There's obviously going to be a judgment call at some point.
Are stories about boy wizard orphans all protected by copyright? Of course not.
But if you make a story about Larry Potter and his trip to Gogworts from platform 8 and 3/4s, you should expect to get sued as a copyright infringer.
In this case, one example of problematic content that would, I think, be infringing, is the maze itself (shown on the developer page). There are almost an infinite number of ways to structure a maze but at a glance, it appears he has ripped off the exact layout of one or more of the Pac-Man mazes. (Pac-Man and the ghosts seem nearly identical, too; was the artwork literally copied? It doesn't need to be. If you sit down and sketch a mouse that is "inspired by" Mickey Mouse, it doesn't have to be a perfect copy for it to be infringing.)
Some other people have pointed this out, but there are two flaws with your understanding:
(1) This is not transit traffic, at least neither has described it as that. This is traffic being carried to end customers. In/out ratios matter a lot for transit traffic, where you're receiving traffic for another peer. This is where networks are connected:
A B C D
If C is sending B traffic for A, then B expects to be able to send just as much traffic to C for D.
(2) "Ratios" in the peering sense often are much less about local traffic ratios - they're about long haul. If A needs to send traffic from the west coast to B on the east coast, and it has a choice between giving them the traffic at the west coast exchange and letting B carry it across the country, or they can carry it across the country and give it to B. That "long haul" cost is over a lot more miles of fiber and is therefore a lot more expensive than local exchange - a lot of these providers will already have metro fiber rings that terminate in a multi-tenant telco building, and so adding bandwidth between them is just a matter of having a big enough router, and running a cable between the ports. Carrying the traffic across the country means having fiber buried in the ground. Peering disputes often happen because of the un-evenness of the network. Even if you exchange equal traffic, if provider A has customers all of the country/world, and provider B is just in LA, provider A is bearing all the long-haul costs, and provider B is "riding free". Yes, both A and B's customers want to exchange traffic, but peering (settlement-free peering) is based in general on the "meet me halfway" principle.
That said, there's an entirely different question here, because I've heard Comcast mention CDNs a few times. CDNs have nothing at all to do with "peering". If Comcast provides a bunch of CDN capacity on their network, if L3 wants to use a lot more CDN capacity, that's on L3 to pay. (At least as far as I know, it has always been the person delivering the content that bears the cost of a CDN. Consumer broadband providers may run and use caching servers that ACT like CDNs, but without configuration from the end sites, but they wouldn't be called CDNs.)
Perl, Python, and Ruby unable to match Java's performance.
I saw a comparison a while again of 3 sites implementing identical functionality in PHP, Python, and Java, and the performance characteristics were nearly identical, assuming that none of them were interpreting on the fly. (ie, php had a bytecode cash that was hot for the purposes of the test, etc.)
If anything, I'd say that while runtime speed might be similar, Java uses more memory per connection.
Dude, if someone wants to hang out in front of your store to trade a game all day, I think you should probably not worry about it. That's a price in time almost no one is going to be willing to pay.
You could ask why not refer to Google App Engine as a Platform as a Service and leave it at that, or why not call gmail a software as a service, and leave it at that.
We're really only talking about semantics, so it's not like there's a right answer, per se. But I can say that I interact with people all the time in Fortune 500 companies, talking about cloud, and IaaS is firmly considered part of "cloud services" in the vernacular.
Amazon only provides IaaS but is clearly considered cloud. Even for large entirely private enterprises, they've begun referring to internal IaaS projects as "private cloud". (e.g., I know of a large bank that ditched 30k desktops in favor of 10k rackmount servers, delivered desktops to the vast majority of employees via KMS service, and then used the unused cpu for number crunching. They refer to their 10k servers as their private cloud.)
And then there are people using IaaS and paying for it, and they call it cloud, whether that's Zynga or Netflix or the like.
So I think IaaS-as-cloud is here to stay. Which isn't to take anything away from PaaS or SaaS usage of the term.
I was unclear. I was referring to Infrastructure as a Service Cloud. (Although newservers.com, for example, bills as "bare metal cloud", and comes very close to meeting the Gartner definition.)
And GAE and Gmail are definitely cloud services - a PaaS service and a SaaS service, respectively.
