Think twice before signing subscription to Adobe products - <AUTHOR> https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1372913 <comment><USER2> Notice how Adobe support staff are quick to address each individual complaining customer's short term one-off problem of unsubscribing, yet they never acknowledge that there is a general overarching problem with unsubscribing being impossible because of their broken looping web site, or promise to fix the actual cause of such a frequent and long standing problem.

Why, after the many years the problem has been repeatedly reported, doesn't Adobe fix their apparently terribly designed and maintained web site, which sends many of their customers who are trying to unsubscribe into a frustrating infinite loop, instead of manually unsubscribing the few persistent squeaky wheels who one by one eventually find their way to the forum to complain and demand a refund?

Could the reason be that Adobe's staff is unable to fix the looping bug in their own web server that their users keep reporting? Do they not employ anyone who has the appropriate skill set to fix that problem? Do they not have a bug reporting and tracking system in place? Does Adobe, of all companies, not consider the web to be important enough to devote sufficient resources to competently maintaining their own web presence? Or perhaps there is another reason?

The reason is because it's a dark pattern they've purposefully implemented and maintained in its broken yet lucrative state, because it makes them a hell of a lot more money that way by systematically fucking their customers on a large scale, while also saving them money paying their staff to fix their "broken" web site that's actually working as designed, by making them more and more money each time it "malfunctions".

<comment><USER3> Alternatively - it might be typical big company bureaucracy. These staff members might simply not have an effective way to communicate with anyone that could fix the underlying problem - without going seriously out of their way and maybe missing a few targets as a result.

<comment><USER2> The excuse of "our sales people have no way to contact the web developer who's on vacation, and we don't have a bug tracking system in place" might work for a dentist's office, but not a company that prides itself in developing online software and tools for maintaining web sites, and brands its products with the buzz-word "Cloud".

<comment><USER4> When one works for companies of such size, discovers there is a huge difference between how things should be and how they actually are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some years ago, I bought a perpetual license for FlashBuilder 4.7. Recently, it failed to build an Air package because the product, which hasn't been updated for years, connects to an obsolete time server. To fix the problem, I followed the directions in Adobe's support site. Right after doing this, it asked me to re-enter my license key. It rejected it, saying it was no longer valid. A license that was sold as perpetual, no longer valid!

Their support was completely worthless: after being redirected to five different support teams that had no clue how to solve my issue, I realized I was never going to get a solution, and gave up.

My personal lesson learned: never buy or use anything from Adobe ever again.

<comment><USER6> Email them, ask your money back.

<comment><USER7> Doubt that is going to be any easier to get them to do.

<comment><USER8> No, but potentially significantly more valuable, depending on how much the product cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I recently tried to subscribe with Adobe. I really only wanted access to two apps: Illustrator and Photoshop. I have absolutely no use for any of their other apps, and I hate all their cloud stuff. Unfortunately, that forces you to buy a $50/mo plan. Regardless, I thought it'd still be worth it, so I was willing to pay the price. After subscribing I download their Creative Cloud installer, only to find out it doesn't on case-sensitive file systems on macOS!

Unsubscribing wasn't that bad, though. They have a bullshit popup where they force you to give a reason. But afterwards, it seems to have gone fine. We'll see if any charges show up next month.

Honestly, this is a huge problem with all subscription services. I should be able to easily unsubscribe from anything without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. I don't want to have to speak with anyone on the phone, nor should I be forced to tell you why I'm unsubscribing. This is an area where I believe we might need a bit more legislation. I've read stories of people trying to unsubscribe from Comcast and getting immediately passed along to their retention department.

<comment><USER10> Your comment about a case-sensitive filesystem on macOS made me curious. Are you using APFS or anything else? What's your motivation to using a custom filesystem?

<comment><USER9> I'm using case-sensitive HFS+. When I last reinstalled macOS on my laptop it was one of the options available. I thought about it and thought a case- sensitive file system was more sensible.

Any problems with case-sensitive file systems must be solved if we want a smooth migration to APFS, which is case-sensitive. I've already reported or helped fix a handful of minor bugs related to case-sensitivity.

<comment><USER11> I can't see the advantage to having two files open and Open in the same directory. Why would you want that?

<comment><USER12> What's the advantage in _not_ being able to have a file called 'Open' in the same directory as one called 'open'?

<comment><USER13> ...being able to ignore case in filenames?

<comment><USER12> Does every language have a meaningful equivalent of "case insensitive" or does that mean we end up either creating lots of special cases or preventing certain languages from being used? I'm ready to be convinced otherwise, but it seems the simplest thing to do is not try to introduce the concept of "case insensitivity".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It gets even worse if you need to do subscriptions for your team. The management console is an utter joke. Adobe owns some of the killer apps of the creative industry but there are alternatives:

 _Photo editing (Photoshop):_

\- Windows: Gimp, Xara Photo, Affinity Photo, Corel Photo. Paint.net

\- macOS: Pixelmator, Affinity Photo, Gimp

 _Vector editing for digital (Adobe had Fireworks but abandoned it, Illustrator is rather print and clumsy):_

\- Windows: Affinity Designer, Inkscape

\- macOS: Sketch, Inskape, Affinity Designer

 _Vector editing for print (Adobe Illustrator):_

\- Windows: Inkscape

\- macOS: Inkscape

 _Desktop Publishing (Adobe InDesign):_

\- Windows/macOS: QuarkXPress which is even more expensive

<comment><USER15> Desktop Publishing: Scribus (Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, ...)

<comment><USER16> I'm a typographer and sometime book designer (as well as a programmer). I've also used InDesign since 1.0, so I'm very familiar with what it does. Having said that, I'd love to find an alternative -- InDesign has gotten bloated and awful over the years, not to mention the dreadful subscription policy. (It's one of the few CC apps for which I _cannot_ buy a standalone/perpetual license.)

However, Scribus comes nowhere close to InDesign. Here are several basic things I require from a page-layout application if it's going to be any kind of competitor to InDesign:

1\. Work in picas and ems, not inches. (Inches are fine for specifying page sizes, but beyond that, picas are the standard in typography.)

2\. Be able to zoom arbitrarily. Scribus doesn't seem to support zoom levels more than 400%, so I can't work with even medium-sized text at all accurately.

3\. Be able to easily set kerning and tracking on arbitrary text. The Scribus manual caims this is possible, but mucking around with the latest dev version (1.5.3), I couldn't figure out how to do it. (I did really well at totally fucking up my layout just by scrolling, through. Scribus is a bit _too_ response in some ways.)

4\. Be able to use OpenType features. Apparently Scribus 1.5.4 will include some of that. But to a typographer in this century, OpenType is essential, not optional.

Apologies to the Scribus developers, but being told that it's a capable publishing app is a bit like a C programmer being told that BASIC should be just fine for them -- hey, they're both programming languages, right?

And yes, I've attempted to use TeX (and LaTeX, and ConTeXT, and XeLaTeX, and...) to do high-quality typographical work. It's possible, but the amount of effort to undo Knuth's poor aesthetic choices (not to mention interface with archaic architecture) is significant, and frankly, not worth my time.

Grumpy typographer is grumpy.

<comment><USER15> I find the same types of gaps across the OSS photo/graphics/layout stack. For my avocational use, OSS is great (and money efficient). If I had to make a living, I'd buy Adobe CS, because I would a) need transferrable skills for in- house employment, and b) need the refined GUIs and workflows to compete with everyone else using Adobe CS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really hate Adobes subscription model. I completely understand why they are doing (increase revenue, decrease piracy) but rather than support it I simply stopped using their products. I had a bit of a work around to get a monthly AI subscription cancelled, but it wasn't as bad as some of these examples.

That's not an option for many people though.

<comment><USER18> I don't mind the subscription that much personally, but what I do mind is their scam of making it seem like a monthly subscription when it is actually yearly. To cancel they make you pay half of whatever your "leftover" subscription rate is, so if you are on the $50/mo plan you have to pay $25/month * however many months are left till your actual yearly renewal date. This is hidden in their terms and not actually stated anywhere that I saw on the main sub pages.

