mryan

AWS will send billing alert notifications via SNS. Theoretically, you could write a script to listen to the alert queue and shut down processing if you breach a pre-defined threshold.

Of course, you then need to make sure your billing script successfully terminates any processes that are costing money.

I'd love to see AWS implement hard cost limits for services like this. e.g. specify you want to spend a maximum of $10/day, and once you reach that limit your service is temporarily suspended.

Presumably lotsofmangos is making a reference to the Nazi salute.

Some of these attacks are remote, some are local privilege escalation flaws.

The local attacker should have user-level access, but instead has admin/system-level access.

This "it's almost fixed, I'll email the client soon" pattern is something I have personally struggled with a lot, and I agree it appears to be common with engineers.

My workaround has been to make something else responsible for sending the email. In a team, this could be a manager setting a cut-off point after which communication must be made. When working on my own, I set an alarm for X minutes. When that alarm goes off I ignore the internal voice which says "just try one more thing, then send the email", and send an update to let the relevant people know my current progress, ETA to fix, and when they can expect the next update.

I think this is similar to how GTD encourages us to use systems for storing to-do lists instead of trying to remember them - our fragile human brains are not always to be trusted.

It sounds similar to the idea of teachers "teaching to the test", as opposed to providing an all round education and critical thinking ability.

Introversion were working on a game (Subversion) which has since been shelved indefinitely. Their city generation videos were amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pR8jpK4ETk

I agree that subsidising solar for the developing world is probably the best way forward. What interests me most about this is the parallels that can be drawn with telephone networks.

Many developing nations skipped out on landlines and jumped straight to mobile. Instead of a nation-wide power distribution network with coal-fired generators, perhaps we will see some countries jumping straight to distributed solar.

http://awsweekly.net/ - A weekly roundup of AWS news

http://postgresweekly.com/

Perhaps someone should start a WeeklyNewsletterWeekly, curating the best weekly newsletters?

SEEKING WORK - Remote, Amsterdam, London

Syadmin as a Service

I'm an experienced sysadmin focussing on automation, with a lot of experience with AWS (author of AWS System Administration).

If systems/infrastructure issues are holding back your development progress, I can help solve the problem and let you focus on building the business instead of managing servers.

Email: mike@epitech.nl Book: http://www.amazon.com/AWS-System-Administration-Practices-Sy... LinkedIn: https://nl.linkedin.com/in/mikery

Nobody is "entitled" to make a living from making music. However, everyone is entitled to say "I have created some music. In exchange for some money I will give you a copy of this music".

You say "no-one questions the business model" which is clearly false. Have you never heard of a developer being asked to work for free (or equity) on someone else's idea? IMHO that's the same as you saying musicians should be grateful to earn any money from their work.

I highly doubt that will be possible. Actually I think it is entirely impossible, but I'm trying to future-proof my statement :-)

The battery system will just know how much power is currently being used. It will have no way to identify which devices are currently drawing power. For that, you'd need something like this on each outlet: http://www.amazon.com/P3-P4400-Electricity-Usage-Monitor/dp/...

Maybe future smart homes will have the Kill A Watt built-in to electrical outlets for monitoring purposes.

I imagine you will be able to get metrics on current usage, peak usage periods et cetera.

I used to be a big fan of Blitz.io, and used it a lot for benchmarking my client's services. However they changed their payment model so the only option is to sign up for a monthly subscription, which does not fit in with my use case.

Does anyone know of an alternative that uses a pay-per-use option? In the meantime I have reverted to Bees with machine guns.

Because I would still need to run NGINX alongside it to handle HTTP proxying. By removing HAProxy from the stack, I have one less component to manage/maintain/upgrade.

I've used HAProxy for a long time and been very happy with it. But, everything else being equal, a stack with n-1 components is better than a stack of n components.

HAProxy is used for TCP too. The main benefit from my perspective is that there is one less component in the stack. Whereas I would previously need HAProxy running alongside NGINX to balance TCP and HTTP, I can now do all of this with NGINX.

That's correct. It's configured in much the same way as HTTP proxying, with a few different load balancing methods (least connections, consistent hashing).

The NGINX Plus docs on TCP Load Balancing: http://nginx.com/resources/admin-guide/tcp-load-balancing/

Something to read while we wait for the announcement page to come back up :-)

IMHO this is fundamentally unethical. The purpose of education - again, IMHO - is to equip children with the skills and knowledge they need to be successful in the wider world. Advertising has no place in this model.

