The philosophy and nature of the features Rails provides are what causes these security vulnerabilities. Auto-magic features are prone to this sort of exploitation.
I gather he meant the colloquial meaning in most places of the world which is something to the tune of "Something best avoided rather than confronted.". I believe it originates from a story or fable as such.
However I assume you meant he was using it in the more offensive slang usage for african-american. Chances are he might not even know it has the connotation as it's pretty specific to America.
However it doesn't really pose a risk to our market niche. We differentiate ourselves from Amazon on numerous fronts, primarily performance and paradigm. Both of which are sustainable for the foreseeable future.
Amazon coming to Australia mainly poses a risk to traditional VPS hosting and commodity cloud providers.
Personally, Amazon joining us here shows that validation and maturity of the market in Australia has been reached and is a big boost to our business.
Hi, I'm Joseph. Another of the OrionVM Founders. :)
To add to what Alex said above..
I think the major misconceptions are caused by the fact that most of what we are doing is done much like a "stealth" mode startup.
We -are- a service provider, but under the hood we are very much a tech company building the next generation of IaaS technologies. That is not to say we won't just be a service provider in the future - but only there is much more happening here at OrionHQ.
For instance we have developed a fully distributed block storage platform on Infiniband that does away with the scaling and performance issues of EBS, traditional SANs like HDS/Netapp etc. It is also a fraction of the cost to build and maintain, along with having a ton of other benefits.
We very much pride ourselves on being an innovative company and I just wanted to communicate that we aren't an Amazon clone. But this post is getting long in the tooth and I don't want to come off as a "butthurt founder". :P
Welcome to have a chat with anyone interested in what we do, we are also hiring btw! :)
This is true, unfortunately the cost of bandwidth in Australia is very high even for service providers such as ourselves. That being said we currently don't have the scale to leverage our data consumption to decrease costs through peering etc. For now $1/Gb places us one of the cheaper providers for bandwith in Australia. We do however see data ingress as a significant hurdle to cloud adoption so we will be foccussing on reducing these costs in the future. :)