The taxi system already has good infrastructure in place and could destroy Uber if they wanted to, simply by competing fairly and adopting the "choose where you want to go before the cab gets to you" model.
But instead of doing this, they try to take the easy way out and sue.
Think of how optimized the cab system could be if they used Uber's model? But no, it's still based on the old "hail a cab and tell them where you're going" system.
Mainframes aren't even obsolete. IBM still sells them, fully code compatible going all the way back to 1968 when the first System/360 mainframe shipped.
Companies that use this stuff have big expensive support contracts with IBM. They don't replace it because it works. In fact it works so well that "the mainframe is down!" is seen as a HUGE DISASTER in the business process, akin to a building burning down.
It's a whole different world than the modern idea of blades in a rack running Linux. And it still works today, which is why it sticks around.
I've been to a few hotels where I had trouble getting my personal hotspot feature to work, and ended up having to switch to USB tethering to use it. I never really gave much thought to whether the hotel might be at fault; I just chalked it up to "tech shit sometimes breaks" and used an alternative method to just get it done because I had to get online and didn't have all day.
Of course, this would screw people over who just have a personal hotspot device with no USB capability. Luckily, my phone can do WiFi, USB or Bluetooth and the latter two work well (though bluetooth is a bit slow)
How about NOT laying off your US IT workforce, and how about NOT outsourcing this work?
How about hiring people within our country first and only hiring abroad if you cannot find local talent?
This sort of thing is going to destroy our country if it keeps up. We really need some regulation in this area that makes it unprofitable to outsource IT to other countries.
Who is going to pay for relocation and construction costs for a new facility? If they were given the go ahead to build in 2012, revoking that now surely means they shouldn't have to pay for the relocation costs?
How about making the people who complained pay for it? They don't seem to understand the concept of living in a big city and that you sometimes have to deal with other people, commercial activity and noise. If they don't want that they should move to the countryside.
In the end, contracts are worthless unless there's the threat of men with guns showing up to physically enforce them.
Has it ever gotten to this point? I'm just thinking if I ran a company and another country wanted to send their goons in to look at my hardware and proprietary data, I'd want to be able to legally tell them to fuck off.
If they're going to mandate locking down, lock down the WiFi radio, as that's the part that uses the radio waves. The WiFi radio can be a "black box" with it own firmware, much like on cellular phones, where the cellular radio is a similar black box.
This keeps the FCC happy, because people won't be able to violate FCC rules, and it keeps users happy because they can keep running custom software. The WiFi firmware isn't typically something you want to mess with anyway.
I recently "fixed" one of our ZFS fileservers at work which was performing very poorly by *removing* a failing drive. The drive was taking a few seconds to read blocks, obviously dying, so it was slowing down the entire system. As soon as I pulled it ZFS finally declared it dead and the filesystem was running at full performance again.
I felt so confident being able to just walk up and yank the troublesome drive; that's how much trust I've built in ZFS. It's incredibly stable and fault tolerant.
>neither Linus nor the ZoL team want ZoL in Linus' tree.
I bang my head on my desk frequently over Linus' stubborn nature, then I realize it's that same stubborn nature that makes Linux as great as it is, so I forgive him.
If ZFS were part of the kernel, bugfixes and updates would have to follow the Linux kernel release schedule, which would make it a huge hassle to update the code on running systems without building custom kernels.
Building custom kernels is something you shouldn't be doing in a production environment unless it's either 1995 or you're a masochist.:)
Likewise; we use it all over the place in our department. We have a bunch of 96TB/80TB usable ZFS file servers based on 24 4TB SATA drives. The performance is amazing for the price and they are rock solid under all kinds of heavy load, except for one tiny bug we hit recently that has been fixed already.
What's frustrating is that it's not the ZFS license that's the problem. It's the GPL. Oracle couldn't give a flying fuck if someone put ZFS into the Linux kernel, but the GPL zealots would probably raise a huge stink about it and keep it from happening.
