Don't look East.

For auto-scaling to realize material savings, the variation in the workload needs to represent a significant change in the production footprint. Many applications in the Private Sector now being dumped into relatively expensive compute and storage cloud services don't have that profile. A handful of virtual servers inside a corporate data center with an internal user base is usually uneconomical to refactor or replace with a lower-cost footprint, at least for now.

For the small office, AWS, i.e "cloud" is definitely easy and economical, however the promised economies of scale are not easily realized in larger organizations. There are a number of reasons for this, but two of the main ones are that the provider's interests are aligned with the subscriber spending as much as possible on compute, storage and I/O - and most subscribers, especially the larger ones, are notoriously bad at properly measuring, managing and optimizing these resources. Additionally, the promises of manpower reductions are overblown in the glossy slides that the C suite sees. Sticking your computer in somebody else's data center saves a bit of upfront grunt work, but you still need everybody else from the sysadmin up to deliver the service.

The transition is inevitable of course, as organizations globally of all size rush to concentrate their compute and storage infrastructure into 3 major providers and get data centers and bare metal off their balance sheets. The premise that these providers will jack up prices once they have enough control of the market seems reasonable based on where we are today. AWS now charging for public addresses and increasing the cost of their Email Service may just be the beginning of what they can get away with. If there is a way to squeeze out smaller providers completely they will definitely find it.

Yes, you're right. Headline probably translated because it's not a clear way to say this. Also was surprised that gold bars are only 2K each, but I see the common size is 1 oz and they aren't very big....

"Gifted" is a bit of a stretch. They were found in a package addressed to the Red Cross. Rightfully delivered, perhaps.

Don't look down.

Big Brother Turns 68: George Orwell's '1984' Masterpiece Coined a Lasting Lexicon for the World

Temperatures in cells are well over 100 degrees and go as high as 140 degrees. Staying hydrated is sometimes impossible, because the tap water can be so disgusting that incarcerated people refuse to drink it.

“It smells.” “It is brown like it came from a dirty lake.” “I cut up my sheet and make a filter and tie it to the faucet. The crud that accumulates is scary.” These are the comments families and friends are getting from those inside.

Most Texas prisoners have no money in their commissary account. If no one can help them, they are out of luck. Reason? Texas prisoners earn not even one cent an hour, even though they are forced to work.

Matthew Chapter 25

41 Then he will say also to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels; 42 for I was hungry, and you didn’t give me food to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink; 43 I was a stranger, and you didn’t take me in; naked, and you didn’t clothe me; sick, and in prison, and you didn’t visit me.’ 44 “Then they will also answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and didn’t help you?’ 45 “Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Most certainly I tell you, because you didn’t do it to one of the least of these, you didn’t do it to me.’ 46 These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Kill your television.

Thank you for the reassurance because I felt like an idiot when the penny finally dropped. Although, admittedly, I've found that I rather enjoy being old and out of touch. My dad would have likely thought it was something about Linus from Peanuts.

not having the data of being told to fuck off, presumably.

Never heard of before and dgaf about whoever Linus Sebastion is. All this stuff I've been seeing about what an asshole "Linus" is thinking it must be some kerfuffle about Linus Torvalds but the bits and pieces I read made no sense. Even less now I've figured out it's just some random asshole named Linus. How did I end up here? Take me back to my room, please.

https://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/demo/

Especially if you were indigenous.

wunderwaffen

too good a word not to research.... comes from WWII, naturally...

panjandrum (British) - two wheels connected by a sturdy, drum-like axle, with rockets on the wheels to propel it forward. Packed with explosives, it was supposed to charge toward the enemy defenses, smashing into them and exploding, creating a breach large enough for a tank to pass through. But when it was tested on an otherwise peaceful English beach, things didn’t go quite as planned. The 70 slow-burning cordite rockets attached to the two 10-foot steel wheels sparked into action, and for about 20 seconds it was quite impressive. Until the rockets started to dislodge and fly off in all directions, sending a dog chasing after one of them and generals running for cover. The rest was sheer chaos, as the Panjandrum charged around the beach, completely out of control. Unsurprisingly, the Panjandrum never saw battle.

The Goliath Tracked Mine (German) The tracked vehicle could carry 60kg of explosives and was steered remotely using a joystick control box attached to the rear of the Goliath by 650m of triple-strand cable. Two of the strands accelerated and manoeuvred the Goliath, while the third was used to trigger the detonation.

Each Goliath had to be disposable, as each was built specifically to be blown up along with an enemy target. The first models were powered by an electric motor, but these proved difficult to repair on the battlefield, and at 3,000 Reichsmarks were not exactly cost effective. As a result, later models (the SdKfz 303) used a simpler, more reliable gasoline engine.

