I'm in no way bitter. A sci fi writer thought of a technology that would be neat, having no idea how to implement it, or if it was ever even going to be possible. A technology guy (Bill Gates) thought of an implementation of it as a similar technology but could never quite get it. Apple realized that the key to the user experience was touch sensitivity that had been developed long before by someone else. It was a tremendous innovation in design to realize that was the the key missing element. It was so crucial to the whole thing they could come up with probably the stupidest product name in decades, and it *still* sold like hotcakes. That shows just how valuable design innovation is.
But they didn't develop touch screens. In the context of what is an innovation, developing a touch screen was a science and engineering innovation, apple didn't do that. They did innovate the design and integration.
Without the technology for touch screens it would have never come together at all. And we'd be stuck with microsofts vision of tablets and slates (which, admittedly served me very well for specific purposes, but not for what an iPad does).
If you want to go one step further, the Android guys (and microsoft) are trying to figure out what the most important things Apple missed are. Androids answer to this is "mostly open marketplace", Microsoft is more on the 'stop thinking of it as a collection of dumb icons' approach.
I appreciate that you may have had trouble reading the first line of my post, but I was quite clearly I was drawing a distinction between types of innovation, and stating one cannot exist without another. That happens a lot. No hard feelings.
That was my point. Apple didn't invent touch screens, that was a science and engineering innovation. Some sci fi writer looked thought 'wouldn't this be grand' some other technologist (bill gates) thought about what could be done. Apple realized the key was to glue someone elses science and engineering innovation into the other technologists to produce sci fi.
That wasn't a science and eng innovation, that was a design innovation. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you want to only value science and eng innovations credit goes to whomever figured out how to make a touch screen.
depends how you count it. And there are a lot of ways to count it.
Apple is highest total market cap regularly, (trading places the Exxon depending on share prices). It is no where near the largest assets or total employees. Though those don't count sub contracted employees (think foxconn) or intellectual assets.
I think it's most profitable, but it doesn't actually pay a dividend (yet), so other companies that do pay dividends are worth more in that respect. It's way down there on revenue, but profit per revenue it's probably towards the top of big companies, of course bigger companies can do more things to hide their obscene amounts of wealth, including paying principle shareholders fees as employees or contractors, for example imagine if Steve Jobs made a Company, named Steve's Job Company, and Apple payed Steve's Job Company 10 billion dollars a year for management services. Or more likely, Goldman Sachs will own 5% of the company, and is paid as the accounting firm for the company sort of thing. I can say a lot of bad things about steve jobs, but it doesn't seem like he ever tried to loot apple for his own purposes.
If you want to count state owned corporations it's still probably the largest, but not necessarily, the Saudi oil company, the UAE's various sovereign wealth funds etc. are all essentially corporations, but no one makes public how much money they have, the value of their assets, their revenue, or who gets the payouts.
They're more design and user experience innovations than science and engineering ones.
But that's the case with any business. Even if you do a lot of research (think Microsoft), you can't research everything, you read up on the literature on what other people are doing, copy the ideas you want and package it up (copying may include paying for it in some form).
Of course the design and user experience innovations don't mean anything without the science and engineering ones. Bill Gates was telling us for years we'd have tablets and slates that we could carry around with us, and the concept was proliferated and demonstrated before him on Star Trek which got it from other sources etc. etc. etc. It took Apple to realize the key technology innovation was touch sensing for both phones and slates, and to package that up into a computing device that's named for a teen girls first feminine hygiene product. Without touch sensors slates would still probably be a dead end, regardless of how good the vision of what they *could* do was.
Fly to LA, mail from LA. That's as close to 'in the mail the next day' as you can get.
Also, your ballot doesn't need to get to your home jurisdiction to be counted. That's making it more difficult than necessary. An approved elections official, or more likely several, needs to certify that votes were cast and counted for a district and forward the result to them to be incorporated into the final tally. Anything else is artificially impeding the success of the system for the sake of being incompetent.
You might wonder if this is adding a layer that can be hacked into the system. The answer is no, since the information gathered up has to be gathered up and passed around between election officials already, adding one more communication to the process isn't any better or worse.
Different problem. Books, movies, etc. have value outside of the cloud service that's hosting them. This game has characters... I'm sorry.. cards, in it, that people have spent time/money to acquire, but they aren't anything outside of the game. I suppose you could print off a PDF of all of the cards in game, but you can't do anything with it.
You can't just have a gnome deathknight that you refuse to store on WoW because you don't trust blizzard to not shut down the servers. The gnome deathknight doesn't exist without the servers, regardless of how much you did, or didn't pay for it (directly or indirectly), if you prefer a more F2P comparison, ships in Star Trek Online, or some of the tanks in World Tanks are examples of a this. You can get a statue made of your ship, tank, or gnome deathknight, but it's not a ship, tank or DK, it's just a statue of it. Without the world that makes it exist it isn't anything. An ebook is just another variant on book, book on papyrus, book on paper, book from printing press, book in german, book in english, book in electronic format, and without amazon you'd be locked out of the only format of that book you paid for, even though one of the other book formats would still have had value to you. A Magic The gathering card stored 'in the cloud' that you could access anywhere would still have play value if you could take it out of the cloud if the service was to shut down, as you could still play the game without the cloud storage. In this case the game is shutting down, and the data it has can't be 'pulled out' separately.
Whether or not it's a good idea to pay for virtual cards vs physical ones is a whole other argument.
A more interesting question is whether or not you are more likely to lose your own data (house fire, hard drive/raid failure etc.) than amazon is. For most people on/. the answer is a definitive no, since we are savvy enough to have various layers of storage for our stuff. But that isn't true of everyone. If all your data is on one computer with one hard drive and it gets stolen/fails/etc you're SOL.
That's slightly different, in that the data would still have value if you pulled it out of the cloud. The challenge with a online game (collectibles or otherwise) is that they only have a relative value within a narrow system of the cloud. Without the game they have no value other than sentimental, which is of course important to some degree, but because you can duplicate the cards infinitely outside of the system they have no meaningful value otherwise.
To quote myself "That's why these things are illegal". I'm not saying it wasn't illegal, and that isn't important as a principle. But the suggestion that this somehow screwed people using PS3 clusters is simply false. It wouldn't necessarily be false in general though for some arbitrary computing box that offered some arbitrary compute cluster functionality. That is why it's illegal. Only this specific instance it wasn't an accurate depiction of the problem.
For the military in overseas operations in something like guam or airbases it's probably the most easy. Their deployments are scheduled by the government in advance, and they are there by orders of the government who will generally need to be able to speak with them before their deployment and generally during. You may need to make allowances that they need to vote either in advance (potentially days) or you need to accept a delay in the return of their results or a bit of both. Guam is also US territory, meaning there are official US government officials running the show who should be able to organize things. The same could be said of any area with an Embassy, since the election should be handled through the Embassy and consular offices. A flight from Guam to Hawaii is 7 hours. Vote on the island, load plane with ballots, fly to hawaii, or 5 more hours and Los Angles. This doesn't need to be hard.
