My neighbor is the head of city planning for a large Minneapolis suburb and he was telling me about the latest negotiations cell carriers have been having with municipalities. He's not a technical person computer-wise, but his explanation was that they were moving away from the traditional large cell model to much smaller cells and negotiations for right of way and placement.
He was critical of Minneapolis, the first city they negotiated with who he said "gave away the store" and suburbs were having a hard time negotiating against the bad agreements Minneapolis made.
Anyway, maybe they are already planning for a different cell size/structure to go along with 5G, or maybe it's just an adaptation for the realities of LTE.
IMHO, the "Democrats with bylines" label has become a real problem, even to the point now where journalists have invented a debate where they ask with Trump if they even have to bother with the kabuki theater of neutral journalism. My sense is that this is a symptom of collective bias infused with personal rage. They're so disgusted with him on an ideological level that they can't even maintain a level of professional neutrality.
I'm no Trump supporter, but the media and especially the print media seems to massively misquote and misinterpret him. On too many occasions I've seen him speak in video clips and the stories that wind up in print about the same sound bites that appeared in the videos seem as if the reporters are paranoid schizophrenics. Maybe Trump has a manner of speaking that doesn't translate to print, or maybe reporters are willfully twisting his words, or some other reasonable explanation, but so often the media coverage of him seems entirely disconnected from reality, giving the appearance of extreme bias.
The bias was more subtle against Sanders in favor of Clinton, but the media's unquestioning support and lack of criticism of her seems extremely apparent to me.
Do they have the smartphone-enabled model that lets you control the vibration functionality from a *remote* smartphone, so you can further bridge the phone sex gap?
What is the best PDF display choice for Windows 10?
I'll admit to using Edge just out of sheer laziness on a fairly new Win 10 laptop just to avoid Acrobat Reader. From file explorer, I usually point them to Chrome.
It seemed like for years Reader was a big security problem. The last time I looked at third party PDF display software, it was a maze of spyware and nagware with no obvious great replacement.
Is there a good resource on how the typical Comcast municipal network is actually structured?
My vague understanding based on looking around is that some series of houses (a few blocks, more or less, for a typical single family house urban neighborhood) are all tied to a node via coax, and the node is tied to the rest of the Comcast network via fiber optics.
Is that how it actually looks? Are the nodes tied directly to some central office? Do they send cable TV video via fiber optics, or is video handled through some separate RF distribution system? What kind of connectivity do they generally use from the node on up?
Maybe to his favor, Obama hasn't gotten into any new conflicts, but it seems kind of funny to judge what he hasn't done as an affirmative accomplishment. By that standard, you could judge him by other things he hasn't done, too, and many of them could be negative, failure-to-accomplish-anything kinds of changes. I didn't commit mass murder at lunch, but nobody's giving me a peace prize for what i didn't do.
Maybe I underestimate the power of doing nothing (although God knows I've managed to make a career out of it), but it seems to me when doing nothing is used as a standard of a positive accomplishment it usually feels like an excuse for not doing anything.
I can't tell if Libya is a gross failure. Maybe we've just gotten lucky, and the proximity of kinda-stable Algeria and Egypt and the fucking Sahara desert have kept what is a an objective disaster from being an active, horrible nightly news disaster, or whether there's some way to spin it into on the cusp of stabilizing, although I think I recently read we're doing a little close air support there lately.
Syria is a train wreck which Obama's do-nothing work ethic seems to have done nothing positive to improve. Obviously not an easy place to make positive contributions, but something tells me we might not be any worse off had we managed to displace Assad. I don't think ISIS has the mettle to take and hold the entire country and it might be argued that had Assad been pushed out early on, the stalemate its turned into might not have developed, leaving them with less free space to maneuver in.
And you can go on and on about lots of places where the do-nothing work ethic maybe hasn't positively contributed to making things worse, but where they sure seem like nearly anything would have been better.
She sure sounded like she was more than capable at working any call center job and was genuinely conflicted about the type of work she was doing.
While the people I've riled up weren't like that, what makes me feel guilty about riling them is that at the end of the day, I know they're just people making the best out of an impossibly shitty life of poverty in an impossibly shitty country in an era of impossibly shit economics.
