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I'm the site admin. Sorry for the inability to withstand slashdotting. This was supposed to only go in "Idle"...

You can get to the actual evolving music bit
via this ugly EC2 URL

That link will not work in a few days from now (when I let go of the machine). Too stingy to pay for an elastic IP ;-)

cheers,
Bob.

Rotavirus or, surprisingly enough, the Novel H1N1 strain going around. Compare This particular iteration to the following: H1N1 or Rotavirus

at the bottom of this image: http://mandelbulb.s3.amazonaws.com/full/q50/Mandel3Dpersp-med.jpg

jesus in a toast!

he says to make more fractals nom nom nom

I've used this program with some of my users on a large network volume that they needed to do keyword searches on. The initial index build takes time (although not days), but subsequent updates are fast, and searching is super-fast. You can tell it what file types to index, too, which is nice. Everyone I've installed it for loves it, even though we have enterprise content management - they just find this easier to use and faster. http://s3.amazonaws.com/redtree/wilma/en/help/index.html

Yes, and we're still sorry about that.

http://hoaxblog.s3.amazonaws.com/birthplace.jpg

In the salary cheque that is.

No?

The camera doesn't lie:
http://collegeotr.s3.amazonaws.com/images/blogs/b422245a96af7340b70921c641e0b6db.jpg

Simple. Set up a dating site which costs a thousand+ a month for guys but is free for women.

Checkout http://s3.amazonaws.com/nasathermalimages/public/video/Pretext.wmv and http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM

The thing about S3 is it their pricing structure is almost too granular. I mean, S3 charges $0.01 per 10,000 GET's in addition to the data transferred per request. Their EC2 charges $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests.

I mean, those numbers sound small, but even I have no clue how many IO requests I am making right now... is ten cents per million a good price or a bad price? Dunno! Is a penny per 10,000 GET's a good price? Probably--that is ten bucks for 10 million requests, right?

The disadvantage is that it ties them to Amazon.

Sure it ties them to Amazon, but how tightly? I mean, as a percentage of their codebase, there is probably what, 0.5% specific to Amazon? And codebase aside, how hard is it to migrate your data from one cloud to another? I mean, at most it is a month long project and most of that is probably testing and dealing with unexpected edge cases. But none of these cloud guys do anything that really tie you in any more than a regular host.

BTW--I was looking at the URL structure of twitter and I tell you, if I was to use S3, I wouldn't tolerate the URL's for my images looking like this:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/120987937/twitter_photo_bigger.jpg

That URL looks really unprofessional for such a big player. Can't they at least get their own hostname? It does prove my point though--about the only cost to migrate is changing the "upload avatars" code and changing the template to use a new URL structure.

This is an even better picture. But it's not Joanna.

Hey, that girl is in a bunch of music videos and one of those surreal AXE commercials. There is even a weird sort of commercial for HP where she gets jumped by Shaun White.

This is an even better picture. But it's not Joanna.

I work for ElasticHosts, a UK cloud computing infrastructure which is the first globally to be based on Linux KVM.

For Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Amazon EC2, ElasticHosts, GoGrid, etc.), issues of data ownership are clear (the same as traditional VPS hosting), and there is already a valid need to standardize the basic access APIs that are used to start and stop servers on our respective cloud infrastructures. c.f.:

Amazon cloud infrastructure API
ElasticHosts cloud infrastructure API
GoGrid cloud infrastructure API

Since all these APIs achieve similar tasks, standardization would:
- Simplify the job of the ecosystem (e.g. RightScale going multi-cloud)
- Protect our enterprise customers, who are concerned about vendor lock-in.

There are serious IaaS industry discussions, including via the CCIF, to get an API which is simple, common, and works. You can read more about ElasticHosts beliefs on designing a great API for cloud infrastructure.

I don't think the linked article provides links directly to the memos, but propublica did, so here they are:

Memo on Transparency and Open Government

Memo on the Freedom of Information Act

And here's the Executive Order on Presidential Records, which makes clear that claims of secrecy by the former president and his subordinates will be evaluated, and accepted or rejected, by the current president.

