Indeed, 300 msec per year would be eight nines. Of course in this case we need to figure out how much time it was down over its entire operational life - we know it ran continuously for 16.5 years, but we don't know when it booted for the first time or why it was rebooted 16.5 years ago. Netware 4 was introduced in 1993 - earlier than when this system booted prior to running 16.5 years - so we can conclude it likely wasn't rebooted for a Netware upgrade.
Remember how the Foveon X3 sensor was supposed to revolutionize digital photography and make the standard sensors obsolete? Tell me how many cameras you've used with those sensors in them.
In other words, technological superiority doesn't always win in digital photography.
If that's not what you're after, then what IS your point?
My point is that there were jobs there, and now there are none. There were hardworking and smart employees there, and they lost their jobs because of their inept corporate overlords. The retail slaves busted their asses and were given pinkslips in return. The corporate bigwigs ruined a company and took big bonuses in return.
Do you seriously dedicate that much of your life to re-living that fateful day when you no longer had a single particular retail slave job?
No. I left the company before it was bought out by Carlos Slim. Even at that time it was clear that corporate management was utterly clueless and didn't give a shit.
Its effect on the world was minimal, as it had strong competition and didn't do much unique and new.
At the time, it had strong competition. Now a lot of areas have only Best Buy.
The world has no obligation to care about this old, defunct company.
I never said the world had any obligation to it. Similarly if you are struck by a bus tonight the world owes you nothing for that as well. That doesn't mean it doesn't effect anyone, however.
Someone's going to take over that property sometime.
Or they will tear it down and make a parking lot. The chances of there being as many jobs in that spot as there were when it was CompUSA is not great.
This was all over the news... yesterday. Kudos, though, for linking to the original Science paper instead of some crappy summary of it - even though the Science paper is paywalled.
At lot of people worked in those buildings and got the shaft when the company collapsed under the weight of its own corporate stupidity. We shouldn't be celebrating someone making use of the buildings if they aren't doing anything to help the retail slaves find work.
A corporation is the sum of its employees... and their failure wasn't just executive stupidity.
I worked at CompUSA for quite some time back when they were doing well as a company (before they were bought out by Carlos Slim). I can tell you that the hands of myself and other retail slaves in that company were shackled by stupidity from middle and upper management (to be fair, our store managers were actually quite good but they were also restrained by cluelessness from district and corporate). The employees worked hard and still faced the consequences of those up above who seldom - if ever - entered actual stores. To make matters worse, one year after posting the 3rd or 4th consecutive year with record numbers for our region, our managers asked their superiors where their annual bonuses were for that year - they were told "you get to keep your jobs".
So in the case of CompUSA, the failure of the chain belongs to the executives. They restrained the people who were doing actual work and took the whole damned thing down in doing so.
At lot of people worked in those buildings and got the shaft when the company collapsed under the weight of its own corporate stupidity. We shouldn't be celebrating someone making use of the buildings if they aren't doing anything to help the retail slaves find work.
Some people just are not inclined to trust a service provider with holding their private data, even when it is encrypted. An OEM could probably make some money by designing redundant and power-efficient storage nodes for home / small business networks to meet that demand.
hosting a 3mb pdf will never cost 30$ per copy, no matter how much they say it does.
Getting to that 3mb pdf is a long process, which does cost money. Now of course whether or not it really costs $1500-2000 (USD) to do that is another matter, but it does cost money. The hosting is, of course, trivial in expense. However the files do need to be hosted in a reasonable manner so that the papers can be searched and updated (particularly updated when other papers reference them).
So there is certainly a cost incurred by the journals. The question is how well the publication charges reflect that.
Scientific publishing is where the worlds of scientific research and business collide. People who do scientific research are used to needing to get things done with the smallest investment of resources, time, and money possible. Business people are skilled at finding the most profitable points for selling their wares. This collision has one particular effect that does not meet standard thoughts on free markets; competition brings prices UP. Look at PLoS journals for example; they started with very low publishing costs and now for non-members it costs quite nearly as much to publish in PLoS ONE as it does to publish in Nature or Science. Even competing journals from different publication houses are increasing their prices in parallel rather than trying to compete for authors by price.
