"That's just semantics."

Exactly. The semantics is what the words actually mean.

"That's just semantics" is a common way of saying "you're arguing over semantics instead of the point." When arguing semantics is disguised as a genuine rebuttal, it's a fallacy.

If I say the sky is blue, and you assert the sky has no color, you're not actually contradicting my assertion you're disagreeing about the meaning of the word 'sky'. That's arguing semantics instead of addressing the point.

Yes, by "that's just semantics", I meant that it doesn't matter which party you call the customer. The thrust of the argument is still that Groupon is screwing over merchants and that I'm not convinced that merchants will continue to work with Groupon.

There are 25,000 Google employees, how many of them do you think are attending IO (total attendance 5000), let alone speaking there.

That's a stage managed corporate event announcing new products and initiatives, it's no more a display of openness than Steve Jobs' keynotes.

Most people don't upgrade their CPUs. Most people don't know what generation their CPU is from when they buy.

They don't have to take it.

And that's why they have multiple fully-isolated regions. Availability zones are a purposeful tradeoff that provides easier to use service with higher inter-zone communication performance and lower cost.

No, that's not what Amazon says.

The following is from the AWS web site [1]:

> Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location.

No mention of tradeoffs.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

The tradeoff is in that AZs are "engineered to be insulated" as opposed to being actually, or naturally isolated. Prior to their downtime, I've had plenty of conversations with folks that I work with about AWS and we've always assumed that AZs are not 100% isolated. I can see how someone can read "engineered to be insulated" the other way, but I generally read these kinds of materials as guaranteeing nothing beyond the most limited possible reading, and probably not even that.

The quoted statement doesn't say that isolation is 100% or that multiple AZs can't ever ever fail at the same time. It says that if only one AZ goes down and you have servers in another, then those servers will still be up, which should be obvious. Insulated doesn't even mean the same thing as isolated.

Sure, I don't disagree with what you are saying. However I think that the way Amazon presents the concept of an AZ is that it IS isolated from other AZ's in the same region.

Even the name, 'Availability Zone' implies that it is isolated from other 'Availability Zones' in the same region. And that text I quoted does nothing but substantiate that inference.

I just think that Amazon are misleading here. Maybe they shouldn't call it an Availability Zone.

I'd go see that movie.

It's not a huge restriction since GAE will happily spin up dozens of instances without any intervention if your load requires it. Getting multiple concurrent requests into each instance will make things like local memory caching somewhat more useful though.

There seems to be a steady stream of these from ex-Googlers, which is frankly what I'd expect from a company of that size. What I'd be interested to know is what percentage of SWE's are leaving each year, and of course how do the people that are left feel about the company. The ones that I've heard from have a range of opinions from It's Ok to It's Great, but those are of course anecdotes.

Also, "behaviors that lead to success" are not necessarily the same as "behaviors of the successful". Lots of folks have effectively won the lottery.

Programming is not tedious, and it is hard. Listing instructions for the computer to follow is only 10% of the job. Most of the job is figuring out how to deal with complexity in a way that is economical, maintainable, and satisfies secondary requirements like security and performance.

In any system design involving software, the software is where the complexity goes. To save money, you might replace an electronic component with an algorithm. To make a better product you might replace a tedious user action with an automated system. This is because (some!) software developers/programmers have tools for dealing with complexity. Things like abstraction and re-use that don't trivially map to the concrete world.

Frankly if software were about enumerating steps, I would have been out of this business long long ago.

As I've always said, coding is easy, analyzing is hard.

Not if x is negative.