probably requires an exponential increase in cost. In a good market, consumers decide what they're willing to pay and providers provide that amount of uptime.
Cow Cube
Apathy! Yes, =you=. Let's see... Why did Bush get to steal the election? Why do some get to patent truly absurd things? Why is nothing really useful being done about the well-proven fact of global warming? Why does the RIAA get to run rampant over people and their rights? Why does the government get to do ten times that? Why did the Amerikan people stand passively back and allow this criminal conspiracy that is 'our' government to invade the sovereign country of Iraq? Why do businesses big and little get away with s**tty customer service? Why so MANY things? Why? Because people just don't care enough to bother, they're too lazy to complain, they don't effectively protest/complain even if they do, they're selfish, and they're so apathetic that this country, this society, indeed this lifeform that is human beings is at severe risk of extinction by it's own hands. In fact, of course, your cellphone IS a radio, and for radio to work as reliably as wirelines used to would cost more than people would be likely to pay, the power requirements of the devices would be higher, resulting in diminished battery life and/or larger, heavier devices, and of course the companies would need to be compelled to bother investing in more reliable hardware overall. Of course, I'm just one mere human bean, and my comments are worth precisely what you and I paid for them. However, I'm damned glad I'm not immortal, and that you young people that don't fiercely demand things, and work aggressively toward being a part of it, probably will deserve what you get. Including less-than-100% wireless uptime.
- that means we still see IT world developing rapidly, new innovations and progress every 2-3 years. so we all just tolerate the mishaps. IT is the smiled-upon child of human civilization.
Read radical news here
"... 99.999% uptime? That's the gold standard, and one that we are used to thanks to regulated telephone service." Ha! Welcome to the post-Bell System world. Where have you been? What took you so long to notice?
Same when dealing with any type of wave length. So you cell phones getting perfect reception in a thunder storm is nothing more than luck. Have the wrong type of cloud form (or move) between you and your signal source and you'll see that call drop/hear robotic type sounds/pretty much any call quality issue can be heard.
Simple and short is, we all demanded better quality service. And in an effort to appease the mass demand, the communications company pushed them out. We're no longer operating on copper wire alone...which is a very reliable mode of data transfer. We're dealing with things that can be affected by a simple change in weather, realize that, and stop screaming for more that 99.9 uptime. In ANY signal there is noise. The more noise, the less signal (obviously)....there is no 100% service. It isn't going to happen until we get better at working with this (still fairly new, relatively speaking) mode of transport. Even copper didn't have 100% uptime, it jsut had less problems, so this we used to have great service thoery most have is bullshit....you just didn't have enough knowledge to understand you WERE having problems....it just wasn't effecting you to a noticeable degree. A cut copper wire will still transmit data if the split ends are close enough...even if they aren't touching...just from the arc of the electricity. Fiber won't, satallites won't, antenna's........WON'T!
People...it's time you wake up.
This is Slashdot! Give me the latest gadget, bug, or OS project! This ain't english class so don't confuse the two!
I shouldn't have been surprised that nobody here mentioned the 99.99% reliability of condoms. Maybe if I made a pun about "uptime" then they would think about it!
Thank you for bringing some sanity into this argument. Before you showed up it was dominated by idiotic hippies ranting about our mindless consumer-driven existence, the destruction of the environment, Microsoft, and just about everything else that has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
99.999% uptime is orders of magnitude more expensive than 99.99%, which in turn is orders of magnitude more expensive than 99.9% uptime, and so on.
The added cost is simply not worth it, in any sense of the word, to the general public.
I, for one, would prefer to deal with a day's worth of power loss in a major storm, than paying 10x as much for my electricity in order to make it bulletproof.
The savings would be better spent elsewhere.
Note that this is not an argument against proper planning and preventative maintenance to REDUCE downtime as much as possible, just an argument against designing everything in the world to survive a nuclear bomb when that level of reliability is simply not worth the cost.
if you want a reliable IP connection, you can get it, but it'll cost you about 10x what you're paying now. same for mobile phone service: "just" go get a sat phone. the "good" (in those engineering terms) stuff tends to lag in features somewhat (be less new and shiny) too, but is available if you need it.
to be clear: normally when i hear people make this argument, the unspoken addendum to "most people prefer cheap to good" is "because they're dumb". i don't think that's fair in the least. most people really don't need particularly reliable service by engineering standards. and the fact that most people push the feature set instead of more conservative engineering values has obvious benefits, too. there are costs, of course; like everything in engineering, it's a trade-off. if you stop and actually think about it, rather than just wanting everything to magically work, i think you'll find this is true for yourself, as well.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
The reason the market will tolerate those kinds of disruptions is because that is all that is available. My options for internet are a-few-outages-of-a-few hours-each-year, or no internet service at all. The same for my cell phone.
