Fine, let's be really generous and say all of their transactions are processed in one hour. That's a rate of 8 transactions per second. That still doesn't hold a candle to the 133+ per second that we do. You would have to process all 40 million transactions in about 5 minutes to even come close to that rate. And if they really process all of them in 5 minutes, then that's an even stupider use of resources to have 1300 machines idle for 23 hours and 55 minutes every day.
Unless they're going for the top spot on Seti@Home or something.
In addition, our boxes can actually peak at a total of over 6000 transactions per second together, which would chew through 40,000,000 transactions in just under 2 hours (6700 seconds). We never come close to running that fast all day long. We'd flood all the downstream systems if we ran that fast for even 20 minutes. In theory, we could handle upwards of 518,000,000 transactions per day. Given an average of 25 scans per package, that would still be over 20 million total, end-to-end shipments. If we assume the post office really is talking about complete tracking packages (instead of transactions) we could handle their 40 million with around 100 boxes, not the 1300 they use, but I doubt that they really mean 40 million "packages", as that's quite a percentage of total mail (667M / day) they don't give stats for the number of tracked packages. I receive maybe 10 pieces of tracked mail per year, out of probably 1000 or more pieces of mail. That's about 1%. That would be 6 or 7 million items per day.
By the way, if you shipped your server via Express, I'd be very surprised if FedEx put a fork-lift sized hole in it. There's really no place that packages are handled via fork-lift at FedEx Express (I've been at the stations, ramps, and Memphis super hub). The only place they're used is to move the big cargo containers into the planes. And a container with a fork-lift hole would violate FAA rules and we couldn't fly it.
Honestly, my guess would be the guy loading it onto the FedEx truck wherever you ordered it from.
FedEx Express now has three hubs in the USA: Memphis, Oakland, and Indianapolis. I believe they are building a fourth. These central hubs process express packages only. Ground has their own sorting and moving systems (I'm not involved in those) and Freight has the same. There's also an international clearance hub in Alaska. Then there's the international hubs as well, at DeGaulle airport in France, and the new one in Guangdong(sp?) China, and probably a couple more I don't know about. FedEx hasn't had a "single point of failure" system in some years. Unless you really think Fred Smith wants to refund all the overnight packages because a bad storm rolled into Memphis for 24 hours and grounded all the airplanes.
And FedEx has several thousand "Stations" that act a lot like the local post offices. In fact, if I were to ship an express package from Colorado Springs to Denver, it would never ride a plane. It would be trucked to the Denver station and sent out from there, never seeing a hub.
Oh, and remember that post office has subcontracted all of their "Priority Mail" to be shipped via FedEx. We get bags at the airport and move them via FedEx to destination post offices. It's FedEx that gets that Priority Mail there on time, not the USPS.
Ooh. Gosh. We run 60 boxes. They live in the data center in Memphis, TN. They're HP Linux Boxes running RedHat. You could find most of that out from A) Oracle press releases [at one point, many moons ago, ours was the largest install of Oracle ever done. Now it's pathetically small.) B) the press release from FedEx when we upgraded to Linux Boxes last year from the IBM AIX boxes thus saving bu-cu bucks. C) the fact that we pioneered the new standard hardware and software platforms for FedEx services which means all new development gets pointed to *us* as a model, and D) just about anyone in IT at FedEx knows what the "Shipment Event Processor" group is, and could pull up our hardware diagrams on the company intranet. That makes about 10,000 people with access and hundreds or thousands of contractors.
Finally, the entire system sits inside the firewall. It has no customer facing access. I require both physical and password security to even access the production boxes in read-only mode, and only the Sys-Admins have root access, and they live inside locked buildings at the data centers.
They get 0.33 TPS per server by their numbers, or 1/3 of a TPS. We get 133.3 TPS per server. Let's see, 133.3 / 0.33 == 400. Hmm. 400 times the performance. Check.
They use 1300 servers. We use 57. That's 1.9% of the number of servers they use. Or 98% more efficiently, which is a factor of 50 times less hardware.
Each of their servers processes about 30,800 transactions per day. Each of ours peak at about 11,517,000 per day. So, we could do everything they're doing with 3.5 servers (okay, 4) In other words, with 4 servers, or 1/400th of theirs, we can process their "40 million transactions per day".
I compared their transactions per day (40 million) to our transactions per day (100,000,000). Please note, we do not max out our servers during peak cycle. They spend most of their time idle. In fact, in the rare cases where we do actually run at full speed (say, after a software load where transactions have backed up in the incoming queues) we regularly swamp the downstream systems and have to put ourselves into a "pause" mode to let them catch up.
So, once again, 400 times the performance means we could actually replace all their servers (1300) with (1300/400 = 3.25 rounded up to) four servers. Add a lot of redundancy (which is why we have 45) and you can see where I arrived at my number of 25 servers.
Yes, theirs may be average load per day. But so what? Our average is about 60,000,000 per day. And we usually spin at about 15% of the CPU being used.
