Fukushima is a testament to the sad reality that people who couldn't find their own asses if they had blinking neon signs pointing at them still get to make decisions about the safety measures for industrial installations.

That makes sense. Still, though, "just lump everything together" is not neccessarily a good idea, especially if the responsibilities aren't well defined and it isn't understood that someone in a hybrid role isn't equivalent to two specialists.

"The dev guys are tech savvy so they will be able to keep our infrastructure running with no impact on their workload and development efficiency" simply doesn't work, no matter how much certain people would like it if it did. Another related mistake is "we outsourced part of our infrastructure to another company, thus we will never have to spend significant time caring for it", which falls flat on its face once the outsourced infrastructure starts misbehaving or interacting with business requirements in a nontrivial way.

Holy crap, that's nasty. My experience is vastly different.

On my high school equivalent we had a bully in our class. When the teacher realized he didn't get a grip on the situation on his own we got a surprise visit from the principal who chewed out the bully in front of the class, gave him a somewhat humiliating (but not actually insulting) punishment next recess and promised he'd be back if the bully didn't straighten up. The bully did.

In this case the school was more concerned about its stellar reputation being sullied by bullies running around unchecked. Then again the school has a thousand-year history and used to be a high-class school for much of it so it might not be very representative...

The configuration "Developers - DevOps - Operations" makes sense. Unfortunately, a lot of companies just remove everything but DevOps from the picture because having dedicated developers and admins around would just be redundant.

I'm in such a company and its a hellhole - you can get emergency calls at any time of day because you're responsible for the infrastructure but that's not reflected in your pay because hey, you're just a developer. Also, keeping the infrastructure running flawlessly is not supposed to take any time away from coding; you're expected to fix any problems that arise and still get eight hours' worth of quality code done. Ater all, developers in other companies have no trouble doing so. Also, since support personnel is also redundant (because hey, the DevOps guys already know how the system works) keeping the customers happy is also the developers' job, again without compromising efficiency in your other responsibilities.

Of course the company is not doing well and of course the boss has no idea why. It can't be his management style; that approach worked well when he ran a similar company in a related market ten years ago with no existing customer base so obviously it would work now, too...

Careful. You came dangerously close to criticizing Wikipedia there. If you had then as per Section 34 (1), WikiG I would have been legally required to threaten to curbstone you. For your convenience I have appended a translation of the relevant article to this post.


Section 34 Defense of Wikipedia's Honor
(1) If any German citizen becomes aware that Wikipedia is
1. criticized;
2. ridiculed;
3. slighted;
4. compared to Hitler or
5. mentioned by or in the same sentence as an Axel Springer AG publication
then the citizen is to threaten the originator of said remark with a curbstoning within no more than twenty-four hours of becoming aware of the remark unless such a threat has already been issued within that time.
(2) It is up to the threatening citizen to decide the time and place of the curbstoning, should they decide that one is neccessary.
(3) Any citizen who fails to adhere to subsection (1) shall be punished with reading no more than five threads in 4chan's /b/ board or a fine.

So what you're saying is that Ubisoft titles should retail for fifty bucks while multiplayer-capable Ubisoft titles should go for five bucks. Gotcha.

Easy. You add some double heat sinks. If those take up too much space try to make the reactor stronger so you can put some in there.

Sure, it gets a tad more complicated if you want to build a brawler with triple-strength muscles or a high-output laser boat but if you keep track of your loadout's heat generation and maybe err on the side of cooling your 'mech should work beautifully even during heated engagements. (Pun intended.)

Well, until you run into someone packing flamethrowers, of course. Or plasma rifles.


I can't be the only one who read TFS and immediately thought "myomer".

I fail to see the big evil here. CSS Regions is just an editor's draft at this point and while browsers often go and implement drafts (in order to see if they work as intended) they're not standards and not an official part of CSS at this point. Regions is interesting for browser makers and people who like to test the bleeding edge and pretty much for nobody else right now. In fact, Blink doesn't even support it if the user doesn't enable it in the advanced settings.

The Blink team is breaking nothing here. If your website uses CSS Regions today then you were already aware of the fact that the standard (and browser support) can radically change at any time, leaving your design broken for many visitors. (Well, or you just used anything WebKit has a prefix for, assuming that everyone in the world uses your browser configured like you do and that draft specs never change. In that case, please stop making websites.)

One could argue that Google's actions are extreme - they're not just removing Regions support but are actually reverting their entire text column handling to an earlier version of the corresponding specs. That may become a problem as Blink might render regular non-Region content differently from all other browsers. Not supporting CSS Regions, however, is not a problem at all.

There is a simlar product on the market: BP-5. It's intended as short-term emergency food and pretty much does what Soylent does minus some calories and fine-tuning. Actually, Soylent might have a chance of competing with BP-5 if it can boast a similar shelf life but superior nutritional value.

If you want to buy BP-5 and can't buy it there's a similar product (virtually identical except in taste and packaging according to the German Wikipedia) called NRG-5 which might be easier to obtain.

If you want absurdly long nouns, German legalese is your friend. German lawmakers [i]love[/i] to take reasonable names (e.g. "Gesetz über die Illustration langer Namen"; "law for the illustration of long names") and just cram everything into a single noun ("Langnamensillustrationsgesetz"). Then they abbreviate it because nobody is going to write the long name (e.g. "LNIlluG").

Thanks to this, from 2003 to 2007 Germany had an actual law with a name a whopping 67 characters long. That name was "Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung" ("estate commerce approval jurisdiction assignment act").

(I wonder if Slashcode will butcher that name...)