Not necessarily wat I was getting at but yeah I could see a case for that. Sure encourage people to post all kinds of personal information all in one or two very convenient locations, then give us a backdoor so we can "target ads" to suspected "customers".
Exactly. If 70% of the capacity is in Virginia can the other 30% keep everyone going? The other locations probably have a lot of load too because people tend to have instances in different zones to try to route traffic to nearby clusters for example. So lets say europe and asia each have the other 15% (I realize there is some other datacentres in the US so not exactly true but approximate). You have 2B+ people in asia all hitting that 15% of hardware already. Now you try to shovel off 35% of your network to their cluster ie greater than 2X more work and have all the extra latency issues to deal with (because presumably US instances were being used because they were closer to the users) ouch.
That said though I guess we don't know how their usage looks. They might be double sized already and so it would only be 0.5*(15+35)%. I doubt they are keeping that much spare capacity around but who knows?
No still a guess. From the blog he says he can only discover a rack if he managed to get a instance on it. So yes there might be racks that he never sees (for example I'm sure Amazon reserves some racks for themselves) but also he is assuming that the rack is full if he sees it. As well he is assuming he is right that the networking is done on a per rack manner for all the datacentres. Who knows different datacentres might do it differently (for example maybe europe only has half the servers of a US based datacentre but to keep the number of vlans the same they split the racks in half and only use the first half of the/22 IPs, maybe Amazon has a crap load of racks half full because they haven't gotten around to installing all the equipment, are in the middle of a hardware refresh, debating on having NAT or compute chassis in the available space etc. The only way to have a reasonable idea is to knock on the door and ask them. If they answer they "might" be telling you the truth But "researching" from the outside? You have know idea what you are looking at.
DC (actually HVDC) is actually more efficient for long distance transfer as far as I know. Why it isn't used in a lot of areas is because it is extremely expensive to convert back to AC and transform down the voltage (at least at that scale). A problem though is that the line loss goes as the square of the current but is essentially independent of the voltage (hence why they pack more energy per electron in a high voltage wire and then step it down closer to the customer). So running straight DC into your servers would mean you are using the low voltage (12V) and relatively speaking high current through the wiring versus 220V or whatever and stepping down in the power supply of the server. Might still be worthwhile I suppose because your one (or redundant pair or whatever) powersupply would likely be a much more efficient system but still you'd likely be betting AC from the power company, converting it to DC and then stepping it down versus taking AC to the server and converting and stepping down together. Not sure which wins. Also heat distribution would be different I'd imagine that the big DC power supply would spit off a fair bit of heat all in roughly one spot versus a lot of little heat sources scattered throughout the datacentre. Anyways would need to be thought about a bunch.
Bots send short emails usually for throughput reasons. Why waste bandwidth when you are both trying to use little enough so you don't get caught and your peak email send rate is inversely proportional to content size.
Another tidbit that I'm sure a bunch of people know but is worth throwing out there: spam with images, there is a reason for that. The images round trip to the spamers servers. Usually they set it up so that your email account is tagged somehow in the url that your viewer sends to their server. So opening the email "calls home" and tells the spammer "hey I got a real email addreess" (and likely someone gullable enough to look at spam). The spammer can then add your email address to a list of "live email accounts" which sell easily for 10X what a list of unconfirmed email addresses do. So... if you don't recognize the sender don't even open it even if it is just your webmail client. If you do expect more spam.
I worked for an anti-spam provider > 90% of emails were spam some customers > 99%. That said though spam emails tend to be short, almost to the point of ridiculous. I don't remember the exact numbers but say the average email that is legitmate is about 50k (because of attachments skewing it, but still even legitimate email tends to be 5+ sentences). Along comes duffious spammer. Not only are they shooting off 10k emails per bot per hour, but they are all one sentence emails with a tinyurl link in them. The lack of size is one of the key indicators left once you remove the obvious keywords and the sending history. Kind of makes me wonder why the bots spamming other content are so chatty.
I guess if you are spamming forums you have to have a "comment" length message to send sometimes to look legitamate. You can't just say "go to http://tinyurl.com/growyourpenis" with out being obvious. But that said why do spammers get away with it in email but not in forums? I mean someone is clicking the links in the emails because it is a large business (likely multi-billion dollar). Hmm... I'll start running the unsuspicious botnet on the forums posting email like spam and post forum spam length content to email accounts, I'll make millions, er well a few dollars anyways.