This model is fine for companies and large businesses, but for small time contractors that might only need software for a month or two it is a complete scam. I missed my renewal date this past year but in the mean time I've started gathering alternatives for all the software I use from Adobe.

<comment><USER19> Their pricing page clearly says "annual plan, paid monthly" [1] which isn't deceptive. So it's not a scam, it's just expensive.

[1] [https://creative.adobe.com/plans?sdid=PGRQQLYP&mv=search&s_k...](https://creative.adobe.com/plans?sdid=PGRQQLYP&mv=search&s_kwcid=AL!3085!3!102933539584!b!!g!!adobe%20creative&ef_id=VlaeZgAAATOnigiD:20170108152604:s)

<comment><USER17> The have a pay by month option, it just costs more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am so sick if this perpetual dark pattern being used by online services. The following has saved me tons of time: I have setup separate debit cards for my online subscriptions. When I want to cancel one, I go through their cancel process once, and then I cancel the debit card used for that subscription, get a new one from my credit union (same day service with a credit union) and update my other online subscriptions if that debit card was used with them. My credit union (First Entertainment, southern California) will issue me as many debit cards as I want, so I have bad-acting online services all on the same card, for easy canceling.

<comment><USER21> You do realize that charges to dead cards attached to live accounts can and do go through, right?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update: Adobe made this thread of forum hidden (only visible for registered users). Bad move, Adobe. Here is public copy: [https://cdn.rawgit.com/e-oz/79954d0d7fff37b5f3c8d322202721be...](https://cdn.rawgit.com/e-oz/79954d0d7fff37b5f3c8d322202721be/raw/a73a97d821a89fc334ea5f09b09f26f9660b66e1/adobe.html)

<comment><USER22> Thread shows up normally for me, no login or anything.

It's also three years old...

<comment><AUTHOR> And still actual.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Unfortunately, Adobe is a terrible company these days. I had been using their products for over a decade, so unsubscribing and vowing never to work with their software again was not an easy decision for me. It sucks, because I think their software is great, but the company has completely lost my business.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm a custom software developer, mostly e-commerce, and over the years I have been asked numerous times to implement similar schemes.

The most popular is a recurring payments, such as for health supplements, that you cannot cancel on the web site. Not a broken system, but just no way to do it. You have to contact them via email. And many of them have a unspoken policy of not cancelling on the 1st, or maybe even the 2nd, request.

My suggestion is contact your credit card and declare the charge fraud and stopped.

<comment><USER25> Please don't do this...

The fraud chargeback code is supposed to be reserved for transactions where the card holder did not participate and are used for training a variety of systems. Everything from product like FICO Falcon that is used by card issuers to detect fraudulent transactions to databases that are used to detect compromised systems. Adding a lot of bad data decreases the performance of these systems and makes it easier for fraudster to operate.

Correctly disputing the transaction will get the same result and also makes it easier for supervising banks to identify the problem and either get the merchant to resolve the issue or take the merchant down. When they are incorrectly coded as fraud the supervising bank will often go after the merchant to tighten their fraud systems rather than addressing their behavior (bad business practices).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sometimes you just have to cancel your credit card and get a new one.

I had to do this with d××× the rip off merchants in Australia who refused to acknowledge or fix issues with their non functioning wifi broadband service years ago.

Only THEN did they contact me saying give us money, so I sent a complaint to the ombudsman and they suddenly said you don't owe us anything and cancelled the $300 they said I owed.

<comment><USER27> Canceling your credit card may not always work; there are methods in play which let companies who provide subscriptions to get your updated card information and continue to charge you.

In its most innocent form, this is useful when your card naturally expires (or is reissued), since you don't have to go back and re-setup your CC with dozens of companies. In its most nefarious, there is no way to stop charges short of completely shutting down a CC account.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As an addition: today Adobe sent me email that they are going to increase price (2x) and there is no way to cancel subscription.

<comment><USER28> I have a subscription in Spain, I have not received that email and our laws say that if there is a unilateral change of conditions, they should be told with a month in advnace and the consumer can cancel if he doesn't agree

<comment><AUTHOR> Price rise is declared for limited set of countries. Also, "Cancel" button is not hidden not for all users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> One of several reasons I left my first job out of college is that the boss made me remove the ability to cancel a subscription from our web application. I thought it was pure jackassery to make people call and then try to wheel and deal to keep them on, but it did make a surprisingly real difference to the bottom line.

No doubt something similar is at play with Adobe. Personally, I'm not sure I'd be opposed to a law or regulation of some kind that any subscription you can sign up for from a website you can also cancel from the website.

The whole "let's make it hard to cancel" play is so slimy.

<comment><USER30> I can see both sides to the issue.

As a consumer, I loathe any company that makes it difficult to cancel.

As the owner of a business management platform, we've found that more than half of our cancellations are due to lack of knowledge.

The product is fairly complex and has hundreds (possibly 1,000) settings that cover just about any customization a business in our niche could want. People don't want to learn or read documentation, so we offer one on one video calls with our team to support configuration.

The cancellations come when they forget about the (free) one on one time and get frustrated with all the configuration.

The way we handle cancellations is to follow the "don't be a dick" policy. When a customer requests cancellation (a single email to their acct manager) we remind them about all the resources they still have available and offer to chat with them to see if there's a workable solution for them. If we don't hear back within 1 day, we process the cancellation and refund.

<comment><USER31> You're still kind of being a dick to anyone that really does want to cancel. The flip side to the "half" of the customers that you can retain with this policy is the other half of the customers that just want to end their subscription and would be better served by a webpage and not having to get past a customer support script to do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> In 2008 I was doing some contract work for a print shop that was still using CS2. For most work, it was fine.

As a graphic designer, I'm shackled to Adobe's line. However, I've avoided moving to CC. I did a trial and found that most of the new 'features' didn't benefit my workflow. Illustrator was significantly slower, Photoshop was alright, and InDesign is always the same.

The deeper issue is that the suite itself is sloppy. It's never been great -- but we've grown to love it (Stockholm syndrome...)

Inconsistent hotkeys across applications, odd behaviors (e.g. OSX users cmd+tabbing from photoshop to Chrome.) It feels like Adobe never really improves their products, but merely adds a few tweaks, a handful of moderately useful features, then slaps a new version number on it.

For me, its not worth moving from a paid-for product to a subscription model. I'm not alone in this either. The $50/m isn't a bad price, but I personally feel that Adobe needs to take a step back and focus on how their applications interact with each other and also how the user interacts between each application.

This doesn't even account for the somewhat sketchy 'difficult / impossible to unsubscribe' issues, user info leaks, etc.

</comment><comment><USER33> It is convenient to have a service where you can generate "virtual credit cards" and set monthly or all-time spending limits to each of them separately and close the cards when you need.

In Finland we have Aktia Wallet[1], but probably similar services exist in other markets as well.

[1] [https://aktiawallet.fi/web/](https://aktiawallet.fi/web/)

</comment><comment><USER34> A bit late to the game, but the consumer side risks of the subscription model got me a-thinking.

My main credit card offers a one time temporary credit card number for use when I want to buy something from a dodgy website. I log into the credit card company website, hit a couple of buttons, and generate a random CC number with an expiration date one month out.

This works great for a one time purchase, but rather badly for a subscription purchase. I guess what I would do is, when wanting to cancel the subscription is to change my billing credit card from my "real" credit card to one time credit card number with a short expiry date. The one time card number will be dead within 1 month after such a change.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is why you should never sign up for automatic billing. I had an issue with Verizon some years ago, and was glad I had taken the time to explicitly pay my bill every month. I told a customer service person to cancel my account at the end of my contract. When this didn't happen, and I kept receiving bills, I spent some time trying to navigate customer retention (i.e. "customer disservice") without much luck. Fortunately, I had made sure to never enable auto-billing, so I simply stopped paying, and they eventually took a hint and cancelled my service.

I'm glad I have a pre-"Cloud" version of Lightroom, so I don't have to deal with this nonsense.

<comment><USER36> Make sure they don't put it on your credit report.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Can confirm. Happened to me.

Recently made it to the cancellation page. They offered two options: pay a penalty for canceling early, or get two months free.

