If you like Apple you really only have the 1 choice in Apple products. You either buy the iPad 1.0 or you wait until the expected iPad 2.0 comes out. Really, Apple is the one that competes with Apple. For an Apple fan, there is no alternative.
As an Android fan there will be a lot of Android tablets. I'm waiting around to see who comes out with the best one that fits my needs.
They used Xen because that's what was mature at the time. In many ways Xen is still more mature than KVM, though it won't be that way for long.
Amazon supplies you a bunch of tools for dealing with the images. They call the "stored" images AMI's. There's a huge list of public AMI's you can choose from and anyone can create their own AMI off pretty much any Linux distribution.
You can snapshot a running instance using the ec2-ami-tools which are installed in your running instances. Using those you can easily create your own AMI's off a running EC2 instance. So you'd create a base EC2 instance off a public AMI, customize it and then "snapshot" that as a custom AMI you can re-use later.
Amazon EC2 is Xen. The back end storage for that is empherical in that it goes away when you shut it down. So they introduced EBS which is persistent storage. So you could have a EC2 server and mount EBS volumes on it and those EBS volumes will exist even when the EC2(Xen) server goes away. You can even mount them on different EC2(Xen) servers(though not at the same time). Also today you can have the EC2 server itself run on top of EBS if you want the data on it to stay around after a reboot.
Then there's also S3 which while a separate product, ties into all the above as a "slower" storage medium where you keep your Xen images and (if you're smart) permanent backups. You can also use it for storage for your applications, there's an API to put and get data from it. S3 has an insane level of reliability, supports versioning and can even be setup so that you can't delete from it without a hardware fob key device. So you could put customer data there and only the CEO of the corporation could delete it.
EBS is basically like iSCSI, but far more complex. There's a lot of proprietary stuff they're doing with it.
So you have:
EC2(Xen) servers which can be thought of as disposable. S3 which is an absurdly reliable storage back end, but you can't really use it as a filesystem. It's not high IO. EBS which is your high IO filesystem that's persistent and portable. It's something you'd use for a database filesystem and their database product(RDS) uses this, since it's basically just MySQL Xen on top of EBS.
In this case they had an issue with EBS in 1 of their north Virginia data centers. This affected 1 of 3 east coast availability zones but you can't really say which one since the zone names are randomized for each customer(to prevent everyone from using the same zone name).
Outside of the 3 east coast availability zones they also have zones in other regions that weren't affected.
EC2 is just tools. It's as cloudassed as you make of it.
I can take ESX and use a Netapp for data storage and if my Netapp cluster takes a dive, you can't fail over to anything since your data is down.
On the other hand I can take EC2 and run apps and clustered DBs across the east and west coast and put ELB on front of it. If the east coast takes a nuke, everything will keep on running.
"Back on topic, I just don't see all these day-long outages that apparenty seem to happen all the time in companies that haven't moved their servers to The Cloud(tm)."
You must not get out much. Atlantic.net I had a 11 hour outage due to the staff not understanding how to update a Cisco router. Then a 4 hour outage when they screwed up billing and shut down our service with no warning. Then there was that time they didn't like our DNS traffic and shut down DNS with no warning or notice. That was a fun hour or so of me trying to figure out why our applications were having issues.
So.. we go to replace them and one of the places we visit(that was highly recommended), first words outta their mouth was "So I'm sure you heard about that 6 hour outage we had xxx back. Here's what we've done to make sure it doesn't happen again..."
Long outages happen. I'm pretty much in the firm belief that if your app can't scale out across large geography automatically the only thing giving you solid uptime is pure luck. Any time someone wants 5 9's with a single data center I just laugh. But setting up your app and data to work that way takes Work.
Which, btw, would've also prevented outages for companies here. Only 1 zone was affected, EC2 also has zones on the west coast, Ireland and Asia pacific. If you built your app to use those and balanced via ELB, you likely wouldn't be impacted with this outage. But again, that takes $$$. Most companies don't want to spend that and frankly most companies probably don't need to.
"In the "old school" thinking, smart companies have a redundant data center somewhere, humming along and waiting to be switched on if the main data center ever goes down. "
The problem is that gets really really expensive and it's actually quite hard to do properly.
You can do this with EC2 though, just have your application cross various geographical zones. Things like ELB even make this somewhat easier. But you still have to solve all the application problems that exist when your data stores exist across large distances.
With FOSS software when the programmers stop updating, new programmers fork the code and continue to update it.
This happened with X11, Open Office, etc etc. As a user of FOSS you can pretty much rest assured that the software you use will be supported so long as it fills a need or isn't replaced by something superior. It won't be abandoned even if you don't code, simply because other programmers can pick up the ball and keep going with the product.