You can do much better than that with Indian fake support guys.
I find that if I delve into the right insults I can get them swearing, insulting and threatening. Sometimes you have to hang up on them, they won't quit.
It's like I'm undermining American foreign policy one person at a time.
I've said some truly horrible things to them that probably make me an awful human being, but then I remember they were trying to steal from me, which is worse than words, and I don't feel bad at all.
I use VLC on my laptop for playing movies on planes. It'd be kind of nice to have a touchscreen-friendly UI for those situations. It's kind of a nuisance to remember keybindings or use the touchpad.
I think we're largely setup for perpetual copyright anymore now that so much of the economy is based on intellectual property and it can be duplicated so easily.
I think IP owners like DRM at least as much for its eventual obsolescence as for its resistance to casual copying. They know that they can comfortably license content with DRM knowing that the distributor and/or their DRM regime will eventually go out of business or become obsolete and that all they have to do is re-license it to the next distributor and sell the same product again.
What bothers me is how easy it is to buy a "perpetual use" license only to have perpetual be tied to the distributor's DRM system. That's not honest.
For watches that don't change very much, I've noticed they have changed without a ton of observation.
My wife gave me a Tag Heuer chronograph for my birthday. Now this is the fast food level of nice watches, but it was $2500 new in 2007. I'd like to tell you what it is new now, but they don't make a Tag with the same movement or features anymore. The most comparable chronograph (but without day) was close to $4000.
And when I was in the jewelry store to pick up my serviced Tag, I heard the jeweler telling a customer that her high-end Swiss watch no longer had a bracelet available for it from the manufacturer, if she wanted one they would have to try to find a third party bracelet and modify it to fit her watch.
IMHO, there may a couple of signature models (like the Submariner or the Omega Speedmaster) that are kept the same for brand identity purposes, but my take is that these brands are constantly revising their product line for fashion purposes and to align with whatever the Swiss movement consortium is putting out these days.
Maybe a handful of ultra-expensive watch brands are still the same as they ever were, probably those that make their own movements, hand assemble them and use a lot of precious metals, but overall the "nice watch" thing seems to be just another consumer product that changes with the whims of fashion.
They inundate consumers with options, purchasing plans, agreements, contracts, and all sorts of unnecessary business models designed to overwhelm consumers- none of which is necessarily fraudulent.
I would argue that any deliberate attempt to confuse or overwhelm customers, especially with low-value and high cost options, is prima facie fraud because it's done to prevent consumers from making rational choices and represents trickery designed to sell products people don't need or don't understand.
I also think that sellers go out of there way to create false choices and use obscure language in a deliberate attempt to eliminate product comparisons and reduce the perception of choice and competition and create information asymmetry.
It all represents a deliberate attempt to deviate from an optimal market where buyer and seller have equal information.
The problem is that I don't think shady business practices are an enforcement priority, period. David Horowitz's "Fight Back" consumer TV show went on the air in 1976, and Consumer Reports has been publishing longer than that. 60 Minutes used to be famous for their on-camera ambush of fraudulent business before they became a talk show for the Geritol set.
American commerce is chock full of hucksters, scammers and flim-flam artists that get away with all kinds of shady practices that if pulled off by individuals would result in jail time, but as "business" they seem pretty immune from investigation let alone prosecution.
I could tell the cops my elderly neighbor sells Oxycontin and get more investigatory effort than is put forward towards the entire state's car dealers.
I sometimes wonder if hustling people (in effect, lying to them) is so ingrained in American culture that we really don't *want* strict enforcement of scams and fraud because at the end of the day we worry that our own frauds will be exposed and punished.
If you and I did this through some business we owned, we would be charged with a dozen felonies. The prosecutor would have a field day over the fact that we obscured the nature of the charges to make it look like our legitimate business charges and did nothing to guarantee the charges were legitimate. Bottom line, we would go to jail.
AT&T? A fine so small that it is a rounding error on their SEC filings. And certainly not a hint of any criminal prosecution.
This is sham justice. AT&T should have been fined 10x the gross revenue they received from this little scam. The executives in charge of managing this scam should have been jailed for fraud, possibly even as co-conspirators in whatever drug investigation caused the DEA to find this operation.
