btb

What brand notebook is that? Just so I can make a mental note to avoid purchasing that brand in the future :)

Inspired by the article I signed up and spun up a 512 mb droplet. It eventually came up(although took alot longer than the advertised 55 secs). Felt very sluggish, or maybe they run alot of startup scripts on boot? I tried running "top" and it ran a whole bunch of unfamiliar looking commands using 96% CPU. So I destroyed the droplet and wanted to try a 8gb/4core droplet. In the interface it says it was created in 173 seconds. But now 10 mins later I still cant ssh or ping the given IP. So while the pricing is definately good, and I like the idea of SSD-only storage, my first half-hour impression of the service was that it seems a bit rough around the edges and not something I would want to bet my company's hosting on.

Yup. Read an article the other day that police cars in some US cities drives around continously scanning license plates with topmounted cameras. Given Moore's law, I suppose they will sooner or later have the computanional power to be able to expand that to realtime facial scanning too.

Edit, oops followed parents link to this: http://www.tokutek.com/products/tokudb-for-mysql/:

"Tools such as Hot Backup (coming soon) allow a backup to be completed while database is running."

- Does that mean that someone using the opensource version would be unable to take a backup of a running database?

And all those windmill parks are heavily subsidized, which contributes to the Danish electricity prices being the highest in all of EU[1], 0.3 euro per kwh. Its basically a state-guaranteed high yield for the pension funds etc that put them up, paid for by the consumers in DK.

[1] http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index....

Interesting product, considering trying it out. A few questions

1. I gather from reading the How-it-works pages that the monitoring service is not invasive. How about the optional agent, how invasive is that and does it carry extra performance impact? I cant see anywhere explained what it does, and how much of the functionality that depends on it

2. On your demo site, in one of the alerts you slow causes of slow queries. It says "SQL query "dbo.spSlowNumbers" caused slow responses on "/Profile/Save". How does your service know the name of the stored proc? Does it hook into SQL server calls or?

3. Is it safe to install on a production webserver? Was thinking we would try it out on one of our 5 webservers.

4. Is it easy to remove the monitoring service+agent again if we dont like it?

Thanks

Wow thats amazing. Honestly feel bad for any IT admin who bought any of their products not knowing about those backdoors(assuming they arent disclosed anywhere). I personally would be extremely upset to read that A)they had backdoors in the box they sold me, and that B)they intend to keep them intact for "customer support"!

Yeah I've been wondering which tablet/pad to recommend to my parents. They arent that much into computers, and I dont think they want to have two tablets lying around when one is all they need. So for them the nexus 10 sounds like a good choice, provided that the multi account implementation allows them to keep their emails private. From the google info page it sounded like you didnt need passwords to switch accounts, which I found a bit odd. Will wait for the reviews for specifics.

My general take on their writeup was that they have too many services that depend on EBS working. They should try to find ways to decouple critical services like loadbalancers and Amazon RDS from EBS.

Yeah the new 75% income tax bracket in France really is putting the Laffer curve theory to the test. Will be very interesting to see how it pans out. I'm sure socialist governments elsewhere in Europe is following this grand experiment closely.

The scariest part of this article IMO is how there now is a recipe posted for getting into any amazon account. Imagine all the damage/harassment they could do once in there, buy all kinds of stuff and have it sent to you. Spin up 20 EC2 instances and use them to perform illegal activites etc, while burning up cash on your credit card.

That to me seems much worse than having an imac wiped.

Kinda ironic, I get "Oops! Google Chrome could not find blog.picplum.com" :)

Would these be suitable to run a single big SQL Server on? I mean specwise they seem perfect for our size/use. They say data will survive a reboot, but what are the chances I would some day have to wake up in the middle of the night and having to restore the database to a new server? Would some of the recent amazon downtimes be one of those cases where that could happen?

And just before it deletes itself it posts threatening messages via your twitter and facebook account, designed to trigger the automated systems presumably watching these, thereby triggering an investigation into your affairs.

YouGoToJail indeed.

Ahh interesting. My password was on the list(I changed it before checking).

old password: ve78d9k6k

4c1433ca9d58d7d7ba00658d209583d8edde144a

Interesting, I've noticed that alot of sites I read started using them as well. I dont know why, because IMO its a giant step backwards compared to pdf's, at least you can always search and copy-paste relevant sections from those. Not so on a few documents I've encountered on scribd.

