Maybe it's time for you to stop using Facebook altogether.
I would have to start using Facebook first. I've never had an account and have no plans to get one.
Your continued use of the site IS their explicit permission that they can serve you their content - ads and all.
I don't use their site so they don't have any permission from me about anything. Anyway they can try. Doesn't mean I have to cooperate or let them do it. I have confidence I'll win that arms race.
As if I needed any more reasons to avoid Facebook they go ahead and give me a doozy like this. Cute how they think I'm obligated to cooperate with their little scheme. Seriously I can't imagine anything Facebook could do at this point that would make me want to use their service.
You have every right in the world to ditch facebook, but you will become a complete social pariah in 2016 doing that.
If you actually believe that then you probably are severely lacking in real world friends. Just because someone "friends" you on Facebook doesn't actually mean they are your friend. If your "friends" treat you like a social pariah for not looking at their banal Facebook scribblings then they probably aren't someone you really need to be spending time interacting with anyway.
Facebook is ad-supported. Ads are a part of the Facebook experience; they're not a tack on,
A) Yes the ads ARE tacked on after the fact. B) Facebook being ad supported is Not My Problem (tm). If they want to negotiate a deal directly with me for cash money whereby I will no longer block ads I'm willing to have that conversation but it won't be cheap. Certainly will cost them more than the shitty services they currently provide. I will actively fight anyone who thinks they have a right to put advertisements in front of me without my explicit permission.
On the other hand, if we waited for the first version of every product to be perfect before shipping, nothing would ever ship.
Doesn't have to be perfect. It does has to have the proper design intent. The iPhone got the fundamentals of a smartphone right. That's why pretty much every smartphone since has cribbed a lot of their original design. (which is a good thing) No Apple didn't get every detail correct right away but the framework was there. I don't think Apple has accomplished the same thing with the Apple Watch. Not yet anyway. I also think they are chasing what really is a pretty narrow set of use cases.
Complex product design is an iterative process. The first cars didn't ship with airbags, 300 horsepower engines, antilock brakes, and power steering.
No but they did get the fundamentals right. 4 Wheels, steering system, suspension, seats, etc. A Model T is recognizably a car like one today even if they didn't get all the details right. The PCs from the late 70s & early 80s got the formula right and it's been iteration ever since. I'm not convinced the Apple Watch has got the fundamental formula right. (nor anyone else for that matter) I don't see a use case that would get me or those I know to start wearing a watch given that I very rarely wear one now even if they dramatically improve its current deficiencies.
Sometimes it's useful to release a product that is useful to a significant market segment, and then get usage statistics and product feedback in order to make it far more useful to a much larger market.
Certainly although I've seen little evidence so far of Apple doing this with the Apple Watch. I'm sure they are working hard to improve it but working hard if they are on a dead end path ultimately is futile. While I'm not certain if they are on a dead end, they certainly are a long way from what I consider a product worthy of purchase. My take on it is that the technology isn't quite there yet for a really useful smartwatch. I don't think the idea is dumb but I'm not sure we have gotten quite to the point where it can all come together into something greater than the sum of the parts.
I said "useful". So no, I didn't forget at all. The only thing about it that makes a watch a status symbol is the price and that is an independent variable from the design. A bag of shit could be a status symbol if you could convince people to pay a lot of money for one and display it prominently. (See Trump Fragrances if you need an example)
The most common use case I hear for smartwatches is "I don't need to pull out my phone to look at notifications during meetings!". Yeah, neither do The sort of notification that may require my immediate attention during a meeting (or any other situation, really) comes with a klaxon, a red strobe light and people wailing about the awakening of Cthulhu and end of the world (i.e., the network is down).
Exactly. If something really demands my immediate attention either A) I know about it in advance and just warn people when socially necessary that I might have to attend to whatever it is or B) I don't know about it in advance but it will come from a source that will know how to get my attention in an emergency (call my secretary, etc) and so a watch provides zero additional value. But almost always it can wait a few minutes. I just don't get the notification argument for a phone. The marginal value of that is close to nil.
"Proof" is an absolute. It's either waterproof or its not.
