Crowdfunding is one of the more promising alternatives, I agree. However, on the evidence so far, it's typically between one and two orders of magnitude less effective in current implementations. It's also becoming increasingly clear that current crowdfunding models leave a great deal of risk with the funders rather than the content creators, which I'm not sure is a good thing. If and when we get better at it -- possibly with a general shift in our culture back towards respecting content creators and being willing to support works we actually do value -- it will be an interesting direction to explore. But we aren't there yet.
Copyright not expiring at all does have a relatively small effect, simply because most things that people actually want to copy are naturally the newer and as-yet less widely experienced works. Obviously the principle of endless extensions is a violation of everything copyright was meant to be and should be fixed; I'm not in any way suggesting otherwise. However, as a practical matter it doesn't actually make much difference whether it's 50 years of 500 years of protection if 99% of what everyone wants to share is less than 5 years old anyway. Once you've taken the idea too far, how much too far is less important.
Fair enough. If, as with music, you can still be commercially viable with a large market and close to but greater than zero pricing, that might be a good business model that works for all concerned. Unfortunately, music is one of relatively few areas where this can work economically. Popular fiction books is another. However, the same idea usually doesn't work for areas like movies or computer software, where the production costs are often much higher, or for work like composing or arranging orchestral scores, where the production costs are lower but the market is also more specialised and much smaller.
No, arguing that one bad act that has a small effect on a few people morally justifies another bad act done by many people with much greater effect is lame. Not as lame as resorting to swearing at someone because you haven't got a real argument, perhaps, but still lame.
The deal was that we give them a temporary monopoly and in return they add to the public domain. Sonny Bono & Mickey Mouse suspended public domain indefinitely, and thus have reneged on their side of the social contract. Why should we continue to uphold our end of the bargain?
This is a common argument, but a lame one. The vast majority of content that is illegally shared online is very recent, often less than a year or two old. It would have been covered by copyright even in the original form with just a few years of protection for the rightsholder.
The erosion of the public domain and repeated extensions to the length of copyright protection are real problems and should be fixed, but they are a very issue.
This is why no one has any respect for copyright, nobody feels the slightest twinge of guilt bypassing your paywalls & getting your content for free.
A lot of people don't even understand copyright. They just assume that if they can get something for free online, that's OK. They'll even rip off more positive content providers who don't want to use DRM, and tell them that if they don't want people to just copy all their stuff they shouldn't deliver it as standard video/audio files. (Seriously, I've been involved with some of these businesses and seen the mails. People really do this.)
Until then I guess you'll just have to keep suing your customers, thats a sure way to win back their loyalty.
And yet someone who pirates all your stuff isn't your customer, and statistically the friends they will badmouth you to if you do take legal action against them are also unlikely to be your customers. Customers pay you money in return for your stuff, you see.
The penalties for copyright infringement are grossly disproportionate in some cases, IMHO, but they certainly can provide a degree of compensation to rightsholders whose material is widely distributed in violation of those rights.
All the anti-copyright arguments about how "I was just sampling but would have bought it anyway if it was good", or "I'd have bought it if you just provided it through a more convenient channel", or "If you sue me then you'll just be attacking your own customers and then they won't buy from you in the future"... don't mean a thing when a judge rules that your savings now belong to the lawyers from Big Media.
Unfortunately, the market cost for digital content with near zero marginal cost for reproduction is also near zero, once the initial sunk cost has been paid and the content has already been produced. This is not a sustainable business model for producing new content, though.
I admire the sentiment, but unless you really are going to live as a hermit off the grid, just doing what you can to avoid this sort of intrusion personally is never going to be enough in our brave new world. What we actually need is for our laws and more importantly the social/ethical views motivating them to catch up with the capabilities of modern technologies.
The real solution to excessive privacy intrusions and security lapses by businesses is remarkably simple: they just have to cost the businesses and those running them significantly more than they stood to gain.
The real solution to excessive privacy intrusions and security lapses by governments is for enough people to become aware of them and the negative consequences that the political will moves.
Unfortunately the latter is probably a prerequisite for the former as well. Even more unfortunately it probably means multiple very bad things have to happen very visibly and to a lot of people to overcome the ignorance/apathy surrounding these issues among non-geeks.
my wife's new vehicle comes with 3G internet built-in... there are dubious for-pay features, but even if you don't pay, they're apparently required to give you free 911 and Assistance calling.
This is one of the few areas where I have a legitimate ethical dilemma about requiring IoT-style connectivity.