As an example: http://www.scribd.com/doc/91764042/April-2012-TEF-Commentary When I try to copy-paste some text from that document it comes out gibberish. And I cant search in it either.

IMO a dependable stack requires a firewall in front of your servers. Sure you can configure software firewalls on all of your servers, but its nice to have an outer wall as well(defense in depth and all that). If hetzner started offering that and private vlan support they would have a really killer offering.

IMO CS is necessary to advance the state of the art. And while I completely agree that many computing/programming tasks currently do not necessarily require a CS degree, there is no guarentee that will always be the case.

As for my myself, I studied roughly 3 years of computer science before I dropped out to work full-time, so I only have a half-finished bachelors degree. I wont say I regret it, because the last 5-6 years of being partner in a startup and earning a good pay-check have been fun. But I very much do regret not being able to completely grasp all the new interesting research papers that are coming out. Nothing is more frustrating than reading a research paper, and knowing enough to be able to grasp that this algorithm could improve some part of your system, but then being unable to decipher/implement it, because one have forgotten(or not learned) parts of the mathematical notation/background. In other words being able to see the solution, but the solution being juuust out of your grasp. I hope down the road to be able to compensate for this problem by hiring smarter guys than myself that DID finish their CS degree :)

Also another benefit of studying CS is that around year 2-3 you will be introduced to some subject matter that I at least personally am pretty sure I would never have heard of otherwise. I found stuff like operations research and integer programming very interesting. I havent yet have had opportunity to use any of it in the "real world", but its nice knowing whats out there, who knows it might come in handy a few years down the road in some other venture.

Not sure I agree. I've never heard of Coda before, and the webpage doesnt really tell me what it does or why I need it. I get the impression its some sort of visual studio-like thingy for mac users?

Or he have an MSDN subscription which covers both Windows+Visual studio, and dont want to pay extra for an OEM license to something he already has the right to use.

I had similar problems with the windows 8 server beta. Tried installing it in a vm to check it out. And I was unable to figure out how to do anything at all with it. No windows explorer, or command prompt available. I dont even get the metro skin, it just popped up the server configuration manager. I spent 10 mins googling if there was a way to get the start button back to no avail(since most posts were about the consumer preview). I guess I will try again once the final version is out.

Wondering that too. I really like the idea of having hosting in the cloud. But I'm not going to move anything critical there until the storage gets better and more predictable. All these stories you read about having to stripe several EBS volumes together to get even half-decent performance seems to add a lot of complexity/extra engineering for something that ought to just work out of the box. Seems to me that its unlikely that EBS will be any good until their entire infrastructure gets upgraded to 10gbit ethernet.

Meanwhile we still have 1 1/2 year left on our current 3 year datacenter contract(we run on 6 server vmware setup hooked up to a hitachi SAN on which we rent storage space). So Amazon have around 1 year left to come up with some good reasons for us to switch. Otherwise we will probably just grab another 3 years with the current provider.

Then you might also enjoy this review: http://www.storagereview.com/intel_ssd_520_enterprise_review

I found the write speed improvements from overprovisioning the SSD 20% especially interesting. Although probably irrelevant if your webservers are mostly doing reads.

Ditto with Denmark. Although we have to register our opt-out with the postal service, and then we receive a special sticker to put on the mailbox. There are have even been talk about changing junkmail to opt-in instead.

Please.. save the outrage for something that matters, like SOPA or protect IP. There is IMO no "issue" here. I dont see any problem with googles approach. I agree that you can probably find alot more offensive profile pictures and its borderline, but presumably they were reacting to a complaint and made a judgement call.

Childish indeed, for a grown man to A)have a flipping bird picture as his profile picture and B)writing a whining blog post when it gets removed..

Well we just went through the same process. And the guy we talked to at google was extremely helpful and knowledgeable. But in the end that did not matter, because even after a 80% discount of the list price the final google maps offer was still 350% more expensive than our local alternative(a country-specific provider). So come january 1st, we are changing map provider. Fortunately it was rather easy to switch. Its been great having been able to use google maps all these years for free, and for that we are grateful.

Yes it is, at least for us. We run a 15 mio pageview/month website, completely reliant on advertising, and we have a google map on probably 4 mio of those pageviews. So our bill is going from free to 16.000$ pr month

$4 cpm is interestingly enough the same as we charge our own advertisers leaving zero profit margin for us. We are now in the process of converting our website to another map provider.