At the office, we've retrofitted a few conference tables with simple parts from Mockett . Pretty straightforward stuff - cut the proper holes, drop in the receptacles, and plug them in.

Store it all as plain text files (mbox format?), and write a quick script to send it all to an ElasticSearch index.

While I agree mostly with what you've said, keep in mind that, as a contractor, he's been asked to provide a different service, to train the new guy, and is being compensated as both parties deem appropriate. I completely agree that the submitter shouldn't work for free, but if he's amicable to this agreement (as he appears to be) then there's no reason he can't continue. He's made his objections about hiring a newbie to do it, but it's their code to do with as they please.

Don't forget zip bombs, like 42.zip. Over 4 PB compressed down to 42k.

What if the data I stored was a string of "0" characters and the transfer was gz'd? That would shrink it quite drastically.

For what it's worth, the 13" Retina MBP has roughly the same resolution and only the HD 4000.

You won't be playing any high-end, full 3D games, but it'll be just fine for Chromebook needs.

The online version includes a license of the offline software.

You don't have to trade the whole department. But instead of hiring 5 administrators with various levels of expertise, you can hire 2 or 3 and let the experts deal with their systems.

As for those other people? Of course they're not working for you. But they're working for their bosses who are working for your business. Believe it or not, there are companies out there whose sole purpose in life is not to screw you over. Trust is earned - let them earn yours.

He's not saying it will disappear, but that it's changing. IT jobs will continue to exist, but they'll be moving to service providers rather than being kept in-house.

And, frankly, this makes sense - if you pay provider X to host your mail server, you're paying them for both the hardware needs (which they can buy in bulk because they're bigger than you) and their expertise (as they're spending their days exclusively maintaining mail servers, while you may be building a webserver one day and fixing a printer the next, forcing your knowledge to be more general.

Webex's use of Java seems that it's only to launch the native client. I'm not sure why they go this route rather than using a URL handler (e.g. webex://[meetingnum]), but once it fires off the native client, it's no longer in use.

What's great about running Java on the server platform is that while most of these exploits allow properly crafted code to do something nasty, our goal as a service provider is to never let users run their own code on our servers in the first place.

Managing SSH keys for known service accounts is easy with configuration management tools like Puppet, Chef, or Salt.

Long lost friends wouldn't have to - they'd ask to be your friend first. Once they're your friend, you don't have to pay. This is for when you want to message people you actually aren't friends with.