>They must still be chasing growth in the UK. It was once like that in the US as well
Where I live (in a large US city) many things are same day delivery, an enormous amount are next day delivery and, weirdly, except for four-serving Strawberry Jell-O (which ships from Texas), almost everything is two-day delivery.
Not sure where you live, but my experience is completely different from yours.
Mr. Jones related an incident from "some time back" when IBM Canada
Ltd. of Markham, Ont., ordered some parts from a new supplier in Japan.
The company noted in its order that acceptable quality allowed for 1.5
percent defects (a fairly high standard in North America at the time).
The Japanese sent the order, with a few parts packaged separately in
plastic. The accompanying letter said: "We don't know why you want 1.5
percent defective parts, but for your convenience, we've packed them
separately."
-- Excerpted from an article in The (Toronto) Globe and Mail
>It’s wild that this got flagged. There are some really important points here that deserves a discussion.
Whoever flagged it got what they wanted. Flagging generally kicks a submission right off the front page and limits the post's visibility.
After posting, it received a bunch of upvotes and comments. Within an hour or so of flagging, both pretty much stopped -- which achieved the goal of whoever flagged it -- to limit the discussion of this topic. I'll leave identifying the flagger's motivation as an exercise for the reader.
>Unless there is some huge change, like moving from one CPU architecture to another, apps should not even have to be rebuilt, let alone modified, just to keep working year after year.
And, as history teaches us[0], not necessarily even then.
>From my understanding cities like NYC were actually in a really bad shape in 1950s and after compared to now, until around the 90s
>Edit: actually, from what I find in the 1950s there was even ongoing heroin epidemics, in addition to gang warfare, and of course racial inequality
I can confirm the gang warfare (at least in the 1970s and early 1980s) -- there were street gangs every few blocks and the police were (mostly) just considered the biggest and best armed gang -- and for good reason.
I didn't know Verdi Park[0] was called "Verdi Park" until the late 1990s. It was (but not any more) shaped like a triangle which is why I (incorrectly) thought it was actually named "Needle Park" But that was actually because of the heroin.
But all that's changed and has been for more than 20 years. NYC is the safest it's ever been.
>No, studies have been done, and routinely show that non-citizen voting in election accounts for a pittance of the vote (e.g., "A study of 2016 data by Brennan Center for Justice from 42 jurisdictions found an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting out of 23.5 million votes cast (or .0001% of votes)"); historical data of prosecution of non-citizen voters agrees with the studies, similarly showing it to be non-issue.
Forget about the Brennan Center's single year audit. The Heritage Foundation's Election Fraud Database[0] goes back 40+ years to 1982.
In those 40+ years, they have documented less than 2,000 cases of voter fraud, with more than 1,500,000,000 votes being cast within that time frame.
That's a voter fraud rate of 0.0001333%. And even if we (without evidence), claim that the amount of fraud is 10x (0.001333%) or even 100x (0.01333%)higher and just not detected, despite the presence of observers from all involved parties at all the polls/counting stations in all of the 3500+ separate elections[1] that take place in the US yearly.
The rate of fraudulent votes isn't high enough to impact the outcome of elections, even if we say that there's 100x more voter fraud than the folks who scream voter fraud is everywhere!!! have detected.
It's a complete non-issue that's used by cynical folks to make it harder for their political opponents to vote. Which is disgusting, IMNSHO.
[1] Elections are managed at the county level (of which there are 3500+ in the US), although processes and procedures are often dictated by state governments.
>Dismissing Linux as a hobbiest OS definitely turned out badly.
That actually made me laugh. Not because it's untrue, but because it reminded me of this:
One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How
enthusiastic is our support for UNIX?
Unix was written on our machines and for our machines
many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on
our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX
use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy
to get started with. It’s great for students, great for
somewhat casual users, and it’s great for interchanging
programs between different machines. And so, because of
its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have
good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s.
It is our belief, however, that serious professional
users will run out of things they can do with UNIX.
They’ll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when
they get to be serious about programming.
With UNIX, if you’re looking for something, you can
easily and quickly check that small manual and find out
that it’s not there. With VMS, no matter what you look
for — it’s literally a five-foot shelf of documentation —
if you look long enough it’s there. That’s the difference
— the beauty of UNIX is it’s simple; and the beauty of
VMS is that it’s all there.
— Ken Olsen, president of DEC, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984
Because history[0][1][2][3]. The timelines (and license, in the case of VMS/OpenVMS -- even to this day) didn't make it inevitable, but certainly paved the way for Linux (although one or more of the BSDs could have filled that niche instead, had a fully unencumbered[5][PDF] BSD become available sooner) to have the level of adoption it ended up having.