Took the two months free and signed some agreements. Wish me luck!

<comment><USER38> When I had 4 month remaining, I have called in and basically gave me same deal. Basically they didn't charge me four two months. After two more charges, when I hit my anniversary month, I have canceled my subscription. I don't think they made me sign agreements though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Mods, can someone please change the thread title? I am pretty sure this violates site guidelines on titles.

</comment><comment><USER40> Taking a more bird's eye view, this is what happens when to buy something you have to give over the information that lets anyone take money from you.

Things like this would probably be better served in many ways, such as putting money on a temporary credit card.

</comment><comment><USER41> I had a poor experience was cancelling Adobe Premiere Pro. Let this be a wake up call to Adobe. Make it easy for your customers to come and go.

Treat your customers with contempt and well, the bitter taste in my mouth will take years to clear.

</comment><comment><USER42> Contact your credit card company, and stop payment. If you tried unsubscribing multiple times in good faith, then that should be enough. Softbank of Japan tried pulling this fiasco years back, and the above tactic was used by subscribers.

</comment><comment><USER43> Maybe the answer is being able to control is via the payment processor like this subscription supports Apple payment subscribe /opt out or whoever and that middle man can kill off the account.

</comment><comment><USER44> There needs to be some sane solution in between Sketch and Photoshop/Illustrator. The former is a little too simple, the later becoming byzantine and crazy expensive.

<comment><USER45> Affinity Designer and Photo are excellent products, I would argue that affinity designer is much easier to work with than Illustrator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> What happens if you buy a years' worth of pre-paid subscription to CC? Will they also slap a charge on you if you decide not to renew it after a year?

</comment><comment><USER47> I refuse to ever pay for their products again because of this. I shouldn't have to call the phone number to unsubscribe from a web product.

</comment><comment><USER48> Nice way of punishing paying users ;)

This is the reason to support Pixelmator and Sketch.

</comment><comment><USER49> Pro Tip: use PayPal account for any Adobe subscriptions. If you suddenly want to cancel Adobe subscription cancel it in PayPal. Very easy

</comment><comment><USER50> Can't you just... call your bank and tell them to reject any payment requests from Adobe? It puzzles me to see so many people in that thread saying they've been charged for months and can't stop it... if that happens to you, your problem might be something else...

<comment><USER51> I tried to do this for my gym. After many back and forth calls with the bank and them telling me they just have to dispute the charge and do something else. Went in person to the bank (WF) and she said there was nothing they could (probably means will) do and I have to get a new credit card).</comment></comment>


Again with the Modules - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/jrburke/0479f25edfc6bb043ddb

<comment><USER2> I think the article's reference to AMD refers to part of the RequireJS framework:

[http://requirejs.org/docs/whyamd.html](http://requirejs.org/docs/whyamd.html)

Until I found this in some of the links later in the gist, I was very confused, because I'm pretty sure that whether your CPU is AMD or Intel or ARM makes no difference that browser-based JS would care about.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd really like to know where TC39 stands on that matter, and when the spec will be ready.</comment>


Piwik hits 1.0 - Open source web analytics - <AUTHOR> http://piwik.org/

<comment><USER2> I've used piwik, it really powers the way you can do in-house analytics. Real time, javascript based tracking - no need to wait for data to accumulate. Plugin model makes it highly flexible and extensible. Module Design is very good.

I wanted something to analyze existing log data and could quickly write a small extension to do that. Creating new views or data points were straight forward too. Could easily integrating a simple external package like statviz.

Wasn't very fast processing data in bulk - 20 minutes to process 200K visits. But this was like a year ago. Ofcourse php, Zend db has its limitations with data processing and if the fact table and aggregate creation is rewritten in perl, C++ or something and done at predefined intervals without doing a running average it can handle fairly large amounts of data I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been using this for a few weeks and it is really solid. It feels nice to have my analytics data on my own server instead of the GOOG's.

Now they only have access to _almost_ all of my data...

<comment><USER4> Were you able to import any Google Analytics data into Piwik? Does GA offer a way to get your data _out_ , other than exporting specific reports?

<comment><USER3> No, I just jumped in cold turkey, but Googling around produced this which you might try:

[http://jaymz.eu/2010/02/importing-existing-visitor-stats- fro...](http://jaymz.eu/2010/02/importing-existing-visitor-stats-from-google- analytics-to-piwik/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Piwik is nice; another open source tool worth looking at is Open Web Analytics, <http://www.openwebanalytics.com/>. Both have their advantages and are both under active development.

</comment><comment><USER6> The real power of GA is watching it scale to handle 100mm+ monthly pageviews. Can Piwik do this?

<comment><USER7> I've been watching Piwik for a bit (they do analytics software, we do analytics software) and I believe they set aside their scaling work until after version 1.0.

I would love to see an independent open-source analytics company with a services / enterprise business model, along the lines of OpenX for ad serving and the pre-acquisition MySQL. Not so sure the economics justify it, though.

<comment><USER8> Actually, I've been thinking about doing this for a while -- this thread convinced me to put up my MVP to see what happens.

While I'm waiting for DNS to propogate, here's a sneak peek: [http://img.skitch.com/20100831-kf41k4mpc4gd612jyhdcbtyxgh.jp...](http://img.skitch.com/20100831-kf41k4mpc4gd612jyhdcbtyxgh.jpg)

edit: it's now available at <http://dashboard.io> \-- would love any feedback I can get. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Dealbreaker for me: Piwik cannot do page-specific stats.

Everything else was in Piwik's favor, but I'm going to have to use GA because of this one requirement.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like there could be a trade-off between using resources on your own server to keep track of these analytics versus just having Google do it. But then maybe it is insignificant.

Anyone has some stats on how much hit on the server it is doing?

<comment><USER11> Not me, but the privacy trade-off is pretty good. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Been using it myself since... around 0.2 or so, very satisfied.

The upgrades were painless too, which was a nice surprise - I expected a few hickups during the earlier releases, but found none.

<comment><USER13> I've been using it for about 8 months now and I have been nothing but impressed with these guys. It has proven very stable even from their earlier releases and very snappy.

</comment></comment><comment> loup-vaillant Just wondering: does anyone know of a mere log analysis tool, that would just look at Apache's logs? What data would I miss, compared to Javascript or PHP based tracking?

I'm asking because I'm looking for a non-invasive method, which I could use on old logs if possible.

</comment><comment><USER14> I used slimstat (w/ PHP) a while back, and it was pretty decent. I wonder how they compare...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> An amazing product that I've been following for the last year has reached the 1.0 milestone.

I don't use GA so can't comment on feature parity. Importantly (for me) it has a powerful API, plugin architecture, easy integration, dead easy multi-site configuration.

I can't speak highly enough of this product.</comment>


Amazon Drops Price Of EC2 Dedicated Instances By Up To 80% - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/10/amazon-drops-price-of-ec2-dedicated-instances-by-up-to-80/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER3> Choosing EC2 and other Amazon offerings means a lot of freedom for startups, it's easy to just create a whole infrastructure at the push of a button. However, this comes at a high cost. Amazon is really expensive and once you're locked into their way of doing things, migrating away can be a near-impossible task. I think for some years, companies didn't realize how high the cost of running on EC2/S3 actually is compared to, say, a dedicated rack colocated somewhere - that's kind of a compliment to Amazon tech and marketing.

It's still not uncommon to talk to a random startup person and they'll tell you they have hosting costs in the tens of thousands of dollars per year. When you then compare this to what they're actually doing with their servers, it seems to me they're overpaying by several orders of magnitude.

I was using EC2 for years and kind of grew to accept (and ignore) its limitations. It was only when I reviewed some dedicated server plans at other providers I (re-)discovered how much raw power you can get elsewhere for the same money. Additionally, I became very frustrated with the lack of pricing transparency and inability to forecast costs - at first glance the Amazon cloud is as open as it gets but the real surprises come when you're running it for a while.

No doubt Amazon has caught on to this trend and is fighting to squeeze out some competitors that have sprung up. This pricing change is most likely directly aimed at Hetzner and other inexpensive-but-powerful hosting providers. It means they were either massively overcharging the whole time or they are using profits from other plans to offer Dedicated EC2 at a loss until the competition folds.

