Four short links: 22 August 2017
Multi-Cloud, GIS Politics, Board Meetings, and Programming Biology
- Going Multi-Cloud with AWS and GCP: Lessons Learned at Scale — Wow… billing. The fundamental way in which AWS and GCP bill is very different. And getting a handle on your cloud spend is a huge hassle in both AWS and GCP. Plenty of detailed technical comparisons between the two, but this is the note that resonated most with me.
- Nobody Knows What Lies Beneath New York City (Bloomberg) — Con Edison, which by 2001 had been on the cusp of agreeing to initiate a fully digitized, shared map of the electric infrastructure, pulled its support, citing security concerns. “9/11 giveth, and 9/11 taketh away,” Leidner says with a rueful laugh. “It gave because it created a lot of attention for the uses of GIS and showed how integrating that data for every kind of use was key. But it also reinforced the need for security. And now nobody wanted to part with the data.”
- What People Really Think During a Board of Directors Meeting — I’m sobbing at how accurate it is. CEO: Looks like we are out of time and I know <Independent> has a hard stop. [Haha, we didn’t have time for even one of the “strategic” items.]
- Antha — a high-level programming language for biology and an operating system for all your laboratory hardware, making it easy to design experiments that are reproducible, reliable, and fast. Antha allows you to abstract away many of the complexities of working with biology by linking software and hardware with laboratory working practices. By doing this, it is easier than ever to build robust computational models of these systems and take advantage of flexible low-cost robots for physically performing experiments. Open source (GPLv2).