The guy who's screwed is an aid worker trying to get red cross supplies into Syria, aid into Somalia, that sort of thing. There's no official government presence where you can show up and connect to them, the deployments are arranged as needed, on short notice in many cases, and they may not have any sort of diplomatic baggage transfer system that you can access, especially without an embassy (think Iran, where even though US operations are going to be run out of someone elses embassy you don't necessarily want to hand the Iranians a list of all Americans in the country by virtue of asking them to vote).
Now that doesn't mean the US government doesn't make life unnecessarily difficult for voting from Guam or Afghanistan or whatever, but there's no reason it needs to be. If you can get someone ammunition you can get them a ballot. And if you can't get them food or ammunition you generally know well enough in advance that they're being sent out.
Submarines operating on long deployments submerged are basically screwed. But not Guam. Yes, you have to have some tolerance for early voting, that a person who's going to be deployed to a fire base for the next 2 months might not have a ballot on election day sort of thing. But if the military is running it, it really isn't that hard to handle an election, they may make it seem hard by choosing to be incompetent, which makes a lot of sense on the specific example of Guam of course.
For a while that happened. The PC was, without steam, mostly a no no market for big guys. Think Fable 2. Very expensive to work on, very inconsistent player experiences, lots of support costs etc. It still has a lot of those problems (along with piracy of course), but generally now you can do the same thing on all 3.
But once you've spent all the money on art, content creation etc. if there are enough PS3 consoles out there, it's worth making it for the PS3 because those are more customers. Most of the cost of game development is in content creation, not engine programming. There are sequence issues created by the engine programming time (you need an engine before you can put things in the engine, obviously), but the big money is on artists and content creators, and advertising (which is a whole other problem).
And of course, the job of a console seller is to get enough exclusives that you'll buy that console. You might have multiple consoles personally, but a lot of people will only get one, so you want to hit both platforms as a dev to hit the widest audience. Unless a manufacturer is chipping in some money to make sure you stay with them, and them alone.
As a game programmer... not so much. Now I have a problem. Well I don't, because I make PC games. But my colleagues do.
Any code you write right now for the cell probably won't work on the PS4. So is my game going to come out before the PS4 launches, or after? Do I launch on the PS3, which has one hell of an install base right now (~50 million consoles) where it's not too hard to move half a million units, or do I stop all that work, and bank on the PS4, which might be delayed, then I have a game I can't sell, and no money to make another, or hope the PS4 launch titles move enough units to make my money?
When the PS3 *launched* most PS2 games worked on it (no special controllers), give or take that wierd graphics bug. but anyway they said it would work. So as a developer, if I was finishing up a PS2 game, no prob, just finish it, it will run on the PS3, so no problem. But if it won't work on the PS4 do I want to bank on people still buying PS3 games at all by the time I launch (if people move entirely to the PS4 and ditch the PS3 I'm in real trouble).
The other thing is that people have invested a shit load of money learning to make stuff for the Cell. That investment is probably all getting tossed.
Is it? How many of those PS3's will fail? A customer that buys 1500 PS3's and no games cost them 150 000 bucks (on the early PS3's that were losing between 100-150 dollars per console, so I'll low ball it). Sure, 150k worth of PR when that company is the air force, but it's not that many. Yes, there was some big money on the 8000 dollar toshiba laptops that had a 4 cell add on in them, but that wasn't going to Sony was it? (And how many of those did they ever sell?).
If a console does fail are they going to want to replace it at all, even if you have parts available (answer: no, PS3's are poor value for computing dollar, as is the cell in general for this sort of problem). The airforce is used to buying things expecting a certain percent to fail over the years, and having to use the existing inventory to replace them with. That applies to Aircraft as much as computing consoles.
Even then, Sony might have a handful of original firmware PS3's in a warehouse for customers with whom they made an arrangement. If you (like we did) bought them from a regular retailer, and really, who buys 1500 consoles from Walmart or GameStop, you accept that you may not be able to get replacement parts the way you want. We would have loved to have 1024 MB of RAM in the console (now that I'm a game developer I feel the same way) for clusters, but well, that isn't going to happen when you buy retail.
And then they cut PS3's that supported another OS from the product line and it was clear the way the wind was blowing. Time to switch any money you have to GPU computing. Run the PS3 cluster until it dies or is no longer worth the rack space, but if anything dies the money is better spent elsewhere.
Yes, and that screwed us a lot more than removing the Other OS feature. By the time they removed the other OS feature PS3 clusters were a dead end because they weren't going to make any more, and as it turns out a 250 dollar GPU is better for number crunching (if you including training costs) than a PS3.
You sound like you might be confused. There are several physical revisions of PS3 consoles. They removed the feature to install linux (along with most of the PS2 compatibility) by about the 3rd revision of the console. That's both legal, and reasonable, PS3 linux was to make it a *computer* to dodge import tariffs in the EU, which failed (they thought this would get them over the hurdle the PS2 addon kit also failed to pass, they were wrong), and backwards compatibility drove up costs. To gaming purists it was unreasonable, and fair enough from that perspective. But anyway, long after the new hardware revisions of the console were not supporting the other OS, they released a software update that hosed other OS support in the software on prior consoles. That's illegal. It didn't actually matter to those of us at universities etc. running clusters, because the PS3 firmware didn't ever add anything to the Linux OS that I was aware of. If you were seriously running it as a cluster you didn't get the PS3 OS firmware installed, pretty much ever, because if it's a cluster it's not gaming.
As a practical matter the PS3 isn't very good value for number crunchers. GPU's do the job better, and have less esoteric training costs and you know there will be GPU makers 10 years from now. But the PS4, as per the article, may not use the cell so it might be a one trick pony project. Those have their value, but you don't want to heavily invest grant money in a project that's a dead end. 5000 bucks in hardware that didn't work out long is about the cost of a student who flunks out their first semester. No big loss. But in terms of performance per dollar, training cost per performance etc. by the time they removed the other OS in software it was clear GPU computing was the future. And well, it still is.
So yes, making it impossible to replace dead consoles was inconvenient, but they did that long before they pulled the other OS off existing consoles, and there's no point in replacing a console anyway, because the money is better spent elsewhere, and that was clear by the time they stopped selling consoles that supported the other OS in the first place.
As someone who worked with a PS3 cluster, the removal other OS functionality did not impact me in the slightest. If you're using them for a cluster you aren't using them for gaming. If you're using them for a cluster you don't download the updates that have absolutely no impact on your console, which is all of them.
What they did that impacted the PS3 cluster business was they took away the other OS option in future consoles, which makes sense since it was a waste of money on their part anyway, but that means there's no way to replace broken parts of the cluster. Though as it turns out, it wouldn't be worthwhile anyway, since GPU's do the number crunching better, and for less money.