<comment><USER4> After all the talk about how much cheaper dedicated hosting can be compared to AWS, I looked into dedicated hosting recently. It didn't seem as great as the comments here led me to believe. Rackspace for example starts at $499/month for a server with 4GB of RAM. On AWS I can get a c1.xlarge instance with 7GB of RAM for $435/month, and that's with paying the on-demand price 24x7.

Ok, that doesn't include EBS and bandwidth. So let's throw in 1TB of outbound data (less than the 2TB that Rackspace includes, but still more than I'd ever use in a month) and a 150GB EBS volume with 1000 provision IOPS. Let's also use the 1 year heavy utilization price while we're at it. Now I'm looking $342/month with $1800 upfront, which amortizes to $492/month.

With AWS I also don't need to stick with paying 24x7 for infrastructure. I don't need to keep my CI infrastructure running on nights and weekends for example, and with AWS I have the flexibility to turn that into cost savings.

So I don't see the order of magnitude price difference. So maybe I shouldn't be looking at Rackspace? Hetzner keeps coming up on here, but I don't need a server in Europe. Maybe OVH? Hmm, the comments on Hacker News don't exactly inspire confidence in OVH for something more than a personal server to screw around with. I need to run infrastructure for my business. Do I start hunting for bargain hosting providers on WebHostingTalk?

Ok, back to AWS it is for me.

EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions to look at Softlayer. A server with 1 CPU and 8GB of RAM starts at $399, which is better than Rackspace, but not exactly orders of magnitude cheaper than the c1.xlarge I mentioned above.

<comment><USER3> I think you picked the most expensive dedicated hosting provider in existence. Have a look at SoftLayer, Hetzner, Incero, or one of the other alternatives. Also, at these prices, it's not unreasonable to just order any old Dell server for $600 and put it into a colo rack somewhere.

For reference, the dedicated server I rent for my private projects comes in at €49/month and it has these specs:

      Intel® Core™ i7-2600 Quad-Core
      16 GB DDR 3 RAM
      2 x 3 TB SATA 6 Gb/s HDD; 7200 rpm

Support is extremely fast and competent, I'm really happy. To try and mirror that package with any kind of Amazon (or Rackspace it seems) offering would be prohibitively costly.

<comment><USER4> I did look at SoftLayer and it's still not significantly cheaper than AWS. Hetzner doesn't seem to have servers in the US, so I've already ruled them out.

Incero seems cheap, but that's the only thing I've seen about Incero. I consider Incero to be in the bargain hunting on WebHostingTalk category of providers. I'm not entirely comfortable hosting mission critical infrastructure there yet.

<comment><USER5> An issue with virtually all dedicated server vendors is the tendency to grossly under-equip servers with memory: My Mac Mini has 16GB (a $100 upgrade), and it is simply ridiculous that going above 4GB on a server is considered some extravagant feature the requires significant, expensive upgrades of every other component.

<comment><USER6> 16GB of ECC memory for servers is a lot more expensive than your Mac Mini's memory. I recently spent £250 on 2x 4GB DIMMs for a Dell Poweredge server[1] (ok DDR2 is older and therefore more expensive, but still). The same configuration for my Mac Mini came in at around £50[2]

[1][http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=36C1...](http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=36C1FA30A5CA7304)

[2][http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=9137...](http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=9137AB4EA5CA7304)

<comment><USER7> Actually prices for ECC memory are comparable with regular desktop RAM - <USER2> are around $300 for 32GB (4x8GB) sets:

ECC memory: [http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007952%20600083963&IsNodeId=1&name=32GB%20%284%20x%208GB%29)

Regular memory: [http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007611%20600083963%204802&IsNodeId=1&name=Top%20Sellers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The 80% number was for a "dedicated instance". A dedicated instance is not the same as a reserved instance.

Dedicated instances, charged on top of the regular price, are where you are guaranteed not to have anyone else on the same host server as you. Dedicated instances already cost 10% more than their regular counterparts (small/dedicated/on-demand costs 6.6/c hr vs 6c/hr.)

At any point, the most you could be "wasting", was the leftover capacity on a host that only had one small server on it (they didn't do micro). Imagine a simplified version of EC2 as per [1], which fits 12 small instances on one physical host, and you could therefore be wasting 11 slots that you could run a m1.small in. They can't sell these to any other customer. If you buy a second instance, they put that on your first host; you are now wasting 10 slots. Carry on down to when you fill up your first host and spill over onto a second, back to wasting 11 slots.

Previously they were charging $10/hour for those wasted 11 slots, which you could have filled by paying 72.6c/hr. Now, they're only charging $2.

[1] [http://perfcap.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/understanding-and- usin...](http://perfcap.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/understanding-and-using-amazon- ebs.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Source: [http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2013/07/09/price-r...](http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2013/07/09/price-reductions-on-amazon-ec2-dedicated-instances/)

Not to detract from the conversation, but I've pointed out numerous times about techcrunch / this author -- FREDERIC LARDINOIS -- nearly plagiarizing the the entirety of his sources in the many articles, of his, posted here. Maybe it's not strictly plagiarism, but there is almost NEVER value added by his regurgitation. It has got to be etiquette to link to the best source, and Techcrunch has really gone south with the AOL/HuffPo relations -- cheap content rewrites and not a source.

</comment><comment><USER10> There are a lot of comments about EC2's pricing competitiveness with dedicated hardware. These are fair discussions and should be had, but I figure it's worth commenting that EC2 (and AWS in general) is about much more than cheap metal.

The company that I am a developer at has aggressively adopted AWS with applications using it at both the PaaS and IaaS levels. At the end of the day what we've received the greatest value from isn't an impressive "cost per compute unit", but rather a flexibility that would be incredibly painful to let go of. For example, our QA team can spin up or tear down entire environments by chatting with our Campfire bot. Our developers can do likewise using a simple CLI we built.

Granted, this isn't exactly bleeding edge stuff here... it's simply "the cloud" (apologies) delivering on the promise of dynamic, elastic environments. But it's a really, really nice promise, and at risk of sounding like an advertisement, I'll still say that AWS/EC2 has delivered quite nicely on it.

<comment><USER11> In all honesty you can get these same benefits from dedicated hardware. Throw openstack or similar on a set of Hetzner or similar machines and have at!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Direct link: [http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2013/07/09/price-r...](http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2013/07/09/price-reductions-on-amazon-ec2-dedicated-instances/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Hourly billed "bare-metal" cloud servers from Softlayer seem to be cheaper still: [http://www.softlayer.com/cloudlayer/computing](http://www.softlayer.com/cloudlayer/computing)

<comment><USER14> and softlayer is at the high end of the market.

Check out incero.com or securedservers.com for some perspective.

also serverbear.com is always great to check for price-performance comparisons, especially taking into account SSD performance.

<comment><USER13> incero and securedservers don't seem to offer hourly billed dedicated servers. Monthly billed dedicated servers are a different market.

<comment><USER14> Agreed - and yet thats half the problem; is people aren't using EC2 for just a few hours... they use it all month, and then complain about it being expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Amazon Web Services has achieved compliance with the Federal Risk Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP).

The FedRAMP program has also established a Joint Accreditation Board (JAB) consisting of Chief Information Officers from DoD, DHS and GSA.

</comment><comment><USER16> My company runs a largish crawling infrastructure. We evaluated Amazon extensively but just could not make the price/performance calculation stack up. If you have lots of "always on" gear dedicated works out significantly cheaper. We have boxes with 256GB of RAM, 300mbps network pipes for under $330 per month and we don't have to share any CPU or Disk I/O.

<comment><USER17> Likewise. My company decided to lease a rack at a colo, unlimited bandwidth (practically speaking) and we can add capacity as necessary.

We're planning to (eventually) utilize Amazon to temporarily add capacity when necessary, but it will never be our primary hosting solution.

