IANAL, but I'm married to an employment attorney. People with kids are not a protected class, so no. Race, religion, gender and sexual orientation are protected classes. If someone does not like unmarried dbags, there is no legal protection.

FWIW: Ford cared a great deal about his employees. He didn't just want them to work 40 hours a week. He wanted them to have balanced lives, nice homes and happy families. Had incentivized the whole bit of it too and even sent inspectors to make sure it was working in peoples' homes. He was not just a slave driver. Frankly, he was fairly in line with TFA.

Precisely. I went from working heroic hours to 9-5 once we really were Agile. Most of those long hours in the past could be traced back to poor planning and management acquiescing to last minute customer requirement changes. Once you accept that you were doing Waterfall wrong and want to fix it, life can be much better.

Ever heard of Coconut Grove?

I was there, 200m from the bombs. Phone never had issues sending texts, but could not us Google Voice or regular calling to place a call out. Never had an issue with data/text however, which was useful as I texted folks asking "WTF was that?" Local hardwired wifi never skipped a beat, but sites like Boston.com and Letsrun.com tanked almost instantly.

During the Cold War there was a telco exchange in Northern Virginia (I forget the number) that if you dialed through would give your call Federal precedence. It was used by Congress/Senate and high up Federal employees. In the case of a national emergency, those calls would be routed first and others dropped to make way for them. This idea is nothing new. I'm sure something similar exists today with 911 or similar.

Poor planning, plain and simple.

I work for a major financial institution on the street. Various facilities were swamped, and we never missed a beat. What, were we just "lucky?" I don't think so.

Starting a week ago we had disaster crisis centers setup.
* Every few hours all East coast facilities reported in any issues
* Inspection and testing of all critical systems ahead of time
* Stockpiles of supplies on hand
* Prefail over to DR where possible
* All hands on deck to respond


Sadly, if you want to be prepared, you can be. If tons of money is on the line, then the price of being prepared is well worth it. We test our systems continuously year round. We have disaster recovery drills at all facilities multiple times a year. Departments' rating depend on how well prepared they are for things like this.

And don't throw that "1888," "worth storm ever" crap around. This is Wall Street. Manhattan. Terrorists have tried to blow it off the map multiple times. Several hurricanes have hit this spit of land that sits a mere few feet above sea level in the last decades. A hurricane hit and flooded parts last year even! If you did not prepare for this including flooding and sealed underground tanks and sandbag walls, it was your own fault.

Just use the CIA's policy: if you must really keep something secret, don't do it on a computer.

I don't mean to offend, but I think we need to make some differentiation between the levels of "IT." To the lay person IT might mean someone that works with computers. However, as the TFA points out, there are many levels of IT from the person that installs desktops and support desk, to the application developers, to the datacenter operations technicians, to the CIO. The compensation varies wildly for these roles as does the level of education and demand. Personally, I'm an app dev at for a financial institution that has specialized in some Java technologies over the last several years. Our devs make well more than TFA figures and where we are located (RTP in Raleigh,NC) IT unemployment is 3%. It is very difficult to even find skilled devs before someone else hires them. What's more, our devs are flocking to SF in droves too for even higher pay. So yes, specialize and learn more. Become a Java/Compiler/OO/UML guru. Then you'll certainly be able to earn more. And, if you want better pay, go somewhere where you'll be in demand like SF, DC, RPT, etc.

I knew something was up in Raleigh. I think I was online for every one of those outages. Too bad we don't get an SLA with TWC?

Looks like their VA datacenter is down to two 9's for this year. Whatever happened to A+B power? You have two rails in your rack. Rail A goes to powergrid A, rail B goes to powergrid B. Then again, if, as you point out, your millions of dollars of switching gear does not work, does it matter how many redundant systems you have?

Good point. Also don't forget that even if you colo'd in a major VA datacenter, and the center lost power, you'd still be just as screwed, cloud or no cloud.

And don't forget, this is the second time in two weeks this happened at this data center. Bezos is going to have some heads on Monday. Funny though, Google learned this less long ago. Forget the $10M of UPC's. Strap an emergency exit light lead acid cell to each server/switch (DC->DC, nice). If you loose power, server is good for 10-20min while the building cuts over. Otherwise 1s or 10min outage does not matter. You're still performing a cold startup on a massive system. Good luck with that. Oh yeah, and they're still not out of the woods yet. http://status.aws.amazon.com/rss/ec2-us-east-1.rss

Sounds like you're doing it wrong. Try GWT. I've done many other RIA frameworks (ASP.NET, C#.NET, WP, JQuery, Prototype, CakePHP, ExtJs), but GWT is just perfect. You get every possible optimization to your application and you just program in delightfully typesafe Java. Plus, who cares about AJAX calls and handlers? GWT just autowires that for you. To really take advantage of the modern browser, you need a modern approach like GWT.