Not true at all. A watch can be waterproof at 1m depth and not waterproof at 20m depth. That is true for any device, whether it be a submarine, a wristwatch or anything else. You can accurately describe something as waterproof as long as you also provide the conditions under which it is waterproof. Water resistant means that it will not immediately fail under a particular set of conditions but that prolonged exposure will probably result in damage or failure eventually. Water proof means it can withstand those condition indefinitely without ill effect. See the difference?
"Better waterproofing" just means it wasn't waterproof before.
Incorrect. It means it is waterproof in conditions where it wasn't previously.
maybe the killer applications will also be external sensors
A wrist watch really only has two things that it is valuable for. 1) portable notification of concise pieces of information (time, short messages, notifications, appointments, temperature readings, etc) and 2) a portable sensor suite and data logger (thermometer, barometer, altimeter, gps, accelerometer, compass, etc) . And these things are really only useful if they come in a package with substantial battery life (1 week minimum) and an interface that isn't absurd. The key word in all that is portable. It's only for applications where carrying something bigger like a cell phone makes no sense. Workouts, sloppy conditions, swimming, certain social situations, and the like. Any situation where carrying a smartphone makes sense the watch becomes redundant. So any watch that isn't useful without a cell phone is de-facto pointless.
My concern with the Apple watch is that they are trying to turn it into another smartphone rather than a device that makes sense by itself within its own design constraints. It's like they are trying to stuff 10 pounds of crap into a 5 pound bag. I own a smartphone because it doesn't tether me to a PC and it provides a ton of value by itself. In fact it made it so that I can carry fewer devices since it consolidated my MP3 player, PDA, point and shoot camera and cell phone into one device. I don't own a smartwatch because A) I don't like wearing a wrist watch and B) it isn't useful as a standalone product for anything I need and C) it doesn't replace or consolidate anything for me. I already have an old school wrist mounted chronometer (which I rarely use) and also a fitbit for the rare occasions when I need that sort of data logging. The smartphone I carry does almost everything an Apple watch does and does most of it better except in the rare cases where I need extreme portability. If I have to carry both anyway what is the point of the watch?
I'm not opposed to the idea of a smartwatch but nobody has hit the magic formula yet I think.
I go by the notion that locks are for honest people and things like smartlocks and connected locks are primarily for the convenience of the owner. Realistically, for most consumer applications of locks, if someone wanted to get in, the lock isn't keeping them out.
That's true but there is no point in making it easier than necessary for a lock to get picked. At least with the deadbolt on my door someone would either have to A) smash the door which tends to leave evidence or B) pick the lock which (should) take non-trivial amounts of time. You are quite correct that locks are generally more for keeping honest people honest than to keep out determined criminals but that doesn't excuse making a shoddy, easily bypassed product.
"Smart" thermostats ofter communicate with the furnace / cooling via a cat-6 or some other type of communications cable, they are rarly just a switch.
No they do not. Retrofitting a cat6 (overkill) cable to run to the HVAC in an existing house would be prohibitively expensive and/or time consuming. They communicate with the HVAC via the same set of wires a "dumb" thermostat would use and gets power over the same cables. They generally communicate with the network via wifi. Nest even kindly color codes everything so that someone who isn't a a licensed technician can do the job.
What I liked was the ability to ship to to a local store (5 miles away) and pick it up there for zero shipping charge.
Zero shipping charge but you spend 30+ minutes (minimum) of your time plus gas going to pick it up. It might be cheaper depending on what you are having sent to you but the price isn't zero. Plus you have to actually go to a Walmart which is something I'd actually pay to avoid. My nearest Walmart is about 8 miles away so with my truck I'll spend roughly 3/4 of a gallon of fuel to get there and back. At local fuel prices as I type this (around $2.25) that is about $1.68 per trip in fuel alone for "free" in store pickup. Not even counting the value of my time either. Not bad but not great either. See below.
That's so much better than Amazon's having to wait three days to a week before it is even shipped if you opt for free delivery. (I'm not talking about amazon prime's free shipping, I don't pay $100 per year for free shipping when the product price already has shipping charges baked in.
