Ruby makes sysadmins cry. I tried updating a legacy server yesterday that is running a ruby app. After two hours of trying to make it work, I gave up.

Trees fuck in the air. What do you think pollen is?

I think there are some rare cases where public opinion is wrong, and this would be one of them. I also think this is a horribly passive-aggressive way of doing it. If you feel that strongly, just set in motion the process of capping them, and if it fails, well, you tried.

I keep thinking of places down south who need all the water they can get, and we're just wasting a whole reservoir full. That saddens me.

(I live in Portland, but I'm in the Tualatin Valley water district, so it doesn't affect me much.)

I live in Portland. They'd probably allow it if he was a free-range drunkard with organic piss.

I've been a developer, a sysadmin, and a devops guy. And the number of developers I've had to gently (and sometimes not so gently) say "stop doing that, you're crashing the server!" is way more than I am comfortable with...

That's the kind of reply that gives "anonymous coward" its name...

Yeah, you put a coherent thought together and actually contributed to the discussion.

Keep that up and you'll have no street cred on Slashdot at all!

The point of devops is not to take jobs away from developers. The point of devops is to provide an interface between system administration and development. Development and system administration have always been at odds with each other - system administrators not really understanding or caring how the application works, and developers treating the systems as an infinite resource pool with no real rules or resources past "does my code run?"

The sole purpose of devops is to ensure efficient operation of the infrastructure in a way that allows for repeatable deployments and controlled versioning, and that also includes system software such as operating systems (sysadmins benefit too because they no longer have to do one off deployments of OSes).

This criticism strikes me as woefully underinformed as to what devops actually does, and I'm wondering if the author of this is a developer who is upset because devops is forcing them to actually use the software lifecycle properly rather than just doing cowboy deployments and hoping they work.

I agree that people talking to imaginary entities are crazy and stupid. The debate is whether they're imaginary. You can't prove they are.

What do you have against mom's apple pie? It's warm and squishy and... and...

I'll be in my bunk.

Not agreeing or disagreeing with your point, but since Mitt isn't going to be any better, according to you, why are you focusing on Obama? Agreed that he is president, but implicit in your statement is an admission that the problem is bigger than Obama.

I'm not as worried about the existence of the cameras as I am that lots of people seem to know whose they are and no one's telling. That's kind of the antithesis of government transparency. I hope someone sues under FOIA.

Now that's a useful and interesting comment. Thanks for engaging me as if I were an intelligent person, thereby allowing me to keep up the ruse in my head for a little longer. :)

I think it's completely fair to state that what I'm saying is not *likely*. I don't seriously believe elves are pulling people down, nor do I seriously believe the earth was created 6,000 years ago. I'm just not prepared to state that everything is known and it's settled. Very little, I think, is settled, and if we were to understand how things *really* worked our brains would explode. All of this kerfluffle is just us trying to make sense of what we see with our quite inadequate and puny five senses. A good start, a worthy goal, but who knows what other interesting stuff awaits. Thanks to scientists for trying to discover it, thanks to spiritualists for trying to make sense of it. :)

Going to have to agree to disagree on that. I'm pretty sure you were not here from the beginning. It's completely circumstantial.

And now I have productive things to do that don't involve arguing with people on slashdot.

Sure, who's to say it doesn't pop up every single nanosecond in the exact same state it was before. I wouldn't be able to tell the difference, so I don't really care. It's still in the realm of possibility, and trying to tell me that it's not happening just tells me that you don't have enough of an imagination. :)