Corporate software is much much more likely to become abandonware. Companies go out of business, their corporate goals change, a product may not be generating enough income, or they simply want to sell something new and shiny. Compare that to a product like Emacs. It was first released in the mid 70's and just had a new release last month. Odds are it'll still be around 30 years from now.
Sometimes people don't want to hear things or don't put a lot of value on underling opinions.
Was in a meeting when a client wanted a website called "Busted Moms" for a financial thing and just couldn't get the porn reference. The site got designed, published and everything, THEN taken down after all the work got done.
In my limited understanding the speed limit is a constant in the universe, sort of a "nothing goes faster than this" and light(along with other things) just travels at this speed.
And light itself isn't special. You can slow down light in certain mediums and have other particles go faster than light in those mediums. So you CAN go faster than light. But you still don't exceed that universal constant speed limit.
Actually it's because we can't do all that much against natural disasters. I live in Florida and "Death by Hurricane" is sort of the deal you make to live here.
But we don't have to mismanage nuclear power, or focus our (distant) future on it.
Back in the early 1900's the papers would quote doctor's who would say that people who fell out of a plane at 5k likely died of a heart attack before hitting the ground. I'm sure it made people feel all warm and fuzzy but it was complete bullshit.
People jump from planes at 24k ft, 30k isn't that much higher. What would most likely happen is you'd pass out due to lack of oxygen then wake back up when you got to a lower altitude. This happened to a friend of mine on a 24k jump because she donated blood the day before. She passed out, woke up, never realized she passed out until the person jumping with her kept point at this altimeter and the ground.
Finistride has been in use for over 20 years and there still hasn't been any proof that it really causes these issues long term. The science is still really against it.
Frankly impotence, low sexual desire, fatigue, can all have psychological causes. I think it'd be interesting to give people a placebo, tell them it may cause sexual dysfunction, then point them to a website www.sugarpillscausedmyED.com and see what the carnage was.
95%, if not more, of people using Photoshop don't need it. We tried for a major push for Adobe Elements at one place I worked at, but a lot of people wanted Photoshop just because it was the "grown up"/Real product.
Propecia does not restrict testosterone. It binds with an enzyme that converts testosterone to DHT. DHT is used during male development, it's sort of a marker chemical that says "this is a guy, grow him like a guy". It's why there's a warning label on Propecia for pregnant women not even to handle the stuff. It can screw with their kids development.
So if you take Propecia you actually end up with more testosterone and less DHT. The side effect of DHT is that it binds with your prostrate and certain hair follicles and can cause problems with both. Body builders who take testosterone often times take Propecia to keep their DHT down so they don't lose their hair.
Also when you stop taking it your body goes 100% back to normal. There's no longer any finastride in your system to bind with your DHT making enzymes, so there's really no way for it to cause permanent effects.
The biggest issue is that "sex drive" is hugely influenced by psychology. So if you give a drug to someone and say "may cause sex drive loss", despite the studies only showing a 1.8% incident rate(the placebo had a 1.3% incident rate) you can sort of create a self fulfilling prophecy.
> And the uncomfortable elephant in the room is what do you do with the ones who can't specialize and can't apply? The ones who can barely pass rote memorization even with lowered standards? Pat them on the back and throw them at the nearest menial labor recruiter?
Auto shop. Electric shop. Plumbing shop.
And for the record that doesn't mean they won't do well in life. The oil change in my boat was quoted at 80$ an hour and cost me a total of $700, since the mechanic had to move a battery, remove the alternator to get around at things.
I don't think it was a "perfect storm" of events that took out the plant, rather an inept/corrupt system of implementing nuclear power. I think we have the technical prowess to do nuke power safety, the problem is getting the current corporations and governments to do it properly.
Our social and political structure lags behind our technical one.
I don't get all the "develop on the same platform" comments. I finished off a 3 year job as a systems admin for a Mac shop with Linux servers and the setup was absolutely perfect. Of course we were using Ruby on Rails for which Mac is pretty much the standard development platform for.
Slashdot Mirror
If you like Apple you really only have the 1 choice in Apple products. You either buy the iPad 1.0 or you wait until the expected iPad 2.0 comes out. Really, Apple is the one that competes with Apple. For an Apple fan, there is no alternative.
As an Android fan there will be a lot of Android tablets. I'm waiting around to see who comes out with the best one that fits my needs.
They used Xen because that's what was mature at the time. In many ways Xen is still more mature than KVM, though it won't be that way for long.
Amazon supplies you a bunch of tools for dealing with the images. They call the "stored" images AMI's. There's a huge list of public AMI's you can choose from and anyone can create their own AMI off pretty much any Linux distribution.
