Many products/techologies follow the S-curve. Slow start, exponential growth, plateau (mature product, 3-5% growth per year) - and then slow death. From my perspective, we have a broad set of capabilities. Let's take transportation. There are performance attributes like time, speed, work, power, mechanical efficiency, etc. The wheel was a technology that was surpassed by the horse and buggy and then eventually the automobile. The capability is needed but the technology or family of products eventually becomes obsolete.
Commodity products are on the plateau. The technology has been proven and there is broad market acceptance. The unit cost has been brought down substantially from the point of market entry. Tesla's electric vehicles are pushing in this direction but it will still take some time.
My company is launching a new web design and development service using Google Cloud services. Initially, this was an experiment because we received some Google Cloud hosting credits. We run LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) stacks on virtual machine instances on servers worldwide of our choosing.
After Google I/O, some webinars and testing I learned about how quickly new websites and apps could be deployed, Google DNS for managing domains, App Engine and other load balancing features that can help manage cost.
The ability to SSH into a virtual machine has proven quite useful to enable my team to coordinate and manage projects. I am still open to using other services like AWS but Google Cloud has been great - especially because they also offer customer service for tech and billing issues.
Spendology is the company >>> spendology.net. Our new service is called Blue Apex Digital. I just used Google DNS and Google Compute Engine to publish >>> blueapexdigital.com. Thanks GCP!
I do have a quick question. I am running a LAMP stack with the A standing for Apache. I put an "Index.html" and an "Index.php" file in my "www" folder. I realize that new files append old files. However, I want to add a ".htaaccess" file with DIRECTORY prioritization for the PHP file over the HTML.
I tried copying an htaaccess file via the gcloud command line tool but I got an error. I've been looking through help, faqs, and searched but haven't seen a solution as of yet. Did I miss something? Thanks!
fwiw, this is currently my favourite site to check for possible optimizations, I ran the test so you wouldn't have to wait 30 seconds in the queue ^_^ http://yellowlab.tools/result/e7v314ikq3
I have noticed that all google cloud services now require credit card information for validation. Can this be be made optional and instead rely on their Gmail accounts ? (Especially for people just wanting to tinker with new services for fun)
I suspect that it's unlikely that google can remove this because bad guys tend to spin up many free trial instances and do bad things (sharded bitcoin mining, DDoS'ing, etc). Privacy is #1 so they aren't allowed to look inside your machines or inspect your traffic...so that leaves billing / such metadata to fight abuse.
That makes perfect sense, and I don't argue with this logic at all. But since you're here, I'd like to say something (that isn't horrible :P) that I've actually wanted to [have the opportunity to] get out there about GCP for a while now.
The "Heroku-style free" tier is likely to be all I can manage for the short to medium term future, due to a variety of factors.
As a result, the two go-to systems I would turn to if I need code hosting are Heroku and OpenShift, and I have accounts with these platforms (although I'm leaning toward the latter lately). I am yet to do anything generally interesting with them myself, but these are the systems I take into account when talking to others, because I have no experience with GCP. (I wonder if this is true for others too, and how big that number is.)
I have zero idea how Heroku are fending off precisely what you refer to. I've heard about situations where individuals' AWS accounts have been hacked by automated systems that spin up "instances with everything", but once it was established with billing that the account was hacked, the charges (which in one case were 5 figures) were fully reversed. Perhaps this fact is relevant here.
I think the problem can be solved before it (theoretically) gets to that point, however.
Serving up webpages, doing the occasional database transaction, etc, produces a significantly different CPU load than bitcoin mining does. I don't consider instance CPU usage monitoring a violation of my privacy, so I think it would be perfectly fair to throttle back continuous high CPU usage, but allow for short bursts of high usage. (In fact, I think this kind of thing is already standard...?) For bonus points, make the system track instance CPU usage and adjust its thresholds to allow for periodic high burst usage :P (since, thinking about it, masquerading as a web server and doing 30 seconds of mining every 5 hours is going to work out to zero gain).