<comment><USER16> That is the one thing we do miss. Elastically scaling dedicated boxes that can often take 12 hours from order to go live means we end up with a few hot spares laying about just in case but overall it is still cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I always wonder how a company can offer such a rebate without giving direct insight about how exactly their prices were absolutely outrageous and completely uncorrelated with the offered value to begin with.

People who were paying full price prior to this rebate must feel pretty annoyed right now.

<comment><USER19> First rule of pricing: price to value, not to cost.

People are used to the prices of things going down as economies of scale kick in. That doesn't mean it actually _happened_ here, but if you were already a happy customer at $100/month, when next month comes around and it's $20, you're just more happy.

<comment><USER20> It's weird how people still struggle to understand that one should always price _according to what a customer is willing to pay_ , rather than some sort of magic formula "price = cost + socially-acceptable-profit". I thought Apple and Starbucks had made it so brazenly obvious even to the layman.

<comment><USER21> > It's weird how people still struggle to understand that one should always > price according to what a customer is willing to pay, rather than some sort > of magic formula "price = cost + socially-acceptable-profit".

What one should do depends on one's goals. To maximize profits, and ignoring the costs involved in doing so, one should charge each customer what that individual customer is willing to pay. Approximating this is a big motivation most market segmentation schemes.

Of course, doing so naively can maximize _short-term_ profits while negatively affecting goodwill, which can then hurt long term profits.

Also, even ignoring goodwill, pricing to maximize returns from the _current_ market for a good or service can limit the ability to develop new markets for it.

<comment><USER22> >What one should do depends on one's goals. To maximize profits, and ignoring the costs involved in doing so, one should charge each customer what that individual customer is willing to pay.

There you have the American university system in a nutshell, though you might have to substitute "able" for "willing".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Now I wander if Heroku prices will follow or if they'll decide to just pocket the difference themselves.

<comment><USER24> Does heroku run on the dedicated servers?

Dedicated being different from 100% utilization reserved servers

[http://aws.amazon.com/dedicated-instances/](http://aws.amazon.com/dedicated- instances/) vs [http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/](http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/) (which did not get 80% cuts)

<comment><USER25> I'd think they would employ dedicated instances which they then subdivide to keep their customers as isolated as possible.

<comment><USER26> Aren't dedicated instances only available in VPCs? In that case Heroku would not use them as all Heroku machines are public.

<comment><USER27> You can easily make a VPC fully public, or have fully public subdivisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why do they charge the $2/hour dedicated fee for the CC2.8xlarge? Isn't that size already a dedicated instance if you just use it as an on-demand instance? You get 32 virtual cores which makes sense for a dedicated instance, since you get 16 physical cores (2x8) and the hyper-threading makes 32 virtual cores.

"CC2 and CR1 Instances are backed by 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors, eight- cores with hyperthreading"

Am I missing anything or is there a benefit to doing a dedicated cc2.8xlarge instance? Compliance maybe?

<comment><USER29> Compliance is the main reason to purchase Dedicated Instances -- maybe the only reason at all. Amazon could always silently introduce better physical hardware, at which point they could put 2+ cc2.8xlarge instances on a physical server. I'm sure there are more m1.smalls on each 2013-era box than there were in 2007.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> One would think why Digital Ocean is first to come to my mind.

<comment><USER31> I saw this article in hacker news today, and noticed somebody mentioning digital ocean. I switched one of my servers over to digital ocean to try it out.

The process was smooth and enjoyable, and now I'm spending less than half as much as I was with EC2.

I even got to try their recovery console after I mistakenly deleted the root password without first giving myself sudo. Worked like a charm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> These prices were ridiculous to start with. Now the are only 20% as ridiculous.

<comment><USER33> That number should be less than 20%, no?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Can someone please advise what is the most cost optimal way running MongoDB on AWS ? I am bootstrapping/coding/testing and all these options make my head spin. My web application would be running on AWS Elastic Beanstalk and they would be using the MongoDB.

<comment><USER27> AWS recently released a whitepaper describing the best practices for doing just this: [http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_NoSQL_MongoDB.pdf](http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_NoSQL_MongoDB.pdf) [PDF]

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> We're going to update [http://www.planforcloud.com](http://www.planforcloud.com) to include dedicated instances to help people forecast and compare these to other providers and EC2 purchase options. If you run enough instances, the incremental cost of the regional fee gets diluted and your overall cost is not that much higher than other purchase options.

</comment><comment><USER36> There is a colo in Boulder that will host a Mac mini server for around $75/mo (negotiable). I haven't tried it yet, but I'd imagine that I could get 3-5 'servers' off of eBay and negotiate a nice monthly rate for hosting them.

<comment><USER37> That doesn't seem like a very good deal. For $75/m you can get a dedicated server with equal or better specs and not worry about owning the hardware.

<comment><USER36> I rather like having a modest collection of hardware that I can call my own. That aside though, is it possible to get a dedicated server with SSD-like disk IO and 8-16 GB of memory for ~75 dollars a month? I admit that I only have experience with Rackspace, and that a few years ago, but it seemed like the pricing was more than twice that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Cool, I hope this helps startups that need HIPAA, PCI, and other compliance requirements.

</comment><comment><USER39> So for the first year, a micro instance is basically free, right? That makes testing aws out super easy for new startups.

Anyone else do something similar? If not, you are going to see people stick with the vendor they know best.

</comment><comment><USER40> Amazon's response to higher demand (anticipated or real) for dedicated instances outside of the US to avoid the NSA's prying eyes?

<comment><USER41> Aren't all those servers still owned and operated by a US company?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Prices are still ridiculous. Compare it with something like Hetzner:

[https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4](https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4)

[https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex10](https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex10)

<comment><USER43> I'm a recent Hetzner customer.

32Gb/i7.

I used them for 5 weeks, in that five week period I had 5 1-2 day blocks where the machine was unreachable.

>A incoming attack influence the network for few minutes. The network department has solved the issue.

 __few minutes was 31 hours __

our network-team told us, that there was again an attack which caused the issues you mentioned.

 __27 hours __

currently we can 't see any issue, is this still given?

 __connection timed out (no idea how long as I 'd not installed monitoring at that point).

etc etc.

I canceled shortly after.

I'm back on Linode for now (I actually changed the design of the product I'm developing so that I can store files onto S3 so I can stay with Linode and move easily in the future).

A fast server is a paperweight without reliable network access.

<comment><USER44> i host a few sites with moderate traffic on an ex10 server. I can't remember of any network issues. Current uptime:

12:13:14 up 183 days, 21:23, 2 users, load average: 0.51, 0.55, 0.49

The problem is unreliability of hardware. When one of the hard disks broke in the previous server, it was faster to setup a new server to transfer everything rather than waiting for the repair.

<comment><USER45> You're telling me swapping HDDs and letting RAID rebuild is slower than setting up the server again?!

A failed HDD should NEVER, EVER, bring a server down.

<comment><USER44> i should have mentioned that both disks reporting errors. The DNS change required less downtime than the downtime of backing up everything and setting up the servers from the start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It chocks me that no one mentions that these instances run on dirty coal plants.

<comment><USER47> What should they run on? Unicorn sparkles?

<comment><USER48> There's plenty of alternatives to coal!

<comment><USER27> Not when you buy from the general purpose grid. You can eventually become big enough to pressure the power companies to source from cleaner generation types but that doesn't over night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> _"are ideal for workloads where corporate policies or industry regulations require that your EC2 instances be isolated from instances that belong to other customers at the host hardware level."_

What a hypocrisy. This should be read as "polices require that an adequate and predictable I/O performance could be provided".

<comment><USER50> This is usually a security requirement for big corporations with paranoid legal departments, not a performance requirement.</comment></comment>


Tesla tells workers to report to factory, cites 'conflicting' coronavirus orders - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-03-18/coronavirus-tesla-fremont-plant-shutdown <comment><AUTHOR> Choice quotes:

> "I will personally be at work, but that's just me,"

-Elon

> Thousands of workers streamed into the factory Tuesday, many arriving by > bus.

-LA Times

\---

I've already canceled my Tesla order (RN112815329) for how grossly Elon has personally mismanaged this by passive-aggressively driving people into offices and factories by simply saying he himself would still show up.