The Cell on clusters suffers the same problem it has in a console. It's not enough better than a CPU for the extra time needed to learn to use it properly. And it's not good enough to compete with a GPU for pure computing needs. It was an amusing project, and sure, once the cluster is running you want to churn through some data with it, but by the time they ditched the Other OS feature in software they were beyond viable to build new (since you couldn't get consoles that would do it).
That doesn't mean it wasn't illegal to remove the other OS feature after the fact. It probably was on principle. But don't misrepresent who it mattered to. The fraction of a percent of people who ever actually used the other OS feature *and* games did get screwed, no doubt. But if you seriously used the OtherOS functionality you didn't use them as gaming machines at the same time. Remember a lot of people 'used' the other OS feature in the same way 90 million people 'use' google plus. And yes, that small collection of power users, and that larger but still small collection of pirates got screwed on the deal. That's why these things are illegal.
If, in the long run, yeilds are better, more sustainable, more secure etc. then ultimately all future generations benefit from it. The reason you want GM at all is because there's a market that isn't able to be filled by current products, something new, that fills both the new and old role is by definition better, the transition may not be pretty, but if at the end of it you can feed 20% more people, or the same number of people with 20% less water/fertilizer/area/whatever then in the end you've made the world a better place.
Oil made the world a better place, for all of its perils. You accept that there are some perils, but you have to look at the benefit as well, that applies to anything. Any particular GM food may or may not have any actual benefit though, and I don't doubt there are a lot of snake oil sales out there. That doesn't mean all GM will always be bad, no more than all pharmaceuticals versus snake oil.
It's amazing what enough money to buy millions of barrels of oil a day, electrical power for refrigeration, and general farming equipment will do to yields.
100 years ago it took 2/3rd of the population to grow enough food for 100%. Now we can, in the west, pull that off with 1 or 2% of the population because we've mechanized it. Mechanization comes with its own problems, but we'll just gloss over those.
Of course we can also feed 1.4 billion people in an unsustainable way. If you rely on fertilizer that's mined in some distant country, oil to run the machinery etc. all you're doing is shifting the problem around.
It's not that traditional crops can't feed people, it's a question of whether or not you can do it more efficiently or cost effectively. If you need pour billions of dollars of chemicals on food to feed 1.4 billion people then being able to get the same effect with less billions of dollars in externally sourced chemicals is good. Those chemicals don't have to be pesticides, hell, it could be water. Imagine being able to engineer a plant to need 20% less water. Sure, you can feed the same number of people with it, but using less water would be wonderful at creating food security for billions of people. Even if it has 10% lower yeilds, if your limiting factor is water, not land (and this applies to pretty much anything) you're still ahead.
Whether or not any particular GM crop is worthwhile is separate from the principle that GM crops could do wonders to help feed people more cost effectively, and more sustainable. Any particular GM crop could be completely useless or downright dangerous. You can make the same argument about buildings. Great things to live in, but putting a building not designed for earthquakes in an earthquake zone is not a great plan. That doesn't mean we should never build buildings, or even shouldn't build buildings in earthquake zones, you just need to understand the requirements and be able to design towards it, and the same applies as much to crops as it does to anything else.
No one gave a shit about Tibet before, why would they now? Tibet was always (at least last 2 centuries sort of always) in the chinese empire's sphere of influence. Just because China has a new coat of paint doesn't mean there's a need to change much.
The reason China has a security council seat is even if we wanted to do something about Tibet what exactly could they do? We locked the PRC out of the UN for 20 years, despite their possession of 98% of china, and it didn't do any good other than help keep millions of people in china poor and starving, and Tibet still firmly under Beijings thumb.
The other major powers can ask each other nicely to stop behaving badly, or they can outright threaten each other (suez crisis for example) but any one of the 5 could seriously mess with any distant ambitions of the other, and anything close to home is already settled. None of them have anything near tibet, nor do they care to. It's like the ireland of central asia, you really want it... well we object strongly, but have actually important things to worry about. Like ireland, which actually has about a million more people living in it than Tibet.
Put another way: Trying to get china to give up tibet was causing more people to starve to death and die unnecessarily early in China than live in Tibet. By several orders of magnitude. Tibet isn't worth it. Kuwait was, because even though kuwait was small (though again, still half a million more people than tibet), the people who took it over were also small, and the total human cost of action either way was in the small hundreds of thousands. Britain could depopulate Deigo Garcia because it's not worth it either. The UN tried to convince the argies the falklands weren't worth it, and well, they weren't.
The secret alliances are basically a no no now, and were under the league of nations. The UN acts as a collector of treaties, even though for some reason we don't know where the official border is between Saudi and the Emirates they have a treaty, and it has been filed with the UN for future use.
The UN is also a recognition that there are a lot of very unsavoury people in the world, they're in charge of things, and like it or not they're making decisions. So you may as well give them an official seat at the table, rather than envelopes full of cash that no one knows about.
The UN also acts as a fair and impartial arbiter, insofar as such a thing is ever possible. When Canada had a dispute with the US over territory from the alaska purchase, in 1903 a commission was created, that was 2 canadians, a briton (who was probably the only one who had any brains, despite what we think of him in canada) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_boundary_dispute), and 3 americans. Any other arrangement, 3 britons and 3 americans, or 3 canadians and 3 britons for example, would have probably caused a split and who knows what would have happened (war between the British Empire and the US over the territory possible). The briton had the foresight to realize that even if it was some shipping gold tax rights, it wasn't worth fighting over in the broader context of Anglo-American relations. The UN first avoids 50/50 split, and second will try and act on the legal merits of the claims fairly, not act on the strategic interest of the powers in question. That's better for everyone. It also means everyone hates the UN, because it's not serving them. Which is the point. The UN recognizes that certain powers (the 5 permanent security council members) can do pretty much whatever the hell they want, and no one can do much about it, but that would be true with or without the UN, and at least this way all 5 of them get some officially wrangling by the rest of the the world.
Define sovereign government, and how do you clarify legitimate sovereign government from an illegitimate one. If I put a flag out my window and proclaim myself a sovereign state that does not make it so. If we're bombing an illegitimate government is that a war, whether they are sovereign or not?
Does it matter if we call it a war, or 'Military Action" because the point of military actions, or wars, isn't to kill people usually. Usually it is to effect political change, and, ideally, the *threat* of military action deters reckless action and avoids a war.
Which goes to the problem of counting wars that have been avoided because the UN has come close enough to authorizing military action to dissuade political actions that could eventually result in a war. Or whether by virtue of the UN acting the scale of war that have happened is reduced. The UN couldn't prevent the US from attempting to recolonize iraq, but it can, by virtue of past treaties and the threats of future actions against the US limit both the effectiveness of any recolonization (and convert it into liberation), and limit the nature of civilian casualties.