But there is a difference between a VM, and an IaaS Cloud service, even though ~all IaaS services will have a VM layer underpinning them.
There are a lot of vendors providing appliances now that recognize this, and especially now that VMware has entered the cloud market with their cloud director product, you can expect to see an even bigger proliferation of appliances. Want to run LogLogic? Don't buy a box, push a "deploy appliance" button at your provider. What, your new group needs a sharepoint server? Push buttan.
At least for a small instance, a reserved instance running full time for 3 years is 50% (50.8%, to be exact) of the cost of 3 years of full usage of an on demand instance..085*24*365 = 744.6
Amazon's offering is great, but it has a long way to go to perfect. If you use a VMware cloud director based cloud service, you start to get a feel for how much more can be done. For example, as soon as you can just click on a VM and have a full keyboard-mouse-screen console pop up, you start to wonder why you'd want to live without it.
(1) You just assumed that your use case was all use cases. Here's an example of a company I've done work for that is in the cloud. They have software that maps 2d face photos onto 3d models and then can render video out in flash that is customized for the user. (If you tried Nike's world cup you-in-the-advertisement video ad, that was them.) Can you imagine how variable demand is if your cpu utilization goes up 10,000% when a client pushes an ad to market, versus when you're largely idle and doing demos and handling light consumer demand? That's burstability.
(2) On a lesser scale, many sites may have huge variation on when they have high traffic. I'm sure we can find a lot of sites that are insanely busy in the evening from, say, 5-9pm, and basically idle all night long.
(3) Many organizations - larger ones - need to supply temporary environments, like dev & test/QA build environments. They need to spin them up to test applications and then dump them. They might be utilized 20 hours/month, but be under heavy load for those 20 hours. Did your calculations take into account needing an entire copy of your production site for 20 hours a day for dev & test?
This is just a few of many examples. Outside of Amazon, cloud computing also is used internally. I know of one large bank that got rid of 30,000 desktop machines in favor of 10,000 racked servers and KMS services. By day, the KMS services serve desktops to users, and IT never has to go touch an end user computer again. By night - so 15-16 hours a day - all that cpu, instead of sitting idle and being wasted, is scooped up by the software running their financial modeling software, so it number crunches all night long. It's like a triple win - easy to administer "desktops", less actual machines, and a bunch of extra compute power for their number crunching farm.
So, you may have done the math for your use case, but there are companies which could easily afford to build out datacenter space, and instead are using huge amounts of cloud resources instead.
Amazon is not running a cloud with their spare resources. I believe I heard at one point that someone (Zynga?) was running 10,000 VMs on amazon at once. And that's one customer. Amazon is trying to be THE host of the future. Which is funny, since their other business is retail.
But make no mistake - 10 years from now, Amazon could easily be known as the Cloud Infrastructure provider, who also happens to do some retail. (Or less than 10.)
VMs are a building block of a cloud computing environment. Definitions vary, but you can read Gartner's definition of Cloud, for example.
- Service interfaces - Scalable and elastic - Shared - Metered by use - Delivered over the Internet
So a VM is necessary but not sufficient; a VM is what you get when you virtualize an underlying resource pool. If you virtualize a pool of hardware, you get an elastic pool of shared compute resources; but there still needs to be more coordination to supply an API, metering, etc.
Beyond IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), there are additional cloud tiers - Platform as a Service (Google Apps for example), and Software as a Service (salesforce.com, or Google Apps for your Domain).
You can't just keep scaling horizontally to avoid noisy neighbors. The problem is, unlike with cpu and memory, Amazon doesn't currently have a way to control how many IOPs one tenant has. You might even scale up from 2 "servers" to 4, and end up with the same neighbor because you're on the same underlying hardware. Plus, the issue is: it's not predictable. You might have great IOPs at one point, and then some other tenant starts consuming a bunch of them and there's contention, and your performance degrades.
Is your DVR the pay-an-additional-monthly fee to your cable type, or pay-a-monthly-fee-for-programming-data type? Either way, DVRs are a shitty solution to a shitty system of content delivery.
Isn't this supposed to compete with TV, where you pay $60 a month for access to shows with Ads that are only shown at specific times where you have to be watching, and generally come in bad resolution?