You are aware that Walmart has their own version of Prime, right? Whether Prime is a good deal depends on how you shop. For me I buy a LOT through Amazon so on a per transaction basis it would be substantially more expensive (not to mention time consuming) for me to go pick something up at Walmart every time I placed an order. I placed 154 orders through Amazon in 2015, so the freight cost per order was $0.65 per order. That's less than the cost of gas to my nearest Walmart and back AND I didn't have to waste my time traveling to Walmart.
Sears.com is, bar none, the most crufty and crappy e-commerce site I have ever seen. When you combine that with their high prices and poor customer service, it's a wonder they haven't folded already.
It's only a matter of time I think. Sears (and Kmart - same company now) have been in a seeming death spiral for quite a while now. Stunningly badly managed. I actually worked for Kmart for a brief time and my experience working there was so bad I've been rooting for them to die in a fire ever since.
Without Federal requirements there is no way a corporation is going to spend that kind of money.
A few failures like this one and they'll dig into the couch cushions to find the change for it. Having a backup data center for stuff that will shut the company down is not exactly a tough thing to justify. This shutdown alone would probably justify the cost in a single day.
They have legal protections in place to assure they retain their terminal slots, so while they aren't making money now they won't lose in the long run.
Perhaps but if they managed their IT properly they wouldn't have to lose money now. They can buy the insurance or they can take the risk of serious illness so to speak. Their choice and their funeral. Sounds like they rolled the dice and came up snake eyes today.
The only businesses with total data recovery sites and plans to actually use them are Banks, and that is because they are required by the FDIC.
Not true. Some medical practices have them. Some internet firms have them (at least for the mission critical stuff). Some bits of the military and government have them. Insurance companies have them. Stock exchanges have them. And there are more as well. If it's valuable enough you have a backup data center of some sort.
For any IT discussion on slashdot, as time T increases, the probability of a neckbeard blaming "MBAs" approaches 1
Yeah, it's sort of a riff on Godwin's law. If you blame "MBAs" for a problem, that person has no fact based arguments left so the argument is over and the person doing it loses the argument. It's basically scapegoating and tribalism at its worst.
Management is a pretty easy target. Management has to make decisions with imperfect information (like playing poker) whereas engineers are used to working with greater certainty (more like playing chess) and it's hard for many of them to wrap their head around the difference. Engineers who don't actually know any better seem to think MBA is shorthand for management incompetence. Never mind that a MBA is a degree, not a person or even a category of people. It's as stupid and incoherent as saying CS = incompetent programmers. I happen to be an engineer but I'm also a certified accountant. I have degrees in both engineering and business and I use both in my day job running a manufacturing plant. I can say with absolute confidence that there are just as many engineering school graduates who are bad at their jobs as there are business school graduates who are bad at their jobs. I run into both routinely. And just as many who are good at their jobs as well. Just because you may have run into some of the bad ones doesn't grant the right to paint the rest with the same brush.
I'll bet you dollars to donuts that the IT folks squealed like stabbed piglets that they needed a backup system alternative.
I'll take that bet. I'm betting they either overlooked something technical or they are just really bad at making financial arguments. Since a key part of engineering is being able to justify what you want to do in financial terms my guess is that they just weren't very good at their job. Justifying equipment to prevent an outage that would cost millions of dollars per minute is trivial.
Who knows? Maybe the costs of dealing with this fiasco will be cheaper than having a backup system . . . ?
Maybe but I doubt it. Given that Delta and other airlines are experiencing record profits, it's hard to see them not understanding the math of a system-wide shut down and what that would cost them.
Actually, what I'm hearing is that a fire in the backup generator took out the primary generator.
Shouldn't have any effect on the BACKUP DATA CENTER. One facility can go down. It happens. It should take a thermonuclear war to take out several if they are doing it right.
Still though, this begs to be something hosted in a datacenter/cloud with an online shadow in the background of another location replicating everything and ready to take over at a moment's notice, or something similar. Pretty standard these days, but airlines are so tight for money that they end up sometimes shooting their own feet...
Airlines are making record profits these days. Arguing that they don't have the money to properly set up the system that runs the whole company is ridiculous.
I wouldn't be so fast to lay this at the feet of IT.
It's the fault of IT (which includes IT management) unless you have evidence to the contrary. If they didn't adequately present the argument for why a robust network is a valuable asset then shame on them. Preventing then entire company from shutting down and losing millions of dollars per minute is a trivial argument to make. So yeah, IT carries most if not all of the blame here. If they couldn't make that argument then they suck at their job.
