I'm not saying Amazon's solution is bad, but I'm not sure it is in the spirit of what I would consider real cloud hosting. Really, they are providing the tools so that you can build a cloud service.
What you would consider "real cloud hosting" doesn't exist. Moreover, it *can't* exist in a general-purpose[1] way that doesn't require applications to be rewritten to make CAP-theorem tradeoffs explicit -- if you're writing an electronic medical record system with massive financial penalties if you lose someone's prescription, you simply can't afford to lose a few seconds of data when one of your DCs goes offline, whereas you can't afford not to defer synchronization of less critical data in cases where 200ms of extra latency (at barest minimum) makes the difference between your application being considered usable and trash.
So -- here in the Real World, we have a system of regions and availability zones, first courtesy Amazon and more recently picked up by other providers, which gives you the tools to build your own solution. Sure, it's not what pie-in-the-sky dreams are made of... but it's a heckuvalot cheaper and easier to run a "knife provision" command and spin up a fleet of VMs in a different region or zone than it is to get on the phone, rent rack space, buy servers, pay someone to install them, and so on and so forth for every geographic location in which you want to have a presence.
Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, eh?
[1] - "General purpose" meaning that you could certainly build something like this if you were willing to force a particular set of tradeoffs -- say, if your customers were required to agree that they could lose up to a certain amount of committed data without warning (with availability failures in cases where the amount of potential dataloss would go beyond that amount), or that they would use a datastore (like CouchDB) with explicit conflict resolution support for split-brain cases when multiple DCs thought they held the "live" master copies of the data -- but these solutions are incompatible with giving people the conventional "I have a server, I can install whatever I want on it, my data is persistent" view of the world they expect.
Really? Wow. Perhaps you should let major sites like Reddit know. They've been down for *hours*.
The cloud works if you don't care about having control over when your business is down.
Last time I had a physical DC go down it was a cooling failure. Didn't have much control over that either.
Moreover, with a cloud vendor I can have servers in multiple sites with different power, connectivity, and geographic location without massive investment in each.
This will become quite the event in data warehouse circles I bet, because the cost of 'being in the cloud' just doubled; it's not enough to buy storage from one provider. The "always there" quality that's supposedly the benefit of cloud storage is a facade.
You can buy from one provider -- every major cloud provider has multiple availability zones. But yes, lots of people buy in only one zone because it's cheaper, and then suffer for that mistake -- in situations just like this.
So you're arguing not that there's anything wrong with cloud-based services, but that people who should be buying fully-managed services are instead buying cloud-based compute time, bandwidth and storage, paying their staff (or someone else) to set up the services they want on those images, and then forgetting that they need to keep paying said staff (or 3rd-party provider) to maintain what they just paid for?
What stops someone from buying a bunch of colocated boxes, paying staff to configure them, and forgetting about those... and how is it different? (Can you "prove" that colocation services don't cause similar mistaken laxity?)
You call them up they spawn a VM and send it through the billing app once a month.
Huh? Phone a human to spawn new machines? Monthly billing? That's missing the point.
Billing resolution down to the minute, on the other hand, with fully automated management is actually taking good advantage of what's available -- if your load is spiky, maybe it's worth the markup to launch new machines based on current load (or pull underutilized systems out of the pool and shut them down) and pay for only what you use....and by the way, if you think you can hire a full-time UNIX admin and buy and host a rack full of 2Us for less than you'd pay a competitive cloud vendor (note, I said "competitive", not Amazon)... well, your idea of the numbers is waaaay off. I've played it both ways, and next time I'm doing a ground-floor startup, the last place I'll want to be is managing physical infrastructure.
Fair 'nuff. Given as Lakeway isn't exactly a cheap place to live (median household income $86K), I doubt that's the mechanic at work here.
Ugh -- I had "that stop beyond the furthest I ever go" wrong; it's Lakeline, not Lakeway. Still not the slums by any means, but not at all the same demographic.
Why, yes, it will run QuickBooks and Quicken (WINE is bundled in modern distributions, and QuickBooks in particular has received a great deal of attention). And it supports Aunt Tillie's camera as soon as she plugs it in, no reason to install the software off the disk that came with it at all. I dispute that your hypothetical Junior is buying games for his PC more often than his Xbox, so that one's moot.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but you clearly haven't looked at a modern desktop-oriented distribution lately.
