Why the hell would I want to tell an organization that is more focused on their actual business that they need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build up a datacenter over weeks / months worth of time when I can literally do it myself using Chef / Puppet and Amazon EC2 in a few days, and we're not on the hook for any hardware maintenance or replacement in the future?

The business gets to keep focus on the business without the overhead of running a whole datacenter including power, cooling, wiring, real estate, countless admins, service contracts for hardware and network gear, construction costs, built-in costs for future hardware replacement and scaling, etc. etc.

There's a reason why lots of people are following Amazon into this space. It's possible to do things right, and to do it cheaper. And you are far more agile in needs should you be successful by pairing their load balancing services with something like Chef or Puppet. Oh, and just do your offsite backup out of "the cloud" to a box at your office, and an off-site at a regional or whatever.

Yes, there's some risk associated with the "Amazon / Microsoft / RackSpace / Whoever fucked up", but it's far more likely they'll figure it out and get it back up and running far faster than if the same fuckup occurs within your private datacenter, because datacenter is their business while the company I'm working for cannot say the same.

The good news is that Apple isn't selling their A-series chip to anybody else, and the only people that will even know there is an "A9" branding issue will be the 0.1% of the market that actually pays any attention to what the SoC in their phone is named.

Google Maps still cannot locate my house, where every other map service has no problem. And this house has been in this neighborhood since 1978, so it's not like they haven't had a chance to figure it out, or that it's way out in the middle of nowhere.

It is Microsoft, so what works well in this version will stop working well in the next.

I'm still running 8.3.2 because all 9.x versions have had a nasty kernel panic bug in the 3Ware 9660 drivers that apparently I'm the only one experiencing. So I'll stick with it until I need to rebuild and import the ZFS pool. The hardware is a bit old anyway (and was super cheap when obtained off eBay), so it's probably almost time.

Yes, the same bug exists in FreeBSD - I tried that too.

Yeah, what a shithead for donating some of his resources to charity.

He gives more money than you'll see in your life in one day, and you're shitting on him because he didn't give more? Ingrate.

Someone want to tell me how this doesn't run foul of HIPAA?

I don't remember signing a release form...

I've not heard it used for a production release, but in QA-speak, a "code drop" is whenever a new build comes into the lab for it's shakedown from development.

I think I may have heard it used in this way in the hip hop circles, and it should remain there.

The FireGL brand took a HUGE step back when it was purchased by AMD / ATI. I remember when they were the best OpenGL performers you could buy...

And isn't the GPU doing WAY more work than it needs to, if it first renders everything at 4k and then scales it to some crap $120 1600x900 display?

No thanks, I'll take the framerate increase of rendering in the resolution I'm actually displaying.

I always see it the other way 'round - "Look how rubbish our drivers were!"

Of course, anyone but the absolute most stalwart AMD fan already knew their drivers were rubbish, so I guess this is an improvement.

We also had a government that *wanted* to go from first orbit to the moon in a decade. Not the case today.

Today we have a government that just wants NASA to not screw up.

They're all Constitutional rights. See: the Ninth Amendment.

Yeah, who cares that it is completely new hardware. We already did this under vaguely similar circumstances on Apollo 7, so clearly Orion doesn't require testing in high orbit to make sure that it was safe to stuff 4 people inside, and return without them being baked to a crisp from a radiation shield not being adequate, or the heat shield failing and causing the whole thing to turn into a rapidly expanding fireball.

Because it worked on a spacecraft that we're not operating anymore, therefore we never need to do it again!

They are making sure that their spacecraft actually works before putting people in it. Not that hard to suss out.