If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by vampirechicken » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 5:16 AM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #152

vampirechicken wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selling the companion ticket falls outside of my definition of "reasonable use". The article I read said they were annoyed that some of these guys would actually use the tickets to, you know, fly places, all the time. As if they had unlimited access. Did they really expect to sell a $400k item so somebody and for the buyer to fly three times a year?

"Rothstein made 3,009 reservations in less than four years, almost always booking two seats, but canceled 2,523 of them." Sounds like he was not actually using the ticket to, you know, fly places.

So what? How far ahead of the flights did make the reservations, and how far ahead did he cancel?

Are we really saying that the handful of wealthy people who bought unlimited tickets are to blame for AA's problems, and not the fact that AA appears to have been bad math?

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

#162

Post by welebrity » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 6:14 AM UTC

If something "sounds" suspicious, it usually is. I had one of the early "truly unlimited" mobile data plans w/VZ. They actually honored it until I made the blunder of changing my plan. I was grandfathered in, but they kept sending me teasers to get me to switch. Once I did, going back was not an option. They got what they wanted . . .

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

#163

Post by NeutronBoy » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 6:19 AM UTC

vampirechicken wrote: post #161

tedunangst wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Rothstein made 3,009 reservations in less than four years, almost always booking two seats, but canceled 2,523 of them." Sounds like he was not actually using the ticket to, you know, fly places.

So what? How far ahead of the flights did make the reservations, and how far ahead did he cancel? Are we really saying that the handful of wealthy people who bought unlimited tickets are to blame for AA's problems, and not the fact that AA appears to have been bad math?

People were making booking on 3-4 flights per day, on the same route, and just showing up to the one that suited them best on the day.

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

#164

Post by sparkinson » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 8:11 AM UTC

punjabisingh wrote: post #117

sparkinson wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> http://isitup.org/joyant.com joyant.com is up. [...] ip of 208.91.197.128 Although the spelling was wrong, it clearly was having a few issues.

It is not joyant.com, it is joyent.com.

Well that was stupid of me :/

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

#165

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 10:14 AM UTC

vampirechicken wrote: post #134

tedunangst wrote: post #127

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.

> "They used it more than we'd anticipated."

If you read the Times article you'll see some pass holders sell tickets, book the same route on different flights (in case they get delayed in traffic) and book two seats in order to have more space. It's not just a case of flying too much.

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

#166

Post by makomk » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 8:38 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #141

carson wrote: post #92

Anyone remember Joyent's Strongspace service? http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyen...

They got a free thumper from Sun through the "try and buy" program, loaded it up with customers, and ... failed to operate it properly. IIRC, it wasn't just a service outage - some data was irrevocably lost. ZFS on Solaris was a non-beta, prime time product at that time, so it's not fair to blame it on "a ZFS thing". Deploying customers on loaner hardware is scrappy and admirable, in a way, but Sun wasn't giving thos…

ZFS was officially a non-beta, prime time product. In practice, apparently anyone who tested its robustness thoroughly before deploying it found that it tended to crash and burn at the first hint of trouble exactly like it did for them.

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

#167

Post by jaggederest » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 10:42 PM UTC

patrickgzill wrote: post #146

jaggederest wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, running Ruby on Joyent was an exercise in frustration. Heroku isn't only Ruby these days, but operating as a stable ruby platform is still a requirement I think. Among other things: Solaris threading libs with crashy bugs when you pop a new thread open. Took quite a while to figure that one out.

It is perhaps a difference in thread creation semantics, or something like that. But, Solaris threading has been rock solid for many, many years.

Not in my direct confirmed experience. pthread lib on Joyent's particularly weird version of solaris was f'd hard.

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

#168

Post by Raphael » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 11:13 PM UTC

alanh wrote: post #126

It should be “if I were your cloud provider.” It’s a possibility and a wish of theirs, so it should be expressed in the subjunctive. http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/subjunctive-verbs-was-i...

They were referring to a Justin Bieber lyric, "If I was your boyfriend", which was parodied by the girl who became the Overly Attached Girlfriend meme, which is popular on Reddit.

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

#169

Post by vampirechicken » Thu, Oct 25, 2012, 2:45 PM UTC

chc wrote: post #151

vampirechicken wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A contract does not provide for what is reasonable. It stipulates the relationship between two parties. if you say unlimited personal use, with no right of resale, then I can fly all day every day without worry. I don't see how flying a lot on an unlimited lifetime ticket can be legitimately called abusive. If I buy a lifetime, fly anytime ticket, and use it all the time, you don't get to call that abuse. If I use th…

Yes, that's my point exactly. By claiming the absolute right to force upon the counterparty anything they have not explicitly forbidden by contract, you require them to create absurdly lengthy and unnecessarily expansive agreements that enumerate every possible circumstance and give them almost unlimited leeway in the event of a dispute. And then people complain that EULAs are too long and make unnecessary power grab…

Take a look at the contract that you've entered into with an airline when you buy a regular ticket. These guys are in the pantheon of crossing every t and dotting every i, going do far as to say if we declare something an act of god, then you get no refund, nor recourse.

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

#170

Post by tripzilch » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 10:06 PM UTC

chc wrote: post #151

vampirechicken wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A contract does not provide for what is reasonable. It stipulates the relationship between two parties. if you say unlimited personal use, with no right of resale, then I can fly all day every day without worry. I don't see how flying a lot on an unlimited lifetime ticket can be legitimately called abusive. If I buy a lifetime, fly anytime ticket, and use it all the time, you don't get to call that abuse. If I use th…

Yes, that's my point exactly. By claiming the absolute right to force upon the counterparty anything they have not explicitly forbidden by contract, you require them to create absurdly lengthy and unnecessarily expansive agreements that enumerate every possible circumstance and give them almost unlimited leeway in the event of a dispute. And then people complain that EULAs are too long and make unnecessary power grab…

What part of "a contract stipulates the relationship between two parties" did you not understand?

It goes both ways!

That is exactly what contracts are meant to do, and have always been meant to do. And in order to use them successfully, they don't need to be "absurdly lengthy" or anything. The boilerplate you're referring to generally has nothing to do with "abuse" or "being reasonable", and most of it doesn't even need to be there, because if you'd leave it out, it'd be implied.

What you do have to do, however, is stick to the unique terms that you did write in your contract. And if you cannot, don't put them there, or don't offer the contract.

Simple as that. If you offer people unlimited phonecalls, you should be prepared for them to be on the phone 24/7. If you're not, you really shouldn't be offering them unlimited phonecalls, instead maybe offer them 20,000 minutes per month (that's about half of 24/7).

And if "twenty thousand minutes per month" doesn't sound as snazzy as "unlimited minutes", that's too bad because the reality of the matter is that you apparently cannot afford to actually offer "unlimited minutes".