I used to get multiple Zivver messages a week from the health providers I work with. However, I haven't received a single one since the announcement of the takeover a while ago.
I recently moved to a Dutch municipality that runs its own non-profit ISP. They installed a symmetric 1 Gbps fiber connection with a static IP at my house for 40 euros per month.
The service is solid, there’s no upselling or throttling, and hosting things from home just works. I bring this up because when we talk about “open”, “fair” and “monopolies” the model of a local, non-profit ISP backed by the municipality could offer a real alternative. It doesn’t directly solve the peering issues, but it shifts the balance of power (and cost) somewhat.
i've wondered for a long time why this isn't a more common solution to these services that are almost inevitably monopolous. power, water, and internet kind of things.
tldr: one town in the US did it and it became an economic miracle, big telcos noticed and have set up lobbying and advertising infra to ensure it never happens.
The video doesn't explain much. At the end, it says this:
> "The average voter doesn't understand how these systems work so there is little risk for [state] lawmakers in siding with these companies."
The million-dollar question is why those lawmakers are siding with these companies when the economic miracle case exists right in front of their eyes. The answer to that question is the real explainer.
In Europe these were largely publicly-owned, but the neoliberal tendency to privatise everything has slowly dismantled the public corporation.
My home country's formerly public energy provider has a weird share structure: a Chinese company and BlackRock add up to a fourth of the stock. No foreign investor should really be buying up stock in critical infrastructure.
Somewhat similar over here in Chattanooga (aka "Gig City"): our city's Electric Power Board has offered synchronous gig fiber for $75/month, a 300mbps "slower option" for $58/month — it's plenty fast — or 25gbps for $300/month... to all electric customers [0].
Of course our lobbied state congress critters passed a law to restrict this, so EPB can only offer internet to a limited geographic area (under the auspices of network monitoring of power delivery) — wouldn't want their Comcast-bros to have any competition! Certain apartment complexes are exempted, which prevents you from using EPB.
Wish more jurisdictions were even allowed to do this; wish politicians weren't such whores.
While this is great when it works it does raise some interesting challenges, what happens if the ISP loses money, should taxes be used to cover the cost since this is a public service? Is it reasonable for this ISP to undercut commercial offerings? Internet is in a weird grey zone where it's almost a utility but not on the same level as water or sewage.
I'm glad this non-profit ISP exists but on a national level I would prefer (strong) net neutrality laws. Probably not an issue in NL but in less developed countries neutrality isn't guaranteed.
Usually these ISPs are part of or under the municipal utility provider. So if they lose money, it first gets offset by profits from other utilities and eventually yes, the taxpayer will step in, directly or indirectly. No big deal. No one is complaining about subsidies for water or power lines in rural areas, neither should they when it comes to internet. Remember: These ISPs were founded because the market was already failing to provide decent offers or any at all.
In Austria the Internet, like the postal service, is a Universal Service ("Universaldienst"). As such, any completely unserviced citizen can petition the current Finance Minister to decree an ISP of his choice - usually A1, which is the privatized form of our former public office for postal services and telegraphs - to service their area. The costs of facilitating the servicing of this area are covered by all active ISPs of a certain size operating in Austria.
Telecommunications law in Europe is a very interesting thing.
After a famously bad wind storm in 2008, my house (along with thousands of others) was without power for about two continuous weeks.
The internet connection, which was FTTN VDSL, never skipped a beat. It was completely solid.
This was accomplished by using batteries and generators.
The ISP was The Phone Company, so their Cold War-era central office had very good backup power.
The VRAD nodes scattered all over town had enough battery backup that (at least in my neighborhood) things stayed up until they brought out generators for those nodes.
And at my house, the VDSL box had its own UPS. And I also had a rather overkill UPS, and a portable generator
We ran the generator intermittently, mostly to charge batteries and chill down refrigerators.
It wasn't an awesome time. It was hot as hell. It was a pain in the ass to keep the generator fueled. We didn't even try to run the desktop PC rigs.
But, yeah: The internet was working fine.
(We charged batteries for neighbors, too. One or two neighbors also dragged over extension cords to run their own fridge. And I opened up the WiFi completely so everyone nearby could use it.
