I think quitting television makes more sense for me than to keep up with this. Too complex. Television programming has never been high enough in quality to justify this kind of effort and expense on my part.

I don't think it'll get that far. It feels like the car has veered off the road into stupid land. There was a time when progress meant moving from hubs to switches, buying products online instead of going to the big box store - these were things that made life better, right? I'm pretty sure any thinking person can agree that there's a difference between improving life by creating the commercially viable cellular phone and building a gaudy monstrosity of a social network whose only raison d'etre is to collect your information and sell it to marketers and god-knows-who. "Original Programming" feels like the continuation of a trend of finding ways to pull more money out of the average person's wallet to pay for stupid things. Count me out.

For the last couple of years, mobile and "cloud" were the new things. Both absurd from a certain point of view - mobile because what were people doing with it exactly? Facebook and Snapchat? And cloud, as a concept, is not new. Every few years, companies don't have a choice and need to move into new markets because they're getting yelled out by shareholders. Fine. "Original Programming" is the new thing now? Everyone wants to do this (Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, now Yahoo, probably Facebook next month), they want to have a set top box in the living room that can be used for everything, but the irony is laughable because you need to own practically every set top box on the market to get all of the content out there since no one company has everything.

So, "Original Programming" is going to be three times as expensive as cable and you'll be tracked and data mined.

Yeah, but they don't know what color pants your wearing.

I think that's how the DevOps role came about - it evolved from a need that required filling. I can imagine the weight of the workload that comes down on a dedicated programmer (as you've pointed out). A DevOps person can build what they need on a different schedule. I had weekdays and weekends to build my project exactly how I wanted it - an appliance that runs a wallboard that can be rebuilt from scratch in a little over an hour.

There are at least a couple of ways of looking at this. An oligarchy might be part of the natural evolution of an industrialized, technology-based society. Have you noticed that there's an abundance of indifference towards world events and politics in most first world nations? Maybe this is what happens when you have it good for too long - certain large swaths of society become content and stop caring. It's jarring whenever you hear people complain about corporations and politicians all day, but when you look into their overall behavior everything they do feeds the machine. They buy happy meals, use smartphones, stand in line for days to watch their movies, buy their music, drink their soda - the money you spend pays for the world you live in. You can't kick, scream and yell about privacy violations while you're updating your Facebook status, it doesn't work that way. And if you do any of these things, you shouldn't be complaining about an oligarchy - our society is a reflection of us.

If you don't like it, don't support it. You can be certain that every organization that makes something you buy has lobbyists that may be lobbying for things you don't approve of. Or maybe you do approve of what they're lobbying. Just don't complain because no one is listening.

"You do a disservice to everyone involved when you force your brightest people to take on additional roles."

I'm not sure that's accurate. Programming skills are pretty important today and most people, including myself, learn to code so that their current skill set (and market value) can be enhanced. It used to be that if you need an application, you'd have to buy one or hire a contractor to build one. So, this route has some problems associated with it besides cost. For example, if what you buy breaks, it's harder to fix without calling the company that made it. If you work in telecom and need a call center wallboard, you can either buy one or make one. I chose to write my own with Debian, PHP, and Apache. And it works just the way we like it, we have full documentation on how to rebuild it if needed, it's an inhouse solution that was built by "DevOps". There was a steep learning curve to develop the skill set to do this - it took a few months of hard work and learning. But it was totally worth it.

If anything, the existance of DevOps is totally natural and was born from necessity. If I were a full time programmer, would I be bothered by this trend? Maybe.

Kids were dropping out of high school to work in IT during the tech boom. Whether this is the right path depends on the person's abilities - some kids are total tech heads and a four year degree is excessive. They're still doing fine even today. It becomes a problem if they ever want to go into management, I think, but if they don't care for management, if four year degree may be optional. I, personally, would always recommend completing a bachelors program. If the argument is, "why should I bother since I'll graduate with this college debt that isn't necessary", believe it or not there are ways to complete a degree that don't involve taking on any debt at all. Live at home for four years until you finish your degree.

Ironically, I couldn't finish this post. I think this is what tl:dr was created for.

I will be following this with great interest. The closest device that compete with this, I think, is the ARM-based cubieboard/cubietruck. I have a cubieboard 2 with Debian for development that runs Apache, MySQL, DNS, DHCP, and a Mumble server from a SATA laptop hardrive - costs about 80 dollars without the hard drive and runs on 5V. For the Linux enthusiast, this class of device is about as good as it gets.

Facebook does allow users to "delete" their accounts. I'm sure ithey're not deleted out of backups and archives. However, the issue of a former user having a "ghost" of themselves on their systems isn't as valuable as you might think just because a snapshot of yourself obviously isn't a reflection of your current self (since we all change over time). The information is valuable if it's accurate/up-to-date. I can imagine a situation where a college user with Democratic leanings deletes their account and becomes Republican after graduation (common). That ghost profile is not worth much. If you don't like them, don't use anything Facebook owns. Very likely they're on the wrong side of history and we'll look back at a bizarre time when Americans were jumping up and down screaming about privacy while updating their Facebook profiles. Quitting Facebook is very easy, most people you know will just send you SMS messages or Apple iChat messages. It's more convenient anyhow. Personally, I don't get why anyone would still use Facebook, it's so noisy and gaudy - I find nothing intellectual about the experience.

I'm trying to be polite, but it sounds like you're really into educational programs. Way too into them. In this age we live in, I'm pretty sure that you were aware at the time you enrolled that studying philosophy doesn't translate into a job, it's not like you were attending Cambridge with Wittgenstein just before WWII. I think you've done enough programs, seriously you want to do an Associates than a Bachelors after working through a philosphy degree?

Data center operations are expensive when you factor in power, gear and staff. But I don't think cloud solves those problems particularly well and it actually adds some more. Cloud data sits on someone else's secondary storage, and if you don't understand the implications of this you are not thinking hard enough. I think the decision to use cloud varies on a case-by-case basis and that you just have to measure it for yourself. It might make sense for development, but maybe you don't want your code on someone else's systems, for whatever reason. I like to write code on my cubieboard, an SoC platform that runs on 5 volt - runs Debian, can mount a laptop hard drive on it, has a dual core proc on it. Runs great for its purpose. If I try to do the same thing on a cloud system (and I have), the cost rises dramatically. But you can't run a high traffic web site off of a cubieboard. There's a line where cloud begins to make more sense. Depends on what you're looking for. But it won't replace the data center.

iWatch, right? Seriously, tell me with a straight face that "iWatch" isn't the funniest thing ever? We're going to start wearing things on our wrists that track us all day from geolocation to personal preferences? Can we cut to the chase and get to to the iCollar already or is that too soon?

It's foolish to try and secure XP after its support ends. So much logic is thrown out the window with this idea. Try to remember that Windows XP was designed and released around the the time of the Tech Boom/Bust. A pretty different technical environment. That it's still being used is, in a way, a testament to Microsoft's dedication to it, but after twelve years - I mean, geeze, who runs the same OS for twelve years? Do you still play games on a Sega Dreamcast? Ok, that's a bad example, even I still play games on a Sega Dreamcast. But that's an entirely different era by tech standards. The larger problem you may be dealing with is that Microsoft can basically pull support when it likes and if your shop doesn't like it, you should focus on alternatives. If you're going to be a Microsoft Shop, you should adjust your upgrade budget and IT Shop's priorities appropriately, not try to keep using XP and O/S2 Warp and Windows Me because the change is too (understandably) painful.