Could well be useful for memcache-type applications. Not likely to be terribly powerful; but quite possibly one of the cheaper ways to get 128GB of ECC RAM into a small box(Intel's C2000 Atom-for-server stuff currently tops out at 64GB, and their Xeons cost more).
It's especially galling because, even if you want the fancy cloud stuff, this is a situation where an older-than-dirt bimetallic strip and tilt switch could easily be added as a fail safe. With a horrifying pile of software you cannot expect everything to work properly all the time(though hasn't this issue come up during prior winters?); but it wouldn't be difficult or expensive to have a classic bimetallic strip thermostat set to a don't-freeze-the-pipes temperature that just waits in the background to save the day if the fancy stuff gives up.
I wish that this were more often true; but firmware appears to be getting bigger and uglier(even on systems where 'firmware' means only the BIOS-or-equivalent stuff, not the entire embedded OS), rather than more unobtrusive over time.
Sure, the PC BIOS was pretty lousy; but we went and replaced with with UEFI, which is essentially an always-on secondary OS designed by the people who thought that ACPI wasn't a dubious plan. That's not exactly progress.
It's also false that firmware doesn't limit you from using silicon as you prefer: Since it's often cheaper to reduce the number of different SKUs than it is to shave every last transistor off the size, it's quite common to find parts that are feature-differentiated by firmware enforced locks(and, with a competent implementation of 'verify against the key burned into silicon', not something you can reasonably expect to just hack around). The Rasberry Pi, for instance, is based on a chip with a variety of supported codecs; but Broadcom will sell you versions with some enabled or disabled(so that you can avoid paying license fees for codecs you have no intention of using; but they don't need to spin a variant for every last possible combination of codecs). The rPi people attempted to square this particular circle by arranging so that you can buy unlock codes individually as needed; and I don't blame them for a situation largely beyond their control; but they are a good example of hardware whose exposed capabilities are directly controlled by firmware.
More broadly, the delightful 'crypto bootloader' phenomenon has cut a fairly broad swath through hardware openness. Tivoization is not a new thing; but it seems to be more popular than ever; and techniques for moving enforcement directly onto the die, where attacks are difficult and almost always uneconomic, has proceeded apace. If you can't even boot something not blessed by the vendor, the hardware could be 100% open and it still wouldn't do you a bit of good without the necessary private key.
I had the same question about the BATF and the feds generally; but my understanding is that commercial-scale grease disposal is a matter of some concern to municipalities because of what it tends to do to sewer systems. Either by itself, or combined with assorted debris, fat/grease/oil mixtures are prone to clumping and clinging to piping, are obviously not very water soluble, and don't decay fast enough to be self cleaning. For those reasons, grease traps are usually required for sources larger than minor residential stuff; and somebody has the joyful job of collecting the ghastly mess that collects in grease traps from time to time.
As for the economics of dumping vs. recycling/reprocessing, I don't know how it shakes down, probably depends on what fuel costs are doing and how much lipid sources that need less purification cost. My naive assumption would be that, once you've gone to the trouble of collecting the stuff from multiple locations, there is probably somebody who will at least take it off your hands for you; but individual restaurant operators looking to cut costs may have an incentive to quietly empty their own grease trap into the nearest drainage ditch when nobody is looking.
It isn't too much of a surprise that the economics of producing biodiesel from used restaurant oil are shaky; and it also wouldn't be much of a surprise if on-site/near-site illicit dumping by individual operators looking to avoid paying for collection would be pretty common; but I am a little surprised that, if you are going to go to the trouble of collecting the stuff, it isn't economic to burn in less demanding applications.
Coal-fired power plants, say, are much less picky about the details of the fuel than internal combustion engines or combined cycle gas turbines are(plus, given the sheer volume of coal involved, you could get rid of a lot of grease without changing the behavior of the fuel by much) since the fuel doesn't interact with the intricate moving parts; and whatever nasty mixture of grease, fried food scraps, carbony bits, etc. should release more energy when burned than it takes to get burning, and probably has lower sulfur, mercury, and similar contaminant levels.