So if you were my neighbour in that 2008 power outage, I'd have just taken care of that internet problem for you. The range at 2.4GHz was amazingly good in that abnormally-quiet RF environment.)
When we loose power here internet usually works just fine. All you need is a generator and you're back up and running. Usually the POP still has power so this works for a long time. Sometimes they are or run out of (backup) power too if its widespread and prolonged. Cell service including LTE is usually still up / up for longer, so again as long as you have a generator, you're good.
One doesn't have to rely on others for power. One can run their own generator, or set up a solar power system, or if you live out in the sticks, run a mini hydro system or use wind power. All of these can provide power to the home.
There's voting with your wallet and voting with your, well, vote.
In some sense a democracy is also a market and can lead to efficient allocation of resources, particularly common resources for common good.
This is why public utilities tend to work so well in practice. People, especially in the US, don't seem to realise that such services are also subject to strong market forces, just a different kind of market.
Voters care a lot about good public services, and they also care a lot about not getting taxed much. This can lead to very efficient outcomes in well functioning democracies, often more efficient than those that come out of private enterprise, when it comes to services that most of the population needs.
If it loses money, do some combination of raising prices and cutting costs. Aim for an average of zero profit/loss over the long term. Undercutting commercial offerings is perfectly fine if it works out that way.
This comment makes this thread a great time capsule. Given that the website is now over 10 years old, it perfectly illustrates how much 'best practices' and architectural complexity (and cloud bills) have changed since then.
I was there before 10 years ago. I remember the pain in the ass that was hosting your own web server and own hardware, dealing with networking issues with cisco switches and thinking about getting a ccna. I remember the days of trying to figure out php and ranodm ass modules or how python and wsgi fit together on a slow ass windows machine instead of just spinning up an app and doing network calls using a spa.
Have you guys just forgotten all the enterprise crap that existed? Have you guys forgotten before that how things like compilers (ones you had to pay exorbintant amounts of money for) and different architectures were the headaches?
It's been two steps forward, one steps back, but we're still way better off.
Yes, people bring in k8s because they want to resume build and it goes poorly, but I've also used k8s in my personal setup that was much easier than the poor man's version I had of it.
All of this is just rose-tinted glasses, and people throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Just because some people have bad experiences with microservices because people don't often do them right, people just write them off completely.
I know people who can wrangle k8s and set up rules in whatever it's called to spin up and down the whole kaboodle of services effortlessly. It's like they know a whole level of programming I'm not familiar with, at all. I know the dotnet stuff pretty well, after many years fiddling with it. I do stuff in dotnet now I didn't have even terminology to talk about before. What they do in k8s and friends reminds me of that.
I personally don't care for it and if I design something I make it so it avoids that stuff if I can at all help it. But I've come to see that it can have real value.
The thing is though, that then you really need someone to be that very competent ops person. If you're a grug like me, you don't get many shots to be good at something. I probably don't have the years in me to be good at both ops and "pure" programming.
So if you are a startup and you're not some kind of not only very smart but smart, fast and with taste, maybe pick your battles.
If you are great at the ops side, ok, maybe design it from that perspective and hire a bunch of not-made-of-unobtainium regular middle-of-the-road coders to fill in what the microservices and stuff should contain and manage those. This requires money for a regular hiring budget. (Or you are supersmart and productive and "play pretend enterprise" with all roles yourself. But I have never seen such a person.)
Or focus on a tight design which can run without any of that, if you come more from the "I'm making a single program" part of the world.
Tinkering syndrome can strike in any kind of design, so you need personal maturity whatever path you choose.
This feels to me like HP is trying to formalize a whole new business around second-hand hardware — not just selling off returns, but really building a controlled ecosystem for trade-ins, refurb, and resale. My guess is they want to keep that value in-house rather than letting third-party refurbishers or resellers capture it.
The Carfax reference stood out to me. It seems more like a feel-good marketing move than anything with real substance — just enough to trigger that association of “trusted, inspected, certified.” Not necessarily bad, but definitely more about perception than transparency.
Overall, I think they’re trying to rebrand “used hardware” into something safe, premium, and profitable — under the HP umbrella, of course.
