atomic77

Indeed, LXD would seem to be a faster, more efficient way of doing what you would do with traditional VMs. I don't see a lot of overlap with docker, despite the superficial similarity.

I certainly agree with the underlying idea, and maybe its not an apples to apples comparison, but Openstack would be an example of an open cloud platform that has failed to provide such benefits.

Rackspace has largely abandoned the project after initially opening it up, and public clouds based on Openstack seem to be getting shut down left and right (I could go on a long rant about why that is the case, since I am an Openstack contributor :)

I kind of see where you are going with this, but perception may not be as important here as you are suggesting.

To address your last 'if' scenario - notice that Amazon, as a large online retailer, had a compelling reason to offer up the use of the infrastructure they had to build anyway, which was over-provisioned for most of the year. I don't have numbers, but I would be surprised if Google has anything close to the kind of seasonality Amazon experiences.

Once it became clear that Amazon was onto something with this whole utility computing/cloud thing, the rest had to play catch up, and continue to do so to this day.

This makes sense. Perhaps Amazon hasn't come far enough along in that process, or, they see their proprietary designs as competitive advantage.

I haven't followed this project too closely, but, it seems interesting that it has taken this long for Google to join (and the conspicuous absence of Amazon). Anyone able to speculate on why now?

It's comparable to Chicago, perhaps a bit colder in the winter.

Fair enough. My only point is that salary is only one part of the equation when you compare a place like Montreal to the bay area - public services, being in a better overall state in terms of priority and financing mean that you don't need as much money to have a good quality of life.

No question the salaries are lower, but two things balance that out.

Income distribution is somewhat more even in Canada, so maybe you don't make as much but the people in 'lower' positions make more, relatively. This is actually a feature, not a bug - the city is safe, there is still a middle class, public services work (relatively) well and you can walk around as a tech person without worrying about a person randomly punching you.

Second is that you will not have to worry about, and save for, large costs like health care and schooling. People in the US seem to go way outside of their budget just in order to get into a district with good public schools, or, pay an obscene amount for private schooling. That kind of adds up over 18 years. Private schools in Canada exist, but by no means are you disadvantaged in life if you grow up in an average middle class area and go to a public school.

To address both comments - I didn't mean to suggest Montreal is the new promised land, just to add some discussion of non-US locations that may hold promise since the comments had been US-centric.

Most tech people working in the US likely will be shocked at how little tech workers are paid in most of the rest of the world, including Canada. But not everything is about absolute salary.

Montreal, imo, provides a well-balanced quality of life for a wide range of demographics. Good schools and govt-provided health care for those with families. Bilingualism for the culturally inclined. Nearby mountains and wilderness for nature lovers. Unrivalled nightlife for the younger who want to party it up. I don't know of another place that can offer all of those things together.

In Canada, Montreal is a great city with reasonable living costs and a decent tech scene (esp game development). Climate will probably scare away anyone not originally from the east coast or midwest though.

Toronto and Vancouver, despite having some pluses, unfortunately can't be recommended to anyone that cares about cost of housing.

Seems like March has been quite warm in the eastern half of North America and Europe - not sure about other places.

Certainly it's the right direction, but, you have to wonder about a company that took until 2016 to realize that Linux was an important platform to support for an enterprise RDBMS.

With the unseasonable March temperatures, I actually thought April fools day had crept up on me...

Where this could be interesting is in cloud/VM environments where the block device may actually be mounted over the network.

The performance improvement for fast devices cited in a link on the article [1] are pretty dramatic, but I wonder about how slow the device needs to be before polling becomes a problem. That same link mentions that slow devices benefit, but, speculate that it may be due to the CPU not being able to go into a deeper sleep state.

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/663543/

Actually, further to your point, the documentation states this explanation of the default for random/seq_page_cost:

"The default value can be thought of as modeling random access as 40 times slower than sequential, while expecting 90% of random reads to be cached

If you believe a 90% cache rate is an incorrect assumption for your workload, you can increase random_page_cost to better reflect the true cost of random storage reads. Correspondingly, if your data is likely to be completely in cache, such as when the database is smaller than the total server memory, decreasing random_page_cost can be appropriate. Storage that has a low random read cost relative to sequential, e.g. solid-state drives, might also be better modeled with a lower value for random_page_cost."

