Actually, the model of remotely-managed on-premise appliances is not that crazy. Assuming it's done securely, you get the best of both worlds:

If the customer's Internet access goes down, they're not dead in the water as they would be with a cloud solution.

If you manage everything for them, then the box is completely hands-off... just like a cloud solution.

There's an entire business category called "Managed Service Providers" whose vendors do exactly this: Remotely manage all aspects of your IT infrastructure so you don't need to worry about anything. For mom-and-pop non-technical businesses, it's an excellent model.

Managing the OpenVPN connections is not that bad. You give each client its own key and certificate and you use OpenVPN's ccd/ directory to assign VPN IP addresses.

We use the following tools to monitor our servers, but we're only monitoring about 30, not 500:

• OpenVPN for accessing the remote servers. SSH if we need to log on to the server to do something. Some of our more important servers include built-in KVM-over-IP ability which can be very handy if the OS locks up.
• Xymon (formerly known as Hobbit) for monitoring the health of remote servers. We include some custom Xymon plugins to monitor SNMP variables. I find Xymon much easier to configure than Nagios, though it's not quite as flexible.
• Munin for tracking performance and ensuring we have baseline data.

I'm not sure how well this would scale to 500 boxes, though Xymon claims to be able to monitor "lots of systems".

I actually like Perl statement modifiers; they can make code more readable if used judiciously. Something like:
return unless $DEBUGGING;
can be pretty useful. Obviously, something like:
$a += $b * complex_function($c, $d, $e) unless ($x > 100.7 && pre_condition($d, $c, $e));
is not good.

csh is one big wtf. Those of you on Linux/UNIX boxes with csh active, start csh and then type:

else

Keep typing stuff in.

breaksw does the same thing. Who wrote that parser?

x86_64 firefox on Debian Wheezy and it works perfectly. I really like Firefox and don't understand the anti-Mozilla hate people seem to express.

How, exactly, is "faith" a "way of coming to knowledge?" What knowledge is revealed by believing in burning bushes, virgin births, or flying horses?

You are full of shit.

The scientific method (what you call "Science") makes testable and falsifiable predictions. Religion does not.

If a scientific theory is shown to be wrong, it is either modified until it better fits the facts or an alternative theory is developed. If religious belief is shown to be wrong, odds are the people showing it as such are shunned or killed.

Science has nothing whatsoever to do with religion. The scientific method is the single biggest factor in the progress of humankind.

It's Comcast or no TV.

This is a concept I do not understand. Paying someone to watch TV shows riddled with commercials?

We use an antenna and receive about 12 channels very clearly. I have yet to see a TV show I would pay for. I spend 8 hours a day in front of a computer; not being able to spend another 3 hours vegging in front of the 500-channel universe is not a big loss.

I understand upselling. I run a business and can appreciate its effectiveness. However, there's a time and a place for everything, and customers who do not want to be sold anything should always have their wishes respected.

When I deal with large corporations who try to upsell me, I tell the reps to stop doing that and deal with my question. It usually works. If it doesn't work, I cut them off and ask to speak to the manager. That always works.

Is that all you can come up with? Calling someone names instead of actually trying to understand where he's coming from?

Hint: My business runs on email. My business, in fact, is in the email security space. I think I understand a little more about email than you think I do.

Sorting by sender or by date is not usually useful to me. Sorting by importance and urgency is, but I've yet to teach my computer to do this.

"Long story short, if someone did that to me I'd take my business elsewhere, I don't appreciate having my time wasted . Fuck 'em."

We used to have customers like you until we fired them.

The correct protocol (and the one we follow at my company) is to use role addersses such as sales@, support@, info@, etc for things that absolutely must be read by a human being in a timely manner. Think requests for product information, price quotes, requests for technical support, etc.

We guarantee that those addresses will be routed to a person who can respond quickly. All bets are off for personal email addresses, however. I see no harm in asking a requestor to redirect his or her request if a person is away on vacation. Odds are the requestor will appreciate being able to resend it to someone who can respond quickly rather than waiting for the original person to return.

"Great. Here is a stack of 100 letters. I give you 2 seconds to sort them by sender. Go!"

First of all, that's not what faces me when I get back from vacation. I have a stack of flyers, etc. which are nuked very quickly, a few bills, and then (if I'm very lucky) *one* actual letter. Secondly, why would I want to sort them by sender? I sort them by priority and that's really easy to do with physical mail.

"If you don't have separate work and personal email accounts ... Oh I see. I'm being trolled."

I have multiple accounts, but I do get some personal email on my work account. I also get email of varying importance at work, ranging from unimportant to urgent, and there's no obvious way to sort it without at least reading the subject and sometimes the body. Why should I have to sift through all kinds of stuff on my return? Once senders know I'm away, I can trust them to refrain from sending me unimportant stuff, and to send urgent stuff to the contact person in my initial auto-reply.

I would not use "Delivery Failed" in the subject line. Most of those are annoying backscatter that just gets deleted. And most of the rest are delivery status notifications in a form 99.9% of people don't understand.

How hard was it to separate out the junk mail vs. scan a large email INBOX? When I get back from a couple of weeks of vacation, the junk mail is gone within about two minutes. It takes me much longer to go through the equivalent amount of email.