Near the coast, "bunker fuel" might also be an option. Since operating costs depend heavily on fuel costs, and there are few air quality regulations once you get out of port, large ships burn some of the nastiest dregs of oil refining that nobody else wants; because they are cheap and because it's easier to deal with very high viscosity fuels when you are operating large, purpose built, engines. Given the horrible crap that gets used, you might not even need to strain used grease for it to qualify as an improvement.
Why is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms interested in illegal grease dumping? Illicit grease disposal is a potential environmental, water quality, and combustion hazard issue; but that's more the EPA's thing, perhaps local authorities, maybe FBI if it's a interstate conspiracy.
Does somebody think that Tyler Durden is skimming off the grease to manufacture nitroglycerin for Project Mayhem and his anarcho-primitivist insurgency?
I suspect that the suburbs and exurbs are the worst for it. Especially in dense urban areas pedestrians and public transit are a fact of life. It's really the suburbs where you aren't a real person until you can get from place to place by car.
Land of the free my ass. It's a nation of lunatics ruled by fear.
It was never outlawed; but if some neurotic busybody called the Podunk PD because they saw a kid outside and decided that they were either about to be abducted by pedo-terrorists or on their way to delinquency, and Podunk PD decided to throw some spurious neglect/endangerment charge at you, it would still ruin your day. That's the real problem. Even if the first judge who sees it tosses the case in disgust, you'll still have a lousy time until then.
When a guy hawking space-gizmos says we need "an inspirational space program", that's a sign that he isn't even going to try to come up with some real reason for why we need to spend a lot of money buying his stuff; and is instead asserting that doing so will cause conveniently-unquantifiable warm and fuzzy feelings.
Isn't it practically part of the job to start out by denying the request on any grounds that a naive text search suggest are relevant; just to discourage the pesky users from bothering you and force the actually committed ones to really work for it?
They certainly could have been more tactful about it; but the 'vaccine issue' arouses some strong feelings because it (albeit at an epidemiological level, so touching anecdotes aren't always easy to come by in the soup of probabilities) involves real people really dying for trivially preventable reasons because of ongoing FUD.
It takes serious patience to remain polite when those are the stakes and the opposition has dug in and is willing to move the goalposts no matter what evidence you bring to the table.
In the case of most modern OS window managers, don't most programs end up getting their output scrawled onto some surface that the GPU manipulates, even the seriously retro ones that predate the concept of 'GPU' as anything other than a RAMDAC and some primitive fixed-function elements?
Chrome, and similar, interact substantially more than that; but I thought that most of the various desktop transparency/preview/fancy-window-swooshing/etc. stuff was handled by drawing program output to something that the GPU can then manipulate.
Out of curiosity, in terms of 'what should be done', is the idea that an application should be responsible for clearing memory before releasing it considered a good practice; or is it considered a least-worst option to deal with the fact that the OS can't necessarily be trusted to do the job properly?
Speaking as a complete layman, I would think that, just as handling memory allocation is usually left to the OS, in an ideal world the OS' memory allocation mechanism would also be responsible for clearing something before allocating it to some other process, rather than relying on every last random application to behave correctly.
Is that a "No, so wrong I'd need to spend ages teaching you enough to even understand why it's stupid." situation? A "It'd be nice, but since we can't trust the OS we clear memory before we release it if we are concerned about it." or a "Too much overhead to do universally; but having a mechanism to tell the OS 'this memory is now free, needs cleaning' would be nice" situation?
Any chance you feel like patenting that atrocious, but clever, terrible plan to help ensure that someone who isn't even slightly joking doesn't go running with it?
It's honestly somewhat surprising(perhaps a testament to the fact that with great power comes nontrivial chance of really crashing the hell out of things, perhaps just the availability of softer targets) that GPUs don't get involved in much scarier evil more often.