I thought what he said was perfectly in context. The bill, however, had provisions which disallowed raising rates in response to the new requirements (ie, anti recission, child coverage, pre-existing conditions) - because the bill also had a mandate. Insurance companies were supposed to save enough via the mandate that the provisions would balance out.
Google could not exist without a free and educated society. Maintenance of a free and educated society requires a social framework that includes education and social services. Those things must be paid for. They should be paid for by all, but to the extent that collection of the funds required represents a significant burden, that burden should be shifted towards those upon whom it has the least impact.
A laissez-faire society where everything is a purchase is a recipe for darkness, ignorance, slavery, and chaos.
Note: none of this is actually to argue that there should be a corporate income tax or a punitive one, which based on everything I've seen, there probably should not be, or it should be much, much smaller. But the idea that a fee-based society would function is preposterous.
To me, grinding implies you do something repeatedly that you don't enjoy, for the sake of acquiring something. I look forward to raiding each week because it's fun time for me.
I can't say my guild is typical, but it's generally very drama free. We're pretty damn picky about who we recruit and we've passed on extremely good players in the past because they didn't fit the guild persona.
I completely understand the sort of drama you're describing, but it's almost entirely absent from our guild, probably because our officers make an earnest effort to treat everyone equally and it's noticeable. The guild itself has been around a long time, and in that entire time, I've only ever seen one person leave for another raiding guild. Basically once people play with us, the only reason they leave is because they are quitting raiding to pursue other interests or because of life changes like a job/etc.
Raids are still not being tested on Beta. Even if they rolled today, it might be tight to test/tune those in 3 weeks. I'd give the beta thing another week or 3.
Regarding the Arena Season - even if the ratings at first don't mean much, Arena Pts = get gear, so I'm sure some people want to get some matches in and start getting points for playing.
Slashdot Mirror
There's obviously going to be a judgment call at some point.
Are stories about boy wizard orphans all protected by copyright? Of course not.
But if you make a story about Larry Potter and his trip to Gogworts from platform 8 and 3/4s, you should expect to get sued as a copyright infringer.
In this case, one example of problematic content that would, I think, be infringing, is the maze itself (shown on the developer page). There are almost an infinite number of ways to structure a maze but at a glance, it appears he has ripped off the exact layout of one or more of the Pac-Man mazes. (Pac-Man and the ghosts seem nearly identical, too; was the artwork literally copied? It doesn't need to be. If you sit down and sketch a mouse that is "inspired by" Mickey Mouse, it doesn't have to be a perfect copy for it to be infringing.)
Some other people have pointed this out, but there are two flaws with your understanding:
(1) This is not transit traffic, at least neither has described it as that. This is traffic being carried to end customers. In/out ratios matter a lot for transit traffic, where you're receiving traffic for another peer. This is where networks are connected:
A B C D
If C is sending B traffic for A, then B expects to be able to send just as much traffic to C for D.
(2) "Ratios" in the peering sense often are much less about local traffic ratios - they're about long haul. If A needs to send traffic from the west coast to B on the east coast, and it has a choice between giving them the traffic at the west coast exchange and letting B carry it across the country, or they can carry it across the country and give it to B. That "long haul" cost is over a lot more miles of fiber and is therefore a lot more expensive than local exchange - a lot of these providers will already have metro fiber rings that terminate in a multi-tenant telco building, and so adding bandwidth between them is just a matter of having a big enough router, and running a cable between the ports. Carrying the traffic across the country means having fiber buried in the ground. Peering disputes often happen because of the un-evenness of the network. Even if you exchange equal traffic, if provider A has customers all of the country/world, and provider B is just in LA, provider A is bearing all the long-haul costs, and provider B is "riding free". Yes, both A and B's customers want to exchange traffic, but peering (settlement-free peering) is based in general on the "meet me halfway" principle.
That said, there's an entirely different question here, because I've heard Comcast mention CDNs a few times. CDNs have nothing at all to do with "peering". If Comcast provides a bunch of CDN capacity on their network, if L3 wants to use a lot more CDN capacity, that's on L3 to pay. (At least as far as I know, it has always been the person delivering the content that bears the cost of a CDN. Consumer broadband providers may run and use caching servers that ACT like CDNs, but without configuration from the end sites, but they wouldn't be called CDNs.)