I'm certain they wanted to make it robust, distributed and redundant but that all costs money. When PHB's with MBA's see IT as a cost centre, they see all this redundancy as "waste" to be cut back. Budgets are reduced and so are capabilities.
[sarcasm] Ahh, yes the MBA scapegoat. Couldn't possibly be that the folks who designed the network did a shit job of it. Clearly they must have been undercut by some bean counter somewhere. [/sarcasm] In a company the size of Delta if a power outage in a single location causes a company wide failure, that is almost certainly a technical screw up and not a budgetary one. Making the argument for some equipment to make the network resistant to power outages is a trivial financial argument to make. If the IT engineers had a single point of failure like that and they weren't able to justify whatever upgrades were necessary then they are bad at their job. Either they didn't see the problem or they failed to justify the resources to fix it. Either way they are incompetent and take the lion's share of the blame.
A power outage in Atlanta at about 2.30 a.m. local time is said to be the cause of computer outage.
Kind of amazing they haven't figured out how to make their system redundant, distributed, and/or robust. It makes zero sense that a power outage in Atlanta should have any effect on a flight going from Salt Lake City to Seattle. If this was the first time something like this had ever happened I could see them being caught off guard but stuff like this is nothing new and multiple airlines have been affected. You would imagine that having a robust network would be job number 1 for their IT people since one failure like this can easily cost tens of millions of dollars.
Out of 4,000 information workers who were surveyed in the U.S. and Europe, 37% of the 18-34-year-old group reported trouble with multiple devices, compared to just 13% of respondents over 55.
What the heck is that supposed to mean. How many devices were they using? What were the nature of the complaints? How picky were they being? Did they control for the sophistication level of the devices in question?
I have 18 devices in my house last I counted with an IP address (computers, phones, tivo, tv, roku, thermostat, print server, webcam, etc). Folks in my dad's generation might have 2-4. (probably just phone and computer) Who do you think is going to complain about more devices? Who do you think it going to get the tech support call when something goes wrong? (hint, it's probably the guy with more devices)
I've had to cancel a phone number over the sheer number of robocalls it got, rendering it useless.
I don't get a lot of calls but I do get some and my basic policy is that if the number isn't in my address book or I'm not expecting a call from a particular party it goes straight to voicemail because I won't pick up. I have a voicemail service that lets me block callers (they get a number not in service message), require them to enter a phone number if they block the caller id, and the service also helps flag robocalls, spammers, etc. It also transcribes the voicemails so I don't actually have to listen to them unless I want to.
One other thing I do is I have a forwarding number (like Google Voice) that I give to people instead of my direct cell number. That accomplishes two things. 1) I can weed out calls easier and 2) If I ever need to change cell phones or can't be reached on my cell phone for some reason I can redirect it to a different phone very easily or even have it ring several of them at once.
While it's almost certainly not permitted to broadcast your own play-by-play in real-time, you can certainly give those accounts at a later time.
You can however broadcast a play-by-play of the broadcast without permission. Oh, they could bring a lawsuit over it but I think you'd be on safe legal ground. That's basically what media companies do all the time. Nothing illegal about real time second hand report of events. ABC is under no obligation to kowtow to NBC regarding reporting facts as long as they don't use copyrighted materials or trademarks without permission.
MLB prohibits using the calls by the announcers without permission.
MLB can claim to prohibit whatever they want but unless you are actually rebroadcasting the calls themselves (or a reasonable facsimile of them) then they can't do shit about you reporting what happened in the game itself.
They're part of the broadcast, so it's logical that they would be subject to copyright.
Of course they are just like any performance would be. But I can report on the performance as long as my report doesn't resemble what is being performed.
If they returned it to the original Greek format (naked), I might be interested. Otherwise... yawn.
Watch beach volleyball. They're getting pretty close. A really aggressive game of "keep the balloon from hitting the floor" isn't interesting enough by itself so they mandated bikinis as the required uniform. A little T&A never hurt ratings right?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it's time for you to stop using Facebook altogether.
I would have to start using Facebook first. I've never had an account and have no plans to get one.