Depends how much infrastructure you need. We really do have I think it's 6 IT guys. What exactly each of them does I'm not sure. We do have to create accounts for several hundred students every semester though, and they have to maintain all of the local infrastructure no matter what, 20 professors, 150 grad students 500 or so computers in labs. So you need some IT staff for that. You can't give every research group identical computers, in fact, they buy their own equipment for their own needs in some cases (with their own money, that's the whole 'being self funded thing'). So overall we might run 700 machines across I guess two buildings, with 3 main servers, 'staff' 'student' and 'research that shouldn't be mixed with students' (which I've never used so I have no idea what its uptime is), profs will have a 'office' machine, and then research lab (rather than teaching lab) machines as well, as will many grad students. But only those that work on stuff that shouldn't be near things students can touch.
Now lets say you're talking about IT for 2500 employees. How about 6000? Our university has about 35 000 students, we have about 2500 staff total, and then lab computers. Do you want to be the sole sysadmin for what is probably about 10 000 machines? You have to have a collection of sysadmins (who probably have a hierarchy, but they're still sysadmins). There might be one overall admin, there usually is, but they have to delegate management of various assets to other people if you have enough stuff.
One IT guy can do a decent job on a 50 or 60 person outfit, even at a few colo's. But managing 500 machines, that's pushing your luck. And that was my point about there being some crossover. Probably a 200 -300 person (computer) place is big enough to warrant enterprise IT, but not necessarily big enough to support enterprise IT properly. Think call centres and things like that. Lots of staff, high turnover, (high training), and you don't have the money to pay decent people in house for a lot of stuff either. Whereas a 6000 person outfit is necessarily playing at the enterprise IT level.
addendum - I'm not the anonymous coward below. I'm not exactly sure what a community college is, there is a college here in town called Fanshawe and while we get some students from there and we train some of them (and my colleagues train them at Fanshawe) I do not attend that school. Community college is a US concept, and not being part of that education system (fortunately)I have nothing to do with it.
Universities: academic degrees (e.g. computer science, engineering, physics, medicine) including advanced degrees (masters, doctorates) colleges: tradeskills (auto mechanic, Linux server administration, IIS administration that sort of thing).
Actually they do obstruct the view of the article. That's what I mean precisely by them being the top results.
Which goes to the second point, and I'm not sure I can keep making it, if you search for Alfaques the first result is *not* their campsite. It is material related the disaster that are from Wikipedia, newspapers and google properties, and the Alfaques official site doesn't even get a thumbnail image whereas the others do.
Or at least, those were the results from here when I posted stuff a couple of days ago. It's possible we've google bombed them into the correct place, or google fixed it.
No matter what we're shifting the burden on who does the searching around. Either campers have to know to add the english word campsite when looking for a spanish business (how much sense does that really make) to get the result they want at the top, or the person searching for the disaster has to know to add disaster to get the result they want at the top. My argument is precisely that if I search for (to repeat the same example) slashdut the result should first be slashdut, with a reference to the fact that I may have just misspelled slashdot. If I search for Alfaques the first result should be Alfaques not Alfaques + some parameter with Alfaques further down the list. That's google deciding that + parameter is more important than no parameter, but I searched with no parameter.
Lots of businesses run 5 9's of uptime. You *can* do it. It's not a matter of *can* it's a matter of how much does it cost, and is it more or less economical to pay someone else to do some or all of it.
We were hit by the "northeast blackout of 2003". Which, where I was (different than were I am now) was without power for 24 hours, most places were 7 or 8, some a lot more than 24. So the power distribution itself didn't manage 4 9's for 24 years averaged up. Ourbackup generator I think was only good for 8 hours. Whatever it was, we had to go in and shut everything down within a couple of hours of the power not coming back up (this was when I was working with equipment that really cannot lose power, controlled power down was very expensive).
University of Western ontario. Comp sci department.
Also, that was sort of my point. We *should* be able to get it straight, and can't. I don't really care that much, and in general it's not that big a deal. Students work on their own machines unless they specifically have labs, so the facilities we run are there to be used if people need want them, but most people don't need or want them. Such is live in a BYOD business, and for us, if you can't BYOD you probably won't have one, because we don't give kids laptops. They pay us to be here after all. (Er, i guess I pay us to be here too, I'm a grad student, so I sort of pay myself for the privilege of being a student).
Ah, so there's the question. How much would it cost for you to run a system with 'no' downtime? I'm at a university, some of our labs (not so much in comp sci but generally) have fairly specific requirements about say not losing power, because it would damage/destroy equipment or running experiments.
But IT is more than just power. In almost 4 years here every year we've had several days of downtime for our main undergraduate server (the one undergrads are supposed to use for various things, and that handles their logins and file storage), and several on the separate but arguably more important staff server, which is supposed does the same thing, but that includes all of our grant applications.
Causes of our server outages (I'm not an IT guy, this is just what they've told us that I can remember): Power failures. Yes we have battery backups, but they're only good for so long, and since none of our equipment suffers permanent damage without power this isn't high priority. Networking. We only have two redundant pipes. That, for home use for example, or most businesses is pretty good. For our pipes one goes to a host to the west, one to the east. I'm not specifically familiar with what failed that took our networking offline for 7 or 8 hours but it affected both pipes. Storage: bad raid controller on the main fileserver. This has a few cascading effects. If you don't realizing it's garbling data it ends up distributing that garble off to the backups or clones. When it crashes (which doesn't take that long after the controller starts getting messy) you may have several backups that need to be repaired. We can't do much to the file system while it's being repaired or rebuilt (which, afaik you should be able to do on most professional grade setups, but for whatever reason our linux guys can't get it to behave). Added fun: When the system comes back up, if you tried to access your e-mail while the file system was garbled you probably still can't. And you get no error message about it. It just spits back nothing, as though you have no new mail. The system is 'up' but doesn't work and you have to go into your directory and delete some files that most people have never heard of. It's not hard to do, but because you have no idea that there's a problem the less technically inclined (or just ESL) people in building full of computer scientists don't always fix it immediately. The net effect is that if the storage controller gets messed up, we're down for 3 or 4 days if not longer.
And that's just one university department. We have a relatively decent amount of money, and several full time staff for these things. But we probably can't match any cloud services uptime, even with 7 or 8 hours of downtime regularly, not even close. It's not a trivial calculation, even a 50 or 60 employee outfit will probably have trouble matching Amazon or Azure uptime with a full time IT guy. There's probably a cross over point where you have enough employees to support big enterprise IT infrastructure and manpower, but only support it badly (there's not enough money for proper replication or whatever), and then eventually you get big enough that you just run everything in house anyway because there's definitely no cost advantage to hiring someone. For us, I think we have 5 or 6 IT staff, if we could toss 3 of them, + all of their equipment, you're looking at somewhere around 350, 400k/year to spend on a support contract. I'm guessing, but don't know, if you can get a cloud service for ~20 TB of reasonably reliable file and e-mail storage for less than 350k/year from these guys.
The big place I see people right now (as a sort of flavour of the month) using cloud service as an augment to burst capacity needs. That's a whole other analysis.
