its

Sure professor. Keep digging that grave.

aims to

Aims to. As in, has never once reached. So, you’re suggesting that in a state that has never happened, but theoretically could happen, then it’s OK to have a for-profit business.

What about in the real world?

That’s an “if” big enough to drive a train through.

There has never been a classless society where everyone’s basic needs are met. So, pretending that that’s the starting point for this hypothetical is a sign you’re pretty desperate.

And which of them thought that communism without capitalism allowed someone to run a for-profit business?

You mean, whatever Marx says.

No, private property is things like a coat and shoes.

If someone owns an industrial lemon juicer, that’s part of the means of production, and must be collectively owned. Sorry Jenny, you can’t have a lemonade stand.

In fact, Jenny’s parents are allowed to own a small lemon juicer as part of their personal property. But, if Jenny tries to use that juicer for her lemonade stand and charges money for her lemonade, that juicer is now part of the means of production (as are the lemons) and she’s now operating an illegal enterprise.

The USSR and other supposedly “communist” governments all eventually allowed some capitalism in their economies, because 100% pure communism simply didn’t work.

So, you’re in favour of private ownership of the means of production?

I’m considering getting one. I currently have a nearly silent computer working as a HTPC but I can’t play games on it. I can get around that with Steam Link, but that isn’t ideal. So, it would be an upgrade that would let me play games on my living room TV without needing to tie up the gaming computer.

The other thing it looks ideal for is a travel computer. Gaming laptops suck. Often they’re absurdly expensive. When they’re decently powerful, they’re almost always obscenely loud. That fan whine really bothers me. Plus, they almost always have major Linux compatibility issues. The current laptop I’m using with Linux has weird driver quirks. Like, for example, to re-enable WiFi after it goes to sleep I need to wake it up from sleep, turn on airplane mode and then turn it off again. Only then will the WiFi work again. And getting an external monitor to work after sleep… ugh.

Also, I think it’s easy to underestimate the value of what is effectively a Linux gaming console. I’m almost exclusively a PC gamer these days, but one thing I always appreciated about consoles is that you never had to ask “will this game run well on my console?” 99.9% of the time, if a game was released for a console, it was optimized for that console. Even when a game was multi-platform like say FIFA, each console got a build that was as good as possible for that console. For PC games, I think that means most developers will have a Gabecube and ensure all their games run as well as possible on it. The fact that it’s Linux-first is also important to me. It means any drivers or software updates will be tested and optimized on Linux. It won’t be an afterthought like it is most of the time.

So, this machine is nearly silent, runs Linux, and plays most of the games in my Steam library. It’s expensive, but maybe it’s worth it?

So, no mom and pop shops? No lemonade stands? No independent book stores? No family farms? Nobody allowed to sell homemade quilts or paintings?

For me: Gnome + extensions.

The default Gnome feels way too locked down to me, and I don’t like some of the choices. But, with the right extensions “locked down” becomes “simplified enough to get out of your way”.

What is the feeling when you’re pleased with the decisions that people who live in the same place as you are making, because their decisions show a willingness to make personal sacrifices for the greater good of humanity or the planet?

Aren’t all states the result of colonialism or warfare if you go back far enough?

The demo would be a lot more impressive if the questions you were asking weren’t longer than the extremely simple SQL queries it generates.

Also, it’s always “I would kill for my child”, not “I would take a job at a health insurance company, denying the claims of people who need health care to live for my child”. Always the big dramatic moment, not the mundane daily dreary murder by increments using statistics.

How often is it offline outside the maintenance windows?

Yeah, maintenance windows are annoying, but they don’t really count when describing the availability of a system. Many government systems are only available during normal business hours. That means they’re offline for 16 hours per day. What matters is how available they are when they’re supposed to be working.

For Elder Scrolls, two nines would mean that the game was allowed to be down for more than an hour a week outside of those maintenance windows. Or, if measured by quarters, which is more typical, the game would still have those maintenance windows, but, in addition, it might be down for a full day once per quarter.

Basically, the 8 hour windows every Monday is a trade-off so that the rest of the week is uninterrupted. They probably manage three nines the rest of the week by shifting any serious maintenance into the weekly downtime.

And, as for the game being “still popular”, one site says that there are currently 7199 players in Elder Scrolls but more than 161k in World of Warcraft. It could be that part of the reason that World of Warcraft is more popular is that it doesn’t have 8 hour maintenance windows every week, but it does often have 2+ hour windows. The number of players who are willing to put up with 8 hour maintenance windows every week seems pretty small.

Again, a human hasn’t even gotten paged and out of bed in 5 minutes time.

Why don’t you go back and actually read what I wrote?

You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.

It’s not impossible. Large reliable websites do it all the time. It’s call 100% uptime.

No, no website does it. There is no such thing as 100% uptime. If it happens, great, but I can guarantee you that no website even aims for 5 nines of uptime.

Google is the benchmark for website availability and in 2022 they had an outage that lasted an hour, meaning they didn’t meet 4 nines for the year.

Sure, it’s measured per year, and sometimes they have some outage that breaks the record. But, it is possible to have 100% uptime throughout the year.

If you miss your SLO target for the year, then you missed your SLO target. If you’re down for 60 minutes but fine for the other 11 months, 29 days and 23 hours, you still missed your yearly SLO.

No, it means you don’t have outages. Ever.

No, that’s infinite nines, which isn’t possible.

Five-nines is something like 7 minutes of downtime throughout the entire year. At best, you might have automated failover systems that require tiny outages. No human involvement, though, unless you’re deal with some major breakage that would have killed the five-nines commitment that year, anyway.

Yes, you have automated failover systems. But, if something happens which causes those systems to fail over, you need to immediately investigate what happened and why. Even at four nines you have automatic failover, redundant system, hot spares, etc. But, you accept that sometimes not everything will work as planned and you’ll need to fix something. Five nines is just that and more.

It’s takes a human something like 5-10 minutes just to get out of bed and figure out the situation, anyway.

Right, which is why I said that four nines is your realistic maximum if you’re going to have people on call who aren’t actually at their desks. To get better than four nines you need to have around the clock coverage with people at their desks so when a system breaks you have eyes on it in something like 30s.

I’ve worked on services with 5 nines of availability (i.e. 99.999% available, less than 5 minutes of downtime allowed per year). I’ve more frequently worked on ones with 4 nines, where you’re allowed almost an hour of downtime per year. GitHub is now barely maintaining 2 nines. That’s just embarrassing.

Each “nine” you add is much more difficult. To get four nines you need people on call who can start working on a problem within 5 minutes and fix it within a few more minutes, and you can only get those calls once every couple of months. Five nines means that you need people at their desks in shifts ready to start fixing something the moment there’s a problem because it would take too long for someone on-call to get their computer out, connect and authenticate. It requires warm backup systems that are sitting idle but ready to take over fully at a moment’s notice.

A two nines system is allowed to be down for 100x as long as a four nines system, and 1000x as long as a five nines system. It’s almost 15 minutes of downtime allowed per day, compared to about 15 minutes every 3 months for a four-nines system. Gamers wouldn’t even put up with a two-nines system for a video game. It’s absurd to allow that for a critical piece of infrastructure for software.