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cothomps

Re:Dr. Don Gurnett, U. Iowa Space Physicist Retires on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @09:27PM (#20047506)
Dr. Gurnett is one of the principal investigators on the Voyager I & II projects; his group was the one to discover the heliopause boundary.
Re:Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian on Thursday July 26, 2018 @05:03PM (#17621108)
I was curious whether or not the Sride project was failing. We were about to do a migration once some key integration things were done; doesn't look like they'll finish those.
Or scenarios where you can use EFS to stage data 'for something else' (i.e. shared image / upload content that stages to a CDN, etc.)

Keep in mind (and this comes from hard experience in 'traditional' NFS web server architecture) - if you mount everything on an NFS volume, you ensure that

1) If something goes wrong on that NFS mount, everything goes wrong. (bad code deploy? All nodes are down!)

2) If you rely on an NFS mount to store everything (e.g. trust keystores for JVMs,etc.) your entire infrastructure is dependent on the I/O capabilities of that NFS mount.

3) No matter how clever you are (or how much you trust NFS clients/versions) you will deal with file locking if you are doing a fair amount of read/write from multiple nodes to a single NFS mount.

Short story - EFS will make some of the 'hard' things with distributed nodes possible, but don't make the easy things impossible to troubleshoot.

.... kind of. A reservation is all about planning capacity. If you know (e.g.) that you need two web servers "hot" all the time to serve a base level of traffic, you can pay for that up front either partially or in total (a reservation) at some pretty significant savings. You can add hourly (or spot) capacity as needed - but paying for what you'll be using up front can make AWS very economical.

If you're paying for X1 servers for an extended period of time on an hourly basis, you should be entitled to a thank you note from Jeff Bezos.

Re:The Art of Monitoring on Saturday June 11, 2016 @12:43PM (#11884106)
To the "free chapter" idea - I think the website has a pretty good prospectus, and compared to other tech books / publishers, it's certainly well worth taking a flyer on it for a maximum of $20.
Re:In Defence of WordPress on Thursday May 14, 2015 @09:11PM (#9548443)
Nice!

As much as Wordpress gets bad pub, there is certainly the open ways in which security is handled and patches are distributed. Far better in most ways to commercial CMS (and even some open source) where systems seem to run unpatched until a system upgrade or a security incident.

Use it to build web scrapers hunting for AWS Keys on GitHub, to spin up more instances to scrape for AWS keys to..
Re:Usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago on Monday December 22, 2014 @12:08AM (#8782089)
The great thing about USENET was (and well, is) that news is a protocol so you could choose from a few different clients if the UX for one was horrible. Not a panacea, but it was nice to have that kind of competition.
... And at this point "Internet" companies are far more ingrained in the mainstream economy than they were in 2000. There will be some companies that will be hit, but things won't be as bad as it was when nearly anything net related took a hit.
It seems that by the time a career path / financial instrument is widely talked about as a "lifestyle", it's time to get out.

1999: "The dot-com lifestyle", everyone is an HTML/Flash developer. 2005: Flipping houses, adjustable mortgages - Mini Donald Trumps abound.

2015 seems to be lining up to be an energy industry crash.

I'll note that one positive in the industry is that people put some serious thought into working in a way that was more productive than dot-com crazy and we all took Agile methodologies seriously.
1) I was fortunate enough to be in a good place where my wages were not hit terribly hard, but there was a big slowdown in wage growth.

2) I did take a pretty dull "and stressful for being that dull" job with an insurance co. as a senior developer after the startup (probably closer to 'small biz' at that point) I worked for had a major restructuring. The dull job did allow me to focus a bit more on some other freelance/networking opportunities.

3) As a few have noted, the biggest thing afterwards seemed to be the outsourcing wave. That plus the sudden glut in the market seemed to nearly wipe out entry level opportunities. There was a period of time where I (being only 6-7 years out of college myself) don't recall working with a single new graduate.

Re:AWS Cloudfront down? on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @08:02PM (#8665489)
Doesn't seem global - the CF domains I hsve in us-east seem fine
Re:MakeMeASandwich.js on Tuesday October 07, 2014 @02:41PM (#8423071)
I decided to load test the app and am now receiving 500 sandwiches / s.
You'll get to see more XML metadata than you thought possible.
^^ Oregon deciding to have Oracle consulting engage on a time and materials contract is the big problem.

Hint: always, always do these on bid. No one ever saves money/budget on consultants working time and materials.

Re:GitHub monoculture on Saturday May 03, 2014 @11:55PM (#7693235)
It helps that ad-driven SourceForge seems to be doing its best to shove people off the platform.
Re:How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @10:58PM (#7595823)
... this is right on. I've seen my own role in "DevOps" as being one that is less task-oriented and more toward bridging skill sets. The drive toward specialization (mentioned by the author) is leading us toward having "Ops" administrators that are completely incapable of understanding how an object-oriented system is constructed and "Devs" who seem almost oblivious to how computers (web servers, middleware containers, databases, etc.) actually work.
Re:How to Minimize Politics in Your Company (2010) on Sunday March 16, 2014 @02:46PM (#7410628)
Completely agree on your #2 - even in cases where management sincerely believes that they are "open and honest", if you haven't established trust at all levels the rumor mills will fire up as soon as closed door meetings happen.

Even worse (and I've seen this probably too many times): at various meetings talk about openness, transparency, etc. - then a day or two later announce a reorg, let a few people go and send vague boilerplate e-mail to all hands.

I'm always amazed at various managers/leaders that are totally oblivious to the fact that they are developing their own reputations primarily through their actions and the opinions of "ex" employees. If you're a shop in town with more 'ex' employees in the general workforce than actual employees, smart people will figure it out.

Re:The History of Velveeta on Saturday January 18, 2014 @09:20PM (#7083142)
Great comment - but what the hell is "salad cream"? (Miracle Whip?)
Re:Investors Drop Big Money On Dropbox So It Can Beat Box on Saturday January 18, 2014 @09:17PM (#7083134)
Simpler: "DropBox is the service that makes your iPad useful."

Ask HN: Is the Bastion Host Security Pattern Outdated?

Following on to this article:http://programming.oreilly.com/2014/01/is-the-jump-box-obsolete.html?cmp=tw-prog-na-article-pr_is_the_jump_box_obsoleteThe article proposes that the Jump Box / Bastion Host pattern is obsolete for many cloud deployments. I've been using a 'bastion host' pattern to access Amazon VPCs - and while the security / IP infrastructure is somewhat simpler to maintain, there...

( Read More... | 1 comment | 3 points | on HN )
Re:Why the Climate Corporation sold itself to Monsanto on Monday January 13, 2014 @08:19PM (#7054768)
Good question - I was targeted by a CC recruiter and wondered the same thing.
Re:Software in 2014 on Thursday January 09, 2014 @09:59PM (#7034838)
.. and ranting about Spring is about what, 2006?
Re:How Silicon Valley became "The Man" on Thursday January 09, 2014 @09:51PM (#7034815)
The first part of that article - the discussion of culture / counter-culture sounded like it could have come from the pen of Thomas Frank:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Conquest-Cool-Counterculture-Consu...

Re:The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume II on Saturday December 21, 2013 @10:49AM (#6946912)
... and as a freshman physics student many of these lectures were a little opaque. I really came to appreciate them as an upperclassman / grad student.
Re:The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume II on Saturday December 21, 2013 @10:47AM (#6946906)
Except manny of the CalTech freshmen in these courses did drop - with seats being filled by grad students.

(FWIW - the recordings marketed in the "Easy Pieces" series from the lectures are a great last minute Christmas gift.)

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