I think it is also a strategic thing. China 15 years ago was mainly a low cost goods manufacture. Toys, pens, etc. They want to move up market where there are higher margins. They have had some success in those areas. By being the only guys in town with lots of rare earth element X they can make sure that everything that needs X is made in China, meaning they get the battery tech, the solar tech and engineering jobs rather than the assembly jobs.
Protectionism can be bad in a purely economical sense but still done for strategic interests. For example the US could have decided that the ability to make TVs was of critical importance since it is used by everyone including military planners etc. But alas they didn't and so as far as I recall there is no TV manufacturer still building sets in the US. People get cheaper sets and in theory the employees move on to the segment of the local economy that the US is competitive. Unfortunately the segment of the economy that the US is still competitive happens to be retail and fast food:-( (Oh and bombing 3rd world countries, still the world leader there)
They just announced that the version presumably from 2 years ago is the last one? Man they really do have a hard time finding experts to keep their info current. I'd hate to be the person that was saving up for the 2013 version. Now what are they going to do with the money buy a car?
and the cost of dog meat too I assume. Australia for example is mining like crazy just to keep China going. Presumably chinese companies are mining China like crazy too. So two huge land masses funneling production to mainly one. Chinese companies are also buying up canadian resource companies like crazy too. All the resources funnel into the country building stuff which for the most part is China.
The WTO can be upset about it but how about making the US export strategic assets they don't want to give away? Say Iran wants to buy a few nukes. NK wants some fighter planes etc. Every country decides what is in their best interest and I don't think WTO can do anything to make China share things they want to keep to themselves. Worst case scenario they would just create unofficial mines like Iran's nuke program and deny it to death and claim all their mines have been closed.
Oh I think there is more than "some" people in the OSS community. There is the whole Stallman drone subset that think charging for software is evil. I'm guessing we are talking about double digits not single digit fringes.
Heck I've worked for start-ups that wouldn't even consider free software that needed windows to run. They were so focused on open source that even a platfrom that wasn't open wasn't interesting to them. This was a company that sold THERE software in closed source format. There is a large number of people, not the same issue I agree, that some who are skeptical of all closed software except the products they sell.
I was being really generous.:-) I thought it was less than 1% but wasn't sure how much of Scandinavia off the top of my head was above. I new most populated bits of Russia was further south too but thought maybe St Petersburg was far enough north. But nope. So yeah: virtually no one to be affected in the arctic by the no-daylight issue. I'm sure they already cope in their own ways. Most of the far north people in Canada for example are aboriginals that chose to live there in a relatively traditional way. You just deal (and take drugs to help with depression) with it and work "whenever" as far as I know. No one cares when you club that seal but the person that is eating it/making clothes out of it.
Oh and coming from southern ontario and east Germany, 6 months a year != freezing cold 6 months a year. It is usually warm enough for a light jacket all the way to mid Dec, and come mid march. So about 3 months a year you probably won't want to be outside much, but for about 6 months a year you get hardly any daylight hours to actually do stuff outside. Which makes things seem cold since you are always out when the sun is down.
It is a dungeon in the sense that you can't feel the wind, can't see the sun. These are good things to have in the day and if you live in the north you get hardly any of them for about 6 months a year. I'm not talking arctic either, just northern states, Canada and above (which pretty much means all of europe the former soviet stans, north chine etc).
Subsistence farming isn't good no, but their really isn't a point in having people spend the entire daylight hours either on the way to work or at work either. That is what light bulbs are for: so people can work when the sun isn't out. It is more of a pain in the ass to work in your yard, shovel snow etc in the dark than it is to work at a desk for example.
Ha:-) Given as they are maybe 5% of the world population I think we can survive. It is good to not let the edge cases prevent a better solution. If the arctic has to do something strange for things to work I'm sure they will (and probably already are).
This is part of the reason why things should be decoupled in business. If a customer puts in an order for say office supplies to be delivered in a week there is no reason why someone has to be there all their business day. As long as there is a few hours of overlap everything should be fine for the ~50% of the time that they actually need to talk to someone. After all this is what people deal with when they are in a different timezone anyways.
Coupling also happens because of unreasonable expectations. A personal pet peeve of mine is someone that sends a non-urgent email then shows up at my office 15min later asking if I've seen their email and what do I think? I'm sorry but just because it is an email doesn't mean that I'm not working on something I need to concentrate on or on lunch or whatever. I'll get to it when I get to it. I've started keeping Outlook in a different desktop just for that reason. When I'm coding doing research or whatever I can't even see the email notifications. Every ~15min-1hr when I need a mental break I pop over for a few minutes to see if there is anything needing my attention. This why I get to pick when to get distracted not the other way around.