That said -- I see a lot of people in suits on the train from Lakeway into downtown Austin around the 9am and 5pm runs. Maybe you should rethink that whole public transit stigma thing.
I first heard "cager" as a motorcyclist -- I've never heard it as a bicyclist.
Then again, I'm the kind of bicyclist who follows the laws to the letter (including the ones that let me take the lane when it's safer to do so) and shows up at state congress transportation committee meetings in a suit, not the kind who goes flaunting the rules in Critical Mass but can't be bothered to lobby to change them.
If I'd been in those chambers, I don't think I would want photos of my agonies being shown the world over.
You wouldn't? Even though it would serve the cause of bringing down those who are causing that suffering? (ignoring that there aren't actually any victims in these photos)
If your local credit union is the only one, then find another one that you're eligible for which is a member of shared branching. That way you can use your credit union anywhere. My credit union BMI is a member, and I haven't been to a BMI branch in years. Oh yeah 9% interest on my credit card, and they said "don't worry about it" for my credit card payments when I deployed to Iraq. No late fees, no interest, just called once a week until I got home.
My credit union story isn't quite as awesome as yours, but it's along the same vein -- when an extended warranty company refused to refund the "refundable" policy I'd bought through my credit union on financing my car, the CU refunded the cost of the policy out of their own pocket even though the fine print explicitly protected them from needing to do so.
They've also been able to bend policy on a few occasions (ie. allowing that car loan slightly below their usual minimum down payment). It's great dealing with people who are empowered rather than faceless corporate drones.
If you read TFA's links, you'll find that Flickr's founder is among the members of staff documentably out of compliance with this policy.
By the way, "infringing" is not the same as "non-first-party" -- plenty of things are the latter but not the former: Cases where permission is granted are the most obvious (presumably, the cases where Flickr's founder posted photos with metadata indicating them to be taken by someone else fall into this category) -- and even were such permission not granted, the Egypt scenario is also on the lightest end of the gray area of fair use (where newsworthiness, lack of commercial value, and similar factors come into play). I can appreciate Flickr generally choosing not to get themselves involved in fair-use determinations (staying out of that minefield is certainly good policy in general) -- but if they're going to have enough wiggle room to violate their own policy under other circumstances, this is clearly at least as an appropriate a case for exceptional behavior.
If electricity is cheap in the daytime and scarce/expensive at night, the market will figure it out.
Maybe that means people have incentive to charge their cars at work. Maybe it means entrepreneurs buy excess electricity on the spot market during the daytime, use it to pump water uphill, and use the potential energy of that water to generate more expensive electricity at night. (Is that process lossy? Sure! But the market will only reward it if it provides a net benefit, so it's all good. Same for battery / ultracapacitor / other technologies -- if they're a good fit for the problem, someone will make money using them; if not, they won't).
Still, it is going to take him forever to pay off his likely expensive tuition on that salary. However it would make a great 2nd job to have on the side.
Depends -- do we know which school he went to? It's still possible to pay your own way... or was a decade ago, anyhow.
I'm not sure what value it brings besides putting the books in front of you and the professors who used to be in the field in front of you.
For folks in software development, the value it brings is exposure to theory. I've had to clean up after folks who know the practice but not the theory -- poorly-chosen data structures, needlessly O(n^2) algorithms (or worse), schema design decisions indicating that they wouldn't know a normal form if it hit them in the head.
Mind you, it's possible to learn the theory without a formal education, and people who know the theory but not the practice can be pretty useless too... but I only know a single person whom I consider to be doing groundbreaking work who got there strictly on his own.
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I'm not saying Amazon's solution is bad, but I'm not sure it is in the spirit of what I would consider real cloud hosting. Really, they are providing the tools so that you can build a cloud service.
What you would consider "real cloud hosting" doesn't exist. Moreover, it *can't* exist in a general-purpose[1] way that doesn't require applications to be rewritten to make CAP-theorem tradeoffs explicit -- if you're writing an electronic medical record system with massive financial penalties if you lose someone's prescription, you simply can't afford to lose a few seconds of data when one of your DCs goes offline, whereas you can't afford not to defer synchronization of less critical data in cases where 200ms of extra latency (at barest minimum) makes the difference between your application being considered usable and trash.
