Posts by Trevor_Pott

Re: will it really help?

Fortunately, I don't have to make that choice. The Register is, in fact, working on HTTPS support (or so I have been told). But you know what? Yeah. In the long run, if I couldn't convince them that it mattered - especially for a technology site! - I'd probably take my content elsewhere. I don't want to, but I really do think ethics matter.

Someone has to say "no, I won't take that job". I've started to do just this with some of my sysadmin clients. I think it's valid to think about it applying to writing, too.

There is room for discussion about taking things to extremes though. If your employer is making headway and clearly working on the problem, it's probably not going to help anything if you pull the rip cord. But if they just stubbornly don't care about their customers to the point that they ignore security why would you believe they give a bent damn about you?

But before we can hammer out these sorts of fine details we need to start having the discussion about infosec professional ethics in the first place. Glad to see some readers are willing to join in.

Re: Rise up Techie Introverts and be ...

Yep. That's a big problem right there. I don't really have a solution to that. Maybe it requires an extrovert to start taking a stand so the rest will follow. Maybe it requires massive encouragement across the industry. Maybe social media can help. But we need to get everyone - even the introverts - to stop allowing badness to ensue through apathy. If anyone comes up with magical solutions to motivate, I'd love to hear them! :)

Re: First, I stand for TLS, not SSL.

Hah! Fair point. I think of TLS as "SSL" even though I know the difference. Same purpose, same libraries, same modules...guess I'm just getting old; conflating things that are "close" because of implementation rather than provenance.

OCZ didn't take a huge hit for selling bad flash. They took a huge hit for denying the issue repeatedly and loudly and treating victims of the flaw like shit. OCZ were (and who knows, maybe still are) run by utter twatdangles and how they handled the whole affair will end up in multiple text books about how not to do things in the modern world. Or any world.

Ever.

Re: A few points...

Again, you are mistaken that this as is all about you. This isn't your lawn and your aren't a part of The Register, you write guest contributed, unpaid content and you comment on the message boards.

I'm not a part of The Register? I have 418 articles published here. I've been writing here for over 5 years. At what point are you "part of" a publication, hmm?

Also: my articles are unpaid? That's news to me. And my bookkeeper. And my 4 employees. Because it seems to me we invoice The Register for rather a lot of money. Which is nice. As it does things like pay our mortgages.

It's a hot topic and you want to wave your flag, we get it.

It's a boring topic that the overwhelming majority of Register readers don't give a flying fuck about. Some do, but there's only about 800K - 1M that seem to care enough to poke their noses in on this, and fewer still who care to comment.

And again, you're wrong, I really don't want to "wave my flag" here. People like you whoa re assholes on the internet, make it a very unpleasant topic to write about. I've gotten death threats because I have written something that someone doesn't like; most of the negative feedback begin from the zealots that inhabit the storage industry.

I don't even like storage. I got sucked into being a storage blogger/analyst/whatever-the-fuck-I-am entirely against my will. And once sucked in, I learned fast. Now people see me as "knowledgeable" on the topic and seek me out at an ever increasing rate for advice.

But I hate storage. I really, really do. It's boring and the people are mean.

There are much better things to write about. Things that actually interest me. DevOps. SDN/NFV. Compute hardware. Above all else: security. These are my actual passions. They also "get the clicks" as it were.

Sadly, storage needs a shit disturber or twenty. Your own douchetastic response is exactly why. Zealotry and misinformed ad homenim too often take the place of reasoned discourse, as your perpetual firehose of haterade so ably demonstrates.

But it's not even necessary, you have a voice here and you post regularly on The Register. I'm not trying to shut you up, I'm simply suggesting you chill out and let others chime in without sucking all of the oxygen out of the room by responding to every single comment.

But you are trying to shut me up. That is exactly what you are doing. You feel somehow that you, personally, have a right to dictate when and where I should be allowed to speak. What gives you the right to determine the context of my speech? And why shouldn't I be allowed to participate in discussions both from an official platform (as a writer for The Register) and from an unofficial platform (as a commenter on The Register)?

The various mediums available to me - numerous places where I publish my articles, Twitter, my own personal blog, various comments sections, forums and message boards - all offer me the chance to approach topics in various ways. Some allow me to advance my personal opinion in a more unbridled fashion than others. Some have a mass audience while some a more select one.

