22july2013

BlueLightning said:

Surprised something like this would get past testing (assuming testing was done).  

Proper testing requires "testbeds" that are identical to BOTH the server side (Cloudstrike) and the client side (the airlines.) You can't assume that a testbed on one side is all that is required for "testing."

Every system that needs to be reliable should have a document explaining what the average uptime percentage is. A 3-day outage per year would correspond to a 99% average uptime (since there are roughly 300 days per year.) I built and ran a system that had a 99.9% average uptime per year. That meant we were allowed about 8 hours of downtime per year. I think we always met that goal. But we had a lot of expenses building that system. Some years we had no downtime at all. If you want only one hour of downtime per year, then you need roughly 99.99% uptime. I would estimate that each additional "9" will double the price of your expenses, including salary, hardware, software, building space, etc.

sloaah said:

wdowell said:

macca said:

Correction England doesn’t have a Parliament. Its the British Parliament

It’s not British Parliament - it’s UK parliament - (Northern Ireland..  ) https://www.parliament.uk/

The majority of Northern Irish (ie non-republicans) would describe themselves as British, so colloquially it’s fine to say the British Parliament. After all, the island of Ireland is part of the British Isles. 

The word "British" is inaccurate because not all of the British Isles are part of the United Kingdom. That's like Americans who call their country "America" when "America" includes Mexico, Canada and Brazil, and the term "America" isn't the name of the United States in its own constitution.

My favourite quote about AI comes from Edgar Allen Poe around 1824 (200 years ago):

and accordingly we find every where men of mechanical genius, of great general acuteness, and discriminative understanding, who make no scruple in pronouncing the Automaton a pure machine, unconnected with human agency in its movements, and consequently, beyond all comparison, the most astonishing of the inventions of mankind.

Poe was writing about a (fake) chess playing machine called "The Turk" (which we now assume had a human hidden inside it, but at the time, this was not known.) He was trying to debunk the machine's capabilities, but the quote above is a mocking critique of what Poe says about the fools who believed that an intelligent chess-playing machine was the most astonishing invention of mankind. Ultimately, however, Poe was the fool, because we now have chess machines that match Poe's description, and are rated more than 1000 FIDE points higher than Magnus Carlsen. I do agree with Poe's implication that an intelligent machine is, beyond all comparison, the most astonishing of the inventions of mankind. None of the following inventions will have the same impact on mankind as AI: 

• Printing Press
• Wheel
• Computer
• Compass
• Fire
• Telephone
• Internal Combustion Engine
• Penicillin
• Gunpowder
• Airplane
• Lightbulb
• Automobile
• Electricity
• Paper
• Steam Engine
• Steel
• Bronze
• Fertilizers
• Vaccines

hmurchison said:

Inevitable price increase coming.  

How can Apple increase the price globally when this benefit is US-only (like the March event)? In the March event, global customers didn't get a discount, so essentially US customers of Apple TV+ were getting subsidized by global customers. People in poorer nations who subscribe to Apple TV+ should not be subsidizing rich US customers, giving them better service. You should be paying for what you get. Those who get less should pay less.

The world has never been a level playing field, and international companies have to make adjustments, or leave. Apple can always leave a market. There are still a couple of markets that Apple has not entered.