So -- here in the Real World, we have a system of regions and availability zones, first courtesy Amazon and more recently picked up by other providers, which gives you the tools to build your own solution. Sure, it's not what pie-in-the-sky dreams are made of... but it's a heckuvalot cheaper and easier to run a "knife provision" command and spin up a fleet of VMs in a different region or zone than it is to get on the phone, rent rack space, buy servers, pay someone to install them, and so on and so forth for every geographic location in which you want to have a presence.
Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, eh?
[1] - "General purpose" meaning that you could certainly build something like this if you were willing to force a particular set of tradeoffs -- say, if your customers were required to agree that they could lose up to a certain amount of committed data without warning (with availability failures in cases where the amount of potential dataloss would go beyond that amount), or that they would use a datastore (like CouchDB) with explicit conflict resolution support for split-brain cases when multiple DCs thought they held the "live" master copies of the data -- but these solutions are incompatible with giving people the conventional "I have a server, I can install whatever I want on it, my data is persistent" view of the world they expect.
Really? Wow. Perhaps you should let major sites like Reddit know. They've been down for *hours*.
The cloud works if you don't care about having control over when your business is down.
Last time I had a physical DC go down it was a cooling failure. Didn't have much control over that either.
Moreover, with a cloud vendor I can have servers in multiple sites with different power, connectivity, and geographic location without massive investment in each.
This will become quite the event in data warehouse circles I bet, because the cost of 'being in the cloud' just doubled; it's not enough to buy storage from one provider. The "always there" quality that's supposedly the benefit of cloud storage is a facade.
You can buy from one provider -- every major cloud provider has multiple availability zones. But yes, lots of people buy in only one zone because it's cheaper, and then suffer for that mistake -- in situations just like this.
Amazon has "availability zones" for a reason, as do other cloud vendors.
If your infrastructure isn't resilient against everything in a zone suddenly disappearing, you're Doing It Wrong.
So you're arguing not that there's anything wrong with cloud-based services, but that people who should be buying fully-managed services are instead buying cloud-based compute time, bandwidth and storage, paying their staff (or someone else) to set up the services they want on those images, and then forgetting that they need to keep paying said staff (or 3rd-party provider) to maintain what they just paid for?
What stops someone from buying a bunch of colocated boxes, paying staff to configure them, and forgetting about those... and how is it different? (Can you "prove" that colocation services don't cause similar mistaken laxity?)
Huh? Phone a human to spawn new machines? Monthly billing? That's missing the point.
Billing resolution down to the minute, on the other hand, with fully automated management is actually taking good advantage of what's available -- if your load is spiky, maybe it's worth the markup to launch new machines based on current load (or pull underutilized systems out of the pool and shut them down) and pay for only what you use. ...and by the way, if you think you can hire a full-time UNIX admin and buy and host a rack full of 2Us for less than you'd pay a competitive cloud vendor (note, I said "competitive", not Amazon)... well, your idea of the numbers is waaaay off. I've played it both ways, and next time I'm doing a ground-floor startup, the last place I'll want to be is managing physical infrastructure.
Fair 'nuff. Given as Lakeway isn't exactly a cheap place to live (median household income $86K), I doubt that's the mechanic at work here.
Ugh -- I had "that stop beyond the furthest I ever go" wrong; it's Lakeline, not Lakeway. Still not the slums by any means, but not at all the same demographic.
Why, yes, it will run QuickBooks and Quicken (WINE is bundled in modern distributions, and QuickBooks in particular has received a great deal of attention). And it supports Aunt Tillie's camera as soon as she plugs it in, no reason to install the software off the disk that came with it at all. I dispute that your hypothetical Junior is buying games for his PC more often than his Xbox, so that one's moot.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but you clearly haven't looked at a modern desktop-oriented distribution lately.
Fair 'nuff. Given as Lakeway isn't exactly a cheap place to live (median household income $86K), I doubt that's the mechanic at work here.
It's a cheap camera, not a high-end one.
That said -- I see a lot of people in suits on the train from Lakeway into downtown Austin around the 9am and 5pm runs. Maybe you should rethink that whole public transit stigma thing.
