The combination of globalization and remote working is changing the definition of the corporate culture. I've lived in Japan since 1991 and have clients not only all over Japan, but in Europe and North America. This has given rise to a shift in my cultural outlook from the perspective as a service provider. I think our cultural alliances are now more defined by where and with whom we hang out online. Rather than being more identified with nationality, I think we're more defined by the groups and activities with which we engage. I'm Canadian, but I've lived abroad so long that I have adopted various idiosyncrasies from other languages/cultures.

I can't say I feel very Canadian anymore. I do, however, feel very much in allegiance with software localization and server administration.

I even find cubicles to be a drag. During the 7 years I spent surrounded by 3 partitions, I spent the vast majority of the time in that chair wearing headphones to block out as much of the environment as possible.

That should be after clicking on/entering a link in the browser that takes you to a password reset prompt. There is no excuse to send a password over e-mail, encrypted or otherwise.

Really. Well. Stated! *wild applause*

There is a lot of angst here, but the reality is that putting a CMS online is not the end of the task, it's the beginning. If you want to have a public-facing web site, that means keeping it up to date so that providers have no qualms about upgrading. In many cases, the issue isn't the client, per se, but the requirements of the client site that slow down upgrading. As an example, Zend still hasn't managed to add PHP 5.5 support to their Guard product, so anybody who has clients using Zend in their sites will be stuck on 5.4.x till, well, whenever Zend gets a move on.

In any case, running a provider is a matter of pushing clients to keep up with server changes in a timely yet forgiving fashion. There's no reason that upgrading from PHP 5.4.35 to 5.4.36 should break ANYthing, so there's no excuse for a provider to not keep up with patch releases. Moving from 5.4 to 5.5, for example, will introduce potential incompatibilities, so providers need to give 30-60 days advanced notice to ensure client sites can be checked and upgraded as required. As long as plugins and CMS releases have been updated as they come along, the reality is that most upgrades are pretty painless. It's the big-jump scenario, 5.2-5.5 kind of upgrade that will be a nightmare. Those should never happen.

A good provider will retain legacy servers for those who still toddle along with FrontPage extensions and the like, but only till such time as the base services, e.g., Apache 2.2.x and PHP 5.4.x reach end of life. At that point, a provider needs to come to the realization that putting an entire server at risk at the behest of a few clients who are slow with the updates is bad business. PHP might have its downside, but keeping in tight lockstep with upgrades keeps things (usually/hopefully/OMG-I-pray) one step ahead of the kiddies and blackhats.

The mission was designed to last 90 days. Through the wonder of excellent engineering and fortuitous circumstances during the mission, it has lasted a decade. There is no reason to abandon the mission now while they're still managing to get good science out of the vehicle and its instruments. When such time comes that the cost is greater than the justification to extend the mission, it shall be retired as so many other missions have in the past.

The flash memory controller was created in-house. Back in 2004, Spirit had well-documented memory issues that were traced to file system logic that didn't properly clear deleted files during a reset. Eventually, storage systems were overrun, which forced NASA to basically reformat the storage system and start afresh after reprogramming the controller firmware.

My mid-2007 MacBook2,1 13" went back to Apple for repairs under APP no fewer than 5 times over the 3 years that it was covered. Amazingly, the thing has been completely reliable since APP expired in 2010. Go figure, but glad for that.

This is one of the reasons that I generally don't power off any of my equipment. Pretty much the only time I ever see hardware failures is when trying to bring a system back online from a complete shutdown. Sleeping a laptop still results in cooling, but not quite as much as a full power-down.

Yes, I'm fully cognizant of the nutjob whale lovers (tried it at my MiL's and nearly vomited) and the danger of fugu (tried it and managed not to die). The joke failed on the "if it takes effort" part. It would have been funny were there any effort being made to promote it; in the absence of any effort, there's also an absence of requisite irony.

LOL - Thankfully, fugu and jellyfish are seldom mistaken for one another. :)

I recognize the words as English, but the sentence itself certainly seems apropos of nothing whatsoever.

Kurage (jellyfish) have featured in the Japanese diet throughout history. There is no "effort" of which I'm aware, and I've been in Japan since 1991.

Two problems here.

(1) The article has nothing to do with Fukushima or TEPCO. It's about someone who sent anonymous death threats.

(2) Sherman and Mangano, the authors of the paper you linked to an article about, are kooks. Just google on their names together, and you'll find plenty of info discrediting their claims, e.g.: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/12/20/researchers-trumpet-another-flawed-fukushima-death-study/

(3) The Open Journal of Pediatrics appears to be one of the many open-access journals these days that have no standards for publication. See http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-exploding-world-of-pseudo-academia.html for more about these journals. I support the concept of open-access journals, but many of them are junk journals.

(4) Sherman and Mangano's junk science didn't get blocked by evil governments or evil corporations. They put it on the internet and nobody interfered with them.

In the 18th century, privacy was a pretty straightforward thing. That's why, in the 18th-century US, it was straightforward to write the 4th amendment. As a result, the government can't open my snail mail without a warrant, and can't come into my house and search it without a warrant.

The technological reality is very different in the 21st century. I support individuals' rights to use strong crypto and to control their own computer hardware and software. But it's undeniable that these rights carry collateral damage.

In 2012, the University of Pittsburgh was basically shut down for several months by a series of 145 bomb threats that were sent by email, anonymized via Mixmaster. This is not a good outcome.

If someone is using Tor to post death threats anonymously, that's not a good outcome.

Despite these bad outcomes, I still support the individual freedoms that let them happen. But that doesn't mean that it's not a real problem. It's very much like gun violence in the US. I support the 2nd amendement, but I recognize that that comes at a cost.