Not really half-assed from an implementation perspective, but from a marketing perspective. Amazon likes people to think it's magic, which is fine if it worked flawlessly all the time. But it doesn't, because it's just a technical solution for a specific problem. Unless you run instances in multiple zones, use redundant EBS volumes, and your entire app is built to handle global redundancy, it's not just going to be 100% uptime out of the box. I fault Amazon for lying to technical-enough people.
It's not short sighted at all. When someone else runs your gear, all you can do is sweat until they get things back online, and they can take their time under what's known as "commerically reasonable SLAs". When you own your own gear, your own colo, etc., how much effort you use to get back up and running is up to you.
"The Cloud" for mission critical businesses is a joke.
But when it's your gear, you have some control over the situation. When it's "in the cloud", you sit and get yelled at by the CXO and sweat if you'll still have a job while cloud provider X works to fix the problem (and their liability? whatever you paid for the service).
In the event you're lucky enough to be on Mars when an extinction level event happens on Earth, you have the benefit of getting to continue to live (if self-sufficiency has occurred by then).
OK. Let's assume best case you don't care about the purity of the water you're using. Unless you're next to the ocean, where are you going to get millions of gallons at a sufficient rate to cool a reactor? A river perhaps (Byron Generating Facility in Byron, IL sits on the Rock River, so this would be possible). But anywhere else? I doubt you're going to get a sufficient flow rate from an underground aquifer, so you'd want to site future plants near either a) lakes, b) fairly large sized rivers, or c) the ocean.
Shit is going to break. This is a fact. You can plan for everything, but some damn gremlin is going to throw a wrench somewhere in your engineering plans at some point. Plan for the worst, and hope for the best outcome.
There are dozens of this sort of reactor still in use. All of them should be fitted with gravity-fed cooling systems, immediately.
Indeed, although I think the more difficult problem is going to be finding a constant supply of pure water to circulate as coolant when disaster strikes. Most disasters are going to cause hell for whatever container you're using to keep millions of gallons of pure water at the ready.
They're probably paid better than the national average because the government requires a lot more college-educated folks than the US economy as a whole does. I'm not a US government employee, but I am a skilled worker who gets paid well.
I've trailered my Tesla Roadster to the Dragon's Tail (NC/TN) (http://tailofthedragon.com/dragon.html) and the Blue Ridge Parkway (http://www.blueridgeparkway.org/) with a Toyota Tundra pickup equipped with a swapped Cummins Diesel powertrain powered by biodiesel.
Not everyone has this advantage, but to write off electric vehicles because EV charging infrastructure isn't ubiquitous yet is disingenuous, chicken/egg and all that jazz. Some group is going to have to be the first adopters who don't whine and learn how to work around the problems, and those people would be us Roadster, Model S, and Nissan Leaf owners.
Quit whining and either a) get an electric car, b) promote electric vehicle charging stations in your community, or c) both.
If you believe providing healthcare to a country's citizens to be facisim, I'm sure there is space available for you in Somalia (a libertarian paradise). You pay taxes for roads, schools, police and fire protection, regulation that protects YOU (DOT, EPA, etc). Healthcare is no different. We're the only first world country with a pathetic healthcare system, and it'd be cheaper to bitch about it than to go all tea party crazy like you're doing.
No sir, they would've gone up anyway. Health insurers have shareholders who demand "value". GPP was just lucky enough to get some benefit from the typical screwing.
More than 70% of Americans have a roundtrip daily commute of 30 miles. If you're too dumb to buy an electric car and rent a gas car for those few times you're going out of town, then don't be pissed when folks like me speculate on the price of oil to make money off your irrational behavior and poor critical thinking skills.
Amazon is the biggest provider of retail cloud storage that they're providing to pay for the storage/computing power they're not using during their idle parts of the year. That doesn't mean they're anywhere as large as someone like Google (estimated at over 100,000 servers).
I'm not saying it's unreasonable. For Amazon, it is. I'm saying that someone with bigger resources is going to come along (Apple/Google) and totally stomp on it. You only have to store the MP3 once (yes, multiple copies for redundancy, pedantic, etc). Once that MP3 is stored, you just link other "owners" to it. How many TB could that really be? 100TB? Even at a Petabyte, that's easy for $BIG_DATA shops.
But then, I logged in and you only get 5GB of storage for free. Seriously? You can de-dupe on the Amazon S3 backend and just charge a flat fee for unlimited music? How many unique MP3s can possible be out there?
Slashdot Mirror
Not really half-assed from an implementation perspective, but from a marketing perspective. Amazon likes people to think it's magic, which is fine if it worked flawlessly all the time. But it doesn't, because it's just a technical solution for a specific problem. Unless you run instances in multiple zones, use redundant EBS volumes, and your entire app is built to handle global redundancy, it's not just going to be 100% uptime out of the box. I fault Amazon for lying to technical-enough people.