Having a vehicle summon help automatically after an accident and provide advance information to emergency services if no-one in the vehicle is able to do so is literally a life-saver, and is fast becoming a legally mandated feature of new vehicles in much of the world.
On the other hand, having such a phone-home system used for anything else, including things like sending telemetry data back to the vehicle manufacturer or dealer about anything whatsoever, is well into creepy surveillance world. Having anything other than one-way communication available is also a potential security risk.
I have a tracker in my car anyway. It was required to get insurance from literally anyone I asked, and insurance is a legal requirement in my country regardless of its practical benefit. But the tracker is operated by an independent company, whose agreement is with me and me alone, and is not connected to any other system other than I think for power. The only thing anyone can do with it is activate the tracking system so police can try to locate the vehicle if necessary, and they have no incentive to do that other than at my request or in a genuine emergency.
If I could buy a new vehicle with no remote communications but the anti-theft and emergency-call functionality and any self-contained radio or navigation systems I chose to include, that would be great. But of course no-one wants to sell me one any more, because too many people think having an integral WiFi hotspot follow them everywhere they go is wonderful and have no idea of the potential downsides.
Sadly, given the safety, efficiency and comfort improvements of modern vehicles, cars are one of the few devices where updating to something much more connected really will be a practical necessity before long. At least for now I can still buy one that I theoretically control myself, and there's apparently some information out there about the electronics so I can make a slightly informed decision about who the least bad options are from a security and privacy perspective.
It's tough to do a fair comparison, because I'm in the UK so pricing for a lot of things will be slightly different, but I can have a go in general terms.
As an example, a colo package we've looked at for one of my projects would place boxes in major London data centres with proper redundancies etc. The entry level has 1TB/month of data transfer included and enough power and rack space for an entry-level server, and would cost about the same as the data transfer costs alone with AWS, with a similar rate for any extra bandwidth required. So at that level the colo aspect is heavily dominated by bandwidth, although of course it's a bit more expensive if you need extra space or power for a larger server.
The next question is probably how the cost of an equivalent server stacks up against a t2.medium instance. Since I don't know anyone who sells colo servers with 40% of a CPU and 4GB of RAM, I can't meaningfully compare these, so I'll have to use another example. If I've correctly interpreted what a vCPU actually is, a fairly basic server that we might use for the project I was thinking about looks roughly equivalent to an m4.2xlarge instance in terms of processing power and RAM. Amazon will rent you one of those for a bit over £3k/year in London. Reserving for a year with full up-front payment seems to save just over a third of that AWS fee. Buying a server outright probably falls somewhere around the full (non-reserved) price, depending on the rest of the spec, so you're looking at say 1-1.5 years of AWS EC2 instance fees to buy a roughly equivalent server.
To be realistic, we should then allow for significant inefficiency with having a permanent server that probably won't be 100% utilised, but that only seems to make a difference if you've got one of the smaller, burst-friendly EC2 instances, since if we're looking at the prices for reserved instances on AWS they have analogous inefficiency.
We should also do some sort of calculations regarding storage, but this is probably the hardest area of all to do a fair comparison. The price for a single GB-month of storage on EBS is already far more than the price of buying equivalent storage in a server hard drive outright, or about 3-4 months' worth of AWS EBS storage buys you the equivalent in local SSD capacity. We'd have to consider things like redundancy/backups through EBS and inefficient use of resources with local storage to get any sort of meaningful comparison here, but assuming 50% capacity usage of any given drive and let's say only 2/3 efficiency due to whatever RAID setup or other redundancy we have in our servers, you're probably still looking at buying fast, local, redundant storage within a year of the equivalent EBS storage capacity.
I'm certainly not claiming that pricing is the whole story, because even these basic back-of-envelope calculations show up obvious differences in terms of how the pricing models work and redundancy and efficiency issues that need to be taken into account to decide which approach is best for any given situation. And of course if you really do only need a very low level of resources, AWS will do that just like any other level it offers, while you'd be looking at a shared hosting account rather than a dedicated hosted server or colo arrangement.
However, for pricing, I think it's quite hard to find a situation where the cost for the actual hardware resources and connectivity doesn't work out quite a bit cheaper for self-hosted (or colo) arrangements over the long term unless you have sufficient variation in demand that your usage is going to be highly inefficient and the inherent scalability of AWS becomes the deciding factor.
Beyond that, there are the issues of management to consider, but my argument there was that the Cloud emperor often has no clothes, because it turns out that you just need experts in the Cloud infrastructure and how to deploy efficient and resilient systems in that environment instead of experts in hosting or colocating self-managed equipment.