I first heard "cager" as a motorcyclist -- I've never heard it as a bicyclist.
Then again, I'm the kind of bicyclist who follows the laws to the letter (including the ones that let me take the lane when it's safer to do so) and shows up at state congress transportation committee meetings in a suit, not the kind who goes flaunting the rules in Critical Mass but can't be bothered to lobby to change them.
You wouldn't? Even though it would serve the cause of bringing down those who are causing that suffering? (ignoring that there aren't actually any victims in these photos)
If your local credit union is the only one, then find another one that you're eligible for which is a member of shared branching. That way you can use your credit union anywhere. My credit union BMI is a member, and I haven't been to a BMI branch in years. Oh yeah 9% interest on my credit card, and they said "don't worry about it" for my credit card payments when I deployed to Iraq. No late fees, no interest, just called once a week until I got home.
My credit union story isn't quite as awesome as yours, but it's along the same vein -- when an extended warranty company refused to refund the "refundable" policy I'd bought through my credit union on financing my car, the CU refunded the cost of the policy out of their own pocket even though the fine print explicitly protected them from needing to do so.
They've also been able to bend policy on a few occasions (ie. allowing that car loan slightly below their usual minimum down payment). It's great dealing with people who are empowered rather than faceless corporate drones.
If you read TFA's links, you'll find that Flickr's founder is among the members of staff documentably out of compliance with this policy.
By the way, "infringing" is not the same as "non-first-party" -- plenty of things are the latter but not the former: Cases where permission is granted are the most obvious (presumably, the cases where Flickr's founder posted photos with metadata indicating them to be taken by someone else fall into this category) -- and even were such permission not granted, the Egypt scenario is also on the lightest end of the gray area of fair use (where newsworthiness, lack of commercial value, and similar factors come into play). I can appreciate Flickr generally choosing not to get themselves involved in fair-use determinations (staying out of that minefield is certainly good policy in general) -- but if they're going to have enough wiggle room to violate their own policy under other circumstances, this is clearly at least as an appropriate a case for exceptional behavior.
If electricity is cheap in the daytime and scarce/expensive at night, the market will figure it out.
Maybe that means people have incentive to charge their cars at work. Maybe it means entrepreneurs buy excess electricity on the spot market during the daytime, use it to pump water uphill, and use the potential energy of that water to generate more expensive electricity at night. (Is that process lossy? Sure! But the market will only reward it if it provides a net benefit, so it's all good. Same for battery / ultracapacitor / other technologies -- if they're a good fit for the problem, someone will make money using them; if not, they won't).
So you were doing work for a spammer and now you're suddenly all holier-than-thou because he didn't pay you?
I guess you've made a few calls to the BSA in your time, too.
Read the article much?
The payments were for a court-ordered judgement.
It specifically advocates the killing of Jews and apostates, and the subjugation of unbelievers. I have the backing of the imams on this.
"The imams" aren't a unified group -- that's why people have been known to shop around to get a statement they agree with.
I'm not going on a blog post. See the FSF's analysis.
Eh? As the copyright holder, they can relicense under any terms they want, including App Store compatible ones; it's anyone else who can't do that.
Sorry, no.
VLC is GPLv2, and it's blocked from the app store due to license incompatibility.
Whilst it's inexcusable that they've been ripped off on their assets, it was rather foolish to release the source code for a currently marketed game.
They've been ripped off on the source too -- the App Store's license isn't GPL-compatible.
Still, it is going to take him forever to pay off his likely expensive tuition on that salary. However it would make a great 2nd job to have on the side.
Depends -- do we know which school he went to? It's still possible to pay your own way... or was a decade ago, anyhow.
For folks in software development, the value it brings is exposure to theory. I've had to clean up after folks who know the practice but not the theory -- poorly-chosen data structures, needlessly O(n^2) algorithms (or worse), schema design decisions indicating that they wouldn't know a normal form if it hit them in the head.
Mind you, it's possible to learn the theory without a formal education, and people who know the theory but not the practice can be pretty useless too... but I only know a single person whom I consider to be doing groundbreaking work who got there strictly on his own.
Not a big fan of Tom Lehrer, eh?
I've never -- never! -- heard the anthropic principal abused in that manner.