I for one have never worked in a 9-5 environment. Army: work/sleep/eat when they told me too (always fun trying to sleep when ordered too even if it is 11am and you just got up at 6am because they plan on you spending all day/night setting up a convoy ambush:-)). Call centre/factory work several different schedules: maintenance guys might do 4X10 8-6, normal people 7-3, IT/admin 9-5 etc. Then I've worked in academia, technical side of healthcare and startups and it was pretty much: show up when you want as long as you are hear sometime during the 9-5 window so people can schedule meetings and put in a good day's work. Seems reasonable to me. Not everyone is a morning person they might as well have you in the office when you are most mentally sharp, rather than when you are running at 70% "just in case someone might want you".
It is stupid I agree. Another solution would be just specify the start of the work day relative to sunrise. Ie we work from sunrise + 1 to sunrise + 9. That way the sun would always have risen when you go to work and you'd have at least 1 hour a day to get your vitamin. The current system doesn't work in Canada or europe (and further north). For most people you wake up in the winter and the sun is just starting to rise, you get to work. By the time you leave work the sun has set. You go home in the dark. Thus you see the sun for all of the 20-30min you spend getting to work.
The standard for "invention" has dropped a long way hasn't it. The whole "getting up with the sunrise" idea from antiquity was the original dailylight savings time. It was only once people started working in dungeons...er... factories that schedules started being different from work when you can see what you're doing. You can't forget something and then remember it and replace it with a less precise system and call it an invention.
I guess I should have said source of power or that a heat differential can be used as a source of power. Regardless it isn't running with less of a power draw than it is being supplied with, only that only some of the power is coming from the wire, and some from another source.
People seem to forget that heat is power too. The room has heat either from the sun or because something else is using power to heat it (eg. furnance). Either way the energy isn't free it's coming from somewhere (cooling room, sun etc).
Cores matter because it for example say you had 1000 shaders on a 20 core system. That means effectively you can have bunches of 50 shaders doing one type of thing with 50 pieces of data X 20 different potential different instructions/frames or whatever you are working on at the same time. Versus one core 1000 shaders where you could use all 1000 only if you had 1000 pieces of data that you wanted to do the same thing too.
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Not necessarily wat I was getting at but yeah I could see a case for that. Sure encourage people to post all kinds of personal information all in one or two very convenient locations, then give us a backdoor so we can "target ads" to suspected "customers".
Exactly. If 70% of the capacity is in Virginia can the other 30% keep everyone going? The other locations probably have a lot of load too because people tend to have instances in different zones to try to route traffic to nearby clusters for example. So lets say europe and asia each have the other 15% (I realize there is some other datacentres in the US so not exactly true but approximate). You have 2B+ people in asia all hitting that 15% of hardware already. Now you try to shovel off 35% of your network to their cluster ie greater than 2X more work and have all the extra latency issues to deal with (because presumably US instances were being used because they were closer to the users) ouch.
That said though I guess we don't know how their usage looks. They might be double sized already and so it would only be 0.5*(15+35)%. I doubt they are keeping that much spare capacity around but who knows?
No still a guess. From the blog he says he can only discover a rack if he managed to get a instance on it. So yes there might be racks that he never sees (for example I'm sure Amazon reserves some racks for themselves) but also he is assuming that the rack is full if he sees it. As well he is assuming he is right that the networking is done on a per rack manner for all the datacentres. Who knows different datacentres might do it differently (for example maybe europe only has half the servers of a US based datacentre but to keep the number of vlans the same they split the racks in half and only use the first half of the /22 IPs, maybe Amazon has a crap load of racks half full because they haven't gotten around to installing all the equipment, are in the middle of a hardware refresh, debating on having NAT or compute chassis in the available space etc. The only way to have a reasonable idea is to knock on the door and ask them. If they answer they "might" be telling you the truth But "researching" from the outside? You have know idea what you are looking at.
I wonder if the NSA is running things on it :-) Close enough.
DC (actually HVDC) is actually more efficient for long distance transfer as far as I know. Why it isn't used in a lot of areas is because it is extremely expensive to convert back to AC and transform down the voltage (at least at that scale). A problem though is that the line loss goes as the square of the current but is essentially independent of the voltage (hence why they pack more energy per electron in a high voltage wire and then step it down closer to the customer). So running straight DC into your servers would mean you are using the low voltage (12V) and relatively speaking high current through the wiring versus 220V or whatever and stepping down in the power supply of the server. Might still be worthwhile I suppose because your one (or redundant pair or whatever) powersupply would likely be a much more efficient system but still you'd likely be betting AC from the power company, converting it to DC and then stepping it down versus taking AC to the server and converting and stepping down together. Not sure which wins. Also heat distribution would be different I'd imagine that the big DC power supply would spit off a fair bit of heat all in roughly one spot versus a lot of little heat sources scattered throughout the datacentre. Anyways would need to be thought about a bunch.
