Static RAM they bought from IBM; they trusted it too much, didn't include ECC in its path to CPUs, and completely torched any chance at becoming an enterprise vendor by blaming their customers, making them sign NDAs before Sun would "help" etc. You really don't want customers to describe an "enterprise" experience as "They treated the whole thing like a cover-up"https://www.computerworld.com/article/2596346/more-users-sla...
That and what PeterStuer's describes as "They died because they were unable to rapidly change their businessmodel that relied on an expensive sales staff vendoring relatively big ticket items." killed them dead.
Specifically startups weren't able to buy Sun's high quality x86 systems in medium quantities from Sun's designated channels, there was a fatal gap between what you could put on a credit card and placing million dollar enterprise quantity orders. So startups bought from Dell which was actually willing trade money for hardware, learned how to deal with those cheaper systems' quirks, and if successful by the time they were big enough to buy Sun systems in enterprise quantities it was way too late. This of course before the cloud became a thing.
Something like what's discussed in the recent topic "Bugs that cost money" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34103323 If you won't accept money from the people who want to pay you it for your stuff you aren't likely to survive.
Is that really a lot in the scheme of things? I don't have CFL backlit LCD TV info handy since they've been supplanted by LEDs, but I looked at Best Buy (a big US seller of these sorts of things) and found a popular $500 65" and their most insane 98" $15,000 Samsung ones, 190 and 360 watts respectively.
I'm old and by my family's standards 65" diagonal would be questionable at best, so I checked in the vicinity of 48", 43" and 50" only gets you down to 120-5 watts. Add probably not very many watts for whatever's supplying the signal and it doesn't sound like a big deal, although of course everything adds up.
Real, intelligent people for customer support (well, the last time I needed any, which was years ago). You are paying for the service and it's not cheap although also not expensive compared to normal things you also need like Internet service (using US prices). GMail is normally "free," you are the product, and customer support and caring about customers is simply not in Google's DNA. Which we can see in too many of their paid services.
The real protection is to get your own domain which Fastmail of course supports, so you can point it at a different email provider if worst comes to worst, like ajross's plausible proposition that:
"[...] I'd put the odds of Fastmail failing entirely as a business rather higher that those of any single user having an unresolvable 2FA glitch with a gmail account. In the world of real data and not anecdata, Big Tech is incredibly reliable."
> I'd put the odds of Fastmail failing entirely as a business rather higher that those of any single user having an unresolvable 2FA glitch with a gmail account
Well that's funny, because I see a desperate post by a gmail user with an unresolvable 2FA glitch (except by screaming for help on tech-oriented forums hoping someone will notice) basically every week, and yet somehow Fastmail isn't out of business yet. And who knows how many "normies" without an HN/Twitter megaphone just silently lose access, weep a bit and give up?
I have no doubt that Google won't actually lose my email data, but if I can't access it and have no recourse then there's no difference in practise.
"not going out and getting better vaccines for narcissistic reasons"
Not narcissism but the loss of face, which also means a loss of power. Which is the only thing Communists care about; compared to that the loss of a few million lives is nothing unless that also brings about a loss of power.
Narcissism is caring about how you appear (to others)- remember he's looking at himself reflected in the lake? It's caring about appearances and others opinions. That's face, precisely.
Selfishness is a different word entirely.
Also, Chinese culture has always cared immensely about face; the CCP not only didn't invent that, they've toned it down a bit (not much.)
"If by being open and liberal (in the non-political sense) one risks being banned then essentially it's punishment (or the threat of punishment) for defection and the outcome is for everyone to end up being governed by the censors."
Except there's a whole lot of the Fediverse that doesn't work by this "free speech is fascism that must be banned" principle. You can even find huge lists of such nodes in the huge blacklists maintained by this loose community.... And it's quite refreshing to communicate without worrying about every word you say.
It's an outside of the Fediverse problem which therefore cannot escape it, but with solutions that work both outside and inside it.
There are others, Pleroma was explicitly designed to be lightweight for small nodes, written in Elixir and thus running on the battle tested Earlang ecosystem BEAM VM. Also have heard and run across a few instances of Misskey which runs on node.js. Both use Postgres and I see from the install instructions the latter also uses Redis. Have heard of others as well but have no idea at all about them, a search on the above two backends will find you more.
You've also got some choices in front ends, I know Pleroma supports several. I strongly recommend not using Soapbox for a variety of reasons unless you really like its UI.
"I've also seen instances blanket-blocking anything Pleroma, because "all the bad people come from Pleroma". I've even seen it called evil software because it affords more customization of filtering, rewriting, and federation."
And God help you if you use or let your users have the option of using the Soapbox Front End (FE) on top of Pleroma.
You should be careful about such "I'm sure" statements. "Right wing" Fediverse is very tolerant in moderation, that which results in bans, the only big issue is how much, if any pornography to allow and that gets fierce arguments. The big issue users might run into is harassment, but there are fine grained controls that allow you to trivially ignore or block such people going forward.
Other issue which may not matter so much if you're "a fascist capitalist pig" is that your instance will likely be blocked by left wing Fediverse nodes. This can get silly, there are blocklists that often cite as cause nothing more than the software "right wing" nodes use, or in one case written by a particular developer. Too much of the Fediverse is that tribal.
For a concrete example, look at how TERF spinster.xyz federates with "right wing" nodes and is blocked by many left wing ones, including all the ones I could look up just now with a Google search.
I use scare quotes for right wing because many of these sites are politically neutral or thereabouts.
One other thing to factor into this good picture you're making of the situation: at each step in greater transmissibility of variants and sub-variants for Omicron a given isolation or here Zero COVID policy becomes harder. That said, Xi/the CCP/PRC kept it up for almost a year after the first variants of Omicron started getting detected all over the world. Per Wikipedia the first ex-Africa case was in Hong Kong....
Against classic Wuhan it's pretty much accepted the two big PRC vaccines are less effective than the best two Western mRNA ones. This might not play out the same for variants, since these PRC ones are of the inactivated whole virus type, likely expose more proteins to the adaptive immune systems than spike focused ones.
Their two main COVID vaccines aren't terrible as far as I can tell but they're not great. Against classic Wuhan and I'm not sure about pre-Omicron variants. Which we've got some data saying is as bad as the previous ones to the totally immunologicaly naive (although per another paper 30% tested had general protection against all coronaviruses due to their adaptive immune systems targeting some of their most basic functionality and the four strains that were endemic prior to COVID).
There's theoretical reasons to believe they might hold up better than solely spike protein focused vaccines; a greater problem could be low uptake, especially among the elderly (the PRC doesn't have a great record overall with vaccines). See this recent HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34053879#34054893 which covers other issues on the ground.
An even bigger problem is, aside from the measures people are themselves taking, Xi has in effect done an all or nothing approach, first Zero COVID then when that became unsustainable and regime threatening "let it rip."
That and what PeterStuer's describes as "They died because they were unable to rapidly change their businessmodel that relied on an expensive sales staff vendoring relatively big ticket items." killed them dead.
Specifically startups weren't able to buy Sun's high quality x86 systems in medium quantities from Sun's designated channels, there was a fatal gap between what you could put on a credit card and placing million dollar enterprise quantity orders. So startups bought from Dell which was actually willing trade money for hardware, learned how to deal with those cheaper systems' quirks, and if successful by the time they were big enough to buy Sun systems in enterprise quantities it was way too late. This of course before the cloud became a thing.
Something like what's discussed in the recent topic "Bugs that cost money" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34103323 If you won't accept money from the people who want to pay you it for your stuff you aren't likely to survive.