In terms of impact, one could argue Steve Jobs had a major one (one of the key pioneers of personal computing), and will be remembered about as long as Turing. That's economic influence, not scientific influence, but we all stand on the shoulders of prior giants like Turing.
Rob, been here a long time, mostly lurking as of late.
Been here a long time... also was the lucky 10 millionth hit way back in 1998 or so. This was my first stop in the morning and at night for many years.
I fondly remember the years where the community here was a huge voice. You and this place really changed the world, and that's fantastic. You have a knack for forming or running online communities, hopefully you'll find a new outlet for that some day.
I watch Movies and TV shows all the time on my iPad, it's a great portable media player for the bedroom, kitchen, or on a plane.... at home with basically any format using AirVideo, or over an internet connection via Netflix, or (of course) iTunes. While flying Virgin America recently I could basically use the airplane's WiFi and watch any Netflix show I wanted instead of the crappy in-flight options.
The recent update of Netflix also added support for the video out cable.
It's a pretty good portable media player. A laptop is more versatile, but it's much bigger and heavier.
Yep, no crisis at all right. Easy to find jobs. We didn't waste billions of taxpayer dollars "bailing out" businesses. Not sure if that was your primary point that it didn't exist, but putting "economic crisis" in quotes seem to indicate it...
The bailouts have been working. Yes, we have lower job numbers than desirable, but that's arguably because the stimulus wasn't big enough.
Because we should all be just happy that we have a president who has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars, supports a supreme court nominee vowed against true freedom of speech and supports unsustainable programs. Right?
I note that the bank bailouts were accomplished under Bush. I have no idea what you're talking about regarding Kagan or Sotomayor, and i've been following both FOX and other outlets' opinions of her. Many conservatives are supportive of Kagan. As for unsustainable programs, I assume you are referring to Medicare and Social Security? What would you propose be done with them?
News flash. News sources are biased. It isn't new. Look at MSNBC, heck, look at the Guardian which TFA is taken from. The Guardian doesn't even make any claims to be balanced or fair.
MSNBC has some left wing opinion shows, a right wing morning show, and pretty much run of the mill NBC news otherwise.
I venture that your views above have demonstrated a number of falsehoods mixed in with truths, and some debatable points. You might want to sort out which from which.
Err, they saw the ad during the Oscars and read about it in the paper prior to that. Neither would have any idea what an SD card or USB is; we share photo and vids via email or MobileMe , and even that doesn't work well with my Aunt since she doesn't have a PC. We wind up mailing photos and stuff.
I don't like being "family tech support" so no, I didn't push this on them, but apparently your worldview requires you to believe that I'm already a fanboi and thus not worth listening to.
A walled garden isn't required, never said that it was, only that I appreciate Apple's for removing bullshit from my computing and communications devices.
I think the folks attacking Apple have as much of a track record of being consistently and intentionally wrong. Case in point.
For example, both my Mother and my Aunt, in their 60's, want an iPad. They are not fangrrrls. One has a Mac and would prefer the pad, the other doesn't use PC's a lot but would like a simple, portable device for email and internet, and easily sharing photos of my family (since she lives in Europe).
As for the walled garden, I'd say the motives are mixed. I (and many people I know) actually like walled gardens, in some circumstances, if it helps remove bullshit from my life. Not all circumstances, of course.
I do agree the blocking of iPad -> iPhone tethering is crap, but I can't tether on AT&T as it is.
As I've said elsewhere, I fly regularly, and until this weekend, the TSA, while generally surly, has not been as much of a hassle as most people here that swear off flying think it is. Yes, I'm a white Canadian, so it colours my experience, but I don't think that makes it worth dismissing.
I flew the day the airports reopened after 9-11, through the shoe bomber incident, the liquid bomber crap, and now this fire cracker asshat. I do think the TSA needs to change it's policy on responding to terrorist threats, and avoid these panic-stricken restrictions, like the ones this weekend, or 2006's liquid/gel restriction. They are pure theatre.
But usually, after the initial slow down, things get quite manageable and efficient at security checkpoints. For every anecdotal horror story, there are dozens of regular travellers that continue to travel this way, and it's gotten much more efficient than back in 2001-2002. The TSA needs to improve, absolutely, but I think many people that swore off flying years ago have imagined a beast far worse than the reality.
