Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04...

Microsoft's numbers include Office 365 and other service revenue, not just straight Azure services. Where are you getting the $1.57 billion number for Google?

Anon stated: "I eventually gave up and started a new AWS account which is now billing me $30/month for a Windows Server 2008 "Workspaces" instance I NEVER use." I assumed he setup the Workspace since he said he never used it, instead of saying he never set one up.

In my four years of using AWS, attending Amazon events, webinars and participating in cloud computing forums, I have never seen a billing issue that was not caused by the user or a user sharing the account.

The only billing issue I have ever seen Amazon cause was two years ago when their billing process sometimes skipped a day and so the second day included the previous day's usage. That ruffled a few feathers and was attributed to a maintenance window being mis-scheduled on their end or something.

I am, however, incredibly pissed at them for losing my email addresses in one of their big data breaches. I get tons of spam now on several of the AWS account email addresses starting literally the week after the breach.

OpenMPI is a messaging system designed for massive cluster supercomputers on private high-speed networks, why would you think running a test would be cheap using cloud resources which already have a significant premium?

And it sounds like you need to spend some time looking through the AWS console. If something shows up on your bill in AWS, it is running somewhere and you most certainly set it up. The entire process is completely automated so the only human error is your own.

I help run six AWS accounts, ranging in monthly expenses of $400 to over $12,000, and never had a billing issue. In fact, on that bigger account we were leery of the costs as well so we setup an auditing system to keep an eye on transfer costs and S3 usage on the servers themselves. The numbers our auditing system provided matched what Amazon was telling us down to the tenth of a cent. Many transactions differ by a tenth of a cent because I imagine our auditing system was tracking at a faster pace and Amazon rounded up somewhere in the difference.

We do not use their Workspaces service but I am pretty sure the moment you create a Workspace, there is a box sitting there running for you at all times so it doesn't matter if you use it or not. The service is meant for people who work remotely constantly. If you want to be billed only when you are using a box, you can setup an EC2 instance and only turn it on when you need to use it.

I think there are even apps for desktop or smartphones that can do that for you (turn the EC2 instance on when you want to connect).

The majority of the pan handlers aren't even homeless, they're just lazy, incompetent con-artists.

And for that reason I relate more to the Marine and Runaway's sentiments, because there are tons of people working and resources going to helping veterans. So much so, there is literally no reason for a veteran to be pan handling or homeless.

If this Marine did find out the pan handler was a real Marine, I guarantee you he would have got the guy in touch with agencies to help them.

Because that's what it means to be a part of a fraternity like that. If enough care, stuff gets done and people get helped.

Cancer survivors shouldn't let someone abuse their accomplishments either. Shaming this woman and showing others is the best way to make sure other people don't try the same thing to get ahead.

Um, producing trades that you do not intend to act on to manipulate prices is literally fraud and illegal. This will never be legal, nor should ever be legal.

The laws aren't written specifically for the stock market, this is a general principal upheld by any type of market.

No, using the Great Lakes was not suggested. More like setting up reservoirs along Mississippi tributary flood plains, giving the river breathing room for flooding and holding onto the fresh water to be used on land instead of letting it slip into the sea. The water would not be cheap, so I do not see this as enabling bad behavior at all and by no means will the water from the Midwest made it across the Rocky's to California. I suspect most of the water would go to Prairie states and Texas (or hell, help the Great Lakes eventually too).

But I take real offense to the protectionist tone that you and others responding to me have taken on. Should Pennsylvania start deciding on the temperature in people's homes in Michigan because they supply the natural gas? Should Texas tell Iowa they can't use their fertilizer or gas products without their approval? That's not how things should work nor how they do work. We all chip in to supply need and protect a common living standard. To force others into squalor because you don't want to sell them your resource (at fair cost), is not just immoral but unethical as well.

Honestly, this is suppose to be a UNITED STATES. You already take advantage of a massive amount of resources and labor from other states to survive (this goes for any state), why the hell do you think you can take such a position is beyond me.

All you selfish twits need to pull your heads out of your asses and look at the life you live. You are not independent, you need the rest of us and some of those people need the water to give you what you want.

No, you can't. People assert this constantly by stating evolutionary pressure propagates drug resistant bacteria but that is by far not the leading cause.

Bacteria are more like a city of people and less like a field of crops. When a new type of bacteria joins a location, it tries to talk to all of the bacteria around it (even outside it's species) using chemical triggers or even electrical pulses. When one type of bacteria is having troubles, either by not getting what it needs to survive or being attacked by anti-biotic or virus, they send out stress signals. Sometimes other bacteria in the area receive these signals and start taking action even though they do not need to do anything. This in turn leads to chaos, either from bacteria starting to produce a barrage of chemical defenses (setting off more defenses of other bacteria), trying to split to create new cells, throwing all their resources into unnecessary processes, etc., that starts to severely limit resources at the location for all of the bacteria.