Easily among the most powerful devices in the system that isn't the CPU(and, while not necessarily ideal for things that aren't specific compute workloads, turing complete), plenty of RAM to store payload to be injected in assorted places or data stolen from other areas of the system, plus DMA, which offers a great deal of latitude in doing whatever the hell you want, above and beyond whatever weaknesses the GPU driver may have.
With the move toward firmware signing, to keep people from flashing gaming cards into super cheap almost-Quadro/Firepro cards, they aren't a great place for a persistent bug; but they are otherwise pretty scary pieces of hardware, especially if some optimist has enabled WebGL...
When you build on somebody's platform, it's more or less expected that this sort of thing can happen. So long as you fill a niche that they cannot or don't wish to, you are an asset, you make their platform better vs. the competition, as long as you don't do anything blatantly abusive or system-breaking, any little TOS details clearly don't forbid whatever you are doing. You might even get called onstage during some CES demo or given favorable marketing placement.
If your thing is either deemed a threat to the platform(as with Netscape's 'reduce windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers' trash talking) or now overlaps with a feature that the platform owner wishes to add to their offerings; well, maybe you get acquired(as SoundJam MP became iTunes), maybe you'll just get squished. Happens every time.
This may change if enough cheapie drones filled with assorted narcotic goodies keep making it over the fence; but my understanding is that team FCC has been surprisingly effective, even in the face of 'zOMG Security!' and 'Tough on Crime!' in holding the line on jammers. Contraband cellphones have proven tricky to keep out of prisons(not yet normally delivered by drones; but any facility moving around that much food, garbage, laundry, visitors, etc. is necessarily porous); and penal authorities would love to be able to just jam them, rather than painstakingly try to frisk the population over and over to try to stay ahead. So far, the answer has been No.
Actually, given the market for wifi AP location databases, for assorted GPS-with-a-little-help-from-its-friends arrangements for phones, it might well be worth their while to just grab whatever they can if the gear is already installed and being operated in case something suspicious shows up.
The resolution would be poor compared to ground based mapping(like the Google cars that got caught being a little too inquisitive about wifi traffic); but if you have to have the system running to detect suspicious activity anyway, doesn't cost much extra to dump the boring parts of the dataset to disk and see if anyone is interested.
Against idiots and casual would-be malefactors who don't know what the hell they are doing, I assume that(while dubiously FCC approved in any case, and likely to interest Uncle Sam if it involves too much GPS-monkeying) jamming the drone's control link would work reasonably well.
Against someone who is expecting to be jammed, I'd assume that the drone's default behavior would be 'fly toward the strongest RF source if you lose connection with manual control' and the jammer would be a nice handy beacon.to head right into as fast as possible.
It is difficult to imagine 'telemedicine' being competitive for elective operations, at least until the robots are so advanced that the human on the other end of the line is increasingly redundant. It becomes more theoretically interesting if the patient can't be safely moved or the procedure can't be safely delayed. I don't know what proportion of operations are actually that urgent. Some are, certainly; but those may be more dramatic than they are common.
Even a relatively slow link would also be very nice if it could be (more or less transparently) be used as a reliability aid for a faster, but shorter range and more vulnerable to interference, wireless link in 2.4 or 5GHz.
Most applications are pretty polite about handling slow connections. They will test your patience; but they will also keep working. It's a lot less common for everything to be able to neatly resume where it left off when a connection is actually severed and then reestablished. Perhaps in an ideal world we would fix that first; but until the ideal world happens keeping the connection up, even at a fraction of a megabit, when somebody starts using their leaky microwave or I wander into a location where the building happens to block 5GHz signals between me and the AP particularly well would be nice.
This move is also unpleasant because it involves the ISP directly fiddling with different types of traffic in order to drive down the expected data use based on customer behavior without being upfront about what they are doing.
If my connection is throttled to 1.5Mb/s because I purchased a "1.5Mb/s Internet!" plan, all well and good. This, however, is a 'zOMG 4G LTE xTreme!'(except for applications you actually want ample bandwidth for; but totally crazy fast for anything you hypothetically might do but don't)' scheme, which is very, very, close to just slapping a fraudulent higher speed label on a lower speed connection.