One can stop flying because they don't like being patted down and searched, and that's fine. It's a tradeoff.
But I also believe that it is politically impossible for the U.S. to drastically change their philosophy of airport checkpoint security, in spite of your best efforts to contact your congressman about this matter. The political climate is way too polarized. Minor adjustments will probably be achievable though. And I really hope this weekend's restrictions are lifted, the current news seems to indicate it will after Tuesday.
If you got patted down as missed your flight, you certainly didn't show up to the airport early enough. It adds maybe 10 minutes to the security process at most airports. I'd also note that missing a flight is a fairly minor inconvenience.
I think heightened inspection is generally a good thing, and a minor inconvenience. There are aspects I disagree with (liquids/gel restrictions, and this weekend's nothing-on-your-lap fiasco). But random inspections and pat downs, to me, make a lot of sense for this mode of travel.
Sure. And there are lots of Russian, Indian, and Arab colleagues are also Canadian and U.S. citizens, and really don't have problems with the TSA. I do know some dual citizens of countries such as Canada + Lebanon that have problems with CBP, but that's a different agency.
My point is that there are a number of people that refuse to fly because of TSA fears. And I think that's been overblown, generally. Until this past weekend, when they basically crippled inbound U.S. travel (some family members are still stuck in Toronto).
I fly regularly. It's really not that bad. I've never had a problem at the checkpoints, even when I'm randomly selected for a detailed search. Even U.S. CBP has been courteous when I cross the border.
This last hour sitting bullshit is rather fresh, of course.... but the TSA's measures aren't much of a hassle to date.
FWIW, Oracle takes about 30 minutes to install to vanilla state & create a basic database.
The big problem with VMs is image proliferation. Package-level management, like RPMs, etc. still is essential to understand versioning dependencies; virtualization does not fix that problem.
I've tried Conan, LOTR, Warhammer, and Eve. Eve was cool but different playstyle. Warhammer was also cool but the social aspects were botched IMO and it's too PVP focused (though I still have an account). LOTR is pretty close, admittedly. Conan didn't click with me.
The only MMO that looks like it might really give Blizz a run for their money is Bioware and the Old Republic.
Between Malygos & The Nexus, Obsidian Sanctum, and the fact that Ulduar is , er, quite huge, I think there's some sour grapes there.
The new Colesium 10/25 raid has some quite fun encounters; Faction Champions in 25 is a fun grawl, and Twin Val'kyrs has a unique twist. Of course, this is all to get people to gear up for Icecrown, so there's not another Sunwell debacle where most people don't get to see that content.
I don't get the bitterness about grinding, it's inevitable that something new will always be added - you never will "win" the game. The only reason there is to go hardcore or to grind it out is to be "first". And with the achievements / title system, you get to brag about it afterwards, if that's your thing.
While in principle, I agree, it's unclear what level of "free" involvement one expects from a standards organization.
"Pay to play" standards organizations have for long been the norm - including the W3C. The IETF, while not pay-to-play, is certainly funded by large organizations.
So, in their cases, while you don't need to pay to implement the standard, you do need to contribute to the standards organization costs (not trivial) to participate in forming the standard.
In short, organizing teams of people costs money, and someone has to foot the bill. That's either a background benefactor, or its a published process for participants.
Back in those days, "open systems" was coined by UNIX vendors for the same reason - you didn't need to buy IBM hardware to run software, you could run software, and it was arguably portable. BillG took the same term and applied it to Windows in a different sort of way - if you ran Windows, you could still fire your hardware vendor and swap in a new one.
It was a bigger deal than one might imagine in today's world of virtual machines. People couldn't switch off of IBM despite tens of millions of $$ going to them for mainframes. The same argument applied to "software platform" was why Java took off in the 90's - that way you could use Linux, Windows, or UNIX and it wouldn't matter (for server software, anyway, for the most part - GUI was more of a failure).
So am I, which is why I can tell you that you're full of it. Go search the USENET archives, for example: you won't even find any significant mention of the term "open standard" prior to the introduction of "open source" in 1998. The term simply wasn't in common use. After that, many companies have been trying to misrepresent both their software and their standards as "open" in order to mislead customers into thinking that their products are something that they are not.
