Probably because Excel uses some crappy file format? Last Excel version I had as a student couldn't even export to PDF out of the box.

I was def underestimating the size of AWS, but I still think Google is way way bigger and it's not close. They classify the entire web.

FWIW, Google does not use commodity machines. They build their own. I think it was Sergei Brin who pointed out that Google is actually one of the largest hardware manufacturers in the world even tho it only builds hardware for itself... (pre Motorola purchase)

Edit: Was the CFO: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise...makes_servers/.

Interesting, I always assumed they use commodity machines or maybe slightly customized ones. Do we know what kind of machines they build?

They won't say. BTW, this is a nice article for people who are interested in Google's networking: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise...e-flow-google/

I guess it depends on what you mean by this. If you mean 2x-4x the size of Amazon than yeah, I'd agree with you. If you think its 4x or bigger I think thats very unlikely.

Yeah.. I'm comfortable with > 4x. Obviously there's not much we can do here because we're both arguing about what numbers are in sealed envelopes, and nobody's opening them any time soon.

Definitely. It's been interesting reading about though. I found one site that said Google claimed it cost about 0.3 watts for every google search.

That's not even in the right units, so it can't possibly be true. A watt is a unit of power--energy over time. That's like saying "My house is 5 miles per hour away from your house."

Watt-Hours. My bad.

Edit: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/te...ectricity.html

You just need to know how many queries are run in a unit of time.

Lol at you guys. Aws is bigger.

Google launches their cloud service and the next day a storm knocks out the Amazon's East region, knocking Netflix and Instagram both offline.

Luck doesn't even seem like the right word to describe that.

It's true that one data center was knocked out. Afaik Netflix completed failover to another data center in under an hour. My niece was using it all day on my iPad (east coast fwiw). Isn't instagram on FB servers as of early June?

had to do some simple video work recently, discovered AviSynth - wow what an amazing piece of software!

I'm not trying to say that the entire AWS went down, or that they're even at fault. Netflix did go down for at least some period of time, not sure how long. FWIW I use Amazon and am very happy with their service.

What I'm saying is that its incredible lucky for Google to launch their cloud service, and the next day their #1 competitor has a very public system outage.

On Drudge as I'm typing this:



It doesn't matter whether it's true, or to what degree.

There has to be a joke with a storm and the Amazon cloud

Does anyone know how Stars etc. handle their card graphics (and other graphics as well)? Iirc there's usually one big image of all cards so I guess they have some sort of script to cut the right cards out?

Different sites probably handle it differentlya, looking ofr good ideas of going about it.

I guess SVG is the way to go?

Don't know anything about it, but there are alot of mod-threads in the software forum. Maybe ask the question there

Mvh
Inga

pretty sure it was due to complications with the leap second, not a storm

SVG is probably the way to go, FTP moved to SVG shortly before imploding IIRC

Stars currently assembles cards from a few files, a base.bmp (which is say 4 cards wide and contains colours for suits) and cardrank.bmp which is 13 cards wide and contains (A, K, Q etc) and another one that contains the little suit symbols. I thinks there's an .a.bmp alphamask for these too to control blending. They are moving to PNG for a lot of table parts, but not yet on the cards. Take a poke about gx\chips&deck\deck\simple to see for yourself. There are numbered folders 0-7 for how large the bitmaps are.

Party just has separate .bmp for each card IIRC Ad.bmp, Kc.bmp etc. Been a while since looked at those.

I suppose anything using a single large image will use a technique similar to "CSS Sprites" to chop out the desired card.

My DNS provider (zoneedit.com) is down, and has been for a few hours. Is this something normal to expect from DNS providers every now and then, if not, can anyone recommend a more reliable one for me?

I liked openDNS until they didn't work at work and it's preventing me from logging into Diablo 3...

pretty sure google offers free dns servers as well

Google DNS

I don't actually use it, but it is an easy IP address to ping as a first step if you are trying to figure out network issues.

yeah I use google dns whenever I suspect issues because 8.8.8.8 lol - but I think Gull is meaning the other end of the dns setup, right?