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If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

joyent.com

131–140 of 170 posts

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#131
post #21

My new startup, Uptano ( https://uptano.com ), is a cloud provider (still hurts me to write "cloud"). ..and we've had 100% uptime in our short run so far. Our systems are highly redundant and as decoupled as possible. Still, I wouldn't for one second claim that I, or anyone else, could do better than AWS on reliability. AWS does a great job on reliability. I do think EBS is a terrible technology that should die in a…

> Still, I wouldn't for one second claim that I, or anyone else, could do better than AWS on reliability. // That may be true over all customers but for reddit I'm estimating about 1 day of downtime for me in a year (that might even be conservative?) - so that's 99.7% approx. Joyent are claiming that their customers [who?] have only about 30s of downtime per annum. Reliability obviously extends beyond downtime but st…

They must be trying to sweep http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2269329 under the rug. It would take six millennia with 100% uptime for that outage of days to average down to to 30 s/y.

Edit: And allegedly three hours without SSL today, which would put them over 30 s/y for a few more centuries.

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#133
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, "was" implies the past indicative, which means "If I was your cloud provider in the past", whereas "were" implies the subjunctive mood, which expresses "various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood )

I thought "If I had been" is past indicative, and "If I was" is ungrammatical. Insofar as hodgepodgy English has real rules anyway...

"Had been" is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluperfect, further into the past than "was".

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#134
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the lifetime free flights that were offered in the past: http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2012/05/lifetime-air...

They still honor those passes, except in the case of people clearly abusing them.

How can you abuse "lifetime, unlimited"? I want a plane ride, I book a ticket. I cannot book multiple simultaneous tickets. So abuse can only be defined as "They used it more than we'd anticipated."

That school of thought is very much like the oversubscribed phone lines of yore, which made the phone companies highly intolerant of long modem sessions.

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still honor those passes, except in the case of people clearly abusing them.

How can you abuse "lifetime, unlimited"? I want a plane ride, I book a ticket. I cannot book multiple simultaneous tickets. So abuse can only be defined as "They used it more than we'd anticipated." That school of thought is very much like the oversubscribed phone lines of yore, which made the phone companies highly intolerant of long modem sessions.

This kind of sentiment is why everything nowadays comes with 20 pages of fine print that nobody can wade through. It's not enough just to expect people to be reasonable — everything must be clearly spelled out in excruciating detail, as people will feel free to do any insane thing that comes to their mind if you do not restrict it explicitly, and they will loudly object if you tell them that what they're doing is not reasonable. I'm not sure it is a much more desirable state of affairs.

(Clarification: I'm specifically addressing the idea that there can be no "abusive" use of a lifetime offer. Obviously the TextDrive customers are not in this category.)

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#137
post #14

If I were a grammar nazi, I'd be quite irate.

WordReference usually has good discussions on such topics. E.g. http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=50929 Having studied Spanish, "if I was" sounds very strange now. In Spanish it'd always be the subjunctive: e.g. "si fuera..." and never the indicative "si fui...".

Same with Italian, although occasionally people do use the past rather than the subjunctive, but it sounds pretty bad; much worse than "If I was".

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still honor those passes, except in the case of people clearly abusing them.

How can you abuse "lifetime, unlimited"? I want a plane ride, I book a ticket. I cannot book multiple simultaneous tickets. So abuse can only be defined as "They used it more than we'd anticipated." That school of thought is very much like the oversubscribed phone lines of yore, which made the phone companies highly intolerant of long modem sessions.

Order a ticket plus companion ticket to London for every other day of the month. Sell the companion ticket on craigslist for $200 and ferry people you've never met to Europe.

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still honor those passes, except in the case of people clearly abusing them.

How can you abuse "lifetime, unlimited"? I want a plane ride, I book a ticket. I cannot book multiple simultaneous tickets. So abuse can only be defined as "They used it more than we'd anticipated." That school of thought is very much like the oversubscribed phone lines of yore, which made the phone companies highly intolerant of long modem sessions.

IIRC, some people were selling their free companion ticket--you could make pretty decent money flying someone along with you whenever you flew. And that was definitely prohibited in the original agreement.
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