You can get a very small (t2.micro) Linux AWS server with 1GB storage for $106 a year. Is that really more expensive than colocation (let alone far more expensive as you claimed)?
That's quite an apples-to-oranges comparison, don't you think? A single t2.micro instance is a far lower specification than even the most basic server you'd colo, and surely no-one is running a substantial online service on a single t2.micro instance and nothing else even in AWS world. I confess that I've never got my head around all the modern AWS options, but it looks like even a moderately loaded web server could exceed the bursty CPU behaviour of such a small instance, and you need to allow for storage and data transfer as well. If anything, this is closer to the general purpose admin account we have on a shared hosting box with our colo/hosting provider, which costs a lot less than $106+storage+transfers per year.
That is a good example. If you're running a large online store and have very seasonal buying patterns, sure, the on-demand scalability of Cloud-style architecture makes sense.
I think it's also fair to say that not all e-commerce is like that. I've worked with a few smaller or niche market stores, and they'd love to have enough demand that hosting everything on a handful of servers and delegating payment processing to an external service wasn't sufficient. If you're a big national chain and dealing with thousands of orders per minute, your situation is different to, say, a local furniture store that would be happy to reach a thousand sales in a month.
Of course it's not much cheaper. At the low end, if you only need a handful of servers, it's far cheaper to just buy them and colocate them somewhere, and the management overheads are low anyway. At the high end, it's still cheaper to just buy the dedicated hardware and arrange your own facilities and IT team, because that's all you're effectively doing with Cloud hosting, you're just paying someone else's profit margin on top. In between, where there is a chance to make savings on things like rapid scaling up/down without having to buy the maximum level of hardware you ever need or through reduced management overheads, the higher direct costs of Cloud infrastructure might be outweighed by those savings. As I said before, it's not clear how wide that zone is. There are a lot of businesses who think they're in it, but in my experience that's not always the case when you run the numbers.
As for not setting it up right, many of the most high-profile web sites and apps in existence have suffered downtime as a direct result of "not setting it up right". If they can't do it reliably, even with their modern tools and Bay Area salaries and IT staff who have been using these technologies since their inception, maybe the problem isn't (only) with the clients using these services.
Executives also read the press release, though. The mighty Cloud was supposed to mean much easier administration so we didn't need to handle most IT matters in-house.
In actual $$$ terms, at both the low end and the high end the Cloud often works out more expensive than self-hosting, often by quite a wide margin. There's a zone in between where that doesn't always seem to be the case, but I'm not sure how wide it really is, and it's usually based on TCO rather than the hardware and connectivity expenses alone. The thing is, it turns out that you can't just delegate all responsibility and get good results.
How many times has a significant chunk of the Internet gone off-line because a major AWS data centre was knocked out for a while? Sure, all those beautifully-architected, Cloud-hosted web apps could have just switched over to a standby -- the AWS infrastructure would have supported that in various ways -- but it turns out that you still need enough expertise to understand how your infrastructure works, Cloud or no, or you just moved your single points of failure/vulnerability to another building. And of course the same considerations apply to all the other big Cloud hosting systems as well, as well as to simpler hosting like your favourite blogging platform or storing your code on GitHub.
Likewise in terms of finances, how often has someone who didn't fully understand the implications of a Cloud system or even just off-site hosting been hit with a huge bill they didn't expect, because the pricing model wasn't clear and they didn't really know what they were paying for and how much to budget?
There still ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and outsourcing critical business functions still ain't a silver bullet.
I think the buck clearly stops with May herself this time. This was a shameless attempt at an opportunistic power grab by a PM no-one voted for. It was presented deceptively as a matter of strengthening her hand in the Brexit negotiations, yet the Tory manifesto sneaked in numerous "nasty party" policy changes relative to the previous one, some of which were barely even picked up by the media before the election. And of course the Tory campaign was all about her.
I wonder how long she'll last running a minority government, or indeed how long any minority government itself will last. The odds on a second general election later this year were already shortening during the night as the likelihood of a hung parliament became a certainty.
If only the traditional moderate third party hadn't turned itself into a single-issue campaign group this time, and picked an issue heavily opposed by public opinion at that. The Lib Dems' political incompetence and ability to make strategic blunders seem almost boundless, and until they do something about that weakness, they're never going to attract and maintain enough support to actually do anything about policies that matter. I fear we are now doomed to a generation of two-party politics in England, with both being rather too extreme to actually be any good.
As I understand it, the problem in this case is that people aren't just choosing to pay more. Because of the regulatory issues, and in particular the way doctors are writing prescriptions, it appears that some people are being forced to pay for this particular product at its now dramatically increased price, without the option to choose one of the alternatives otherwise available.