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I'm in no way bitter. A sci fi writer thought of a technology that would be neat, having no idea how to implement it, or if it was ever even going to be possible. A technology guy (Bill Gates) thought of an implementation of it as a similar technology but could never quite get it. Apple realized that the key to the user experience was touch sensitivity that had been developed long before by someone else. It was a tremendous innovation in design to realize that was the the key missing element. It was so crucial to the whole thing they could come up with probably the stupidest product name in decades, and it *still* sold like hotcakes. That shows just how valuable design innovation is.
But they didn't develop touch screens. In the context of what is an innovation, developing a touch screen was a science and engineering innovation, apple didn't do that. They did innovate the design and integration.
Without the technology for touch screens it would have never come together at all. And we'd be stuck with microsofts vision of tablets and slates (which, admittedly served me very well for specific purposes, but not for what an iPad does).
If you want to go one step further, the Android guys (and microsoft) are trying to figure out what the most important things Apple missed are. Androids answer to this is "mostly open marketplace", Microsoft is more on the 'stop thinking of it as a collection of dumb icons' approach.
I appreciate that you may have had trouble reading the first line of my post, but I was quite clearly I was drawing a distinction between types of innovation, and stating one cannot exist without another. That happens a lot. No hard feelings.
That was my point. Apple didn't invent touch screens, that was a science and engineering innovation. Some sci fi writer looked thought 'wouldn't this be grand' some other technologist (bill gates) thought about what could be done. Apple realized the key was to glue someone elses science and engineering innovation into the other technologists to produce sci fi.
That wasn't a science and eng innovation, that was a design innovation. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you want to only value science and eng innovations credit goes to whomever figured out how to make a touch screen.
depends how you count it. And there are a lot of ways to count it.
Apple is highest total market cap regularly, (trading places the Exxon depending on share prices). It is no where near the largest assets or total employees. Though those don't count sub contracted employees (think foxconn) or intellectual assets.
I think it's most profitable, but it doesn't actually pay a dividend (yet), so other companies that do pay dividends are worth more in that respect. It's way down there on revenue, but profit per revenue it's probably towards the top of big companies, of course bigger companies can do more things to hide their obscene amounts of wealth, including paying principle shareholders fees as employees or contractors, for example imagine if Steve Jobs made a Company, named Steve's Job Company, and Apple payed Steve's Job Company 10 billion dollars a year for management services. Or more likely, Goldman Sachs will own 5% of the company, and is paid as the accounting firm for the company sort of thing. I can say a lot of bad things about steve jobs, but it doesn't seem like he ever tried to loot apple for his own purposes.
If you want to count state owned corporations it's still probably the largest, but not necessarily, the Saudi oil company, the UAE's various sovereign wealth funds etc. are all essentially corporations, but no one makes public how much money they have, the value of their assets, their revenue, or who gets the payouts.
They're more design and user experience innovations than science and engineering ones.
But that's the case with any business. Even if you do a lot of research (think Microsoft), you can't research everything, you read up on the literature on what other people are doing, copy the ideas you want and package it up (copying may include paying for it in some form).
Of course the design and user experience innovations don't mean anything without the science and engineering ones. Bill Gates was telling us for years we'd have tablets and slates that we could carry around with us, and the concept was proliferated and demonstrated before him on Star Trek which got it from other sources etc. etc. etc. It took Apple to realize the key technology innovation was touch sensing for both phones and slates, and to package that up into a computing device that's named for a teen girls first feminine hygiene product. Without touch sensors slates would still probably be a dead end, regardless of how good the vision of what they *could* do was.
Fly to LA, mail from LA. That's as close to 'in the mail the next day' as you can get.
Also, your ballot doesn't need to get to your home jurisdiction to be counted. That's making it more difficult than necessary. An approved elections official, or more likely several, needs to certify that votes were cast and counted for a district and forward the result to them to be incorporated into the final tally. Anything else is artificially impeding the success of the system for the sake of being incompetent.
You might wonder if this is adding a layer that can be hacked into the system. The answer is no, since the information gathered up has to be gathered up and passed around between election officials already, adding one more communication to the process isn't any better or worse.
Different problem. Books, movies, etc. have value outside of the cloud service that's hosting them. This game has characters... I'm sorry.. cards, in it, that people have spent time/money to acquire, but they aren't anything outside of the game. I suppose you could print off a PDF of all of the cards in game, but you can't do anything with it.
You can't just have a gnome deathknight that you refuse to store on WoW because you don't trust blizzard to not shut down the servers. The gnome deathknight doesn't exist without the servers, regardless of how much you did, or didn't pay for it (directly or indirectly), if you prefer a more F2P comparison, ships in Star Trek Online, or some of the tanks in World Tanks are examples of a this. You can get a statue made of your ship, tank, or gnome deathknight, but it's not a ship, tank or DK, it's just a statue of it. Without the world that makes it exist it isn't anything. An ebook is just another variant on book, book on papyrus, book on paper, book from printing press, book in german, book in english, book in electronic format, and without amazon you'd be locked out of the only format of that book you paid for, even though one of the other book formats would still have had value to you. A Magic The gathering card stored 'in the cloud' that you could access anywhere would still have play value if you could take it out of the cloud if the service was to shut down, as you could still play the game without the cloud storage. In this case the game is shutting down, and the data it has can't be 'pulled out' separately.
Whether or not it's a good idea to pay for virtual cards vs physical ones is a whole other argument.
A more interesting question is whether or not you are more likely to lose your own data (house fire, hard drive/raid failure etc.) than amazon is. For most people on /. the answer is a definitive no, since we are savvy enough to have various layers of storage for our stuff. But that isn't true of everyone. If all your data is on one computer with one hard drive and it gets stolen/fails/etc you're SOL.
That's slightly different, in that the data would still have value if you pulled it out of the cloud. The challenge with a online game (collectibles or otherwise) is that they only have a relative value within a narrow system of the cloud. Without the game they have no value other than sentimental, which is of course important to some degree, but because you can duplicate the cards infinitely outside of the system they have no meaningful value otherwise.
To quote myself "That's why these things are illegal". I'm not saying it wasn't illegal, and that isn't important as a principle. But the suggestion that this somehow screwed people using PS3 clusters is simply false. It wouldn't necessarily be false in general though for some arbitrary computing box that offered some arbitrary compute cluster functionality. That is why it's illegal. Only this specific instance it wasn't an accurate depiction of the problem.
For the military in overseas operations in something like guam or airbases it's probably the most easy. Their deployments are scheduled by the government in advance, and they are there by orders of the government who will generally need to be able to speak with them before their deployment and generally during. You may need to make allowances that they need to vote either in advance (potentially days) or you need to accept a delay in the return of their results or a bit of both. Guam is also US territory, meaning there are official US government officials running the show who should be able to organize things. The same could be said of any area with an Embassy, since the election should be handled through the Embassy and consular offices. A flight from Guam to Hawaii is 7 hours. Vote on the island, load plane with ballots, fly to hawaii, or 5 more hours and Los Angles. This doesn't need to be hard.
