OP starts with: "I am the sole sysadmin for nearly 50 servers (win/linux) across several contracts. ..."

This implies that he's paid hourly. Contracts implies that he's a consultant. If there's anything that a consultant craves, it's billable hours...

Your points are valid, in a sense. But do you really think that people are going to stop trusting Open Source technologies? What isn't part of the conversation is just how terribly horrible OpenSSL actually is. It's a readability nightmare. The patch makes my eyes bleed, makes me weep gently to myself as I rock myself in an attempt to succor the horrific nightmare that code of this quality is what drives most Internet "security".

I so sorely wish more consideration was given towards NACL as a replacement for OpenSSL. It's clean, elegant, readable. Bugs will be shallower because readers might have *some idea* what is going on. And with an LGPL license, it should be quite embeddable.

IMHO, OpenSSL should be toss summarily as soon as possible. Beneath its horrific API and code lurk untold numbers of nascent, undiscovered holes no doubt already being exploited by our good friends at the NSA.

Writing security code is *hard*, folks. Making it hard to read only makes it impossible to debug...

Deveops types aren't the kind of people to be crawling around under desks or helping directly to push for a release milestone.

They're the go-betweeners, sort of a cross between senior sysadmin and development project management assistant. They are the internal toolsmiths, depending on the blacksmiths to produce effective metal so they can hone the tools for the carpenters' needs. They are broadly skilled and know how to at least muddle along in both a developer and a sysadmin job, but prefer the big picture of orchestration. They're the ones who figure out where the shortcomings are, and are broadly skilled enough to jump in and provide possible avenues and solutions, seeing where one side can't fix a problem, and the other may have a solution.

Exactly.

This "there is no role for devops in a mature company" attitude cries back to the age of isolated business units with isolated departmental goals, often where sales sells products that don't exist and engineering produces products nobody wants. The money to run the company will come from somewhere!

In short, developers don't want to dogfood, because that's hard. It's much easier to not challenge yourself with divergent ideas from what you and your brainfund coworkers cook up: after all, developers made it, so it must be good.

And yes, devops is an integral part of dogfooding. It makes sure the left hand is talking to the right, Support is able to effectively move issues laterally, operations can effectively provision IT infrastructure budgets, and Engineering can focus on the real issues that impact the product. It's called teamwork. If you can't get this part done right - at the very least, making sure your product works in an operational capacity internally - how can you expect it to be a commercially viable option out of house?

It would make sense, if it wasn't for the fact that Comcast operates as a government-sponsored monopoly.

They get away with this crap because their potential customers are prohibited from operating: there is no free market. In a free market, you'd probably have full gigabit fibre to the home as an option in most metropolitan areas at this point. As it is, ISPs rarely can even gain the rights to offer service in areas due to exclusive deals Comcast has brokered by greasing the palms of local officials.

Capitalist incentives, if they were in play, would lead to a mass exodus from Comcast. There's really nothing 'capitalist' about how Comcast operates, except that they use money.

^^^ This. I bought an officially branded Comcast MODEM on ebay for $21 after shipping. It paid for itself in just 3 months, and hasn't given me a lick of trouble in YEARS.

Well, that is certainly possible if that's important to you. .

You also could have clicked the link I provided,l and perhaps typed the word "ethernet"... There are lots of models covering many different use cases. My unit works great over wifi, which is great since I have no Ethernet in my bedroom...

Google TV isn't a failure, it's just not the only success.

I have a Google TV stick and I love it! It is just a tablet that uses my TV as its screen and a wireless keyboard as its input. It is about the size of a thumb drive. It cost $40 on Amazon (.search for mk808b to get the exact model I'm watching Hulu+ on as I write this)

See my post history for details: this is quite successful. I have no idea what Google would want to improve...

Play store: no problem. How else do you think I installed Netflix, CBS.com, Hulu, uTorrent, and all the other apps?

Seriously, just imagine a tablet running on your TV using a mouse/remote instead of a touch screen. That's what I use every day. (And what is currently playing Sherlock Holmes a la Hulu; my wife loves that show)

I have a "Google TV" and I love it! Also called a "TV Stick" they are best sellers on Amazon with many models to choose from starting at around $25. I bought an MK808B for my bedroom TV and it's hard not to love.

1) It cost $40.

2) It uses my already existing TV

3) It streams Hulu, Netflix, CBS, NBC, and any other TV network that bothers with an Android app over wifi.

4) It uses about 2.5 watts of power.

5) It's not much bigger than a thumb stick.

6) It works seamlessly with an "air mouse" wireless remote.

7) It plays MP4 videos fluidly and runs uTorrent without issue.

8) It has room for two USB devices and an SD card.

9) Effortless support for 1080p resolution.

What more do you want from set top box that actually hides behind the TV?

Seriously: a major airplane "disappears" despite evidence that it wasn't really crashed. Everybody's wondering who dunnit and how, and whether or not it will become another impromptu bomb.

There's a *lot* you can carry on a 777. $50 mil is a lot, but the amount of damage such a plane could do with a little direction makes $50 mil look like peanuts. And it's pretty clear that anybody with the skills to make it disappear as completely as it did is capable of more than just a little direction.

You know, it could be that Tesla enlists the help of elite hackers who have compromised other high-flying products to harden their systems before somebody gets killed?

The problem here is that the product has no specific point to it - it exists *solely to produce vendor lock in*. Since it's little more than a re-badged Android TV stick there's really nothing special at all about it. This, in a market space that's saturated with me-too also-rans.

It's not that Amazon's offering is horrible, it's that it's not notable in a field littered with the corpses of other not-notable failed products.

BTW: Very few "normal" people are actually aware of hypermiling. Techies/nerds more so.

You can pretty significantly improve your fuel economy by using a "hybrid" approach, which I do to raise the average fuel economy of my car by about 20%, which is significant. This, by the way, includes enough "pedal to the medal" incidents that I do get to enjoy the 200 HP engine in my beautiful convertible!

Simple things, like trailing cars going through timed lights, letting off the gas a mile or so before your turn off so you bleed speed from 65 to 50 or so before exiting and watching a half mile ahead for red lights can improve fuel economy significantly without pissing people off. If you were in the car while I drove, it's likely you wouldn't notice unless I said something.

Bezos isn't crazy? How much do you want to bet on that?

The Drones idea has more holes in it than an R/O water filter....