And as the summary suggests, this is muddied by the fact that the journals don't like to be upfront with their publication charges or charge structure. Many journals even bury how their charges work - do they charge by the page, by the image, some combination thereof, or something completely different? This makes it a massive pain in the ass for a researcher to decide whether or not to try a new (to them) journal for their paper, when they can't figure out how much it would cost to publish in this unfamiliar journal in comparison to one they usually publish in.
Who still watches netflix on their computers, anyways? At least half the blu-ray players on the market today can play netflix out of the box. Every major game console can as well. Quite a few TVs have it built-in now, too. Why on earth would you want to watch it on your computer?
This will set in motion for T-Mobile to be bought out by someone else so that the other carriers and their mandatory 2 year contracts don't look bad for consumers. Even if the FCC blocks ATT from buying out T-Mobile we'll see some other group that isn't currently a large player in mobile phone networks buy them out and re-institute 2 year contracts.
The carriers simply won't stand for this, even with T-Mobile being the smallest of the big carriers.
If Verizon Wireless is the Republican party - interested just in clever new ways to extract more money from those with the least money to spend so they can funnel it to the top executives - then T-Mobile is the democratic party, promising all kinds of things that they can't deliver while ultimately giving you the same lousy and uncaring product as the Republicans but with a fresher face to it.
In the same vein - and I know this won't be popular here:
Sprint is Ron Paul. He wants you to believe he's different but ultimately he's just another high priced fascist who happens to have better PR.
AT&T is the green party. They have a couple of ideas worth exploring, but they can't get their shit together well enough to convince anyone that they are important, and they lack the discipline to return calls when people have questions.
And Virgin Mobile is "the rent is too damn high" party. They have catchy slogans and good PR but ultimately we've seen all these parts before and we know how this story will go.
They're by far the least evil of the major carriers in the US.
Only for certain definitions of "evil". I've been with them for 7+ years and every year the service gets a little worse, the plan gets a little more expensive, and they offer fewer new phones that I actually want to purchase. Sure, their customer service is cheery and all, but they rarely actually accomplish anything.
Don't blame T*Mobile for a lack of phones - they can't force manufacturers to support their frequencies (though AT&T GSM phones will work just fine on T*Mobile as long as you don't care about 3G or 4G data - I used an Android phone on T-Mobile that only worked with 2G and it was surprisingly usable despite the slow data speeds).
There is no evidence that T-Mobile has even gone to the table to negotiate with a lot of phone manufacturers over new phones. There have even been cases where small regional carriers operating on T-Mobile frequencies have picked up phones that T-Mobile has never carried (the last Blackberry Pearl, the 9100, was an example), so it clearly was not a case of the phone not existing or being made for T-Mobile frequencies. R
Blame regulators - if they wanted to enforce any sort of free market, they'd require that all phones have dual-mode GSM/CDMA radios that cover all carrier frequencies -- that would let consumers hop between carriers without spending $500 on a new phone.
That would increase the cost by quite a bit. We have two major GSM carriers in the US who use different frequencies, and two CDMA carriers who also use different frequencies. Hence a phone to hop between all four carriers would need to be able to communicate on four different sets of frequencies, and that isn't even including the various data frequencies.
I don't think car manufacturers would get away with releasing a car that requires Exxon gas (which is 50% more expensive than other smaller brands) for the first 2 years, so why do the cellular carriers get away with it?
I don't know where on earth you buy your gas, but where I live nobody would stay in business charging that much more than their neighbors. If a gas station charged five percent more - with gas at $3.50 and up for regular where I live - they would look like a hollywood ghost town. With 50% difference they might as well not even bother taking delivery.
That said, motor fuel is not a particularly good analogy for cell phones and cellular networks, even if you were to call GSM "gas" and CDMA "diesel". There is more in common between the engine types than there is between the phone types, amongst other things.
They're by far the least evil of the major carriers in the US.