I saw a comparison a while again of 3 sites implementing identical functionality in PHP, Python, and Java, and the performance characteristics were nearly identical, assuming that none of them were interpreting on the fly. (ie, php had a bytecode cash that was hot for the purposes of the test, etc.)
If anything, I'd say that while runtime speed might be similar, Java uses more memory per connection.
Sooo... since when?
Dude, if someone wants to hang out in front of your store to trade a game all day, I think you should probably not worry about it. That's a price in time almost no one is going to be willing to pay.
You could ask why not refer to Google App Engine as a Platform as a Service and leave it at that, or why not call gmail a software as a service, and leave it at that.
We're really only talking about semantics, so it's not like there's a right answer, per se. But I can say that I interact with people all the time in Fortune 500 companies, talking about cloud, and IaaS is firmly considered part of "cloud services" in the vernacular.
Amazon only provides IaaS but is clearly considered cloud. Even for large entirely private enterprises, they've begun referring to internal IaaS projects as "private cloud". (e.g., I know of a large bank that ditched 30k desktops in favor of 10k rackmount servers, delivered desktops to the vast majority of employees via KMS service, and then used the unused cpu for number crunching. They refer to their 10k servers as their private cloud.)
And then there are people using IaaS and paying for it, and they call it cloud, whether that's Zynga or Netflix or the like.
So I think IaaS-as-cloud is here to stay. Which isn't to take anything away from PaaS or SaaS usage of the term.
I was unclear. I was referring to Infrastructure as a Service Cloud. (Although newservers.com, for example, bills as "bare metal cloud", and comes very close to meeting the Gartner definition.)
And GAE and Gmail are definitely cloud services - a PaaS service and a SaaS service, respectively.
But there is a difference between a VM, and an IaaS Cloud service, even though ~all IaaS services will have a VM layer underpinning them.
There are a lot of vendors providing appliances now that recognize this, and especially now that VMware has entered the cloud market with their cloud director product, you can expect to see an even bigger proliferation of appliances. Want to run LogLogic? Don't buy a box, push a "deploy appliance" button at your provider. What, your new group needs a sharepoint server? Push buttan.
The US government just awarded a large contract (or set of contracts) for IaaS:
Here
They have 11 vendors - one of which is a company that is using AWS under the hood.
At least for a small instance, a reserved instance running full time for 3 years is 50% (50.8%, to be exact) of the cost of 3 years of full usage of an on demand instance. .085*24*365 = 744.6
(.03*24*365)+(350/3) = 378.666
Is the annual cost comparison.
Like spotcloud?
Amazon's offering is great, but it has a long way to go to perfect. If you use a VMware cloud director based cloud service, you start to get a feel for how much more can be done. For example, as soon as you can just click on a VM and have a full keyboard-mouse-screen console pop up, you start to wonder why you'd want to live without it.
(1) You just assumed that your use case was all use cases. Here's an example of a company I've done work for that is in the cloud. They have software that maps 2d face photos onto 3d models and then can render video out in flash that is customized for the user. (If you tried Nike's world cup you-in-the-advertisement video ad, that was them.) Can you imagine how variable demand is if your cpu utilization goes up 10,000% when a client pushes an ad to market, versus when you're largely idle and doing demos and handling light consumer demand? That's burstability.
(2) On a lesser scale, many sites may have huge variation on when they have high traffic. I'm sure we can find a lot of sites that are insanely busy in the evening from, say, 5-9pm, and basically idle all night long.
(3) Many organizations - larger ones - need to supply temporary environments, like dev & test/QA build environments. They need to spin them up to test applications and then dump them. They might be utilized 20 hours/month, but be under heavy load for those 20 hours. Did your calculations take into account needing an entire copy of your production site for 20 hours a day for dev & test?
This is just a few of many examples. Outside of Amazon, cloud computing also is used internally. I know of one large bank that got rid of 30,000 desktop machines in favor of 10,000 racked servers and KMS services. By day, the KMS services serve desktops to users, and IT never has to go touch an end user computer again. By night - so 15-16 hours a day - all that cpu, instead of sitting idle and being wasted, is scooped up by the software running their financial modeling software, so it number crunches all night long. It's like a triple win - easy to administer "desktops", less actual machines, and a bunch of extra compute power for their number crunching farm.
