gbeech

Well I think "it Depends." At my school we had E's both E's and F's where failing, but the difference was that with E's you could make up the class in summer school, with F's you had to repeat the class the next year, multiple F's would mean you had to repeat the grade.

>Same goes for the clipboard– hell if I know why MS would use that icon for paste, but in no other software that I can think of is that normal.

That's easy. When you copy something you place it onto the clipboard, when you past it you are pulling a copy off the clipboard.

Those drives still cost about 20k or so to purchase, for only about a 25% increase for reads and 10% for writes (http://blog.serverfault.com/2011/02/09/our-storage-decision/) why would we pay that extra for so little gain?

Also, with FusionIO you are putting all of your eggs in one basket - drive wise. If that card dies you are done. In short we don't _need_ the FusionIO so why would we put out that kind of money for it?

Also we went to 96GB about a year or so ago when we setup those boxes it was a reasonable amount of memory to put in now - we are maxing the thing out at 288GB now.

> eliminating internal sysadmin staff completely (and outsourcing all the remaining sysadmin work to Amazon)

Man, this idea is one of the most insane things I hear. Amazon does not install your operating systems, Amazon does not install and configure you applications, Amazon does not troubleshoot anything related to the operation of the servers, Amazon does not do analysis on your traffic patterns and decide when you need more instances, Amazon absolutely doesn't care about how well your product runs as much as your own staff does, in other words there is no way you outsource your WHOLE sysadmin staff. All Amazon does is provide the hardware and network infrastructure to run on. It is not a magic bullet that says I don't need to have these people around. SysAdmin != server monkey - yes it is part of our jobs, but quite honestly it is a very very small part of it.

> Anyone that thinks that it's pleasant to spend time in a data center is insane

Call me insane because I sure do love spending time in a datacenter, it's one of the few times working in IT you really get to do something with your hands, and that does have a certain appleal to me.

It is a little more complicated than that. The bizspark program lets you continue using the software you have installed without buying the licenses at the end of the program - as long as your use falls within certain parameters. Namely, this "gift" is based off of something like 2 windows standard servers and 1 SQL standard server. We are way beyond that and will have to pay for our licensing at the end of the program. But for a lot of startups that haven't gotten our funding it is a great boon.

It's pretty simple, we started off on Ubuntu for our linux boxes. Then made a decision to move to CentOS for the stability and vendor package compatibility for our core services. However, We are going to stick with Ubuntu on some of our back end servers - management and utility servers for the larger package repositories. Our Core Q&A engine is written in C# with MS-SQL databases so obviously we need to run windows for that.

There are only 2 sysadmins so yes we work on all OS's

yes, we are in two colo's one in Oregon and one in NYC