1. Get used to the idea that your development and production environments are two distinct animals to be kept apart on purpose. Using one machine to develop and to host the production service is a recipe for disaster.

2. Stop using the cloud as a magical entity that holds everything that is online. You can go to many web hosts and pick up a decent IIS and SQL Server hosting plan for just a few bucks per month. If you build your solution so it can allow multiple server instances, you can always move it to the Azure Service or Amazon's cloud service.

3. "Hoped to attract" is not going to cut it. You need to have market research and a lot more before you can even talk numbers, otherwise you are down to a "cool idea that I hope catches on."

4. Offload your non-programming duties on somebody else. After many years programming, I have found that I was consistently miserable when my job description included responsibility for the infrastructure. It doesn't mean you stop learning about the infrastructure, it is just that you just concentrate on what you are building and somebody else is stuck keeping the servers alive.

The part of LinkedIn that creeps me out is whenever (strangers) people I have had zero professional contact with contact me out of the blue to add them to my network. Or friends that are out of my professional life context annoyed that I won't add them. I am a programmer, I don't mind adding other programmers, project managers I have worked with in the past, that kind of thing, but adding a cousin or a friend that work in unrelated fields is just stupid. It completely defeats the purpose of the site.

Not only that, but it is multi-platform. I have used both the OSX and Windows versions extensively and both are very nice. I doubt the Linux version is any different than these two.

It is a great app, the developer is very active (some say to a fault) and he doesn't blast you with donation begging screens every other click. It is also very simple to use, of the half-dozen Kindle users I know that also use Calibre none yet has complained about it.

Because it opens the possibilities of other "unexpected" hacks that people can't visualize simply by looking at the available ports for a given device (not just the one in the article). If you can plug that thing into the microSD port and make it talk to VGA with 10 resistors and a bit of software, it means you can probably use microSD as a connector on other devices knowing that the connector and board are not only dirt cheap but open.

I don't understand why this is modded funny, it is the correct plan of action assuming the move was voluntary. If this is a programmer that is trying to bail out of a sinking ship and this was the only job available at equivalent pay, then it is a completely different issue.

The biggest red flag is the "unlimited budget" that doesn't cover hiring a properly trained network admin, instead pushing him/her to learn the whole thing from scratch at the same pay.

Until I actually worked side-by-side with a few. Never in my life have I worked with anyone that (at least on paper) was a world authority in a very minuscule field of study, while at the same time showing close to no knowledge in pretty much everything else around them. It was depressing because I always assumed a PhD would be a really smart person that was an expert in that one particular thing, when in reality it felt like dealing with an idiot savant. Worse, all of this additional education resulted in no impact on their paychecks.

Out of the five we had on staff at one time or another, the two that I consider to be real experts in their fields couldn't be trusted to perform the most basic computing tasks, and the other three were pretty much stupid all around. I am talking "what do you mean I am not supposed to put my critical files in the recycle bin?" kind of people. How the hell can somebody under 40 in this country become a PhD in a computationally intensive biological research field without learning how to use a computer?

I don't get it. I would rather have a tester crash the app than an end user. With the tester I hopefully stand a chance of getting some useful information to track down the bug. With the end user it is a crap shoot.

All it takes is two Netflix streaming users in one household. Right before the cap started Comcast opened a reporting page to show us our average usage for the previous three months. I had hit the cap on all three months, even if for month three I cut down my torrent usage down to zero. That means we hit our cap just watching streamed video. I ditched Comcast (22/8, not that it ever performed at that level) for FIOS (25/25 for $5 per month, always performs beautifully) and never looked back.

They won't even borrow them at their local library for free.

I have a wall 6 bookcases wide, 6 shelves each, crammed with books. Once we got the first two Kindles we realized that in just a few months we had replaced the contents of one full bookcase. Out of the 6 full bookcases, less than one full bookcase can be considered must-keep books, either because they are unique, they have maybe a dedication, etc. The other 5 bookcases are hundreds of pounds worth of novels with a paper value of close to zero, and they take space, and they need to be kept clean, and they need to be protected against insects, humidity, etc.

And to answer your question on why spend so much money buying and re-buying gadgets? Because I can. I am willing to spend money to gain convenience. I really like not having to chase down for books anymore. All my favorite authors are selling on the Amazon Kindle market, and 99% of the time their prices are reasonable. Usually when somebody gets greedy and overcharges there's a gaggle of people on Amazon that will immediately start complaining and making noise until the prices are lowered.

Is this for everyone? Of course not. But if you are addicted to reading general fiction and you don't care about reselling your old books, a Kindle wifi is practical and very cost effective. The $114 (or what the hell, the $139 I paid for mine) is less than the cost of books and the bookshelves to hold them for even one year of my kind of reading.

When the original Kindle came out, people complained it was horribly expensive. Whenever Amazon released a new model and/or chopped the MSRP, people complained it was horribly expensive. When it went under $200 people bitched that there was no reason for it to sell for more than $150. When the Wifi model came out for $139 people complained that there was no reason for it to cost more than $100. Now the Wifi can be purchased for $114 and people are going to come up with any excuse to complain about the price, ads or both.

I am 100% convinced that even if Amazon gives it away just for the cost of shipping (free if you are on Prime), people will still bitch and moan about the stupid ads.

I have owned two Kindles (awesome, cludgy), two Kindle 2s (awesome, period) and currently two Kindle 3 Wifi (awesome, keyboard sucks). All of our previous Kindle devices were sold to friends for a reasonable price, and all of them are (that I know) still up and running today, and each and everyone loves them.

Both my wife and myself adore this device, for people like us that read a book or more per week these devices are extremely practical. The Wifi model uses so little power that it freaks me out whenever I realize that I actually need to charge it.

With Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) you can deal with the book problem the same way you would use iTunes to catalog music and video. It is available for Windows, Linux and OSX. I have personally used it for both OSX and Windows for a few years and it has never let me down.

The video problem is much harder because the tagging is nowhere as mature as what we have available for music. What really drives me nuts about this is that there is no consistent way to apply parental ratings to content in a way that it is recognized by OSX and Windows. This keeps me from sharing my videos across the home network since there is no way I can easily block certain videos from my son's Xbox and his iMac. I would have to manually set play lists, which is a lot more work, it would be nice if I could tag content as PG-13 or above and let the Xbox use its built-in content ratings mechanism.

Same as Unicorns to Leprechauns.

What carrier? I have installed at least 3 so far with no issues, this is a Samsung Intercept (2.1) with Virgin Mobile USA.

The problem with Mass Effect 2 is the stupid crew achievement and the way you easily confuse having the full crew AND having the full crew trust you, which is how you can even access the decisions that will let the full crew survive. When you spend a few dozen hours playing a game and you think you just nailed the ending, only to find out that you lost a couple of your crew members because of some obscure choices you made 15-20 hours ago, it can be frustrating. A lot of my frustration with this game came from just that lousy achievement, I was willing to live with the ending because I had not met all of the crew criteria.

Fallout New Vegas at least tries to warn you. There are two major missions that only come up to hint at you that if you head towards a certain direction you will antagonize a specific faction (there is one for NCR, one for the Legion). Some people may not be able to tell that what they are doing may indirectly annoy one of the big factions, so these two missions sort of help them notice. Mass Effect 2 is a lot more subtle than this, and the ending comes as a complete surprise.