I loved the bit where he spent a small pile of that money on an Inverted Jenny postage stamp then used it to send a postcard.

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I got a free Echo Dot a number of years ago when I attended an AWS conference. I played briefly with it but never found it all that useful. I certainly never would have trusted using it to order things from Amazon, which is one of the things they hoped people would do. It sat in a pile of junk for a year or so before I finally got rid of it.

Just as long as he declares it “an official act”. I think he just has to say that. It doesn’t have to be written down or anything. And it doesn’t matter if anybody actually hears him say it, as long as he does.

Do you not recall when Amazon lost their S3 service in us-east1-1 region back in 2017? That caused cascading failure across the Internet for a good part of the day…

We have a cron job that once a quarter files a ticket with whoever is on-call that week to test all our documented emergency access procedures to ensure they’re all working, accessible, up-to-date etc.

I know some sites have experimented with feeding bots bogus data rather than blocking them outright.

My employer spotted a bot a year or so ago that was performing a slow speed credential stuffing attack to try to avoid detection. We set up our systems to always return a login failure no matter what credentials it supplied. The only trick was to make sure the canned failure response was 100% identical to the real one so that they wouldn’t spot any change. Something as small as an extra space could have given it away.

Same. I used Apollo almost exclusively for Reddit. I left the day it shut down and haven’t been back.

Redaction means it’s still classified for some reason. Makes me wonder what they think might still be sensitive on a 40+ year old lecture like this, when DOJ guidelines call for automatic declassification of “records having permanent historical value” after only 25 years unless they fall into a handful of very specific categories, like divulging the identity of an active agent.

I graduated college in 1990 and one of the places I interviewed for a job was with the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics. They build the submarines for the US Navy.

During my interview they told me that the computers on the current generation of subs were programmed by punch card. The punch cards were sent to the one contractor that had the ability to convert them to the magnetic tape actually used to load them onto the subs systems.

Perhaps by now they have indeed upgraded from punch cards & mag tape to floppy disks of some sort…

Yup, the Supercharger network is great. Last year my wife and I did a road trip up a down the east coast in our Model Y, and thanks to the superchargers and their integration with the Tesla navigation system we never had any issues.

Having said that, I’m hoping that the rollout of other NACS networks picks up steam. 5 or so years from now when I start thinking about a new car I’ll be taking a hard look at non-Tesla options for both vehicles as well as charging.

We did that (with Rackspace) for years before migrating to AWS. AWS is still far better from a service & flexibility perspective.

My employers website has certain times of the year where we see a huge increase in web traffic. When we had a hosted solution it took weeks of preparation to provision additional web servers to handle that load. We had to submit formal requests for additional servers, document how to wire them into our network & required firewall rules, etc. Then we had to wait an arbitrary number of days for them to do the work. And then we had to repeat that whole process when we no longer needed the additional capacity.

With AWS we just define an auto scaling group and additional web servers are spun up automatically when demand is high, and frees them up again when no longer needed. Even if we didn’t use auto scaling we could easily automate this sort of thing via terraform or other tools and spin up additional instances in minutes instead of days.

Having done everything from building my own servers 30 years ago to managing hundreds of servers in data centers to now managing hundreds of instances and other services in AWS, I’ll gladly stick with AWS. The hardware management alone makes it well worth the overhead.

25 or so years ago I had to troubleshoot a hardware issue in a SCSI-based server with 6 hard drives in it. A drive appeared to be failing so I replaced it and immediately another drive failed, then another, and so on. After almost a full day of troubleshooting later and we realized the power supply was actually the culprit and could no longer provide sufficient power to the full set of hard drives.

20 years ago while managing 700+ servers in a datacenter we had to manage a recall of about 400 of them thanks to the Capacitor plague that caused a handful of our servers to literally burst into flames.

Hardware failures like the above and dozens of others were mitigated in most cases thanks to redundancies in the software we wrote. But dealing with hardware failures and the resulting software recovery was a real PITA.

With AWS I may occasionally have a Linux instance lock up due to a hardware failure but it’s usually fairly easy to reboot the instance and have it migrate to new hardware. It’s also trivial to migrate a server to run on more (or less) number of CPU’s, RAM, etc. with only a couple of minutes of downtime.

The more advanced services AWS offers like object storage, queues, databases, etc. are even more resilient. We occasionally get notified that a replica for one of these services had failed or was determined to be on hardware that was failing, and it was automatically replaced with a new replica.

I’d much rather work this way than the way I did 20+ years ago.

It’s not currently in the best interest.

IF Trump wins the election then it would be in the best interests of the US. It would be akin to a judge throwing out a juries verdict because the jury clearly made the wrong decision.

Man I could have used this when reading Ulysses in college…

Yup. Blocks ads on our iPhones, iPads, streaming services, etc. Between that & uBlock Origin on our laptop browsers we hardly ever see ads.

I don’t understand why Cloudflare gets bashed so much over this… EVERY CDN out there does exactly the same thing. It’s how CDN’s work. Whether it’s Akamai, AWS, Google Cloud CDN, Fastly, Microsoft Azure CDN, or some other provider, they all do the same thing. In order to operate properly they need access to unencrypted content so that they can determine how to cache it properly and serve it from those caches instead of always going back to your origin server.

My employer uses both Akamai and AWS, and we’re well aware of this fact and what it means.

Speaking of slot machines, every slot machine, electronic poker machine, etc. are just state machines that operate based on a stream of random numbers fed into them by another device.

The random number generators (RNG’s) used for gaming are highly regulated (at least here in the US) and only a small handful of companies make them. They have to be certified for use by organizations like The Nevada Gaming Control Board. RNGs have to be secured so only NGC officials and other key people can access them. If they are opened unexpectedly or otherwise tampered with then they need to go into lockdown and stop generating numbers until an official resets it.

The RNGs also need to be able to replay sequences of numbers on demand. If the same sequence of numbers are fed into a game and the user plays the same way then the result of the game should be 100% identical each time.

My wife and I plan 6-12 month out, and sometimes more. At least for the dates of our vacations. My wife runs a small dog boarding service out of our home, and limits the number of dogs she boards. As a result she has clients that will schedule boarding up to a year in advance. So we need to block out our vacation time early enough to prevent clients from making reservations at those times.

At some point after we block out the time we’ll figure out where we want to go.