They could have sent a message that said if you want to skim the cream with your billing operation, great, but make sure the billing is 100% legitimate or you will be held accountable for fraud.
those metal "utility buildings" are probably not fire rated; from your description, they might be just the enclosures that outdoor generators come with.
It was kind of hard to tell whether they were just OEM enclosures or something purpose built, as they had the same generic institutional bland paint scheme as the building. I will say that they didn't look significantly larger than the stock enclosure you'd expect around a generator. But again, hard to judge because they're slightly larger than shipping container and I've also seen a similar size box with OEM graphics and paint on them.
I kind of wonder if generator manufacturers have a "fire containment" enclosure option with built-in fire suppression that would also close all the air intake/exhausts to help extinguish a fire, as well as being made of a material that would withstand a brief fire.
Now when you order a Widget, the order picker grabs one out of the bin, and it's anyone's guess whether you're getting a real Widget that Amazon sourced directly, or a knock-off version supplied by the third party vendor. Even though you chose the version "Sold and fulfilled by Amazon" you can still wind up with a counterfeit.
That sucks.
I always kind of assumed that the third party sellers listing the same SKU as Amazon but with prime shipping were basically paper companies, somehow buying OEM stock at a marginal discount, giving up 75% of the profit to sell the same item at a marginal discount but with nothing but electronic logistics as overhead -- possibly even "buying" from the OEM and getting "fulfillment" with the inventory the OEM already provided to Amazon.
Harder to do when you're in Florida and its -20F at home.
Pay the ransom or run the risk of burst pipes and destroyed interiors from water damage.
During the mortgage meltdown, there were at least a couple of "frozen waterfall" houses that turned up in the news when the heating failed. Basements flooded, ceilings collapsed and pretty ice sculptures where you'd normally expect drywall.
I was going on a previous post's claims of a generator fire, rather than an ATS failure.
I would think an ATS failure resulting in fire would be pretty darn hard to recover from in a timely fashion due to what I would expect would be some major electrical rework to replace the ATS, housing, and feeds, and related switchgear.
I would guess that a "modern" data center design would isolate these components enough that even if the ATS melted to slag in place it would be a matter of just replacing the ATS. At a legacy or private data center, I can see lots of these components housed in proximity with little isolation, and a catastrophic failure resulting in lots of power system damage.
Generator fire(s), while putting generators offline, would seem to be easier to recover from barring data center facility damage. Switch back to utility power and await delivery from Caterpillar of temporary backup power units which would be put back onto the generator bus.
How does "Sold by and shipped by Amazon.com" work then?
To avoid junk or misrepresentation, I usually choose the Amazon-as-seller option. vs. the negligible savings of a third party seller.
I can believe that products Amazon sells and stocks are merely "owned" by Amazon in the sense that they essentially just act as a logistics warehouse, perhaps paying some small premium to possess the item in their warehouses to meet Prime delivery obligations.
My question would be why primary and secondary generators were placed close enough that a fire with one would so easily affect another. I get that there are some serious temptations, including not wanting to run main power feeds very far or shared fuel storage.
But the kind of proximity that would pose a dual generator fire risk seems like a bad idea.
Ironically, this even crossed my mind at a year old data center I was at last week. Both backup generators were fairly close together and I wondered what kind of fire it would take to make both generators offline.
Maybe there's some kind of protection against this. In the data center I was at, the generators appeared enclosed in those metal utility buildings; perhaps these are sturdy enough to contain fires or have significant fire suppression abilities inside them that would keep a fire from spreading.
Calm down. Your social media site wasn't flying a half million people around the world in pressurized aluminum cans every day.
Not even counting future travel reservations or queries, how many DB transactions do you think they handle per passenger per day alone? And none of that counts any other potential transactions, such as service info, flight data such as aircraft telemetry, employee data, regulatory information and so on.
500 servers sounds almost too low, especially when you consider that probably more than a few are either legacy systems or run some kind of specialized software to move data between new systems and external legacy systems.
I don't spend any time on kickstarter, but my perception based on the kickstarter projects I do end up hearing about tend to be either totally unique products for which there is no market equivalent or products with features or functionality which no market equivalent has or does well.
