jread

Wish this had support for Amazon Payments and Paypal in addition to Stripe.

Check out http://nsone.net - newer service with a unique approach to geo/load balancing/failover using user defined rulesets (filter chains and data feeds).

Tests are from your connection using whatever resolver chain your ISP has in place. It uses a wildcard name record and an 8 byte json-p include. It alternates between downloading that file from the same origin using a cached DNS record (test run up includes 3 downloads to prime the resolvers with a cached hostname) and an uncached record (a new randomly generated hostname) and reports the difference in time between the two.

It's a start - barebones authoritative DNS only - no monitoring/failover, load balancing, Geo, LBR, etc - provisioning via API only. Route 53 started out this way, and has since added many of these features and now has almost 7% Alexa 10k marketshare and rapidly growing.

I created a browser test that measures recursive DNS query times. You can test Google DNS query performance using this link: http://bit.ly/1nY4e60

It does with ELB

The EC2 C3 instance type is going to be about the same price as DO for 1 year reserve and less than DO for 3 year. Spot pricing will also be lower than DO for C3s. On top of that EC2 is far superior to DO in many ways: EBS off instance storage (DO is local storage only), volume snapshots, IPv6, load balancing, private IPs, multiple IPv4 addresses, 8 data centers globally, firewalls, VPN, VPC, PCI DSS compliance, companion services like S3/CloudFront/Route 53 and much higher default quotas just to mention a few. DO is essentially a VPS with utility pricing.

I've had this happen while flying military helicopters at night. We usually get a grid or address, and report it when we land.

This is nothing new. Conforming loans for self employed have always required 2 years tax returns. I just went through this process myself. It is more painful than W2, but if you have 2 years returns, acceptable debt to income ratio, and decent credit, you can get a loan. What has changed if there aren't many non-conforming loan options like there were in the bubble years.

I lived in Utah which can get very smoggy due to winter inversions. PM2.5 levels sometimes hit 80 mcg in the winter, often the highest in the country and utterly depressing to live in.

You're better off evaluating CDNs using real user/last mile testing than a few pingdom servers in data centers. Cedexis has has some decent analysis of this type on their website: http://www.cedexis.com/country-reports/

Generating web traffic summaries from nginx logs for a CDN with 150 servers, 10-15 billion hits/day. Summaries then stored in MySQL/TokuDB.

I created a browser based test a few years ago that captures CDN latency from real users and correlates the results regionally using MaxMind (http://cloudharmony.com/speedtest). CDNs set themselves apart outside of the US where infrastructure is more complex and costs are higher. I posted a spreadsheet that provides a breakdown on CDN latency globally based on this testing (tens of thousands of tests from thousands of ISPs):

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Al_R0WNcU3q9dGV...

Aircrews have their own ROE and approval process for engagements. They aren't simply trigger pullers for the JTAC. However, there is an implicit trust in the JTAC, and desire to protect the ground unit. If ROE is satisfied and approvals are in place, the aircrew is generally not going to second guess the guys getting shot at.

Keep in mind that the JTAC is usually an enlisted soldier embedded with a ground unit. He is highly trained on ROE and positive ID, and generally has a good first hand perspective on what is happening on the ground. He is responsible for protecting the lives of the unit he is embedded with, and air assets are tasked to support him. From my experience, these are not warmongers, just guys doing their jobs, trying to protect lives.

That would be good - I wrote a blog post on the topic. Rackspace cloud servers CPU performance caps out low and $/CPU value isn't good on large instance types: http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2013/06/value-of-the-cloud-cpu-...

cloud servers

6 months/$300 credit - similar to the AWS 1 year free usage http://aws.amazon.com/free/. Rackspace needs to upgrade their underlying years old AMD 4170/2374 hardware for cloud servers. This is a limitation for vertical scaling, and doesn't compare well to EC2/GCE/HP.

I've conducted some independent tests of various block storage options with Rackspace, EC2, HP and GCE. Here are links providing a CSV of the results (may take a few seconds to generate). A value of 100 signifies near performance parity to a baremetal SAS reference system. Overall, Rackspace SSD is performant, but lacks the consistency of EBS PIOPs or GCE persistent storage.

IOPS http://app.cloudharmony.com/cloudgrade/api/query/cloudharmon...

IO Consistency http://app.cloudharmony.com/cloudgrade/api/query/cloudharmon...

I'm not arguing there will be peace - I'm referring to the Nato war, and I don't think anyone familiar believes it is ending in victory.

I just returned. The contrast in culture is striking - flying overhead in a sophisticated aircraft watching farmers till land by hand outside mud huts in remote villages - living life as they have for a millennium. Afghans are resilient - Nato will leave, the war will fade, and they will choose their destiny.

Source encryption does not guarantee endpoint encryption. In the case of gmail via https, an email recipient might download or forward in it in plaintext via pop, imap, smtp or an http email client.

I believe these statements are sidestepping the facts. Explicit requests for user data and backdoor access are a separate issue. If Prism involves capturing and storing packets at major Internet backbones (perhaps just upstream from private networks like Google's), anything plaintext could be searched and extracted after the fact - email messages, web browsing, chat, etc. To this day, a significant amount of communication related Internet traffic is not encrypted. I've worked on software that does exactly this. Here is a public marketing writeup:

"Every packet is recorded, classified, and indexed, making quick discovery, reconstruction, and delivery of files in their original formats easy and intuitive. Reconstruct email attachments, windows file transfers, PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and more, giving you full visibility into everything on your network.... Show all activity over time for a single user or all file-type activity over time for all users."

NSA could apply simple port based filtering to limit capture to only those packets related to communication, thereby streamlining storage requirements. If this was the Prism architecture, then these company statements would be truthful, but misleading. The NSA does not have direct access to their systems or user data, but if the NSA is allowed to record user traffic before it enters, or after it leaves their doors, then the end result is similar.

They could filter for communication related packets based on port numbers: email, chat, voip, etc. The resulting data feed would be more manageable to capture and store long term.

When I left they hadn't worked it out, only plaintext artifacts could be extracted. There was discussion of server plugins to intercept and store SSL keys and later use those to decrypt data, but this would require endpoint access and complex interaction back to the appliance. However, in the case of email, although you might utilize encrypted protocols to send/receive, a direct or indirect recipient might not, so at some point the message may cross the wire in plaintext.

This is my belief as well. A few years ago I worked for a company that sold packet capture appliances to unnamed government agencies. The higher end appliances were capable of 10Gb/s packet to disk streaming. I helped write a search interface for the resulting data capable of the type of filtering and data reconstruction described. If organizations directly, indirectly, knowingly or unknowingly allowed the NSA to tap Internet links, they could theoretically provide full data access, while at the same time publicly deny direct server or backdoor access.

CloudFront doesn't use Anycast for content routing - only the DNS side is Anycast

Author here, "core" is a fuzzy term I suppose, but it's often the most disclosed by services to the outside world. I agree it would be interesting to compare these metrics to some baremetal numbers. It would then be relatively easy to determine if they are dedicated cores of the type advertised.

It routes a single IP address to different DNS servers depending on a user's location. It generally provides lower latency/faster DNS queries by routing users to closer DNS servers.

You're right - corrected

Correct - just basic DNS hosting - no extra features. It is only set apart for having 75 Anycast POPs and hosted by Akamai. Route 53 has 28 POPs, Dyn 17, and UltraDNS 33.