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The Shanghai maglev is german technology (Transrapid). The development began around 1969. Siemens and ThyssenKrupp were mainly looking for a demonstration of the technological capabilities as there was no real world application, mainly due to costs, besides it being ready for application since 1991.
Wouldn't MM mean 2000 in Roman numerals? Like in MMXII. http://xkcd.com/927/
This was already answered on quora by PJ Hyett, GitHub Co-Founder:
"IO performance is essential to our business (handling an enormous amount of disk operations) and EBS wasn't nearly as fast as bare metal when we ran benchmarks prior to moving to Rackspace."
(from http://www.quora.com/GitHub/Why-did-GitHub-use-Rackspace-ove...)
While price most probably played an important role too, as indicated by EngineYard, its former host: http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/engine-yard-and-github-t...