This will definitely lower the demand for coal, which in turn could lower its prices as well. This is good, because India might still need few coal power plants, considering its population size.
The important part here is that solar is still under heavy R&D with consistent real-world non-zero advances in efficiency and cost reduction while coal has, AFIAK plateaued. Even under perfect market conditions, solar will still, eventually price-cut coal.
No! Solar is solar; depends on available sunlight. India is not going to shut any nuclear power plant and is working on new one or next phase of existing ones.
I have used both GCE and AWS. Current I have website that is hosted on GCE, but I am using Cloudways managed platform because I am not good with server configuration thing. GCE is definitely better in performance and cheaper in pricing than AWS. Their block storage is more than AWS and they have native load-balancing technology which AWS does not have have. The only downside I have felt with GCE is that they are present in less regions than AWS. Google should also work on expanding their presence to more regions.
Well, there's spot instance pricing and reserved instances with AWS that nobody can touch. What "native load balancing" are you referring to that has no equivalent with AWS? There are many options for EBS - including magnetic storage. I doubt you can beat the speed of EBS with provisioned IO! Maybe you weren't using the right type for your need!
We have our own spare capacity product called preemptible VMs (cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms) with a similar discount and no need for bidding (Disclaimer: I worked on it). Also, we don't have reserved instances because our sustained use discounts, per-minute billing and continued year-on-year price drops make more sense than any of the RI combos (1 yr is worse than our pricing with sustained use, 3 years locks you out of price drops).
As to load balancing, I assume the poster is referring to the need to "pre-warm" ELB if you actually want to scale while our Maglev based load balancing goes from 0 to 1M qps within a minute.
Finally, EBS with provisioned IOPS is a good product! But so is PD-SSD, and you don't need to be a storage expert to get the best performance.
As others have pointed out, we've made a lot of progress in the last couple of years. Give us a closer look!
From AWS article on Best Practices in Evaluating Elastic Load Balancing, section Pre-Warming the Load Balancer:
"In certain scenarios, such as when flash traffic is expected, or in the case where a load test cannot be configured to gradually increase traffic, we recommend that you contact us to have your load balancer "pre-warmed". We will then configure the load balancer to have the appropriate level of capacity based on the traffic that you expect. We will need to know the start and end dates of your tests or expected flash traffic, the expected request rate per second and the total size of the typical request/response that you will be testing."
Edit: This means ELB could not deal with sudden spikes of traffic.
Although we've used to call support and request a higher capacity ELBs (you can't get this automatically), recently we stopped doing it recently and handle spikes from 1,000 to 100,000 concurrent users within a couple of minutes without a sweat. By the way, many people are unaware, but CloudFront distributions also need to be upgrade to handle spikes similarly to ELBs.
In some cases, Facebook advertising has proven to be quite profitable. I know some Pakistanis who have created pages to sell imported jewelries and other similar stuff to Pakistani Facebook users. They run FB ad campaigns to promote their products. Now, Pakistani market is lot different than US and other countries. If its cheap and free delivery, people will buy it.
I think Facebook advertising is very effective. First, it is very targeted. Yes, Zuck lets us use any information a person has on their profile to target them. Oh, you work at the media company with 900 employees that I want to work for, let me target each person who works there with an ad. They didn't think that was funny or the comment I made when they made it clear they weren't interested about how, although the number of women working at the company is equal to the number of men, the men working their tended to be much older meaning there was probably a serious wage gap. (I'm still looking for a job BTW). To be fair I mentioned that it might not be their fault. It is possible that instead of a bunch of young women between the ages of 18 and 35 being hired at the company 10 or 15 years ago, young men were being hired who are now in management. Whereas the increase in young women at the company will lead to more women being in management in the next 15 years than men. (I didn't really say that to them, but I thought it.) [1]
Facebook wants advertisers to show relevant ads to people so people with ads that are shared, interacted with, and commented on, get a discount on the price of that ad. Facebook would love it if the ads on peoples' profiles were higher quality than friends' posts. A big reason people purchase GQ and Vogue magazines is for the ads not just the editorial content. Also, taking the time to target people who really care about a product or service makes it much cheaper to sell ads on Facebook. If I wanted to promote a new Japanese restaurant in a 20 mile radius from the restaurant, I'd create an audience of people who liked the local Japanese garden. Who else cares about that demographic? Nobody. So it's cheap.