Divide what? During peak season (Christmas time) we do 100,000,000 transactions a day. In fact, last year I believe we had a peak day of 117,000,000. There's no division. In fact, to be honest, probably 50% of the transactions come between 5PM and Midnight Eastern time. That's when all the stations bundle up packages and push them out to the ramps for movement to the Hubs for sorting. FedEx Express moves about 6 Million packages a day (10+ Million during peak), five days a week, and about 2 million on the weekends. We're global, so there's no "days off" for the system. The bigger FedEx gets, with it's new hubs in France and China, and half a dozen other places, the less breaks we get on our system. The load is still heavy in the mornings and the afternoons, but it's starting to fill up the valleys (at least it was before the economy tanked.)
We treat everything as a transaction, and that means pulling the entire package information from the database, processing it, and putting the modified data back to the database. 20-30 times on an average package. I would imagine the USPS defines a transaction about the same, with a small sample of their total letters, since you have to pay extra for tracking. Those envelopes probably end up with a similar (although I'd wager, smaller) number of transactions per item.
As I mentioned above in reply to another post, we still get hand-written airbills, airbills that have been photo-copied (Gee, twenty packages, all with the same tracking number...) and you can still find airbills in the system that are total crap. Try tracking the package "444444444444" sometime... (Hey, we filtered out "TWELVEZEROES" and "NO_NUM_GIVEN")
Our transactions are things like "contract event" when you fill in an airbill on-line, pickup scans, revenue data, station outbound, ramp inbound, ramp outbound, hub inbound, revenue exceptions, hub outbound, station inbound, on-van, delivery, proof-of-delivery, package close, point-of-failure processing, etc. etc. We have over 70 types of scans, and a typical package ends up with 20-30 events on it. If you think you can see anything when you track a package, you have no idea how much more goes into it behind the scenes. Every one of those scans is 2-3K in length, these aren't just a simple 20 byte "ping" or something. And we retain all that data for nine months.
And we still do 133 transactions per second per server.
And always remember that the USPS contracts out to FedEx to move all of its "Priority Mail".
Actually, FedEx still gets a lot of hand-written, photocopied or otherwise POS labels all the time. Just like the post office, they are encoded with a bar code at the first station that gets the package and are then read optically by a computer from then on. Or did you think those little squiggles on the bottom of your postal envelope (Postal Bar/Line code) were for decoration?
FedEx has a whole bunch of people whose only job is to look at scanned images of labels and type in the actual address when the machines fail to read them.
And I'm not in the part that deals with all that. That's the Tracker hardware. We just get the 60-100M scans per day, turn them from an isolated event into a "package" and then forward that information on to billing and the web interface system for tracking (and another dozen downstream systems that work with the data.) We also get fed information from about half a dozen other systems (like delay information, if there's an accident or a storm that grounds the airplanes) and use all of it to predict delivery dates for the packages. We also process point of failure information and information on commitment dates (the date that your package becomes free if we don't get it there) and containerization and consolidation information (i.e. what packages are in that bag, that got packed into that shipping container that got loaded onto that airplane, etc.) so we can pass scans done on a container down to all of the packages in that container. That's about another 20 million plus events per day.
A typical package traveling in the system ends up with 20-30 events that occur on it. Some end up with 80 or more. There's a lot more that goes on too, like clearance information, and multiple-piece shipments, COD information, and so on and so on. All of it goes through our system. With 45 boxes (actually we just bumped up to 50 with the June updates) and 12 database boxes. All HP boxes running Red Hat.
1300 servers, processing 40 million transactions a day... that's about 30,800 transactions per server. Or one transaction every 2.8 seconds or so. With an entire Linux box dedicated to it.
I work in the scan processing group at FedEx. At peak, we see over 100,000,000 transactions a day. And that's handled on 45 linux boxes, and 12 more for the database, doing upwards of 6000 transactions per second during bursts. That's a peak of about 133 transactions per second, per box. That's a little better than 0.3 TPS for the Post Office. So we have about 400 times the performance with 5% of the hardware. By that margin, I could do their processing with about 25 boxes total. That would mean another 98% savings on hardware alone.
For some reason, I fail to be really impressed that they've gone from "Crappy performance and Expensive" to "Crappy performance and less expensive."
I wonder if I can get the bazillion dollar contract to rewrite their system... No, wait, my name isn't "Boeing" or "Lockheed" or Ken Murtha.
Which would be a wonderful argument, if the "magic date" wasn't the date that Bush announced the ban on federal funding. So you'd have to be heavily invested in researching a stem cell line that was harvested... tomorrow. Doesn't seem like that was a high likelihood. Your straw man is a bit weak there.
...how much government funding he got during the 4 odd years he was "researching" this. Not a bad job to get paid to play a video game for four years and be an utter prick while doing it, while maintaining the rationalization, "it's all for science." Maybe someone should be researching why sociology professors are so willing to live off the public dole like this...
Trust me, buying a prius for the same price as a corvette -- that's a riot in America.
Just because no one got beat over the head, because most of those heads live in the Middle East, doesn't make it any less of one. We beat them where it hurt them most, the pocketbook.
One problem with taxing tires. I bought new tires for my wife's car back in January, last month, with about 4,000 miles on brand new tires, she got a 1/2" bolt through one of them. Now, under your plan, I have to pay for the full 50,000 mile lifetime of the tire.
I see a whole new government plan to put spikes on the road every time tax revenues fall...
In fact, roads in worse conditions would then lead to a rise in tax revenue. It would be in the government's best interest to make the roads worse, not better.
