This seems pretty different from the Canadian asset requirement [1]. The Canadian asset requirement is meant to ensure that new (skilled worker) immigrants can support themselves (and it's on the order of $10 000. The immigrant keeps this money and can spend it however he likes.
Canada does have something similar to this visa though[2], but the investment is managed by the government.
Core Intuition (http://www.coreint.org/), is a really great podcast by two iOS/Mac developers (Daniel Jalkut of MarsEdit fame, and Manton Reece of tweetmarker). Daniel's shtick is that he's a punkass, but it's immediately apparent that both of them are pretty humble, and always trying to keep it positive. The most insightful part of the show they take questions from the audience and answer them.
I was hoping Build and Analyze would be more of the same, but the show took another direction.
In what sense is there less lock in with Brightbox than with EC2? I've run EC2 images on other IaaS clouds, and it's easy to pull an image out with ec2-download-bundle.
In the new Gmail there is a huge amount of unused space, even in the "Dense" view. This results in less emails on the screen at one time in the Inbox (I use Priority Inbox so maybe it works great in regular mode, but it should work in both). The might have been trying to avoid information overload but they achieved information underload.
Now the compose and search buttons are enormous and the only colored elements on the page. Eyes are drawn to them in a way that each competes for attention and eventually you end up at the Gmail logo. Great for Google branding(? I already use Gmail), not so good for me because it hurts my eyes and distracts me.
Next, with everything being white with a few grey highlights, it is unclear where each section of the page begins and ends. Some things start to scroll while others stay static with no indication of what will change. The browser scrollbar takes up the whole size of the browser window but only part of the screen scrolls some of the time.
Diffeent platforms use different font rendering algorithms. I'll avoid saying that one is better than the other, but it's off putting to see one rendering alongside another on the same display. Apple got into trouble with this when they ported Safari to Windows, and used OS X font rendering on that platform.
What incentive is there to create great Playbook Native apps when you can just make 1 web app that "will work" in a "browser" for Playbook?
Developers who really care about the platform will create native apps, and ones who merely want Playbook users to be able to run their app will go with some cross platform thing. (The web, Android, etc).
I think so long as you're satisfied with your tool, you should just keep using it. If you "don't believe the hype", then doesn't just that mean that the benefits that people describe from their experience with vim/emacs/whatever aren't that important to you? If when people describe how they like being able to delete 10 lines with 10dd, or use '.' to repeat the last thing they did, and that doesn't sound interesting to you, then don't worry about it.
Personally, I love vim, and have been using it for years and years, and feel hobbled without it, but if you're satisfied with your tool, and don't long for something better, stick with it.
I am not so sure the exported bundle can be run off AWS, are you sure about that?
On a side note, doesn't the download bundle task require you to stop the instance? That could be a problem since the task can take quite some time to complete during which time your server will be unavailable.
Yeah. It's just a Xen VM. I do this every month or so. You just have to make sure that you have a kernel and modules you can boot the image with on your local Xen host. This is pretty easy, you can do it with whatever package manager your distro comes with, or if you created the image on a local Xen machine, you probably already have this. (yum install kernel-xen works on rhel)
It's true that you can't really do this with a live VM, since the AMI on EC2 will be whatever you had on the image before you last booted it. But you can do a ec2-bundle-vol on your live image to create a new AMI, then do your ec2-download-bundle on your new AMI.
You're really not as "locked in" to EC2 as some people think. You can easily pull your images off there, and then install Nimbus or OpenStack or something and run a local cloud. That's what we do at my job.
Canada does have something similar to this visa though[2], but the investment is managed by the government.
1. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/skilled/funds.asp
2. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/business/investors/in...