Yea, its always been that way. Except back in the 80's it was Japan getting the preference. We in the US would often wait years for games to make it here. I cant really have much sympathy for days...

We use OpenLDAP this same way, but on top of it have many other layers that protect the systems and mitigate risk. Systems authenticate though LDAP, which we enforce on the linux systems using the standard config files, which in turn are version controlled and monitored by a config repository. If for instance someone does create a local account, it's discovered by the linux config manager and it's overwritten. If a server stops responding to the config manager a little alert goes off. These become the keys which you tightly guard. Access at that point becomes less of an issue, as it's easily monitored, controlled, and removed if necessary.

On top mitigate risk is important. No one server can be a single point of failure, and no single system can't be wiped and imaged clean in under 15 minutes. Backups become critical, use a trusted offsite service like IronMountain. Don't just stick them on a local disk, put them in a trusted space and give access on the account solely to people who have a deep vested interested in maintaining the company. If your systems can be rebuilt, and your backups are safe, you're looking at a worst case of being down for a day. Most companies should be doing this anyway, it's not just rouge admins you have to worry about, it's rouge data centers, rouge customers, rouge carriers, rouge asteroids, fires, earthquakes, bombs...

Distributed across disks/machines/racks, yes... datacenters, no. When you create your S3 "bucket" you specify a region to store it in. That region corresponds to a single physical datacenter. You can always dual write it to two buckets in two different regions if you're really worried however.

There are certainly many cases where there are advantages of non-relational systems as layers in the application that complement standard relational databases. Generally frequently read data that does not need to be queried at a granular level, like say session data, or geographical mapping tables. Some good complementary examples include memcache, redis or even ruby's starling. I use many of these in my applications, where honestly MySQL would probably work, but these other solutions provide many performance and cost advantages that simply can not be overlooked. Some, like starling, I've used to simply cache data on disk that does not change often, or lists in Redis to store map data.

IMO it's often easy to say SQL will work so use that, but it's not always the best solution. Sure you can get it to scale; I've used it in very massive petabyte scale without very much issue... but sometimes for smaller sets of data frequently accessed do you really want to invest in the kind of hardware required to make SQL run well, or will an in memory store on commodity hardware work as well or better? Sometimes you have massive data going in where neither SQL nor NoSQL are going to help you, where maybe hadoop or another map-reduce type solution is more appropriate.

It generally comes down to the questions; what type of data are you storing, how much data will there be, how are you going to use that data and at what levels of latency do you require for reads and writes? Before those are well defined you really are shooting in the dark on solutions to store and access it. This IMO is really the major issue most startups have, no one defined the data strategy, they just build with no conscious effort to examine what the business needs are short and long term.

I read this from a few sources today, including fox, and I can't really find fault in the reporting from fox news on this topic; Seems just as complete as any other source I've read.

pronounced bayner, heh

"If the guaranteed annual income had gone through, we would have eliminated poverty."

At best you would have changed the bar for poverty. Like it or not people are in poverty weather the poverty line is 20k annually or 100k annually. If you're at the bottom, you're at the bottom, the numerical value is really vary arbitrary.

For Windows as a guest on Xen you need a host that supports VT in the CPU. If your CPU supports it it'll be an option usually in the BIOS -- you can also check for the vmx flag in /proc/cpuinfo. With VirtualBox that's not the case, windows seems to work fine for standard tasks.

VirtualBox comes with a pretty interface that makes administration easy, xen does not. Although if you want a GUI for Xen there are options out there. Citrix makes one, also there's cloudmin which is really easy to use.

I downloaded this tonight for my droidx and my first impression is not good. In about and hour of use i had to force close twice, the phone was horribly slow while it was running, and pages looked terrible. Maybe the next release ill give it another go.

I used a somewhat customized version of nVentory http://sourceforge.net/projects/nventory/ to manage my data center. The nice thing about it is that you can build clients that connect, update and register themselves through a RESTful interface. It comes with a working linux client, other clients are pretty trivial to make using the linux client as an example.

You missed one on the list:

* "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone"

Not that I agree with what they did, but it's the Hotels right to refuse service.

I just left a company that fired 20% of our staff (many of whom I knew) and tried to strong arm the rest of us into long unpaid hours in compensation. Getting the job done and all that corporate hoo-rah. There are many people still there, putting up with the corporate bs. Not me. You're perfectly capable of saying no, leaving and getting another job. I take it from your post you've never stood up for yourself? Try it sometime. Provided you're not totally inept it really can improve your life.

What stops you from negotiating this on your own? If your skills are in demand, and you're well trained enough in your field you can negotiate anything within reason. I really don't understand people who are told to work for free and just do it no questions asked. You have a choice. There's nothing magical about a union, just they are more willing to say no... you're perfectly capable to do that on your own.

"I haven't either. Is there a good reason why we don't have one though?"

Because, no offense, I can negotiate my own pay and benefits better than you all can collectively for me.

For some professions, like teachers, police, etc, where everyone is doing the same exact job it might make sense to go union..... but you and me, although we are "IT", have two very different jobs and responsibilities. "On call" for you might be drastically different than for me. For better or worse a union is negotiating things very broadly and you can't just package "IT" with a bow and serve up the same one to everyone.

As an alternative, learn to negotiate, learn what questions to ask and what to ask for in return. Know what you're willing to accept, and don't be afraid to reject an offer. Ask for what you'll still be happy with 2 years from now. Try and avoid technically inept companies, and make sure expectations are set (i.e. this pager is for catastrophic network failure, not your home email account is broken).

It's $300 per VM. That $300 is paid each three years, and drops your price per hour in half. If you're running your instance 24/7 it ends up making a lot of sense to just reserve it.