</comment><comment><USER2> Elon Musk has some nice technology ideas but man is he a huge douche-bag. He's even telling his employees that the risks are overblown.</comment>


Shuttle - A simple SSH shortcut menu for OS X - <AUTHOR> http://fitztrev.github.io/shuttle/ <comment><USER2> Not to be confused with sshuttle, a transparent proxy server that forwards over SSH: [https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle](https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle)

<comment><USER3> This looks pretty sweet. Seems like it'd work well with EC2 for transparently getting you into the private hostnames without having to open security groups and use something like FoxyProxy. Anyone used it for this?

<comment><USER4> I haven't looked at it all, but it sounds like you're wanting something like the functionality that SSH's "ProxyCommand"?

As an example, we lockdown our servers so that they are only accessible via SSH from a few hosts. I got tired of SSH'ing into server A just to SSH into server B, so I set up my ~/.ssh/config file so that when I "ssh serverB", it uses the ProxyCommand functionality to basically do that for me.

Here's what it looks like in ~.ssh/config:

        Host serverB
            ProxyCommand ssh serverA.example.com -W %h:%p

When I "ssh serverB", it connects to serverA first and then connects to serverB. I could be wrong but it sounds like that is what you were talking about.

<comment><USER3> Pretty close yeah, except that serverB is only listening on a private IP, and I want to connect to it in by web browser (http). My primary use case is with hadoop clusters, where I access the jobtracker ui on the public hostname, but when I drill down into task logs it points to private/internal IPs. FoxyProxy allows me to access the private IPs directly/transparently, but I do most of my browsing with Chrome these days, so it'd be nice to just be able to do it all in one browser.

ProxyCommand looks pretty cool though, wasn't aware of it - thanks!

<comment><USER4> > ... except that serverB is only listening on a private IP and I want to > connect to it in by web browsing (http) ...

Still possible, with ssh's "-D" option that basically turns a remote SSH server into a (HTTP) proxy server!

        $ ssh -D 4444 serverA.example.com

Log in and keep this session active.

In your browser (I use a separate browser, permanently configured this way), configure it to use a (SOCKS5) proxy server for all traffic. The proxy server should be "localhost:4444".

In your address bar, navigate to "[http://serverB.example.com"](http://serverB.example.com"). The HTTP traffic is sent over the SSH tunnel to serverA and from there it goes out to the network to its destination. To the destination server (serverB), it appears that the request originated from serverA and that's where the response will go (at which point it is again encrypted and sent over the SSH tunnel back to your local machine). Visit [http://icanhazip.com](http://icanhazip.com) (or a similar site), for example, and you'll see that, to the remote web server, it appears that traffic is coming from serverA.

This isn't the most eloquent explanation, sorry. Look into "SSH socks proxy" and you should find much better explanations. It's really much easier than it sounds! =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have two-byte aliases for ssh to all of the hosts I use commonly, doesn't everyone? (It even reattaches my remote screen session.)

Why would I want to touch the mouse?

<comment><USER6> Why is this even a question? It's a tool that someone will want to use. As long as there is a mouse, there will be tools that use it. You are essentially asking 'why does this tool exist', which is an irrelevant question and is needless negativity.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure that is completely fair. He was just making the point that using only your keyboard is much faster and there are already built in tools for doing that. He may have just been asking why someone would want to use a mouse over a keyboard for this type of thing.

<comment><USER8> And the parent's point is that "why doesn't everybody use all keyboard shortcuts all the time" is a HN refrain that is tired and smug, and yet still the top-voted comment here.

<comment><USER9> And the answer is because ssh is entirely keyboard driven. There is no good reason to clumsily mouse through a drop-down menu, then move your hand back to your keyboard, when you can type "zz<enter>" in an open terminal and you're ready to go!

<comment><USER10> Cool, how do you do that with a dynamically changing list of hosts that you're getting from somewhere else? I would _totally_ use this with a team dropbox and a .shuttle.json file full of all of our systems.

Or, put another way: think beyond your own use case before posting, yeah?

<comment><USER5> Crontab a job to generate the aliases and write them to a file, source the file from .profile. Alternately, store the list in an alias-defining file instead of json. Source directly from the dropbox.

No installation required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice job, for me it can't beat a ~/.ssh/config entry though.

I wonder why it's not reading ~/.ssh/config btw, should be doable.

<comment><USER12> "... it makes it easy to generate a dynamic list of hosts from your hosting provider (if they have an API), so you're always up-to-date."

It should at least provide a mapping from the json to ~/.ssh/config formats.

<comment><USER5> The Host directive in an ssh_config file supports wildcards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For me you can't beat the combination of Alfred [0] and the SSH workflow [1].

[0] [http://alfredapp.com](http://alfredapp.com)

[1] [https://github.com/isometry/alfredworkflows/tree/master/net....](https://github.com/isometry/alfredworkflows/tree/master/net.isometry.alfred.ssh)

<comment><USER14> Or (in Alfred) just type:

>ssh [host]

If you keep your ~/.ssh/config up to date and can remember your host names, I find it quicker to do that than bothering with the workflow.

<comment><USER15> I don't think alfred does that by default, does it? Even with the powerpack.

<comment><USER16> Assuming it just runs it as a shell command (and fires up a shell in doing so), that would work.

<comment><USER15> Ahh ok, I misread what he was saying! Missed that > at the beginning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is amazing! I am currently in the process of moving from a Windows machine to a Mac (first Mac of my life...) and was looking for a replacement to AutoPuTTY ([http://www.r4dius.net/autoputty/](http://www.r4dius.net/autoputty/)). This looks like it does just about the same thing. Thanks a ton!

<comment><USER18> Congrats and welcome to the fold :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ignore the disparaging comments in Hacker News. This is really nice. Thanks for your heard work - I'm using it already!

</comment><comment><USER20> Aargh. Only works in 10.8.x - I like new tech but I see no need to upgrade beyond 10.6.8 at the mo' :(

<comment><USER21> I'm not trying to be jerk but, why?

<comment><USER22> I stay on OS X 10.6 because later versions drop support for PowerPC (Rosetta) applications. Many programs - abandoned programs and games - do not have Intel versions. And some games have Intel versions, but the Intel version costs money or is incompatible with previous saved games. I use these old programs rarely, but like to have the option of opening their files or playing those games.

Such applications include Airburst Extreme, the Fountain Music iTunes visualizer, Marble Blast Gold, N-Ball, Noise, SilverCreator v1.5, Sonic Robo Blast II, Super DX Ball, Super Phoenix, Water Tower, and Wire Hang Redux. There may be some plug-ins for various apps I'm forgetting, too.

<comment><USER23> > _Such applications include Airburst Extreme, the Fountain Music iTunes > visualizer, Marble Blast Gold, N-Ball, Noise, SilverCreator v1.5, Sonic Robo > Blast II, Super DX Ball, Super Phoenix, Water Tower, and Wire Hang Redux. > There may be some plug-ins for various apps I 'm forgetting, too._

Sounds like nothing like a reason to keep using Rosetta. I mean, seriously, "Fountain Music iTunes visualizer" and "Sonic Robo Blast II"?

Some business use case I'd understand (some proprietary program that you just have to use). But those? Find some substitute games and programs and move on.

> _I use these old programs rarely, but like to have the option of opening > their files or playing those games._

Sounds more like a soft case of hoarding to me.

In any case, just move to 10.8 and keep 10.6 on a VM (or a bootable USB/external drive) for those games.

<comment><USER22> It's true, I hoard a lot of digital things. Keeping a VM sounds like a good solution that allows me to upgrade to the latest OS without permanently losing any programs.

However, I think that the Fountain Music iTunes visualizer ([http://binaryminded.com/fountainmusic.html](http://binaryminded.com/fountainmusic.html)) is actually the program I'll miss the most after I upgrade. I enjoy listening actively to my music, paying attention to the musical details. And the visuals produced by Fountain Music, unlike every other visualizer I've seen, actually reflect the audio very well. It's not just a mesmerizing screensaver that is theoretically tied to the audio somehow – you can clearly hear a connection between each note playing and each fountain of particles shooting up. The fact that the visuals reflect the music (most of the time) can put me more emotionally into the track, because I'm getting complementary signals through my eyes and ears.