For the record, I support open source; I just don't like the "viral" nature of the GPL. The ZFS situation is a case where it's doing more harm than good.
Not to mention it's bottled by the same companies like Pepsico and Coke that make soda. So if people keep drinking water these companies have nothing to worry about.
We should make them worry and stop buying bottled water. Not only are you flushing your money down the toilet, but getting all those empty bottles out of our waste stream would be a great benefit for all of us.
Seriously, while I do wear one at work, a holster doesn't win you a lot of points in the looks department when you're out socially. It took me a while to recognize this fact ten years ago, and had a couple friends point out to me just how dorky they look.:)
I like to be able to have my phone in my pocket when out and about, anywhere other than work, where holsters fit right in with the standard polo shirt and khaki pants IT uniform.
The sad thing is the feature is based solely on signal strength.
I did a test where I just yanked the ethernet cable out of the back of my Wifi access point, effectively creating a "wifi island" with no internet access.
Everything stopped working and the phone did NOT switch to cellular without turning Wifi off.
I think this situation, a wifi network with a broken or overloaded uplink, is more common than a weak signal, and should have been anticipated as well when implementing this feature.
As an iPhone user I've occasionally envied my Android-using friends for their removable batteries and SD slots.
Now that major phone makers are taking those features away, Android phones are losing two of their biggest advantages over iPhones. I even know at least one Android-using person who is thinking of switching to the iPhone because "What's the point without being able to swap batteries and SD cards?"
Big mistake. And I say this as an iPhone user who still wants Android to succeed because I shudder at what Apple would do without real competition.
It seems Google is ignoring those people who don't want a HUGE phone. The two models should have been the giant screened phone, and a smaller phone for those who like to actually be able to climb stairs with it in their pocket.
Why is there an API for sending a text message from a web page? Why does this need to exist at all?
You'd think someone at Apple, when they came up for this idea for this, would be shot down by someone else saying "Sorry dude, this is a feature that can be abused."
Same deal with javascript being able to open the App Store. WHY??
>One dumb decision was to try to save money by limiting the personnel to one new floppy disk per month
Wow, this has got to be one of the most hilarious cases of "penny-wise, pound-foolish" I've ever heard.
Floppy disks were cheap, even back then! They were practically a drop in the ocean when it comes to the budget of even small companies. What were these managers thinking?
Even "My condolences.:(" is better than hitting a stupid button. We've become a culture that needs a button for everything; I've made posts that get dozens of Likes or +1s or whatever, and have only one or two commments. People don't want to take the time to say how they really feel.
That's one thing I liked about Livejournal, and miss now. There is no "Like", so people left comments more. Even a simple "way to go!" is better than hitting "Like".
Of course I'll probably be screwed out of that, but still.. It's amazing to see someone taking a job with that much stress and responsibility at that age. When I get there I'll be thinking "I've given enough to society. Time to get mine" and find somewhere pretty to relax.
It's been twelve years since it was coined, and yet it's unbelievable that people STILL haven't heard of the Streisand effect.
Trying to shut someone up in this age just makes the information spread much faster and wider. I wouldn't have heard of this at all if the lawsuit wasn't threatened.
I find it hard to believe a software company with the talent to make software so robust and well written that it never needs updates couldn't come up with another blockbuster product to continue making money.
Also, if the product never requires updates, wouldn't that mean that if you're paying a subscription fee you're basically flushing money down the toilet? The money's not being used to fund new versions of the software, you're just paying the developer for something you already own for eternity.
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The taxi system already has good infrastructure in place and could destroy Uber if they wanted to, simply by competing fairly and adopting the "choose where you want to go before the cab gets to you" model.
But instead of doing this, they try to take the easy way out and sue.
Think of how optimized the cab system could be if they used Uber's model? But no, it's still based on the old "hail a cab and tell them where you're going" system.
Mainframes aren't even obsolete. IBM still sells them, fully code compatible going all the way back to 1968 when the first System/360 mainframe shipped.
