"If it took "outreach programs" to make them take interest doesn't it mean that they _weren't_ interested enough in CS in the first place?"
Why do you think that is? The money isn't good enough? The life and hours of a developer aren't good enough? Women aren't capable of understanding programming?
Step back, man. You read like yet another HN poster.
Do you realize the mid-90s was almost 20 years ago? Are you only hiring 40 year olds? No significant minority population in your country?
If you don't think the brotastic world fostered in our industry is relevant, well, I guess (like the author) trying to expand our profession and tone down male-centric views just aren't for you. Kudos to you, I guess.
Typed like a rich white guy. There's a real barrier in our profession -- how many women are in your office? How many black people? -- and why do you think that is? How comfortable do you think your workplace is to a minority or woman? So how are we to study the effect of minorities on open-source when minorities don't want to work in open-source. It's not the money that's holding them back.
Real-world measure of goodness? Come on man. Do you hang out with women are colored folk or folks who came up differently than you did? It's nice, right? It's interesting to hear other folks's points of views, right? Maybe you even rethink some things you took for granted.
Have you never been around brogrammers? Have you never seen a group of dudes spiral into 4chan?
This is common sense, yes. Being a person and interacting with people is my real world measure of goodness.
We're looking pretty good in AWS West 1a. The second thread you linked shows great performance from markdcorner's second load balancer -- the https://forums.aws.amazon.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/3... image -- vs the original ELB, which SpencerD@AWS describes as a custom ELB with some sort of customer-requested secret sauce (maybe some sort of "slow start" to some backend servers?). Indeed we have reached out to AWS a few times in the past and had some magic (at the time ciphers and removing SSL v2) done to our ELBs.
We have seen issues with performance on ELB which is why we originally went with TCP mode HAProxy on the edge of our stack to a cluster of STunnel servers, but again reliability was an issue here and our ELB performance with up to 10K rps looks great in benchmarks. Past 10K we are considering separate dispatchers behind a separate ELB. But at that point I am also tempted to, frankly, switch to our own metal.
Curious: are you comparing ELB performance vs High I/O EC2 instances (say m1.xlarge) open to the world?
We've been bitten by EC2 instances having issues accepting incoming connections (multiple HAProxy boxes in TCP mode to an STunnel cluster), and we've never had that issue in testing with ELB. ELB also beats our failover time when we lose an EC2 machine.
But ELB is in no way a permanent part of our infrastructure (nothing is permanent) especially as we move to supporting technologies such as SPDY on spire.io or, for example for the right customer requirement, SSL throughout the network stack. We're also fond of Stud running on our internal servers. I do think ELB is the right tool for our cloud today.