Posts tagged “infrastructure”

My theory: Amazon's spot instances, launched December 12th, are filling EC2 to capacity by design. The timing matches perfectly with Cloudkick's latency graphs. Spot instances essentially guarantee full utilization at any price point. Anyone have EC2 spot price history to confirm this?

US mobile phones suck due to geography, history, and bad luck. Low population density kills carrier profits, early AMPS network adoption created expensive legacy problems, and late GSM adoption meant missing out on the SMS cash cow that saved European carriers. Americans got screwed at every turn.

Trinidad's downtown Port of Spain traffic lights broke and got stuck on flashing yellow. Traffic actually improved. So they kept them that way permanently. That's home.

My site was down for 24 hours due to an underground fire in Baltimore. The internet is a wonderful thing. Normal service restored, no data lost. Also fixed some broken RSS permalinks.

Three massive blackouts in quick succession across London, the US, and all of Italy. The Americans panicked, the British screamed, but the Italians? Apparently unfazed. Also, is this coincidence, infrastructure failure, or Al-Qaeda targeting power grids? I'm going with conspiracy theory.

I compare London, Paris, and NYC subways and find each gets some things right that the others get wrong. The fixes are obvious and cheap. Why won't they just do them? Hire me, Ken.