Pacifists were reported to be protesting the product, but the White House insists its intention is to reduce blood shed...

Wow, I never knew that. I'm gonna hack and crash my coworkers comp*** CARRIER LOST

I'd give you the good rating. You used the service in a sane manner that exploited the strengths of the system and avoided the weaknesses.

I suspect many users of EC2 actually end up with less reliability than they'd get with a server in a closet, as they don't realize the true effort it takes to have an effective solution like you do.

Reddit's downtime has been a bit of a running joke for a while now, which most (all?) of it being blamed on Amazon.

The way they implemented things is one of the big issues. For example, things like setting up RAID volumes across multiple EBS volumes. They just magnified their exposure to any issues in the cloud. Any one machine goes down the system gets hosed and needs recovery. They also are constrained to a single availability zone in order to get the performance they need from their setup. (This is not intended to be a factual statement. ie, I didn't confirm the details, but I believe it captures the essence of the issue.)

To get the most from the "cloud" you need to build your infrastructure accordingly. You can't take old systems and throw them in the cloud and expect it to scale. Neither can you take all the old ideas, new tools will require new techniques which the industry will learn as things mature.

Typically your computer asks your firewall/router for a DNS lookup. It relays that to your ISP's DNS server. Your ISP looks up the DNS server responsible for the domain and contacts that server and sends your original request. That request doesn't include your IP however, so Akamai's DNS servers are returning regional specific servers based on your ISP's DNS server IP/geo-location. That's usually perfectly acceptable, since presumably your ISP's DNS server would be located on a good route with a low ping.

So if you replace your ISP's DNS server with those of OpenDNS, google or whatever else, it is that server which determines your location when Akamai's DNS servers decide which IPs to give you.

You should be able to replace your DNS server with your own locally hosted one as well. ie, you contact the root-servers, hunt down the responsible server, then contact it directly for the IP. I'm not sure what the implications of that is though. The intent of the typical setup is that the ISP DNS servers can cache things and reduce the load on the central root servers.

If 50% more battery life only adds 10% to the overall weight, the current battery must be less than 20% of the iPad 2's overall weight. I kinda doubt that, though I could be wrong.

Leave it with Skype if your time has ANY value whatsoever....

I love VOIP stuff, but it can be a real time waster, especially if you enjoy these tinkering with these kinds of things :)

Plus, that's only if you're actually paying for power.

Not many in India do... http://www.travel-images.com/pht/india128.jpg

I don't see how that has anything to do with it.

They've never blinked selling your hypothetical CPU as a 4-core CPU, not should they. They never had a problem selling a CPU with a lower rated MHz rating either, should that copy not perform stable at higher speeds.

Be impressed, what you said is basically what this flight set out to, and did, prove.

Bzzzzttt, wrong.

The metal plates *are* the antenna, the black lines are what separate one antenna from the next. The magic finger works by connecting the two antennas when placed over the black line.

There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary, and those who don't...

Sure, maybe he is wrong, but you're a bit of a douche for calling him an idiot for merely suggesting the possibility.

Re-read your first post, based on that it's a perfectly legitimate suggestion.

I think you should apologize and thank him for caring enough to reply to your post.

Hug it out you guys.

Hey, what if that bottom shaft was connected to a motor tough enough to be the starter?

Lock the output shaft, spin the bottom shaft, me would think that would spin the motor. Taking the car out of park means unlocking the output shaft.

Though if the torque can't go one direction, could it go the other? Probably right? Too tired to think through. :)

I was wondering about that. 10,000 individual mutations is not so bad like you said, chances are a lot of those cells would die off.

But if that 10,000 number refers to the number of mutations they could find today, ie, mutations that survived and live on in patches of your lung tissue right now, that is a different story.