You can snapshot a running instance using the ec2-ami-tools which are installed in your running instances. Using those you can easily create your own AMI's off a running EC2 instance. So you'd create a base EC2 instance off a public AMI, customize it and then "snapshot" that as a custom AMI you can re-use later.
Amazon EC2 is Xen. The back end storage for that is empherical in that it goes away when you shut it down. So they introduced EBS which is persistent storage. So you could have a EC2 server and mount EBS volumes on it and those EBS volumes will exist even when the EC2(Xen) server goes away. You can even mount them on different EC2(Xen) servers(though not at the same time). Also today you can have the EC2 server itself run on top of EBS if you want the data on it to stay around after a reboot.
Then there's also S3 which while a separate product, ties into all the above as a "slower" storage medium where you keep your Xen images and (if you're smart) permanent backups. You can also use it for storage for your applications, there's an API to put and get data from it. S3 has an insane level of reliability, supports versioning and can even be setup so that you can't delete from it without a hardware fob key device. So you could put customer data there and only the CEO of the corporation could delete it.
EBS is basically like iSCSI, but far more complex. There's a lot of proprietary stuff they're doing with it.
So you have:
EC2(Xen) servers which can be thought of as disposable.
S3 which is an absurdly reliable storage back end, but you can't really use it as a filesystem. It's not high IO.
EBS which is your high IO filesystem that's persistent and portable. It's something you'd use for a database filesystem and their database product(RDS) uses this, since it's basically just MySQL Xen on top of EBS.
In this case they had an issue with EBS in 1 of their north Virginia data centers. This affected 1 of 3 east coast availability zones but you can't really say which one since the zone names are randomized for each customer(to prevent everyone from using the same zone name).
Outside of the 3 east coast availability zones they also have zones in other regions that weren't affected.
"Essentially half-cloudassed clouding."
EC2 is just tools. It's as cloudassed as you make of it.
I can take ESX and use a Netapp for data storage and if my Netapp cluster takes a dive, you can't fail over to anything since your data is down.
On the other hand I can take EC2 and run apps and clustered DBs across the east and west coast and put ELB on front of it. If the east coast takes a nuke, everything will keep on running.
"Back on topic, I just don't see all these day-long outages that apparenty seem to happen all the time in companies that haven't moved their servers to The Cloud(tm)."
You must not get out much. Atlantic.net I had a 11 hour outage due to the staff not understanding how to update a Cisco router. Then a 4 hour outage when they screwed up billing and shut down our service with no warning. Then there was that time they didn't like our DNS traffic and shut down DNS with no warning or notice. That was a fun hour or so of me trying to figure out why our applications were having issues.
So.. we go to replace them and one of the places we visit(that was highly recommended), first words outta their mouth was "So I'm sure you heard about that 6 hour outage we had xxx back. Here's what we've done to make sure it doesn't happen again..."
Long outages happen. I'm pretty much in the firm belief that if your app can't scale out across large geography automatically the only thing giving you solid uptime is pure luck. Any time someone wants 5 9's with a single data center I just laugh. But setting up your app and data to work that way takes Work.
Which, btw, would've also prevented outages for companies here. Only 1 zone was affected, EC2 also has zones on the west coast, Ireland and Asia pacific. If you built your app to use those and balanced via ELB, you likely wouldn't be impacted with this outage. But again, that takes $$$. Most companies don't want to spend that and frankly most companies probably don't need to.
"Redundancy has obviously not worked in this case"
Only 1 region is effective. If your app was set to work with multiple zones then it likely wouldn't be impacted by this outage.
The thing with EC2 is it gives you the tools to build complex clusters. It doesn't do it for you.
"In the "old school" thinking, smart companies have a redundant data center somewhere, humming along and waiting to be switched on if the main data center ever goes down. "
The problem is that gets really really expensive and it's actually quite hard to do properly.
You can do this with EC2 though, just have your application cross various geographical zones. Things like ELB even make this somewhat easier. But you still have to solve all the application problems that exist when your data stores exist across large distances.
"which linux distro releases patches for 10 year old releases, I'm curious.."
If you installed a 10 year old release of Debian you could likely update it to the current release version with no problems.
With FOSS software when the programmers stop updating, new programmers fork the code and continue to update it.
This happened with X11, Open Office, etc etc. As a user of FOSS you can pretty much rest assured that the software you use will be supported so long as it fills a need or isn't replaced by something superior. It won't be abandoned even if you don't code, simply because other programmers can pick up the ball and keep going with the product.
Corporate software is much much more likely to become abandonware. Companies go out of business, their corporate goals change, a product may not be generating enough income, or they simply want to sell something new and shiny. Compare that to a product like Emacs. It was first released in the mid 70's and just had a new release last month. Odds are it'll still be around 30 years from now.
