loire280

This week we had a few minutes of downtime on an internal service because of a node rotation that triggered an alert. The responding engineer started to put together a plan to make the service HA (which would have tripled the cost to serve). I asked how frequently the service went down and how many people would be inconvenienced if it did. They didn't know, but when we checked the metrics it had single-digit minutes of downtime this year and fewer than a dozen daily users. We bumped the threshold on the alert to longer than it takes for a pod to be re-scheduled and resolved the ticket.

Except according to Graeber those jobs exist because leaders, companies, and society like having lots of employees doing this work for various reasons and we all more or less tacitly agree that the output of those jobs is useless and only exists because the last 50 years of productivity gains mean there isn't enough real work to keep everyone busy for 40+ hours 50 weeks a year.

Post WWII, interdependence between European nations has generally been considered good for national security.

I really enjoyed DoW2 as an action RPG but share your disappointment with it as a sequel to DoW1. I think it would have been received better with a different title.

Those features are mostly being added to existing products and therefore aren't supporting new revenue streams. It remains to be seen if these features are popular enough to become table stakes for the existing OS and productivity software businesses and justify continued investment.

However, they require constant human monitoring and interventions from those humans every few miles to work properly - and it's not clear that the need for those interventions will be solved with more training data.

https://www.theverge.com/23948708/cruise-robotaxi-suspension...

Why wouldn’t they? This technology is not a competitive advantage for their company, wouldn’t make sense for them to sell as a standalone product, and it helps their engineering department attract good talent.

I expect that, over the next few years, companies that need to lay off workers will spin their mismanagement by claiming they are replacing those jobs with "AI".

I drive a Volt and I’m convinced this configuration of car is what many Americans should be buying until battery manufacturing ramps up and EV fast charging infrastructure is widely deployed. It gets 45-60mi range but it charges just fine overnight from a 120v plug. Most of the time it’s an EV, but we need the extra range several times a month for longer local trips or to visit family in a nearby city. The gas engine requires very little maintenance because it runs infrequently and at optimal RPM and load, it weighs less than a 200mi+ range battery, and (for now) it’s easier to manufacture from more common materials.

I'd definitely use a job board that was a better interface to a whoishiring thread.

I'm hoping that the mass appeal of BSG (especially now that it has a second life on Netflix) and the accessibility of the new Star Trek movies will pave the way for more space opera on TV.

This is a great idea, but I think the rush to find an alternative is premature - there's going to be a huge shift in the RSS reader landscape over the next few months, and the best alternative may not even be announced yet.

GS Design in Milwaukee, WI is hiring a full-time backend developer. Must be on-site.

GS Design offers an incredible work environment, generous compensation and benefits, and the opportunity to work with a national client roster including Harley-Davidson, Mercury Marine, SRAM Corporation, Showtime and more.

Most of our work is in Python and PHP, and we use Django, Drupal, and Wordpress. Our projects are client-focused and varied - web applications, custom content management, and service integration. We're looking for a flexible, pragmatic generalist who can handle multiple projects and shifting requirements.

We're also looking for an Art Director, a User Experience (UX) Architect, and a technical Project Manager.

You can see all our open positions here: http://www.gsdesign.com/careers

My girlfriend uses the mobile web version of Facebook on a semi-dumb slider phone (it might be some variant of Symbian). I find it baffling because the browser is so terrible and the screen is 320x240, but she's perfectly happy with it. She never uses it for any other sites. I wonder if Facebook has an unusually high number of users like that. The demographic would be invisible to the rest of the web community because those users never leave Facebook.

It's also self-parody of Marco's exhaustively researched reviews - which are often focused on relatively mundane things like LED light bulbs, thermostats, and coffee gadgets.

While what you say is true, I disagree with you in tone.

Adobe makes money from Flash by selling licenses to the tools. During the long period of platform growth, developer community growth and turnover helped maintain profits through new license sales. Now that the Flash community is shrinking, that revenue is not sufficient to maintain the profits that will motivate Adobe to fund continuing development of the platform. This is a business, after all, not a nonprofit like the Apache Foundation.

Meanwhile, you have companies like Zynga making profits from software built on the Flash platform disproportionate to the number of Flash licenses they purchase. Zynga owes much of its success to the high market penetration of the Flash player, which makes its social games extremely accessible to its non-technical core users.

It's reasonable to place much of the blame for Flash's decline on Adobe for failing to maintain the quality of the Flash Player and for underestimating the shift to mobile/tablets. In light of those failures and what must be rapidly falling Flash tool sales, Adobe has made a decision to change the revenue model for Flash so that they can continue to profit from the platform.

