I don't think that the "2am" listed in TFS is "getting up early". Instead, it's more like "staying up late".

For me, it's not really a problem, but I have had to do that kind of maintenance as a team, and some people are just useless if they stay up that long, or even got a short nap. My current job gives us all day one Saturday a month for maintenance, so you can sleep like normal and get up when appropriate (one hour worth of work, start at 2 in the afternoon if you want...7 hours of work, better start before noon). A lot fewer mistakes seem to be made with this sort of schedule.

How, exactly, do you snapshot and test the production VM before the maintenance window and guarantee you won't affect (and by "affect", I mean anything that changes behavior in any way that is not expected by the users) any services running on that VM?

If you meant "clone" instead of "snapshot", that doesn't help either, as the clone will have to have a different IP address, can't connect to the production database, etc.

We've had VMs that have become corrupt in very strange ways so that they would not reboot. The corruption didn't affect any running services, but existed for at least six weeks (we had to go back that far to get a backup that didn't have the issue). Testing a kernel patch that requires a reboot wouldn't have revealed this corruption, as the dev and staging servers didn't have the problem. Testing it on the production server would have revealed it, but we would have to do that during scheduled maintenance anyway....

When this happens, it usually takes a lot longer to fix than it takes to drive in to work, because the way it breaks is unexpected. The proper method is to have an identical server get upgraded with this automatic maintenance window method the day before while you're at work or at least hours before the primary system so that you can halt the automatic method remotely before it screws up the primary system. If the service isn't important enough, let your monitoring software wake you up if there's a failure or ignore it until you get in at your normal time. Most of the time, having a regularly well-rested sysadmin is more important to a company than having "light-switch monitoring server three" running between 4AM and 8AM.

Although I do feel this is the nature of the beast when working in a true IT position where businesses rely on their systems nearly 100% of the time, there are some smart ways to go about it. I'm not exactly sure what type of environment you're using, but if you use something like VMware's vSphere product, or Microsoft's Hyper-V, both allow for "live migrations". Why not virtualize all of your servers first of all, make a snapshot, perform the maintenance, and live migrate the VMs? You could do it right in the middle of the day and nobody would even know. This kind of setup takes a lot of planning however. I personally wouldn't want any maintenance performed on my servers without manual approval. Unattended maintenance sounds a bit too scary for my likes, and in my experience with even small security updates for both Linux and Windows servers, there's bound to be a point where something would fail and you could potentially get in a lot of legal trouble if you fail to meet you SLA, or cause a loss-of-profit due to downtime with a business.

Well, I for one welcome our new meme overlords, and would like to remind them that as a /. poster with excellent karma, I can be helpful in modding up posts for their spreading into new sugar-powered minds.

performance impact or benefit

When gaming, performance = Frames Per Second. It was neither positively nor negatively changed by using a discrete sound card.

I went across the street and told my elderly neighbours (both have since passed) who had survived the great depression and served in world war 2 that no, they had seen worse in the world, and it wasn't going to end, all they had to do was change the batteries in their smoke detectors and get a good nights sleep.

Well THERE'S the problem right there! Your neighbors were in charge of fixing the DMV's software!

The process commonly known as the scientific method is the product of philosophy, and science and the scientific method had nothing to do with the scientific method's birth.

Philosophy created science without science's help.

And also remember that anyone with a Ph.D. in a science field isn't a scientist. They're a doctor of philosophy. Without philosophy, science doesn't exist.

Why not? You'd think they'd be a nice place to cool off.

Writing zeros to every byte of a 32GB flash drive takes less than an hour, even with very slow flash (10 MB/sec write speed).

...which still doesn't allow two different Steam logins to play the same game at the same time unless it is in both their game libraries.

I'm surprised there are console games that allow you to buy one copy and play on more than one console at the same time, as tepples seems to imply in the GP post.

And, they also might have less tweaks for graphics so that in a few years when that $75 card can run the game at max settings, you still can't get any better quality with a $300 card (which matches today's $700 cards). All the $300 card will do is allow you to run at a higher overall resolution, which eventually will start to expose things like lower polygon counts, lack of anti-aliasing (even injected after the fact sometimes doesn't work), etc.

And if you want the wikipedia go article, you can just go to wikipedia. Other go articles are harder to find.