If the leadership was mature and introspective enough to do that these problems wouldn't exist.

On a modern naval vessel if you lose all the electronics the ship is going to be drifting anyway.

Still it seems smart to keep the skill around as the GPS system can be locally jammed and in WWIII could be completely knocked out.

Maybe not. Marine diesel engines can run without the computers attached using mechanical throttles. There has been instances where the yacht's wheelhouse is flooded with water and all the navigation computers and electronic controls are lost. The captain and mate stationed in the engine room coordinate by controlling the manual throttles on each engine. Move one throttle more to turn.

Depends on the ship of course, but this wouldn't have worked on at least one of the naval vessels I've visited. Common on newer ships are electric drives, where diesel or gas turbine engines are connected to generators instead of prop shafts.

Most motherboards still prioritize floppy drives when it comes to boot order. The early viruses were transmitted by floppies.

I also wouldn't trust a floppy controller's firmware any more than I would a CD or USB controller's firmware.

Only HTTP is text based. TCP, IP, and link-layer protocols are binary.

HTTP is text based because it is a protocol for transferring (hyper)text and so was intended to be human readable like hypertext is.

Solitary confinement isn't just a single occupancy cell. Generally it means a cell where the prisoner is isolated from other prisoners.

What drives people crazy is not even being able to talk to another human being.

Solitary doesn't just mean single occupancy cells, it means separation from most human contact.

They could easily have groups of cells where inmates are confined individually but can still have non-physical contact with other prisoners.

And as most of those in solitary aren't raving psychotics (mostly they attacked guards or rival gang members, an issue largely due to prison overcrowding) they could be allowed monitored time in the yard with other prisoners.

The reason there is so much interference on WiFi channels is because there is little regulation within the assigned frequencies.

People playing around with unlocked SDRs is not even a rounding error when it comes to causes of interference.

Could be a ploy like how many scammers use poor spelling and grammar so that they don't waste their time chasing up people too smart to fall for the scam.

Except it is if you are really concerned about security or have a backbone Oracle don't want to waste time on trying to sell to you.

Amazon isn't a couple of guys in a garage. They have hordes of administrative personnel who could be tasked to update a status page.

Companies 1/1000th the size of Amazon can manage it.

Yes and no. Sure, Amazon has administrative personnel. Sure, some of those administrative personnel would probably be happy to get paid extra to carry a pager and be summoned to work at 3AM to update a status page.

But the last thing you want to do is put inaccurate information onto a status page; so mere administrative personnel isn't enough -- you'd need people who understand enough about the system to be able to write about it without introducing errors.

I'm guessing that the intersection of "administrative personnel", "willing to carry pagers" and "understand the internals of AWS services" is a very small set.

Except "willing to carry pagers" is currently the basis of employment at Amazon, and not just for AWS but for whole chunks of their technical business. It's one of the many reasons why they have a pretty dire reputation (see plenty of discussions on here from former Amazon employees).

They also claim to have "customer obsession" as a leadership principle, this whole thread is an excellent example of that being failed in a big way.

This is a situation where "we pay you, now do as you're told" comes in handy.

Not every job can be full of self-directed aspirational spiritual awakenings. If that were the case, nobody would deliver my dinner on a bike when it's -20ºF outside.

>I'm guessing that the intersection of "administrative personnel", "willing to carry pagers" and "understand the internals of AWS services" is a very small set

Being a non-engineer doesn't mean they don't know anything about the technology. And they don't need to know the internals, just enough to convey information from the engineers managers to the public.

Plenty of other organizations manage resolving issues while transmitting information about the issue to other stakeholders.

Also, most administrative personnel have far less job opportunities than engineers. If they can get the engineers to carry pagers they can get a PR minion to carry one.

You would be surprised to learn just how few people run your favorite web service.

What's the power cost per year compared to modern stuff?