Sometimes people don't want to hear things or don't put a lot of value on underling opinions.
Was in a meeting when a client wanted a website called "Busted Moms" for a financial thing and just couldn't get the porn reference. The site got designed, published and everything, THEN taken down after all the work got done.
http://www.adrants.com/2009/03/sears-appeals-to-techie-moms-with-new.php
In my limited understanding the speed limit is a constant in the universe, sort of a "nothing goes faster than this" and light(along with other things) just travels at this speed.
And light itself isn't special. You can slow down light in certain mediums and have other particles go faster than light in those mediums. So you CAN go faster than light. But you still don't exceed that universal constant speed limit.
"all 10 seasons of SmallVille."
LOL. I watch the show and really forgot about that. 10 years and he still hasn't learned to fly yet.
Actually it's because we can't do all that much against natural disasters. I live in Florida and "Death by Hurricane" is sort of the deal you make to live here.
But we don't have to mismanage nuclear power, or focus our (distant) future on it.
>Companies can have enough expenses in a year that they essentially have no or little income
And if you have good accountants, this happens every year, all the time, no matter how profitable you are.
Back in the early 1900's the papers would quote doctor's who would say that people who fell out of a plane at 5k likely died of a heart attack before hitting the ground. I'm sure it made people feel all warm and fuzzy but it was complete bullshit.
People jump from planes at 24k ft, 30k isn't that much higher. What would most likely happen is you'd pass out due to lack of oxygen then wake back up when you got to a lower altitude. This happened to a friend of mine on a 24k jump because she donated blood the day before. She passed out, woke up, never realized she passed out until the person jumping with her kept point at this altimeter and the ground.
Finistride has been in use for over 20 years and there still hasn't been any proof that it really causes these issues long term. The science is still really against it.
Frankly impotence, low sexual desire, fatigue, can all have psychological causes. I think it'd be interesting to give people a placebo, tell them it may cause sexual dysfunction, then point them to a website www.sugarpillscausedmyED.com and see what the carnage was.
It's not a "testosterone blocker", it blocks some of the conversion of testosterone to DHT.
You end up with more testosterone, but less DHT. I'm sure that can have effects, but it's going to vary wildly from person to person.
Any chance they're hiring? I'm in the middle right now of trying to switch my career over to working from home.
95%, if not more, of people using Photoshop don't need it. We tried for a major push for Adobe Elements at one place I worked at, but a lot of people wanted Photoshop just because it was the "grown up"/Real product.
Yes, but all of Japan's robotic technology is focused on developing sex slaves.
Propecia does not restrict testosterone. It binds with an enzyme that converts testosterone to DHT. DHT is used during male development, it's sort of a marker chemical that says "this is a guy, grow him like a guy". It's why there's a warning label on Propecia for pregnant women not even to handle the stuff. It can screw with their kids development.
So if you take Propecia you actually end up with more testosterone and less DHT. The side effect of DHT is that it binds with your prostrate and certain hair follicles and can cause problems with both. Body builders who take testosterone often times take Propecia to keep their DHT down so they don't lose their hair.
Also when you stop taking it your body goes 100% back to normal. There's no longer any finastride in your system to bind with your DHT making enzymes, so there's really no way for it to cause permanent effects.
The biggest issue is that "sex drive" is hugely influenced by psychology. So if you give a drug to someone and say "may cause sex drive loss", despite the studies only showing a 1.8% incident rate(the placebo had a 1.3% incident rate) you can sort of create a self fulfilling prophecy.
Woah, woah, woah. Way too many words. I was like "What?" and then I was like "Huh?" and then, uh, I got a little bored. Something about slides?
> And the uncomfortable elephant in the room is what do you do with the ones who can't specialize and can't apply? The ones who can barely pass rote memorization even with lowered standards? Pat them on the back and throw them at the nearest menial labor recruiter?
Auto shop. Electric shop. Plumbing shop.
And for the record that doesn't mean they won't do well in life. The oil change in my boat was quoted at 80$ an hour and cost me a total of $700, since the mechanic had to move a battery, remove the alternator to get around at things.
I don't think it was a "perfect storm" of events that took out the plant, rather an inept/corrupt system of implementing nuclear power. I think we have the technical prowess to do nuke power safety, the problem is getting the current corporations and governments to do it properly.
Our social and political structure lags behind our technical one.
I don't get all the "develop on the same platform" comments. I finished off a 3 year job as a systems admin for a Mac shop with Linux servers and the setup was absolutely perfect. Of course we were using Ruby on Rails for which Mac is pretty much the standard development platform for.