That's completely, utterly false. 'The Open Group' standards for DCE, UNIX and X dates back to the 1980's. The OMG had open standards in the early 90's for distributed objects. The ANSI, ISO, and IEEE go much further back (POSIX dates back to 1988).
Open source reference implementations are useful to supplement standards, but they're two different things, with two different outcomes. Open source without an open (potentially standard) interoperability architecture is unlikely to generate interoperable & competing implementations. Sure, you can always fork, but that leads to a cacaphony of slightly differing and incompatible options that geeks might love but most customers despise.
On the other hand, open standards without an open source reference implementation may cause problems with the standard's proper adoption, as there's no example for implementors to use. But going too far on the open source side is also a risk to standards adoption -- if an open source RI is copylefted, that dissuades adoption in its own way. Whereas a more permissive license, say MIT, Apache, CC-Attribution, etc. would better incentivize adoption.
Trash SQL in favour of coding all your data access needs. Welcome back to 1973, guys.
It's not like we could do parallel SQL in the 1980's. Or that you can't do parallel SQL in a compute cloud today.
No, It basically seems like they don't want to pay software vendors any money for database technology. That's mostly what the arguments boil down to. Oracle RAC is very scalable, arguably easier to do at massive scale than MySQL - but you have to pay Oracle money. For an Internet startup, I can understand why you'd take your chances with "roll your own". For an enterprise... I think not.
SAN FRANCISCO--Creator Jack Dorsey was shocked and saddened this week after learning that his social networking device, Twitter, was being used to disseminate pertinent and timely information during the recent civil unrest in Iran. "Twitter was intended to be a way for vacant, self-absorbed egotists to share their most banal and idiotic thoughts with anyone pathetic enough to read them," said a visibly confused Dorsey, claiming that Twitter is at its most powerful when it makes an already attention-starved populace even more needy for constant affirmation.... (click link to read the rest)
A lot of people disagree with your view. This isn't a cut & dry case like OJ. The man had a serious Peter Pan complex, yes. Was a he a pedophile? I don't think so, and apparently neither did a jury.
As for his career decisions, etc., I think you are extremely wrong on this. Even a cursory look into the making of his records, videos, etc., shows the man had brains. There are numerous artists that have worked with him that will attest to this, unless you're going to write all of them off too.
Don't forget Skinny Puppy. There wouldn't have been a Pretty Hate Machine without them, and I'm pretty sure "Down In It" was Trent's Ode to "Dig It";-)
Also, for metal fans, there were.. Faith No More Metallica Slayer Iron Maiden (w/ Dickinson) Celtic Frost Bathory Voivod
How do I know this? Well, I don't, but I've verified that Find my iPhone "works" with just WiFi if your phone is otherwise SIMless.
Unfortunately, "Works" is a relative term -- it will guess the location of the IP address based on the WHOIS information, which won't help much other than identify the ISP's location.
On the other hand, it will still display remote messages. And will do a remote wipe.
Actually, this is pretty complex
on
Twitter On Scala
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Twitter is not a trivial application to scale, considering the wide disparity in listeners to follower ratios, that views are dynamically generated by interpolating many-to-many message streams, and that each message is persistent forever.
As an analogy, It's like managing an IRC server, with persistent messages that are full-text indexed, with one channel per user, and unlimited number of users can join each other's channels. When you join a new user's channel, your chat log is automatically (and quickly) re-woven with messages from that channel according to relative time series of these messages. And, there's a global channel that everyone can watch to see what any user in any channel is saying at any time.
Now do this, all the while avoiding netsplits (i.e. missing messages), allowing retracts of almost message, recent or historical, and ensuring the channel history (eventually) reflects that change. And handle sudden bursts of activity among unpredictable sets of channels because they're all attending the same conference, or a burst of network-wide high activity because people are watching the World Cup or Obama's inauguration.
The point is that, while the idea is simple, the variability of use and disparity of activity is what makes life interesting; the messaging & DB architecture that works well for recent activity, for example, doesn't help for having reasonable persistent random-access to historical messages.
In all, Twitter has gotten a *lot* more reliable the past several months than it was a year ago.
Slashdot Mirror
In terms of impact, one could argue Steve Jobs had a major one (one of the key pioneers of personal computing), and will be remembered about as long as Turing. That's economic influence, not scientific influence, but we all stand on the shoulders of prior giants like Turing.