I wouldn't consider it at all unfair to offer a free tier with exceptionally aggressive CPU-time QoS; in fact, it would probably suit me (and a lot of other people) perfectly, giving the funemployed community the option to do things like spin up fascinating new environments like Erlang, Dart, Rust, etc, and play with these environments (which are not yet available on Google's cloud hosting infrastructure) for web serving and similar. (For more bonus points, I'd extend the heuristic CPU-time tracking I mentioned before to classify instances as "friendly" over the long term, and let them have exceptionally low latency! :D)
In short, there's a whole demographic of people out there that you're definitely excluding, including people like myself who are just at the "messing around" stage, to nervous types who don't like deadlines and run from the "free for X period of time" part of GCP.
I realize and recognize that your response here is only your opinion, not Google's, and I'm very happy to respond here or via email (my address is in my profile) if you'd like to discuss any of any of the things I've said. ^^
The quote wasn't spoken eloquently but it was profound. He was speaking truth but it was also amazingly ironic. Why risk and assume so much about success in Iraq with the quagmire of obvious unknowns?
The college model has a forced failure system. The competition model should have no place in educating children who will become working, tax paying, and voting adult citizens.
Most large universities also have their intro courses taught in huge lecture halls with 100+ students. Yeah that system fails, so don't do it.
But take the good parts. Small focused targeted quarterly classes that students can retake if they fail.
Having classes that last an entire school year (or even half a school year) is overkill.
I also like that with the quarter system in college, students typically take three 5-credit classes. That is 3 hours of instructional time per day, which at a good pace in class, is about the max an average person can learn.
With 6 hours of class instructional time, teachers have to "burn" some of that time so students don't burn out. I could not imagine sitting through 6 hours of college lectures per day, it'd be insane, because every minute spent in class is productive.
Compare that to High School, where students spend a LOT of time on busy work, or watching films, or reading entire chapters of a book out loud.
Want a recipe for success? Make a class schedule that is the equivalent of 15 college credits per quarter. 3 hours of lecture per day, intersperse lectures with dedicated study time, let students immediately apply what they just learned to solve problems.
Students will get to learn more per class, and have better adherence to homework policies.
I'm referring to "the curve" when I say forced failure. Grading models at public and private universities require that x% of students receive a failing grade. The goal is not to teach the student to be knowledgeable of subject X but to rather weed out those who do not cross a subjective proficiency threshold.
> I'm referring to "the curve" when I say forced failure. Grading models at public and private universities require that x% of students receive a failing grade. The goal is not to teach the student to be knowledgeable of subject X but to rather weed out those who do not cross a subjective proficiency threshold.
This varies by university and department.
In theory you should always have a performance curve if you have a large enough sample size.
This does not mean that 1 standard deviation away has to fail.
It does mean that some students will do better than others. You can set performance targets however you want, if we desire to create an education system that supports students so that -2σ can still perform at a competent level, well you have a system that supports 97.6% of students. (Although I'd actually say that performance target is somewhat unrealistic for a country in which only a mid 80% of students currently graduate high school.)
Universities don't have the resources, time, or motivation, to educate 97% of the population, so they are going to put policies in place such as "more than -1σ and you fail out".
There is no need to employ that en-masse to all education!
Great article and food for thought as politicians and education reformers push school vouchers, Common Core, union-busting, etc., and other theories without really measuring, testing or optimizing the option's ROI. The idea has been "well let's just try something new" without rhyme or reason.
Folks would bring cots and blankets during Finals week while studying in the Engineering building at my university. Engineering students were not being coddled - you had to put in countless hours of study to make the grade.
Pushing 40, if I went back to college, and all the kids were taking cots to the engineering building to sleep on while somehow getting ready for a final, I'm sure I'd have nothing to do with it. I'd push the midnight oil if I could, then I'd go home, sleep snug in my bed, and be back bright eyed and bushy tailed at 5am to get started again.
But when I was 20, I'd be there with my cot, no question.
