In the course of developing a large, scalable, social networking application, one aspect of this is 'Stress Testing', in which, common sense dictates that you need to set-up a staging environment with fake users, and scripts (aka: bots) that act as users interacting with the system.

The fact that they used this practice in production to get attention or mislead and entice real people to use their system, is not that surprising, or un-common. The real news here is that the majority of reddit users are, and have always been, complete morons.

I work in a Software Engineering department for a major company (>3k staff), with over 150 Linux desktop users, and a team of only 3 linux desktop admins.

These guys have things down to a science here, and are far less authoritarian than the Windows Desktop IT team, who won't even let us change our screen saver settings without forcing us to open a ticket, which all stems from security issues and lame IT policies.

Everyone here is an educated and skilled engineer, and is expected to know how to *at least* perform normal day-to-day operations using a linux desktop. The defacto here is Fedora Linux, for many obvious reasons.

All of our engineers have the freedom of sudo to install/configure their system accordingly, within the realm of support. If they decide that they are better-off administrating their machine on their own, then they have free reign to change the root password, and the linux desktop staff no longer has to support their needs. They are then on their own and considered skilled enough to support themselves.

Our Windows Desktop infrastructure is an entirely different story. There is an entire team of ITSEC engineers who are constantly watching the network traffic, and often remotely snooping on users desktops.

Linux is here for those who are educated, skilled, or curious enough to figure it out and use it to their heart's content. Linux is not here to replace Windows or Mac as a desktop, unless you yourself (as I) have chosen to do so.

It's ironic that MS pays Gartner and PC World and all these other 'sponsored' media outlets to spread PR/FUD against Linux-based systems. They'd be better off fixing the bugs in Windows, with those funds, rather than misleading the short-sighted Managerial types who continue to make bias decisions and ruin companies thanks to these lame efforts to secure a market share.

Let's face it, this is nothing more than a lame argument to secure the idea of a new, much more oppressive distribution and consumption model, and has nothing to do w/ losing money, and everything to do w/ losing customers.

If the game that you developed *sucks*, and people only buy a used copy, and/or the majority of people resell their $60 copy for $10-$15, who is really losing money here? *The consumer!*

You can't blame the consumer for your game sucking, and you can't blame the consumer for not wanting to spend $60 on a new copy, if they know the majority of people think it sucks.

There are, of course, the cheapskates who would far rather spend their money on a used copy 3 months after the release. News flash: They aren't going to submit to being forced into buying $60 games due to DRM. These are the types who will instead ditch their console and just download cracked PC versions. Either way, you'd never see their money to begin with.

It is my opinion that the public education system is, and has always been, pretty much a joke, and this really won't solve that problem, but will at least allow the poor students who are subjected to teacher's who themselves are stuck in 20th century workforce mentality, in the 21st century, and ultimately preparing students for jobs that no longer exist in this country.

The struggle to maintain validity and their own job security has been trumping the capabilities of students for at least the last 2 decades, and this is only going to become more of a reality in the next 10-20 years, as quite a few University-level courses are slowly replaced by courseware. Sure, Doctors and perhaps, Lawyers may still need to attend class, but do english majors really need to sit in a class? Sure, there will always be an argument in favor of interaction with awesome teachers, but this is no reason to *not* embrace evolving methods of learning, not to mention, teaching.

As someone who was constantly ridiculed, demotivated-by, or simply insulted-by comments from teachers growing-up, who eventually dropped-out of HS, and now enjoy a far more stable and well-paying career than said teachers, I welcome this initiative, and hope teachers will wake-up to the realities of the 21st century markets, and workforce requirements. Not that everyone else should follow my footsteps, but the fact is, you can succeed fine in this world, given enough self-discipline, continuous learning, and determination. In that regard, this country still offers more than any other country, and should be noted accordingly.

err, I meant 'nothing but netflix'...

I boycotted cable after my apartment burned down last year. After about 6 months of nothing but youtube and crappy low quality internet streams, I finally caved and got DirecTV. I still hate paying for the service, but it is really nice having the option of not having to 'digg through the crates' in order to find something to watch, when I feel like being spoonfed by the programming networks.

The fact that I had bought a 1080p LED samsung TV, and was subjecting it to nothing but netflix via netbook or xbox, sure was visible once I plugged-in my DTV box and got actual HD video. HUGE difference, I don't care what any stream-only advocate says. The bandwidth and programming simply isn't there just yet.

This is the decade of death for the big broadcast networks and providers though, I can safely say (as I said in 1998 about the record industry).

My point is that media distribution models can co-exist and offer a much better "I'm in control" experience for the user, rather than being subjected to one or the other, or being constantly spoonfed, if you can afford it.

"In Soviet Korea..." anyone?

Did anyone notice that there was not one reference point to any of the claims or stories mentioned in the article? or were you too busy reacting in a rage of fury by posting some 'Orwellian police state' comparison? 1000+ comments so far? I guess the social engineering aspect of the article worked, and even duped the slashdot crowd. Not surprising, these days, especially coming from a gawker site. What a loathsome bunch of mudslingers.

I had been one of those mislead skeptics and paranoid anti-radiation-braintumor cellphone conspiracy theorists until I actually worked around some radiology detection systems and began randomly testing things, like cell phones.

I never got to test an iphone, which is what I have now, but my old Samsung A90 from sprint, never set off any of the detection systems, unless I had just walked-in from the outside during day time, which was due to residual radiation from just walking outside. So I quickly realized that just walking around outside in the sun, exposed me to far more radiation than my cellphone alone ever would.

It was most interesting, though, when my old CTO went in for a CT scan and was tripping-off the radiation detectors for 3 days straight thereafter.

hmmm... cause or effect?

I seem to have bad luck with the one I named Alderaan, though. It seems to either disappear or blow up randomly when I plug my laptop (deathstar) on to the network. I don't get it either.

There are many reasons to chose to create your own framework, just as there are many reasons why you may choose not to.

Personally, I avoid mainstream OSS frameworks because of the security implications involved. Not that writing your own framework will reduce security implications (technically), but if you look at wordpress or joomla, both of which had a number of security exploits that targeted and penetrated millions of web sites that were using them, begs the question: would you want to be another one of those 'stunned' victims?

There are 'robots' crawling the web specifically programmed to root-out targeted exploits within specific OSS web apps, such as wordpress and joomla. The chances of someone writing a bot to exploit your (1 and only) framework, that nobody else uses, is a LOT less likely, albeit still possible.

There are also code-control issues to consider. As someone who has written PHP for years, and had to work with other people's code as well, I find it far less aggravating to work with my own code base, especially considering it takes about as long to adapt to someone else's code, as it does to simply write your own.

Originality is another big issue as well. If I have to look at one more mucked-up wordpress, drupal, or joomla site again, I think I'll stop browsing the internet entirely. Blogs have ruined the Web Application Ecosystem, imho. /digress