"no need for capital expenditure" and "minimal start-up costs" are not the same as "cheap". All it means is that you don't need to pay up-front.
It's like renting a car for a day vs buying one. If you only need a car a few times a year, renting is cheap. If you need a car every day for a decade, you should probably buy one.
As a cloud customer, reliability (currently at least) is up to you. If you want the extra reliability of running instances in multiple availability zones then it's up to you to pay for it.
The point of the cloud as it stands currently is not that it's cheap or reliable, but that it's easy to scale up/down with demand.
"cloud" is sold as a *convenient* way to compute, where it's quick to add resources when needed so you can start small and scale up (and down) with demand.
It is *not* generally considered a cheap or particularly reliable solution. So far at least none of the cloud providers are offering five nines--if you want that, you should (for now at least) jbe looking at enterprise/telecom gear.
I've heard decent things about the Western Digital TV Live boxes. For people that like to play with their tech, the Pivos Xios DS can be reflashed with a factory supported XBMC load. (Still basically beta, but reasonably stable.) This is a little ARM box that comes stock running Android, that has full sized USB ports, microSD slot, ethernet/WiFi, etc. I have one of these boxes, I use it for playing local media. I also have a Roku that gets used mostly for Netflix.
I played with a Raspberry Pi running XBMC...it worked, but the menus were a bit sluggish. The Xios is quite a bit quicker at navigating the menus.
If someone is laid off, the company owes them either notice or pay-in-lieu, as well as severence pay (which is intended to cover the typical time taken to find an equivalent job in a similar field). Both are on a sliding scale depending on time with the company and type of job. Once all that expires then there's still Employement Insurance benefits.
There are a whole lot of workers in the oil patch that get flown in for a week from wherever in the country they live, and then flown back home at the end of the week.
This replaces the old "company town" model, where the company would actually move whole families closer to the work site. The downside is that there are an awful lot of familes that are effectively single-parent half the time.
One of my friends is currently doing this, and it's terribly disruptive for his kids--it takes several days to adapt when conditions change.
Either go with pants/shorts with large thigh pockets, or else a small bag. Those holsters all look dorky, especially if you plan on wearing them in the summer with no jacket to hide them.
Just to nitpick, according to Wikipedia the design speed of the flat portions of the Autobahn was 160km/h. Certainly when I drove on it the slower traffic was generally doing 130 while the other lanes got progressively faster.
Unless the other family members are part of the business, if that person ever gets audited they're going to get dinged. You're only supposed to include actual business costs...in the case where something is shared between personal and business use you're supposed to pro-rate the amount you use it for business.
The low end is foil-wrapped particleboard, and is crap.
The mid range, is stained pine, and some of it is okay as long as you realized that it will dent fairly easily and is just barely beefy enough to do the job so it "feels" cheap.
The high end is solid walnut/oak/birch/maple, and is reasonably good, given that it's mostly designed to knock down for transport.
I have a solid birch kitchen table that is 9 years old. It's still in fine condition, except for where the kids dented the top banging it with utensils. The main downside is that it's laminated together from a bunch of short pieces of wood, but it cost less than it would to just buy the wood if I were to build it myself (which I could).
The Ikea kitchen cabinets use Blum hardware, which is about as good as it gets. Even there, you can get foil-wrapped particleboard doors, or painted MDF, or solid hardwood....you pick the quality level (and therefore the price).
At the previous company I worked for, a nightly software build ran for 15 hours on a couple of quad-core machines with 16GB of RAM. Building for a single target could easily take 6 hrs. I'd love to have a 32-core build machine with 128GB RAM and a terabyte of SSD.
All my other utilities have fixed monthly costs for basic access and a variable cost based on consumption. There's really no reason why you couldn't do the same for Internet access.
An ISP provides the ability to transfer packets between my home and the rest of the internet. As long as I'm within the speeds (and data cap) that I paid for, Net Neutrality says that it shouldn't matter what is actually in those packets.
To say that I'm not allowed to run a low-volume mail server is just a money grab, since I could use *way* more bandwidth watching netflix all day.
My connection is described as X Mbps upstream and Y Mbps downstream (where Y > X).
It really shouldn't matter if my upstream packets are acks to downstream data, or contain data from my server being requested by the outside world. Packets are packets, and if I'm supposed to get X upstream bandwidth, I should be able to do whatever I want with it.
If my ISP says I get 1Mbps upstream, it shouldn't matter if those upstream packets are acks to a fast download, or data packets being sent out by a server on my network. Net neutrality says that packets are packets.
I don't think offering a nobbled residential plan that doesn't allow for you to run a server - allowing Google to drive people onto a more expensive business plan that frees you from these constraints - is an assault to net neutrality.
Sure it is. Upstream packets are upstream packets, regardless of whether they're acks to a download stream or data sent in response to a request.
They can specify an upstream bandwidth without violating net neutrality, but to put arbitrary limits on what data I can send in my upstream packets is definitely violating neutrality.
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There are some things where five-nines makes sense.
Disclaimer...I have worked in the telecom industry in the past.
"no need for capital expenditure" and "minimal start-up costs" are not the same as "cheap". All it means is that you don't need to pay up-front.
