On site disaster recovery? Off site disaster recovery? Split your hosting between multiple providers?
It really depends on how much risk you're willing to accept, and how much that is worth to you. It can be quantified via revenue lost, but reputation is much harder to put a number on.
If I had to quantify this - 3 hours * 3 people who can't work and publish posts + about a week of marketing costs for damaged rep (apologies, PR, ads for exposure). I'd say that for the very least this cost us at least 1000$ and probably north of 3000$.
This is not the first time this has happened in the last two months (after a relatively reliable year). The problem is I'm not sure any other hosting provider would do any better.
So the question becomes, would putting a DR site on AWS or Google cost more than the $3000 this outage cost you? If the answer is no, wouldn't it be worth architecting to not put all of your eggs in one basket?
Be mad at the service provider if they don't live up to the number of nines they promised. Be mad at yourself if you expected more nines than they can deliver.
Issues? I find that Commission Junction affiliates can't even get their links right all the time which is basically their entire business. Talk about a "shotgun" approach...
"America is still the world's largest importer of crude oil. From January to October, the country imported 2.7 billion barrels of oil worth roughly $280 billion."
"Fuel exports, worth an estimated $88 billion in 2011 ..."
The author suggests that Google has a unified product vision; I'd love to hear what it is. To me, Google has been all over the place in the last 5 years.
I believe it's about information flowing free and avaliable for everyone, apps running in browsers instead of the desktops and to use applications-as-a-service.
It's about data. Getting as much data as possible and putting Google in the position to launch crazily innovative products: e.g. Google Glass, automated cars.
No other company is in the position right now to develop products like that because nobody else has the data that Google has.
RIM will remain the choice of companies and governments strictly due to BES; no other OS offers such direct central control over the users' devices. Companies (mine in particular) are struggling to cope with Apple and Android devices in the enterprise, and Windows Phone 7 only slighty better.
I wouldn't bet on this forever. There are increasingly good tools to manage at least iOS devices in enterprise environments, and the platform security features of iOS are nearly as good as Blackberry. In the BYOD world (which is growing), you can deal with less management of devices (enforcing some minimum standards), then layering stuff like Good on top of them to secure business applications.
In the BYOD world, very few people will be bringing Blackberries to the party.
Yup, agreed, and RIM seems to be reinforcing that effort with BlackBerry 10. Moreover, they're branching out across platforms with their Mobile Fusion efforts. They know that going forward, BYOD is going to happen, and IT admins will want to manage the access those devices have. It's RIM's hedge against the failure of BB10. If BB10 fails, they can at least pivot into an mobile enterprise services company.
"right click -> Copy As PlainText"? Office 2010 still doesn't ship with such a feature, and it's been a problem from the '90s!"
Have you used Office 2010? There are multiple options to pasting: Keep source formatting, merge formatting, and keep text only. The options in Excel are even greater.
As crazygringo said, the problem is copying from Office into textboxes. Any developer who's ever worked on a web-based CMS will tell you how painful it is to have to deal with people pasting walls of text from Word.
(And btw, I do use Office 2010 every day of my cursed life...)
I'm glad the author mentioned Project Euler... I've never heard of it. Anyone else have experience with these problems? Is it a good way to improve your development skills?
Whenever I recommend Project Euler to people wishing to practise coding I always caveat it by saying "the first 50 problems are useful". After that Project Euler quickly becomes more mathematical, which is great if you wish to practise your maths skills, but may not be what you're looking for. There are exceptions, of course, and some questions may require implementing an important algorithm, but it is difficult to tell at first glance if you will be learning some esoteric area of number theory or something useful to your coding skills.
TopCoder, CodeChef, SPOJ may be what you're looking for.
(Having said that, PE is great fun if you're interested in maths per se).
If your someone who isn't very experienced in mathematics, it's better to do them in order (easiest to harder) that's how your suppose to progress. If you're starting with the last one, it's normal you feel lost, it's like starting mountain climbing with the Mount Everest.
One good thing about it is that there are different levels of success.
The problems usually come with a simplified version to which the result is provided. That way you can confirm your solutions works. Then, the real problem scales it and you have to improve the algorithm to achieve the performance goal of less then 1min cpu time.
It's also o good way to learn a different language. You can compare your solutions in different languages and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses.
It's been useful for me. Back in high school, I raced to 50 problems against a friend and learned a lot along the way. Sure, you can get problems elsewhere, but the site has a nice way of continuously upping the complexity to enable self-learning.
It really depends on how much risk you're willing to accept, and how much that is worth to you. It can be quantified via revenue lost, but reputation is much harder to put a number on.