Let's say that there are many wealthy buyers who can easily afford to buy a Porsche. However, Porsche sets up a dozen dealerships in remote corners of the desert, each separated by miles of dirt road. Each dealership has a couple of models, but does not readily publish what you'll find at each dealership. If you manage to find the dealership carrying the Porsche you want, you have to use Western Union to wire transfer money to the company before you can take possession of the car. Finally, if the dealership you bought the car from goes out of business or loses their contract with Porsche, your car disappears overnight without notice.

I can't afford to buy a Porsche, but I am both willing and able to buy content. However, I often spend 15-20 minutes looking at the various online outlets for a particular movie or television show, credit card in hand, and find that Amazon (or Ebay if it's out of print) is my only option. I know Hulu, Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon Instant would love to sell me that media - it's the content owners who prevent me from giving them money.

Drinking lots of coffee likely doesn't increase cancer risk, but it can be an indicator of poor sleep habits.

The dollar value of shipping isn't the only cost - 2+ days is a long time to wait and Wal-Mart is only a couple of miles away. Some things can wait and you can plan ahead to account for shipping times, but not everything can be planned for and sometimes you just want or need something tonight.

Weekends are especially bad - once Thursday afternoon passes, you're probably not going to get what you order until Tuesday or Wednesday.

$20 for a one-time scan? Assuming their SEO is as honest as their business model, this site must print money.

This isn't an unusual dilemma in publishing - print or online. If for-profit companies can adequately maintain editorial integrity despite pressure from ad partners, I think an ideological non-profit like Wikipedia can manage.

It seems unlikely that the type of people who shepherd Wikipedia pages in their free time would fail to notice and immediately report that type of censorship. The proof would be unnecessary - even the implication that Wikipedia was tampering with the content of its pages would have a huge effect on its reputation.

This is why I stick pretty close to stock vim - I use it on too many remote systems to worry about keeping my environment consistent. I could automate something, and maybe when our sysadmin finishes integrating puppet into our servers I can use that, but in the meantime, my .vimrc is just syntax highlighting and tab settings.

Looks like a heavy-handed attempt to maintain their culture - as uncouth as it may be.

True, and I've heard that iOS 4 didn't run so well on the iPhone 3G in the first place. However, even once support was dropped, the iPhone 3G was still on the current major version (4.3, a relatively minor update, is the version that dropped 3G support), and it doesn't seem like apps required 4.3 until well after that version was out. That's a big difference than being 1-3 major versions behind on Android (especially considering the rather substantial changes in each major version of Android).

Developers care. What use are the new shiny features in Ice Cream Sandwich when I need to make my app compatible with phones on Eclair or Froyo to access a sufficiently broad portion of the Android install base? If developers are wary of developing for Android - especially the latest-and-greatest - that will affect the satisfaction of regular users.

The chart cuts off after 3 years - the point is that the original iPhone was supported with the current version of iOS for 2 years after the last one was sold (minus two days - iOS 4, the first version to drop support, came out June 21, 2010).

On AT&T, at least, most iPhone customers are eligible for an upgrade after 18 months because of the cost of their plan, so everyone was eligible, by a significant margin, for an upgrade before their phone was droppped.

His contributions to the community were released under liberal licenses and will undoubtedly be widely available tomorrow. Heck, you can `apt-get install diveintopython` on an Ubuntu system. However, a lot of links just got broken across the internet - and his books are popular entry points for novices. Hopefully when whatever is going on in his life cools down, he can transfer the domain names to a responsible custodian.

The domain for that site is owned by a Chinese university, and the IP address of the server it's hosted on looks like a shared server (there's over 200 sites hosted on that IP). I doubt Mark has anything to do with hosting that site.

The hardware in an iPhone really isn't that important as long as the interface is responsive. Apple has consistently made choices that ensure that performance can be squeezed out of slower hardware. These include restrictions on iOS development (less abstraction in interface elements because of limited aspect ratios, restrictions on background processes and aggressive memory management) and hardware acceleration and optimization that comes from very limited hardware profiles. That's why an iPhone 4, with it's single 800mhz core, in most instances feels as fast as the dual core, higher-clocked Android phones that have come out since its introduction.

"The 3GS sold fantastically for the first 6 months or so but it was the Q1/Q2 2010 time-frame where Android phones really took off in part because they simply had better hardware."

That isn't borne out in sales numbers. Apple sales continued to grow during Q1/Q2 2010, and in Q2 2010 Apple sold more iPhones than any previous quarter, even with the (very publicly) impending launch of the iPhone 4. Android sales were also growing rapidly during that time, and that is the period where Android unit sales passed up iPhone unit sales. However, that is more likely due to the availability of competitive Android phones on all the rival networks (iPhone was still AT&T only at that point) during the time when smartphones hit mass popularity.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/apple-q22010-financial-re...