I am surprised they are starting with Laptops. IMO, it makes more sense to start with servers. They are car-priced assets, and stand much more to gain from a multi-point inspection versus a laptop. They are also less likely to suffer from long term damage damage, such as water damage.
Slap another 5 years of hardware support on it and resell for 20% above the used market. Many small and medium size enterprises will happily take you up on that offer. For example, typical dell hardware support is 5-7 years, the systems are still usable for several years after hardware support ends.
HPE is very happy with off-lease server HW only being sold on ebay and appearing as sketchy as possible. The margins are really high on server HW - offering HW support on systems sold at 20% above the used market under their brand name would cannibalize their core business so it will never happen.
But in consumer space, margins are very low, and so there is money to be made reselling used HW at a premium, so they will try.
How many enterprises want to use two or three generation old second-hand leased servers?
As a homelabber I can see the sense, but as the IT guy at a small company it doesn't sound like a great deal.
If I were in a situation where I needed some physical machines, didn't care how old they are, and budget was an issue, I'd just go to eBay. Just get something cheap and own it outright without some corporation sticking their nose into the process.
I imagine the market segment willing to accept old and refurbed servers, yet requires some SLA from the vendor is not terribly large. Almost all businesses would be better served by owning last generation servers outright or simply using AWS.
Then again, we are talking about an industry that's happy paying tens of thousands of dollars in AWS bills for an application that can reasonably run on a single server from 2016. So there's no inherent logic at play.
There is difference of usage patterns between servers and laptops. Servers are most likely run nearly entire duration they are used or leased. Maybe not loaded, but is not massive difference.
On other hand laptops might spend significant time being turned off. Or their usage patterns might affect batteries. Like how deep they were drawn. In that sense getting more telemetry on laptops is much more useful.
This book was a great help to me years ago, and I still have a hard copy lying around. It's wonderful to now have a digital edition as well. I often look back on my time with the Delphi IDE with fond memories—though, thankfully, the bad ones seem to fade faster.
As a synthesizer enthusiast, I'm excited to read about this. A well-designed button layout on a synth sparks my creativity. Tweaking knobs on a touchscreen doesn’t work for me because I constantly have to check the screen to make sure my fingers are on the right control.
the obvious consequence of electric vehicles is live configurable filters and patches for performance tuning. I want an ADSR for my accelerator in different modes. give me an EQ for acceleration and braking, along with a feedback cycle for cruising, and the era of performance personalization will be huge.
I would buy a tesla instantly if you gave me a eurorack dashboard insert!
eurorack module designers have moved hardware interface design to where they can create intuitive design languages as well.
Similarly, I find mixing on a tablet slower than mixing on a console with tactile controls - because you can do things like change multiple things by different degrees at once (you don't have to look at both controls to ensure your fingers are tracking) and adjust a control while looking at the stafe.
A poorly designed synth doesn't generally cause a car accident though, far less of a legislative impetus to stop softwaring everything in synth-land =)
Its so great when you know where the buttons are located, that you can touch them in the darkness without them suddenly selecting anything. When you need to make sure "is this the second one from the left?", then apply some force to actually change its value.
Interestingly, Norwegian has both "luft" (air)/"lufte" (to air) and "lukt"/"lukte" (smell, to smell), and it turns out they share the same proto-Germanic origin as Dutch "luchten" as well as the equivalent German terms, and English "to lift" and Norwegian "å løfte", all centering around air with different angles.
Maybe "the world" needs to pay to countries with large forests (like Brazil) to maintain them, instead of paying them for cutting them down (lumber, agro, resources)
The opposite, "the world" needs to put trade sanctions and large tariffs on countries which have exports which are cheaper because they abuse the environment (deforestation, fossil fuel powered, etc.) and while they're at it: labor (wage slaves, child labor, unsafe practices, actual slavery).
Don't pay corrupt countries to be less corrupt, charge them a fee that makes bad practices more expensive than good ones.
This is a game. Dictators and developing economies are good at taking incentive payments and pocketing them.
+1 … it has a great discussion of structural vs object-oriented vs functional, presenting the trade-offs, it describes different service and module decomposition patterns, with pros and cons for each, without prescribing one.