Benefits the rich people the most, since poor or rich, you usually drive the same distance. My next door neighbor works at the school down the street from where I work. We both drive the same distance to work each day. We both drive a vehicle in the 30MPG range. She's a teacher. I'm an IT professional.
She makes in the neighborhood of $30K. I make in the neighborhood of 3x that.
We drive the same miles, buy roughly the same amount of gas.
But she pays 3 times as much as me in taxes. That's because, by percentage, the part of her income paid in taxes is, by percentage, three times the amount of the percentage of my income.
In other words, $10 to her is three times more precious than $10 is to me. Or, put it another way, $300 to me is a mere.3% of my income, but 1% of hers. I can spend $300, 300 times in a year, she can only spend it 100 times.
We both eat roughly the same amount of food, buy the same amount of clothing, etc. At the end of the year, if we do that, and she runs through all $30,000 of her income (and I'm ignoring net vs. gross here), then I'll still have $60,000 of disposable income. She has nothing.
If I raise the gas tax on us both, she's in trouble. She has to sacrifice something she needed, food, clothing, utilities, whatever -- while I can just say, "meh, an extra $150 a year is unimportant. I still have $59,850 of disposable income."
In other words, all gas taxes are regressive and hurt the poor the most. Be it by mileage or by the gallon, or both.
They'll pull this plan, not because of the obvious privacy concerns, or the raw stupidity, but because there's no way to present it without it clearly being a tax that hurts the poor the most, and there's no way that Barack "Government Motors/Chrysler CEO" Obama is going to do that. Not and maintain the illusion that he's not in the back pocket of big business. (Wait, as the new CEO of "Big Auto", doesn't that mean he's in his own back pocket? Isn't that kind of like having his head up his... never mind.)
Well, the mileage tax would add between $6.00 and $12.00 (or my more cynical $24.00) to the price of that fill-up. Do you care now?
I don't think we should have a gas tax at all. Honestly, I don't think the Federal Government should give a damn about roads in the first place. I don't see "fix the roads" anywhere in "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity".
Yes, I know that Alexander Hamilton found the Federal Banking System in "promote the general welfare", but I'm pretty sure that "fix the roads" isn't in there, and that means the 10th Amendment makes it the States' job.
(And just to head off the inevitable argument -- yes, I know the Interstate system was built "for the common defense" in order to move nuclear weapons from place to place. That's a great argument, made moot by the fact that you can't get anywhere on a Interstate these days because of the ongoing construction because of all the semis, cars, horse trailers, moving trucks, and various other vehicles breaking up the roads. When they were built, the Interstates were not to be used by the public. Then you could argue they were for the common defense. As soon as they opened them to public use, they ceased to be a federal concern. We move our nukes by air transport now, thank you very much.)
Really? We didn't have a revolt? Sales of hybrid cars went through the roof. Overall miles driven plummeted, and *everyone* was screaming about the oil companies, OPEC, and cutting all gas taxes to try to make gas more affordable. The gas tax didn't go up, but the price of oil did and people changed their behavior because of it. The demand for oil in the United States showed a marked reduction -- I've heard numbers as high as a 30% decrease in gas purchases. So, yes, a revolt *did* happen when gas went to $4 a gallon. (Gosh, the free-market system works. Who'd have guessed?)
But if the tax is raised, it's an entirely artificial addition to the cost. There is no market force on taxes, save that taxes steal money from the private sector and move it to the public sector. The people in Washington know this. They also know that Gas Taxes are one of the most regressive of all the taxes in society, taking the largest chunk of income (by percentage) from the poor, who still have to buy gas to get to work. For someone earning $20K a year, adding $0.20 a gallon, or about $2.00 per fill up works out to about an additional $100 per year (assuming a refill about once a week.) Now a rich person drives the same amount, pays the same tax, but earns $100K. By portion of income, the rich guy is paying 1/5th as much in taxes as the poor person. In other words, you're taxing the poor at 5 times the rate of the rich.
All such taxes are regressive, hitting the poor harder. Now, the poor outnumber the rich in the United States, so there's no way that the politicians are going to pass a regressive tax.
On the other hand, this "mileage tax" will likely become means adjusted. In other words, they'll look at the price of your car and nail you for some percentage based on that. So, the guy driving the $500 beater will pay $0.001 per mile, and the guy driving the $100,000 mercedes will be paying $0.10 a mile.
So, not only will they now be tracking everywhere you drive, but charging you based on what you own.
And, of course, again, it means that buying the $500 car makes more sense then buying the $50,000 Prius. Once again, counter-productive to "fixing the environment."
How about this, drop the gas tax, drop the mileage tax, and just charge a tax based on curb weight of the car on your annual license renewal. Heavy cars cost more because they do more damage. Light cars cost less. That forces a move to lighter, more-efficient cars, drives a movement by car makers to lighten the cars, reduces damage on the roads, and penalizes those who do the most damage to the road while driving (namely the Hummers and the semis.)
At least that would link the tax to some actual physical number that doesn't involve the government sticking their nose into every aspect of our lives.
That's the Obama Job-creation plan. You need a million new bureaucrats to process a hundred million vehicle GPS tracks every month and send out the bills. That's a million new high-paying government jobs for you.