This would seem to dovetail with the sheer volume of product "hacks" out there and the web sites which focus on them, from lifehacker to instructables to a lot of YouTube videos showing you how to mod something or use common parts/ingredients to make or modify something to do its job better. Kickstarter just seems to be a way to buy these things out of the box without without having to do the modding yourself or for things where modding just isn't practical.
I think the better answer is your last one -- the market forces features we don't want and doesn't improve the features we do use. The former often seems to be features guided by MBA spreadsheets calculating added profit margins and estimating market lock-in they can achieve.
The consistency thing is a problem with Windows generally -- you can see it on Server 2012r2 where you need to use Server Manager to perform certain tasks, but many others are still handled by MMCs that haven't changed much if any since 2003 Server. Many don't even appear to use updated display APIs and look weird when subject to display scaling.
And where they have new features that require Server Manager, the Server Manager GUI can only partially configure them, the more specific configuration details require PowerShell commands, with all of their obscure, multi-syllable options. So the GUI isn't feature complete.
Compounding this is that some new features, like Storage Spaces, are really just disk management features. So Server Manager can do some of those, too, but you end up asking yourself -- how much effort did it take to create an entirely new GUI management system that only partially implements old management tool features, which you still need to do a lot of tasks? Wouldn't it have been simpler to simply add new features to the existing GUI tools?
Personally, I'm fairly cynical -- I think that so much management effort is put into scheming, trying to create lock-in scenarios and creating an illusion of newness that there's little human capital left for *engineering* the product. So you end up with something that may have some worthwhile enhancements from a core technology perspective, but it has so many cosmetic changes that the entire thing feels designed by committees whose leadership doesn't communicate. It's like if you work for a group under Windows, you think of something and submit it to a committee to get included in the next release, but the person who decides what to include is more focused on market share and looks, so there's just no coordination.
Slashdot Mirror
They seem to be planning for it.
My neighbor is the head of city planning for a large Minneapolis suburb and he was telling me about the latest negotiations cell carriers have been having with municipalities. He's not a technical person computer-wise, but his explanation was that they were moving away from the traditional large cell model to much smaller cells and negotiations for right of way and placement.
He was critical of Minneapolis, the first city they negotiated with who he said "gave away the store" and suburbs were having a hard time negotiating against the bad agreements Minneapolis made.
Anyway, maybe they are already planning for a different cell size/structure to go along with 5G, or maybe it's just an adaptation for the realities of LTE.
IMHO, the "Democrats with bylines" label has become a real problem, even to the point now where journalists have invented a debate where they ask with Trump if they even have to bother with the kabuki theater of neutral journalism. My sense is that this is a symptom of collective bias infused with personal rage. They're so disgusted with him on an ideological level that they can't even maintain a level of professional neutrality.
I'm no Trump supporter, but the media and especially the print media seems to massively misquote and misinterpret him. On too many occasions I've seen him speak in video clips and the stories that wind up in print about the same sound bites that appeared in the videos seem as if the reporters are paranoid schizophrenics. Maybe Trump has a manner of speaking that doesn't translate to print, or maybe reporters are willfully twisting his words, or some other reasonable explanation, but so often the media coverage of him seems entirely disconnected from reality, giving the appearance of extreme bias.
The bias was more subtle against Sanders in favor of Clinton, but the media's unquestioning support and lack of criticism of her seems extremely apparent to me.
Way back in the 1980s when USA Today was just getting started, a news kiosk on campus had the logos of various papers on the wall next to the kiosk.
One day next to the USA Today kiosk, a graffiti artist had added in extremely neat penmanship "...tomorrow the world!" in a kind of matching font.
Not only was it pretty funny, but I think because it looked like it belonged, it never got removed.
Do they have the smartphone-enabled model that lets you control the vibration functionality from a *remote* smartphone, so you can further bridge the phone sex gap?
I'm asking for a friend.
What is the best PDF display choice for Windows 10?
I'll admit to using Edge just out of sheer laziness on a fairly new Win 10 laptop just to avoid Acrobat Reader. From file explorer, I usually point them to Chrome.
It seemed like for years Reader was a big security problem. The last time I looked at third party PDF display software, it was a maze of spyware and nagware with no obvious great replacement.
