181–190 of 285 posts
2:1 by who? That is not written. These types of schemes ring very poorly in my head for charity. If someone has the ability to give 2$ for every 1$ I give, why are they only giving on contingence? Just give the money!
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> Is it very important that they have someone to restore service at 3am? Depends on the service, but any effort to maintain this daft "gosh, what are they worried about, it's just the internet archive" line of thought is going to depend on either trivializing the needs of their staff, their users, or their computer systems. Good on them for taking things more seriously. (3:00 AM on the west coast is work hours for so…
They can use an online service in the middle of the night, but as a citizen, I'd be upset if I learned my public library were paging someone in the middle of the night if it weren't working. That's incredibly inappropriate. It can wait. Like I said in another comment, computers generally don't just randomly stop working, but no, a library worker doesn't need their computer at 9am so badly that they need an on-call IT…
A single worker probably doesn't, yes. In contrast, hundreds of people being unable to do anything when they come to work in the morning is not a terrible reason to call someone and have them login for a few minutes.
Back to the IA, it seems to me our hundreds of thousands of users, employees and volunteers in time zones across the globe will be unable to access the service until we fix this is a decent reason for an institution that takes its own mission seriously to have an on-call. But you do you.
> Hell, most banks in the US are "closed" for maintenance online for several hours every weekend (or at least they were as of a couple years ago) and no one cares. It's fine.
(this is my industry) Some of their online services are closed, yes. The hours they'll be closed are typically posted ahead of time to minimize the inconvenience to everyone concerned and to display an understanding on the part of the institution that downtime is taken seriously and to signal it is not the result of carelessness. In contrast to online services, most institutions consider it a major failure if something like the ATM system is down for more than a few minutes.
> This attitude is how you waste a ton of money overcomplicating everything while making working conditions terrible for literally no reason.
That's remarkably backwards. The need for humans to be on-call is a result of systems being overcomplicated, not a cause.
I like the theory of the IA enough that I have a reoccurring donation, but I've thought a few times about e-mailing them to cancel (they have to halt your monthly donation charges manually). There's plenty of things I can overlook, like having to compete with scrapers to get a single page to load, or a myriad of longstanding technical issues (my favorite being that the collection upload system silently and irrevocabl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is it very important that they have someone to restore service at 3am? Depends on the service, but any effort to maintain this daft "gosh, what are they worried about, it's just the internet archive" line of thought is going to depend on either trivializing the needs of their staff, their users, or their computer systems. Good on them for taking things more seriously. (3:00 AM on the west coast is work hours for so…
They can use an online service in the middle of the night, but as a citizen, I'd be upset if I learned my public library were paging someone in the middle of the night if it weren't working. That's incredibly inappropriate. It can wait. Like I said in another comment, computers generally don't just randomly stop working, but no, a library worker doesn't need their computer at 9am so badly that they need an on-call IT…
I like the theory of the IA enough that I have a reoccurring donation, but I've thought a few times about e-mailing them to cancel (they have to halt your monthly donation charges manually). There's plenty of things I can overlook, like having to compete with scrapers to get a single page to load, or a myriad of longstanding technical issues (my favorite being that the collection upload system silently and irrevocabl…
It's happened:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachette_v._Internet_Archive
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Music_Group_v._Inter...
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And archive.org removes perfectly legal content from their accessible archives. Nobody's perfect. The guy running archive.today has done a shit ton of good.
My beef with IA is that none of the books as listed for borrowing are borrowable anymore. Why list it then!
I read that Internet Archive keeps 2 copies of all their data. Storj, the decentralized storage service, is currently in Chap 11 bankruptcy, mostly IMO because of incompetent management. They pay their node operators, the guys that actually maintain the hard drive space, $1.35/TB/mo to store data. (However it costs Storj 1.8x that because of erasure coding). They still have way more available capacity going unused, s…
Isn't storj a crypto thing? I don't think they'd want to be involved. I get the sense they are idealists
(and I am not saying it's bad, or indeed good, just that the usual expectations of being pro- or anti- cryptocurrency or AI don't easily map to things like the Archive)
They have some positions posted on their job board. I would do this for free. They should adopt a volunteer workforce like the Redcross Code4Good Volunteer Enterprise Web Services team. Senior Datacenter Network Infrastructure Engineer Full Time San Francisco, CA, US 30+ days ago Requisition ID: XXXX Salary Range: $140,000.00 To $200,000.00 Annually
It always irks me when these tech organizations beg for donations to ... pay silicon valley wages because they insist on being located where all the other big boys are.
I worked there (as a software developer) for 3 months and took a 75% pay-cut from my previous tech job. Luckily I don't live in SF! IIRC California employees were paid a little more, but not even remotely SV money.
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Pick 2 out of 3 for these kinds of volunteer work: - Capable - Reliable - Free You going to be on call at 3am to bring services back up doing it for free?
> You going to be on call at 3am to bring services back up doing it for free? Yes. For the Internet Archive I totally would. As responsible as I do my main job.
There's no reasonable world where this is a few hour's per week volunteering like your local boat club. It's a Top 200 website, around the size of the Guardian newspaper -- never mind that Wayback is only a small portion of what they do. (Book scanning, inter-library loans, paid services for other GLAM organizations and governments etc.)
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> You going to be on call at 3am to bring services back up doing it for free? Yes. For the Internet Archive I totally would. As responsible as I do my main job.
The work required to keep IA infrastructure operating is full time: these are full-time positions. IIRC they were at ~70 racks of stuff just in the California locations and apart from on-call and emergency response there's growth to keep up with, future planning etc. There's no reasonable world where this is a few hour's per week volunteering like your local boat club. It's a Top 200 website, around the size of the G…