Mind you, they don't create anything, they don't provide a service, they produce nothing of value to the economy, and their salary is taken at gunpoint from every American...
See, the people will revolt if we suddenly double or triple the gas tax, which is 18.5 cents a gallon.
But, since we're going to mandate that all cars get 35 miles per gallon, and then we charge 1 to 2 cents (and it'll be two cents, if not four by the time it gets passed), then that means we've effectively upped the gas tax to between 35 and 70 cents a gallon (or $1.40 by four cents a mile). And the great part is that, just like income tax, they won't see the per gallon increase, they just get a bill at the end of the month that they have to pay.
Way to double, triple, or more the gas tax without looking like it.
Also, by the law of unintended consequences, by removing the tax from the gas, it makes it more cost effective to buy an older, cheaper gas guzzler, than a new, expensive, hybrid car. Thanks for destroying the environment, morons.
Except, of course, that I'm referring to the terms as they are used in the United States, where, traditionally, the Democrats have sat on the left side of the house of Representatives, while the Republicans have sat on the right side. In the United States, the terms take their meaning from that division.
In that case, we have the traditional "Progressive" ideology, who believe in government control of the economy, spreading "fairness", and providing social safety nets sitting in the "Left-Wing" and the party that believes (or used to believe -- gosh I wish I still had a party) in the "conservation of the founding principles" or the "conservative" view of small government, self reliance, and laissez-faire capitalism. Thus, the right-wingers.
The same terms have arisen several times in history as far as left-wing and right-wing are concerned. This "opposite" view of the terms from the United States is why we often have trouble with understanding why other countries call their labor/labour/socialist parties the "Right-Wing".
Now, of course, the U.S. Congress consists of the Left-Wing and the "Even More" Left-Wing. So really the point is moot.
People really need to know what a true right-wing ideology means (and the last administration was not right-wing in anything but their self-given name.)
A true right-winger abhors authority and embraces personal responsibility. I'm considered strongly-conservative, and I would like to see the smallest, least-powerful government the American people can possibly get away with. "That government which governs best, governs least."
Here's a hint: Don't let qwest move you to the DSLAM hotels on the FTTN network boxes. They'll talk up and down about how great it is that they run fiber to the box, and offer speeds up to 20MB if you switch to the FTTN box. However, despite having five different qwest people ensure me that the move wouldn't affect my 3rd party connection, if you move to the FTTN box, they'll limit your connection to 640K/256K and then tell you "hey, it's the same price as 1.5MB/1MB, so you can't complain."
I was convinced to switch after my CO connected DSL started dropping down to 7db signal to noise after 7 years without a problem. They convinced me that it would take 3 months to schedule a new cable pull and that I could connect to the FTTN node 200 feet away and get an always perfect signal with no problems. They told me repeatedly it wouldn't affect my third party ISP connection. I even had the guy from Qwest write it on the work order.
After the switch, I couldn't get over 640K/256K, no matter what. Actually on the first night, I called their customer service number and they said, "oh, a switch must be set wrong" and I was back up to 1.5/1 for a whole 45 minutes. Then it was back to 640/256. After three weeks of dealing with customer reps via in-person, voice, e-mail, and chat, they admitted that this is an intentional filter of third party ISP's on all the FTTN nodes to force you to switch to Qwest as your ISP.
After you do that, you get a new IP address every 22 minutes (at least on my connection.)
I've already filed a complaint with the FCC and told Qwest that if I can find any alternative (other than the local cable carrier, who's worse -- they advertise 45MB rates, but actual speeds on their overloaded networks are in the 150K range) that I will be dropping them immediately.
They could care less, because they know they're the only game in town.
FedEx is not allowed to carry letters, thus, the 20+ billion pieces of mail that get carried by the post office are off-limits as a source of revenue. However, given that a typical household probably receives 4-10 pieces of mail a day, that's $1.60 - $4.00 of revenue, unless they've raised prices again, every day, for every household.
That's about a $200 million a day revenue stream. And basically every house gets a delivery every day. Now, if that were the case, then FedEx would have one or more stations in every town -- they're called post offices now -- and would have the infrastructure to deliver overnight to every little town in America. As it is, they are limited by how often they can justify sending a truck to a rural location.
Although FedEx is working to make their coverage better every day, it's just not economically feasible to provide overnight service to a town of 500 that may receive or send two or three packages a week. If they were shipping and receiving a big bundle of mail every day, that might be a different story.
In other words, your argument is a straw man. You say, "FedEx can't get a package to my (notably small) hometown in less than two days." However, I'm guessing that your "notably small" town is still big enough to have a post office. If you had a FedEx station in your town, you'd have a valid apples-to-apples argument. But saying that a company that's not allowed to dip into that gargantuan revenue stream that the post office slurps down (and wastes apparently, given their recent money-losing financial reports) is somehow going to offer the same level of service to every little town is not a fair comparison.
I think it's far more likely that Hawking found out that he was being connected to that vicious rape of a particularly good kids show (Isaac Asimov wrote for the show) and is dying from *that* embarrassment.
Someone, please stop Will Ferrell before it's too late!
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Fine, let's be really generous and say all of their transactions are processed in one hour. That's a rate of 8 transactions per second. That still doesn't hold a candle to the 133+ per second that we do. You would have to process all 40 million transactions in about 5 minutes to even come close to that rate. And if they really process all of them in 5 minutes, then that's an even stupider use of resources to have 1300 machines idle for 23 hours and 55 minutes every day.
