I currently have multiple USPS packages (incoming and outgoing) that have statuses of "In Transit, Arriving Late" and have not been scanned for many days. One package was last updated 13 days ago. An acquaintance who sells things online is seeing the same thing, packages in transit with no updates for 1-2 weeks.
It's possible we've just been unlucky and these packages are lost, but it could also be indicative of a larger logistical problem with USPS.
I shipped a package from Chicago to Baltimore last month. Based on tracking info, the USPS had it on a truck within hours. To Wichita. It made it through the distribution center there and back on a truck within another few hours, where it showed up in Washington DC 6 days later. And now I guess it's heading to Baltimore. Or at least I hope so.
My daughter sends books via media mail to a friend in suburban NYC. For basically pocket change, they get there in 3 days or so.
When I tested one of these machines out 2 months ago, a new QR code was generated each time the machine timed out to the home page. At this point, the old QR code and even the loaded webpage became useless.
This means you can’t save the URL, leave the restaurant, then use it to control the machine later.
McMaster has a powerfully simple website. You can get to any item with mcmaster.com/<part number>. They often provide 3D models of their parts. You can even paste in a list of items to quickly bulk-add to your cart. It just works.
Their customer service is also second to none. I've never had the phone ring more than once before being answered by a real person. And they'll respond 24/7 to phone calls or emails. Oh, and they've accepted returns a year after I bought something, no questions asked.
In the Atlanta area they usually deliver same-day via courier, or you can drive over to their warehouse for will call.
McMaster can often be more expensive than other distributors, especially for things like metal stock (I recommend price-comparing with onlinemetals.com or midweststeelsupply.com but be careful about Midwest Steel's processing times). But you're paying for the service and ease of use.
Probably the biggest problem I have with McMaster is their lack of insight into shipping cost. They don't give you even an estimate of the shipping before you check out, it just gets added once they ship. I will say their shipping prices have always been fair but it can be scary to buy something not knowing what it will cost.
I've probably put in 100 McMaster orders over the last year via work, side gig, and home projects. My take on this is that their prime customers (businesses) do not put shipping costs in their top 5 or maybe even top 10 priorities. Businesses pushing out products or engaged in rapid prototyping or meeting a deadline are much more concerned with speed, and McMaster always beats Amazon in shipping time to my workplace (usually less than 24 hours from order to delivery, no joke). Their customer also values accurate technical data so they've put a lot of effort into CAD models and are very responsive to customer service calls.
In short, they know their customer persona. I wouldn't hold my breath that they'll add upfront shipping costs any time soon!
This exactly matches my experience. I run a prototyping shop in the LA area. I get items the very same day from McMaster. That kind of feedback loop is priceless. They ship with DGC for most deliveries, and DGC is usually cost-competitive with any other service.
My issue with requiring a so-called "quibbler" to develop the proposed change themselves is it puts a high cost on making constructive recommendations.
This can be useful for dealing with the type of argumentative person who will find something wrong with anything. But for a busy person who's been assigned a PR to review, this methodology restricts them from offering feedback since they don't have time to develop fixes, only to suggest them.
Do you resolve this by ensuring PR reviewers are allocated enough time in their schedule to develop suggested changes?
There's another problem here. Requiring others to fix bad code instead of pushing back bad PRs to the original developer removes an incentive for them to write good code. If someone else will fix it, why bother? Do you resolve this at the performance review level?
There ought to be some middle ground here, where you can shut down actual quibblers while allowing legitimate feedback to be quickly given.
> puts a high cost on making constructive recommendations.
A "constructive recommendation" is fine, so long as the reviewer still clicks
"Accept" on the PR instead of "Requests changes." Otherwise, reviewer must
make the change himself. It's called "work" for a reason.
> Requiring others to fix bad code... removes an incentive write good code.
I don't think you understand programmers then. It's an exacting profession --
it's against our nature to embarrass ourselves like that.
That is correct, AirDrop works without Internet. It's unfortunate that Google and Apple have created these respective systems with no cross-compatibility. There's really no technological reason for it, but an obvious business reason.
I use HN with Javascript disabled and it works just fine. I'm currently posting this comment with JS disabled so to answer your question, yes it is possible.
ZFS snapshots can be automated. I have ZFS periodic snapshots enabled on my FreeNAS system, where I can select when snapshots will occur (frequency and time) as well as how long the snapshots will be kept.
Backups can also be automated. I think that parent's point is that, like backup, if it isn't the default then users are probably not doing it. It is my experience that most people, even people who should know better like you or me, think of data loss risks as theoretical until they've experienced it first hand once or twice.
For better or worse, ZFS isn't really targeted at "average users" as of right now.
See also: There is no stable ZFS implementation for Windows as of right now, and the implementation for macOS (while surprisingly painless in general) requires at least some command line use to set up.
If anyone actually develops a ZFS implementation designed for average users, I would agree that it should include automated backups by default.
In addition to it being hard to rapidly change the face of business, these teams can be doomed to failure by virtue of the restrictive environment that they exist in - for example having to work within the sprawling policies of the business.
I had an opportunity to work in a small digital transformation project at one of these "big businesses". When they had me come in every day and do basically nothing for 2 weeks before they could check all the boxes to ship me an engineering computer, I got the first big glimpse of how big business bureaucracy can doom these sorts of lean teams to failure.
It's possible we've just been unlucky and these packages are lost, but it could also be indicative of a larger logistical problem with USPS.