Japans new supercomputer cost $100M to build and takes $10M/year in electricity plus all the staff - so $1200/hour sounds pretty good.
Of course the problem is that the Amazon machine isn't a supercomputer any more than me claiming that all the PCs on the floor at all the BestBuys in the world add together to make a supercomputer.
What makes a supercomputer is that those 30,000 cores can all talk to each other very very very quickly
It's also part of crazy Hollywood acounting. The more you can charge against the film the better, that's why flops like Titanic and Empire strikes back still haven't made a profit
You don't want the film company to actually own anything because then the people owed money might have something to go after
Where does it say on harvard.edu that they wont kill students and harvest their organs?
Edit: Oh sorry forgot that people in the land of the free don't have a human rights act preventing Google reading their email (not sure about harvesting organs)
It does however tend to color your judgement about how professional and reliable this service is. If they risked their future on the stability of the Somalia domain registry - just so they could have a quirky domain name.
Calling yourself slashdot is funny if you are a geek site - worrying if you are my pension fund.
It fails when a certain proportion of the filament has evaporated.
The evaporation rate is pretty constant, assuming either a getter or large enough bulb that the evaporated tungsten doesn't change the environment.
So you would expect some form of bell curve distribution around the design lifetime.
Bath tub curves tend to come from large assemblies of reliable components
Yes it was different in the middle ages, it has changed now. Only 10% of UK government ministers went to Eton and only 70% to Oxford and Cambridge so the power of the old-boys network is disappearing.
competitiveness only matters when you have competitors.
So if you are an engineering company and you work like this you will be destroyed by countries with more meritocratic hiring systems.
If you don't have any competitors because you work for government or in a sector like banking where you are protected from foreign competition and all you competitors hire on the same system - then you will do fine (for now).
Can we spot any English speaking countries which might be an example of this?
Successful go to elite college, successful only hire from elite college, therefore to be successful you go to elite college.
Of course this system eventually breaksdown. But for Eton school it's worked since 1440, for Oxford since 1096, Cambridge since 1284 - but eventually it will break down.
>Half a mil to learn about Poetry Writing. Sorry, but that's just silly.
Half a mil so that when you apply for a job at $MEGA-CORP or in government the hirer says "Oh you went to %SCHOOL%, same as me" welcome to our management fast-track program, followed by promotion and VP-dom.
As opposed to "Oh you got a CS degree", well programmers get to sit in this cubicle and get paid $50k until we outsource the whole thing to India.
ICBM's use inertial and (in the case of Trident) star mappers.
The reason they don't use GPS is that you would (hopefully) only start throwing ICBMs around if you are in "nucular combat toe to toe with the Rooskies" - and the way you know you are in a proper war is that all your GPS satellites have just been destroyed by the other side.
At that point the site has to make enough from advertising to cover all the channel's costs.