Only for certain definitions of "evil". I've been with them for 7+ years and every year the service gets a little worse, the plan gets a little more expensive, and they offer fewer new phones that I actually want to purchase. Sure, their customer service is cheery and all, but they rarely actually accomplish anything.
If Verizon Wireless is the Republican party - interested just in clever new ways to extract more money from those with the least money to spend so they can funnel it to the top executives - then T-Mobile is the democratic party, promising all kinds of things that they can't deliver while ultimately giving you the same lousy and uncaring product as the Republicans but with a fresher face to it.
In other words, ICANN is still just looking for more of your money. That is all they have cared about for many years now. They haven't cared for some time what impact their decisions have on people who use the internet, provided it brings more money to them.
So now you blame me for your lousy choice. Clearly your first comment told me all I needed to know about your lack of intent to have a discussion on this matter.
You are far too late, and far too far down the road of foolish assumptions, for me to take you seriously in this discussion. You have no justifiable reason to attempt to talk down to me about any moral high ground with the way that you introduced yourself into this discussion. I offered a serious discussion and you went off with silly name calling and throwing of your utterly baseless assumptions.
Hence there is no reason whatsoever to expect that you are capable of holding a serious conversation of any depth. Go pester someone else. You couldn't even write your "critique" without throwing more silly insults at me, hence giving me no reason to read it.
I don't know, that's not what I get from damn_registrar's post. I get from that post that they don't feel they should have to pay attention to the spiel at all
For a lot of us, the spiel is a giant waste of time. We've seen it many, many, many times before. I know how to buckle my seatbelt, I know where the emergency exits are, I know where the bathroom is and that I can be charged with a felony if I talk smack to the lavatory smoke detector. I know that the bags on the oxygen masks might not inflate under loss of cabin pressure, even with oxygen flowing - and that I should put on my own mask before helping others.
Every time I fly, I hear that talk at least 4 times before I get back home, because I can't fly anywhere useful without at least 1 connection. I could give the damn talk. Why do they care if I pay attention to it or not? Why can't I do something useful during that time period? And why do we have to wait until we are at cruising altitude before we turn on electronic devices?
And attached to the same, why can't I leave my phone in airplane mode when I'm on the airplane? They now make a point of saying that phones must be turned off, specifically that airplane mode is not sufficient.
- are people savvy enough to turn off these radios on their devices to reduce the noise to acceptable levels in a given population (of passengers)?
People who are smart enough to know how to access airplane mode on their phones are smart enough to use it, those who are not will turn them off completely. I don't see the problem with airplane mode on an airplane.
- is a list of "approved" electronics too onerous to maintain and enforce to be practical?
Every plane I have flown on has a list of approved devices either in the airline's magazine or in the safety brochure. Obviously it does not include specific models but it tells you enough that a person who is smart enough to own such a device can figure out whether or not said device is on the list.
Ultimately my point is that the airlines are wasting a lot of passengers' time. I'm not saying the safety talk needs to be ended, because it is important for plenty of fliers. I'm just saying they could allow some fliers to do other things without causing any safety risk whatsoever.
You entered a civilized discussion as a babbling idiot spouting the classic symptoms of someone who has spent too much time memorizing pointless internet "debate" memes and too little time in the real world talking with actual people. You only got worse from there and you expect me to be kind to you now? Get lost, kid. If your goal was to de-civilize the discussion, take a look at the rest of it before you go and declare yourself victorious.
There you go again, insisting that some great anger exists just because you state it to be there. You can call yourself "feisty" if you so chose, but that is no more accurate than what you have been trying so desperately to label me as.
Care to pull any more shit out of your ass in this discussion, or are you done now?
When the style is that poor there remains no substance of merit. He could have presented his comment in a mature and balanced manner but instead opted for juvenile, assuming, and condescending. I am surprised he didn't follow up by accusing me of worshiping and/or providing sexual favors to (whomever he presumes to be) my favorite politician.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot to do a substitution cypher on your numbers, you fail.
This is just annoying. Really, who uses rot13 for anything?