Also, there is rarely such a thing as "substitute games". That's what makes games different from other programs – well-made games, even ones in the same genre, have their own unique, irreplaceable features. They are like books and movies in that regard. That's why emulators for consoles like the SNES and the Dreamcast are still around – people don't want to give up their favorite old games.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> For a long time I was adding aliases to .ssh/config manually and managing things that way but a coworker introduced me to a couple of tools which made things much easier!

One is a tool similar to Shuttle to access all our EC2 instances called Elastics[1] (Mac). It provides a menu listing every EC2 instance, showing it's status, IPs, config details, cpu usage, etc and allows you to click to open SSH. It's not perfect but very handy!

I also use an in-house tool which queries the EC2 API to sync my .ssh/config with aliases for every server based on EC2 tags. If you're interested it's built with node.js using awssum [2] to query AWS and sshconf-upsert [3] to update the config.

[1] [http://tundrabot.com/](http://tundrabot.com/)

[2] [https://github.com/awssum/awssum](https://github.com/awssum/awssum)

[2] [https://github.com/hughsk/sshconf- upsert](https://github.com/hughsk/sshconf-upsert)

</comment><comment><USER25> What is that cool shell prompt that's in the video?

<comment><USER11> I think it's Powerline [1] or at least inspired by Powerline.

[1] [https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline](https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline)

<comment><USER26> Thanks for the share. Its a great theme

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Menu->Configure opens the configuration file in TextEdit, which is a disaster since it has smart quotes on by default. I spent a significant amount of time trying to figure out was wrong with your json parser before I realized what was going on.

<comment><USER28> You can change the TextEdit preferences to always open files up as plain text instead of rich text if this annoys you, by the way.

<comment><USER27> It was opened as plain text. That option is orthogonal to smart quotes, although it turns out those can be turned off globally as well. Thanks for leading me in the right direction.

I still think there must be a better way to do it for Shuttle, though, given what the defaults are. Even something as hacky as replacing smart quotes with normal ones before json parsing would be pretty useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Could anyone recommend a good/free program for making these kind of animated gifs that record your computer (like the one on Shuttle's homepage)?

I've been trying to add the same kind of thing to my site but I don't know how to do it.

<comment><USER30> I've heard and seen many good things about LICEcap[0]. There doesn't appear to be a Linux install, just so you know.

[0][http://www.cockos.com/licecap/](http://www.cockos.com/licecap/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> If anyone needs something similar for Windows, use [https://gist.github.com/arnehormann/5975783](https://gist.github.com/arnehormann/5975783) and put all shortcuts with a folder into the quickstart part of the taskbar. The hta file I link to is html with visual basic instead of JS - executable on click, pretty compact, shows a dialog. Don't know if this breaks in later Win versions though, I wrote this some years ago and it worked fine in Vista...

<comment><USER32> Or even better, right click putty on your taskbar in windows 7 and all your profiles are listed.

<comment><USER31> Maybe I should have upgraded before switching to OS X :)

My approach still has one advantage: I have 60 user/server combinations and can order them by user/rack/whatever by using subfolders. And it's possible to assign custom icons, which I never did...

<comment><USER32> True. I only connect to two hosts and ssh on from there so non issue for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I have a widget like this for AWS+Virtualbox, it sorts all instances across all regions into tag name groups, by ip, by region, and by instance type. Unfortunately I know it only works for Windows and linux at the moment and my company hasn't given me a green flag to release it.

Still this project is a lot prettier and appears to have been more refined while mine was hobbled together in a hour or two and fit in one Python file ( reasonably, its not 10 files in one ).

</comment><comment><USER34> Yet another way to have clickable short-cuts for opening SSH connections using OS X (Safari only): OS X understands URL schemes like ssh://email@example.com:port. Throw it into the address bar or even save this as a bookmark. Safari asks for permission before opening such non-http protocols nowadays and transfers you to Terminal.app. Pro: Less clutter in menu bar. Con: Safari only. (As for me, I prefer ~/.profile and 'alias').

<comment><AUTHOR> I was actually going to do this at first. Something as simple as openURL:"ssh://firstname.lastname@example.com", then let OS X handle opening the default terminal. But I wasn't able to easily specify things like a different private key (for AWS or Vagrant). This at least gives the user the ability to specify any option that they could also specify on the command line.

<comment><USER4> You can specify per-host keys in ~/.ssh/config (hint: "IdentityFile").

<comment><USER34> Right. Nevertheless, this tiny little menulet might be a nice starting point for all those people who are not too experienced with secure shell sessions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> For a similar set-up for Linux, see [1]. Here we use dmenu to displays hosts defined in .ssh/config, and open a connection to the selected host in a new window. See [2] for the relevant script.

[1]: [http://www.asayers.org/blog/ssh.html](http://www.asayers.org/blog/ssh.html)

[2]: [https://gist.github.com/asayers/5975856](https://gist.github.com/asayers/5975856)

</comment><comment><USER36> Installed. Nice little utility. As others probably do, I have ~/.ssh/config set up so that it's as easy as `ssh us1` to SSH into a server.

</comment><comment><USER37> Very nice! This is almost exactly like an app I've been slowly chipping away at since last September, except my project acts as a front-end for reading and editing the ~/.ssh/config file.

Still haven't gotten anything released but my WIP builds have certainly proven useful in my daily workflow. Has been a nice project for teaching myself Obj-C too!

</comment><comment><USER38> Cute idea but I prefer to set up these profiles in iTerm2 because when I ssh somewhere, I usually use a different background to differentiate the various hosts (production, staging, etc...).

I also tend to split iTerm2 horizontally and vertically and create ssh sessions in tabs, so I hardly ever need an ssh session in a brand new window.

</comment><comment><USER39> Aliases in ~/.ssh/config are my preference, but if clicking with the mouse is your thing, why not throw Terminal.app in the Dock and click/hold the icon? Choose New Remote Connection... and you can save all your services and hosts right there. No additional processes running or clutter in the menubar.

</comment><comment><USER40> Is it just me or people are really lacking with names? Rocket, shuttles and similar seems a bit overused...

</comment><comment><USER41> I like how the name "Shuttle" implies that this is going to make your SSHing experience "take off", but anyone with an SSH config file is like:

"You mean you weren't doing this years ago? Why do I need a UI to get to a shell command? I'm already in the shell!"

</comment><comment><USER42> I love this more than for just ssh. I added a few other common commands into the menu for easy access.

<comment><USER43> That is a great idea. Thanks!

<comment><USER42> Yep. Also, I understand what other people are saying about already having aliases, I do too. But, as a visual list of servers I can ssh into it is a nice reminder. Plus there are some files that I edit only from time to time (php.ini, apache config, etc). I made shortcuts that throw those files into my editor. Call me an amateur, but when I have to edit some of those my first question is usually, where the hell is that file again? Anyway, I find this tool useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Just installed this, really nice little shortcut for the servers I connect to.

</comment><comment><USER45> Terminal already does most of this, right? Preferences -> Settings -> "+" -> Shell -> Run command "ssh user@hostname". And you can set the background color &c for each host.

</comment><comment><USER46> Having exactly the same in fluxbox since more than 10 years ago...

And more "dynamic" and "generated" menus (all that is needed is the "include" directive in the menu handler and cron).

</comment><comment><USER47> Thanks for this, will be saving me time.

As a quick feature suggestion, I wonder if it's possible to have a shortcut key to get into the menu, and then possibly shortcut keys to every entry in the list?

</comment><comment><USER48> I made alias' in my .bash_profile to handle this shortcut need, although, for servers that I don't access often, it might be nice to have the dropdown list as a reminder.

</comment><comment><USER49> This looks pretty awesome! I will try it out when I get back. I usually just add a load of shortcuts to my hosts file but even that's a pain.

</comment><comment><USER50> This is a clever little utility, I've got my setup mostly scripted off but I'm sure I'll find a use for it.

</comment><comment><USER51> Doesn't everyone do this with sessions in iTerm? Right-click on the dock icon and then pick your server...