Your continued use of the site IS their explicit permission that they can serve you their content - ads and all.
I don't use their site so they don't have any permission from me about anything. Anyway they can try. Doesn't mean I have to cooperate or let them do it. I have confidence I'll win that arms race.
Somehow, somewhat strangely, you seem to actually care about Facebook - so much so that you even bother to comment about it.
As did you. I care about Facebook in the same way that I care about something like malaria. I consider it a sort of public health emergency.
As if I needed any more reasons to avoid Facebook they go ahead and give me a doozy like this. Cute how they think I'm obligated to cooperate with their little scheme. Seriously I can't imagine anything Facebook could do at this point that would make me want to use their service.
You have every right in the world to ditch facebook, but you will become a complete social pariah in 2016 doing that.
If you actually believe that then you probably are severely lacking in real world friends. Just because someone "friends" you on Facebook doesn't actually mean they are your friend. If your "friends" treat you like a social pariah for not looking at their banal Facebook scribblings then they probably aren't someone you really need to be spending time interacting with anyway.
Facebook is ad-supported. Ads are a part of the Facebook experience; they're not a tack on,
A) Yes the ads ARE tacked on after the fact. B) Facebook being ad supported is Not My Problem (tm). If they want to negotiate a deal directly with me for cash money whereby I will no longer block ads I'm willing to have that conversation but it won't be cheap. Certainly will cost them more than the shitty services they currently provide. I will actively fight anyone who thinks they have a right to put advertisements in front of me without my explicit permission.
On the other hand, if we waited for the first version of every product to be perfect before shipping, nothing would ever ship.
Doesn't have to be perfect. It does has to have the proper design intent. The iPhone got the fundamentals of a smartphone right. That's why pretty much every smartphone since has cribbed a lot of their original design. (which is a good thing) No Apple didn't get every detail correct right away but the framework was there. I don't think Apple has accomplished the same thing with the Apple Watch. Not yet anyway. I also think they are chasing what really is a pretty narrow set of use cases.
Complex product design is an iterative process. The first cars didn't ship with airbags, 300 horsepower engines, antilock brakes, and power steering.
No but they did get the fundamentals right. 4 Wheels, steering system, suspension, seats, etc. A Model T is recognizably a car like one today even if they didn't get all the details right. The PCs from the late 70s & early 80s got the formula right and it's been iteration ever since. I'm not convinced the Apple Watch has got the fundamental formula right. (nor anyone else for that matter) I don't see a use case that would get me or those I know to start wearing a watch given that I very rarely wear one now even if they dramatically improve its current deficiencies.
Sometimes it's useful to release a product that is useful to a significant market segment, and then get usage statistics and product feedback in order to make it far more useful to a much larger market.
Certainly although I've seen little evidence so far of Apple doing this with the Apple Watch. I'm sure they are working hard to improve it but working hard if they are on a dead end path ultimately is futile. While I'm not certain if they are on a dead end, they certainly are a long way from what I consider a product worthy of purchase. My take on it is that the technology isn't quite there yet for a really useful smartwatch. I don't think the idea is dumb but I'm not sure we have gotten quite to the point where it can all come together into something greater than the sum of the parts.
you forgot "status symbol".
I said "useful". So no, I didn't forget at all. The only thing about it that makes a watch a status symbol is the price and that is an independent variable from the design. A bag of shit could be a status symbol if you could convince people to pay a lot of money for one and display it prominently. (See Trump Fragrances if you need an example)
The most common use case I hear for smartwatches is "I don't need to pull out my phone to look at notifications during meetings!". Yeah, neither do The sort of notification that may require my immediate attention during a meeting (or any other situation, really) comes with a klaxon, a red strobe light and people wailing about the awakening of Cthulhu and end of the world (i.e., the network is down).
Exactly. If something really demands my immediate attention either A) I know about it in advance and just warn people when socially necessary that I might have to attend to whatever it is or B) I don't know about it in advance but it will come from a source that will know how to get my attention in an emergency (call my secretary, etc) and so a watch provides zero additional value. But almost always it can wait a few minutes. I just don't get the notification argument for a phone. The marginal value of that is close to nil.
"Proof" is an absolute. It's either waterproof or its not.