Is there a good resource on how the typical Comcast municipal network is actually structured?
My vague understanding based on looking around is that some series of houses (a few blocks, more or less, for a typical single family house urban neighborhood) are all tied to a node via coax, and the node is tied to the rest of the Comcast network via fiber optics.
Is that how it actually looks? Are the nodes tied directly to some central office? Do they send cable TV video via fiber optics, or is video handled through some separate RF distribution system? What kind of connectivity do they generally use from the node on up?
Would you buy degraded status quo?
Maybe to his favor, Obama hasn't gotten into any new conflicts, but it seems kind of funny to judge what he hasn't done as an affirmative accomplishment. By that standard, you could judge him by other things he hasn't done, too, and many of them could be negative, failure-to-accomplish-anything kinds of changes. I didn't commit mass murder at lunch, but nobody's giving me a peace prize for what i didn't do.
Maybe I underestimate the power of doing nothing (although God knows I've managed to make a career out of it), but it seems to me when doing nothing is used as a standard of a positive accomplishment it usually feels like an excuse for not doing anything.
I can't tell if Libya is a gross failure. Maybe we've just gotten lucky, and the proximity of kinda-stable Algeria and Egypt and the fucking Sahara desert have kept what is a an objective disaster from being an active, horrible nightly news disaster, or whether there's some way to spin it into on the cusp of stabilizing, although I think I recently read we're doing a little close air support there lately.
Syria is a train wreck which Obama's do-nothing work ethic seems to have done nothing positive to improve. Obviously not an easy place to make positive contributions, but something tells me we might not be any worse off had we managed to displace Assad. I don't think ISIS has the mettle to take and hold the entire country and it might be argued that had Assad been pushed out early on, the stalemate its turned into might not have developed, leaving them with less free space to maneuver in.
And you can go on and on about lots of places where the do-nothing work ethic maybe hasn't positively contributed to making things worse, but where they sure seem like nearly anything would have been better.
She sure sounded like she was more than capable at working any call center job and was genuinely conflicted about the type of work she was doing.
While the people I've riled up weren't like that, what makes me feel guilty about riling them is that at the end of the day, I know they're just people making the best out of an impossibly shitty life of poverty in an impossibly shitty country in an era of impossibly shit economics.
You can do much better than that with Indian fake support guys.
I find that if I delve into the right insults I can get them swearing, insulting and threatening. Sometimes you have to hang up on them, they won't quit.
It's like I'm undermining American foreign policy one person at a time.
I've said some truly horrible things to them that probably make me an awful human being, but then I remember they were trying to steal from me, which is worse than words, and I don't feel bad at all.
I use VLC on my laptop for playing movies on planes. It'd be kind of nice to have a touchscreen-friendly UI for those situations. It's kind of a nuisance to remember keybindings or use the touchpad.
I think we're largely setup for perpetual copyright anymore now that so much of the economy is based on intellectual property and it can be duplicated so easily.
I think IP owners like DRM at least as much for its eventual obsolescence as for its resistance to casual copying. They know that they can comfortably license content with DRM knowing that the distributor and/or their DRM regime will eventually go out of business or become obsolete and that all they have to do is re-license it to the next distributor and sell the same product again.
What bothers me is how easy it is to buy a "perpetual use" license only to have perpetual be tied to the distributor's DRM system. That's not honest.
For watches that don't change very much, I've noticed they have changed without a ton of observation.
My wife gave me a Tag Heuer chronograph for my birthday. Now this is the fast food level of nice watches, but it was $2500 new in 2007. I'd like to tell you what it is new now, but they don't make a Tag with the same movement or features anymore. The most comparable chronograph (but without day) was close to $4000.
And when I was in the jewelry store to pick up my serviced Tag, I heard the jeweler telling a customer that her high-end Swiss watch no longer had a bracelet available for it from the manufacturer, if she wanted one they would have to try to find a third party bracelet and modify it to fit her watch.
IMHO, there may a couple of signature models (like the Submariner or the Omega Speedmaster) that are kept the same for brand identity purposes, but my take is that these brands are constantly revising their product line for fashion purposes and to align with whatever the Swiss movement consortium is putting out these days.