The example given by gumby is particularly insidious. I could make the argument for including products that the children will be familiar with to make maths problems seem more applicable to the real world. However, knowing that the "best-selling packaged cookie in the world is the Oreo cookie" does nothing to enhance the child's mathematical ability.

The Merchants of Venus by Frederick Pohl is a satirical SF story about the potential perils of runaway capitalism. I could see school districts experiencing rivalry depending on whether they are a "Coke school" or a "Pepsi school". The last thing school systems need is yet another superficial basis for tribalism and rivalry.

There is one potential benefit that I can see. Advertisers would presumably pay money to schools for the privilege of advertising to such a malleable, captive audience. If this money were to be used to enhance the quality of education at the school, could it outweigh the damage caused by advertising to children? I'm not sure, but I doubt it.

Accepting command line options does not make something Unix-y, IMHO. I assumed it was called a "Unix tool" because it reads data from a file/stdin, does something, then writes to stdout.

If I needed to do something with JS as part of a series of Unix commands this would fit in the pipeline nicely. e.g. let's say someone wanted to do a one-off data transformation and they understand JS a lot better than Awk.

Route 53. Managing Route 53 from the command line with CloudFormation adds some convenience, and also lets you store your zone records in Git.

> In The Netherlands you need to invest 18k EUR to create a BV

This used to be the case, but the rule was changed in October 2012. I started a BV with 100EUR initial capital. I think this contributed towards the increase in Dutch startups in the last few years, in addition to the points you mentioned.

Of course. The point still stands - a person either is, or is not, in state of pregnancy.

I think that, from context, it was clear I was using "pregnancy" to mean "the state of being pregnant" and not referring to the nine month gestation period.

That'll teach me to contribute to pedantry-focussed subthreads. :-)

That simply means they have a very large baby bump. It does not mean that they are "more pregnant" than a lady with a smaller bump. Pregnancy is a binary state.

I think you're right, we're talking about different things :) I misinterpreted your comment - I was thinking of things like company cars, travel benefits etc. being considered part of the taxable pay package.

It is not prudish to think this is immature. I like boobs and I like tech conferences. But not at the same time. There is no synergy there.

I have a feeling this was set up by immature expats who lack the life experience to understand why this is stupid and exclusionary.

Expats, because I doubt most Amsterdammers really care that much about the RLD.

Immature, because "lol boobs".

I'm trying to avoid getting on my moral high horse here but... Godverdomme, this is one of the reasons it is difficult to rectify the gender disparity in the tech industry. For every well-balanced person who really does not care about the gender of their colleagues, there seems to be an immature person who thinks boobs and booze is a good way to reach out to the tech community.

As an (expat) Amsterdammer, and someone who would love to see the end of the "boys club" or brogrammer culture, this is an embarrassment.

To the organisers: Grow up a bit guys. You're dissuading a lot of your potential audience by pitching an otherwise interesting idea in this fashion.

</rant>

Sure, there is a distinction between pay and wage. However, tax offices - at least here in the Netherlands, and the UK - are interested in equivalent wage, rather than the direct salary number.

In most countries, certainly not. The tax office will require this information so it is already being stored somewhere.

The adage "there's no such thing as bad publicity" is no longer true, if it ever was.

Sure, I've now heard of Gradberry, but my association is "those spammers who scraped GitHub for email addresses". Any email I get from them will be immediately deleted.

On the face of it, it is easy to say "it's just milk, it all tastes the same", but there are significant differences in how milk is produced in the US compared to the EU.

Most US-made milk is produced using genetically engineered growth hormones (rBGH) which are banned in the EU as they are believed to increase the risk of cancer. It would not be legal to sell US milk in the EU (or Canada) for health reasons. That, and other differences in production methods, could go some way towards explaining the perceived superiority.

Respectfully, I think you are overthinking this.

One could use the same logic to make the argument that this article strongly supports the sanctions:

1: [CC on keyboard] "Hackers are trying to steal your money. We need these sanctions to protect you" 2: [Anonymous] "Look at the scary hacker. Don't you know kids these days can do anything with your computer?" 3: [Switch Rack] "See how complicated the internet is? Don't think about it too much, just let us protect you"

Personally I consider it more likely that those were the first results on the stock image site when the reporter searched for "internet, security, hackers" :-)