A private cloud would be a single physical server on-premises, or uplinked to the clients office from a datacenter via MPLS circuit

The private/public distinction seems totally artificial then.

Does it really matter whether their internet service is residing in a VRF, with IP space routed to a VLAN on the virtualization cluster, or whether the end user has a site-to-site VPN solution, as if a VPN suddenly makes it public?

Is the distinction private/public not totally artificial?

Of course there should be a scalable cluster and a large storage array, as shared storage is required for high availability. If you don't have a cluster, then you have a single physical server... not a cloud, where things are distributed and protected.

I see no reason OpenStack, CloudStack, OpenNebula would be required.. right... those are essentially APIs to optionally enable developers to do a lot of fancy things. just create a user in vCenter for the admins in each organization, with read access and remote console/power/reboot to only their vApp, and a couple orchestrator workflows for setup/teardown, which is more than most need -- when most people are reliant on the technology provider support department to do all their planning and provisioning anyhow.

the U.S. branch of Apple probably has gigantic expenses that it owes to another branch of the company that operates in international waters (or the Cayman Islands, or Ireland) for the use of the trademark "Apple". It's a shame

If it's legal to do, then I suppose it is the rational approach, and we can't fault Apple for that.

However, one of two things. Either; a company operating in international waters should not be permitted by the USPTO to be assigned a trademark right, OR, there should be a 40% tariff for the licensing by a company (outside US borders) of a right to a US company, unless that overseas company reports US income in the amount of the total of "exported trademark revenues".

In other words.... the transfer of US dollars overseas to cover the expense associated with a "trademark", "patent", "copyright", "contract", or other intellectual property license, should have a duty assessed, slightly in excess of the income tax rate.

They'll eventually get fed up of being told their code is bad even though it is and will just leave it bad and ignore any warnings.

The developers who don't ignore them, and consistently improve their CQM or have good CQM get all the important development work.

Those who choose to ignore successful metrics ultimately get marginalized and eventually laid off.

So all government is evil?

1. No government is terrible.

2. A little limited government is good.

3. A little more government than a tiny limited government is extremely good

4. A little bit more government is a tiny bit better

5. A lot of government is really no better -- there are diminishing benefits at this point.

6. A big government is a bit worse than (4) -- too costly, too controlling, few advantages over (5).

7. A huge government is much worse than (3) -- massive cost, drain.

8. A massive tyrannical government is terrible -- worse than (1).

This bad publicity can cause the companies involved to suffer a punishment of a loss in revenue - the public are less likely to do business with companies they see as not paying their fare share of tax.

I'm not less likely to buy any Apple product because of this.

What seems unfair is the US government attempting to lay a claim to revenues that were generated by Apple's related entity in another country.

This is because the "income tax" itself is immoral. The only country that should fairly have any ability to be able to tax the revenues is the country that they were generated in.

The so called "social acceptability" is just an attempt at manipulating companies into fiscally irresponsible behavior to prop up the poor behavior of fiscally irresponsible governments.

If you are really concerned about latency then a private cloud would be the best solution.,

Ah, but you see... It's not about private clouds... it's not me alone that is concerned about latency... it would be my customers that would be considering using a cloud service for their internal servers, because there are no big datacenters nearby, but my datacenter is nearby...

The big cloud providers' datacenters are far-away net-wise, so I ought to be able to service some latency-sensitive workloads with good performance at a level of service that Linode/Rackspace could not possibly hope to provide... naturally, I would expect to be paid a premium for doing this, but if there is sufficien demand, it still ought to be reasonable for me to build..

And if Linode/Rackspace's nearest datacenters are so far from your geography, that the latency is too high for internal business apps?

Because a good design doesn't overcome bad code.

In theory, a good design ought to be provide some insight into how that design can be tested.

Often tests only look at 'correctness'; does the code yield the proper output given the right input.

Ideally there should be some code quality metrics included in testing, and also performance benchmarking including resource usage.

E.g. in addition to required input/required output; required satisfactory runtime characteristics and code quality metrics (CQM)

Anyways; it may be a challenge, if the code quality metric is good enough, it could be used to overcome bad code by flagging it for review and rewrite

$99,000 makes the developer a demi-god.

