Month: December 2015

Amazon Makes It Almost Impossible To Calculate Their “Virtual CPU” Equivalent

So, it looks like I’m not the only one trying to figure out Amazon EC2 virtual CPU allocation.  Slashdot runs the story (and a heated debate, as usual) on the subject of Amazon’s non-definitive virtual CPUs:

ECU’s were not the simplest approach to describing a virtual CPU, but they at least had a definition attached to them. Operations managers and those responsible for calculating server pricing could use that measure for comparison shopping. But ECUs were dropped as a visible and useful definition without announcement two years ago in favor of a descriptor — virtual CPU — that means, mainly, whatever AWS wants it to mean within a given instance family.

A precise number of ECUs in an instance has become simply a “virtual CPU.”

You are your phone

Fig 1
Barcode of smartphone use over two weeks.Black areas indicate times where the phone was in use and Saturdays are indicated with a red dashed line. Weekday alarm clock times (and snoozing) are clearly evident.

Here are a couple of quotes from the “You are your phone” article:

Even obscure variables such as how frequently a user recharges the phone’s battery, how many incoming text messages they receive, how many miles they travel in a given day or how they enter contacts into their phone — the decision to add last name correlates with creditworthiness — can bear on a decision to extend credit.

and

The test subjects used their phones more than five hours a day, on average. Much of that usage went on unconsciously, the researchers found. When the subjects were asked to estimate how often they checked their phone during a day, the average answer was 37 times. The tracking data revealed, however, that the subjects actually used their phones 85 times a day on average, more than twice as often as they thought.

It’s an interesting read, though not too surprising.