Not true at all. A watch can be waterproof at 1m depth and not waterproof at 20m depth. That is true for any device, whether it be a submarine, a wristwatch or anything else. You can accurately describe something as waterproof as long as you also provide the conditions under which it is waterproof. Water resistant means that it will not immediately fail under a particular set of conditions but that prolonged exposure will probably result in damage or failure eventually. Water proof means it can withstand those condition indefinitely without ill effect. See the difference?
"Better waterproofing" just means it wasn't waterproof before.
Incorrect. It means it is waterproof in conditions where it wasn't previously.
maybe the killer applications will also be external sensors
A wrist watch really only has two things that it is valuable for. 1) portable notification of concise pieces of information (time, short messages, notifications, appointments, temperature readings, etc) and 2) a portable sensor suite and data logger (thermometer, barometer, altimeter, gps, accelerometer, compass, etc) . And these things are really only useful if they come in a package with substantial battery life (1 week minimum) and an interface that isn't absurd. The key word in all that is portable. It's only for applications where carrying something bigger like a cell phone makes no sense. Workouts, sloppy conditions, swimming, certain social situations, and the like. Any situation where carrying a smartphone makes sense the watch becomes redundant. So any watch that isn't useful without a cell phone is de-facto pointless.
My concern with the Apple watch is that they are trying to turn it into another smartphone rather than a device that makes sense by itself within its own design constraints. It's like they are trying to stuff 10 pounds of crap into a 5 pound bag. I own a smartphone because it doesn't tether me to a PC and it provides a ton of value by itself. In fact it made it so that I can carry fewer devices since it consolidated my MP3 player, PDA, point and shoot camera and cell phone into one device. I don't own a smartwatch because A) I don't like wearing a wrist watch and B) it isn't useful as a standalone product for anything I need and C) it doesn't replace or consolidate anything for me. I already have an old school wrist mounted chronometer (which I rarely use) and also a fitbit for the rare occasions when I need that sort of data logging. The smartphone I carry does almost everything an Apple watch does and does most of it better except in the rare cases where I need extreme portability. If I have to carry both anyway what is the point of the watch?
I'm not opposed to the idea of a smartwatch but nobody has hit the magic formula yet I think.
I go by the notion that locks are for honest people and things like smartlocks and connected locks are primarily for the convenience of the owner. Realistically, for most consumer applications of locks, if someone wanted to get in, the lock isn't keeping them out.
That's true but there is no point in making it easier than necessary for a lock to get picked. At least with the deadbolt on my door someone would either have to A) smash the door which tends to leave evidence or B) pick the lock which (should) take non-trivial amounts of time. You are quite correct that locks are generally more for keeping honest people honest than to keep out determined criminals but that doesn't excuse making a shoddy, easily bypassed product.
"Smart" thermostats ofter communicate with the furnace / cooling via a cat-6 or some other type of communications cable, they are rarly just a switch.
No they do not. Retrofitting a cat6 (overkill) cable to run to the HVAC in an existing house would be prohibitively expensive and/or time consuming. They communicate with the HVAC via the same set of wires a "dumb" thermostat would use and gets power over the same cables. They generally communicate with the network via wifi. Nest even kindly color codes everything so that someone who isn't a a licensed technician can do the job.
What I liked was the ability to ship to to a local store (5 miles away) and pick it up there for zero shipping charge.
Zero shipping charge but you spend 30+ minutes (minimum) of your time plus gas going to pick it up. It might be cheaper depending on what you are having sent to you but the price isn't zero. Plus you have to actually go to a Walmart which is something I'd actually pay to avoid. My nearest Walmart is about 8 miles away so with my truck I'll spend roughly 3/4 of a gallon of fuel to get there and back. At local fuel prices as I type this (around $2.25) that is about $1.68 per trip in fuel alone for "free" in store pickup. Not even counting the value of my time either. Not bad but not great either. See below.
That's so much better than Amazon's having to wait three days to a week before it is even shipped if you opt for free delivery. (I'm not talking about amazon prime's free shipping, I don't pay $100 per year for free shipping when the product price already has shipping charges baked in.
