Sysadmins are worried about a lot more than how fast something is for development.

As a DevOps minded person who does code and understands hardware very well, Amazon and Rackspace are both a pile of garbage. They run on 4-year old Xeons that have been split 30 different ways. There are major IO contention issues. Snapshots take hours. SSDs cost thousands a month. They lock you into their service by using proprietary standards (e.g. RDS disables external replication). They come with little to no SLA.

Secondly, we've got privacy and security issues to worry about, regulations like HIPAA, PCI compliance, backups, redundancy, failover, documentation and continuity of business planning. We'll probably still be working for the company long after Amazon has gone out of business and the development team has been replaced or quit.

So, please, forgive your admin if he gets upset. A lot of us are in it for the long game and prefer not to shit all over our employer so they can continue to do business in the future.
 

If you're up for it, just run the calls through an Asterisk server running off a 800 number or PRI from a provider that actually gives you the real caller data.

At that point you'll have the real ANI instead of the CPN (caller ID). Grab that number, track down who owns it, then get a lawyer to serve them with a cease and desist.

If it were so easy to just automate extreme failures, websites like Google, Facebook, and Amazon would go down a lot less often. Unfortunately despite thousands of employees with extreme technical skill, there are still mistakes that bring them down from time-to-time. If we didn't have human SREs or System Administrators, things would be a lot worse. A computer doesn't have the analytics skill of a pilot and never will unless we end up with a singularity.

We don't have strong AI yet and pilots will never just "sit down with a programmer". Automation has to be tested thousands of times across thousands of scenarios in different aircraft and conditions for decades. Even then, there's always the chance that some snippet of code is waiting to kill a plane full of people because it got the wrong set of sensor inputs.

Personally, I'm confident the experts can be very wrong because if you look at history, it's happened time and time again. Computers and spreadsheets don't change that.

I'd say the science is pretty new. Things need time to settle down before we can sit back and take them for what they're worth.There simply hasn't been enough time for it to have established rigor and respect.

This doesn't mean I don't believe in AGW, but it also doesn't mean I blindly support the deindustrialization of the western world without, you know, a little more investigation.

More secure for the Bank that is. In the US we see so much fraud because merchants are negligent. I'm not sure if you've heard the horror stories, but in Europe banks will refuse to admit that fraud has occurred because they consider the system unhackable.

When someone uses a rigged terminal to capture your pin AND card data, you're up shit creek and the stuck picking up the pieces. The credit card company will not do a chargeback.

Doesn't this set dangerous precedent?

Plenty of organizations have dozens or hundreds of passwords. Is it really the employee's responsibility to remember each and every password and keep records of them indefinitely after employment? Should I be required by law to produce network diagrams?

Yes, this guy was a douchebag, but he shouldn't have to turn over anything.

Access control policy is the responsibility of the employer. If they fail to set policy or fire employees before it's too late, it's their own damn fault. This is just another example of mismanagement backed by a broken justice system.

The minute someone starts talking about energy sources in terms of "How many percent" of the Earth's surface they need to cover, I stop listening.
It's just number-crunching mental-masturbation to actually think that our energy problems can be distilled down in such a simple way.

If you live anywhere with actual seasons, and if you actually do crunch the numbers, you'll find that a rooftop solar array actually generates zip in the real world.
The 15% efficiency figure is pretty useless when the clouds are out and you've got 6 hour days with a low angle to the sun.

As you've just demonstrated, electrical capacity is a small fraction of our global energy requirements

If you drive a RAV4-EV powered by a nuclear generating plant, the whole "SUVs are bad" argument becomes pretty meaningless. When the petroleum runs out, we need a power source that can run all our vehicles, transportation infrastructure, agriculture, and more. Solar/wind/hydro just isn't going to cut it.

What's fascinating is that Apple was the last to go onboard according to the slide. Granted, I don't trust them but I wonder if Jobs was involved and in any way resisting that program.

We always like to think of Apple as the bad guys, but clearly they could've sold out much earlier. Apple also has a good history of security (FileVault), promoting good security practices, and not giving in to law enforcement (iMessage).

They all put backdoors into their products. That's the joke. If there's a backdoor for the government, there is a backdoor for hackers, and I'd never consider anything Cisco to be suitable for a production environment for that reason. Unless you can see the source, you have no idea who's inside your network.

More ISPs that care about privacy should look into deploying open-source networking equipment. We should practice peering with neighboring networks, use secure VoIP when possible & support open-source software. Spying is not a conspiracy anymore, it's a fact.

As someone working at a small, relatively new startup using a 'hip' stack, unfortunately, no.

Most new shops heavily tie into Github for code deployment, configuration management, and most importantly, Agile development practices that require continuously querying Github to test code (CI) plus frequent pulls and branching.Github being down basically means development grinds to a halt and startups' ability to run their own stack diminishes.

Like the Amazon outages, hopefully this serves to teach people that infrastructure isn't just something you can outsource to the 'cloud' and expect to work perfectly without doing your homework.

The reality is that Github is just a hosting provider and no different than any other hosting provider in the last 20+ years.

Why then is Apple capable of releasing polished products from the beginning?

Google yet again comes out with a neat concept but fails at delivery. They're obviously trying to get journalists to review it and generate the fake exclusivity hype. Unfortunately, as usual, the prototype doesn't deliver, makes compromises in quality, and looks absolutely goofy. It's hilarious they have the audacity to charge a ridiculous sum of money for a 640x360 screen shoved in some sunglasses.

I'm sorry, but great innovations are 1% ideas and 99% application. Google should STFU about concepts until they have something worth buying

Why not support long term studies on non-GMO food? I think it's possible that completely natural tomatoes cause cancer, but the studies just haven't been done because of the big-tomato industry. Just because we've been doing it for a thousand years doesn't somehow make it safe. Take tobacco for example. Tobacco is completely natural, yet contains carcinogens.

My proposal is that we ban ALL food until it's been conclusively been proven safe by a 40-100 year long study. There's no way we can let big corporations get away with this.

Do you know what's not sustainable? Hunter/Gatherer society.

Like it or not, we're humans, and that means we change our environment to suit ourselves. Genetically engineered food is just another step in a natural progression. Did our ancestors argue about the sustainability of eating cooking meat? We shouldn't be changing our lifestyles, we should be changing the planet so more people can enjoy the same standard of living we do in the first world.

Part of the reasons people starve is because the food isn't where people are starving. It's hard to grow food in some African climates/soil, and most agriculture is low yield and results in failure. Genetic engineering would solve all those problems by enabling more hardy crops that can grow in tougher regions. The technology could very well solve the problem of world hunger.

Viruses & cosmic rays naturally cross-contaminate or modify DNA. There is no natural order as to what nature is supposed to be, or what is supposed to cross breed. Plenty of natural foods will kill you or give you cancer. It's unfair to only cite cross-breeding when there are dozens of mechanisms where genetic manipulation naturally occurs. Without the FUD, gene modification could be feeding millions in 3rd world countries.

If this were a Pandora's box, it was opened billions of years ago.