A lot of people have asked me if indeed you can view Netflix or Hulu or any other streaming service in HD on a regular 5Mbps Unifi connection (that’s the slowest possible Unifi connection).
Yes you can! Check out the “Now Playing HD” bit on the bottom right hand of the image below.
To learn how to watch Netflix or Hulu from Malaysia, check out my previous post here.
Google recently announced their Amazon EC2 killer, the Google Compute Engine or GCE. Google wasn’t messing around and went straight for the Amazon jugular releasing 4 instance types all of which appear cheaper than their Amazon counterparts. That being said the price comparison was done solely on the basis on a on-demand Amazon instance types–Amazons most expensive prices, if you compare for the Reserved instances, then prices become more competitive.
It’s exciting to finally see a Juggernaut big enough to take on Amazon in terms of price and scale. This is all around good news for everyone, especially since this report from Cisco estimates that revenues from IaaS providers are not only high right now, but will continue to grow over the next 5 years. There’s a lot of room at the IaaS space, and Google just wants to wet their beak here as well.
So it must have come as a pleasant surprise to Google when they heard ‘hurricane-like’ thunderstorms ripped across the US east coast taking down power to 3.5 million–and the Amazon East Data center as well. I was personally affected by this phenomena when my access to Netflix was abruptly halted, as you can imagine I wasn’t a happy camper.
Maternity leave has long been plaguing womens career, women would usually take an extended leave and risk falling behind their male counterparts. As an extension to this, employers were also hesitant to hire women (particularly pregnant women) since it meant a legally mandated leave of absence that their male colleagues would never take.
Governments have tried to stem this discrimination by passing various enactments preventing employers from discriminating against women and even providing incentives to employers to promote women within their organizations. These changes however–never really worked.
The Scandinavians found a rather cheeky solution to the problem–give men more paternity leave. By giving men as much maternity leave as women, the equality was easily set. Now employers would had no incentive to hire women over men, because men were as likely as women to take extended leave due to a birth of a child. It appears that the ‘standard’ way of trying to solve the problem wasn’t as effective as the less obvious method. Brilliant!
It’s distressing is that even though this method of addressing the inequality has proven so effective in Scandanavia, and there is so much evidence to support it, Malaysia and many other countries have chosen to continue pressing on the ineffective approaches legal enactments and incentives. Choosing instead to neglect the empirical evidence in favor of a more straightforward and less effective approach.