You are aware that Walmart has their own version of Prime, right? Whether Prime is a good deal depends on how you shop. For me I buy a LOT through Amazon so on a per transaction basis it would be substantially more expensive (not to mention time consuming) for me to go pick something up at Walmart every time I placed an order. I placed 154 orders through Amazon in 2015, so the freight cost per order was $0.65 per order. That's less than the cost of gas to my nearest Walmart and back AND I didn't have to waste my time traveling to Walmart.
Sears.com is, bar none, the most crufty and crappy e-commerce site I have ever seen. When you combine that with their high prices and poor customer service, it's a wonder they haven't folded already.
It's only a matter of time I think. Sears (and Kmart - same company now) have been in a seeming death spiral for quite a while now. Stunningly badly managed. I actually worked for Kmart for a brief time and my experience working there was so bad I've been rooting for them to die in a fire ever since.
Without Federal requirements there is no way a corporation is going to spend that kind of money.
A few failures like this one and they'll dig into the couch cushions to find the change for it. Having a backup data center for stuff that will shut the company down is not exactly a tough thing to justify. This shutdown alone would probably justify the cost in a single day.
They have legal protections in place to assure they retain their terminal slots, so while they aren't making money now they won't lose in the long run.
Perhaps but if they managed their IT properly they wouldn't have to lose money now. They can buy the insurance or they can take the risk of serious illness so to speak. Their choice and their funeral. Sounds like they rolled the dice and came up snake eyes today.
The only businesses with total data recovery sites and plans to actually use them are Banks, and that is because they are required by the FDIC.
Not true. Some medical practices have them. Some internet firms have them (at least for the mission critical stuff). Some bits of the military and government have them. Insurance companies have them. Stock exchanges have them. And there are more as well. If it's valuable enough you have a backup data center of some sort.
For any IT discussion on slashdot, as time T increases, the probability of a neckbeard blaming "MBAs" approaches 1
Yeah, it's sort of a riff on Godwin's law. If you blame "MBAs" for a problem, that person has no fact based arguments left so the argument is over and the person doing it loses the argument. It's basically scapegoating and tribalism at its worst.
Management is a pretty easy target. Management has to make decisions with imperfect information (like playing poker) whereas engineers are used to working with greater certainty (more like playing chess) and it's hard for many of them to wrap their head around the difference. Engineers who don't actually know any better seem to think MBA is shorthand for management incompetence. Never mind that a MBA is a degree, not a person or even a category of people. It's as stupid and incoherent as saying CS = incompetent programmers. I happen to be an engineer but I'm also a certified accountant. I have degrees in both engineering and business and I use both in my day job running a manufacturing plant. I can say with absolute confidence that there are just as many engineering school graduates who are bad at their jobs as there are business school graduates who are bad at their jobs. I run into both routinely. And just as many who are good at their jobs as well. Just because you may have run into some of the bad ones doesn't grant the right to paint the rest with the same brush.
I'll bet you dollars to donuts that the IT folks squealed like stabbed piglets that they needed a backup system alternative.
I'll take that bet. I'm betting they either overlooked something technical or they are just really bad at making financial arguments. Since a key part of engineering is being able to justify what you want to do in financial terms my guess is that they just weren't very good at their job. Justifying equipment to prevent an outage that would cost millions of dollars per minute is trivial.
Who knows? Maybe the costs of dealing with this fiasco will be cheaper than having a backup system . . . ?
Maybe but I doubt it. Given that Delta and other airlines are experiencing record profits, it's hard to see them not understanding the math of a system-wide shut down and what that would cost them.
Actually, what I'm hearing is that a fire in the backup generator took out the primary generator.
Shouldn't have any effect on the BACKUP DATA CENTER. One facility can go down. It happens. It should take a thermonuclear war to take out several if they are doing it right.
Still though, this begs to be something hosted in a datacenter/cloud with an online shadow in the background of another location replicating everything and ready to take over at a moment's notice, or something similar. Pretty standard these days, but airlines are so tight for money that they end up sometimes shooting their own feet...
Airlines are making record profits these days. Arguing that they don't have the money to properly set up the system that runs the whole company is ridiculous.
I wouldn't be so fast to lay this at the feet of IT.