VMS has always been proprietary, despite the name, and is still an expensive[4] option for commercial use
I mean Olsen was kind of right. Most VAX sold didn't run Unix and VMS and VAX were incredibly successful. Unix at that time was successful on workstations more then servers.
And by the time Unix became successful it was as complex arguably VMS was at the time.
DEC didn't fail because they supported VMS, in fact VMS was great costumer lock in for them and its still made money for HP despite being developed in the late 70s.
And in terms of clustering, Unix has never matched VMS.
DEC didn't fail because of VMS. Their big failure was not to make a fast RISC workstation that ran VMS early enough. And then in then in the late 80s not switching to RISC fast enough with VMS.
So I think he had a point, most serious banks and insurances did run VMS and paid lots of money for it for the next 20 years. VMS was not the reason DEC ran into issues. Their complete management of first personal systems, then workstations, then mainframes, then RISC servers is what destroyed them.
>I mean Olsen was kind of right. Most VAX sold didn't run Unix and VMS and VAX were incredibly successful. Unix at that time was successful on workstations more then servers.
>DEC didn't fail because they supported VMS, in fact VMS was great costumer lock in for them and its still made money for HP despite being developed in the late 70s.
>And in terms of clustering, Unix has never matched VMS.
Absolutely. Even the filesystem was made for redundancy and, AFAIK, no one has implemented the automated file versioning available to VMS back in the 1970s.
I used VMS at several jobs and it was both rock solid and light years ahead of Unix back in the 80s and 90s.
It's only funny because of how things turned out -- with VMS falling by the wayside for a variety of reasons.
Most folks these days think UNIX is the dinosaur, ignoring the BSDs that are still used (not even including MacOS) for many purposes and while they never got the kind of reliability/redundancy that VMS (or AS/400, for that matter) enjoyed, Sun (SunOS/Solaris), HP (HP/UX) and DEC (Ultrix) did provide levels of reliability still unheard of in linux.
When I first saw that Olsen quote (early '90s) I thought it was funny because Unix had come pretty far since 1984 (when that quote was published).
I thought of it because the comment[0] to which I responded reminded me of Olsen's quote when they pointed a finger at Sun for taking the attitude that Linux was a hobbiest[sic] OS.
Which wasn't all that wrong either. Given that MINIX was the model for Linux and MINIX definitely was a hobbyist/proof-of-concept OS, not something that was actually useful.
My thought was mostly that "times change, people don't."
I think it worked out for the best. That said if we had Linus implementing LVMS instead of Linux history might not be that different.
I think one serious issue was that they took way long to realize portability.
They had rough group implement MICA OS that was supposed to be partially compatible. But the dropped MICA and PRISM and instead adopted MIPS and Ultrix. But then they never bothered to port VMS onto MIPS and their workstation line.
Then they mismanaged their whole VAX line and massive lost out to the improving Unix offerings, partly for performance and partly for 'openness' reason.
I think if they were smart they would either have gone 'all-in' on MICA and make it the future of both Unix and VMS. Or simply support both Unix and VMS on all of their platform. They were big enough that this wasn't some incredibly complex task.
They ported VMS to Alpha, but that was a 64bit machine that most people didn't need. Meaning they lost in the lower spec server spaces where Sun and HP were selling tons of Unix servers.
Had they ported VMS to MIPS and also had sold lower spec server with all these features, VMS might not have become so niche.
Personally I really believe that their complete mishandling of RISC, despite having arguably the best chip design team in the industry to be the reason for much of their failure.
>Unaligned bombs didn't break out of their confines on their own.
You really buy that ridiculous argument that "the AI broke out of its sandbox! We had no idea! It's dangerous I tell you, dangerous! Unless you make us the sole gatekeepers of this incredibly dangerous 'intelligence', everybody gonna die!"
Please.
Bring the CFAA[0] hammer down on these guys and watch how fast those "uncontrollable" LLMs get controlled. "Oh, gee! Prison? We can't control this stuff...but it'll never happen again!"
That whole thing was, and is, a bunch of hooey. Those running the LLMs are entirely responsible for them, there is no such thing as agency for algorithms. Full stop.
Where I live (in a large US city) many things are same day delivery, an enormous amount are next day delivery and, weirdly, except for four-serving Strawberry Jell-O (which ships from Texas), almost everything is two-day delivery.
Not sure where you live, but my experience is completely different from yours.
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