The problem is that the barriers for entry, both political and financial, are quite high in those types of industries so competition is low. Why would any company break the bank trying to provide better service than the other 2 or 3 players in that region in that industry? It's not like people can leave them for a company who does provide better service. They simply don't exist. And when some upstart startup finally does get their foot in the door, they discover that all their potential customers are all tied up in year 1 of a 3 years perpetual contract.
Until people stop signing stupid contracts and until the government stops meddling to keep the big players happy, there will be no space for newcomers and the market will look exactly as it does right now.
Because poorly operated backhoes keep digging up fiber.
"after decades of mobile phones, why do we even still have dropped calls?" This is just stupid. A dropped call is not the network, it's your phone losing the network. There is absolutely no way to avoid them, none. RF only travels so far and through so many things. I completely understand the article and its merit, but this is just the author being ignorant of their subject or scoring sensationalist points with uninformed readers. Someone explain to me how a company could possibly cover the entire US, and I mean Wyoming and Montana too (if you want zero dropped calls). Then there the fact that Americans will take a $0 junk heap of a phone with a contract and hope that it will perform well.
Agreed. While some of the outages described by the article submitter are "backend" outages that are probably avoidable (such as the Blackberry ones), some are just a fundamental aspect of the technology used:
"Mobile phone companies compare who has the fewest dropped calls (after decades of mobile phones, why do we even still have dropped calls?)" - It would be prohibitively expensive (and in some cases impossible) to achieve 100% rock-solid cellular coverage over the entire country. There are some areas where all the money in the world won't get a carrier extra coverage. To put in a cell site, a carrier needs a location for that cell site - Sometimes such locations are simply not available for whatever reason (often NIMBY - amusingly enough the same people who fight the placement of cell towers are often the first to complain about bad service.) Carriers have gotten quite good at hiding cell sites on buildings. One example are the almost invisible sector antennas painted to match a church steeple - church gets paid good rent money, carrier gets a site, and usually the antennas are not noticeable unless someone is looking for them. Barton Hall on Cornell's campus is another such example, it's almost impossible to identify the Verizon antennas unless you're looking for them. (Admittedly, the Cornell Amateur Radio Club's gigantic Force12 HF antenna makes a good distraction from those particular antennas...)
Cable TV and cable Internet - RF cables require much more precision and are degraded more rapidly by corrosion and such than the POTS twisted pair used for voice lines. CATV providers already spend a LOT on weatherproofed connectors and outdoor equipment, but often it is not enough and going to the "next level" would be prohibitively expensive and make cable unaffordable for most customers.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It's because of value propositions.
In the U.S., we'd usually rather have (on a consumer level) Fast & Cheap. Not Fast & Reliable, nor Cheap & Reliable.
Case in point; I'd rather have my 16 Mbps cablemodem than a 4 Mbps DSL, even though the DSL will get slightly better uptime, and is slightly cheaper. Also, I probably wouldn't upgrade to fiber if it was more than 5-10% more expensive, since the hour or two my cable modem is down really isn't a big deal.
Today, people have multiple forms of communication. It unlikely that your cellphone and VoIP will fail at the same time, and in case the reliability of both combined is similar to POTS these days. If my Internet is down for an hour? Big deal; I'll watch TV. And if TV is down? I'll watch a DVD, or read a book, or take a bath. Or maybe even step outside.
You can't have fast, cheap, and reliable. It simply doesn't work. Either the network contains redundancy, or it doesn't, and redundancy costs money, money that could better be used on capacity. It's the same thing with cellphones. A more dense network of towers means you can deploy fewer towers nationwide, unless you simply deploy more towers than your competitors, but then you're going to have to spend more, and the service will cost more. Therefore, consumers are willing to put up with dropped calls, up to a point.
You see, the market *has* decided. Instead of doing it "government style", the way the POTS network was built, we traded 5 nines reliability for speed and capital efficiency. Under the yoke of AT&T, communications in this country barely advanced, and the ideological successor to the old AT&T, SBC cum AT&T, we're seeing the deployment of a "fiber" network that maxes out at 1 HD stream and 6 Mbps, which is way behind the offerings of all other carriers. But by george, it was Cheap and Reliable!
That's not what consumers want, and isn't really even what most businesses want. Of course, people get upset when reliability goes _substantially_ down, i.e. more than a few hours a month. I think perhaps we are at 98% or 99% reliable. But that is most definitely good enough, and the resources that would be used to improve that are better spent on other issues.
Open Heart Surgery? 99.999% would be great!
