You: ... and I'll need your cost code for this work ..... you do have a cost code, don't you?
CEO: Fuck the cost code, you figure out one to charge to. Why? Because IT'S YOUR JOB TO FIGURE SHIT LIKE THIS OUT.

You: Is that the Mark 3 or the Mark 4, cos those old Mark 2's well - they're just not up to it ...
CEO: Oh, well then you'll need to make it work for Marks 2, 3, and 4. Why? Because IT'S YOUR JOB TO FIGURE SHIT LIKE THIS OUT.

You: ... need to keep it for a day or two to test the integration...
CEO: Fuck that. You'll need to figure out how to do that without using my personal device. Why? Because IT'S YOUR JOB TO FIGURE SHIT LIKE THIS OUT.

Remember the "precedent" where record companies had exclusive rights to distribute recorded music?

The Congress is about to discover the same lesson regarding technology that refuses to be regulated.

Agreed. I just want to get the fucking thing working.

Once the fucking thing is working, I'm done. Ready to hand it off to some janitor, beancounter, or some such other process-loving dweeb. Let them work out all the corner cases and test coverage. That way, I can more quickly move on to some other interesting thing.

initscripts. If you're not writing them, you aren't a software developer.

This says a lot more about the intelligence of the company's employees than it does about the software.

Dang! Out of mod points! Anyone who's developing thick-client GUIs in this day and age is a fool.

Since I live in Austin, not far from the UT campus, I just brought up Google Maps and had a look ... and there we are, my wife and me in our front yard. We just happened to be outside when the image was made. I admit to feeling just a bit creeped out.

Anyone who doesn't see this as a problem probably has never really had to deal with configuration management and Q/A issues in a production environment.

I have, and if I were an app developer, this info would scare the crap out of me. Keeping your product stable, repeatable, and traceable on a single platform is hard enough.

When someone offers you a deal that you really don't want, but for whatever reason, you don't want to be seen saying "no" or otherwise turning down business -- then say "yes" to the offer, but make sure that it will be so expensive that the deal is sure to be OBE.

To wit FTA:

Ed, man!

!man ed
http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html

It has two passwords: One password provides access to the system. The other, if used, causes the system to silently erase itself or otherwise self-destruct. In this case, the prisoner could solve two problems with the second password: He provides "the password" to the authorities, thereby keeping himself out of jail, and he has those same authorities do the dirty work of destroying the evidence.

Does there already exist an encryption system and/or filesystem does this?

With all due respect, I'd like to go on record as disagreeing with every point in your entire post. Instead of making what I think your point is, your post points out the fundamental faults associated with the path the industry has taken over the last 15-20 years.

TFA hints at this but doesn't come out and say it: the larger you scale, the more you swamp yourself with atomicity protocol overhead. If your database is geographically distributed, then you have to decide if atomicity is more important than forgoing the very large bills for the associated network usage. I suspect that this may explain a lot about why Google, Amazon, etc., went with NoSQL solutions.

For those of you wondering WTF this is all about, Wikipedia has a good write-up on leap seconds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second

Are you trying to tell us that you don't know the difference between an operating system and a web server software package? [*]

[*] Apache also runs on on Windows