It is a historical norm; but one that has substantially declined in recent western history. I'm not sure exactly how much of the slack has been taken up by the increase in short term, impersonal, contractual work(you don't have a groundskeeper; but LawnCorp LLC. will send a work crew over twice a month if you pay them to), how much has been absorbed by technological change(the pool of people who actually dictate word-for-word to secretaries is not doing well vs. people who just type because it's faster than talking, even if they have secretaries for tasks that are easier to delegate in big chunks), and how much reflects the fact that abundance in mass-produced goods and services has expanded the pool of 'comfortable/middle class' faster than the supply of poor-people-you-would-want-in-your-house has grown, making servants more expensive in comparison to other markers of wealth.
Obviously Zuckerberg could now afford to have a hand-picked troupe of novelty midgets on hand to tongue wash his car on demand if he felt like it; but he isn't old money, or even middle-aged new money(for a few more years), so odds are good that he grew up with a limited acclimatization to dedicated domestic servants and he has had a limited amount of time to get used to the idea outside of a workplace-only context.
I assume that he quite happily contracts out a lot of what would historically have been domestic chores and I'd be far from surprised if an au pair from some country with a language he wants his spawn to enjoy the cognitive benefits of shows up in the relatively near future; but the slice of society actually accustomed to the idea of having a butler and a scullery maid embedded in their house has shrunk pretty dramatically in the last century or two; and requires an atypically retro or very wealthy acclimatization to be fully comfortable with. This doesn't mean a bold spirit of egalitarianism; dubiously legal Mexicans to cut the lawn for less and fawning attention from the local hirelings on Caribbean package vacations are much more broadly accepted; but somebody poor enough that you can afford having near family-level access to your private life is not nearly the institution it once was.
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Could well be useful for memcache-type applications. Not likely to be terribly powerful; but quite possibly one of the cheaper ways to get 128GB of ECC RAM into a small box(Intel's C2000 Atom-for-server stuff currently tops out at 64GB, and their Xeons cost more).
It's especially galling because, even if you want the fancy cloud stuff, this is a situation where an older-than-dirt bimetallic strip and tilt switch could easily be added as a fail safe. With a horrifying pile of software you cannot expect everything to work properly all the time(though hasn't this issue come up during prior winters?); but it wouldn't be difficult or expensive to have a classic bimetallic strip thermostat set to a don't-freeze-the-pipes temperature that just waits in the background to save the day if the fancy stuff gives up.
I wish that this were more often true; but firmware appears to be getting bigger and uglier(even on systems where 'firmware' means only the BIOS-or-equivalent stuff, not the entire embedded OS), rather than more unobtrusive over time.
Sure, the PC BIOS was pretty lousy; but we went and replaced with with UEFI, which is essentially an always-on secondary OS designed by the people who thought that ACPI wasn't a dubious plan. That's not exactly progress.
It's also false that firmware doesn't limit you from using silicon as you prefer: Since it's often cheaper to reduce the number of different SKUs than it is to shave every last transistor off the size, it's quite common to find parts that are feature-differentiated by firmware enforced locks(and, with a competent implementation of 'verify against the key burned into silicon', not something you can reasonably expect to just hack around). The Rasberry Pi, for instance, is based on a chip with a variety of supported codecs; but Broadcom will sell you versions with some enabled or disabled(so that you can avoid paying license fees for codecs you have no intention of using; but they don't need to spin a variant for every last possible combination of codecs). The rPi people attempted to square this particular circle by arranging so that you can buy unlock codes individually as needed; and I don't blame them for a situation largely beyond their control; but they are a good example of hardware whose exposed capabilities are directly controlled by firmware.
