In short, at the scale any block service is intended to serve, HDDs/SSDs are going to fail, networks are going to be down, data corruptions are going to happen, unpredictable latencies are going to appear, etc. etc. All these failures are destined to happen at a not so infrequent rate. The service offers the abstraction/illusion of "HDD in the cloud that never fails (or may 9s SLA)" despite all that is pretty hard to pull off.
Maybe I'm biased, but personally, I never ever clicked on any ads showed up along my google search query, even if they are relevant. I just can't get rid of the nagging feeling that: "there gotta be better deals else where (e.g. on Amazon?)" or "The merchant paid Google a premium to show up along side my search results, the price can't possibly be the lowest". Am I the only one feeling this way?
With the risk of being down-voted, I would like to ask does "fight for freedom of expression and social rights" really has to be the polar opposite of "pro-business and more money-driven"? To me, those are answers/attitudes towards two potentially orthogonal questions. To put it another way, is a "pro-business and more money-driven" a good predictor on a person's opinion on "freedom of expression and social rights" and vise-versa? Since there are so many potentially orthogonal questions to ask, it seems to me it tells more about those who ask those questions (which questions are more important to them), than those who answered.
I think what you said just confirmed my point: Is "Lower their expectations" necessarily a good thing? Especially when we are talking about under a professional environment. "He's really an American, he doesn't really understand how to be a good manager for a team of native Chinese" doesn't sound like an advantage to me.
I heard the other side of the story that ABCs could have a hard time in China, because they look just like full han Chinese, but when people find out you are not really "Chinese Chinese", attitudes/expectations/behaviors change.
Edit: I guess I should say "attitudes/expectations/behaviors change, for the better or worse"
I feel these type of commentary often times achieving exactly the opposite of what it advocates, if it ever achieves anything. Maybe because the TL;DR is buried midway through the post, or because the actual reasons to dissuade buying an Echo is nothing new (Privacy and Security? and to be fair, there indeed is something new in the post that I didn't know about, regarding Echo data being used in a homicide investigation). At the end of the day, the impression left in an average reader's mind might be: nothing to see here, but maybe buying an Echo as a gift is a neat idea...
I don't know much about Japanese, but in written Chinese, the stroke order is less likely to be consistent. One of the challenges for early leaners of writing Chinese characters is to "get the stroke order right", and many, even sufficiently educated adults could struggle getting all orders right. Also, writing Chinese characters in cursive often requires different stroke orders for the same character due to aesthetic reasons, and the boundary between print and cursive style in hand writings could be very blurry. Therefore, I could see stroke-order becomes a very noisy, inconsistent and less reliable input.
As mentioned in the other comment, I was actually only thinking about use cases like Athenta + csv_on_s3. and that's the really "low cost" approach I was referring to for analytical data.
I do know Athena is built on top of Presto and it can pair with lots of different data sources. But somehow when talking about Athena I always end up thinking about using big CSVs on S3 as data source, so what I really meant was Athena+S3 I guess.
Edit: regarding transaction though, I wonder if Athena could even be used as a "meta sharding" layer, when all of the underlying data sources support transaction, but data is too large to fit in a single instance. The advantage would be to not implement sharding logic in code. Not sure about the performance though. Just a thought.
Not sure if it's related, and AWS Athena is not a Database in a strict sense (or in any sense at all since it's not a transactional DB), but it seems to offer both scale and lower cost if it fits your requirements (read only, DW like traffic)? Anybody has experience using it in prod as a DW replacement?
This is true, but no mandate on encryption in the HTTP/2 standard was an deliberate decision, one of the very few differences between HTTP/2 and SPDY. But yes, practically, you can't use HTTP/2 without encryption nowadays.
STUN is for signaling, but the hole-punching business is not 100% guaranteed to work, so you need TURN as the back up relay server. DTLS is needed for both p2p traffic and the replaying traffic through TURN, so your TURN server does need DTLS for its job.
Thanks for the clarification. I was aware of the DTLS requirement for WebRTC, but not sure the whole WebRTC stack support on erlang/OTP. Now thinking about it, maybe an erlang/elixir/whatever-on-BEAM implementation of STUN/TURN server would make sense...
Could you elaborate more on this? I don't know much about erlang/OTP's support for WebRTC. Does adding DTLS makes erlang/OTP possible to talk to WebRTC clients because WebRTC requires DTLS? or this means erlang/OTP now has a complete stack and API for WebRTC communication out of the box?
Sure, labor is cheap in China, but still, you'd pay $0 for the pilot for the unmanned drone, and it can fly 24/7. Edit: ok, maybe not $0 since the drone may not be autonomous, but still, much cheaper operating drones on the ground than hiring a pilot.
I think since it's internal services, you control both the client and server side. Applying back-pressure would be a good alternative than just using rate limiter on the server end and let your client just flood away your internal service interfaces.
Looks like most of the use cases you mentioned could benefit from this? About "good network", today's wireless network's peak performance might be enough, but being mobile, you can't guarantee you always have that peak performance. Having a dedicated high performance SoC definitely helps those use cases especially under mobile.
Interesting, I'm aware of the hassle to build it, but constant regression...that means it's not production ready yet. Regarding the same regression in Chrome, does it mean the WebRTC in stable version of Chrome also has the same compatibility/gain/echoing problems with new android devices?
Another "serverless cron" option from aws is their Data Pipeline service. It is intended for data processing as its name implies but does fits the bill for lots use cases as a generic "serverless cron". Note that Lambda has executing time limit that's pretty short, while data pipeline can be configured to have much longer timeout.
> Most people aren't drawn to VR.
That's an interesting observation, especially from a Vive owner. From my limited experiences, everyone I showed Vive to was blown away by it (demo ranges from teenagers to non-techie adults), and definitely wanted to use it more, the only problems for them to have one of their own immediately are 1) price point, 2) setup complexity. On the contrary, Cardboard users responses were lukewarm in general.
Regarding VR for the mass, I see it as a new content consumption platform, the fact that it's mostly for games right now doesn't mean it'll stay in that way. Isn't introducing/promoting VR for the mass exactly what Daydream is intended for? Otherwise I'm not sure why Google is interested in pushing a platform just for a niche market.
Sigh, kinda disappointed given all the hype and secrecy around this, and makes me doubt the near future of VR (I have a Vive, and was a believer until this point). For VR to really take off, we do need a "good enough" experience for the mass while letting the Vives driving the leading edge. Cardboard was clearly not good enough (otherwise it would have taken off by itself already), Daydream (with Pixel phone) just seems like a polished version of cardboard, but still not good enough: actually, is it in anyway better than cardboard towards the direction of Vive? Slightly higher resolution? A little bit more comfortable, maybe easier to setup, and that's it? How about 6 degree of freedom, more precise controller tracking? at least 1K per eye resolution? Just wish Daydream won't kill VR by over-marketing it and fails to deliver. If that happens, it may take another decade for VR to come back.
Silly question: is the US dollar being the world's go-to currency part of the US's national interests? If so, how big of an interest is that to the US? If "yes", and "very" are the answers, I wonder if Yuan can ever replace US dollar without a fight.