Bots send short emails usually for throughput reasons. Why waste bandwidth when you are both trying to use little enough so you don't get caught and your peak email send rate is inversely proportional to content size.
Another tidbit that I'm sure a bunch of people know but is worth throwing out there: spam with images, there is a reason for that. The images round trip to the spamers servers. Usually they set it up so that your email account is tagged somehow in the url that your viewer sends to their server. So opening the email "calls home" and tells the spammer "hey I got a real email addreess" (and likely someone gullable enough to look at spam). The spammer can then add your email address to a list of "live email accounts" which sell easily for 10X what a list of unconfirmed email addresses do. So ... if you don't recognize the sender don't even open it even if it is just your webmail client. If you do expect more spam.
I worked for an anti-spam provider > 90% of emails were spam some customers > 99%. That said though spam emails tend to be short, almost to the point of ridiculous. I don't remember the exact numbers but say the average email that is legitmate is about 50k (because of attachments skewing it, but still even legitimate email tends to be 5+ sentences). Along comes duffious spammer. Not only are they shooting off 10k emails per bot per hour, but they are all one sentence emails with a tinyurl link in them. The lack of size is one of the key indicators left once you remove the obvious keywords and the sending history. Kind of makes me wonder why the bots spamming other content are so chatty.
I guess if you are spamming forums you have to have a "comment" length message to send sometimes to look legitamate. You can't just say "go to http://tinyurl.com/growyourpenis" with out being obvious. But that said why do spammers get away with it in email but not in forums? I mean someone is clicking the links in the emails because it is a large business (likely multi-billion dollar). Hmm ... I'll start running the unsuspicious botnet on the forums posting email like spam and post forum spam length content to email accounts, I'll make millions, er well a few dollars anyways.
I think it is also a strategic thing. China 15 years ago was mainly a low cost goods manufacture. Toys, pens, etc. They want to move up market where there are higher margins. They have had some success in those areas. By being the only guys in town with lots of rare earth element X they can make sure that everything that needs X is made in China, meaning they get the battery tech, the solar tech and engineering jobs rather than the assembly jobs.
Protectionism can be bad in a purely economical sense but still done for strategic interests. For example the US could have decided that the ability to make TVs was of critical importance since it is used by everyone including military planners etc. But alas they didn't and so as far as I recall there is no TV manufacturer still building sets in the US. People get cheaper sets and in theory the employees move on to the segment of the local economy that the US is competitive. Unfortunately the segment of the economy that the US is still competitive happens to be retail and fast food :-( (Oh and bombing 3rd world countries, still the world leader there)
They just announced that the version presumably from 2 years ago is the last one? Man they really do have a hard time finding experts to keep their info current. I'd hate to be the person that was saving up for the 2013 version. Now what are they going to do with the money buy a car?
and the cost of dog meat too I assume. Australia for example is mining like crazy just to keep China going. Presumably chinese companies are mining China like crazy too. So two huge land masses funneling production to mainly one. Chinese companies are also buying up canadian resource companies like crazy too. All the resources funnel into the country building stuff which for the most part is China.
The WTO can be upset about it but how about making the US export strategic assets they don't want to give away? Say Iran wants to buy a few nukes. NK wants some fighter planes etc. Every country decides what is in their best interest and I don't think WTO can do anything to make China share things they want to keep to themselves. Worst case scenario they would just create unofficial mines like Iran's nuke program and deny it to death and claim all their mines have been closed.
Aaah Aaaah aaah. Occasionally it is duck season I do recall too ;-)
all the White House press core. Would be fantastic.
Hooked on phonics can go fuck themselves.
Oh I think there is more than "some" people in the OSS community. There is the whole Stallman drone subset that think charging for software is evil. I'm guessing we are talking about double digits not single digit fringes.
Heck I've worked for start-ups that wouldn't even consider free software that needed windows to run. They were so focused on open source that even a platfrom that wasn't open wasn't interesting to them. This was a company that sold THERE software in closed source format. There is a large number of people, not the same issue I agree, that some who are skeptical of all closed software except the products they sell.