More broadly, the delightful 'crypto bootloader' phenomenon has cut a fairly broad swath through hardware openness. Tivoization is not a new thing; but it seems to be more popular than ever; and techniques for moving enforcement directly onto the die, where attacks are difficult and almost always uneconomic, has proceeded apace. If you can't even boot something not blessed by the vendor, the hardware could be 100% open and it still wouldn't do you a bit of good without the necessary private key.
I had the same question about the BATF and the feds generally; but my understanding is that commercial-scale grease disposal is a matter of some concern to municipalities because of what it tends to do to sewer systems. Either by itself, or combined with assorted debris, fat/grease/oil mixtures are prone to clumping and clinging to piping, are obviously not very water soluble, and don't decay fast enough to be self cleaning. For those reasons, grease traps are usually required for sources larger than minor residential stuff; and somebody has the joyful job of collecting the ghastly mess that collects in grease traps from time to time.
As for the economics of dumping vs. recycling/reprocessing, I don't know how it shakes down, probably depends on what fuel costs are doing and how much lipid sources that need less purification cost. My naive assumption would be that, once you've gone to the trouble of collecting the stuff from multiple locations, there is probably somebody who will at least take it off your hands for you; but individual restaurant operators looking to cut costs may have an incentive to quietly empty their own grease trap into the nearest drainage ditch when nobody is looking.
It isn't too much of a surprise that the economics of producing biodiesel from used restaurant oil are shaky; and it also wouldn't be much of a surprise if on-site/near-site illicit dumping by individual operators looking to avoid paying for collection would be pretty common; but I am a little surprised that, if you are going to go to the trouble of collecting the stuff, it isn't economic to burn in less demanding applications.
Coal-fired power plants, say, are much less picky about the details of the fuel than internal combustion engines or combined cycle gas turbines are(plus, given the sheer volume of coal involved, you could get rid of a lot of grease without changing the behavior of the fuel by much) since the fuel doesn't interact with the intricate moving parts; and whatever nasty mixture of grease, fried food scraps, carbony bits, etc. should release more energy when burned than it takes to get burning, and probably has lower sulfur, mercury, and similar contaminant levels.
Near the coast, "bunker fuel" might also be an option. Since operating costs depend heavily on fuel costs, and there are few air quality regulations once you get out of port, large ships burn some of the nastiest dregs of oil refining that nobody else wants; because they are cheap and because it's easier to deal with very high viscosity fuels when you are operating large, purpose built, engines. Given the horrible crap that gets used, you might not even need to strain used grease for it to qualify as an improvement.
Why is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms interested in illegal grease dumping? Illicit grease disposal is a potential environmental, water quality, and combustion hazard issue; but that's more the EPA's thing, perhaps local authorities, maybe FBI if it's a interstate conspiracy.
Does somebody think that Tyler Durden is skimming off the grease to manufacture nitroglycerin for Project Mayhem and his anarcho-primitivist insurgency?
I suspect that the suburbs and exurbs are the worst for it. Especially in dense urban areas pedestrians and public transit are a fact of life. It's really the suburbs where you aren't a real person until you can get from place to place by car.
Insurance companies certainly seem to operate on that theory.
Land of the free my ass. It's a nation of lunatics ruled by fear.
It was never outlawed; but if some neurotic busybody called the Podunk PD because they saw a kid outside and decided that they were either about to be abducted by pedo-terrorists or on their way to delinquency, and Podunk PD decided to throw some spurious neglect/endangerment charge at you, it would still ruin your day. That's the real problem. Even if the first judge who sees it tosses the case in disgust, you'll still have a lousy time until then.
When a guy hawking space-gizmos says we need "an inspirational space program", that's a sign that he isn't even going to try to come up with some real reason for why we need to spend a lot of money buying his stuff; and is instead asserting that doing so will cause conveniently-unquantifiable warm and fuzzy feelings.
How nakedly parasitic.
Isn't it practically part of the job to start out by denying the request on any grounds that a naive text search suggest are relevant; just to discourage the pesky users from bothering you and force the actually committed ones to really work for it?