Unless they're going for the top spot on Seti@Home or something.
In addition, our boxes can actually peak at a total of over 6000 transactions per second together, which would chew through 40,000,000 transactions in just under 2 hours (6700 seconds). We never come close to running that fast all day long. We'd flood all the downstream systems if we ran that fast for even 20 minutes. In theory, we could handle upwards of 518,000,000 transactions per day. Given an average of 25 scans per package, that would still be over 20 million total, end-to-end shipments. If we assume the post office really is talking about complete tracking packages (instead of transactions) we could handle their 40 million with around 100 boxes, not the 1300 they use, but I doubt that they really mean 40 million "packages", as that's quite a percentage of total mail (667M / day) they don't give stats for the number of tracked packages. I receive maybe 10 pieces of tracked mail per year, out of probably 1000 or more pieces of mail. That's about 1%. That would be 6 or 7 million items per day.
By the way, if you shipped your server via Express, I'd be very surprised if FedEx put a fork-lift sized hole in it. There's really no place that packages are handled via fork-lift at FedEx Express (I've been at the stations, ramps, and Memphis super hub). The only place they're used is to move the big cargo containers into the planes. And a container with a fork-lift hole would violate FAA rules and we couldn't fly it.
Honestly, my guess would be the guy loading it onto the FedEx truck wherever you ordered it from.
FedEx Express now has three hubs in the USA: Memphis, Oakland, and Indianapolis. I believe they are building a fourth. These central hubs process express packages only. Ground has their own sorting and moving systems (I'm not involved in those) and Freight has the same. There's also an international clearance hub in Alaska. Then there's the international hubs as well, at DeGaulle airport in France, and the new one in Guangdong(sp?) China, and probably a couple more I don't know about. FedEx hasn't had a "single point of failure" system in some years. Unless you really think Fred Smith wants to refund all the overnight packages because a bad storm rolled into Memphis for 24 hours and grounded all the airplanes.
And FedEx has several thousand "Stations" that act a lot like the local post offices. In fact, if I were to ship an express package from Colorado Springs to Denver, it would never ride a plane. It would be trucked to the Denver station and sent out from there, never seeing a hub.
Oh, and remember that post office has subcontracted all of their "Priority Mail" to be shipped via FedEx. We get bags at the airport and move them via FedEx to destination post offices. It's FedEx that gets that Priority Mail there on time, not the USPS.
Sorry, you'll have to talk to Billing about that. I just track packages.
Ooh. Gosh. We run 60 boxes. They live in the data center in Memphis, TN. They're HP Linux Boxes running RedHat. You could find most of that out from A) Oracle press releases [at one point, many moons ago, ours was the largest install of Oracle ever done. Now it's pathetically small.) B) the press release from FedEx when we upgraded to Linux Boxes last year from the IBM AIX boxes thus saving bu-cu bucks. C) the fact that we pioneered the new standard hardware and software platforms for FedEx services which means all new development gets pointed to *us* as a model, and D) just about anyone in IT at FedEx knows what the "Shipment Event Processor" group is, and could pull up our hardware diagrams on the company intranet. That makes about 10,000 people with access and hundreds or thousands of contractors.
Finally, the entire system sits inside the firewall. It has no customer facing access. I require both physical and password security to even access the production boxes in read-only mode, and only the Sys-Admins have root access, and they live inside locked buildings at the data centers.
What exactly have I given up?
They get 0.33 TPS per server by their numbers, or 1/3 of a TPS. We get 133.3 TPS per server. Let's see, 133.3 / 0.33 == 400. Hmm. 400 times the performance. Check.
They use 1300 servers. We use 57. That's 1.9% of the number of servers they use. Or 98% more efficiently, which is a factor of 50 times less hardware.
Each of their servers processes about 30,800 transactions per day. Each of ours peak at about 11,517,000 per day. So, we could do everything they're doing with 3.5 servers (okay, 4) In other words, with 4 servers, or 1/400th of theirs, we can process their "40 million transactions per day".
I compared their transactions per day (40 million) to our transactions per day (100,000,000). Please note, we do not max out our servers during peak cycle. They spend most of their time idle. In fact, in the rare cases where we do actually run at full speed (say, after a software load where transactions have backed up in the incoming queues) we regularly swamp the downstream systems and have to put ourselves into a "pause" mode to let them catch up.
So, once again, 400 times the performance means we could actually replace all their servers (1300) with (1300/400 = 3.25 rounded up to) four servers. Add a lot of redundancy (which is why we have 45) and you can see where I arrived at my number of 25 servers.
Yes, theirs may be average load per day. But so what? Our average is about 60,000,000 per day. And we usually spin at about 15% of the CPU being used.
Divide what? During peak season (Christmas time) we do 100,000,000 transactions a day. In fact, last year I believe we had a peak day of 117,000,000. There's no division. In fact, to be honest, probably 50% of the transactions come between 5PM and Midnight Eastern time. That's when all the stations bundle up packages and push them out to the ramps for movement to the Hubs for sorting. FedEx Express moves about 6 Million packages a day (10+ Million during peak), five days a week, and about 2 million on the weekends. We're global, so there's no "days off" for the system. The bigger FedEx gets, with it's new hubs in France and China, and half a dozen other places, the less breaks we get on our system. The load is still heavy in the mornings and the afternoons, but it's starting to fill up the valleys (at least it was before the economy tanked.)
