Well, then, it is a good thing you don't know what the hell you are talking about.
This offering from Microsoft isn't about a web based office suite or webmail, it is foundational web services that allow businesses and developers to build websites and services while offloading the heavy lifting (such as writing distributed systems or load balancing). The primitives Microsoft is offering are similar to those Amazon already has: storage, database, compute, queueing. In general, you don't access these through your browser.
This isn't some new AJAXy Web 2.0 website. "The Cloud" is about outsourcing the building blocks of software--database, storage, compute--to someone else and paying for exactly what you use. Instead of buying your own machines, managing the fleet, and building or buying scalable software, you pay for a service and someone else takes care of all of that for you.
It is like the transition to the electric grid. Instead of paying for a generator and diesel upfront, you just pay for what you use from the electric company, and benefit from their economies of scale. This is utility computing.
Can an Amazon admin or script grep through your ram or storage? Of course they can. Can and admin or script snapshot your instance and save it somewhere else? Of course they can. This is likely what the OP meant by "creepy".
But how is this any different from Rackspace or Dreamhost? Most people who berate cloud computing tend to have no idea how it actually works. The only difference between dedicated hosting and EC2 is that one charges you by the hour. How is that an invasion of your privacy or a dangerous lack of control?
Even though the individual machines aren't always fully utilized, in aggregate they can make assumptions about utilization and run very close to max at the rack and PDU levels.
Also, I agree that this isn't necessarily a zero-sum game. If the chips have the same power profile but are more durable at higher temperatures, then they are better off at Google. Most other datacenters don't run as hot, so the extra heat durability the chips provide would be wasted.
Most of those screenshots don't look much like Stargate at all. The look and feel of some of the city designs and terrain is all off. That's not what the forests outside Vancouver look like at all!
Try reading this blog post about "cloudbursting" and the pages it links to. It talks about using your fixed infrastructure, but also expanding to the cloud when you need a sudden burst of power/infrastructure.
What's wrong with H1B visas? A bunch of folks at my work are here on that (or equivalents). They aren't competing with Americans because we still have lots of open heads we can't fill across the company.
Is this the exception? I've never once encountered a CD I couldn't rip to my computer. If I did, I would return it to the store and get a refund.
I still buy most of my music on CDs (although, the $2 specials from Amazon MP3 are slowly tipping the scales), so I think I would've encountered a non-Red Book CD by now, if they were in fact common. However, most of the CDs I've purchased recently are albums that were released decades ago, so maybe I'm not purchasing the right demographic to find them.
Funny, I haven't had issues accessing any AJAXy websites from Safari in years. Google Maps and Docs didn't support Safari when they first launched, but they do now. I can't think of any webapps that don't work in Safari these days.
Yeah, the default is the nasty javascript system. I also opted out immediately, but whenever I'm on a computer where I haven't logged in yet, I see the JS heavy comment page.
Except that AltaVista was bought by Overture who were then bought by Yahoo!. Also, I wouldn't really call MapReduce a technology. The individual functions (Map and Reduce) come from functional programming, but the concept is becoming popular because Google's implementation and Hadoop have made it easy to write large scale data processing applications without having to worry about scaling or failures yourself. It also doesn't hurt that many problems can be solved with MapReduce.
A five digit user getting it all wrong? Unpossible.
Google already creates a different encoding for iPhone (H.264) since it can't play Flash videos. If they are doing this for the iPhone (which I have a hard time believing), why don't they only do it for the files destined for the iPhone?
I thought with TiVo it just needed to download enough so that once you start playing, it'll finish downloading before the movie is over. With the Unbox client, that only took like 5 minutes or so.
That said, this new one doesn't have that problem, it begins playing immediately; where immediately is about 10 seconds.
I've used it and it is so much better than the old version. There is no buggy client to install and it works on Windows or Mac. When you view a detail page, the video starts playing automatically, which is a little annoying, but it is nice to get a preview of the show you are considering watching. If you decided to buy it, just click purchase in the viewer and the video extends seamlessly, it doesn't pause at all.
The new video library is way better than the old client. All the videos show up in a tiled view. You click the show you want and it flips around to reveal the options. Click play and the show starts in the current window, and is very fast to start.
The video quality seems to be lower than the download versions of the same shows. While the downloaded movies were approximately DVD quality, I can really see the artifacts in the streaming version.
You assume it is that easy? I mean if Amazon had this huge retail arm that they could leverage that had to deal with credit card fraud for the past decade, then maybe, but a small startup like Amazon? You ask too much sir!
That universal binary thing is really, really nice (my 8 core mac pro can boot from the same hard drive as my Quad PPC G5 and my PPC G4 Cube) but it makes things twice as large. Actually, I think it makes things for times as large: 32/64-bit x PPC/x86.
I remember watching Spirit land on Mars a few years ago. I streamed NASA TV over the internet and remember the anticipation of waiting for data and the excitement when the images finally began appearing on screen. It is a memory that is very fond to me and is still clear in my mind. Being too young to experience the moon landing, the Spirit landing and Columbia disaster are my strongest memories of the space program. Each represents the best and worst of the space exploration.
I hope to be able to stream the Phoenix landing on Sunday.
If an itunes-like publisher were to open up, and offer low priced books direct from the author (like on the itunes app store model maybe) this would revolutionize (read KILL) the dead tree publishing industry. It would also open the door to lots of CRAP. But a ratings system would emerge I am sure. Something like Amazon's Digital Text Platform perhaps?
I missed the oil from my statement. But nevermind, I think you are right, the prices are being controlled by the seven Jews in Europe in a partnership with the Illuminati and Dick Cheney's energy pals.
