Go has been out for a while, it's really cool to see it finally starting to gain traction.

Am I reading it right that America has to import skilled workers, but Canada has so many they try to keep them out?

Anecdotally that appears to be correct. My company tried to sponsor a graphic designer to come up from the States. We were denied because the gov't said there were more than enough skilled graphic designers available.

To be fair though, there really are enough skilled graphic designers around - especially in the cities.

Software developers on the other hand...

Obviously depends on the market, but... in Vancouver for example, median wages are simply not competitive when compared to what's available 3 hours south of the border.

Completely agree with you. It's a good time to be a software developer! :D

Without looking at the list I K&R isn't on it. It's really all you need to get started, you can find code snippets and experiment to get past that.

Has anyone noticed how many books on C are 4 times the size yet leave you with less valuable information than K&R?

If he were in the states I'd say he's just trying to build up a case for an insanity plea, but I'm pretty sure he knows how well that will go over in Belize.

Hoax or batshit crazy, or a little of both.

I've been running Windows 8 over a year, the only time I had "crashes" when was my SSD was going out. Can hardly blame that on the OS.

Windows Server 2012 is a whole other story for me though.

I dont think its about blame. It is about how people experience the ecosystem as a whole. The average windows computer may consist of hardware and software from tens of different vendors, but for the end user something eiher works or it does not.

Linus is a socialist, and has always hated big corporations and profiteering too much off technology.

Thats why I think he's awesome.

This is the kind of stuff I think about when I hear people talk about the cloud and promise that downtime is a thing of the past.

Cloud hosting is not drastically different from any other type of service and is still vulnerable to the same problems.

If you go through the pains of architecting your system to span multiple AZs, or you avoid using EBS, then you probably dodge most of the EC2 outages. (Remains to be seen if that is the case here.)

That said, I don't think most people think using the cloud means that downtime is a thing of the past. I think the more attractive proposition is when hardware breaks, or meteors hit the datacenter, etc, it is their problem, not yours. You still have to deal with software-level operations, but hardware-level operations is effectively outsourced. The question is if you think you can do a better job than Amazon -- some companies think they can, most startups know they can't.

Yeah. Even with this, they still do better than I would. My record: misconfigured air-conditioning unit alarm leading to servers being baked at high temperature over a weekend, leading to much wailing and gnashing of teeth. I now know to be really careful to set up air conditioning units properly, but what other lessons am I still waiting to learn? The main lesson that I took from this is that I should stick to what I am good at: cutting code & chewing data. :-)

Yeah this is another important point. Part of the cost of AWS is also a bit of an insurance policy against you physically breaking your servers :)

I always understood the cloud to mean a black box of sorts that automatically handles failover, among other things. The cloud being just a fuzzy representation of the infrastructure.

S3 probably fits the description of a cloud service. You send your data, and the service worries about making it redundant without your intervention. If data in NE USA is unavailable, the service will automatically serve you the data from somewhere else. You don't need to know how it works.

EC2 and some of these other building blocks, however, I would not consider to be cloud services. Merely tools for building out your own cloud services to other customers who then shouldn't have to think about failover and other such concerns.

If you know you are using a server that is physically located in a certain geographic location, it need not be represented by a cloud. It is a distinct point on the network.

The great thing about these URL shorteners is the companies seem to be very proactive when dealing with spam and malware. They don't want to be associated with this crap so naturally they block it when they find it.

It's not as bad as some people say. Metro is not a good interface for desktop/laptops but you aren't forced to use it. You can always switch back to a desktop and yes you can still get to a command prompt.