Being sent back to the drawing board is a disgrace usually reserved for weapons that never saw battlefield action. Goliaths did see combat and were deployed on all German fronts beginning in the spring of 1942. Their role in the action was usually nugatory, however, having been rendered immobile by uncompromising terrain or deactivated by cunning enemy soldiers who had cut their command cables.

The bat bomb (American) Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a Pennsylvania dentist named Lytle S. Adams contacted the White House with a plan of retaliation: bat bombs.

The plan involved dropping a bomb containing more than 1000 compartments, each containing a hibernating bat attached to a timed incendiary device. A bomber would then drop the principal bomb over Japan at dawn and the bats would be released mid-flight, dispersing into the roofs and attics of buildings over a 20- to 40-mile radius. The timed incendiary devices would then ignite, setting fire to Japanese cities.

Despite the somewhat outlandish proposal, the National Research Defense Committee took the idea seriously. Thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats were captured (they were, for some reason, considered the best option) and tiny napalm incendiary devices were built for them to carry. A complicated release system was developed and tests were carried out. The tests, however, revealed an array of technical problems, especially when some bats escaped prematurely and blew up a hangar and a general's car.

In December 1943, the Marine Corps took over the project, running 30 demonstrations at a total cost of $2 million. Eventually, however, the program was canceled, probably because the U.S. had shifted its focus onto the development of the atomic bomb.

Gustav rail gun (German) The railway-mounted weapon was the largest gun ever built. Fully assembled, it weighed in at 1,344 tons, and was four stories tall, 20 feet wide, and 140 feet long. It required a 500-man crew to operate it, and had to be moved to be fully disassembled, as the railroad tracks could not bear its weight in transit. It required 54 hours to assemble and prepare for firing.

The bore diameter was just under 3 feet and required 3,000 pounds of smokeless powder charge to fire two different projectiles. The first was a 10,584-pound high explosive shell that could produce a crater 30 feet in diameter. The other was a 16,540-pound concrete-piercing shell, capable of punching through 264 feet of concrete. Both projectiles could be shot, with relatively correct aim, from more than 20 miles away.

The Gustav Gun was used in Sevastopol in the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa and destroyed various targets, including a munitions facility in the bay. It was also briefly used during the Warsaw Uprising in Poland. The Gustav Gun was captured by the Allies before the end of World War II and dismantled for scrap. The second massive rail gun, the Dora, was disabled to keep it from falling into Soviet hands near the end of the War.

Some mailing lists are membership and/or opt-in only. There are legitimate needs for bulk mailing.

He said "I know you run the show down here, but give the devil his due...

I'll bet a toilet of gold against your soul that I can intimidate you"

endlessh

yep... https://nullprogram.com/blog/2019/03/22/

reminds me of this

https://www.vice.com/en/article/d3b7na/the-story-of-lenny-the-internets-favorite-telemarketing-troll

as I remember, serranos do not start turning red until the very end of the season and the plant is almost done.

With respect to pricing, I've been using SES for maybe 10 years, possibly more - this month is the first time I think I've ever been charged. The free tier used to include a very large number - I think it was 30,000 or or more emails a day that I never exceeded. Now it's 0.10 USD per thousand messages. Which is a pretty big change from free, even though the overall costs are small - and it's still a bargain. As with everything in "the cloud" though, the big players will squeeze the competition out then increase prices. I fully expect SES prices to keep increasing now they've figured out they can extract a few extra dollars from users and how relatively cheap SES is compared to the other overpriced crap. It won't surprise me if they jack this up significantly in the coming years.

Referencing sending quotas - Amazon is very lenient - I was talking about the big providers like gmail. It might be different now that my accounts have a long reputation as trustworthy senders, but when I first started using SES way back when, gmail and yahoo would start rejecting mail if more than something like 200 or so messages were submitted in a single batch, so I had to check the recipient domains and limit the numbers for each hourly iteration to stop them rejecting. I keep the email batches pretty small since I'm only sending out about 5-10K at a time and I stagger the send over several hours.

It's a bit of a minefield but overall pretty happy with SES, mainly because the mail gets delivered. You don't need to originate sending from an EC2 hosts (the pricing is the same, even though they make a distinction in the price list:

Outbound email from EC2 $0.10/1000 emails $0.12 for each GB of attachments you send*

Outbound email from non-EC2 $0.10/1000 emails $0.12 for each GB of attachments you send

*You might incur additional data transfer charges for using EC2 (it seems very likely they will increase the non EC2 price to drive you to a place where they are getting your compute and storage $ as well).

https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/