The guy who's screwed is an aid worker trying to get red cross supplies into Syria, aid into Somalia, that sort of thing. There's no official government presence where you can show up and connect to them, the deployments are arranged as needed, on short notice in many cases, and they may not have any sort of diplomatic baggage transfer system that you can access, especially without an embassy (think Iran, where even though US operations are going to be run out of someone elses embassy you don't necessarily want to hand the Iranians a list of all Americans in the country by virtue of asking them to vote).
Now that doesn't mean the US government doesn't make life unnecessarily difficult for voting from Guam or Afghanistan or whatever, but there's no reason it needs to be. If you can get someone ammunition you can get them a ballot. And if you can't get them food or ammunition you generally know well enough in advance that they're being sent out.
Submarines operating on long deployments submerged are basically screwed. But not Guam. Yes, you have to have some tolerance for early voting, that a person who's going to be deployed to a fire base for the next 2 months might not have a ballot on election day sort of thing. But if the military is running it, it really isn't that hard to handle an election, they may make it seem hard by choosing to be incompetent, which makes a lot of sense on the specific example of Guam of course.
For a while that happened. The PC was, without steam, mostly a no no market for big guys. Think Fable 2. Very expensive to work on, very inconsistent player experiences, lots of support costs etc. It still has a lot of those problems (along with piracy of course), but generally now you can do the same thing on all 3.
But once you've spent all the money on art, content creation etc. if there are enough PS3 consoles out there, it's worth making it for the PS3 because those are more customers. Most of the cost of game development is in content creation, not engine programming. There are sequence issues created by the engine programming time (you need an engine before you can put things in the engine, obviously), but the big money is on artists and content creators, and advertising (which is a whole other problem).
And of course, the job of a console seller is to get enough exclusives that you'll buy that console. You might have multiple consoles personally, but a lot of people will only get one, so you want to hit both platforms as a dev to hit the widest audience. Unless a manufacturer is chipping in some money to make sure you stay with them, and them alone.
As a game programmer... not so much. Now I have a problem. Well I don't, because I make PC games. But my colleagues do.
Any code you write right now for the cell probably won't work on the PS4. So is my game going to come out before the PS4 launches, or after? Do I launch on the PS3, which has one hell of an install base right now (~50 million consoles) where it's not too hard to move half a million units, or do I stop all that work, and bank on the PS4, which might be delayed, then I have a game I can't sell, and no money to make another, or hope the PS4 launch titles move enough units to make my money?
When the PS3 *launched* most PS2 games worked on it (no special controllers), give or take that wierd graphics bug. but anyway they said it would work. So as a developer, if I was finishing up a PS2 game, no prob, just finish it, it will run on the PS3, so no problem. But if it won't work on the PS4 do I want to bank on people still buying PS3 games at all by the time I launch (if people move entirely to the PS4 and ditch the PS3 I'm in real trouble).
The other thing is that people have invested a shit load of money learning to make stuff for the Cell. That investment is probably all getting tossed.
Is it? How many of those PS3's will fail? A customer that buys 1500 PS3's and no games cost them 150 000 bucks (on the early PS3's that were losing between 100-150 dollars per console, so I'll low ball it). Sure, 150k worth of PR when that company is the air force, but it's not that many. Yes, there was some big money on the 8000 dollar toshiba laptops that had a 4 cell add on in them, but that wasn't going to Sony was it? (And how many of those did they ever sell?).
If a console does fail are they going to want to replace it at all, even if you have parts available (answer: no, PS3's are poor value for computing dollar, as is the cell in general for this sort of problem). The airforce is used to buying things expecting a certain percent to fail over the years, and having to use the existing inventory to replace them with. That applies to Aircraft as much as computing consoles.
Even then, Sony might have a handful of original firmware PS3's in a warehouse for customers with whom they made an arrangement. If you (like we did) bought them from a regular retailer, and really, who buys 1500 consoles from Walmart or GameStop, you accept that you may not be able to get replacement parts the way you want. We would have loved to have 1024 MB of RAM in the console (now that I'm a game developer I feel the same way) for clusters, but well, that isn't going to happen when you buy retail.
And then they cut PS3's that supported another OS from the product line and it was clear the way the wind was blowing. Time to switch any money you have to GPU computing. Run the PS3 cluster until it dies or is no longer worth the rack space, but if anything dies the money is better spent elsewhere.
Yes, and that screwed us a lot more than removing the Other OS feature. By the time they removed the other OS feature PS3 clusters were a dead end because they weren't going to make any more, and as it turns out a 250 dollar GPU is better for number crunching (if you including training costs) than a PS3.
You sound like you might be confused. There are several physical revisions of PS3 consoles. They removed the feature to install linux (along with most of the PS2 compatibility) by about the 3rd revision of the console. That's both legal, and reasonable, PS3 linux was to make it a *computer* to dodge import tariffs in the EU, which failed (they thought this would get them over the hurdle the PS2 addon kit also failed to pass, they were wrong), and backwards compatibility drove up costs. To gaming purists it was unreasonable, and fair enough from that perspective. But anyway, long after the new hardware revisions of the console were not supporting the other OS, they released a software update that hosed other OS support in the software on prior consoles. That's illegal. It didn't actually matter to those of us at universities etc. running clusters, because the PS3 firmware didn't ever add anything to the Linux OS that I was aware of. If you were seriously running it as a cluster you didn't get the PS3 OS firmware installed, pretty much ever, because if it's a cluster it's not gaming.
As a practical matter the PS3 isn't very good value for number crunchers. GPU's do the job better, and have less esoteric training costs and you know there will be GPU makers 10 years from now. But the PS4, as per the article, may not use the cell so it might be a one trick pony project. Those have their value, but you don't want to heavily invest grant money in a project that's a dead end. 5000 bucks in hardware that didn't work out long is about the cost of a student who flunks out their first semester. No big loss. But in terms of performance per dollar, training cost per performance etc. by the time they removed the other OS in software it was clear GPU computing was the future. And well, it still is.
So yes, making it impossible to replace dead consoles was inconvenient, but they did that long before they pulled the other OS off existing consoles, and there's no point in replacing a console anyway, because the money is better spent elsewhere, and that was clear by the time they stopped selling consoles that supported the other OS in the first place.
As someone who worked with a PS3 cluster, the removal other OS functionality did not impact me in the slightest. If you're using them for a cluster you aren't using them for gaming. If you're using them for a cluster you don't download the updates that have absolutely no impact on your console, which is all of them.
What they did that impacted the PS3 cluster business was they took away the other OS option in future consoles, which makes sense since it was a waste of money on their part anyway, but that means there's no way to replace broken parts of the cluster. Though as it turns out, it wouldn't be worthwhile anyway, since GPU's do the number crunching better, and for less money.
