Collecting tech news & Commenting on I.T. every day!
The electricity was out for 5 days. We got back into the house 9:30 Monday night. Then Tuesday the Nor’Easter came and dumped record amounts on us (20 inches in one day). We got another few inches to go between now and 8pm. Cannot wait until it ends. We got to replace all the refrigerator contents we dumped after the fridge stopped last Wednesday.
UPDATE: Shortly after 5 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Amazon said that the affected services were fully recovered and operational. =====Original Story ==== Sure, Amazon is a huge retailer and a giant media company, but its biggest presence is hidden from a lot of folks: It’s a massive internet host. Thousands of sites and companies rely…
via No, It’s Not Just You: Lots Of The Internet Is Down, Thanks To A Problem At Amazon — Consumerist
In the tweet storm that followed the outage of Amazon’s S3 service at US-EAST-1, I learned a few things.
So learning this as I go along I realize I’m very much at the mercy of my upstream “provider” in this case it’s a packaged web app that the provider has hosted on Amazon S3. The people I work for sign a contract with the web app provider. But I am never privy to the details on the contract (Service Level Agreement) the provider has with Amazon S3. I know nothing about their architecture/design/disaster recover plan. But at a certain level of paying that provider and knowing they have many other accounts they handle in addition to mine, I’m thinking they are making a wise choice hosting on Amazon S3. They must know something I don’t and they MUST have architected their web app to work gracefully within the Amazon Devops platform, design to fail-over with no boost/assist from Amazon S3 other than to keep their Zones and Regions running as much as possible.
All that would be naïve magical thinking in the Universe we inhabit now I fear. Our web app was out from 12:45P EST to 5:00P. I worked another 2 hours after that to ensure all the queues and work that got submitted completed out and that the service is ready for tomorrow (Wednesday) at 9am when it is going to start the day doing work again. I’m so much more thankful for the last 3.5 years where this web app has had little to no outages. I guess we got lucky. That’s something at least. Whatever the root cause, I hope Amazon comes clean and lets the cat out of the bag and really begs everyone’s forgiveness. The trust in not just the service, but the expertise, all the articles written about Amazon’s engineers, patents, research, papers on Data Center design/ops/architecture is now flushed down the toilet. I don’t care now how much bigger Amazon is than Google/Facebook/MS Azure. There is a golden opportunity now for any entrepreneur out there to make web apps that can turn on a dime and move effortlessly between Google’s data centers, Microsoft’s and yes Amazon’s data centers. Or provide the glue, and expertise to make that happen. And then make the big 3 bid on hosting your damned service on their infrastructure. Then outages like today’s Amazon S3 downtime would mean something,… It would mean breach of contract, and you would pick up your toys, your DNS entries, your databases, your whole stack and move it to a competitor in a blink of an eye. That’s what I want, a cell phone service-like compute/storage infrastructure I can turn-over/cut-over when I get dissed, upset or disappointed by the performance of the hosting provider. No Vendor Lock-in, Free as in Freedom.
People simply aren’t using RSS readers any more, and I’d argue if you even mention “RSS” people won’t even know what you’re talking about. RSS isn’t social. You can’t reply via RSS. You can’t share via RSS. Only social is social and Facebook just opened that (using “open” very loosely) to the entire web.
Source: If You Didn’t Think RSS Was Dead Before, Facebook Just Killed it, Completely | Stay N Alive
Wherein the writer Jesse Stay acts as a tout and corporate shill for one Mark Zuckerberg and his advertising platform known as “The Facebook”. Much trolling and baiting of RSS readers and weblogging occurs throughout the article. I declare it FAKE NEWS ala Donald J. Trump. How’s this for sharing via RSS Mr. Jesse Stay?! Hmm? Is your Search Engine Optimization and Performance Dashboard picking up this signal yet? PING!!
I dare say Feedly is providing an adequate refuge for the users of Google Reader who had to flee that platform. I’ve been using it and it works/looks similar enough to Google Reader for my taste. And even better the Mobile App is feature equal and feature complete to the Desktop browser version as well. That was something I never did with Google Reader, never used it as a mobile app. So kudos to Feedly for keeping the mobile app revised and up-to-date. I couldn’t happier and recommend anyone who did use Google Reader, and desperately wants a way to subscribe to and read feeds from your favorite blogs, and news sites, do use RSS. Do NOT use Facebook.
I’m sitting here starting an argument with you and you are starting an argument with me.
I am against expressive social media, I say. I think it is making us very dumb and we should use other forms of social media to teach kids.
“But, Mike,” you may be thinking, “why are you so binary, why not BOTH?”
“But, Mike,” you may be thinking, “you must respect the students and their expressive urge!”
“But, Mike,” you are thinking, “is this really an extended subtweet of something I said? Is it against me? It’s against me, isn’t it?”
Or perhaps you’re thinking, damn straight, it’s about time someone spoke against expressive social media. Sock it to ’em, Mike!
If you’re really enlightened maybe your opinion is that it would be silly to be for or against the article at this point. Let’s wait until the terms in the headline are defined…
View original post 1,512 more words
So far, the only thing the White House has said about its plans to replace the Affordable Care Act is that it would provide “insurance for everyone” and that people would be “beautifully covered,” but comments coming out of Washington indicate that not everyone will be able to obtain coverage under the replacement plan. Bloomberg…
via Report: Obamacare Replacement Will Likely Cover Fewer Americans — Consumerist
I think John Boehner knows better than Paul Ryan or anyone else what the Republicans are up against with a Repeal/Replace of the Affordable Care Act.
I’ve generally kept my advocacy for the Lead-Crime Hypothesis of this blog. This is a blog about web-enabled education, after all. But today I can probably get away with it because there’s a web literacy connection. Seriously, I promise. For those who don’t know the lead-crime hypothesis, it goes like this: the massive crime wave […]
via The Lead Hypothesis and a Gripe About Mobile — Hapgood
Using McLuhan as a yard-stick, I’m going to put mobile phones into the cool category. A laptop or desktop computer is hot. Mobile is definitely one-way consumptive and information is treated “as received” from the sources. Mike has a point here, a creative act or a medium that allows for creation and not just consumption would be hot. And further, being able to participate and create, makes it hotter still. It is a medium that is fully 2-way and not just “as received”.
Some things, you can measure centrally. Some, you can survey with a sample group. But sometimes, what you really need is a giant crowdsourced effort — and that’s what New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is asking Empire State residents to help with. You may remember that the AG brought a lawsuit earlier this month…
via NY AG: Please Send Us Your Broadband Speed Tests So We Can Investigate Providers — Consumerist
I know that our cable modem is likely deficient. It was issued around 2005 before DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems were widely distributed by TWC. We’ve been on the same modem since that time. And I guarantee it would never support more than a 10Mbit connection download and 1Mbit upload.