So, you may have done the math for your use case, but there are companies which could easily afford to build out datacenter space, and instead are using huge amounts of cloud resources instead.
Amazon is not running a cloud with their spare resources. I believe I heard at one point that someone (Zynga?) was running 10,000 VMs on amazon at once. And that's one customer. Amazon is trying to be THE host of the future. Which is funny, since their other business is retail.
But make no mistake - 10 years from now, Amazon could easily be known as the Cloud Infrastructure provider, who also happens to do some retail. (Or less than 10.)
VMs are a building block of a cloud computing environment. Definitions vary, but you can read Gartner's definition of Cloud, for example.
- Service interfaces
- Scalable and elastic
- Shared
- Metered by use
- Delivered over the Internet
So a VM is necessary but not sufficient; a VM is what you get when you virtualize an underlying resource pool. If you virtualize a pool of hardware, you get an elastic pool of shared compute resources; but there still needs to be more coordination to supply an API, metering, etc.
Beyond IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), there are additional cloud tiers - Platform as a Service (Google Apps for example), and Software as a Service (salesforce.com, or Google Apps for your Domain).
You can't just keep scaling horizontally to avoid noisy neighbors. The problem is, unlike with cpu and memory, Amazon doesn't currently have a way to control how many IOPs one tenant has. You might even scale up from 2 "servers" to 4, and end up with the same neighbor because you're on the same underlying hardware. Plus, the issue is: it's not predictable. You might have great IOPs at one point, and then some other tenant starts consuming a bunch of them and there's contention, and your performance degrades.
Is your DVR the pay-an-additional-monthly fee to your cable type, or pay-a-monthly-fee-for-programming-data type? Either way, DVRs are a shitty solution to a shitty system of content delivery.
Isn't this supposed to compete with TV, where you pay $60 a month for access to shows with Ads that are only shown at specific times where you have to be watching, and generally come in bad resolution?
It was about 3:1 Dems in favor, Republicans slightly more against than for.
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2008/roll681.xml
Is the roll call vote for the final House TARP bill from 2008.
I thought what he said was perfectly in context. The bill, however, had provisions which disallowed raising rates in response to the new requirements (ie, anti recission, child coverage, pre-existing conditions) - because the bill also had a mandate. Insurance companies were supposed to save enough via the mandate that the provisions would balance out.
2 recessions and the worst economic crash in 70 years is "pretty well"?
Remember when we told you standards mattered, and cross-browser compatibility mattered?
Well, it was for your own good, as much as ours. My, how the tables have turned.
Since basically every browser supports SSL/TLS for https: connections.
Google could not exist without a free and educated society. Maintenance of a free and educated society requires a social framework that includes education and social services. Those things must be paid for. They should be paid for by all, but to the extent that collection of the funds required represents a significant burden, that burden should be shifted towards those upon whom it has the least impact.
A laissez-faire society where everything is a purchase is a recipe for darkness, ignorance, slavery, and chaos.
Note: none of this is actually to argue that there should be a corporate income tax or a punitive one, which based on everything I've seen, there probably should not be, or it should be much, much smaller. But the idea that a fee-based society would function is preposterous.
To me, grinding implies you do something repeatedly that you don't enjoy, for the sake of acquiring something. I look forward to raiding each week because it's fun time for me.
I can't say my guild is typical, but it's generally very drama free. We're pretty damn picky about who we recruit and we've passed on extremely good players in the past because they didn't fit the guild persona.
I completely understand the sort of drama you're describing, but it's almost entirely absent from our guild, probably because our officers make an earnest effort to treat everyone equally and it's noticeable. The guild itself has been around a long time, and in that entire time, I've only ever seen one person leave for another raiding guild. Basically once people play with us, the only reason they leave is because they are quitting raiding to pursue other interests or because of life changes like a job/etc.
Raids are still not being tested on Beta. Even if they rolled today, it might be tight to test/tune those in 3 weeks. I'd give the beta thing another week or 3.
Regarding the Arena Season - even if the ratings at first don't mean much, Arena Pts = get gear, so I'm sure some people want to get some matches in and start getting points for playing.