They certainly could have been more tactful about it; but the 'vaccine issue' arouses some strong feelings because it (albeit at an epidemiological level, so touching anecdotes aren't always easy to come by in the soup of probabilities) involves real people really dying for trivially preventable reasons because of ongoing FUD.
It takes serious patience to remain polite when those are the stakes and the opposition has dug in and is willing to move the goalposts no matter what evidence you bring to the table.
In the case of most modern OS window managers, don't most programs end up getting their output scrawled onto some surface that the GPU manipulates, even the seriously retro ones that predate the concept of 'GPU' as anything other than a RAMDAC and some primitive fixed-function elements?
Chrome, and similar, interact substantially more than that; but I thought that most of the various desktop transparency/preview/fancy-window-swooshing/etc. stuff was handled by drawing program output to something that the GPU can then manipulate.
Out of curiosity, in terms of 'what should be done', is the idea that an application should be responsible for clearing memory before releasing it considered a good practice; or is it considered a least-worst option to deal with the fact that the OS can't necessarily be trusted to do the job properly?
Speaking as a complete layman, I would think that, just as handling memory allocation is usually left to the OS, in an ideal world the OS' memory allocation mechanism would also be responsible for clearing something before allocating it to some other process, rather than relying on every last random application to behave correctly.
Is that a "No, so wrong I'd need to spend ages teaching you enough to even understand why it's stupid." situation? A "It'd be nice, but since we can't trust the OS we clear memory before we release it if we are concerned about it." or a "Too much overhead to do universally; but having a mechanism to tell the OS 'this memory is now free, needs cleaning' would be nice" situation?
Any chance you feel like patenting that atrocious, but clever, terrible plan to help ensure that someone who isn't even slightly joking doesn't go running with it?
It's honestly somewhat surprising(perhaps a testament to the fact that with great power comes nontrivial chance of really crashing the hell out of things, perhaps just the availability of softer targets) that GPUs don't get involved in much scarier evil more often.
Easily among the most powerful devices in the system that isn't the CPU(and, while not necessarily ideal for things that aren't specific compute workloads, turing complete), plenty of RAM to store payload to be injected in assorted places or data stolen from other areas of the system, plus DMA, which offers a great deal of latitude in doing whatever the hell you want, above and beyond whatever weaknesses the GPU driver may have.
With the move toward firmware signing, to keep people from flashing gaming cards into super cheap almost-Quadro/Firepro cards, they aren't a great place for a persistent bug; but they are otherwise pretty scary pieces of hardware, especially if some optimist has enabled WebGL...
What happened? fit.google.com.
When you build on somebody's platform, it's more or less expected that this sort of thing can happen. So long as you fill a niche that they cannot or don't wish to, you are an asset, you make their platform better vs. the competition, as long as you don't do anything blatantly abusive or system-breaking, any little TOS details clearly don't forbid whatever you are doing. You might even get called onstage during some CES demo or given favorable marketing placement.
If your thing is either deemed a threat to the platform(as with Netscape's 'reduce windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers' trash talking) or now overlaps with a feature that the platform owner wishes to add to their offerings; well, maybe you get acquired(as SoundJam MP became iTunes), maybe you'll just get squished. Happens every time.
Hopefully I won't be there when an AI with its hooks in something important says "challenge accepted" to your proposal.
This may change if enough cheapie drones filled with assorted narcotic goodies keep making it over the fence; but my understanding is that team FCC has been surprisingly effective, even in the face of 'zOMG Security!' and 'Tough on Crime!' in holding the line on jammers. Contraband cellphones have proven tricky to keep out of prisons(not yet normally delivered by drones; but any facility moving around that much food, garbage, laundry, visitors, etc. is necessarily porous); and penal authorities would love to be able to just jam them, rather than painstakingly try to frisk the population over and over to try to stay ahead. So far, the answer has been No.
Actually, given the market for wifi AP location databases, for assorted GPS-with-a-little-help-from-its-friends arrangements for phones, it might well be worth their while to just grab whatever they can if the gear is already installed and being operated in case something suspicious shows up.
