That's what I don't quite understand about the current state of cloud computing. We're seeing huge advances in hardware/network technologies this decade but there's an ever increasing push to centralize hosting with cloud providers. Will this ever swing the other way?
Look at what's driving the shift: data centers are a major capital investment up-front plus a significant amount of staffing to operate and secure them. If you have enough proven need to justify that, you can easily beat a cloud provider — especially if you can simplify the problem in some ways that a generic service cannot.
For most organizations, however, it's hard to justify investing millions of dollars up-front in the hope that at some point you'll be saving enough to make that pay off. If that's not your core business it's often easier and safer to outsource it so, for example, you don't end up with a data center full of 50% utilized hardware which you bought to have capacity for growth which wasn't quite what you expected — or a big crunch when you have more demand than capacity and now need to double that investment to handle [currently] 10% of your usage.
> For most organizations, however, it's hard to justify investing millions of dollars up-front in the hope that at some point you'll be saving enough to make that pay off.
Well if you have your bills and a prospect of how much building and operating a datacenter would be, it could be very easy to do the calculation.
Btw one should not dismiss so easily the work of datacenter companies. They often have very high security standards and practices.
And this means that you don't necessarily have to build a datacenter from the ground up. You can start saving by just renting one or two rack cabinets and start putting your own hardware in there.
Oh, I’m not being dismissive of their work - it’s just multiple lines of skilled work which you have to complete. The building, hardware, and software management all require 24x7 operations and security, work with vendors and capacity planning, etc. and overseeing all of that work.
At some level of usage those costs are lower than the savings but that line has been going up for years, especially for anyone who needs PCI, HIPAA, FEDRAMP, etc. where there’s a ready package available covering a lot of it.
It is interesting that this sentiment keeps popping up regarding the US handling of the situation. The US was fast and early to react, especially compared to the US handling of the swine flu... and people seem to just completely ignore that fact or throw it out the window completely.
Fast and early compared to whom? We knew it was coming and it seems like we’re still making preparations and only started after we unloaded a ship of sick passengers without proper planning.
It's really not hard to grasp why it would spread quickly. This virus harbors in the respiratory system of an infected patient. The viral infection invades cells and releases more of the virus.
This is so contagious because:
1. Everyone breaths in nearly 8000 liters of air each day
2. Virus are so small that they stay suspended in air for a while, some estimates are 30min (think how smoke stays afloat)
Article lists multiple leading experts working round the clock on this, all saying they're not sure why the virus is so contagious.
But some random person of uncertain credentials says "It's really not hard to grasp why it would spread quickly".
If you have some kind of expert credentials with serious evidence, then it would be great to hear it. Otherwise your opinions are just unhelpful, potentially dangerous noise - and the internet has no shortage of those already.
> Authoritative expert opinions that require belief are worse and more dangerous than a random person's honest analysis
Really? Believing multiple named doctors' opinions from a well-known journalistic source on a technical issue is more dangerous than believing a random stranger who I know nothing about other than their username? On the balance of risks, I'll take the doctors, thanks.
What they're trying to figure out is how it spreads so quickly when other viruses of the same family do not. Also this is an RNA virus (like most viruses), and RNA is not a stable molecule, especially compared to DNA. The ability of the virus to attach to and invade cells is also not an absolute. Our adaptive immune system can and does recognize the virus as a threat. What you flippantly described as "not hard to understand" is actually very hard to understand for the domain experts actually working in this field..
Your points suggest that every respiratory virus should be highly contagious, but don't explain why this one is more contagious than other similar viruses.
Yes, all good conjecture that is likely accurate, but wildly important to not only proceed based on these assumptions and to get definitive proof of the mechanisms
Why is there so much general confidence warmer temps will reduce spread? Is it really warm temps = more daylight = more UV bouncing around breaking up virus particles in the air? Does it make any difference at all for the majority of folks who spend almost all waking hours inside?
I think there's probably an aspect of wishful thinking, and I certainly wouldn't say that there's anything like general confidence in the idea. Actually, I've only heard this stated as fact by politicians and similar; experts are mostly WAY more cautious about it.
it is because the warmer weather is what stopped SARS-COV in 2002 from spreading this far. the western world was lucky in that ignoring it the first time was an okay strategy. SARS-COV-2 is making its way around the globe right now and hopefully has the same limitations or this may get out of control. ignoring is the most dangerous option at this point. please watch this video by 3blue1brown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg a math professor in the US about the situation.
But maybe the main reason that SARS died out by the summer was not primarily because of the temperature but had more to do with the fact that it wasn't as nearly contagious and they were able to contain it with social distancing?
I don't know if there is such confidence among specialists, but among non specialists the arguments I have heard are based on assumed similarities with the common flu. These arguments may or may not apply , and there is still disagreement and unanswered questions on why the flu is seasonal:
I believe its something along the lines that when there is more moister in the air, the water droplets grab the floating particles and fall to the ground. Thus higher humidity often slows the impact of airborne virus, hence we have a flu season.
85 cases in Australia. And how many of those are imported?
In a binary sense, yes it “is spreading”. Even an R0 of 0.1 is “spreading”. But there is hardly enough data to say it is spreading widely in Australia.
The virus spread in summer/tropical vs winter/non-tropical regions is orders of magnitude different. But this is also not definitively causal. Just extremely highly correlated.
Yup, the counter to it is India. With almost all of the 43 cases imported even after more than 17000 tests seem to indicate that it's not spreading there (it could be a variety of factors including under-testing).
There does seem to be some secondary spread in Australia however this seems to be from close contact with people who have been overseas. We are a little late to the game having established effective screening and information sharing early On. There is a expectation that the next few weeks will show a marked increase in community spread.
The inflation has been offshored. China's rural population has been lifted out of poverty. What happens to the world economy when china runs out of cheap labor?
There are still many other countries with cheap labor (Bangladesh, Pakistan, lots of Africa etc). It will still take a few more decades for the majority of the whole world to get out of poverty (assuming we don’t go off the rails).
The overwhelming theme of social media is propagating envy. Look at this amazing vacation, look at how handsome I am, look at this happy family with baby and wedding photos, look at all my money, look at me landing a great job, look we just bought a beautiful new house.
How can one be content with your own life if you're constantly comparing yourself to everyone else. Removing images and video might go a long way.
Also, adding some degree of anonymity. It’s much easier to delight in a story/post where there’s less orientation of the story to an attention-hungry identity and less social pressure on friends to ‘like’ and so forth. Not that anonymous social forums are without problems.