Companies that use this stuff have big expensive support contracts with IBM. They don't replace it because it works. In fact it works so well that "the mainframe is down!" is seen as a HUGE DISASTER in the business process, akin to a building burning down.
It's a whole different world than the modern idea of blades in a rack running Linux. And it still works today, which is why it sticks around.
I've been to a few hotels where I had trouble getting my personal hotspot feature to work, and ended up having to switch to USB tethering to use it. I never really gave much thought to whether the hotel might be at fault; I just chalked it up to "tech shit sometimes breaks" and used an alternative method to just get it done because I had to get online and didn't have all day.
Of course, this would screw people over who just have a personal hotspot device with no USB capability. Luckily, my phone can do WiFi, USB or Bluetooth and the latter two work well (though bluetooth is a bit slow)
How about NOT laying off your US IT workforce, and how about NOT outsourcing this work?
How about hiring people within our country first and only hiring abroad if you cannot find local talent?
This sort of thing is going to destroy our country if it keeps up. We really need some regulation in this area that makes it unprofitable to outsource IT to other countries.
Who is going to pay for relocation and construction costs for a new facility? If they were given the go ahead to build in 2012, revoking that now surely means they shouldn't have to pay for the relocation costs?
How about making the people who complained pay for it? They don't seem to understand the concept of living in a big city and that you sometimes have to deal with other people, commercial activity and noise. If they don't want that they should move to the countryside.
In the end, contracts are worthless unless there's the threat of men with guns showing up to physically enforce them.
Has it ever gotten to this point? I'm just thinking if I ran a company and another country wanted to send their goons in to look at my hardware and proprietary data, I'd want to be able to legally tell them to fuck off.
What is it exactly that legally entitles companies like Oracle to audit you?
Why can't you just tell them to F off?
If they're going to mandate locking down, lock down the WiFi radio, as that's the part that uses the radio waves. The WiFi radio can be a "black box" with it own firmware, much like on cellular phones, where the cellular radio is a similar black box.
This keeps the FCC happy, because people won't be able to violate FCC rules, and it keeps users happy because they can keep running custom software. The WiFi firmware isn't typically something you want to mess with anyway.
>athough ZoL is not that hard to get running at all.
It's easy to get running but hard to KEEP running, because DKMS has a bad habit of breaking sometimes when updating the kernel or ZFS itself.
I'd say about a 50/50 chance of having the system come up correctly after a "yum update" for the kernel or ZFS on RHEL 6.
Being able to just install binary modules would probably help considerably, provided they are built correctly by the distro maintainers.
I recently "fixed" one of our ZFS fileservers at work which was performing very poorly by *removing* a failing drive. The drive was taking a few seconds to read blocks, obviously dying, so it was slowing down the entire system. As soon as I pulled it ZFS finally declared it dead and the filesystem was running at full performance again.
I felt so confident being able to just walk up and yank the troublesome drive; that's how much trust I've built in ZFS. It's incredibly stable and fault tolerant.
>neither Linus nor the ZoL team want ZoL in Linus' tree.
I bang my head on my desk frequently over Linus' stubborn nature, then I realize it's that same stubborn nature that makes Linux as great as it is, so I forgive him.
If ZFS were part of the kernel, bugfixes and updates would have to follow the Linux kernel release schedule, which would make it a huge hassle to update the code on running systems without building custom kernels.
Building custom kernels is something you shouldn't be doing in a production environment unless it's either 1995 or you're a masochist. :)
Likewise; we use it all over the place in our department. We have a bunch of 96TB/80TB usable ZFS file servers based on 24 4TB SATA drives. The performance is amazing for the price and they are rock solid under all kinds of heavy load, except for one tiny bug we hit recently that has been fixed already.
This is what I wonder as well.
