The DMZ

LOL:

if version startswith windows 9 (code search)

literally thousands of hits

Scott Pack

3:49 AM

@Simon I'm going to say likely to be true since I know someone who claims he's used that code more times than he would care to admit.

Stack Exchange

4:00 AM

If you want to have more fun at the expense of language pedants, try developing an hypercorrection habit.

7:07 AM

Moved one of my services from Softlayer to Google Compute. Hosting cost for the exact same server configuration drops to 1/10th of what I paid last month. Altogether a positive experience.

Gilles

@tylerl almost all of which are false positives. Didn't anybody who saw this scroll down to the bottom of the first page?

3

@tylerl Cmon, stop advertising your employer's services. ;)

@TerryChia FWIW, I pay the same rate as everyone else. No discounts.

Is Google Compute a IaaS or a PaaS?

7:10 AM

@TerryChia They have both. Compute is like EC2. In fact, amazon dropped their prices to match google's when it came out.

But App Engine is PaaS

@tylerl App Engine is the PaaS right? While Compute is the EC2 like one?

@tylerl Yeah. Hmm, I should take a look at Compute's pricing.

It's crazy cool. You upload your code, and they'll scale it all the way up to millions of servers if that's what it takes.

So it's perfect for stuff like running the back-end of a multiplayer game, or something. You only pay for the resources you use when you use them, but their design constraints make it so that the whole thing scales to absolutely massive capacity as needed.

So, if you weren't convinced that Google was the awesomest place to work: My team decided to spend last wednesday on the beach. The company provided busses for transportation and budget for food and stuff. And we all went to half moon bay for the whole day.

A "team building" thing or whatever.

What kind of company does that?

Anyway, I'm off to bed.

7:50 AM

@tylerl any reasonably decent one

we have things like that at my job a couple times a year normally

not saying google isn't a solid place to work, it is, but there are lots of other similarly good employers out there if you know to look for them and have the talent to get jobs from them

@tylerl almost cheap enough to make me think about moving off dedicated, but not quite

it saddens me that nobody has managed to beat dedicated hosting prices for predictable load on cloud stuff yet, but I guess it makes sense

since there is some overhead

@AJHenderson Why does that sadden you? I think it's pretty normal.

but if I was to try to replicate full uptime on my 3.1ghz quad core, 12gb server with 1tb of storage and unlimited transfer, the price is still about 2 to 3 times higher

The attractiveness of services like EC2 is the ability to scale resources up and down on demand.

@TerryChia it saddens me that nobody has started selling closer to the markup of dedicated hardware

I understand why

but it would be nice if you didn't have to pay a huge markup for the scaling

so that you actually could use it for predictable load as well

If you have a stable load throughout the year it's hard to beat a dedicated server or just buying a server and placing it in a colo.

7:59 AM

I mean, your load has to be pretty inpredictable for it to make sense at 2 to 3 times the cost on average

@AJHenderson Nah, it's not only about unpredictability.

Journeyman Geek

@AJHenderson: and the fact that a lot of folk have no idea how to size capasity. With PAAS, its essentially someone elses problem.

Imagine tasks where you want to scale up to 100s of servers to run jobs in a certain timeframe then idle for the rest of the day/week.

@TerryChia hmm, that's fair

Also, Amazon spot instances are pretty ok in price.

8:01 AM

it still seems like it should be possible to run one closer to cost though

statistically, usage patterns should average out

Some people write sophisticated software to reserve them.

so it shouldn't cost substantially more on average to run a cloud process than a dedicated one in theory

but reality doesn't match up with that

@AJHenderson Can you back that up?

@TerryChia just statistical normalization

on average, as you increase the number of people using a system, the average load should balance out in general. Especially if you can globalize it

Also, cloud prices are in a race to the bottom at the moment, give it a year.

8:04 AM

at worst, you should end up with a situation where you can do market exchange rates based on demand and have it fairly average out

@AJHenderson You can get damn cheap cloud servers. Just look at DO. What providers like Amazon provides is more than a simple VPS.

You get access to the whole load balancing/replication/DNS stuff.

the only hard data I have though is what proprietary info I have from the cloud service provider I work for in terms or our server utilization we see when scaled up globally

Which is incredibly difficult for small companies to build.

Adnan

8:18 AM

10:31 AM

forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2014/08/01/usb-security

interesting

BadUSB exploit causes USB apperatus to act as almost undetectable carrier and executer of malware

@Lighty yarr- it's a bit of a problem for organisations

@RoryAlsop ahwrrrrrrighty then

@Lighty it was always a risk, but what BadUSB does is make it easy for anyone to re-write USB firmware to do this

@RoryAlsop so is it easy as in, it would be a common virus after a while, or is it script-kiddie easy in a while? because im sure AV companies are already digging this with love

It is not a virus. BadUSB is a toolkit to rewrite firmware on any USB device that allows firmware rewriting

AV will not detect

the current USB handshake protocols are not built to cope - the PC asks "what are you" and potentially also asks "please give me the drivers I should use to communicate with you"

= game over

Lucas Kauffman

10:42 AM

@RoryAlsop isn't that the trick to get autorun working for CDs?

but with a pendrive

you make it think it's a CD and you can autorun all the thinggs

@LucasKauffman does anyone still use autorun. Pretty sure Windows has it disabled by default these days

(I say pretty sure. It is disabled on the windows box I have - I don't think I needed to do it)

autorun as a default of asking "oh, theres data on device, what should i do?"

but driver install goes auto

which i had trouble with yesterday, attempted to install my wireless logitech F710 controler's software

Lucas Kauffman

@RoryAlsop I think they initially used to disable it on pendrives but didn't disable it on CDs, might have changed

somehow, the logitech site doesnt work and gives me the wired F510's drivfers, and the drivers on the nano reciever dont work at all (even though they auto install and seem to work, in device manager)

Lucas Kauffman

TGIF to be honest

10:52 AM