Indeed, 300 msec per year would be eight nines. Of course in this case we need to figure out how much time it was down over its entire operational life - we know it ran continuously for 16.5 years, but we don't know when it booted for the first time or why it was rebooted 16.5 years ago. Netware 4 was introduced in 1993 - earlier than when this system booted prior to running 16.5 years - so we can conclude it likely wasn't rebooted for a Netware upgrade.
... How many nines is 16 years of continuous duty? And how many times your beloved "six nines" is that?
Remember how the Foveon X3 sensor was supposed to revolutionize digital photography and make the standard sensors obsolete? Tell me how many cameras you've used with those sensors in them.
In other words, technological superiority doesn't always win in digital photography.
If that's not what you're after, then what IS your point?
My point is that there were jobs there, and now there are none. There were hardworking and smart employees there, and they lost their jobs because of their inept corporate overlords. The retail slaves busted their asses and were given pinkslips in return. The corporate bigwigs ruined a company and took big bonuses in return.
Do you seriously dedicate that much of your life to re-living that fateful day when you no longer had a single particular retail slave job?
No. I left the company before it was bought out by Carlos Slim. Even at that time it was clear that corporate management was utterly clueless and didn't give a shit.
Its effect on the world was minimal, as it had strong competition and didn't do much unique and new.
At the time, it had strong competition. Now a lot of areas have only Best Buy.
The world has no obligation to care about this old, defunct company.
I never said the world had any obligation to it. Similarly if you are struck by a bus tonight the world owes you nothing for that as well. That doesn't mean it doesn't effect anyone, however.
Someone's going to take over that property sometime.
Or they will tear it down and make a parking lot. The chances of there being as many jobs in that spot as there were when it was CompUSA is not great.
This was all over the news ... yesterday. Kudos, though, for linking to the original Science paper instead of some crappy summary of it - even though the Science paper is paywalled.
At lot of people worked in those buildings and got the shaft when the company collapsed under the weight of its own corporate stupidity. We shouldn't be celebrating someone making use of the buildings if they aren't doing anything to help the retail slaves find work.
A corporation is the sum of its employees... and their failure wasn't just executive stupidity.
I worked at CompUSA for quite some time back when they were doing well as a company (before they were bought out by Carlos Slim). I can tell you that the hands of myself and other retail slaves in that company were shackled by stupidity from middle and upper management (to be fair, our store managers were actually quite good but they were also restrained by cluelessness from district and corporate). The employees worked hard and still faced the consequences of those up above who seldom - if ever - entered actual stores. To make matters worse, one year after posting the 3rd or 4th consecutive year with record numbers for our region, our managers asked their superiors where their annual bonuses were for that year - they were told "you get to keep your jobs".
So in the case of CompUSA, the failure of the chain belongs to the executives. They restrained the people who were doing actual work and took the whole damned thing down in doing so.
At lot of people worked in those buildings and got the shaft when the company collapsed under the weight of its own corporate stupidity. We shouldn't be celebrating someone making use of the buildings if they aren't doing anything to help the retail slaves find work.
Some people just are not inclined to trust a service provider with holding their private data, even when it is encrypted. An OEM could probably make some money by designing redundant and power-efficient storage nodes for home / small business networks to meet that demand.
63cm wingspan? I don't know where this inventor is from, but I've never seen a live dragonfly with a wingspan anywhere near that.
hosting a 3mb pdf will never cost 30$ per copy, no matter how much they say it does.
Getting to that 3mb pdf is a long process, which does cost money. Now of course whether or not it really costs $1500-2000 (USD) to do that is another matter, but it does cost money. The hosting is, of course, trivial in expense. However the files do need to be hosted in a reasonable manner so that the papers can be searched and updated (particularly updated when other papers reference them).
So there is certainly a cost incurred by the journals. The question is how well the publication charges reflect that.
Scientific publishing is where the worlds of scientific research and business collide. People who do scientific research are used to needing to get things done with the smallest investment of resources, time, and money possible. Business people are skilled at finding the most profitable points for selling their wares. This collision has one particular effect that does not meet standard thoughts on free markets; competition brings prices UP. Look at PLoS journals for example; they started with very low publishing costs and now for non-members it costs quite nearly as much to publish in PLoS ONE as it does to publish in Nature or Science. Even competing journals from different publication houses are increasing their prices in parallel rather than trying to compete for authors by price.