It's like renting a car for a day vs buying one. If you only need a car a few times a year, renting is cheap. If you need a car every day for a decade, you should probably buy one.
As a cloud customer, reliability (currently at least) is up to you. If you want the extra reliability of running instances in multiple availability zones then it's up to you to pay for it.
The point of the cloud as it stands currently is not that it's cheap or reliable, but that it's easy to scale up/down with demand.
"cloud" is sold as a *convenient* way to compute, where it's quick to add resources when needed so you can start small and scale up (and down) with demand.
It is *not* generally considered a cheap or particularly reliable solution. So far at least none of the cloud providers are offering five nines--if you want that, you should (for now at least) jbe looking at enterprise/telecom gear.
I've heard decent things about the Western Digital TV Live boxes. For people that like to play with their tech, the Pivos Xios DS can be reflashed with a factory supported XBMC load. (Still basically beta, but reasonably stable.) This is a little ARM box that comes stock running Android, that has full sized USB ports, microSD slot, ethernet/WiFi, etc. I have one of these boxes, I use it for playing local media. I also have a Roku that gets used mostly for Netflix.
I played with a Raspberry Pi running XBMC...it worked, but the menus were a bit sluggish. The Xios is quite a bit quicker at navigating the menus.
Where if they don't give notice, they can pay you the equivalent amount of money.
If someone is laid off, the company owes them either notice or pay-in-lieu, as well as severence pay (which is intended to cover the typical time taken to find an equivalent job in a similar field). Both are on a sliding scale depending on time with the company and type of job. Once all that expires then there's still Employement Insurance benefits.
I had worked for them for quite a while though...
There are a whole lot of workers in the oil patch that get flown in for a week from wherever in the country they live, and then flown back home at the end of the week.
This replaces the old "company town" model, where the company would actually move whole families closer to the work site. The downside is that there are an awful lot of familes that are effectively single-parent half the time.
One of my friends is currently doing this, and it's terribly disruptive for his kids--it takes several days to adapt when conditions change.
Either go with pants/shorts with large thigh pockets, or else a small bag. Those holsters all look dorky, especially if you plan on wearing them in the summer with no jacket to hide them.
I've got several pairs of shorts and pants that could easily handle a 7" tablet.
Give me a bike helmet with lots of vents.
While Dell does use branded WiFi components, they also have bog-standard Intel adapters as a higher-end option.
Just to nitpick, according to Wikipedia the design speed of the flat portions of the Autobahn was 160km/h. Certainly when I drove on it the slower traffic was generally doing 130 while the other lanes got progressively faster.
Unless the other family members are part of the business, if that person ever gets audited they're going to get dinged. You're only supposed to include actual business costs...in the case where something is shared between personal and business use you're supposed to pro-rate the amount you use it for business.
http://www.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/for-ibm-power/
The low end is foil-wrapped particleboard, and is crap.
The mid range, is stained pine, and some of it is okay as long as you realized that it will dent fairly easily and is just barely beefy enough to do the job so it "feels" cheap.
The high end is solid walnut/oak/birch/maple, and is reasonably good, given that it's mostly designed to knock down for transport.
I have a solid birch kitchen table that is 9 years old. It's still in fine condition, except for where the kids dented the top banging it with utensils. The main downside is that it's laminated together from a bunch of short pieces of wood, but it cost less than it would to just buy the wood if I were to build it myself (which I could).
The Ikea kitchen cabinets use Blum hardware, which is about as good as it gets. Even there, you can get foil-wrapped particleboard doors, or painted MDF, or solid hardwood....you pick the quality level (and therefore the price).
It takes a loooooong time.
Software compiling can often use as many cores as you throw at it. Video transcoding is parallelizable as well.
At the previous company I worked for, a nightly software build ran for 15 hours on a couple of quad-core machines with 16GB of RAM. Building for a single target could easily take 6 hrs. I'd love to have a 32-core build machine with 128GB RAM and a terabyte of SSD.
All my other utilities have fixed monthly costs for basic access and a variable cost based on consumption. There's really no reason why you couldn't do the same for Internet access.
An ISP provides the ability to transfer packets between my home and the rest of the internet. As long as I'm within the speeds (and data cap) that I paid for, Net Neutrality says that it shouldn't matter what is actually in those packets.
To say that I'm not allowed to run a low-volume mail server is just a money grab, since I could use *way* more bandwidth watching netflix all day.
My connection is described as X Mbps upstream and Y Mbps downstream (where Y > X).
It really shouldn't matter if my upstream packets are acks to downstream data, or contain data from my server being requested by the outside world. Packets are packets, and if I'm supposed to get X upstream bandwidth, I should be able to do whatever I want with it.
If my ISP says I get 1Mbps upstream, it shouldn't matter if those upstream packets are acks to a fast download, or data packets being sent out by a server on my network. Net neutrality says that packets are packets.
I don't think offering a nobbled residential plan that doesn't allow for you to run a server - allowing Google to drive people onto a more expensive business plan that frees you from these constraints - is an assault to net neutrality.
Sure it is. Upstream packets are upstream packets, regardless of whether they're acks to a download stream or data sent in response to a request.
They can specify an upstream bandwidth without violating net neutrality, but to put arbitrary limits on what data I can send in my upstream packets is definitely violating neutrality.