I don't think the linked article provides links directly to the memos, but propublica did, so here they are:

Memo on Transparency and Open Government

Memo on the Freedom of Information Act

And here's the Executive Order on Presidential Records, which makes clear that claims of secrecy by the former president and his subordinates will be evaluated, and accepted or rejected, by the current president.

Cloud companies will likely not make metering very easy or cheap because they *want* you to get carried away.

I've only used Amazon EC2, but I can tell you for a fact that they make it very easy for you to know where you stand. And yes, they also have hard limits.

With EC2, you are limited to 20 concurrent instances unless you request more. The cost of running 20 of their highest-priced servers is $18.00/hr. So as long as your auto-scaling system pings you when your resources go over your comfort threshold, you should be able to get yourself to a computer, cellphone, whatever, and override what your auto-scaler did.

Also, with EC2 you can always log into your account and get an up-to-the-second, detailed account activity listing. There is no surprises. They even provide a detailed calculator so you can forecast what your AWS bill will be.

EC2 is highly transparent. If you can spare $0.10, give it a try sometime. It's pretty neat.

Wow.. And if you would have put a little effort in this, you wouldn't have come out looking like an idiot. We aren't talking about Delegates dumb ass. We are talking about the Super delegates. That aren't the same.

Here are some articles concerning the super delegates that we are talking about. There are/were in 2008, 842 super delegates that had no obligation whatsoever at all to any primary or caucus results. There were 796 unplugged super delegates when Dean made them chose over a risk of losing their voice at the convention. After Dean made his declaration, they _told_ Hillary to stop campaigning when Obama reached the number of delegates required. However, seeing how 441 of Obama's delegates where super delegates and by DNC rules had until the convention months later to decide, Hillary could have easily convinced some of them to goto her camp and Obama wouldn't have gotten the nomination. There is no guarantee that she could have but the rules said that the risk to Obama and the challenge to Clinton should have been there until the convention at the end of August when the votes where counted and if she could have convinced enough of the super delegates to vote for her, she would have had the election.

You cannot deny that. It is fact and hiding behind regular delegates as if your acting ignorant of the facts doesn't make you right or correct. As a matter of fact, rule 9a and 9b speak specifically of the super delegates and their roles in the very links you provided. Of course they listed them as unpledged party leader and elected official delegate as well as add on delegates but I assumed that since you were taking a stand on them that you know this or at least had the wherewithal to google for super delegate in which one of the first pages would have told you about this. I also like the way you think it is perfectly ok to punish democrats of a state that is controlled by republicans who change the timing of the election. That's a bit like citing the passenger of the car for speed and driving without a license because the driver got the ticket. But in the case of preferring Obama, I guess it is worth it, right? And no, I'm not making this up, after the penalty to Michigan and Florida for something that the democrats in the states had no control over, you find that they still favored Clinton over Obama. In fact, the results in Florida was 33.5 Obama to 52.5 Hillary and in Michigan it was 29.5 Obama to 34.5 Hillary. Now if you remember, they cut the delegates in half for Michigan and Florida so Hillary should have gotten 105 in Florida and 76 in Michigan and if the full count would have been listed, Hillary would have had 87 more for a total of 1983.5 which is only 135 below the minimum needed to win. When Dean made his demands, about 320 super delegate votes where up for grabs and some of the already committed super delegates have already switched pledged alliances. Deans own words were The party "cannot give up three months of campaigning and active healing time,"

Don't whine about the political slants of the sites either. I did a simple google search and those are the sites that came up. I'm not getting paid to educate you and I'm not going to invest the time to do it past what is easy for me. You can find the same information on other sites from going deeper into the google search or by even useing a different

As far as redundancy goes, your data gets stored in multiple Amazon datacenters around the country, which provides redundancy and high availability. At the end of the day, it's a far superior solution to anything you can cook up at home.

Of course there is a small cost involved, but at $0.15/GB it's quite inexpensive for what you are getting.

YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

With S3 you'd pay $15/mo (+bandwidth) to have it hosted online, instantly accessible. Will it still be around 20 years from now? One can't be certain, but if not, I'm sure you'll have enough warning to copy things off to another medium, and I'm sure there'll be similar services to take its place if need be.

