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Admin
If you offer an SLA you have to say what will happen when you break it. There is always the risk you'll break it. If you run a datacentre, a 747 might land on it (or a JCB might dig up the fibre outside) - it'll take more than a couple of hours to get back running again... If you have planned well, you'll get going within a day or so, but unless you have complete duplicate hardware at a different location receiving constant updates, it isn't going to be quick.
So, if you say '99.99% uptime', that's fine, but then add something like 'every hour we go over that we'll give you credit for a day's free maintenance, up to a maximum of 1 month free maintenance'.
That limits your exposure, whilst making it clear to the customer that you have a good incentive to get fixing the problem ASAP, rather than sitting on your behind.
Admin
Addendum (2009-05-29 09:28):
... Are you helping install the Great Firewall of Australia or something? you guys really need to smack your elected officials around with some common sense.Admin
Absolutely!
Admin
Admin
You've probably missed that StruggleCo (or, specifically, Gary@struggleco) took "99.99% uptime" to mean "We'd like 100% uptime, obviously, wouldn't we all, but everybody knows that's impossible, so we'll stick in an arbitrary margin for downtime, to keep it real. Just do your best, guys, ok?" whereas MiddleCo took it to be an actual, concrete, contractual obligation that was specifically agreed to in a very real and legally binding way, by StruggleCo, when they signed the contract.
Admin
Ordinary people know that spilling hot liquids on your body can (will usually) cause burns, the hotter the liquid the more severe the burns. They also know that coffee is usually sold hot and can be expected to reach the conclusion that spilling recently bought coffee on themselves is likely to result in injury.
If, as the plaintiff's lawyer stated at the trial, McDonald's sold their coffee at a substantially higher temperature than was customary, that would certainly be negligently exposing the customer to an unexpected risk, hence the lawsuit and the verdict would be justified. (Awarding $2.7M punitive damages would still be ridiculous and obscene, in my opinion.)
Contrary to what http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm says, other sources, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's, state that selling coffee at temperatures of 180°F-190°F is widespread practice. Since coffee kept at lower temperatures quickly becomes stale and undrinkable, I am inclined to believe that.
If McDonald's did not sell their coffee substantially hotter than other vendors, the case shouldn't have gone to court in the first place and certainly the verdict should not have been what it was.
Actually, most of these cases are thrown out of court by american judges, too.Admin
How do you get that wrong?
Admin
When there's a contradiction between a respected archive of legal information and a wiki that can be edited by any mouthbreathing idiot with Internet access, definitely trust the wiki first.
Admin
The article's sources in question are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s#cite_note-14 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s#cite_note-15 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s#cite_note-16
Admin
Use a Windoze server! :-)
-Lego
Admin
[quote user="Sorry, but probably no."] In almost every other country, the plaintiff would have been laughed out of court. But for some reason, american judges seem to think american customers are plain stupid and have to be warned off all obvious dangers (Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear, anyone?)[/quote] Actually, most of these cases are thrown out of court by american judges, too.[/quote]
Haagen Dazs sued Yogen Fruz claiming they were infringing on their trademark. Haagen Dazs claimed that Yogen Fruz's name sounded the same and that consumers would think Yogen Fruz was Haagen Dazs.
From what I read about the case, the judge actually yelled at the lawyers for Haagen Dazs before promptly kicking their asses right out.
Admin
Quoting 99.99% uptime is only a problem if is written in base10.
Admin
Admin
OMG
I remember a meeting like this. I was doing the architecture/design (technical/development level) for a very professional organization that could actually deliver 3 nines when the sales guy on the project - ie. the guy writing the check - asked me, my senior architect and the CIO to attend a meeting to evaluate some product being hawked to him that could apparently do what we were trying to do.
The CEO for the vendor (aged 22) turned up with his dad (to look after him in an important negotiation) with his lead techie (an actually reasonably knowledgeable guy) on the conference phone.
After about 45 minutes of a presentation and Q&A session regarding their little Windows app running on top of MS Access (which was actually pretty functional and not a bad fit to the requirements) I finally got sick of it and started to ask questions about scalability and reliability.
In the space of about 2 minutes I got guarantees of "thousands" of transactions per second with "6 nines" up time over a year, and "whatever you want, we can do it".
When I then pointed out how unlikely this was on a single Windows box with no second node and no RAID and the disgusting transactional and concurrency control available to Access, the "CEO" blurted out that his little company "would make anything work for $20M"
That was a number I wasn't supposed to know.