This is pretty much the standard argument for the VC funding model, but it stands or falls by the same criteria as my original question.
For one thing, by definition VCs have to invest somewhere to make any money. If they can't invest in businesses likely to make multiple-order-of-magnitude returns, they will have to change their investment model to be more selective in order to limit their write-offs elsewhere. I think many people would consider that a good thing.
For another thing, VCs were already investing in the kinds of small, innovative firms you mentioned, without those firms putting their products up to crazy prices. There are a very small number of outliers who are showing such blatant greed as the case we've been discussing today, and they have done so only after the products had already been created and any investment already spent.
Is there any evidence to suggest that research and development would be significantly curtailed if the businesses doing it were only able to make a substantial profit, not an astronomical one, though?
It seems that in the absence of such evidence, both ethically and economically the FRAND licensing approach (or some other policy with similar goals) is better than granting a total monopoly via a patent in its existing form.
Or just impose mandatory licensing on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms for medical patents, in a similar way to various standards bodies expecting this of contributors influencing the standards. You still get your commercial incentive to invest in research and development, you still get to make reasonable profits, but you don't get to literally hold people's lives hostage just because of a legal monopoly.
You're welcome to continue ranting if you like, but your strong views about the process being bungled don't seem particularly relevant to the discussion the rest of us were having.
If you don't think an official document, published by the government and setting out its official position, sent at taxpayers' expense to every household, is sufficient to constitute how the referendum was advertised, then I don't know what standard you would consider acceptable but somehow I doubt anything that anyone could ever do would satisfy it.
And if you want a technical legal argument in favour of the referendum being binding, go read the Hansard comments on the second reading of the enabling legislation and then entertain yourself with Pepper v Hart for a while.
The referendum was on exactly one point. How the result, either way, would be implemented in detail then becomes a political question. The politicians need to figure out why people voted as they did and respect those motivations if they want to keep popular support, just like any other policy. The diplomats need to try to secure any relevant international agreements in order to implement the politicians' decisions, just like any other treaty negotiation.
I mentioned the leaflet because the person I replied to claimed that the referendum was not advertised as binding. Evidently that claim was false.
It was advertised as binding. It literally said the following in the leaflet that the government sent to every household at great expense:
This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide.
Look, here's the PDF of the referendum leaflet so you can check for yourself. It's right there on page 20.
Moreover, numerous MPs said in very unambiguous terms while debating the enabling legislation for the referendum that the people should be given the final say. This is reported in Hansard, the official record of parliamentary proceedings, and is also available for any member of the public to read. The intent of Parliament when they voted to hold the referendum was clear.
The usual argument that it was a non-binding referendum is based on the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. That is a principle that most normal people (i.e., non-lawyers and non-historians) had never heard of before the referendum. It is a principle that many seem to misunderstand to this day: the historical principle is about Parliament's status as the ultimate legislative body in comparison with the monarchy or the church, not in comparison with the people, who after all are charged with electing the MPs. While parliamentary sovereignty has been assumed as a basic principle of modern UK law, it has very questionable validity when interpreted in this way. Can you find any reasonable argument for the democratic legitimacy of parliamentary sovereignty as a legal principle that does not also make a vote by the electorate as a whole just as legitimate? In short, as a basis for Parliament overriding the result of a democratic referendum, this sort of argument is what gets lawyers a bad name.
You can debate the wisdom of holding the referendum in the first place, the choices offered, who was eligible to vote, and no doubt many other aspects of the whole affair, but arguing that the result was non-binding on anything but a possible legal technicality is a stretch.
"Fully costed" don't mean very much if the figures are so optimistic as to be implausible. The idea that you can just put up tax rates as high as you like on the richest and on businesses and only a small amount of financial restructuring will take place to reduce the resulting tax burden is just totally unrealistic. So is the idea that HMRC will suddenly collect billions more by clamping down on tax avoidance, as if no-one ever thought of trying that before.
Agreed. I'm just thinking the odds are better with that roll of the dice than a roll with any of the individual parties having a working majority that puts them beyond challenge. IMNSHO, all of the main English parties have now lost the plot so comprehensively one way or another that I don't feel any of them is even a reasonable representation of my (mostly centre-ish) views at the moment. I'd rather have them stalemated than the Tories running public services into the ground or Labour bankrupting the country.