The resolution would be poor compared to ground based mapping(like the Google cars that got caught being a little too inquisitive about wifi traffic); but if you have to have the system running to detect suspicious activity anyway, doesn't cost much extra to dump the boring parts of the dataset to disk and see if anyone is interested.
Against idiots and casual would-be malefactors who don't know what the hell they are doing, I assume that(while dubiously FCC approved in any case, and likely to interest Uncle Sam if it involves too much GPS-monkeying) jamming the drone's control link would work reasonably well.
Against someone who is expecting to be jammed, I'd assume that the drone's default behavior would be 'fly toward the strongest RF source if you lose connection with manual control' and the jammer would be a nice handy beacon.to head right into as fast as possible.
It is difficult to imagine 'telemedicine' being competitive for elective operations, at least until the robots are so advanced that the human on the other end of the line is increasingly redundant. It becomes more theoretically interesting if the patient can't be safely moved or the procedure can't be safely delayed. I don't know what proportion of operations are actually that urgent. Some are, certainly; but those may be more dramatic than they are common.
Even a relatively slow link would also be very nice if it could be (more or less transparently) be used as a reliability aid for a faster, but shorter range and more vulnerable to interference, wireless link in 2.4 or 5GHz.
Most applications are pretty polite about handling slow connections. They will test your patience; but they will also keep working. It's a lot less common for everything to be able to neatly resume where it left off when a connection is actually severed and then reestablished. Perhaps in an ideal world we would fix that first; but until the ideal world happens keeping the connection up, even at a fraction of a megabit, when somebody starts using their leaky microwave or I wander into a location where the building happens to block 5GHz signals between me and the AP particularly well would be nice.
This move is also unpleasant because it involves the ISP directly fiddling with different types of traffic in order to drive down the expected data use based on customer behavior without being upfront about what they are doing.
If my connection is throttled to 1.5Mb/s because I purchased a "1.5Mb/s Internet!" plan, all well and good. This, however, is a 'zOMG 4G LTE xTreme!'(except for applications you actually want ample bandwidth for; but totally crazy fast for anything you hypothetically might do but don't)' scheme, which is very, very, close to just slapping a fraudulent higher speed label on a lower speed connection.
It is a historical norm; but one that has substantially declined in recent western history. I'm not sure exactly how much of the slack has been taken up by the increase in short term, impersonal, contractual work(you don't have a groundskeeper; but LawnCorp LLC. will send a work crew over twice a month if you pay them to), how much has been absorbed by technological change(the pool of people who actually dictate word-for-word to secretaries is not doing well vs. people who just type because it's faster than talking, even if they have secretaries for tasks that are easier to delegate in big chunks), and how much reflects the fact that abundance in mass-produced goods and services has expanded the pool of 'comfortable/middle class' faster than the supply of poor-people-you-would-want-in-your-house has grown, making servants more expensive in comparison to other markers of wealth.
Obviously Zuckerberg could now afford to have a hand-picked troupe of novelty midgets on hand to tongue wash his car on demand if he felt like it; but he isn't old money, or even middle-aged new money(for a few more years), so odds are good that he grew up with a limited acclimatization to dedicated domestic servants and he has had a limited amount of time to get used to the idea outside of a workplace-only context.
I assume that he quite happily contracts out a lot of what would historically have been domestic chores and I'd be far from surprised if an au pair from some country with a language he wants his spawn to enjoy the cognitive benefits of shows up in the relatively near future; but the slice of society actually accustomed to the idea of having a butler and a scullery maid embedded in their house has shrunk pretty dramatically in the last century or two; and requires an atypically retro or very wealthy acclimatization to be fully comfortable with. This doesn't mean a bold spirit of egalitarianism; dubiously legal Mexicans to cut the lawn for less and fawning attention from the local hirelings on Caribbean package vacations are much more broadly accepted; but somebody poor enough that you can afford having near family-level access to your private life is not nearly the institution it once was.