During this chaos, the rate of mutation is likely to drastically increase, characteristics between bacteria are more likely to be shared and bacteria will try to create defenses to random items it finds during the period. This means that bacteria not directly affected by the anti-biotic can develop the RNA or DNA to combat or avoid the anti-biotic, and then share it with those who are affected.

And this also means that the primary culprit of the spread of drug-resistant bacteria is not the actual use of anti-biotic, but the sheer fact that bacteria is being shared between people.

I hope this raises awareness that the country should have an interstate water sharing system, so that reservoirs can be built in wet areas and pipelines can send excess to states that need it.

It's the key 21st century project that needs to get done to keep the US safe from droughts, aquifer depletion and powerful storms.

Two short paragraphs later, the writer explains both in more detail. I doubt it was an issue of envy, but sticking to standard writing conventions (start broad, dive into details, wrap up).

And it's called the Large Hadron Collider, not the "European Large Hadron Collider". A lot of countries outside of Europe helped build it.

No, the civil rights battles STARTED with religion and continued on to race, women and homosexuals.

This law would literally blow away ALL civil right progress since Philadelphia in 1776, not just Montgomery in 1955.

Completely un-American to support discrimination of any kind for any people and I would even debate un-Christian as well.

Extremist strawman is extreme.

Any public shop must allow the public to enter and purchase products or services. A merchant doesn't have to do everything the customer asks and they can refuse service if they have good reason. But any shop that discriminates on any stereotypical ground is at least being unprofessional and unethical but at worst breaking discrimination laws.

This law is a thinly veiled attempt to remove all of the civil rights successes of the last sixty years.

Anyone can make a religion and say they aren't allowed to do X or talk to Y, then discriminate against anyone they choose. The entire point of the United States of America (LITERALLY) was to avoid that kind of thing.

I completely disagree. The majority of the HPC realm still uses Nvidia only because they know CUDA and not because of any technological advantage. AMD has held the line at not allowing sloppy programming methods into their OpenCL compiler and that has held back a lot of HPC users from jumping ship. You can even see this in many complaints from open source projects, like Blender, where they refuse to produce proper multi-threaded code and rely heavily on the CUDA compiler to do the work for them.

The rest of your complaints, "shitty drivers", "piss-poor memory handling" and "worse performance per watt" are also bogus. I own or manage machines using a large number of Nvidia and AMD video cards, and have seen as many driver issues between the two that neither has come out worse. This is a typical fanboy stereotype that keeps being repeated with no real fact behind it.

Your second complaint is seen a lot in programming forums, but I have never seen anyone do a proper write up of any memory issues with any of AMD's generations and most of the conversations lead me to believe it was an issue of the programmer's personal preference not wanting to learn a second platform with less market share than an actual technical issue. Most of these issues would be alleviate if the programmer would just use a common optimized library and stop trying to redo the work themselves.

Lastly, AMD's offerings have historically produce more performance per watt and their latest offerings continue that trend. This, besides the bit shift ability you mention, is also one reason why AMD was used for Bitcoin mining and supercomputers.

http://www.tomshardware.com/re...
http://www.green500.org/news/g...

Now, my latest personal computer has an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 inside because I more often need to fix CUDA code and noticed some of the games I wanted to play ran better on it (again, from the game designer's preference and not a technical merit). I personally own eight other video cards across AMD, Nvidia and Matrox (who use AMD GPUs these days) and three generations for testing.

And I am only sticking up for AMD because I admire their push to get people to code for multi-core better. Nvidia has been too conciliatory in the last six years in that respect, which is fine for their revenue stream and market share but not a good thing in the big picture for the broader computer industry. Since Moore's law has begun to slow, we are going to need a massive shift to multi-core optimized applications and we need programmers ready for that day.

AMD seems to be ready with the tough love to get everyone there while Nvidia keeps enabling bad behaviors.

I agree. Several of the moves seem completely political and not realistic. For instance, the fall of the USSR should not have been seen as such a positive development for world safety. The army in Russia was severely underfunded up to and for much of the decade after the USSR dissolved, meaning the likelihood of a nuclear warhead being stolen and sold was significantly more realistic. Or worse, a rogue general going ballistic about the union breaking up.

No, they literally copied over the LAN and are intentionally being vague to throw people off that fact. The original Sync blog post did not use Sync across the Internet but the Venturebeat author did disclose sharing across the Internet and stated:

"The transfer process was much longer. Times were in the double digit minutes, and largely depended on what connections my friends had."

In other words, in real-world scenario using the Internet, Bittorrent's Sync was not any faster than the times posted for the other services.

This is a terrible hack job by Bittorrent to spread lies and a horrible job by Venture beat repeating them with no critical thought.

Original Sync Blog post - http://blog.bittorrent.com/201...

a.) Yes, we do because the blog post says as such.
b.) True, and that is why they intentionally nerfed the Dropbox test by creating a new random file to not only avoid "deduplication" as they say, but the LAN Sync being available as well (which they do not admit).

RTFA:
http://blog.bittorrent.com/201...