I hear the FBI was installing software to track Slashdot posters. Is that true?

No, if that was the case uncyclopedia would be down. They host quite a few slashdot posters, here are some:

Good-evening,-Mr.-Gates
Microsoft Hates Apple
Bill Hitler
Microsoft's latest product after researching the black market
A Microsoft campaign to persuade people to install Vista
A screenshot of GNU/Linux® in use, with the GNU/X-Windows GNU/Ubuntu desktop
Rotating Gears, a game which comes preinstalled with Linux®. It is considered to be the best open-source game ever created, next to Russian Roulette.
Pimp Your Linux® ~ Use Fedora Core
Natalie Portman
Hot Grits
A Beowolf cluster
In Soviet Russia...

I backup our growing collection (~7GB at this point) of photos/movies/music/personal docs nightly, costs about $1.20/month.

For now, I'm just backing up everything, brute force, once a week, and doing synchronize nightly (gets the additions/deletions). When I get around to it, I'll actually setup an rsync to a separate LVM volume, and backup just the diffs, or something fancier.

pricing and bandwidth is oulined here about halfway down the page. and a nifty pricing calculator here.

looks pretty reasonable to me, but i dont really have anything to compare it to. no minimum fee. it's completely based on bandwidth, resources, and usage.

Relational databases were the perfect solution for the data processing environments of the 60's through the end of the century, but the computational landscape has changed significantly in three ways: scale, dirty data, and distribution.

To support ACID semantics, relational databases require convergence of control for transactional domains. While this can be distributed, the sacrifices necessary to make it happen typically reduce your relational performance beyond what is acceptable. To handle the scale of data that Amazon and Google process in real time every moment of every day, you need to work independently across dozens or hundreds of machines. Each one can't block its processing in a mother-may-I request to lock objects or commit a transaction. To be able to process every comment on any particular item in Amazon's database in time to spit out a web page in 300ms, you need to leave the transactions behind.

Especially for Google, the data does not lend itself well to indexing. They're sucking down their data from all corners of the Earth (Earth is processed in another system...) and trying to meaningful analysis on this grungy data. It's much easier to have local parsing and exception handling rather than trying to stuff everything into the same rigid schema. Most post-relational systems have soft notions of schema; it's more in the realm of metadata giving hints about how you might want to look at the data rather than a guarantee about what form the data will have, and the code adapts to dirty data as it comes through the pipe.

Related to the first point, connectivity is now so cheap that it's a requirement to make these systems distributed. You can't have all your data sitting in one data center; all it takes is one mouth-breather with a backhoe to turn off your company. So you replicate the data to multiple centers. Of course, you want to send updates to all those data centers, which brings us to the first point that distributed transactions are a barrier to scalability. But most fundamental to the whole discussion is the CAP theorem: you can have Consistency, Availability, or survive network Partitions. Pick two. Post-relational systems choose Availability and Partition survival over guaranteed consistency of their data. This allows them to scale tremendously and be very, very resilient to interruptions in the underlying communications systems.

For a very interesting read, I recommend reading Werner Vogels's excellent paper on the theory and practice of Amazon's Dynamo back-end.

I'm a huge fan of the lap desks. I've got one that's a stiff plastic board with a mini beanbag chair on the bottom. I got it at a thrift store for like $3.

It's way more comfortable & ergonomic (as far as laptops go). More importantly, laptops get hot. So, my advice to all you guys out there:

USE A LAPDESK!
DON'T FRY YOUR NUTS!!!

Here's a picture of mine in use.

No, the giant sticker didn't come with it and no, I have no idea what it's supposed to mean.

If you use a garbage collector, you're deciding that it's worth a small performance penalty and a memory footprint that's slightly higher than optimal, and in exchange having vastly fewer memory leaks than is otherwise likely.

Well, sometimes not that small. You have to keep in mind that collection is far from free. At a conference I attended recently, there was a talk on avoiding garbage collection strain with certain applications using array slicing -- which basically works out to pointer aliasing, with the caveat that the alias can fall anywhere in the range allocated to the original pointer.