</comment><comment><USER52> Too bad it does not work with Leopard...so it becomes useless to me. Otherwise looked like a nice idea!

</comment><comment><USER53> What's he using in the video to give the almost path bar effect for the prompt in terminal?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://twitter.com/fitztrev/status/355340535659122688](https://twitter.com/fitztrev/status/355340535659122688)

It's actually the Solarized Dark, to be more specific. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I love the design of this, from the animated gif tour, to the .json config

</comment><comment><USER55> Something like this would be awesome for vagrant!

<comment><AUTHOR> It actually works pretty well with Vagrant. In fact, I even have Vagrant in the sample config file to show how it's done. :)

[https://github.com/fitztrev/shuttle/blob/master/Shuttle/shut...](https://github.com/fitztrev/shuttle/blob/master/Shuttle/shuttle.default.json#L37)

Basically just do `vagrant ssh-config box_name_here` to get the port and identity file that you need to specify in the SSH command.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> On windows 7+ putty does this by default.

</comment><comment><USER57> Instant win</comment>


New gadgets and apps are trying to make mindfulness meditation easier - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/can-meditation-gadgets-help-you-reduce-your-stressand-find-happiness-1451585505 <comment><USER2> I think that there might be huge value in neurobiofeedback but it's a mistake to brand these devices as an aid to what essentially is a religious practice for many people. Just studying the comments in this thread shows that the sole idea of such a device seems blasphemous for some.

Perhaps it would be better to call it a concentration exercise or a brain fitness trainer, especially since it's not even clear that these devices help you with mindfulness (whatever it might be). I tried to find some reviews of Muse done by experienced meditators (I haven't collected the links, sorry) and the results seem mixed. Some claim perfect score on the first sitting, some say they get the same bad results as everyone else starting out with the app. That would suggest that either the device doesn't really do what it claims or that meditation means so many different things to different people that it's not a useful term to use in a scientific context.

</comment><comment><USER3> The whole point of 'mindfulness' is that you don't need any gadgets or apps to be able to access it. It doesn't require external resources of any kind; it's freely available, at any time.

<comment><USER4> True.

Also, these devices can help by providing feedback that you might not yet be attuned to receiving without the devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Adding gadgetry to meditation is kind of self defeating if you ask me. Typical modern approach to basically everything: add batteries and its automatically better!

</comment><comment><USER6> no.

We have spent last couple of centuries shoehorning every single problems into scientific solution fanaticism. Ofcourse there is no denying science and tech has paid us big dividends.But this single-groove thinking has failed us a in solving more fundamental of human problems. People feel lost/purposeless, people are joining ISIS/blackwater for adventurism, trying to give some meaning to their existence.

People are lost/stressed/bored. We have replaced spirituality/religion/family with a pictures of self-driving cars and missions to mars.

<comment><USER7> But meditation is technology! We just don't think much of tech unless it exists outside ourselves to be consumed anymore

<comment><USER8> Interestingly, this actually gets closer to the original root meaning of the word than what it tends to mean these days:

> TECHNOLOGY: 1610s, "a discourse or treatise on an art or the arts," from > Greek tekhnologia "systematic treatment of an art, craft, or technique," > originally referring to grammar, from tekhno- (see techno-) + -logy. The > meaning "study of mechanical and industrial arts" (Century Dictionary, 1902, > gives examples of "spinning, metal-working, or brewing") is first recorded > 1859.

Source: [http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=technology](http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=technology)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can News Organizations Ever Get Past Asking These Sort Of Simplistic Questions In Thear Headlines?

The TL;DR of this article is, as it usually is with such questions, "Doesn't really seem like it, results are inconclusive, but you gotta start somewhere so why not."

You're better off skipping the read, honestly.

<comment><USER9> Obligatory mention of Betteridge's law of headlines [0].

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)</comment></comment>


The lesson from Blue Bottle Coffee: go fast - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/inside-blue-bottle-coffees-sprint-to-get-off-the-ground-204c55e9ba64#.e0dsst6mg <comment><USER2> "We're talking science here. Coffee scales are accurate to a fraction of a gram." <rolls eyes></comment>


Folklore on the average cost of a defect - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/115091715679003832601/posts/GEsMRMd6rMG

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't run into this folklore very often but it does happen on occasion - I'll file this little tidbit away until its useful in the future. It is funny to think this number hasn't been adjusted since the mid 1970's.

</comment><comment><USER2> I worked at a silicon company earlier in my career ... let me tell you, those defects get more expensive the later you find them by orders of magnitudes some times. That trend is true, regardless of numbers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if there's any published evidence of this. I've heard the same thing and it /seems/ reasonable but then again it could be folklore. I guess it depends on the company and how expensive it is to fix.

I mean small or /agile/ companies that can repair a bug and deploy right away would have a substantially lower cost than say a large company that needs to have dozens of people approve something before it can be fixed.</comment></comment>


Rule-Based Programming in Interactive Fiction (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://eblong.com/zarf/essays/rule-based-if/index.html

<comment><USER2> A while back I made a rule-based text adventure game engine in Python, inspired by Nelson's Inform 7 and also this presentation. My rule system didn't solve for specificity; it simply took the first rule which applied, so hopefully you define the rules in the correct order.

Here's the obligatory Cloak of Darkness: [https://github.com/kmill/textadv/blob/master/games/cloak.py](https://github.com/kmill/textadv/blob/master/games/cloak.py)

Decorators can go a long way for pretending Python has a metaprogramming facility!

(I made the engine so that I could experiment with a continuation-like object which saves the entire world state. Example at [http://tep.mit.edu:8888/game/continuations](http://tep.mit.edu:8888/game/continuations) )</comment>


Ask HN: How do you find advertisers for your product outside of ad networks? - <AUTHOR> I have a product with hundreds of thousands of users that I want to monetize with advertisers/sponsors but that isn't compatible with ad networks like Google Adsense. Currently, I've just been cold emailing companies asking if they'd like to advertise on my product but that hasn't been too effective. Are there any other strategies for finding advertisers/sponsors? <comment><USER2> I have a mailing list for my website ([https://IndieHackers.com](https://IndieHackers.com)). Right after launching, when enthusiasm was at a peak, I included a paragraph in the weekly newsletter saying that I was looking for sponsors ([http://i.imgur.com/EknpPux.png](http://i.imgur.com/EknpPux.png)). A few companies got back to me, and I worked out deal with two of them. Not sure if this is applicable to you, but it's a data point nonetheless.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey csallen, thanks a lot for sharing -- definitely gives me some ideas. Also, great work on IndieHackers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you expand more on the type of product I might be able to help.</comment>


Facial Performance Sensing Head-Mounted Display [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.hao-li.com/publications/papers/siggraph2015FPSHMD.pdf <comment><USER2> Since the title isn't very clear, here is the abstract:

> There are currently no solutions for enabling direct face-to-face > interaction between virtual reality (VR) users wearing head-mounted displays > (HMDs). The main challenge is that the headset obstructs a significant > portion of a user's face, preventing effective facial capture with > traditional techniques. To advance virtual reality as a nextgeneration > communication platform, we develop a novel HMD that enables 3D facial > performance-driven animation in real-time. Our wearable system uses ultra- > thin flexible electronic materials that are mounted on the foam liner of the > headset to measure surface strain signals corresponding to upper face > expressions. These strain signals are combined with a head-mounted RGB-D > camera to enhance the tracking in the mouth region and to account for > inaccurate HMD placement. To map the input signals to a 3D face model, we > perform a single-instance offline training session for each person. For > reusable and accurate online operation, we propose a short calibration step > to readjust the Gaussian mixture distribution of the mapping before each > use. The resulting animations are visually on par with cutting-edge depth > sensor-driven facial performance capture systems and hence, are suitable for > social interactions in virtual worlds.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgKkEnaaSDc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgKkEnaaSDc)

<comment><USER2> Interesting, but it seems the technology is still somewhere in the uncanny valley.

<comment><USER4> Probably because the model isn't mapped to anyone's actual face (or a character if you prefer). This can be changed.</comment></comment></comment>