Rob, been here a long time, mostly lurking as of late.
Been here a long time... also was the lucky 10 millionth hit way back in 1998 or so. This was my first stop in the morning and at night for many years.
I fondly remember the years where the community here was a huge voice. You and this place really changed the world, and that's fantastic. You have a knack for forming or running online communities, hopefully you'll find a new outlet for that some day.
Good luck to you!
That's understandable - they're mostly a hardware company, which historically have lower margins than software companies.
Having said that, compare:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AAPL
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MSFT
21.15% vs 29%
I watch Movies and TV shows all the time on my iPad, it's a great portable media player for the bedroom, kitchen, or on a plane.... at home with basically any format using AirVideo, or over an internet connection via Netflix, or (of course) iTunes. While flying Virgin America recently I could basically use the airplane's WiFi and watch any Netflix show I wanted instead of the crappy in-flight options.
The recent update of Netflix also added support for the video out cable.
It's a pretty good portable media player. A laptop is more versatile, but it's much bigger and heavier.
Yep, no crisis at all right. Easy to find jobs. We didn't waste billions of taxpayer dollars "bailing out" businesses. Not sure if that was your primary point that it didn't exist, but putting "economic crisis" in quotes seem to indicate it...
The bailouts have been working. Yes, we have lower job numbers than desirable, but that's arguably because the stimulus wasn't big enough.
Because we should all be just happy that we have a president who has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars, supports a supreme court nominee vowed against true freedom of speech and supports unsustainable programs. Right?
I note that the bank bailouts were accomplished under Bush.
I have no idea what you're talking about regarding Kagan or Sotomayor, and i've been following both FOX and other outlets' opinions of her. Many conservatives are supportive of Kagan.
As for unsustainable programs, I assume you are referring to Medicare and Social Security? What would you propose be done with them?
News flash. News sources are biased. It isn't new. Look at MSNBC, heck, look at the Guardian which TFA is taken from. The Guardian doesn't even make any claims to be balanced or fair.
MSNBC has some left wing opinion shows, a right wing morning show, and pretty much run of the mill NBC news otherwise.
I venture that your views above have demonstrated a number of falsehoods mixed in with truths, and some debatable points. You might want to sort out which from which.
Err, they saw the ad during the Oscars and read about it in the paper prior to that. Neither would have any idea what an SD card or USB is; we share photo and vids via email or MobileMe , and even that doesn't work well with my Aunt since she doesn't have a PC. We wind up mailing photos and stuff.
I don't like being "family tech support" so no, I didn't push this on them, but apparently your worldview requires you to believe that I'm already a fanboi and thus not worth listening to.
A walled garden isn't required, never said that it was, only that I appreciate Apple's for removing bullshit from my computing and communications devices.
With utterly crap user experiences. No thanks.
Apple wants to control the world's premium hardware devices (and how they are used).
Google wants to control the world's information.
Only one of these visions frightens me.
I think the folks attacking Apple have as much of a track record of being consistently and intentionally wrong. Case in point.
For example, both my Mother and my Aunt, in their 60's, want an iPad. They are not fangrrrls. One has a Mac and would prefer the pad, the other doesn't use PC's a lot but would like a simple, portable device for email and internet, and easily sharing photos of my family (since she lives in Europe).
As for the walled garden, I'd say the motives are mixed. I (and many people I know) actually like walled gardens, in some circumstances, if it helps remove bullshit from my life. Not all circumstances, of course.
I do agree the blocking of iPad -> iPhone tethering is crap, but I can't tether on AT&T as it is.
As I've said elsewhere, I fly regularly, and until this weekend, the TSA, while generally surly, has not been as much of a hassle as most people here that swear off flying think it is. Yes, I'm a white Canadian, so it colours my experience, but I don't think that makes it worth dismissing.
I flew the day the airports reopened after 9-11, through the shoe bomber incident, the liquid bomber crap, and now this fire cracker asshat. I do think the TSA needs to change it's policy on responding to terrorist threats, and avoid these panic-stricken restrictions, like the ones this weekend, or 2006's liquid/gel restriction. They are pure theatre.
But usually, after the initial slow down, things get quite manageable and efficient at security checkpoints. For every anecdotal horror story, there are dozens of regular travellers that continue to travel this way, and it's gotten much more efficient than back in 2001-2002. The TSA needs to improve, absolutely, but I think many people that swore off flying years ago have imagined a beast far worse than the reality.