I'm not sure what kind of methods used to calculate this 99,000 number comes from anyways. Maybe stock grants for developers involved in startups? Or maybe it's a geographic thing.

I've been professional in this field for 6 years; I have a bachelor of science in CS, 8 programming languages, and I don't see nearly half of that.

Admittedly i'm the only developer in my organization, and I get hit with system engineering tasks and working with IT technicians as well, to provide them the help they need to understand what actions they need to be taking.

But I think the 99,000 number is a fiction.

Compensation probably varies from company to company... so where appreciation from stock option grants is considered in some companies 99,000 may be Demo-God status... in other companies 99,000 might be feh...

Companies are unlikely to pay programmers more than their CEO though; furthermore, pay decreases down the chain of managers, and the more managers there are above the developer.... probably, the more people there are that the programmers' definitely won't get paid more than.

Share value increases most when jobs are cut. Any idiot can cut salaries and jobs to get a quarterly bump in share price. The success of US corporations has more to do with corporate consolidation increasing pricing power than it does brilliant management.

Share value increases when jobs are cut, and the resulting decrease in costs is more than the resulting decrease in revenue and future revenue prospects.

The ultimate corporation(TM) is one that has sky-high revenue expected to be repeated and increase every year into the future and no employees or costs required to support this revenue.

Don't know what to tell you except to say that I don't view my manager as a "bastard", nor do I think those two statements of mine would be received identically.

That makes sense... it's not your manager's job to be "the bastard"; its to manage appropriately.

Now your manager's manager may order your manager to do something that is adverse to you; regardless of how nicely you have handled the situation with your manager.

Your manager might not be able to approve the raise, without in essence the counteroffer; your manager's manager when informed of this, may order that your manager start going about the process to replace their person who has done this.

Having accepted then changed his mind, he didn't realize what the other company had put into the process. They had spent hours screening candidates, performing phone interviews, calling people in for personal interview, etc. And then when they had offered him a job that he'd accepted, they had needed to call up the other candidates

If you're going to be seeking a counteroffer, don't lie and accept the offer, until you are finally able to commit to it.

You better inform the prospective employer of your actual intentions

Except there are ways to get around that. Ever known anyone who got a loan from parents/friends/ to start a business? Spin it as debt rather than equity.

If you could avoid it looking to the government like a fixed income security; maybe they could work out a mechanism involving an optional promise to return contributors money after giving out the reward, plus the imputed interest to compensate for cost of capital at the fair market value for consumer debt; conditioned on the project generating revenue or obtaining future funding; less the fixed cost of production.

In other words: a promise that you as an enabling contributor will recapture your contribution, before the project creator is allowed to generate revenue from the project and pocket profit.

It makes sense; but I think the liability to the contributor would have to be a liability from Kickstarter's to the contributor; instead of a liability of the project creator in order for it to possibly be legal.
Because I don't see every project creator going through the paperwork and expense to register individuall with the SEC.

Its not supposed to be you con people into giving you money, let them take the risk that you can't complete development (or that you're just a scam), and then profit as well.

Kickstarter doesn't fully transfer the risk. According to the terms of the site, if the project creator cannot deliver the rewards, they are liable to the contributors, to refund the amount of their contributions; otherwise, they could be sued by the contributors.

So the contributors have the risk if the project creator becomes insolvent, but they don't have the risk if the project creator has other resources, or is not insolvent but just fails to deliver

It would be interesting to have some statistics about Kickstarter projects that were funded but failed to deliver, regarding... what exactly the result was.

Did the contributors just accept their loss, with no legal issues; was the project creator insolvent (as in unable to pay their liabilities to the contributors); did they refund; or did a class action lawsuit result?

Except there are ways to get around that. Ever known anyone who got a loan from parents/friends/ to start a business? Spin it as debt rather than equity.

Are you familiar with the case of Prosper.com ?

On November 24, 2008, the SEC found Prosper.com to be in violation of the Securities Act of 1933. As a result of these findings, the SEC imposed a cease and desist order on Prosper.[11] Due primarily to the novel nature of the peer to peer lending models, the SEC, after review, now treats all peer to peer lending transactions as sales of securities and requires that all platforms must register with the SEC.