I was being really generous. :-) I thought it was less than 1% but wasn't sure how much of Scandinavia off the top of my head was above. I new most populated bits of Russia was further south too but thought maybe St Petersburg was far enough north. But nope. So yeah: virtually no one to be affected in the arctic by the no-daylight issue. I'm sure they already cope in their own ways. Most of the far north people in Canada for example are aboriginals that chose to live there in a relatively traditional way. You just deal (and take drugs to help with depression) with it and work "whenever" as far as I know. No one cares when you club that seal but the person that is eating it/making clothes out of it.
Oh and coming from southern ontario and east Germany, 6 months a year != freezing cold 6 months a year. It is usually warm enough for a light jacket all the way to mid Dec, and come mid march. So about 3 months a year you probably won't want to be outside much, but for about 6 months a year you get hardly any daylight hours to actually do stuff outside. Which makes things seem cold since you are always out when the sun is down.
It is a dungeon in the sense that you can't feel the wind, can't see the sun. These are good things to have in the day and if you live in the north you get hardly any of them for about 6 months a year. I'm not talking arctic either, just northern states, Canada and above (which pretty much means all of europe the former soviet stans, north chine etc).
Subsistence farming isn't good no, but their really isn't a point in having people spend the entire daylight hours either on the way to work or at work either. That is what light bulbs are for: so people can work when the sun isn't out. It is more of a pain in the ass to work in your yard, shovel snow etc in the dark than it is to work at a desk for example.
Ha :-) Given as they are maybe 5% of the world population I think we can survive. It is good to not let the edge cases prevent a better solution. If the arctic has to do something strange for things to work I'm sure they will (and probably already are).
This is part of the reason why things should be decoupled in business. If a customer puts in an order for say office supplies to be delivered in a week there is no reason why someone has to be there all their business day. As long as there is a few hours of overlap everything should be fine for the ~50% of the time that they actually need to talk to someone. After all this is what people deal with when they are in a different timezone anyways.
Coupling also happens because of unreasonable expectations. A personal pet peeve of mine is someone that sends a non-urgent email then shows up at my office 15min later asking if I've seen their email and what do I think? I'm sorry but just because it is an email doesn't mean that I'm not working on something I need to concentrate on or on lunch or whatever. I'll get to it when I get to it. I've started keeping Outlook in a different desktop just for that reason. When I'm coding doing research or whatever I can't even see the email notifications. Every ~15min-1hr when I need a mental break I pop over for a few minutes to see if there is anything needing my attention. This why I get to pick when to get distracted not the other way around.
I for one have never worked in a 9-5 environment. Army: work/sleep/eat when they told me too (always fun trying to sleep when ordered too even if it is 11am and you just got up at 6am because they plan on you spending all day/night setting up a convoy ambush :-)). Call centre/factory work several different schedules: maintenance guys might do 4X10 8-6, normal people 7-3, IT/admin 9-5 etc. Then I've worked in academia, technical side of healthcare and startups and it was pretty much: show up when you want as long as you are hear sometime during the 9-5 window so people can schedule meetings and put in a good day's work. Seems reasonable to me. Not everyone is a morning person they might as well have you in the office when you are most mentally sharp, rather than when you are running at 70% "just in case someone might want you".
It is stupid I agree. Another solution would be just specify the start of the work day relative to sunrise. Ie we work from sunrise + 1 to sunrise + 9. That way the sun would always have risen when you go to work and you'd have at least 1 hour a day to get your vitamin. The current system doesn't work in Canada or europe (and further north). For most people you wake up in the winter and the sun is just starting to rise, you get to work. By the time you leave work the sun has set. You go home in the dark. Thus you see the sun for all of the 20-30min you spend getting to work.
The standard for "invention" has dropped a long way hasn't it. The whole "getting up with the sunrise" idea from antiquity was the original dailylight savings time. It was only once people started working in dungeons ...er ... factories that schedules started being different from work when you can see what you're doing. You can't forget something and then remember it and replace it with a less precise system and call it an invention.
I guess I should have said source of power or that a heat differential can be used as a source of power. Regardless it isn't running with less of a power draw than it is being supplied with, only that only some of the power is coming from the wire, and some from another source.
People seem to forget that heat is power too. The room has heat either from the sun or because something else is using power to heat it (eg. furnance). Either way the energy isn't free it's coming from somewhere (cooling room, sun etc).
Cores matter because it for example say you had 1000 shaders on a 20 core system. That means effectively you can have bunches of 50 shaders doing one type of thing with 50 pieces of data X 20 different potential different instructions/frames or whatever you are working on at the same time. Versus one core 1000 shaders where you could use all 1000 only if you had 1000 pieces of data that you wanted to do the same thing too.