One can stop flying because they don't like being patted down and searched, and that's fine. It's a tradeoff.
But I also believe that it is politically impossible for the U.S. to drastically change their philosophy of airport checkpoint security, in spite of your best efforts to contact your congressman about this matter. The political climate is way too polarized. Minor adjustments will probably be achievable though. And I really hope this weekend's restrictions are lifted, the current news seems to indicate it will after Tuesday.
If you got patted down as missed your flight, you certainly didn't show up to the airport early enough. It adds maybe 10 minutes to the security process at most airports. I'd also note that missing a flight is a fairly minor inconvenience.
I think heightened inspection is generally a good thing, and a minor inconvenience. There are aspects I disagree with (liquids/gel restrictions, and this weekend's nothing-on-your-lap fiasco). But random inspections and pat downs, to me, make a lot of sense for this mode of travel.
Sure. And there are lots of Russian, Indian, and Arab colleagues are also Canadian and U.S. citizens, and really don't have problems with the TSA. I do know some dual citizens of countries such as Canada + Lebanon that have problems with CBP, but that's a different agency.
My point is that there are a number of people that refuse to fly because of TSA fears. And I think that's been overblown, generally. Until this past weekend, when they basically crippled inbound U.S. travel (some family members are still stuck in Toronto).
I fly regularly. It's really not that bad. I've never had a problem at the checkpoints, even when I'm randomly selected for a detailed search. Even U.S. CBP has been courteous when I cross the border.
This last hour sitting bullshit is rather fresh, of course.... but the TSA's measures aren't much of a hassle to date.
FWIW, Oracle takes about 30 minutes to install to vanilla state & create a basic database.
The big problem with VMs is image proliferation. Package-level management, like RPMs, etc. still is essential to understand versioning dependencies; virtualization does not fix that problem.
Srsly. I'd like to know.
I've tried Conan, LOTR, Warhammer, and Eve. Eve was cool but different playstyle. Warhammer was also cool but the social aspects were botched IMO and it's too PVP focused (though I still have an account). LOTR is pretty close, admittedly. Conan didn't click with me.
The only MMO that looks like it might really give Blizz a run for their money is Bioware and the Old Republic.
Between Malygos & The Nexus, Obsidian Sanctum, and the fact that Ulduar is , er, quite huge, I think there's some sour grapes there.
The new Colesium 10/25 raid has some quite fun encounters; Faction Champions in 25 is a fun grawl, and Twin Val'kyrs has a unique twist. Of course, this is all to get people to gear up for Icecrown, so there's not another Sunwell debacle where most people don't get to see that content.
I don't get the bitterness about grinding, it's inevitable that something new will always be added - you never will "win" the game. The only reason there is to go hardcore or to grind it out is to be "first". And with the achievements / title system, you get to brag about it afterwards, if that's your thing.
While in principle, I agree, it's unclear what level of "free" involvement one expects from a standards organization.
"Pay to play" standards organizations have for long been the norm - including the W3C. The IETF, while not pay-to-play, is certainly funded by large organizations.
So, in their cases, while you don't need to pay to implement the standard, you do need to contribute to the standards organization costs (not trivial) to participate in forming the standard.
In short, organizing teams of people costs money, and someone has to foot the bill. That's either a background benefactor, or its a published process for participants.
Back in those days, "open systems" was coined by UNIX vendors for the same reason - you didn't need to buy IBM hardware to run software, you could run software, and it was arguably portable. BillG took the same term and applied it to Windows in a different sort of way - if you ran Windows, you could still fire your hardware vendor and swap in a new one.
It was a bigger deal than one might imagine in today's world of virtual machines. People couldn't switch off of IBM despite tens of millions of $$ going to them for mainframes. The same argument applied to "software platform" was why Java took off in the 90's - that way you could use Linux, Windows, or UNIX and it wouldn't matter (for server software, anyway, for the most part - GUI was more of a failure).
So am I, which is why I can tell you that you're full of it. Go search the USENET archives, for example: you won't even find any significant mention of the term "open standard" prior to the introduction of "open source" in 1998. The term simply wasn't in common use. After that, many companies have been trying to misrepresent both their software and their standards as "open" in order to mislead customers into thinking that their products are something that they are not.
