I'm a happy Rackspace Cloud customer. I use it for a few small VMs that I treat like normal, uniquely-configured servers, but I don't have to mess with all the details of running a data center, and that makes my life easier. I looked at EC2, and it became very obvious that it was not intended to be used that way. If you want to do the whole dynamic cloud thing where your log scraper uses an API to request more CPU for this VM, more RAM for that VM, and duplicate a few more web front-end hosts, EC2 definitely covers the bases, but I just wanted a couple servers with redundant power and storage, pre-built backup/restore system, in a data center that's professionally managed by people who are not me, and I wanted to do it without spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars up front.

In terms of business growth, EC2-style cloud computing is great for large organizations with their own developers who can afford semi-custom solutions that offload 80% of their server infrastructure to Amazon's data centers, but that's a market that will saturate quickly. The larger opportunity is customers like me, who are trying to help a small organization grow into a large organization without investing huge amounts of time and money up front (because they don't have either to spare yet), and need servers that aren't just run from someone's desk. If Amazon invests the short term returns from EC2 into something that competes directly with Rackspace Cloud, I'm sure they'll be competitive, but right now the two offerings aren't directly comparable.

The Democrats have been doing much better than the Republicans lately in the realm of budgetary discipline, mainly because the Republicans vastly underestimate the cost of war, and insist on keeping war expenditures on a separate set of books.

Anyone remember when Slashdot hit 16,777,215 comments, and overflowed MEDIUMINT? The ALTER TABLE statement that fixed it took hours to run. I shudder to think how long it'll take to fix this, even with the problem diagnosed.

...then how is knowing that the server you're looking for is (or more likely is not) somewhere within X meters going to help?

No superpower is useless for picking up chicks.

If you were really serious about security, you'd be using sha256 at least.

While the data within the encrypted volume should be indistinguishable from randomness, the metadata headers are quite distinguishable. It's pretty obvious if something is a LUKS volume, but within that you shouldn't be able to tell.

...is that most users of low-end CPUs won't notice the difference going from 2 threads to 4, or turning on extra cache. They'll just notice their Windows 7 system getting slow, as Windows systems are wont to do, and then pay $50 only to find out that it's still just as slow, because it did nothing for their memory-starved, I/O-bound, single-threaded workload.

Pi has the property that all binary strings of a given length occur with equal frequency, making it an excellent source of fair pseudorandom bits. There are plenty of applications in which 2 quadrillion pseudorandom bits is grossly insufficient.

It would get you nowhere near that. A substantial fraction of any mainframe architecture's instruction set is emulated in software. The actual MIPS ratings are way below the MHz ratings, whereas on most superscalar architectures, MIPS exceeds MHz.

Once you've paid that penalty as well as the qemu penalty, you're getting down to somewhere in the Doom/Quake I range, with no hardware acceleration.

While T-Mobile's towers may be capable of 21 Mbps HSPA+, the G2 itself can only do 14.4 Mbps, according to the fine print on T-Mobile's teaser site. Of course, you'll get nowhere near this in real life, but if you have a 7.2 Mbps HSPA device, and you're expecting it to be 3x as fast as whatever you get in real life on that, you'll be disappointed to only get 2x that, at best.

http://g2.t-mobile.com/

Given that the Z architecture doesn't even have PCI, that would be a no.

There's a first time for everything. When I was at Red Hat, a customer (maybe you?) experienced a SAN-wide outage due to an error, caused by a rare hardware failure mode, that the vendor's engineers told me in private they had never seen before. It was one of the more reputable SAN vendors, and they worked with us on a kernel patch to recover from that error more intelligently. There's now a patch in the Linux kernel to gracefully recover from an error that has only been seen once outside of a hardware lab.

I've also talked to plenty of engineers and support people who had simply never heard of a particular problem before, because their companies lacked sufficiently well-organized support and bug tracking systems, and couldn't hold on to their experienced employees long enough to have someone around who knew what was going on the next time the problem came up.

In the world of enterprise computing, the law of large numbers is working against you. Some vendors understand this, and treat each novel failure as an opportunity to harden the product further. You usually pay a premium for this, but it's worth it. Others just swap the bad board and update their resumes. It sounds like NG went with the lowest bidder.

Given that Blizzard monitors local weather in places where they have data centers, to be aware of potential power supply and cooling issues before the alarms go off, I'm going to take a shot in the dark and guess their SANs use redundant controllers.

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/09/18/blizzard-reveals-some-technical-data-about-world-of-warcraft/