There's a term used called "cloudwashing" that covers inappropriate use of the term cloud, but cloud technology is real and every company in tech is pouring money into this transition.

Anyone who has worked in IT in large enterprise has seen the benefits of virtualization in action; there's an enormous amount of capex and opex savings, and VMware basically dominates the market. There's a reason 99%+ of the Fortune 500 have an ELA with them.

The same principles behind that revolution are now reaching into the public space, and looking to blend the private IT compute farms with public cloud resources as well; plus more apps being deployed as SaaS, and more apps being developed on PaaS stacks; all the technology of big data (eg, Mongo), messaging (eg RabbitMQ), and so on just form a virtuous circle with this trend. Apps become more able to run in generic clouds without requiring very specific hardware control, and thus IaaS clouds become more attractive.

If you're in system, network, storage, or security administration, or IT of any sort, and you're not learning about this, you're basically a COBOL programmer waiting to be put out to farm.

It's meant to be syllogistic.

As in:

Linux:Operating Systems::OpenStack:Cloud

At this point, though, OpenStack is still pre-1.0, perhaps equivalent to Linux circa 1993. Whether it can polish up and continue to deliver what is needed is yet to be seen.

The impetus behind cloud right now means that this will be a lot more high profile than Linux was in 1993. There's all sorts of politics (eg Why Citrix Left Openstack) at play, and no one has an OpenStack cloud of any significant size running. OpenStack has been tooting its horn for 18+ months and yet the most advanced player is really just going into production. Rackspace clearly sees OpenStack as an avenue to leverage outside development in an effort to go after Amazon, but whether that makes it viable for other people - and thus creates a rewarding ecosystem - has yet to be seen.

OpenStack isn't a distro. It's a collection of utilities for virtualizing and managing compute and storage resources to build clouds. Putting Apache, PHP, and MySQL onto a linux box doesn't make the LAMP stack "Linux" any more than putting OpenStack services (Nova, swift, etc) onto a Linux distro makes OpenStack Linux.

I have two suggestions that are close to staying with Java:

(1) Check out Spring (http://www.springsource.org/); Spring has a bunch of goodies that make developing web apps easier, and the guys from spring (Adrian Colyer, Richard MacDougall) are thinking really hard about scalable web services. This is a foundation that will let you write in Java but still be prepared for the future.

(2) Even better, don't go with Java, but leverage some of what you learned and pick up Scala. See http://www.scala-lang.org/, or pick up Martin Odersky's book. Think of Scala as what Java would be if someone who appreciated terse, expressive syntax and great convention redesigned Java. Odersky wrote a reference JVM implementation while at Sun, and Scala compiles into Java bytecode and can directly use Scala libraries. (My first Scala project, for example, I used unboundid's LDAP libs directly in my Scala code.) Odersky along with some other luminaries (Viktor Klang, Paul Phillips, etc) have formed Typesafe, and are producing Scala the language + Akka (an actor framework) + Play (a web framework). Outside of play, many people are huge fans of Lift, and it does have some magic that no other framework has.

Remember how you said "modern" web application? Well, Scala supports functional programming, and you can fix functional and imperative code in the same application, which means you can support massively scalable sites by writing clean, idempotent code where needed.

If all this sounds bad, then I'd recommend Django+Python, as it is, imo, the best way for a relative web novice to produce decent code, and the amount you can do with a few hours reading docs and then digging in is shocking.

This is generally incorrect advice at least for a VMware environment. Best practice is to virtualize vCenter Server and its database, and use them with HA/DRS. The way that vCenter interacts with ESXi (the hypervisor it administers), ESXi is "preconfigured" with HA/DRS rules; if the server running vcenter does down, a different hypervisor will actually bring the management VM back up. (In other words, the vMotion and HA stuff, while CONFIGURED by vCenter server, doesn't not need the vCenter server online to actually carry out an HA restore.

The TSA would not be able to keep the scanners in service if every person opted out every time. (FWIW, I've passed through SLC several times, and the agents have always been respectful, polite, and not particularly aggressive with my crotch region. That said, for the sake of all of our privacy and that of our children, please opt out every time. They will HAVE to change.)