We treat everything as a transaction, and that means pulling the entire package information from the database, processing it, and putting the modified data back to the database. 20-30 times on an average package. I would imagine the USPS defines a transaction about the same, with a small sample of their total letters, since you have to pay extra for tracking. Those envelopes probably end up with a similar (although I'd wager, smaller) number of transactions per item.
As I mentioned above in reply to another post, we still get hand-written airbills, airbills that have been photo-copied (Gee, twenty packages, all with the same tracking number...) and you can still find airbills in the system that are total crap. Try tracking the package "444444444444" sometime... (Hey, we filtered out "TWELVEZEROES" and "NO_NUM_GIVEN")
Our transactions are things like "contract event" when you fill in an airbill on-line, pickup scans, revenue data, station outbound, ramp inbound, ramp outbound, hub inbound, revenue exceptions, hub outbound, station inbound, on-van, delivery, proof-of-delivery, package close, point-of-failure processing, etc. etc. We have over 70 types of scans, and a typical package ends up with 20-30 events on it. If you think you can see anything when you track a package, you have no idea how much more goes into it behind the scenes. Every one of those scans is 2-3K in length, these aren't just a simple 20 byte "ping" or something. And we retain all that data for nine months.
And we still do 133 transactions per second per server.
And always remember that the USPS contracts out to FedEx to move all of its "Priority Mail".
Actually, FedEx still gets a lot of hand-written, photocopied or otherwise POS labels all the time. Just like the post office, they are encoded with a bar code at the first station that gets the package and are then read optically by a computer from then on. Or did you think those little squiggles on the bottom of your postal envelope (Postal Bar/Line code) were for decoration?
FedEx has a whole bunch of people whose only job is to look at scanned images of labels and type in the actual address when the machines fail to read them.
And I'm not in the part that deals with all that. That's the Tracker hardware. We just get the 60-100M scans per day, turn them from an isolated event into a "package" and then forward that information on to billing and the web interface system for tracking (and another dozen downstream systems that work with the data.) We also get fed information from about half a dozen other systems (like delay information, if there's an accident or a storm that grounds the airplanes) and use all of it to predict delivery dates for the packages. We also process point of failure information and information on commitment dates (the date that your package becomes free if we don't get it there) and containerization and consolidation information (i.e. what packages are in that bag, that got packed into that shipping container that got loaded onto that airplane, etc.) so we can pass scans done on a container down to all of the packages in that container. That's about another 20 million plus events per day.
A typical package traveling in the system ends up with 20-30 events that occur on it. Some end up with 80 or more. There's a lot more that goes on too, like clearance information, and multiple-piece shipments, COD information, and so on and so on. All of it goes through our system. With 45 boxes (actually we just bumped up to 50 with the June updates) and 12 database boxes. All HP boxes running Red Hat.
1300 servers, processing 40 million transactions a day... that's about 30,800 transactions per server. Or one transaction every 2.8 seconds or so. With an entire Linux box dedicated to it.
I work in the scan processing group at FedEx. At peak, we see over 100,000,000 transactions a day. And that's handled on 45 linux boxes, and 12 more for the database, doing upwards of 6000 transactions per second during bursts. That's a peak of about 133 transactions per second, per box. That's a little better than 0.3 TPS for the Post Office. So we have about 400 times the performance with 5% of the hardware. By that margin, I could do their processing with about 25 boxes total. That would mean another 98% savings on hardware alone.
For some reason, I fail to be really impressed that they've gone from "Crappy performance and Expensive" to "Crappy performance and less expensive."
I wonder if I can get the bazillion dollar contract to rewrite their system... No, wait, my name isn't "Boeing" or "Lockheed" or Ken Murtha.
Which would be a wonderful argument, if the "magic date" wasn't the date that Bush announced the ban on federal funding. So you'd have to be heavily invested in researching a stem cell line that was harvested... tomorrow. Doesn't seem like that was a high likelihood. Your straw man is a bit weak there.
...how much government funding he got during the 4 odd years he was "researching" this. Not a bad job to get paid to play a video game for four years and be an utter prick while doing it, while maintaining the rationalization, "it's all for science." Maybe someone should be researching why sociology professors are so willing to live off the public dole like this...
Trust me, buying a prius for the same price as a corvette -- that's a riot in America.
Just because no one got beat over the head, because most of those heads live in the Middle East, doesn't make it any less of one. We beat them where it hurt them most, the pocketbook.
One problem with taxing tires. I bought new tires for my wife's car back in January, last month, with about 4,000 miles on brand new tires, she got a 1/2" bolt through one of them. Now, under your plan, I have to pay for the full 50,000 mile lifetime of the tire.
I see a whole new government plan to put spikes on the road every time tax revenues fall...
In fact, roads in worse conditions would then lead to a rise in tax revenue. It would be in the government's best interest to make the roads worse, not better.
