To me, this is just more evidence that they will be dropping OS X and moving to iOS for all devices over the next five years. If they were to introduce a new Xserve now, I suspect that the support date is past whatever EOL date they have in mind for OS X. What is essentially an appliance OS won't work for what are technically meant to be back end servers except for very limited applications. The people who buy the most Xserves (HPC, etc) do not fall into that category.

They likely don't have security personnel. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some "just get in the way" or "security can be added later" or "who cares" or any number of other statements made that clueless developers later on regret.

ON-TAP lacks a decent Kerberos stack. It is embarrassingly ancient in its support of encryption types, which makes it pretty much a non-starter for secure NFS.

Those jobs do exist. You just have to know where to find them. :)

Unless there is a mark that says "Item was bought", I'd argue that most players wouldn't know the difference between a bought or won item anyway.

This is one of the things that I think the Atlantica team really did well on. Because they have an "alternate Earth" as a background, they were allowed to present different cultures with different art styles.

The biggest problems we've seen from a monitoring perspective is that most systems really do have a hard time scaling to large levels and being usable. [A common trick (and one we employ) is to have a multi-tier monitoring system in place, where one monitoring stack monitors the monitoring stack that is actually watching the service/hosts.]

Once one gets past that hurdle, the tricky part is dealing with the "it is OK if X% of my machines are down". Most monitoring systems that I've dealt with are based around the view that they are monitoring a single host/single service and not a collection of hosts where it is OK if chunks disappear. For those types of problems, one still ends up writing a lot of custom smarts it seems.

I'm curious to know how you define a 'corporate farm'. I really hope you don't think that every Xxxx Farms, Inc. is magically part of ADM.

I see Hadoop Summit door prizes.

Who wants a turn-based RPG anymore? It's all about the flashy graphics and real-time combat.

That's why it is interesting watching to see how successful Atlantica Online is going to be (or already is?). A turn-based MMORPG sounds horrible, but they've really done a great job at game mechanics. The irony is that they likely had to do F2P because of the impressions that turn-based gives, but they are probably making money hands-over-fist with the micropayment structure they've setup. It isn't usual to hear of people who have spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on it.