or "facebook won't let you liberate your facebook data to alternate providers".

i don't understand why people tolerate facebook. they don't seem deserving of the trust people give them. first opt-in/opt-out privacy issues, now this... plus it doesn't seem like they're really trying to make money yet. i suppose this is what the initial "exclusivity" of the facebook brand got them: loyalty without needing trust.

Did you know that they had full dose radiation-driven "shoe fitting" devices in over 10,000 shoe stores up until 1970?

They were eventually pulled when reports of burns and stunting of bone and cartilage began to emerge.

It's the little vignettes of history like this that remind me how many grand-experiments there are out there using us all as the unwitting test subjects.

Is the Pilot Union’s boycott a kneejerk reaction to the measured warning about potential radiation damage?

Maybe.

But never underestimate how quickly politicos helping to equip our airports with $100 - 200k a pop units will happily ask for forgiveness, not permission.

Citation for shoe stores - http://www.hemonctoday.com/article.aspx?rid=28218

The fact that the US military response was 'nope, wasn't us' instead of 'oh my fucking god can you believe somebody just fired a missile off the coast of LA!' pretty much tells me it was them.

I moved all my services from EC2 to Rackspace Cloud about 2 years ago, but I'm regretting it.

Rackspace Cloud does one thing well - small instances have great value CPU & local IO performance. If your app is CPU or local IO bound, splitting it across multiple 256MB instances on Rackspace Cloud will get you huge performance relative to price. I've been worried that this would degrade as the service grew, but that hasn't been the case.

Unfortunately many other 'features' of Rackspace Cloud have been poor to awful recently. Some anecdotal stories;

1) We haven't been able to make images of our server or restore ANY backup of our servers for months. There is a bug in the backup service where if you have spaces in the names of your Cloud Files containers (completely unrelated to the backup service) then all images fail to be able to be restored. We can't remove the spaces in the containers because you can't rename containers (only delete) and there's too much data tied to different parts of our infrastructure in there.

2) In relation to the issue above, we have had a ticket open for over 2 months which we continually post updates with new information & asking for issue resolution. We never receive updates to the ticket itself and only receive information when contacting their live chat. The response is always "we're working on it". I could live with it if this was a short period, or not an absolutely vital part of their service, but come on - all backups broken for 2 months! No timelines on resolution. No ticket responses. No happy.

3) While CPU value is great on small instances you get the other end of the stick on large instances as other posters here have said. You don't get significantly improved performance above the 2GB servers. CPU capacity certainly does not double as their documents say.

4) Cloud Files latency is awful. Individual read/writes take 300-1000ms. Fine for a small number of large files. Impossible for a large number of small files. (Having said that, being able to upload files and publish to CDN in a click has saved me lots of time for static files I need to quickly publish).

5) Resizing mid to large instances is impossible. We recently tried to resize a 1GB (40GB disc) server to a 2GB (80GB disc) and it took OVER 3 DAYS. No really. It didn't complete. The resize process takes the server down towards the end. We had to get Rackspace to cancel the resize and manually spin up another server and transfer the files ourselves. To make it worse, we couldn't act on this issue initially because Rackspace insisted that the process was "almost complete" from 12 hours onwards. 2.5 days later we just gave up. We managed to do the manual transfer ourselves in a couple of hours. Even worse Rackspace seemed to not think that it was unusual for the process to take 3 days or express any desire to investigate further.

6) The web interface has awful performance at scale. Once you go above 20 cloud servers every single page load takes 10+ seconds. As the original poster says, the number of errors it spits out about not being able to complete operations is insane. It's rare I can go in there planning on doing something and not have to contact support to fix something broken on their end.

7) They're taking the entire web interface and API offline for 12 hours this week! You won't be able to spin up or take down any of your servers. Why? So they can fix a billing issue related to Cloud Sites (a service we don't use).

I've always been a champion of Rackspace Cloud and Rackspace in general, but sadly I would no longer recommend them to people. I'm starting to make contingency plans and looking for other providers again.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, just proves Gruber's argument that many people buy PCs based on bullet point specs having never seen the enclosure.

With MacBook Pros you get:

- a backlit keyboard with ambient light sensor;

- a high quality display;

- significantly better battery life than any Windows lapt I've ever seen (due in part to software admittedly);

- the best trackpad I've seen on any laptop ever (seriously... Why do Windows laptop trackpads STILL suck??);

- better graphics than much of the laptops Macbooks are compared to;

- a pleasing industrial design.

3 years ago I would've agreed. Now? The "Apple Tax" is small to nonexistent.

Upgrades are often expensive. That's still true but ever big PC manufacturer does this. Dell is probably the worst offender, offering a really crappy spec for a low headline price and then offering, say, a CPU anyone can buy for $300 outright as a $400 upgrade from a $100 CPU. And that's with Dell's buying power.

And yes I know it isn't quite that simple: Dell may have a quota of CPUs they neex to move, etc but the assertion that they charge through the nose for upgrades is (IMHO) irrefutable.

sad to see this article degenerate into another "this guy only works 8-5 and watches the clock! he is not passionate about technology!" posts.

know what i'm not passionate about? working for free.

i don't know of any lawyers who meet with clients for an extra couple hours a day without charging because they're passionate about the law, or surgeons who don't bill for their work because they're just so gosh darn passionate about surgery. i also don't know of any construction workers who construct for free, because they're just so passionate about building great things used by thousands or millions of people.

not commenting on the quality of people discussed in the article, the real "get out of my industry" should be to the people who slave away in front of the computer, working for someone else, and expect no overtime or pay for their above-and-beyond efforts. they devalue the entire profession.

and tangentially, in my experience, it's the overzealous and over-passionate people who ruin the workplace by forcing bizarre methodologies and process on everyone (agile development, anyone?), attempting to coerce everyone into working overtime, and switching technology for the sake of switching. and in the end all i've seen out of those people is completely average results.

Yes. Don't be a jerk. Even knowing that it isn't technically difficult, it can be socially difficult, and this is a useful guide. Knowing the social protocol of how to get started in the community lowers the mental barrier substantially.

My honest question is why there is this odd loyalty to virtual environments in this community. I realize that it may be boring but you guys are passing up insane savings that can be had by using colocation. All cloud providers are very expensive when you actually do the math and you need more then 10 servers.

Our example may be a bit extreme, but we are just building out a new datacenter at a colocation and will recover the entire up front investment ( about 150k, we have the cash to not need leasing ) in a bit over half a year.

Having just recently priced laptops, I didn't have this experience. A 13" MBP is $1200 for the bare-bones options (4GB RAM, Core 2 Duo, 250GB 5400 RPM SATA). It weighs about 4.5 lbs. They want an additional $400 for an extra 4GB of RAM (wtf?)

A Dell Inspiron 14" with the same specs clocks in at $665 at 4.9 lbs (which is still under the 5lb "ultraportable" mark). A Lenovo U350 with similar specs clocks in at $700 and 3.5 lbs.

The Apple tax is very definitely still in play.

I think Asia already knows we can launch missiles from submarines.