The Cell on clusters suffers the same problem it has in a console. It's not enough better than a CPU for the extra time needed to learn to use it properly. And it's not good enough to compete with a GPU for pure computing needs. It was an amusing project, and sure, once the cluster is running you want to churn through some data with it, but by the time they ditched the Other OS feature in software they were beyond viable to build new (since you couldn't get consoles that would do it).
That doesn't mean it wasn't illegal to remove the other OS feature after the fact. It probably was on principle. But don't misrepresent who it mattered to. The fraction of a percent of people who ever actually used the other OS feature *and* games did get screwed, no doubt. But if you seriously used the OtherOS functionality you didn't use them as gaming machines at the same time. Remember a lot of people 'used' the other OS feature in the same way 90 million people 'use' google plus. And yes, that small collection of power users, and that larger but still small collection of pirates got screwed on the deal. That's why these things are illegal.
If, in the long run, yeilds are better, more sustainable, more secure etc. then ultimately all future generations benefit from it. The reason you want GM at all is because there's a market that isn't able to be filled by current products, something new, that fills both the new and old role is by definition better, the transition may not be pretty, but if at the end of it you can feed 20% more people, or the same number of people with 20% less water/fertilizer/area/whatever then in the end you've made the world a better place.
Oil made the world a better place, for all of its perils. You accept that there are some perils, but you have to look at the benefit as well, that applies to anything. Any particular GM food may or may not have any actual benefit though, and I don't doubt there are a lot of snake oil sales out there. That doesn't mean all GM will always be bad, no more than all pharmaceuticals versus snake oil.
It's amazing what enough money to buy millions of barrels of oil a day, electrical power for refrigeration, and general farming equipment will do to yields.
100 years ago it took 2/3rd of the population to grow enough food for 100%. Now we can, in the west, pull that off with 1 or 2% of the population because we've mechanized it. Mechanization comes with its own problems, but we'll just gloss over those.
Of course we can also feed 1.4 billion people in an unsustainable way. If you rely on fertilizer that's mined in some distant country, oil to run the machinery etc. all you're doing is shifting the problem around.
It's not that traditional crops can't feed people, it's a question of whether or not you can do it more efficiently or cost effectively. If you need pour billions of dollars of chemicals on food to feed 1.4 billion people then being able to get the same effect with less billions of dollars in externally sourced chemicals is good. Those chemicals don't have to be pesticides, hell, it could be water. Imagine being able to engineer a plant to need 20% less water. Sure, you can feed the same number of people with it, but using less water would be wonderful at creating food security for billions of people. Even if it has 10% lower yeilds, if your limiting factor is water, not land (and this applies to pretty much anything) you're still ahead.
Whether or not any particular GM crop is worthwhile is separate from the principle that GM crops could do wonders to help feed people more cost effectively, and more sustainable. Any particular GM crop could be completely useless or downright dangerous. You can make the same argument about buildings. Great things to live in, but putting a building not designed for earthquakes in an earthquake zone is not a great plan. That doesn't mean we should never build buildings, or even shouldn't build buildings in earthquake zones, you just need to understand the requirements and be able to design towards it, and the same applies as much to crops as it does to anything else.
No one gave a shit about Tibet before, why would they now? Tibet was always (at least last 2 centuries sort of always) in the chinese empire's sphere of influence. Just because China has a new coat of paint doesn't mean there's a need to change much.
The reason China has a security council seat is even if we wanted to do something about Tibet what exactly could they do? We locked the PRC out of the UN for 20 years, despite their possession of 98% of china, and it didn't do any good other than help keep millions of people in china poor and starving, and Tibet still firmly under Beijings thumb.
The other major powers can ask each other nicely to stop behaving badly, or they can outright threaten each other (suez crisis for example) but any one of the 5 could seriously mess with any distant ambitions of the other, and anything close to home is already settled. None of them have anything near tibet, nor do they care to. It's like the ireland of central asia, you really want it... well we object strongly, but have actually important things to worry about. Like ireland, which actually has about a million more people living in it than Tibet.
Put another way: Trying to get china to give up tibet was causing more people to starve to death and die unnecessarily early in China than live in Tibet. By several orders of magnitude. Tibet isn't worth it. Kuwait was, because even though kuwait was small (though again, still half a million more people than tibet), the people who took it over were also small, and the total human cost of action either way was in the small hundreds of thousands. Britain could depopulate Deigo Garcia because it's not worth it either. The UN tried to convince the argies the falklands weren't worth it, and well, they weren't.
The secret alliances are basically a no no now, and were under the league of nations. The UN acts as a collector of treaties, even though for some reason we don't know where the official border is between Saudi and the Emirates they have a treaty, and it has been filed with the UN for future use.
The UN is also a recognition that there are a lot of very unsavoury people in the world, they're in charge of things, and like it or not they're making decisions. So you may as well give them an official seat at the table, rather than envelopes full of cash that no one knows about.
The UN also acts as a fair and impartial arbiter, insofar as such a thing is ever possible. When Canada had a dispute with the US over territory from the alaska purchase, in 1903 a commission was created, that was 2 canadians, a briton (who was probably the only one who had any brains, despite what we think of him in canada) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_boundary_dispute), and 3 americans. Any other arrangement, 3 britons and 3 americans, or 3 canadians and 3 britons for example, would have probably caused a split and who knows what would have happened (war between the British Empire and the US over the territory possible). The briton had the foresight to realize that even if it was some shipping gold tax rights, it wasn't worth fighting over in the broader context of Anglo-American relations. The UN first avoids 50/50 split, and second will try and act on the legal merits of the claims fairly, not act on the strategic interest of the powers in question. That's better for everyone. It also means everyone hates the UN, because it's not serving them. Which is the point. The UN recognizes that certain powers (the 5 permanent security council members) can do pretty much whatever the hell they want, and no one can do much about it, but that would be true with or without the UN, and at least this way all 5 of them get some officially wrangling by the rest of the the world.
Define sovereign government, and how do you clarify legitimate sovereign government from an illegitimate one. If I put a flag out my window and proclaim myself a sovereign state that does not make it so. If we're bombing an illegitimate government is that a war, whether they are sovereign or not?
Does it matter if we call it a war, or 'Military Action" because the point of military actions, or wars, isn't to kill people usually. Usually it is to effect political change, and, ideally, the *threat* of military action deters reckless action and avoids a war.
Which goes to the problem of counting wars that have been avoided because the UN has come close enough to authorizing military action to dissuade political actions that could eventually result in a war. Or whether by virtue of the UN acting the scale of war that have happened is reduced. The UN couldn't prevent the US from attempting to recolonize iraq, but it can, by virtue of past treaties and the threats of future actions against the US limit both the effectiveness of any recolonization (and convert it into liberation), and limit the nature of civilian casualties.