Benefits the rich people the most, since poor or rich, you usually drive the same distance. My next door neighbor works at the school down the street from where I work. We both drive the same distance to work each day. We both drive a vehicle in the 30MPG range. She's a teacher. I'm an IT professional.
She makes in the neighborhood of $30K. I make in the neighborhood of 3x that.
We drive the same miles, buy roughly the same amount of gas.
But she pays 3 times as much as me in taxes. That's because, by percentage, the part of her income paid in taxes is, by percentage, three times the amount of the percentage of my income.
In other words, $10 to her is three times more precious than $10 is to me. Or, put it another way, $300 to me is a mere .3% of my income, but 1% of hers. I can spend $300, 300 times in a year, she can only spend it 100 times.
We both eat roughly the same amount of food, buy the same amount of clothing, etc. At the end of the year, if we do that, and she runs through all $30,000 of her income (and I'm ignoring net vs. gross here), then I'll still have $60,000 of disposable income. She has nothing.
If I raise the gas tax on us both, she's in trouble. She has to sacrifice something she needed, food, clothing, utilities, whatever -- while I can just say, "meh, an extra $150 a year is unimportant. I still have $59,850 of disposable income."
In other words, all gas taxes are regressive and hurt the poor the most. Be it by mileage or by the gallon, or both.
They'll pull this plan, not because of the obvious privacy concerns, or the raw stupidity, but because there's no way to present it without it clearly being a tax that hurts the poor the most, and there's no way that Barack "Government Motors/Chrysler CEO" Obama is going to do that. Not and maintain the illusion that he's not in the back pocket of big business. (Wait, as the new CEO of "Big Auto", doesn't that mean he's in his own back pocket? Isn't that kind of like having his head up his... never mind.)
Well, the mileage tax would add between $6.00 and $12.00 (or my more cynical $24.00) to the price of that fill-up. Do you care now?
I don't think we should have a gas tax at all. Honestly, I don't think the Federal Government should give a damn about roads in the first place. I don't see "fix the roads" anywhere in "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity".
Yes, I know that Alexander Hamilton found the Federal Banking System in "promote the general welfare", but I'm pretty sure that "fix the roads" isn't in there, and that means the 10th Amendment makes it the States' job.
(And just to head off the inevitable argument -- yes, I know the Interstate system was built "for the common defense" in order to move nuclear weapons from place to place. That's a great argument, made moot by the fact that you can't get anywhere on a Interstate these days because of the ongoing construction because of all the semis, cars, horse trailers, moving trucks, and various other vehicles breaking up the roads. When they were built, the Interstates were not to be used by the public. Then you could argue they were for the common defense. As soon as they opened them to public use, they ceased to be a federal concern. We move our nukes by air transport now, thank you very much.)
Really? We didn't have a revolt? Sales of hybrid cars went through the roof. Overall miles driven plummeted, and *everyone* was screaming about the oil companies, OPEC, and cutting all gas taxes to try to make gas more affordable. The gas tax didn't go up, but the price of oil did and people changed their behavior because of it. The demand for oil in the United States showed a marked reduction -- I've heard numbers as high as a 30% decrease in gas purchases. So, yes, a revolt *did* happen when gas went to $4 a gallon. (Gosh, the free-market system works. Who'd have guessed?)
But if the tax is raised, it's an entirely artificial addition to the cost. There is no market force on taxes, save that taxes steal money from the private sector and move it to the public sector. The people in Washington know this. They also know that Gas Taxes are one of the most regressive of all the taxes in society, taking the largest chunk of income (by percentage) from the poor, who still have to buy gas to get to work. For someone earning $20K a year, adding $0.20 a gallon, or about $2.00 per fill up works out to about an additional $100 per year (assuming a refill about once a week.) Now a rich person drives the same amount, pays the same tax, but earns $100K. By portion of income, the rich guy is paying 1/5th as much in taxes as the poor person. In other words, you're taxing the poor at 5 times the rate of the rich.
All such taxes are regressive, hitting the poor harder. Now, the poor outnumber the rich in the United States, so there's no way that the politicians are going to pass a regressive tax.
On the other hand, this "mileage tax" will likely become means adjusted. In other words, they'll look at the price of your car and nail you for some percentage based on that. So, the guy driving the $500 beater will pay $0.001 per mile, and the guy driving the $100,000 mercedes will be paying $0.10 a mile.
So, not only will they now be tracking everywhere you drive, but charging you based on what you own.
And, of course, again, it means that buying the $500 car makes more sense then buying the $50,000 Prius. Once again, counter-productive to "fixing the environment."
How about this, drop the gas tax, drop the mileage tax, and just charge a tax based on curb weight of the car on your annual license renewal. Heavy cars cost more because they do more damage. Light cars cost less. That forces a move to lighter, more-efficient cars, drives a movement by car makers to lighten the cars, reduces damage on the roads, and penalizes those who do the most damage to the road while driving (namely the Hummers and the semis.)
At least that would link the tax to some actual physical number that doesn't involve the government sticking their nose into every aspect of our lives.
That's the Obama Job-creation plan. You need a million new bureaucrats to process a hundred million vehicle GPS tracks every month and send out the bills. That's a million new high-paying government jobs for you.
Mind you, they don't create anything, they don't provide a service, they produce nothing of value to the economy, and their salary is taken at gunpoint from every American...