That's completely, utterly false. 'The Open Group' standards for DCE, UNIX and X dates back to the 1980's. The OMG had open standards in the early 90's for distributed objects. The ANSI, ISO, and IEEE go much further back (POSIX dates back to 1988).
Open source reference implementations are useful to supplement standards, but they're two different things, with two different outcomes. Open source without an open (potentially standard) interoperability architecture is unlikely to generate interoperable & competing implementations. Sure, you can always fork, but that leads to a cacaphony of slightly differing and incompatible options that geeks might love but most customers despise.
On the other hand, open standards without an open source reference implementation may cause problems with the standard's proper adoption, as there's no example for implementors to use. But going too far on the open source side is also a risk to standards adoption -- if an open source RI is copylefted, that dissuades adoption in its own way. Whereas a more permissive license, say MIT, Apache, CC-Attribution, etc. would better incentivize adoption.
Trash SQL in favour of coding all your data access needs. Welcome back to 1973, guys.
It's not like we could do parallel SQL in the 1980's. Or that you can't do parallel SQL in a compute cloud today.
No, It basically seems like they don't want to pay software vendors any money for database technology. That's mostly what the arguments boil down to. Oracle RAC is very scalable, arguably easier to do at massive scale than MySQL - but you have to pay Oracle money. For an Internet startup, I can understand why you'd take your chances with "roll your own". For an enterprise... I think not.
Twitter Creator On Iran: 'I Never Intended For Twitter To Be Useful'
SAN FRANCISCO--Creator Jack Dorsey was shocked and saddened this week after learning that his social networking device, Twitter, was being used to disseminate pertinent and timely information during the recent civil unrest in Iran. "Twitter was intended to be a way for vacant, self-absorbed egotists to share their most banal and idiotic thoughts with anyone pathetic enough to read them," said a visibly confused Dorsey, claiming that Twitter is at its most powerful when it makes an already attention-starved populace even more needy for constant affirmation. ... (click link to read the rest)
A lot of people disagree with your view. This isn't a cut & dry case like OJ. The man had a serious Peter Pan complex, yes. Was a he a pedophile? I don't think so, and apparently neither did a jury.
As for his career decisions, etc., I think you are extremely wrong on this. Even a cursory look into the making of his records, videos, etc., shows the man had brains. There are numerous artists that have worked with him that will attest to this, unless you're going to write all of them off too.
Don't forget Skinny Puppy. There wouldn't have been a Pretty Hate Machine without them, and I'm pretty sure "Down In It" was Trent's Ode to "Dig It" ;-)
Also, for metal fans, there were..
Faith No More
Metallica
Slayer
Iron Maiden (w/ Dickinson)
Celtic Frost
Bathory
Voivod
All hugely influential...
It uses the Phone's SN#, I believe.
How do I know this? Well, I don't, but I've verified that Find my iPhone "works" with just WiFi if your phone is otherwise SIMless.
Unfortunately, "Works" is a relative term -- it will guess the location of the IP address based on the WHOIS information, which won't help much other than identify the ISP's location.
On the other hand, it will still display remote messages. And will do a remote wipe.
Twitter is not a trivial application to scale, considering the wide disparity in listeners to follower ratios, that views are dynamically generated by interpolating many-to-many message streams, and that each message is persistent forever.
As an analogy, It's like managing an IRC server, with persistent messages that are full-text indexed, with one channel per user, and unlimited number of users can join each other's channels. When you join a new user's channel, your chat log is automatically (and quickly) re-woven with messages from that channel according to relative time series of these messages. And, there's a global channel that everyone can watch to see what any user in any channel is saying at any time.
Now do this, all the while avoiding netsplits (i.e. missing messages), allowing retracts of almost message, recent or historical, and ensuring the channel history (eventually) reflects that change. And handle sudden bursts of activity among unpredictable sets of channels because they're all attending the same conference, or a burst of network-wide high activity because people are watching the World Cup or Obama's inauguration.
The point is that, while the idea is simple, the variability of use and disparity of activity is what makes life interesting; the messaging & DB architecture that works well for recent activity, for example, doesn't help for having reasonable persistent random-access to historical messages.
In all, Twitter has gotten a *lot* more reliable the past several months than it was a year ago.