Cable and Internet? 98% is good enough.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Not that anyone will see this comment, but I've just found out that google calculator is a brilliant way of measuring the actual time cost of one, two, three nines:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?num=20&hl=en&safe=off&client=opera&rls=en&hs=8ZF&q=0.01%25+of+1+year+in+minutes&btnG=Search&meta=
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
He hits the nail on the head with; to have Lots of 9's in your up time you really must have redundant systems. And even then it's not guaranteed, but at least it is possible. Without redundant systems, its not realistically possible.
Wish i had mod points...
Those who can, do.
The root cause of most of this is that "software" is perceived as "hard" to create and develop correctly. The vast majority of coders don't code to any standards, don't reuse code that's known and TESTED to work correctly, and generally -- act like two year olds when management or users demand better.
They want the title "Software Engineer", but they don't want the RESPONSIBILITY that goes with the title. Civil Engineers put their names on things and are INSPECTED by outside third parties. Bridges and roadways falling down are considered career-limiting moves by a Civil Engineering group. Building codes, and/or other build/design rules are the underpinnings of every other style of "engineering" on the planet... try getting a new aircraft through the FAA's certification process inexpensively, if you think you can -- and these types of safeguards and rules are ALWAYS pooh-poohed by the coddled "software engineers".
They state that these and other legal measures are taken to make sure that most "engineered" products, critical for our daily lives, aren't necessary in software. That they would add cost and no value. But then I read SANS and other security-related trade rags that talk about the constant loss of personal data, bad (very bad) security holes in VERY expensive software packages with no patches or even admission that the problem really exists by the software company, etc.
It's time for the insanity to stop. Engineers that engineer software need to grow up and start acting like computers aren't "mystery" boxes. They're not. GOOD software with few problems CAN be written. There's NOT a need for the weekly "patch merry go-round". People WILL pay for something better... they just don't know it exists because software people continue to make excuses for our profession. It's getting old.
+++OK ATH
From the writeup:
Do we? Where are the statistics? A large Swedish ISP (Telia) lost a lot of mail some weeks back. They got a lot of bad publicity from that -- and rightly so.
I still expect mail sent by me to either bounce or arrive to the recipient mailbox. The thing that worries me is what happens after local delivery: (a) it gets discarded by broken-by-design anti-spam software, or (b) the recipient never reads it because it is lost among all the spam.
>During the windows 3.x era, OS/2 WARP was touted as 'a better windows than Windows'
>and this was largely true. Yet OS/2 had a very poor takeup (outside of vertical markets
>like banks) compared to MS Windows.
OS/2 was developed by microsoft along with IBM. Microsoft even promoted OS/2, but found that it couldn't compete with windows 3.0.
According to wikipedia
"Much of its success was due to the fact that Windows 3.0 (along with MS-DOS) was bundled with most new computers.[11] OS/2, on the other hand, was only available as an expensive stand-alone software package. In addition, OS/2 lacked device drivers for many common devices such as printers, particularly non-IBM hardware.[12] Windows, on the other hand, supported a much larger variety of hardware. The increasing popularity of Windows prompted Microsoft to shift its development focus from cooperating on OS/2 with IBM to building a franchise based on Windows.[13] Several technical and practical reasons contributed to this breakup:"
I've heard the OEM deals were seen as scummy by some, and may have been. However, one microsoft product beating another microsoft product by unfair microsoft market practices seems like a poor argument for showing how evil microsoft is. It's disappointing that the product which was technically superior in most ways didn't succeed, but the market clearly didn't want it as sold, and that's that.
Except that no BIOS is stupid enough to just *crash* when they fail to find bootable media on the boot devices - they just carry on. Mine literally locks up.
And I have no intention of using the Linux flash card idea - my computer certainly wont thank me (being inanimate and all) with a printer that will refuse to print because there's flash media inserted.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
the next digit (i.e: 99.9999 instead of 99.999) only gains you a little over 4 minutes, but will cost way more than your time is worth !
Not very long ago, it was common practice to reboot IBM office minis (such as AS/400's) at regular scheduled intervals. Every night, or once a week. The reason for this being that they preferred to lock all objects in the system at the same time for the nightly backup, so that a consistent state was saved. Also, upon starting up, database tables were rearranged and indexes rebuilt, for a slightly better performance during the day, when the machine would actually be used.
IBM also offered another solution, the mainframe, which could guarantee service even while a CPU is being replaced. This kind of machine is a solution to a very different kind of problem, and comes with a very different kind of price tag.
Whether rebooting is an acceptable maintenance tool completely depends on what the machine is used for. For a desktop windows user having to reboot after an update is simply better than having to stop a service, install patch, start service again, stop another service, install another patch, start the service etc.