I would not be surprised if one day people go to Facebook for the ads like they do fashion magazines to find out all the new products and services that they might be interested in to help them at work, at home, or at play.
Turns out that people who are interested in Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu languages in the US and Canada are probably English speakers interested in a second or third language. So their results are correct. Facebook Ads Manager is like any other computer program. It does exact what you tell it to do. Rather than selecting an audience of English speakers they might have had more success selecting the ~45,000 people in the United States and Canada[1] who like the largest Indian news website.[2]
Notice how the size of the audience is almost the same as the number of likes of the page? My guess the reason why the audience is larger is because people who have unliked the page after liking it are still included. Facebook ad manager is very, very accurate at targeting only people who have liked a page, for example, only people who liked the Candlebox band page or any information people have put in their personal profile like having attended Stanford University.
I've tested it. It is very accurate. I've made a post and targeted 300 people who I know or interact with in real life. The post got close to 20 likes and lots of comments but everyone interacting with it was in the audience I selected. I've done a few other tests too and I always only get interaction with people in the audience.
For humans, it was the greatest catastrophe. Remember Permian-Triassic period didn't just affected one species and there were no humans during that period. You could say our ancestors were affected though.
There is the Toba catastrophe theory - basically that the huge eruption of Toba caused a reduction of the number of breeding pairs of humans down to a few thousand:
Perhaps the volcano wasn't the cause, but IIRC there's reason to think that humans display less genetic diversity than might be expected, pointing towards a bottleneck somewhere in the past.
Humans are very unusual from a genetic perspective that makes analysis of us difficult. Firstly, the population has expand hugely in a very short time so there are all sorts of founder effects. Secondly, the selection presure completely changed a few thousand years ago with the transition from hunter-gather to farming. These two factors make it really hard to use the normal genetic tools and concepts to study human evolution and draw accurate conclusions.
"The infection takes three–five days to incubate in people before they fall ill, and another three–five days before, in 80 per cent of the cases, the victims die."
Takes at least 6 days for the infected to die. That's a really deadly disease. Even Ebola was not that fast. The WHO website mentioned that it takes 21 days for Ebola patient to show just the symptoms, which could mean it would still take few more days for the patient to die.
This is partly why there have been rival Ebola-like 'haemorrhagic plague' theories of the Black Death, although they're still niche theories.
Confusing matters is the fact that some accounts of symptoms make it sound like Pneumonic plague was also affecting victims, and killing them even faster. Possibly there was some perfect storm of plagues spreading through multiple vectors at once, with haemorrhagic pneumonic and bubonic plagues striking at different places with different frequencies.
Without a means to distinguish between the plagues (and other diseases), pretty much any death caused by communicable disease would at the time be considered part of the Black Death.
My understanding is that Ebola is not very contagious. You need physical contact for the disease to spread. Which is why there was some many victims among nurses and doctors. But also why it is unlikely you will be contaminated if you sit 5 hours in a plane next to someone carrying the disease.
And the interesting thing about Ebola is that while it's not very contagious it is extremely infectious. Which means that you need contact with just a few virus particles to be infected.
I would bet the deadliness of Ebola has been overstated (at least by a little, probably by a lot). Like any infection, many people who get it are probably asymptomatic, and until recently the vast majority of people tested for it were most definitely symptomatic.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/15/ebola-study-fin...
Transmission of Ebola occurs only after patient develops the symptoms of the disease anywhere between 2 days and 3 weeks after infection [1]. By then most patients are not in a condition to be "walking around".
That's another way of thinking. But a deadly disease is one where death is certain and fatality rate is high. You could say that Ebola had higher chances of spreading, along with being deadly.
Diseases which kill immediately upon contact don't tend to spread. It's the ones that sit silently and don't harm you that spread everywhere (e.g. HIV)
That's what I was thinking. Not all the websites look "brutalist" to me, some are okay. But some websites are really brutal and a pain to look at, like this one: http://kioskkiosk.com/ This one is a joke.
Brutalism is not supposed to be painful or unpleasant, just brutally honest. Brutalist buildings look like giant blocks of raw concrete (béton brut), because that's exactly what they are and no effort is wasted on hiding that fact.