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Crowdfunding is one of the more promising alternatives, I agree. However, on the evidence so far, it's typically between one and two orders of magnitude less effective in current implementations. It's also becoming increasingly clear that current crowdfunding models leave a great deal of risk with the funders rather than the content creators, which I'm not sure is a good thing. If and when we get better at it -- possibly with a general shift in our culture back towards respecting content creators and being willing to support works we actually do value -- it will be an interesting direction to explore. But we aren't there yet.
Copyright not expiring at all does have a relatively small effect, simply because most things that people actually want to copy are naturally the newer and as-yet less widely experienced works. Obviously the principle of endless extensions is a violation of everything copyright was meant to be and should be fixed; I'm not in any way suggesting otherwise. However, as a practical matter it doesn't actually make much difference whether it's 50 years of 500 years of protection if 99% of what everyone wants to share is less than 5 years old anyway. Once you've taken the idea too far, how much too far is less important.
Fair enough. If, as with music, you can still be commercially viable with a large market and close to but greater than zero pricing, that might be a good business model that works for all concerned. Unfortunately, music is one of relatively few areas where this can work economically. Popular fiction books is another. However, the same idea usually doesn't work for areas like movies or computer software, where the production costs are often much higher, or for work like composing or arranging orchestral scores, where the production costs are lower but the market is also more specialised and much smaller.
No, arguing that one bad act that has a small effect on a few people morally justifies another bad act done by many people with much greater effect is lame. Not as lame as resorting to swearing at someone because you haven't got a real argument, perhaps, but still lame.
The deal was that we give them a temporary monopoly and in return they add to the public domain. Sonny Bono & Mickey Mouse suspended public domain indefinitely, and thus have reneged on their side of the social contract. Why should we continue to uphold our end of the bargain?
This is a common argument, but a lame one. The vast majority of content that is illegally shared online is very recent, often less than a year or two old. It would have been covered by copyright even in the original form with just a few years of protection for the rightsholder.
The erosion of the public domain and repeated extensions to the length of copyright protection are real problems and should be fixed, but they are a very issue.
This is why no one has any respect for copyright, nobody feels the slightest twinge of guilt bypassing your paywalls & getting your content for free.
A lot of people don't even understand copyright. They just assume that if they can get something for free online, that's OK. They'll even rip off more positive content providers who don't want to use DRM, and tell them that if they don't want people to just copy all their stuff they shouldn't deliver it as standard video/audio files. (Seriously, I've been involved with some of these businesses and seen the mails. People really do this.)
Until then I guess you'll just have to keep suing your customers, thats a sure way to win back their loyalty.
And yet someone who pirates all your stuff isn't your customer, and statistically the friends they will badmouth you to if you do take legal action against them are also unlikely to be your customers. Customers pay you money in return for your stuff, you see.
The penalties for copyright infringement are grossly disproportionate in some cases, IMHO, but they certainly can provide a degree of compensation to rightsholders whose material is widely distributed in violation of those rights.
All the anti-copyright arguments about how "I was just sampling but would have bought it anyway if it was good", or "I'd have bought it if you just provided it through a more convenient channel", or "If you sue me then you'll just be attacking your own customers and then they won't buy from you in the future"... don't mean a thing when a judge rules that your savings now belong to the lawyers from Big Media.
Unfortunately, the market cost for digital content with near zero marginal cost for reproduction is also near zero, once the initial sunk cost has been paid and the content has already been produced. This is not a sustainable business model for producing new content, though.
I admire the sentiment, but unless you really are going to live as a hermit off the grid, just doing what you can to avoid this sort of intrusion personally is never going to be enough in our brave new world. What we actually need is for our laws and more importantly the social/ethical views motivating them to catch up with the capabilities of modern technologies.
The real solution to excessive privacy intrusions and security lapses by businesses is remarkably simple: they just have to cost the businesses and those running them significantly more than they stood to gain.
The real solution to excessive privacy intrusions and security lapses by governments is for enough people to become aware of them and the negative consequences that the political will moves.
Unfortunately the latter is probably a prerequisite for the former as well. Even more unfortunately it probably means multiple very bad things have to happen very visibly and to a lot of people to overcome the ignorance/apathy surrounding these issues among non-geeks.
my wife's new vehicle comes with 3G internet built-in... there are dubious for-pay features, but even if you don't pay, they're apparently required to give you free 911 and Assistance calling.
This is one of the few areas where I have a legitimate ethical dilemma about requiring IoT-style connectivity.
Having a vehicle summon help automatically after an accident and provide advance information to emergency services if no-one in the vehicle is able to do so is literally a life-saver, and is fast becoming a legally mandated feature of new vehicles in much of the world.