And as the summary suggests, this is muddied by the fact that the journals don't like to be upfront with their publication charges or charge structure. Many journals even bury how their charges work - do they charge by the page, by the image, some combination thereof, or something completely different? This makes it a massive pain in the ass for a researcher to decide whether or not to try a new (to them) journal for their paper, when they can't figure out how much it would cost to publish in this unfamiliar journal in comparison to one they usually publish in.
Who still watches netflix on their computers, anyways? At least half the blu-ray players on the market today can play netflix out of the box. Every major game console can as well. Quite a few TVs have it built-in now, too. Why on earth would you want to watch it on your computer?
This will set in motion for T-Mobile to be bought out by someone else so that the other carriers and their mandatory 2 year contracts don't look bad for consumers. Even if the FCC blocks ATT from buying out T-Mobile we'll see some other group that isn't currently a large player in mobile phone networks buy them out and re-institute 2 year contracts.
The carriers simply won't stand for this, even with T-Mobile being the smallest of the big carriers.
If Verizon Wireless is the Republican party - interested just in clever new ways to extract more money from those with the least money to spend so they can funnel it to the top executives - then T-Mobile is the democratic party, promising all kinds of things that they can't deliver while ultimately giving you the same lousy and uncaring product as the Republicans but with a fresher face to it.
In the same vein - and I know this won't be popular here:
Sprint is Ron Paul. He wants you to believe he's different but ultimately he's just another high priced fascist who happens to have better PR.
AT&T is the green party. They have a couple of ideas worth exploring, but they can't get their shit together well enough to convince anyone that they are important, and they lack the discipline to return calls when people have questions.
And Virgin Mobile is "the rent is too damn high" party. They have catchy slogans and good PR but ultimately we've seen all these parts before and we know how this story will go.
They're by far the least evil of the major carriers in the US.
Only for certain definitions of "evil". I've been with them for 7+ years and every year the service gets a little worse, the plan gets a little more expensive, and they offer fewer new phones that I actually want to purchase. Sure, their customer service is cheery and all, but they rarely actually accomplish anything.
Don't blame T*Mobile for a lack of phones - they can't force manufacturers to support their frequencies (though AT&T GSM phones will work just fine on T*Mobile as long as you don't care about 3G or 4G data - I used an Android phone on T-Mobile that only worked with 2G and it was surprisingly usable despite the slow data speeds).
There is no evidence that T-Mobile has even gone to the table to negotiate with a lot of phone manufacturers over new phones. There have even been cases where small regional carriers operating on T-Mobile frequencies have picked up phones that T-Mobile has never carried (the last Blackberry Pearl, the 9100, was an example), so it clearly was not a case of the phone not existing or being made for T-Mobile frequencies.
R
Blame regulators - if they wanted to enforce any sort of free market, they'd require that all phones have dual-mode GSM/CDMA radios that cover all carrier frequencies -- that would let consumers hop between carriers without spending $500 on a new phone.
That would increase the cost by quite a bit. We have two major GSM carriers in the US who use different frequencies, and two CDMA carriers who also use different frequencies. Hence a phone to hop between all four carriers would need to be able to communicate on four different sets of frequencies, and that isn't even including the various data frequencies.
I don't think car manufacturers would get away with releasing a car that requires Exxon gas (which is 50% more expensive than other smaller brands) for the first 2 years, so why do the cellular carriers get away with it?
I don't know where on earth you buy your gas, but where I live nobody would stay in business charging that much more than their neighbors. If a gas station charged five percent more - with gas at $3.50 and up for regular where I live - they would look like a hollywood ghost town. With 50% difference they might as well not even bother taking delivery.
That said, motor fuel is not a particularly good analogy for cell phones and cellular networks, even if you were to call GSM "gas" and CDMA "diesel". There is more in common between the engine types than there is between the phone types, amongst other things.