My CIO saved me at that point and very gently stopped the sales guy from wringing my neck by pointing out that his technical organization hired very good people like me (and the other guys with me) to build and run very reliable systems that would actually support large business's. He then had the grace to talk gently with the poor kid and encourage him in his business and suggest that he build up a few reference sites first.
Admin
From Wiki...
Fourth-degree burns damage muscle, tendon, and ligament tissue, thus result in charring and catastrophic damage of the hypodermis. In some instances the hypodermis tissue may be partially or completely burned away as well as this may result in a condition called compartment syndrome, which threatens both the life and the limb of the patient. Grafting is required if the burn does not prove to be fatal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn
Admin
Try it while standing on your head - bet that would not end up well!
Admin
I was expecting something like....
Back in the day, I worked as an admin for several servers for a small company. We were bought out by a bigger company, and for a short while, allowed to continue as we had been. Then the bigger company realized it had a lot of redundancies in all of the company pieces parts it had acquired over the year, so decided to select one of each of the various services its pieces parts were providing, and promote it to 'enterprise' status.
The service one of my servers provided was selected for that distinction, and so we suddenly had about 5 times our prior budget, which we needed to quickly spend to make our service redundant and fault tolerant. So one server became 4, and we had our first year as corporate. Uptime: 98%.
We were told, not good enough - but we do recognize that we used your service a lot more than we expected, so here's 2 times the budget, now give us 99.8%. Four servers became 8, and we managed 99.93% uptime.
We were told, better than we asked, but not good enough. Here's 10% more budget, we need 5 9s. Thanks to changes in available servers, 8 servers became 12, and we managed 99.9995% uptime (2.5 minutes downtime, just in case my math's off.)
They still weren't satisfied - they wanted to ding us for network outages that prevented users from getting to our (internationally distributed) servers, so they had us attend an all day meeting with over a score of directors and VPs, with uncounted underlings, to talk about design improvements for the service. Eventually, we all settled on the plan we'd sketched out: instead of focusing on big, powerful servers, we went with smaller, cheaper boxes. So 12 servers became 30, and we had no effective downtime. (There were some network outages that hindered data changes between the nodes, but other than getting some stale data for other sites, no issue.)
They still weren't satisfied - but we were at least able to point out there was nothing we could do - if the network was down, the network was down. Due to corporate expansion, 30 boxes became 35, and we had no downtime for which we were responsible. We pointed out that the load balancers weren't part of our group's gear, and we had specifically been told to use the enterprise load balancers, so that wasn't even our decision to make.
They still weren't satisfied - but we were at least able to point out there was nothing we could do - if the load balancer chose to route all traffic from a major site through a 512k link when the four servers for that site were all functioning properly according to the logs of the load balancer, we couldn't do squat about it. Due to corporate expansion, 35 boxes became 43. We had approximately 35 seconds of downtime, average across all regions. (Every region saw at least 10 seconds downtime. The "incident" happened on a Saturday evening of a holiday weekend, and was scheduled. We processed a grand total of 100 queries the hour prior to the change, and 150 queries the hour after the change; 200 of those 250 queries were test jobs we did to prepare for the change and to verify its successful completion. Average query time: 1s.) Management screamed.
I got a new job. :D
Admin
Ha ha, 99.9 and 99.999 is the same huh?? Does it cost the same?
I had a client a few years back who had a %95 SLA, calculated PER MONTH! WTF!?!
Admin
You, and others, are quite right. It turns out the first aid section of my Boy Scout's Handbook was not as detailed as I thought.
Having had my error pointed out, with documentation, I apologize and graciously thank you for the information. I understand this is the custom on the Internet.
Admin
It really should have a disclaimer, such as "This section only covers the kinds of problems that a prepared boy scout could conceivably help with. If you encounter something out of the scope of this section, such as fourth degree burns, just get help." However, I seem to recall hearing that they actually intentionally left out such a disclaimer, due to a belief that it would do more harm than good, as it would reduce the confidence level of the scout in the much more common cases which are within scope.
Admin
Politeness Man, where have you been?
Admin
Admin
For what it's worth, I have not seen anything higher than 3rd degree covered in any typical first aid course (they were covered in my military first aid course, but not in a later civilian one), probably as:
Burns that severe are very unlikely to happen in everyday life.