On the other hand, having such a phone-home system used for anything else, including things like sending telemetry data back to the vehicle manufacturer or dealer about anything whatsoever, is well into creepy surveillance world. Having anything other than one-way communication available is also a potential security risk.
I have a tracker in my car anyway. It was required to get insurance from literally anyone I asked, and insurance is a legal requirement in my country regardless of its practical benefit. But the tracker is operated by an independent company, whose agreement is with me and me alone, and is not connected to any other system other than I think for power. The only thing anyone can do with it is activate the tracking system so police can try to locate the vehicle if necessary, and they have no incentive to do that other than at my request or in a genuine emergency.
If I could buy a new vehicle with no remote communications but the anti-theft and emergency-call functionality and any self-contained radio or navigation systems I chose to include, that would be great. But of course no-one wants to sell me one any more, because too many people think having an integral WiFi hotspot follow them everywhere they go is wonderful and have no idea of the potential downsides.
Sadly, given the safety, efficiency and comfort improvements of modern vehicles, cars are one of the few devices where updating to something much more connected really will be a practical necessity before long. At least for now I can still buy one that I theoretically control myself, and there's apparently some information out there about the electronics so I can make a slightly informed decision about who the least bad options are from a security and privacy perspective.
It's tough to do a fair comparison, because I'm in the UK so pricing for a lot of things will be slightly different, but I can have a go in general terms.
As an example, a colo package we've looked at for one of my projects would place boxes in major London data centres with proper redundancies etc. The entry level has 1TB/month of data transfer included and enough power and rack space for an entry-level server, and would cost about the same as the data transfer costs alone with AWS, with a similar rate for any extra bandwidth required. So at that level the colo aspect is heavily dominated by bandwidth, although of course it's a bit more expensive if you need extra space or power for a larger server.
The next question is probably how the cost of an equivalent server stacks up against a t2.medium instance. Since I don't know anyone who sells colo servers with 40% of a CPU and 4GB of RAM, I can't meaningfully compare these, so I'll have to use another example. If I've correctly interpreted what a vCPU actually is, a fairly basic server that we might use for the project I was thinking about looks roughly equivalent to an m4.2xlarge instance in terms of processing power and RAM. Amazon will rent you one of those for a bit over £3k/year in London. Reserving for a year with full up-front payment seems to save just over a third of that AWS fee. Buying a server outright probably falls somewhere around the full (non-reserved) price, depending on the rest of the spec, so you're looking at say 1-1.5 years of AWS EC2 instance fees to buy a roughly equivalent server.
To be realistic, we should then allow for significant inefficiency with having a permanent server that probably won't be 100% utilised, but that only seems to make a difference if you've got one of the smaller, burst-friendly EC2 instances, since if we're looking at the prices for reserved instances on AWS they have analogous inefficiency.
We should also do some sort of calculations regarding storage, but this is probably the hardest area of all to do a fair comparison. The price for a single GB-month of storage on EBS is already far more than the price of buying equivalent storage in a server hard drive outright, or about 3-4 months' worth of AWS EBS storage buys you the equivalent in local SSD capacity. We'd have to consider things like redundancy/backups through EBS and inefficient use of resources with local storage to get any sort of meaningful comparison here, but assuming 50% capacity usage of any given drive and let's say only 2/3 efficiency due to whatever RAID setup or other redundancy we have in our servers, you're probably still looking at buying fast, local, redundant storage within a year of the equivalent EBS storage capacity.
I'm certainly not claiming that pricing is the whole story, because even these basic back-of-envelope calculations show up obvious differences in terms of how the pricing models work and redundancy and efficiency issues that need to be taken into account to decide which approach is best for any given situation. And of course if you really do only need a very low level of resources, AWS will do that just like any other level it offers, while you'd be looking at a shared hosting account rather than a dedicated hosted server or colo arrangement.
However, for pricing, I think it's quite hard to find a situation where the cost for the actual hardware resources and connectivity doesn't work out quite a bit cheaper for self-hosted (or colo) arrangements over the long term unless you have sufficient variation in demand that your usage is going to be highly inefficient and the inherent scalability of AWS becomes the deciding factor.
Beyond that, there are the issues of management to consider, but my argument there was that the Cloud emperor often has no clothes, because it turns out that you just need experts in the Cloud infrastructure and how to deploy efficient and resilient systems in that environment instead of experts in hosting or colocating self-managed equipment.
You can get a very small (t2.micro) Linux AWS server with 1GB storage for $106 a year. Is that really more expensive than colocation (let alone far more expensive as you claimed)?
