It's not really the same service. Services such as Akamai serve mostly static content. Google's service optimizes the pages on your website as they are served, even dynamic pages. It basically takes over your website, which many people won't want. It will actually be competing with other similar services such as Cloudflare and Incapsula (both of which I tried and both of which still have some pretty serious issues - enough for me to leave them). If Google does a good job with a competitive price it just might run such companies out of business.

I agree, but they actually never said it would be free. So far they are just testing it so if you want it you can sign up to help them test if for free. But the FAQ says: "At this time, the service is being offered to a limited set of webmasters free of charge. Pricing will be competitive and details will be made available later."

From the article: "...Skype have assured us that they will continue to support and maintain the Skype for Asterisk software for a period of two years thereafter..." If I had paid for the (supposedly perpetual) license as the existing customers have, I would think I was getting screwed too, even if it lasts for two more years.

Skype already has a SIP solution. It's called Skype Connect... and it sucks. The only thing worse than the product itself is Skype's support. I used it in my company for a bit less than year and just recently I got fed up with it and switched to a different provider, which turned out to be cheaper and better. Everything is managed through their web interface, which always has some broken feature. The last time I contacted support because of a broken feature they told me it would take 2 months to fix it. By this "feature" I mean I couldn't renew my online numbers that were about to expire... so instead of waiting for them to fix it and having the number expire, I left. But I digress... since they already have a SIP solution for business I don't see the point of killing asterisk integration. As I see it it's just another way to piss off some of their existing customers. Even if they keep the existing customers active for two years, as they said in the article, it's still bad since the customers had to pay licenses to have this functionality.

I don't know if it would help if they told you exactly how everything works. I'm sure no company with an infrastructure like Amazon's takes backups and safety very seriously. The availability numbers tell you what you can expect statistically from their services. The service that caused data loss is called EBS and acording to Amazon: "Amazon EBS snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% – 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume". So if you have your data there you have to know that it can fail and it probably will fail eventually, so you're right, it's a really good idea to backup the data yourself.

My business runs on Amazon's infrastructure and that was one of my main concerns before hiring their service. Because of this chance of failure I take hourly snapshots of my EBS volumes (which is enough for me.. I could even do it every 5 minutes) and copy the data back to my own servers periodically as you suggest. It's just common sense for anyone who deals with this type of thing. In my case, when the outage happened I just restored the latest snapshots and was up and running in a few minutes.

Now even with "proprietary SAN stuff" and "flaky things with 2k memory programmed in assembler and C with dangling memory pointers all over the place" it's still many times more reliable and many times cheaper than hosting it myself. After moving to Amazon I greatly increased my uptime and reduced IT costs by 90%. That doesn't mean I trust they'll work 100% of the time and that's because I do my due diligence and make backups.

I'm guessing even if your house isn't wired for that it wouldn't be a problem. Usually, when you're home, you tend to stay several hours so you can live with slower charging at home. In practice the fast recharging would mostly be needed when you're away from home and likely available at a service station that is built specifically for that.

Not necessarily... Many stores today allow you to exchange a gift you received (bought on their store, of course) for something else. Amazon is just removing the unnecessary steps of sending it to you and having you sending it back. As a consumer I think it's a great idea and since it's my decision to do this let Aunt Milly come ask me why I exchanged her gift.

Actually the developer has more choices than that... You can allow a user to use your app and delay check until an Internet connection is available (and many apps already require an Internet connection to be useful). Yes, that would mean taking a chance that some people might get to use your app for a while without paying, but it's still a reasonable compromise. This is absolutely not a piracy-proof idea (is there really any piracy-proof software?) and, as you said, there are better ways to do it. This is just so it becomes a bit harder to pirate apps. As a developer, I think investment in DRM or any other anti-piracy measures should only be enough so that the average user can't get around it easily. I also believe that, when in doubt, the app should act as if the user is a paying customer. There is really no point in implementing a very elaborate licensing/DRM system because it will only bother genuine paying customers. Those who are very tech-savvy and motivated enough to save a few bucks on an app will always find a way around it, and share it with others. Today I doubt that there is actually any popular and non-free software in any platform that also doesn't have a pirated no-drm/no-restrictions/cracked version going around in a torrent.

I used to work for a very large e-commerce company that made millions every day off the code I wrote in exchange for a monthly salary. If the code I wrote had made no money for the company I would still get my monthly salary. There was essentially very little risk involved for me. Today I have my own e-commerce company. I don't make millions yet but I still have to pay my programmers their monthly salary. If and when I start making millions that's what they're still gonna get because that's what we agreed to and that's my reward for taking the risk. Of course, once I have a lot I can give them bonuses for their performance if I want to, but that's my choice. If I go under tomorrow I'll be stuck with a ton of debts while the programmers can just get another job (and none of them will be giving me money to help pay for those debts). As for the bosses getting more money than the programmers, that's also the way it works. They have more responsibility, so they have to make more money. If something goes wrong in their department it's also usually their head, not the programmer's. People can always stop being programmers and pursue a management career. It all just depends on the choices you make for yourself.

...though it wouldn't necessarily make the apps any safer: http://www.todaysiphone.com/2010/07/disguised-tethering-app-tricks-apple/

Aw, come on! Phones that make calls are so 2009...

But when I download an app which has functionality related to accessing the content of my e-mails, making phone calls or sending text messages without my intervention, it's usually a good idea to allow them to do so. Besides, you always know what the app can and cannot do before you install it. You don't even have that kind of privilege on your computer. You install new software and you just trust that the developers did everything right, even though, in practice, the software can do just about anything on your computer.

It certainly costs more than owning your own hardware, but you're paying for convenience. If you have your own hardware, the actual cost is not only of the hardware itself. You can go ahead and double that cost to have redundancy (while in EC2 you don't give a crap when a server fails. Just restart the instance... if that). When it does fail you have to send someone out to the server's location to maintain it. You also have to worry about hardware upgrades and internet link upgrades. And that's if you're in the US. I live in Brazil and my company is switching to a cloud-based provider. Since server hardware and internet links are considerably more expensive here than in the US we'll be saving a ton of money every month. Our estimate is that our monthy costs with server maintenance and internet bandwidth will go from today's $2000/month down to around $500/month. (not counting the reduction in down time we'll have). If we needed a huge infrastructure with hundreds or thousands of servers we'd probably be better off having our own stuff, but in our case (and in the case of many others too) it's worth it.

This is what really happened

> His analysis of some 30 studies showed that men and women are fairly equal overall in terms of IQ Actually, when the IQ test was first created men scored higher and the test was considered biased towards men. This was then changed so that the bias would be removed so, men and women are fairly equal because the test was designed to be that way. However, men still have a greater variance than women, even in on average they're both the same.