Awesome monoculture reference :)

If the cloud operator is experiencing any sort of fault, they get dropped from serving the site/services and any DNS pointing to them gets changed to any of the other providers, and more instances spin up. This is either done manually or scripted to monitor the state of the cloud providers.

The point is that using any one provider for anything, cloud or not, isn't a good idea.

I wrote a comment on slashdot a while back which questioned the sensibleness of running services in the cloud. I used to be a sceptic.

Since then I've used Rackspace Cloud and found that it's actually a very good idea, for certain things.

The benefits of using a cloud system are scalability and no commitment- it's not about reliability or higher availability - but you do get a little win in those areas.

To give some examples, I was recently able to play around with mysql clustering. I followed a mysql clustering howto and played around with it, setup a mysql cluster with load balancers. Once I was finished geeking about, I saved the VMs to the file storage and deleted the cloud instances. Total cost a £/$2-3 maximum. I hadn't previously been able to do this, I would have had to rent a dedicated server which would serve websites, email etc. I couldn't really use the dedicated server to play with new technology in case it had a negative impact on the live systems. I did have development box for a while, but it essentially doubled my costs without making any more money, just offering some protecting.

Now I have staging/development instances in the cloud - and no commitments to them - I don't have to worry about a £250 monthly bill or sign a 12 month contract to get my own box. I can fire up some resources, use them, and throw it away when I'm done.

The upshot is that I can play around with other peoples cool open source software without risk or buggering something up on my live box, and the costs are insignificant since I'm only renting it per hour. I can try something new, if it works great - it might go/stay in production. If not, delete it and move onto the next cool thing.

If I need high availability, I would use Rackspace, Amazon, Azure, and I'd ensure that I have a plan to deal with a major outage with any of the providers. Each have APIs, so in theory I could create new instances automagically and failover between different cloud providers with a quick DNS change, while keep costs low.

To recap, the cloud isn't all about high availability - no matter what the marketing says. It's about scaling systems and running resources for small amounts of time, and is perfectly suited to services which have peak demand (ticket sales for example).

*whoosh*

Make all voting done online.

Citizens will have to register on the voting site using their Facebook account and Social Security Number, authenticated by a custom captcha system.

Voting Accounts will be verified by email activation link.

Once logged in the website will pull all of the citizens personal data from the governments databases so the user can ensure the data held is accurate, and any corrections submitted by the user will be saved after being validated with javascript.

Furthermore, this system powered by the Cloud using tried and tested Windows Server technology, ASP, .NET and SQL 2005.

What a strange story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_response_vehicle

Why were you challenged?
You do know that if police point a firearm at you - it has to be justified exactly the same as discharging it.

I say they should have shot you for talking nonsense, your story is full of holes. Even a 7 year old retarded kid would have some questions.

I still have a BT phone line, but my ISP is with BE There, a LLU provider who have their own equipment in my exchange.

It's cheaper and much faster. With BT I was limited to 8/1 mb/s, whereas on BE I get 24/2 mb/s. In practice I sync at 16/2. So it's twice as fast for half the cost. The support is much better, I can use the "Live Chat" feature to make changes to my broadband profile, ask technical and billing questions, without being stuck on the phone. I find writing technical questions much easier than trying to explain it over the phone.

Using smaller LLU companies really offers a lot more value to the consumer.

Friends of mine who aren't really bothered about fast internet speeds are taking our Sky Broadband as part of their satellite TV package, costing an extra £5 or £6 per month. You can't compete against that for the money, single billing provider etc.

"seems to hint it was sold to the highest bidder"

Do you have any evidence to support this, or are you just guessing based on a "seems to hint" gut feeling?

Not with two factor and signed challenge/response.

Say I want to send you £100 from my bank account.
First in my banks browser I enter my membership number and last 4 digitals of my debit cart.
I insert the debit card into my card reader and press [Identify], then enter my PIN.
If correct it displays an 8 digit number which I enter into the login form and press submit.

Once logged into my online banking I click "Make a payment".
Then I enter your account number and amount into my browser.
My bank now asks me to enter my PIN, the account number and the amount due to be paid - into my card reader and to press [Sign].

This generates another 8 digit code, which is obviously unique to the datetime/account/amount.

Now it's possible an end user could be forced or duped into entering the wrong money and defrauded. It's also possible they could be stupid and write down their membership number, PIN and lose their debit card and before they report it stolen and be defrauded.

But it's much more effective than just a password.

When using PIN Sentry (Challenge/Reponse card readers) the account number and amount are part of the signing algorthim. So they cannot work for any other account or any other amount of money.

Yes and I'm convinced that my local council in the UK uses a copy of Simcity to implement road planning and routes: one way systems, traffic lights, road works, etc.

It's quite obvious the user doesn't have a driving licence or drive in my local area, since the decisions they make are completely insane and illogical from a practical point of view, they just look pretty in Simcity.

If you extend javascripts prototype, then they do exist - as does any other event which you care to fire and listen for.

Check the Sencha framework for an example of iOS and Android framework which implements these events and allows you to use these handlers.

I must be new here because this is one of the most retarded /. comments ever.

By your logic a tablet is better at browsing any site that makes use of swipe, pinch, zoom events.