What's frustrating is that it's not the ZFS license that's the problem. It's the GPL. Oracle couldn't give a flying fuck if someone put ZFS into the Linux kernel, but the GPL zealots would probably raise a huge stink about it and keep it from happening.
For the record, I support open source; I just don't like the "viral" nature of the GPL. The ZFS situation is a case where it's doing more harm than good.
Not to mention it's bottled by the same companies like Pepsico and Coke that make soda. So if people keep drinking water these companies have nothing to worry about.
We should make them worry and stop buying bottled water. Not only are you flushing your money down the toilet, but getting all those empty bottles out of our waste stream would be a great benefit for all of us.
>I recommend getting a holster.
I got mine at PreserveYourVirginity.com!
Seriously, while I do wear one at work, a holster doesn't win you a lot of points in the looks department when you're out socially. It took me a while to recognize this fact ten years ago, and had a couple friends point out to me just how dorky they look. :)
I like to be able to have my phone in my pocket when out and about, anywhere other than work, where holsters fit right in with the standard polo shirt and khaki pants IT uniform.
The sad thing is the feature is based solely on signal strength.
I did a test where I just yanked the ethernet cable out of the back of my Wifi access point, effectively creating a "wifi island" with no internet access.
Everything stopped working and the phone did NOT switch to cellular without turning Wifi off.
I think this situation, a wifi network with a broken or overloaded uplink, is more common than a weak signal, and should have been anticipated as well when implementing this feature.
As an iPhone user I've occasionally envied my Android-using friends for their removable batteries and SD slots.
Now that major phone makers are taking those features away, Android phones are losing two of their biggest advantages over iPhones. I even know at least one Android-using person who is thinking of switching to the iPhone because "What's the point without being able to swap batteries and SD cards?"
Big mistake. And I say this as an iPhone user who still wants Android to succeed because I shudder at what Apple would do without real competition.
It seems Google is ignoring those people who don't want a HUGE phone. The two models should have been the giant screened phone, and a smaller phone for those who like to actually be able to climb stairs with it in their pocket.
Why is there an API for sending a text message from a web page? Why does this need to exist at all?
You'd think someone at Apple, when they came up for this idea for this, would be shot down by someone else saying "Sorry dude, this is a feature that can be abused."
Same deal with javascript being able to open the App Store. WHY??
>One dumb decision was to try to save money by limiting the personnel to one new floppy disk per month
Wow, this has got to be one of the most hilarious cases of "penny-wise, pound-foolish" I've ever heard.
Floppy disks were cheap, even back then! They were practically a drop in the ocean when it comes to the budget of even small companies. What were these managers thinking?
Is it that hard to just leave a comment?
Even "My condolences. :(" is better than hitting a stupid button. We've become a culture that needs a button for everything; I've made posts that get dozens of Likes or +1s or whatever, and have only one or two commments. People don't want to take the time to say how they really feel.
That's one thing I liked about Livejournal, and miss now. There is no "Like", so people left comments more. Even a simple "way to go!" is better than hitting "Like".
This is exactly why I'm saving towards retirement, and why I don't plan to count on any government assistance.
I plan to live on my savings, and anything I get from the gov. will be a bonus.
That's around the age when I hope to retire.
Of course I'll probably be screwed out of that, but still.. It's amazing to see someone taking a job with that much stress and responsibility at that age. When I get there I'll be thinking "I've given enough to society. Time to get mine" and find somewhere pretty to relax.
It's been twelve years since it was coined, and yet it's unbelievable that people STILL haven't heard of the Streisand effect.
Trying to shut someone up in this age just makes the information spread much faster and wider. I wouldn't have heard of this at all if the lawsuit wasn't threatened.
I find it hard to believe a software company with the talent to make software so robust and well written that it never needs updates couldn't come up with another blockbuster product to continue making money.
Also, if the product never requires updates, wouldn't that mean that if you're paying a subscription fee you're basically flushing money down the toilet? The money's not being used to fund new versions of the software, you're just paying the developer for something you already own for eternity.