adamlindsay

No and it never well be. Lets consider AWS. On-demand pricing, even reserve is never even going to be close, simply because there exists Amazons overhead, profit, etc. built into the cost. The only possible chance is spot instances. Spot instances start to approach a "free market". The pricing will adjust based on supply and demand. There still exists AWS overhead, as they aren't going to run them at a loss, just far less profit. If the price of say the p3 family of instances approached a profitable price point, then others would flock to using them, driving up the price, causing them to no longer be profitable. There also exist external use cases, such as AI, which can justify the computation power at a higher price point, as the value of the computation might exceed the value gained from mining.

Blinkist is worth checking out. I like using it to determine which books I am going to actually read.

https://www.blinkist.com

jq, vim, sysdig

Does it absolutely need to be brand new? I typically buy my Macs refurbished. Or being in NY, if you are developer, hunt down an ST.121-3 form and get it tax free. Either route will probably save you quite a bit.

Next, take into account resale. All computers drop in value, but Apple products hold theirs better than anything else I have ever seen. I regularly resell my Macs after only a year or two with loss of only a few hundred tops. So the question is more about the yearly cost of ownership. Which also brings up the idea of leasing, but typically it doesn't work out well.

http://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/current_forms/st/st121_fill_in.pdf

I have gone the complete opposite direction of the many questioning who wears a watch anymore. Recently I picked up my first automatic, a Seiko of course. I have worn it for about 2 months now, and am about to tear into it. There are a lot of sites that sell after market hands, faces and of course straps. The movement I picked up is well documented and will allow me to get into it without too much problem. There is something magical about a device that requires no power other than being worn. It tells decent time, but loses a few seconds a month. Thats part of the charm of it. Can your GPS Mobile device tell better time? Of course it can. But that isn't really the point. After only two months, I feel quite an attachment to it and actually feel naked without it. I do use it functionally though. A quick flick of the wrist will always be faster than pulling a phone out of the pocket, pushing a button and putting it back in your pocket. There is of course the aesthetic/fashion aspect as well. Currently I have a nice nato strap which has received a ton of compliments. After many years of no watch and relying on PDA's and Smart Phones, I can safely say I am now a watch wearer for life.

An AWS micro is designed for burstable CPU loads, i.e. Websites. Performing a CPU intensive task will never do well. Amazon even says this in their own documentation.

The second fault I have is that articles like this, is that they only every look at the OnDemand price, which most people using AWS seriously don't pay. AWS has reserved pricing and spot both of which will dramatically drop the pricing. Maybe not as inexpensively as Joyent, but much much closer.

A low price point on commodity hardware certainly doesn't correlate to the hardware industry being dead. If anything it is quite the opposite. With such a low price point, the potential market opens up quite significantly. There become many more people that can now afford a tablet, and there also becomes many that can justify having a few around the house for various tasks. A tablet in the kitchen for just recipes becomes a viable product. Of course I would want that particular tablet to have some particular features. Maybe water proof, and easy to clean.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you do have the Apple's and Amazon's of the world that the author mentioned. Quality/expensive hardware will continue to exist long into the future. It will help drive the advancements in technology, and a portion of consumers will always demand quality regardless of price.

If anything the low price point opens up the market for new products. Take Ouya as an example here. While they managed to get $8.5M on Kickstarter, their initial outset had them need less than $1M. I would argue, and I think I have here that we are on the brink of a cambrian explosion of new hardware devices, and given the low entry point, there will be many new companies that bring us exciting new products.

"Being quite the audiophile, I prize myself with high-quality audio."

So why do you even care about the Apple headphones? Mine have never even made it out of the box from the various iDevices I have owned.

notifybyphone.com - Phone alert system using Twilio storesapp.com - eCommerce platform, had launched in beta and customers, eventually closed. sitesapp.com - CMS sister service to storesapp.com fingerlakeswineregion.org - Free app listing wineries and attractions.

Willing to sell domains as well, I have finally found focus. :)

Everyone's A zone is different. So I could say A is down while someone else is saying B, and we could be talking about the exact same zone. It makes it difficult to say if it is more widespread or not.

The AWS documentation does a good job explaining the setup. As for multiple ELB's mapping to the same instances, I don't know if this is actually documented, it is just kinda known. It use to require configuration via API/CLI, but appears that the web console now even lets you do it.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/lates...

Ah, that is certainly helpful. I didn't realize that.

While a neat solution, I feel this is going the wrong way with things. One of the primary reasons to use the cloud is to get away from SPoF. This solution is simply putting lots of sites on a single instance, which is fine, but how does the port translation work across multiple instances? We ran into this problem recently while architecting a solution for our customers and we ended up using multiple ELB's to point to multiple EC2 instances. Sure at $20/mo its probably a slightly more expensive route, but it solved all the benefits of what is being promoted here. For those that don't realize ELB's can act as SSL endpoints. I believe RackSpace allows a similar such thing. It also means that no complex port/ssl configuration occurs on the web servers, they are actually much easier to deal.

This reminds me when I use to see a ton of resumes which had "TCP/IP, NetBeui and IPX/SPX" listed on them. Of course these were the 3 checkboxes in the Windows control panel. I am sorry but clicking a checkbox does not denote experience with a particular technology. At first I wasn't allowed to reject them based on just that, after a while it was obvious that anyone that did that usually weren't worth speaking to. We eventually taught HR to not even pass those resumes along for us to review. It really reduced the number we had to look when interviewing for a position.

Surprised Backbone.js(http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/) didn't make the list.

Stripe.com, although not sure about #3.

Used Sendgrid for a few apps, was completely fine, never could get past the interface and various "value-adds" they were pushing. Lately I have been moving everything to Amazon SES. All of my hosting is with AWS already so this just makes sense. Its not full of frills, but it works and works well. Not only that but it is fairly inexpensive.

Take an eCommerce system for instance, you want to open up complex shipping or discount calculations to your end users. A great way to to do this is to allow them to write a function that takes in known objects and returns a result. Say it takes in a cart/line_items and returns back a calculated amount. Obviously its a bit more complex then that, but it is a great way to expose some functionality without exposing the entire system.