This certainly puts the recruitment message from an IBM recruiter I got on LinkedIn last week in a new light.

Yep. I bought an 06 in late 06 and got a call about a year later offering to buy the car back from me for (slightly) more than I paid for it, so they could sell it to someone else. (They're pretty eager to buy it again now, even though it is now 5.5 years old. I ran the numbers and thanks to rising gas prices, if I did sell it, I think I'd have about $3k less depreciation than expected.)

It's actually probably because the subsidies have expired. I bought two hybrid cars in late 2006 - one 06 prius and one 07 camry hybrid. First, I've been very happy with the cars in general. Nothing has ever gone wrong with either, at all. Looking at the '12 models, there is basically a $4k difference to get a hybrid.

Assuming your mileage is ~50% city vs highway (and mine isn't; it was, and remains, more like 80/20 city/highway, because I don't have a commute) then you get a est MPG difference of 11 miles per gallon (41 vs 30). 894 gallons of gas is somewhere between $3k and $4k depending on where you live, I think. (Here I think it was ~3.60 last I checked; when I filled up a rental in CA last week, I think it was more like $4.50). That covers ALMOST all of the difference, and if you are a heavy city driver, it does cover all of it.

When I bought our cars, however, there was also a tax credit - something on the order of $3k per car. It appears, glancing at the IRS site, that the last year of car this was available was model year 2009.

Anyhow, gas was a lot cheaper when we bought ours and with the credit I still expected to make it back. When gas went through the roof, it made the value proposition much more attractive, of course. (In fact, about a year after we bought them, I got an offer to buy the Prius back for more than I'd paid for it, because gas prices had gone up so much, it had driven demand for used cars through the roof.)

So in a sense, it DID work the first time, but the lack of tax credit makes it unworth it for some buyers.

Get VMware Workstation. Run a Windows VM in your Linux box, or vice versa. I'm on a Mac using VMware Fusion, but I do things in word and excel all the time and have a SuSE box (don't ask!) open right now for some dev work. It's honestly BETTER, for me as a develop, than an all-in-one environment, because the operating systems in VMs-as-containers means I don't run into application specific configuration or dependency hell. And, if need be, I can push a whole dev environment up into a service provider as a running host.

I have my phone set to autowipe itself after 10 wrong passcode attempts. Does this avoid that auto deletion? Because someone doing it by hand would trigger that and the phone would theoretically wipe itself. (Not tested, but it will start to make dire warnings about wiping the device after several failures.)

How about they advertise their services for less than $275/hour and work for themselves?

There may not be many $250-450k salaried jobs available to new grads, but I'm extremely skeptical there's no work to be had.

I have to respectfully disagree. People hire people because of market opportunities. Market opportunities exist because you can make a profit. The more capable engineers are of building more useful things in less time, the more demand there will be for your services.

I am seeing market opportunities for something new/better all the time; things I could even build on my own if I wasn't entirely too busy with work. Moreover, most times I've needed to hire someone in a situation where I was the hiring manager or if I was an engineer on a team in need, I can say that it has always been hard to find qualified people. I can only think of one time, ever, where there was a position and we passed on someone because of salary. (And I probably could have swung it to a hire, and I later regretted passing. I'd read too many articles like this and was convinced someone equally/nearly equally qualified would come along. Nope. Open position for 6+ months.)

Quite common for a good programmer to pick up a programming language quick, then apply for a job that asks for 10 years experience in it

This is especially true when the language has only been out for 6. I'm sure everyone who has been around long enough remembers jobs that required 10 years of Java in 2001.

Plus, your career is over when you're 40

I am on a team with 9 software engineers, not counting QE. 4 of the team members are definitely older than 40 (I believe one is now in his late 50s/early 60s even), and two others are in our mid-30s. No one is under 30.

Then again, all the managers I've had here have been badasses who make huge contributions to getting good stuff out the door, too.