> on top of the most obscure infrastructure imaginable.
I don't know... look at the Aloha on Rails session summaries; Blake Mizerany says:
Heroku has over 32,000 apps running on it currently, some serving hundreds of requests per second.
Not bad.
> Biden has power?
Well, he has power to annoy the Russians by going on about their 'withering economy'.
...had Martin Odersky in for an interview a while back.
It's good stuff; se-radio isn't afraid to get down in the weeds with the interviewee.
> Then goes on to divide the reading list based on the rank of the reader?
Some truth to that... but I don't know. Seems to me that the senior officer books are more around strategy (see the Navy reading list 'Senior Leaders' section) while the junior folks' books are more general stuff and easy reads. For example, look where Ender's Game shows up on several lists...
> most of the grunts I have worked with have a
> reading / writing level of less an 8th grade student.
Check out the Army reading list section for cadets, soldiers, and NCOs. Some good stuff there... especially Keegan's "Face of Battle". On the other hand, I have no idea how many folks in those ranks have read any of those.
> there are never-ending strings attached to government money.
Yes, but that money must be spent! I quote our vice president: "You're telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt? The answer is yes, that's what I'm telling you." Classic stuff!
> Comcast/AT&T/Time Warner suck, but you can bet
> that the US government will suck even worse.
Yup. That's how I feel about healthcare, too. It's a dog's breakfast now, but having the government take over won't help.
> there are plenty of sites available [missilebases.com]
> to build your own hardened data center.
You'll need to watch for deep crows, though.
> any Marine who could read and write
> was immediately promoted to officer.
These days, though, Marines are different. Check out the Marine Corps reading list, especially the "Private to Lance Corporal" section. "Ender's Game", "The Ugly American", etc...
...in yesterday's post on Mike Shedlock's blog. He makes a telling point: "Bear in mind, you can only sell the Capital Building once. Then what? Is anyone looking ahead?"
> you'd think the stability of working at a large, deep-pockets
> organization would have been an attractive option
Maybe, although those large organizations are the ones that can outsource or cut an entire department for any reason or no reason at all. With a smaller company you at least have some hope of influencing the bottom line and knowing what's going on.
...is that now EngineYard has full-time folks working on Rubinious, JRuby, and Ruby 1.8.6. It's Ruby implementation central over there.
> If there's one thing even slower or more pointless than jvm and ruby,
> it's ruby on rails. I guess someone didn't get the memo,
> but RoR's 15 minutes are up.
To the contrary, people are cranking out new Rails apps at a furious rate, and lots of Java and C# apps are getting ported over to Rails. It's good times.
> I miss the good old disaster flicks of the 1970s
Indeed sir, but I look forward to 2012 topping them all. Consider the latest trailer... looks like good times...
As the trials of life continue to take their toll, remember that there is always a future in Computer Maintenance. -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"