In other words, cache misses are taken into account to the extent that the model above is reflective of your workload and hw environment.

AFAICT pgsql controls this with the random_page_cost and seq_page_cost variables [1], which are relative and seem to default to 4 and 1 respectively. It doesn't look like these are automatically adjusted though based on the hardware.

Some searching and I found some blog posts suggesting lowering them both to closer to one on SSDs [2]. Indeed, the documentation says you can set them both to 1 if you are sure that the database will be fully cached in RAM.

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/runtime-config... [2] http://www.cybertec.at/2013/01/better-postgresql-performance...

This is a good point, what the article really should be discussing is the tradeoff between sequential throughput and random disk access, which is especially important on HDDs, for those unfortunate enough to still be working with things that spin :)

Indeed, this is why the trend has been away from pure "nosql" solutions in the 2000s back to SQL-oriented systems.

And not just in transactional systems but also batch processing, e.g. why would I write mapreduce code if I can just use a system like Hive that gives me a nice SQL-based interface to my data?

The telcos strike back - this could get very interesting.

Another article [1] seems to suggest that this will clearly go against EU net neutrality rules, so it makes me wonder if they have something in their back pockets, or if this is a sign of desperation.

[1] http://fortune.com/2016/02/19/three-network-ad-blocking/

I would respectfully state that you have it backwards - the real problem is that "techies" are becoming ever more powerful as a group, this power is acknowledged, but we have not evolved an understanding of how to wield that power in the broader society, as have the more established professions like lawyers.

I know of no lawyer, personally, that I think would be capable of writing a blog post as insensitive and lacking in subtlety as the one referenced by this article. They know better. I know plenty of tech people who I think are perfectly capable of doing so.

If we don't learn, and quickly, our reputation will soon be no better than that of Wall Street bankers.

When did I say anything about either? I made a general statement about the effect of interest rates on borrowing, which, the last I checked, is equally applicable to governments as it is to private borrowers.

In fact it seems you disagree with my original metaphor, and are commenting without having actually stated the way you interpreted it.

Fair enough, luckily we're not there yet, but what's concerning is that the title of the article uses the words "way, way lower"!

I'm not sure I follow. Lowering rates encourage borrowing, is that not the point?

Negative rates are scary if they go low enough, where an inverse of the problems with high inflation come about. Rather than try to collect payments as fast as possible due to the eroding value of money, there will be an incentive to delay receipt of payment as long as possible. Taxes will be overpaid to be reclaimed in the following year. How would your local telco handle being treated as an implicit temporary checking account?

I don't claim to understand all the implications, but it's an odd experiment we would probably be better off not trying. What's worse, how do we ever get back to some range between [-2,2] once we've gone that far negative?

Somehow this gives me the image of a "high functioning" meth addict discovering the rush delivered by this wonderful drug called heroin. Surely he'll keep things under control.

In my view, everything you need to understand the difference, culturally and economically, between Canada and the United States, follows from two important phrases found in the respective founding documents of the countries:

"Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" - America

"Peace, Order and Good Government" - Canada

For a qualified American, I think a NAFTA visa makes a lot more sense for the potential wave of American "trumpfugees" - first requires them to get a job (and still want to accept it after doing the conversion back to USD :) and also have an easier path to the realization that Canada is actually a different country with a culture that they may not be willing to embrace.

Canada and the US have, as part of NAFTA, an agreement to grant work visas right at the border for 'professionals', including engineers. It's a straightforward process.

http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/work/special-business.asp#nafta http://www.nafsa.org/_/file/_/amresource/8cfr2146.htm

I used StayFocusd for a while, and while it helped, I also had the same problem with my phone, resulting in periodic uninstalls of the social apps. I found this to be attacking the symptoms and not the root cause though.

I then started using the pomodoro technique, with strict no IM/FB/etc during pomodoros. A nice side benefit of disciplining myself to work in this way was to reduce the impulsive desire to check FB, and over time I noticed that my desire to go onto FB, even when it was "permitted", had been reduced. I don't have StayFocusd or any such plugins installed any longer.

An interesting analogue exists in the academic world -- an advisor's most important job is to guide you on what you should not do or attempt.