Maybe a handful of ultra-expensive watch brands are still the same as they ever were, probably those that make their own movements, hand assemble them and use a lot of precious metals, but overall the "nice watch" thing seems to be just another consumer product that changes with the whims of fashion.
They inundate consumers with options, purchasing plans, agreements, contracts, and all sorts of unnecessary business models designed to overwhelm consumers- none of which is necessarily fraudulent.
I would argue that any deliberate attempt to confuse or overwhelm customers, especially with low-value and high cost options, is prima facie fraud because it's done to prevent consumers from making rational choices and represents trickery designed to sell products people don't need or don't understand.
I also think that sellers go out of there way to create false choices and use obscure language in a deliberate attempt to eliminate product comparisons and reduce the perception of choice and competition and create information asymmetry.
It all represents a deliberate attempt to deviate from an optimal market where buyer and seller have equal information.
The problem is that I don't think shady business practices are an enforcement priority, period. David Horowitz's "Fight Back" consumer TV show went on the air in 1976, and Consumer Reports has been publishing longer than that. 60 Minutes used to be famous for their on-camera ambush of fraudulent business before they became a talk show for the Geritol set.
American commerce is chock full of hucksters, scammers and flim-flam artists that get away with all kinds of shady practices that if pulled off by individuals would result in jail time, but as "business" they seem pretty immune from investigation let alone prosecution.
I could tell the cops my elderly neighbor sells Oxycontin and get more investigatory effort than is put forward towards the entire state's car dealers.
I sometimes wonder if hustling people (in effect, lying to them) is so ingrained in American culture that we really don't *want* strict enforcement of scams and fraud because at the end of the day we worry that our own frauds will be exposed and punished.
If you and I did this through some business we owned, we would be charged with a dozen felonies. The prosecutor would have a field day over the fact that we obscured the nature of the charges to make it look like our legitimate business charges and did nothing to guarantee the charges were legitimate. Bottom line, we would go to jail.
AT&T? A fine so small that it is a rounding error on their SEC filings. And certainly not a hint of any criminal prosecution.
This is sham justice. AT&T should have been fined 10x the gross revenue they received from this little scam. The executives in charge of managing this scam should have been jailed for fraud, possibly even as co-conspirators in whatever drug investigation caused the DEA to find this operation.
They could have sent a message that said if you want to skim the cream with your billing operation, great, but make sure the billing is 100% legitimate or you will be held accountable for fraud.
those metal "utility buildings" are probably not fire rated; from your description, they might be just the enclosures that outdoor generators come with.
It was kind of hard to tell whether they were just OEM enclosures or something purpose built, as they had the same generic institutional bland paint scheme as the building. I will say that they didn't look significantly larger than the stock enclosure you'd expect around a generator. But again, hard to judge because they're slightly larger than shipping container and I've also seen a similar size box with OEM graphics and paint on them.
I kind of wonder if generator manufacturers have a "fire containment" enclosure option with built-in fire suppression that would also close all the air intake/exhausts to help extinguish a fire, as well as being made of a material that would withstand a brief fire.
Now when you order a Widget, the order picker grabs one out of the bin, and it's anyone's guess whether you're getting a real Widget that Amazon sourced directly, or a knock-off version supplied by the third party vendor. Even though you chose the version "Sold and fulfilled by Amazon" you can still wind up with a counterfeit.
That sucks.
I always kind of assumed that the third party sellers listing the same SKU as Amazon but with prime shipping were basically paper companies, somehow buying OEM stock at a marginal discount, giving up 75% of the profit to sell the same item at a marginal discount but with nothing but electronic logistics as overhead -- possibly even "buying" from the OEM and getting "fulfillment" with the inventory the OEM already provided to Amazon.
Harder to do when you're in Florida and its -20F at home.
Pay the ransom or run the risk of burst pipes and destroyed interiors from water damage.
During the mortgage meltdown, there were at least a couple of "frozen waterfall" houses that turned up in the news when the heating failed. Basements flooded, ceilings collapsed and pretty ice sculptures where you'd normally expect drywall.
I was going on a previous post's claims of a generator fire, rather than an ATS failure.