No difference in first aid procedure. The instructions in the military first aid text can be summarized as "treat it like a 3rd degree burn and get them to a hospital RIGHT THE FUCK NOW!".
Admin
The real WTF is that this definition of a "real server" didn't include some kind of remote management board.
Two hour drives are for schmucks.
Admin
I had an boss (at a forty-person company) ask me what it would take to guarantee 100% uptime. I told him I would get back to him. I priced a huge room-sized gasoline generator, extra staff (for 24 hr repair), and construction (to build the facility to house the generator). Then I tripled the costs so we could setup three redundant facilities on multiple continents (in case general internet access went down in our area of the city, or another transcontinental phone cable got cut (we were an international company)) and added some dollars to buy and manage the international real estate and fees for possible emerging legal issues. When I came back with the costs, which more than doubled the annual budget for the whole company, my boss decided that the approximately 97% uptime that we had been enjoying would be sufficient.
Admin
Hmm, I don't think you're allowed to do that on the internet. I believe that you're required to profanely insist that you were right and eventually someone will mention Hitler.
oops
Admin
I like how you think. If I had the need for a server you would be hired.
Admin
I thought you were supposed to put butter on burns.
Admin
I saw an interview with her lawyer in which he made very much this same point. And my reaction then was my reaction now: I don't doubt that she was badly burned. And that fact is completely irrelevant.
Suppose I decide to use my lawn mower to trim my fingernails. I end up cutting off several fingers, requring surgery to re-attach them and leaving permanent scars and nerve damage. Would the facts about the severity of my injuries be all that is relevant in determining how many millions the lawn mower manufacturer owes me in my law suit? Or would a rational judge and jury say, "Umm, it's your own fault because trying to use a lawn mover to trim your fingernails is a pretty dumb thing to do. That's not what a lawn mower was designed to be used for, and anyone with even minimal intelligence should know that. You can't blame the manufacturer for your stupidity."
Any reasonably intelligent person expects coffee to be hot. When I pour coffee from the pot into a cup at home, I expect that it is initially too hot to drink. Are the people defending this lawsuit the only humans in the world who have never had the experience of waiting for a hot drink to cool off before it is safe to drink, or of blowing on it to try to cool it off faster? Is that really so much outside the realms of normal human experience, that it is MacDonald's fault for not warning her of this?
I wonder about the people defending her. What business are you in? Please let me know where you work so I can come by and do something incredibly stupid to injure myself, and then sue you for making your knives sharp enough that I could cut myself with one, or your bowling balls so heavy that I hurt myself when I dropped one on my foot, or for the injuries I suffered when I mixed your motor oil with my eye drops. Hey, you should have known that people pouring motor oil in their eyes could result in injury. You should have made motor oil that was safe.
Admin
If she purposely poured the coffee on herself in an attempt to warm herself up, then your comparison to the lawnmower manicure works. Otherwise it just don't cut it.
Admin
Innumerate managers should be killed!
Admin
Here our contracts specify six-nine availability. 9.99999%
Admin
Make that 5.55555555% :)
Admin
The issue with the hot coffee wasn't just that its serving temperature was dangerously hot, even that it was undrinkably hot and needed to cool before customers could safely drink it. It was also that the cups McDonals served it in were dangerously flimsy and prone to spilling the coffee when customers tried to remove the lid. It was also that this was an ongoing problem which McDonalds knew about and did nothing to correct.
McDonalds sold scalding coffee in a container that regularly failed to safely contain its contents under normal use. A container that doesn't safely contain its contents under normal use is defective, and no amount of warnings in the world should cover your ass when an injury results from you knowingly serving a product that is defective.
Admin
Not to derail thread, but you should really look at some of the actual pictures of boiled flesh from that McDonald's incident. The coffee was unsafe. Don't buy the lawyer hype.
Admin
For the record, that woman was parked in the parking lot when she spilled the coffee, and all she sued for was a few thousand dollars to recover her out of pocket medical expenses. (The manager of the franchise refused rather nastily, because he was tired of paying customers for injuries caused by his hot coffee.) It was the jury that awarded the large amount of damages (actual plus punitive), because they were horrified by the photos of the burn damage. As already noted, the award was considerably reduced on appeal.
Everybody likes to hate on lawyers, but what other mechanism bedsides a lawsuit is there to keep corporations behaving responsibly? The woman in this suit was far from the first customer to be injured by the coffee sold at that establishment, but the management had refused to rectify the problem.