Hope and Change. Thanks a lot for that.
See, the people will revolt if we suddenly double or triple the gas tax, which is 18.5 cents a gallon.
But, since we're going to mandate that all cars get 35 miles per gallon, and then we charge 1 to 2 cents (and it'll be two cents, if not four by the time it gets passed), then that means we've effectively upped the gas tax to between 35 and 70 cents a gallon (or $1.40 by four cents a mile). And the great part is that, just like income tax, they won't see the per gallon increase, they just get a bill at the end of the month that they have to pay.
Way to double, triple, or more the gas tax without looking like it.
Also, by the law of unintended consequences, by removing the tax from the gas, it makes it more cost effective to buy an older, cheaper gas guzzler, than a new, expensive, hybrid car. Thanks for destroying the environment, morons.
It's probably the portion of the poles that the orbital inclination didn't allow to be mapped.
Except, of course, that I'm referring to the terms as they are used in the United States, where, traditionally, the Democrats have sat on the left side of the house of Representatives, while the Republicans have sat on the right side. In the United States, the terms take their meaning from that division.
In that case, we have the traditional "Progressive" ideology, who believe in government control of the economy, spreading "fairness", and providing social safety nets sitting in the "Left-Wing" and the party that believes (or used to believe -- gosh I wish I still had a party) in the "conservation of the founding principles" or the "conservative" view of small government, self reliance, and laissez-faire capitalism. Thus, the right-wingers.
The same terms have arisen several times in history as far as left-wing and right-wing are concerned. This "opposite" view of the terms from the United States is why we often have trouble with understanding why other countries call their labor/labour/socialist parties the "Right-Wing".
Now, of course, the U.S. Congress consists of the Left-Wing and the "Even More" Left-Wing. So really the point is moot.
People really need to know what a true right-wing ideology means (and the last administration was not right-wing in anything but their self-given name.)
A true right-winger abhors authority and embraces personal responsibility. I'm considered strongly-conservative, and I would like to see the smallest, least-powerful government the American people can possibly get away with. "That government which governs best, governs least."
Where are my mod points when I need them. Please, someone, mod this up before it gets buried in the flood of Al Gore kool-aid drinkers.
Here's a hint: Don't let qwest move you to the DSLAM hotels on the FTTN network boxes. They'll talk up and down about how great it is that they run fiber to the box, and offer speeds up to 20MB if you switch to the FTTN box. However, despite having five different qwest people ensure me that the move wouldn't affect my 3rd party connection, if you move to the FTTN box, they'll limit your connection to 640K/256K and then tell you "hey, it's the same price as 1.5MB/1MB, so you can't complain."
I was convinced to switch after my CO connected DSL started dropping down to 7db signal to noise after 7 years without a problem. They convinced me that it would take 3 months to schedule a new cable pull and that I could connect to the FTTN node 200 feet away and get an always perfect signal with no problems. They told me repeatedly it wouldn't affect my third party ISP connection. I even had the guy from Qwest write it on the work order.
After the switch, I couldn't get over 640K/256K, no matter what. Actually on the first night, I called their customer service number and they said, "oh, a switch must be set wrong" and I was back up to 1.5/1 for a whole 45 minutes. Then it was back to 640/256. After three weeks of dealing with customer reps via in-person, voice, e-mail, and chat, they admitted that this is an intentional filter of third party ISP's on all the FTTN nodes to force you to switch to Qwest as your ISP.
After you do that, you get a new IP address every 22 minutes (at least on my connection.)
I've already filed a complaint with the FCC and told Qwest that if I can find any alternative (other than the local cable carrier, who's worse -- they advertise 45MB rates, but actual speeds on their overloaded networks are in the 150K range) that I will be dropping them immediately.
They could care less, because they know they're the only game in town.
FedEx is not allowed to carry letters, thus, the 20+ billion pieces of mail that get carried by the post office are off-limits as a source of revenue. However, given that a typical household probably receives 4-10 pieces of mail a day, that's $1.60 - $4.00 of revenue, unless they've raised prices again, every day, for every household.
That's about a $200 million a day revenue stream. And basically every house gets a delivery every day. Now, if that were the case, then FedEx would have one or more stations in every town -- they're called post offices now -- and would have the infrastructure to deliver overnight to every little town in America. As it is, they are limited by how often they can justify sending a truck to a rural location.
Although FedEx is working to make their coverage better every day, it's just not economically feasible to provide overnight service to a town of 500 that may receive or send two or three packages a week. If they were shipping and receiving a big bundle of mail every day, that might be a different story.
In other words, your argument is a straw man. You say, "FedEx can't get a package to my (notably small) hometown in less than two days." However, I'm guessing that your "notably small" town is still big enough to have a post office. If you had a FedEx station in your town, you'd have a valid apples-to-apples argument. But saying that a company that's not allowed to dip into that gargantuan revenue stream that the post office slurps down (and wastes apparently, given their recent money-losing financial reports) is somehow going to offer the same level of service to every little town is not a fair comparison.
Fair notice: I am a FedEx employee (in services)
I think it's far more likely that Hawking found out that he was being connected to that vicious rape of a particularly good kids show (Isaac Asimov wrote for the show) and is dying from *that* embarrassment. Someone, please stop Will Ferrell before it's too late!