That's quite an apples-to-oranges comparison, don't you think? A single t2.micro instance is a far lower specification than even the most basic server you'd colo, and surely no-one is running a substantial online service on a single t2.micro instance and nothing else even in AWS world. I confess that I've never got my head around all the modern AWS options, but it looks like even a moderately loaded web server could exceed the bursty CPU behaviour of such a small instance, and you need to allow for storage and data transfer as well. If anything, this is closer to the general purpose admin account we have on a shared hosting box with our colo/hosting provider, which costs a lot less than $106+storage+transfers per year.
That is a good example. If you're running a large online store and have very seasonal buying patterns, sure, the on-demand scalability of Cloud-style architecture makes sense.
I think it's also fair to say that not all e-commerce is like that. I've worked with a few smaller or niche market stores, and they'd love to have enough demand that hosting everything on a handful of servers and delegating payment processing to an external service wasn't sufficient. If you're a big national chain and dealing with thousands of orders per minute, your situation is different to, say, a local furniture store that would be happy to reach a thousand sales in a month.
Of course it's not much cheaper. At the low end, if you only need a handful of servers, it's far cheaper to just buy them and colocate them somewhere, and the management overheads are low anyway. At the high end, it's still cheaper to just buy the dedicated hardware and arrange your own facilities and IT team, because that's all you're effectively doing with Cloud hosting, you're just paying someone else's profit margin on top. In between, where there is a chance to make savings on things like rapid scaling up/down without having to buy the maximum level of hardware you ever need or through reduced management overheads, the higher direct costs of Cloud infrastructure might be outweighed by those savings. As I said before, it's not clear how wide that zone is. There are a lot of businesses who think they're in it, but in my experience that's not always the case when you run the numbers.
As for not setting it up right, many of the most high-profile web sites and apps in existence have suffered downtime as a direct result of "not setting it up right". If they can't do it reliably, even with their modern tools and Bay Area salaries and IT staff who have been using these technologies since their inception, maybe the problem isn't (only) with the clients using these services.
If your loading is very uneven, it can be cheaper to offload to something like AWS than to keep enough servers around to handle peak loads.
That is true, but how many web apps really have such highly variable demands that this works out in their favour?
That sort of thing happened long before we started calling it the Cloud.
True enough, but that doesn't make the current Cloud-related incarnation any better.
Executives also read the press release, though. The mighty Cloud was supposed to mean much easier administration so we didn't need to handle most IT matters in-house.
In actual $$$ terms, at both the low end and the high end the Cloud often works out more expensive than self-hosting, often by quite a wide margin. There's a zone in between where that doesn't always seem to be the case, but I'm not sure how wide it really is, and it's usually based on TCO rather than the hardware and connectivity expenses alone. The thing is, it turns out that you can't just delegate all responsibility and get good results.
How many times has a significant chunk of the Internet gone off-line because a major AWS data centre was knocked out for a while? Sure, all those beautifully-architected, Cloud-hosted web apps could have just switched over to a standby -- the AWS infrastructure would have supported that in various ways -- but it turns out that you still need enough expertise to understand how your infrastructure works, Cloud or no, or you just moved your single points of failure/vulnerability to another building. And of course the same considerations apply to all the other big Cloud hosting systems as well, as well as to simpler hosting like your favourite blogging platform or storing your code on GitHub.
Likewise in terms of finances, how often has someone who didn't fully understand the implications of a Cloud system or even just off-site hosting been hit with a huge bill they didn't expect, because the pricing model wasn't clear and they didn't really know what they were paying for and how much to budget?
There still ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and outsourcing critical business functions still ain't a silver bullet.
I think the buck clearly stops with May herself this time. This was a shameless attempt at an opportunistic power grab by a PM no-one voted for. It was presented deceptively as a matter of strengthening her hand in the Brexit negotiations, yet the Tory manifesto sneaked in numerous "nasty party" policy changes relative to the previous one, some of which were barely even picked up by the media before the election. And of course the Tory campaign was all about her.
I wonder how long she'll last running a minority government, or indeed how long any minority government itself will last. The odds on a second general election later this year were already shortening during the night as the likelihood of a hung parliament became a certainty.
If only the traditional moderate third party hadn't turned itself into a single-issue campaign group this time, and picked an issue heavily opposed by public opinion at that. The Lib Dems' political incompetence and ability to make strategic blunders seem almost boundless, and until they do something about that weakness, they're never going to attract and maintain enough support to actually do anything about policies that matter. I fear we are now doomed to a generation of two-party politics in England, with both being rather too extreme to actually be any good.
