keepper

He's expressed support on the "right" of businesses to discriminate based on race/gender/etc[1]. As well as libertarianism being critical of the civil rights act, the civil war, etc [2].

How is that doublethink?

[1] http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education... [2] http://reason.com/archives/2010/06/16/racism-civil-rights-an...

I assume the parent is flame-bait... but figured I'd bite.

Your comment is akin to saying "now that we have biologist/geneticist/etc, we no longer need doctors". Admins/Systems engineers are closer to a "true" engineer, than a developer. Developers are closer to a researcher/scientist in some respect.

Most developers ( specially app developers ), have a VERY limited scope/domain of skillsets. Your average web front end developer is great at taking business requirements and making that into a web app, but has usually zero clue of anything beyond that.

"admins" or systems engineers, should be ( and I'd admit, in many places they aren't), just like Systems engineers in any other engineering field. People who hold interdisciplinary skills ( networking and systems knowledge, specific systems knowledge, programming skills, etc ), and are able to manage complex system through their life cycle. They deal with requirements, logistics, coordination, etc, as it applies to the engineering system.

This need will always be there. If anything, more complex software gets rid of the need for different level of app developers. As frameworks become "cookie cutter", business requirements to application may be able to be fully automated. And developers may, in a not so distant future, just be responsible for building such frameworks.

Put it this way, "admins" were thought of by Charles Babbage. There will always be need for them.

note: some companies have just delegated admin and system engineering duties to app developers. That's just an HR system, not a cure as you make it.

> What kind of comparison is that? The DR is practically a failed state.

You've already gotten down voted enough, but wow. DR has had a 7% growth rate for the last 20 years, one of the highest in the Americas...

Your others points are equally off.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Dominican_Republ...

Except I pay for the roads.. you know.. registration, taxes on gas, taxes on purchase of the car, etc etc...

But hey, you're welcome to pay a little for the roads too ;)

Question a cop who's wrong about the law... Stand in front of your house in any major city as a minority... Walk down the street in any major city as a minority...

The bad perceptions of the police have very real reasons behind them.

Respect is EARNED, not given. Cops CHOSE to be cops, they are being compensated to be cops, the onus is on them, to take then danger. Not on the citizen.

servi publici and all that comes with that...

Half a million dollars of load balancers? Either you are buying from the wrong vendor, or you have some wonky ideas of how many load balancers you need per data center, or are not using them correctly. ( hint: check a10 networks and Zeus)

The reality is, that if your problem is only L3, then arguably this can be solved many ways. For example, networks have been doing 10s of gigabits of L3 load balancing using DSR for ages. Dynamic route propagation doesn’t have a hold on this ( albeit it’s more “elegant” ).

But most people do more than L3, and really do L4-L7 load balancing, and most modern “application load balancing” platforms are really software packages bundled up in a nice little appliance. This is where packages like varnish with its vcl/vmod’s and caching, Aflex ( from a10 networks ) and Traffic Sscript from Zeus , amongst others, come in. Shuffling bits is the easy part! Understanding the request, and making decisions on that is the harder part.

If you split the problem, and are using varnish or nginx as your application load balancer, you can’t claim you’ve gotten rid of them, you were either not buying the right initial platform, or using it correctly. When you put a “stop buying load balancers”… you must first define what you mean by “load balancer” ;)

For the record, I've used both commercial load balancing platforms as well as contributed patches and used OSS load balancing platforms..