Depends how much infrastructure you need. We really do have I think it's 6 IT guys. What exactly each of them does I'm not sure. We do have to create accounts for several hundred students every semester though, and they have to maintain all of the local infrastructure no matter what, 20 professors, 150 grad students 500 or so computers in labs. So you need some IT staff for that. You can't give every research group identical computers, in fact, they buy their own equipment for their own needs in some cases (with their own money, that's the whole 'being self funded thing'). So overall we might run 700 machines across I guess two buildings, with 3 main servers, 'staff' 'student' and 'research that shouldn't be mixed with students' (which I've never used so I have no idea what its uptime is), profs will have a 'office' machine, and then research lab (rather than teaching lab) machines as well, as will many grad students. But only those that work on stuff that shouldn't be near things students can touch.
Now lets say you're talking about IT for 2500 employees. How about 6000? Our university has about 35 000 students, we have about 2500 staff total, and then lab computers. Do you want to be the sole sysadmin for what is probably about 10 000 machines? You have to have a collection of sysadmins (who probably have a hierarchy, but they're still sysadmins). There might be one overall admin, there usually is, but they have to delegate management of various assets to other people if you have enough stuff.
One IT guy can do a decent job on a 50 or 60 person outfit, even at a few colo's. But managing 500 machines, that's pushing your luck. And that was my point about there being some crossover. Probably a 200 -300 person (computer) place is big enough to warrant enterprise IT, but not necessarily big enough to support enterprise IT properly. Think call centres and things like that. Lots of staff, high turnover, (high training), and you don't have the money to pay decent people in house for a lot of stuff either. Whereas a 6000 person outfit is necessarily playing at the enterprise IT level.
addendum - I'm not the anonymous coward below. I'm not exactly sure what a community college is, there is a college here in town called Fanshawe and while we get some students from there and we train some of them (and my colleagues train them at Fanshawe) I do not attend that school. Community college is a US concept, and not being part of that education system (fortunately)I have nothing to do with it.
Universities: academic degrees (e.g. computer science, engineering, physics, medicine) including advanced degrees (masters, doctorates) colleges: tradeskills (auto mechanic, Linux server administration, IIS administration that sort of thing).
Actually they do obstruct the view of the article. That's what I mean precisely by them being the top results.
Which goes to the second point, and I'm not sure I can keep making it, if you search for Alfaques the first result is *not* their campsite. It is material related the disaster that are from Wikipedia, newspapers and google properties, and the Alfaques official site doesn't even get a thumbnail image whereas the others do.
Or at least, those were the results from here when I posted stuff a couple of days ago. It's possible we've google bombed them into the correct place, or google fixed it.
No matter what we're shifting the burden on who does the searching around. Either campers have to know to add the english word campsite when looking for a spanish business (how much sense does that really make) to get the result they want at the top, or the person searching for the disaster has to know to add disaster to get the result they want at the top. My argument is precisely that if I search for (to repeat the same example) slashdut the result should first be slashdut, with a reference to the fact that I may have just misspelled slashdot. If I search for Alfaques the first result should be Alfaques not Alfaques + some parameter with Alfaques further down the list. That's google deciding that + parameter is more important than no parameter, but I searched with no parameter.
Lots of businesses run 5 9's of uptime. You *can* do it. It's not a matter of *can* it's a matter of how much does it cost, and is it more or less economical to pay someone else to do some or all of it.
We were hit by the "northeast blackout of 2003". Which, where I was (different than were I am now) was without power for 24 hours, most places were 7 or 8, some a lot more than 24. So the power distribution itself didn't manage 4 9's for 24 years averaged up. Ourbackup generator I think was only good for 8 hours. Whatever it was, we had to go in and shut everything down within a couple of hours of the power not coming back up (this was when I was working with equipment that really cannot lose power, controlled power down was very expensive).
University of Western ontario. Comp sci department.
Also, that was sort of my point. We *should* be able to get it straight, and can't. I don't really care that much, and in general it's not that big a deal. Students work on their own machines unless they specifically have labs, so the facilities we run are there to be used if people need want them, but most people don't need or want them. Such is live in a BYOD business, and for us, if you can't BYOD you probably won't have one, because we don't give kids laptops. They pay us to be here after all. (Er, i guess I pay us to be here too, I'm a grad student, so I sort of pay myself for the privilege of being a student).
Ah, so there's the question. How much would it cost for you to run a system with 'no' downtime? I'm at a university, some of our labs (not so much in comp sci but generally) have fairly specific requirements about say not losing power, because it would damage/destroy equipment or running experiments.
But IT is more than just power. In almost 4 years here every year we've had several days of downtime for our main undergraduate server (the one undergrads are supposed to use for various things, and that handles their logins and file storage), and several on the separate but arguably more important staff server, which is supposed does the same thing, but that includes all of our grant applications.
Causes of our server outages (I'm not an IT guy, this is just what they've told us that I can remember): Power failures. Yes we have battery backups, but they're only good for so long, and since none of our equipment suffers permanent damage without power this isn't high priority. Networking. We only have two redundant pipes. That, for home use for example, or most businesses is pretty good. For our pipes one goes to a host to the west, one to the east. I'm not specifically familiar with what failed that took our networking offline for 7 or 8 hours but it affected both pipes. Storage: bad raid controller on the main fileserver. This has a few cascading effects. If you don't realizing it's garbling data it ends up distributing that garble off to the backups or clones. When it crashes (which doesn't take that long after the controller starts getting messy) you may have several backups that need to be repaired. We can't do much to the file system while it's being repaired or rebuilt (which, afaik you should be able to do on most professional grade setups, but for whatever reason our linux guys can't get it to behave). Added fun: When the system comes back up, if you tried to access your e-mail while the file system was garbled you probably still can't. And you get no error message about it. It just spits back nothing, as though you have no new mail. The system is 'up' but doesn't work and you have to go into your directory and delete some files that most people have never heard of. It's not hard to do, but because you have no idea that there's a problem the less technically inclined (or just ESL) people in building full of computer scientists don't always fix it immediately. The net effect is that if the storage controller gets messed up, we're down for 3 or 4 days if not longer.
And that's just one university department. We have a relatively decent amount of money, and several full time staff for these things. But we probably can't match any cloud services uptime, even with 7 or 8 hours of downtime regularly, not even close. It's not a trivial calculation, even a 50 or 60 employee outfit will probably have trouble matching Amazon or Azure uptime with a full time IT guy. There's probably a cross over point where you have enough employees to support big enterprise IT infrastructure and manpower, but only support it badly (there's not enough money for proper replication or whatever), and then eventually you get big enough that you just run everything in house anyway because there's definitely no cost advantage to hiring someone. For us, I think we have 5 or 6 IT staff, if we could toss 3 of them, + all of their equipment, you're looking at somewhere around 350, 400k/year to spend on a support contract. I'm guessing, but don't know, if you can get a cloud service for ~20 TB of reasonably reliable file and e-mail storage for less than 350k/year from these guys.
The big place I see people right now (as a sort of flavour of the month) using cloud service as an augment to burst capacity needs. That's a whole other analysis.