It's not short sighted at all. When someone else runs your gear, all you can do is sweat until they get things back online, and they can take their time under what's known as "commerically reasonable SLAs". When you own your own gear, your own colo, etc., how much effort you use to get back up and running is up to you.
"The Cloud" for mission critical businesses is a joke.
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.
Your cloud computer is a Xen instance in Virginia, and your "EBS block storage" is an iSCSI target. Magic it ain't.
But when it's your gear, you have some control over the situation. When it's "in the cloud", you sit and get yelled at by the CXO and sweat if you'll still have a job while cloud provider X works to fix the problem (and their liability? whatever you paid for the service).
I read that in Farnsworth's voice ;)
"Good news everyone!"
Sir, I think you're overly optimistic to think we can defend ourselves from everything. We can't even fix our own damn problems (i.e. climate change).
In the event you're lucky enough to be on Mars when an extinction level event happens on Earth, you have the benefit of getting to continue to live (if self-sufficiency has occurred by then).
You forgot about SpaceX developing the cheapest heavy lift vehicle to date, Falcon Heavy (which is most likely going to get humans to Mars). ;)
OK. Let's assume best case you don't care about the purity of the water you're using. Unless you're next to the ocean, where are you going to get millions of gallons at a sufficient rate to cool a reactor? A river perhaps (Byron Generating Facility in Byron, IL sits on the Rock River, so this would be possible). But anywhere else? I doubt you're going to get a sufficient flow rate from an underground aquifer, so you'd want to site future plants near either a) lakes, b) fairly large sized rivers, or c) the ocean.
Shit is going to break. This is a fact. You can plan for everything, but some damn gremlin is going to throw a wrench somewhere in your engineering plans at some point. Plan for the worst, and hope for the best outcome.
There are dozens of this sort of reactor still in use. All of them should be fitted with gravity-fed cooling systems, immediately.
Indeed, although I think the more difficult problem is going to be finding a constant supply of pure water to circulate as coolant when disaster strikes. Most disasters are going to cause hell for whatever container you're using to keep millions of gallons of pure water at the ready.
They're probably paid better than the national average because the government requires a lot more college-educated folks than the US economy as a whole does. I'm not a US government employee, but I am a skilled worker who gets paid well.
I've trailered my Tesla Roadster to the Dragon's Tail (NC/TN) (http://tailofthedragon.com/dragon.html) and the Blue Ridge Parkway (http://www.blueridgeparkway.org/) with a Toyota Tundra pickup equipped with a swapped Cummins Diesel powertrain powered by biodiesel.
Not everyone has this advantage, but to write off electric vehicles because EV charging infrastructure isn't ubiquitous yet is disingenuous, chicken/egg and all that jazz. Some group is going to have to be the first adopters who don't whine and learn how to work around the problems, and those people would be us Roadster, Model S, and Nissan Leaf owners.
Quit whining and either a) get an electric car, b) promote electric vehicle charging stations in your community, or c) both.
s/bitch/fix the problem/
Populist? To rail against a toolbag complaining about making $174K/yr while his party drags teachers through the mud making $50-60K/yr? Fuck 'em.
If you believe providing healthcare to a country's citizens to be facisim, I'm sure there is space available for you in Somalia (a libertarian paradise). You pay taxes for roads, schools, police and fire protection, regulation that protects YOU (DOT, EPA, etc). Healthcare is no different. We're the only first world country with a pathetic healthcare system, and it'd be cheaper to bitch about it than to go all tea party crazy like you're doing.
No sir, they would've gone up anyway. Health insurers have shareholders who demand "value". GPP was just lucky enough to get some benefit from the typical screwing.
Single payer is the only way.
Minor correction: The Roadster is rated at around 240 miles/charge, while one of the owners recently was able to get 300 miles out of it.
More than 70% of Americans have a roundtrip daily commute of 30 miles. If you're too dumb to buy an electric car and rent a gas car for those few times you're going out of town, then don't be pissed when folks like me speculate on the price of oil to make money off your irrational behavior and poor critical thinking skills.
Top Gear is a slightly more intelligent version of an automotive-based Jackass program.
Amazon is the biggest provider of retail cloud storage that they're providing to pay for the storage/computing power they're not using during their idle parts of the year. That doesn't mean they're anywhere as large as someone like Google (estimated at over 100,000 servers).
I'm not saying it's unreasonable. For Amazon, it is. I'm saying that someone with bigger resources is going to come along (Apple/Google) and totally stomp on it. You only have to store the MP3 once (yes, multiple copies for redundancy, pedantic, etc). Once that MP3 is stored, you just link other "owners" to it. How many TB could that really be? 100TB? Even at a Petabyte, that's easy for $BIG_DATA shops.
Until you get a Google Music or Amazon Cloudplayer app for your android head unit in your car.
Fark yeah they will:
http://www.amazon.com/cloudplayer
But then, I logged in and you only get 5GB of storage for free. Seriously? You can de-dupe on the Amazon S3 backend and just charge a flat fee for unlimited music? How many unique MP3s can possible be out there?
Waiting for Google Music.
So. much. THIS.