They're by far the least evil of the major carriers in the US.
Only for certain definitions of "evil". I've been with them for 7+ years and every year the service gets a little worse, the plan gets a little more expensive, and they offer fewer new phones that I actually want to purchase. Sure, their customer service is cheery and all, but they rarely actually accomplish anything.
If Verizon Wireless is the Republican party - interested just in clever new ways to extract more money from those with the least money to spend so they can funnel it to the top executives - then T-Mobile is the democratic party, promising all kinds of things that they can't deliver while ultimately giving you the same lousy and uncaring product as the Republicans but with a fresher face to it.
In other words, ICANN is still just looking for more of your money. That is all they have cared about for many years now. They haven't cared for some time what impact their decisions have on people who use the internet, provided it brings more money to them.
So now you blame me for your lousy choice. Clearly your first comment told me all I needed to know about your lack of intent to have a discussion on this matter.
You are far too late, and far too far down the road of foolish assumptions, for me to take you seriously in this discussion. You have no justifiable reason to attempt to talk down to me about any moral high ground with the way that you introduced yourself into this discussion. I offered a serious discussion and you went off with silly name calling and throwing of your utterly baseless assumptions.
Hence there is no reason whatsoever to expect that you are capable of holding a serious conversation of any depth. Go pester someone else. You couldn't even write your "critique" without throwing more silly insults at me, hence giving me no reason to read it.
Get off my lawn, kid.
I don't know, that's not what I get from damn_registrar's post. I get from that post that they don't feel they should have to pay attention to the spiel at all
For a lot of us, the spiel is a giant waste of time. We've seen it many, many, many times before. I know how to buckle my seatbelt, I know where the emergency exits are, I know where the bathroom is and that I can be charged with a felony if I talk smack to the lavatory smoke detector. I know that the bags on the oxygen masks might not inflate under loss of cabin pressure, even with oxygen flowing - and that I should put on my own mask before helping others.
Every time I fly, I hear that talk at least 4 times before I get back home, because I can't fly anywhere useful without at least 1 connection. I could give the damn talk. Why do they care if I pay attention to it or not? Why can't I do something useful during that time period? And why do we have to wait until we are at cruising altitude before we turn on electronic devices?
And attached to the same, why can't I leave my phone in airplane mode when I'm on the airplane? They now make a point of saying that phones must be turned off, specifically that airplane mode is not sufficient.
- are people savvy enough to turn off these radios on their devices to reduce the noise to acceptable levels in a given population (of passengers)?
People who are smart enough to know how to access airplane mode on their phones are smart enough to use it, those who are not will turn them off completely. I don't see the problem with airplane mode on an airplane.
- is a list of "approved" electronics too onerous to maintain and enforce to be practical?
Every plane I have flown on has a list of approved devices either in the airline's magazine or in the safety brochure. Obviously it does not include specific models but it tells you enough that a person who is smart enough to own such a device can figure out whether or not said device is on the list.
Ultimately my point is that the airlines are wasting a lot of passengers' time. I'm not saying the safety talk needs to be ended, because it is important for plenty of fliers. I'm just saying they could allow some fliers to do other things without causing any safety risk whatsoever.
You entered a civilized discussion as a babbling idiot spouting the classic symptoms of someone who has spent too much time memorizing pointless internet "debate" memes and too little time in the real world talking with actual people. You only got worse from there and you expect me to be kind to you now? Get lost, kid. If your goal was to de-civilize the discussion, take a look at the rest of it before you go and declare yourself victorious.
There you go again, insisting that some great anger exists just because you state it to be there. You can call yourself "feisty" if you so chose, but that is no more accurate than what you have been trying so desperately to label me as.
Care to pull any more shit out of your ass in this discussion, or are you done now?
When the style is that poor there remains no substance of merit. He could have presented his comment in a mature and balanced manner but instead opted for juvenile, assuming, and condescending. I am surprised he didn't follow up by accusing me of worshiping and/or providing sexual favors to (whomever he presumes to be) my favorite politician.