I'm not sure you can call this a big fuckup, we will have to wait for news about the cause.
Yes it is bad, very bad. But I'm sure they got all the redundancy in place and thought about so much more than we can imagine. But even then there might be some extreme event that will throw 'soot in the food'.
I think it is just great how this event is handled. Almost everybody I know knows the alternative alarm number. Police is in the streets so you can walk to them. And as far as we know there are no looters taking their chances.
So yeah, bad, but we have to wait before we can mark it as big fuckup.
This event should not have happened in the first place and it was demonstrably mis-handled in several critical ways.
The fact that the police has responded in the proper way has nothing to do with how KPN has handled this so far and it immediately puts in question the retiring of the siren system used for emergencies, which for cost-cutting reasons has been replaced by the national mobile phone alert system, which apparently does not work when you really need it.
> demonstrably mis-handled in several critical ways.
- No fall-back system in place.
- Alternative alert system did not work.
- Alternative alert went out with the wrong information.
That seems plenty to me.
As far as the siren is concerned: the general alert system is meant for serious threats to public safety, it does not require 'a new phone number in morse', the output is a single bit: siren on: stay indoors, close doors and windows, wait for all clear sign (three short bursts on the siren).
Agreed, but 112 not being reachable definitely is. KPN made a big stink about it at the time how other 'crappy' providers could not be trusted to deliver a thing of such national importance and so they got to do it exclusively rather than to have multiple redundant systems by different providers. I'm sure there will be some second guessing of that decision now.
Agreed that sounding the national alarm over this would be an overreaction, as is the fact that they used the national alert, lots of people are going to disable it as a result of this and that will make the system that much less valuable.
No, I just think that if the national alert system is activated that it should work as advertised, deliver each alert once and that everybody should receive it.
As it was some people got no alerts, others got nine and the information dispensed through it was faulty. That's pretty fucked up.
Those are pretty far down on the likelihood scale, though we have had instances of that, especially near river dikes in the last couple of years. We do not have a lot of dams here.
The more likely cause for such an alarm is chemical pollution from either an accidental release or a fire. Their old use was for air raids but those are even more unlikely (at the moment, of course this can change).
The parent is questioning the reliability of the mobile phone alert system as a replacement for the sirens: it has failed for many people (and has so in the past), and as such one can assert that it cannot replace the siren.
I'm not sure the name is good because light tracing means 'ray tracing from the light to the camera'.
Light tracing gives the best results in theory, but it not very usefull because a lot of rays will be rendered without ever ending up in the camera. Which is ofcourse a waste of resourses.
It’s true that ”light tracing” is some times used to describe forward-only ray tracing, but I don’t think there is much confusion added by the term here. Anyone who knows the terminology (so could be confused) also knows that no efficient path tracer is forward only.
New currencies always fluctuate very much when they start because no one knows what the value is. Most of the time this will settle after some time (years) because then the market decided it's value.
I even think there are countries where the currency fluctuates more than Bitcoin.
I think the first step is to wake up. Really think about what impact the info addiction has on your life. Bucause if you don't it is very hard to see why you should change bad behavior.
The next step is taking babysteps because big steps most of the time don't work.
So for example start by turning off all notifications.
Then allow yourself to YouTube for only 2 hours a day instead of 3.
The Rubin Report has some interviews with Eckhart Tolle on YouTube right now with a lot of insights. And Peter Peterson is also someone who speaks a lot about these subjects.
There is plenty of proof that cephalopods are intelligent, but we keep moving the goal posts on what we define as intelligence.
They have advanced problem solving capabilities and a distributed nervous system that can achieve levels of parallel processing software devs dream of.
We don't need to go to other planets to find intelligent life, it is already here. We are just aren't smart enough to communicate with it yet.
Maybe this one specific behaviour doesn't convince you of intelligence, but squids, octopi, and cuttlefish are among the most intelligent cephalopods, which are in turn the most intelligent known invertebrates.
Oh, I'm well aware of their prowess, it's been taped and discussed (also many more animals have more cognitive abilities than were thought before). I was just discussing this particular reflex/behavior.
I have no knowledge on how they identify/distinguish food over a rock, if the tentacles have some sort of receptors on them, but apparently this didn't "taste" like food, thus unworthy of eating or fighting for and therefore better safe than sorry.
I think the issue is that Apple used to be a more service-oriented brand.
My Dual G4 tower years ago had a run of bad processor modules. AppleCare sent service reps out three times in the space of four days trying to get it working correctly. Today, almost everything has to go back to Apple to be replaced; there are no more Apple-sanctioned repair outlets and the Apple store can't do much more than elevated diagnostics tests.
If you get into a car accident, you can take it to the dealer for repair but it'll likely be much more expensive because their goal is to keep the car running to their specifications. If the repair costs are excessive, your insurance might just total the car. You could still take it to a garage, get it repaired for a fraction of what the insurance claim was and get many more years of use out of it.
With Apple, there's not really much option for repair, as they usually won't sell parts to aftermarket repair outlets.
To me the succes of Slack also shows how invaluable it is.
Companies jumped to it very easily. Everybody just started using it. And the moment something better comes along Slack will be forgotten.
I think this is different from Facebook. Company employees come and go so they don't value what they put on Slack very much. And for companies the history on slack is also not very important.
Well that's how I see how Slack is being used inside different companies.
I don't necessarily think Slack is worth $16B any time soon, but I actually do feel like my searchable Slack history stretching back ~5 years is one of the most valuable resources I have at my fingertips on a dailt basis. The search quickly pulls up stuff from years ago even stuff from before we changed the subdomain for the org.
Before Slack, that history might have been contained in email. Which has always been available and goes back decades in my case. Slack worries me in the sense that when it’s gone so is my data, but email I’ve always got my copy.
"Might". There's a lot slack channels that I'm somewhat privy to, but otherwise would be out of the loop on if it were an e-mail. It gives me access to a lot of institutional knowledge in my organization.
Yes it is bad, very bad. But I'm sure they got all the redundancy in place and thought about so much more than we can imagine. But even then there might be some extreme event that will throw 'soot in the food'.
I think it is just great how this event is handled. Almost everybody I know knows the alternative alarm number. Police is in the streets so you can walk to them. And as far as we know there are no looters taking their chances.
So yeah, bad, but we have to wait before we can mark it as big fuckup.