We estimate savings of ~30% of server cost, none on IT staff. If you do it right. If you do it wrong, costs can rise.

I see your point. It's not my impression that moving things 'into the cloud' will magically make any complexity go away. But it does make that complexity easier and easier to manage.

We can stripe servers around the world at service setup time with one command.

Load balancers now intelligently remove defunct machines and increase capacity (from other zones) to compensate, provided you have defined how you want them to act (and no system will ever define that for you for a known cost).

It's not a panacea for all IT ills, but it is strong medicine.

But they weren't down. I have servers in Dublin. I also have striped redundancy across other EC2 datacentres. We had 100% uptime last night and I'm now watching the Dublin based machines recover gracefully.

Yes, I agree it's "advanced virtual hosting with a different name". But it didn't break its promises.

Oh silly underinformed person. There is a datacentre in Dublin. It is one of six Amazon datacentres. The others were unaffected, as were (our) public facing services, because only some (of our) servers are placed in Dublin.

It looks like a cloud from the outside. Those of on the inside know where the servers are because we want to choose where we place them for latency / redundancy reasons.

Rubbish. We stripe across two EC2 zones. We would always want at least two servers anyway in case of any server failure. We still had 100% uptime over last night because failover worked correctly.

We are now seeing servers come back up gracefully and so far have not had to take any remedial action - a watching brief.

And it's cheap.

Back when I was a wee lad, my wonderful maths teacher taught us to consider aleph-0, aleph-1 etc values of infinity as follows...

There is an infinite number (A) of lines of constant y that don't intersect y=0.
There is a larger infinity of lines of non-constant y that do: For each value of y at the y-axis (an infinite number equal to A), there is an infinite number (B) of angles at which the line can be drawn. Thus the first infinity cancels out, giving the probability of an arbitrary line not intersecting y=0 to be A/AB == 1/B == 0 because B is infinite.

Alternatively: for any location in 2d space, there is one line that does not intersect, and an infinite number that do. Probability of picking one that doesn't intersect is therefore zero even though there is a line that doesn't intersect!

qv Hilbert's Paradox.

Justin.

This reply bothered me (see my other replies to your other posts). From the same website

Test averages include 21 mpg with a manual-transmission 4-cyl sedan, 19.2-21.6 with automatic-transmission GLX versions, 17.8 with V6 4Motion wagon. W8 averaged 16.2 overall, and 22.4 in mostly highway driving. All Passats require premium fuel

There is no way whatever my car gets anything that low. According to their figures, you are getting 30% over the norm.

Am I missing something?

Oh: diesel. Yours petrol?

Still a surprising difference.

Curiously, I have a 1.8l 2003 Passat Estate (which I assume is Wagon in US-speak). I get nearly 50mpg(uk) at cruising 80mph. Allowing for our gallons being ~20% bigger than yours, I make that ~40mpg(us).

I wonder if one of our cars is built somehow differently for the specific market.

And sadly even Nildram, whose customer service and tech support were superb, got bought out and demolished by Opal last year.

I promptly moved to BT, because I've moved to the sticks too, so I might as well have cheap access if I can't have good.

This should be modified insightful...

If this research applies to any 'population', then it could be considered a function of parliament/congress.

Which means that unless the corner case of two groups of >10% with opposing ideas occurs (e.g. labour/democrat vs conservative/republican), ideas will spread as soon as 10% are convinced (e.g. perhaps global warming, multi-culturalism is good, the trickle-down theory)

I'd say this demonstrates the need for greater evidence-based and scientific decision making. Who's with me? And can we persuade 10% of parliamentarians/congressmen?!