It's the fault of IT (which includes IT management) unless you have evidence to the contrary. If they didn't adequately present the argument for why a robust network is a valuable asset then shame on them. Preventing then entire company from shutting down and losing millions of dollars per minute is a trivial argument to make. So yeah, IT carries most if not all of the blame here. If they couldn't make that argument then they suck at their job.
I'm certain they wanted to make it robust, distributed and redundant but that all costs money. When PHB's with MBA's see IT as a cost centre, they see all this redundancy as "waste" to be cut back. Budgets are reduced and so are capabilities.
[sarcasm] Ahh, yes the MBA scapegoat. Couldn't possibly be that the folks who designed the network did a shit job of it. Clearly they must have been undercut by some bean counter somewhere. [/sarcasm] In a company the size of Delta if a power outage in a single location causes a company wide failure, that is almost certainly a technical screw up and not a budgetary one. Making the argument for some equipment to make the network resistant to power outages is a trivial financial argument to make. If the IT engineers had a single point of failure like that and they weren't able to justify whatever upgrades were necessary then they are bad at their job. Either they didn't see the problem or they failed to justify the resources to fix it. Either way they are incompetent and take the lion's share of the blame.
A power outage in Atlanta at about 2.30 a.m. local time is said to be the cause of computer outage.
Kind of amazing they haven't figured out how to make their system redundant, distributed, and/or robust. It makes zero sense that a power outage in Atlanta should have any effect on a flight going from Salt Lake City to Seattle. If this was the first time something like this had ever happened I could see them being caught off guard but stuff like this is nothing new and multiple airlines have been affected. You would imagine that having a robust network would be job number 1 for their IT people since one failure like this can easily cost tens of millions of dollars.
Out of 4,000 information workers who were surveyed in the U.S. and Europe, 37% of the 18-34-year-old group reported trouble with multiple devices, compared to just 13% of respondents over 55.
What the heck is that supposed to mean. How many devices were they using? What were the nature of the complaints? How picky were they being? Did they control for the sophistication level of the devices in question?
I have 18 devices in my house last I counted with an IP address (computers, phones, tivo, tv, roku, thermostat, print server, webcam, etc). Folks in my dad's generation might have 2-4. (probably just phone and computer) Who do you think is going to complain about more devices? Who do you think it going to get the tech support call when something goes wrong? (hint, it's probably the guy with more devices)
I've had to cancel a phone number over the sheer number of robocalls it got, rendering it useless.
I don't get a lot of calls but I do get some and my basic policy is that if the number isn't in my address book or I'm not expecting a call from a particular party it goes straight to voicemail because I won't pick up. I have a voicemail service that lets me block callers (they get a number not in service message), require them to enter a phone number if they block the caller id, and the service also helps flag robocalls, spammers, etc. It also transcribes the voicemails so I don't actually have to listen to them unless I want to.
One other thing I do is I have a forwarding number (like Google Voice) that I give to people instead of my direct cell number. That accomplishes two things. 1) I can weed out calls easier and 2) If I ever need to change cell phones or can't be reached on my cell phone for some reason I can redirect it to a different phone very easily or even have it ring several of them at once.
While it's almost certainly not permitted to broadcast your own play-by-play in real-time, you can certainly give those accounts at a later time.
You can however broadcast a play-by-play of the broadcast without permission. Oh, they could bring a lawsuit over it but I think you'd be on safe legal ground. That's basically what media companies do all the time. Nothing illegal about real time second hand report of events. ABC is under no obligation to kowtow to NBC regarding reporting facts as long as they don't use copyrighted materials or trademarks without permission.
MLB prohibits using the calls by the announcers without permission.
MLB can claim to prohibit whatever they want but unless you are actually rebroadcasting the calls themselves (or a reasonable facsimile of them) then they can't do shit about you reporting what happened in the game itself.
They're part of the broadcast, so it's logical that they would be subject to copyright.
Of course they are just like any performance would be. But I can report on the performance as long as my report doesn't resemble what is being performed.
If they returned it to the original Greek format (naked), I might be interested. Otherwise... yawn.
Watch beach volleyball. They're getting pretty close. A really aggressive game of "keep the balloon from hitting the floor" isn't interesting enough by itself so they mandated bikinis as the required uniform. A little T&A never hurt ratings right?