Still, I'd rather work with a garbage collector than without. I can be clever and use those techniques to reduce the work that the collector has to do, but if I screw up -- and no matter how good I am, I will; and when I do, it's going to be damned hard to find -- the garbage collector will take care of that.

For you, try a garbage collector that records a stacktrace for each allocation, and when it collects, log how much memory was allocated and where. Much faster and easier than hunting down memory leaks manually.

Can someone post a screenshot? I do not see anything resembling a plane so I think I'm not getting the latest imagery (yes, i've loaded http://s3.amazonaws.com/fossett/geoeye-color.kml)

Example of the size of object to look for. The white plane shown above (30 pixel wingspan by 21 pixels by length) is approximately the size of Steve's plane.

Why is the sample image that's supposed to show Steve's plane all black? Does anyone else see this?

"Hint: If you're using GEarth, and not seeing a black and white photo, you're doing something wrong."-An Onerous Coward

Um, no. The images are not black and white in Google Earth. I opened the http://s3.amazonaws.com/fossett/geoeye-color.kml file, and turned off all of the layers as described, including "terrain". My images are definitely not black and white. They're not day-glo green and red, but they're defintely not just black and white and shades of gray.

People who are searching for Steve Fossett should update to the latest colo(u)r images for google earth from the latest data refresh.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/fossett/geoeye-color.kml

(Please mod up. Posted as AC to prevent karma-whoring. Editors please consider for article update.)

The Amazon Turk task says to open the KML file http://s3.amazonaws.com/fossett/geo-eye.kml
How do I open it?

the mechanical turk item pointed to has a pointer to the KML file
http://s3.amazonaws.com/fossett/geo-eye.kml
which has updated data (B&W vs the usual google earth colour) and presumably the origin is the same as the other shots
ie - they have new data

Viewing in Google Earth:
If you wish to view images in additional detail, you can pull them up in Google Earth. To do that you must: Download and Install Google Earth. Open the following KML file: http://s3.amazonaws.com/fossett/geo-eye.kml Cut and paste the co-ordinates found next to the image tile below into the "Fly To" box in the top left corner of Google Earth. For the best experience, you will likely want to turn OFF terrain by unchecking the "Terrain" box under Layers in the lower left corner of Google Earth

I don't know if a convenient 'trickle' uploader exists yet, but I'm setting up a backup scheme for myself that uses duplicity to upload to Amazon's S3, and uses an EC2 instance for a few hours each month to coalesce the incremental backups into a full backup. Since this is for my VPS, I don't worry too much about using a lot of bandwidth when it runs the backup (the incrementals are usually small anyway).

Should we call it now LLMR (Linux + LightHttpd + MySQL + Rails), CMON, LAMP is already everywhere and with solutions like Akelos (see video at http://akelos-org.s3.amazonaws.com/akelos_php_fram ework_screencast.mov) you can have the magic of Rails conventions in your old C-style language ;)

I've been using s3sync to upload/download stuff to Amazon's S3 service for months. It works great. I even use it on Windows (since it's a ruby program, it works anywhere).

There are many graphical managers as well, I use jetS3t, which is a java based gui client.

The huge added bonus (for me) is that with S3 it's trivial to make something public (with or without authentication), or even have it host a torrent.

I just checked out screenshots, and ... uck. I mean, seriously.

The graphics of 1996/1997 looked like this and this. The graphics of 2003-present look like this and this.

Which does Second life (this and this) look more like to you? :P Yes, user-created content adds additional optimization challenges. But this is just rather pathetic. All issues of models aside, their lighting and shading models are just crummy.

How is it that Linden Labs, raking in millions per year, can be outdone by open-source MMORPGs with a few hundred players on at a time, like Eternal Lands, in terms of graphics quality? And there's probably better examples than that, as EL doesn't even have normal maps yet, needs to lower their ambient levels, and ought to subdivide some polys that are closed to fixed light sources.

AWS S3 doesn't have the best interface, but it is cheap ($0.15/GB/yr), fast, and reliable. And they'll XSLT transform your XML for you on the fly.

Direct link: http://s3.amazonaws.com/scripting/dvorak.mov?torre nt

Of course, Dvorak will just say that it's not true -- he was just trolling on that recording, thus completing the prophecy and dooming mankind.