As I understand it, the problem in this case is that people aren't just choosing to pay more. Because of the regulatory issues, and in particular the way doctors are writing prescriptions, it appears that some people are being forced to pay for this particular product at its now dramatically increased price, without the option to choose one of the alternatives otherwise available.
This is pretty much the standard argument for the VC funding model, but it stands or falls by the same criteria as my original question.
For one thing, by definition VCs have to invest somewhere to make any money. If they can't invest in businesses likely to make multiple-order-of-magnitude returns, they will have to change their investment model to be more selective in order to limit their write-offs elsewhere. I think many people would consider that a good thing.
For another thing, VCs were already investing in the kinds of small, innovative firms you mentioned, without those firms putting their products up to crazy prices. There are a very small number of outliers who are showing such blatant greed as the case we've been discussing today, and they have done so only after the products had already been created and any investment already spent.
Is there any evidence to suggest that research and development would be significantly curtailed if the businesses doing it were only able to make a substantial profit, not an astronomical one, though?
It seems that in the absence of such evidence, both ethically and economically the FRAND licensing approach (or some other policy with similar goals) is better than granting a total monopoly via a patent in its existing form.
Or just impose mandatory licensing on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms for medical patents, in a similar way to various standards bodies expecting this of contributors influencing the standards. You still get your commercial incentive to invest in research and development, you still get to make reasonable profits, but you don't get to literally hold people's lives hostage just because of a legal monopoly.
You're welcome to continue ranting if you like, but your strong views about the process being bungled don't seem particularly relevant to the discussion the rest of us were having.
If you don't think an official document, published by the government and setting out its official position, sent at taxpayers' expense to every household, is sufficient to constitute how the referendum was advertised, then I don't know what standard you would consider acceptable but somehow I doubt anything that anyone could ever do would satisfy it.
And if you want a technical legal argument in favour of the referendum being binding, go read the Hansard comments on the second reading of the enabling legislation and then entertain yourself with Pepper v Hart for a while.
The referendum was on exactly one point. How the result, either way, would be implemented in detail then becomes a political question. The politicians need to figure out why people voted as they did and respect those motivations if they want to keep popular support, just like any other policy. The diplomats need to try to secure any relevant international agreements in order to implement the politicians' decisions, just like any other treaty negotiation.
I mentioned the leaflet because the person I replied to claimed that the referendum was not advertised as binding. Evidently that claim was false.
It was advertised as binding. It literally said the following in the leaflet that the government sent to every household at great expense:
This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide.
Look, here's the PDF of the referendum leaflet so you can check for yourself. It's right there on page 20.
Moreover, numerous MPs said in very unambiguous terms while debating the enabling legislation for the referendum that the people should be given the final say. This is reported in Hansard, the official record of parliamentary proceedings, and is also available for any member of the public to read. The intent of Parliament when they voted to hold the referendum was clear.
The usual argument that it was a non-binding referendum is based on the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. That is a principle that most normal people (i.e., non-lawyers and non-historians) had never heard of before the referendum. It is a principle that many seem to misunderstand to this day: the historical principle is about Parliament's status as the ultimate legislative body in comparison with the monarchy or the church, not in comparison with the people, who after all are charged with electing the MPs. While parliamentary sovereignty has been assumed as a basic principle of modern UK law, it has very questionable validity when interpreted in this way. Can you find any reasonable argument for the democratic legitimacy of parliamentary sovereignty as a legal principle that does not also make a vote by the electorate as a whole just as legitimate? In short, as a basis for Parliament overriding the result of a democratic referendum, this sort of argument is what gets lawyers a bad name.
You can debate the wisdom of holding the referendum in the first place, the choices offered, who was eligible to vote, and no doubt many other aspects of the whole affair, but arguing that the result was non-binding on anything but a possible legal technicality is a stretch.
"Fully costed" don't mean very much if the figures are so optimistic as to be implausible. The idea that you can just put up tax rates as high as you like on the richest and on businesses and only a small amount of financial restructuring will take place to reduce the resulting tax burden is just totally unrealistic. So is the idea that HMRC will suddenly collect billions more by clamping down on tax avoidance, as if no-one ever thought of trying that before.
Agreed. I'm just thinking the odds are better with that roll of the dice than a roll with any of the individual parties having a working majority that puts them beyond challenge. IMNSHO, all of the main English parties have now lost the plot so comprehensively one way or another that I don't feel any of them is even a reasonable representation of my (mostly centre-ish) views at the moment. I'd rather have them stalemated than the Tories running public services into the ground or Labour bankrupting the country.