I'll take the bet. You know, because it couldn't have anything to do with the fact that gas and diesel come from different parts of the barrel and that diesel has to compete with home heating for its part during the winter.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, then, it is a good thing you don't know what the hell you are talking about.
This offering from Microsoft isn't about a web based office suite or webmail, it is foundational web services that allow businesses and developers to build websites and services while offloading the heavy lifting (such as writing distributed systems or load balancing). The primitives Microsoft is offering are similar to those Amazon already has: storage, database, compute, queueing. In general, you don't access these through your browser.
This isn't some new AJAXy Web 2.0 website. "The Cloud" is about outsourcing the building blocks of software--database, storage, compute--to someone else and paying for exactly what you use. Instead of buying your own machines, managing the fleet, and building or buying scalable software, you pay for a service and someone else takes care of all of that for you.
It is like the transition to the electric grid. Instead of paying for a generator and diesel upfront, you just pay for what you use from the electric company, and benefit from their economies of scale. This is utility computing.
Can an Amazon admin or script grep through your ram or storage? Of course they can. Can and admin or script snapshot your instance and save it somewhere else? Of course they can. This is likely what the OP meant by "creepy".
But how is this any different from Rackspace or Dreamhost? Most people who berate cloud computing tend to have no idea how it actually works. The only difference between dedicated hosting and EC2 is that one charges you by the hour. How is that an invasion of your privacy or a dangerous lack of control?
No.
I think Raven would disagree with you.
Or you could read their power provisioning paper.
Even though the individual machines aren't always fully utilized, in aggregate they can make assumptions about utilization and run very close to max at the rack and PDU levels.
Also, I agree that this isn't necessarily a zero-sum game. If the chips have the same power profile but are more durable at higher temperatures, then they are better off at Google. Most other datacenters don't run as hot, so the extra heat durability the chips provide would be wasted.
Most of those screenshots don't look much like Stargate at all. The look and feel of some of the city designs and terrain is all off. That's not what the forests outside Vancouver look like at all!
Try reading this blog post about "cloudbursting" and the pages it links to. It talks about using your fixed infrastructure, but also expanding to the cloud when you need a sudden burst of power/infrastructure.
What's wrong with H1B visas? A bunch of folks at my work are here on that (or equivalents). They aren't competing with Americans because we still have lots of open heads we can't fill across the company.
Is this the exception? I've never once encountered a CD I couldn't rip to my computer. If I did, I would return it to the store and get a refund.
I still buy most of my music on CDs (although, the $2 specials from Amazon MP3 are slowly tipping the scales), so I think I would've encountered a non-Red Book CD by now, if they were in fact common. However, most of the CDs I've purchased recently are albums that were released decades ago, so maybe I'm not purchasing the right demographic to find them.
Funny, I haven't had issues accessing any AJAXy websites from Safari in years. Google Maps and Docs didn't support Safari when they first launched, but they do now. I can't think of any webapps that don't work in Safari these days.
Yeah, the default is the nasty javascript system. I also opted out immediately, but whenever I'm on a computer where I haven't logged in yet, I see the JS heavy comment page.
I can't wait to get down to my local shoe store to try out a pair of "The Conquistador"
Me? I am hungry for a churro now.
Except that AltaVista was bought by Overture who were then bought by Yahoo!. Also, I wouldn't really call MapReduce a technology. The individual functions (Map and Reduce) come from functional programming, but the concept is becoming popular because Google's implementation and Hadoop have made it easy to write large scale data processing applications without having to worry about scaling or failures yourself. It also doesn't hurt that many problems can be solved with MapReduce.
A five digit user getting it all wrong? Unpossible.
He's using Verizon math.
Google already creates a different encoding for iPhone (H.264) since it can't play Flash videos. If they are doing this for the iPhone (which I have a hard time believing), why don't they only do it for the files destined for the iPhone?
I thought with TiVo it just needed to download enough so that once you start playing, it'll finish downloading before the movie is over. With the Unbox client, that only took like 5 minutes or so.
That said, this new one doesn't have that problem, it begins playing immediately; where immediately is about 10 seconds.
I've used it and it is so much better than the old version. There is no buggy client to install and it works on Windows or Mac. When you view a detail page, the video starts playing automatically, which is a little annoying, but it is nice to get a preview of the show you are considering watching. If you decided to buy it, just click purchase in the viewer and the video extends seamlessly, it doesn't pause at all.
The new video library is way better than the old client. All the videos show up in a tiled view. You click the show you want and it flips around to reveal the options. Click play and the show starts in the current window, and is very fast to start.
The video quality seems to be lower than the download versions of the same shows. While the downloaded movies were approximately DVD quality, I can really see the artifacts in the streaming version.
You assume it is that easy? I mean if Amazon had this huge retail arm that they could leverage that had to deal with credit card fraud for the past decade, then maybe, but a small startup like Amazon? You ask too much sir!
Actually, January 2008 is the new May 2005.
I remember watching Spirit land on Mars a few years ago. I streamed NASA TV over the internet and remember the anticipation of waiting for data and the excitement when the images finally began appearing on screen. It is a memory that is very fond to me and is still clear in my mind. Being too young to experience the moon landing, the Spirit landing and Columbia disaster are my strongest memories of the space program. Each represents the best and worst of the space exploration.
I hope to be able to stream the Phoenix landing on Sunday.
I missed the oil from my statement. But nevermind, I think you are right, the prices are being controlled by the seven Jews in Europe in a partnership with the Illuminati and Dick Cheney's energy pals.
I'll take the bet. You know, because it couldn't have anything to do with the fact that gas and diesel come from different parts of the barrel and that diesel has to compete with home heating for its part during the winter.