I would think an ATS failure resulting in fire would be pretty darn hard to recover from in a timely fashion due to what I would expect would be some major electrical rework to replace the ATS, housing, and feeds, and related switchgear.
I would guess that a "modern" data center design would isolate these components enough that even if the ATS melted to slag in place it would be a matter of just replacing the ATS. At a legacy or private data center, I can see lots of these components housed in proximity with little isolation, and a catastrophic failure resulting in lots of power system damage.
Generator fire(s), while putting generators offline, would seem to be easier to recover from barring data center facility damage. Switch back to utility power and await delivery from Caterpillar of temporary backup power units which would be put back onto the generator bus.
How does "Sold by and shipped by Amazon.com" work then?
To avoid junk or misrepresentation, I usually choose the Amazon-as-seller option. vs. the negligible savings of a third party seller.
I can believe that products Amazon sells and stocks are merely "owned" by Amazon in the sense that they essentially just act as a logistics warehouse, perhaps paying some small premium to possess the item in their warehouses to meet Prime delivery obligations.
My question would be why primary and secondary generators were placed close enough that a fire with one would so easily affect another. I get that there are some serious temptations, including not wanting to run main power feeds very far or shared fuel storage.
But the kind of proximity that would pose a dual generator fire risk seems like a bad idea.
Ironically, this even crossed my mind at a year old data center I was at last week. Both backup generators were fairly close together and I wondered what kind of fire it would take to make both generators offline.
Maybe there's some kind of protection against this. In the data center I was at, the generators appeared enclosed in those metal utility buildings; perhaps these are sturdy enough to contain fires or have significant fire suppression abilities inside them that would keep a fire from spreading.
Calm down. Your social media site wasn't flying a half million people around the world in pressurized aluminum cans every day.
Not even counting future travel reservations or queries, how many DB transactions do you think they handle per passenger per day alone? And none of that counts any other potential transactions, such as service info, flight data such as aircraft telemetry, employee data, regulatory information and so on.
500 servers sounds almost too low, especially when you consider that probably more than a few are either legacy systems or run some kind of specialized software to move data between new systems and external legacy systems.
IIRC, NWA, which was merged into Delta a few years back, had a backhoe outage when a fiber trunk got cut.
I don't spend any time on kickstarter, but my perception based on the kickstarter projects I do end up hearing about tend to be either totally unique products for which there is no market equivalent or products with features or functionality which no market equivalent has or does well.
This would seem to dovetail with the sheer volume of product "hacks" out there and the web sites which focus on them, from lifehacker to instructables to a lot of YouTube videos showing you how to mod something or use common parts/ingredients to make or modify something to do its job better. Kickstarter just seems to be a way to buy these things out of the box without without having to do the modding yourself or for things where modding just isn't practical.
I think the better answer is your last one -- the market forces features we don't want and doesn't improve the features we do use. The former often seems to be features guided by MBA spreadsheets calculating added profit margins and estimating market lock-in they can achieve.
The consistency thing is a problem with Windows generally -- you can see it on Server 2012r2 where you need to use Server Manager to perform certain tasks, but many others are still handled by MMCs that haven't changed much if any since 2003 Server. Many don't even appear to use updated display APIs and look weird when subject to display scaling.
And where they have new features that require Server Manager, the Server Manager GUI can only partially configure them, the more specific configuration details require PowerShell commands, with all of their obscure, multi-syllable options. So the GUI isn't feature complete.
Compounding this is that some new features, like Storage Spaces, are really just disk management features. So Server Manager can do some of those, too, but you end up asking yourself -- how much effort did it take to create an entirely new GUI management system that only partially implements old management tool features, which you still need to do a lot of tasks? Wouldn't it have been simpler to simply add new features to the existing GUI tools?
Personally, I'm fairly cynical -- I think that so much management effort is put into scheming, trying to create lock-in scenarios and creating an illusion of newness that there's little human capital left for *engineering* the product. So you end up with something that may have some worthwhile enhancements from a core technology perspective, but it has so many cosmetic changes that the entire thing feels designed by committees whose leadership doesn't communicate. It's like if you work for a group under Windows, you think of something and submit it to a committee to get included in the next release, but the person who decides what to include is more focused on market share and looks, so there's just no coordination.