There is an entire internet available for you to vent your hate and spew forth opprobrium. Yet here you are, on my digital lawn, trying to tell me what to do.

Given the context there is only one appropriate response: go fuck yourself, asshole.

And maybe, just maybe, you should actually add something useful to the conversation. If anything is sucking the oxygen out of the room it is your worthless personal attacks and pitiful demands for censorship.

The route to people valuing your opinions is to contribute something meaningful, not restricting who can talk until yours is the loudest voice left. If your ego needs satiating, satisfy it somewhere else.

Re: The shady truth of the storage industry

I also just want to back up what Satinder is saying. Tintri have been absolutely amazing about testing their units. They've given me a completely free hand. (I hope to have the review out this Monday, as a matter of fact.)

I have found some flaws with Tintri's implementation. But I've found a crazy amount of good. Tintri has not shackled me with restrictions on testing or on publishing. They've let me toss a unit into production, run every synthetic I can on it, and abuse it in every way. They've made an SE available to me for any questions and shown me how they prefer to benchmark things, but not insisted this be the only path.

I've learned a lot about storage from them. Just as I have from every really good storage company I've worked with. They have fantastic engineers who have taken the time to get really in depth on things I don't understand, or flat out get wrong.

(Side note: I will disagree with Satinder on the utility of SQLIO. Even full of 0s, it's great for testing the network portion of shared storage, and it is also possible to replace the all-0s file with a randomly-generated one so that you are hammering with more than just 0s. I find it a useful tool, if used correctly. That said, Tintri's "Tingle" load generator is actually pretty cool, and a useful item that the whole industry should be using.)

Another thing that Satinder said is important here: education. Of customers and of reviewers. You can't review storage properly if you honestly think you have nothing new to learn. Each storage offering is different. Not only that, but tools to generate and test load are constantly evolving.

Many vendors - like Tintri - do an excellent job of educating, so it behooves anyone (customer or reviewer) who is doing testing to really listen through the various presentations.

The truth is that there is a lot of good storage out there. Hyperconverged, scale out, object and legacy alike. There are a lot of great companies peddling that storage. More to the point, the market for storage is huge, and continually growing.

We shouldn't need to have the petty rivalries that have developed, or be getting bogged down in who is allowed to review what by which means. We should be educating people as to which test are best to simulate (or test) what components of storage. We should be verifying our synthetics with real world workloads. And we should all be absolutely open and honest about the results because it is how we all - vendor, reviewer and customer alike - learn, adapt, and ensure the next round of products are better than the last.

Re: The shady truth of the storage industry

@Virtualgeek: great response. Truly. I have nothing negative to say to that, it's absolutely spot on. It's why I insist on running real world test with workloads I know inside and out (from having run them for 11+ years in production) alongside the benchmarks. There's a lot more to testing storage than synthetics. (See; iSCSI microburst issues with switches; something we don't have standardized tests for yet!)

Re: E-mail reply from Chuck Hollis of VMware

1) "Profane" language can be used for either emphasis or to provoke a response. It works well in both cases.

2) "Profane"? What era are you from? What was it like watching them invent the steam engine?

3) Yes, I like arguing. Especially with people who like to jump right in on personal attacks.

4) There are rather a lot of people on these forums who post on behalf of their employers. There are also a bunch who are irrational brand tribalists. I see no reason to treat either category as anything other than hostile.

By all means, post things I disagree with. In case you didn't notice, I not only admit that I can be wrong, I tend to point out where and when I feel it is possible that I am wrong, and I will even post information from external sources when I feel that information has come to light which brings my own dialogue into question. (See: posting Chuck's e-mail as an example).

Just because I don't think you are right about your inane blitherings - or that I troll you because you're a douche - doesn't mean I am somehow unaware of my own fallibility or am unwilling to admit it. It really just means I think you haven't clue one what you, personally, are prattling on about.

Also: fuck, shit, ass, and cockmongling cuntpotato! Just because you like the profane.

*Smoochie boochies*

@Alan Brown

There is a difference between "difficult to work with" from a technology side and "difficult to work with" from a people side. Lots of companies have decent-to-good tech but miserable people. Plenty of companies have middling-to-miserable tech but great people.

Great tech can make up for miserable people and great people can make up for miserable tech. The exact mixture that works for one company may not work for another because requirements for uptime, support responsiveness an other such things can vary dramatically.

The biggest warning sign I can give is to take a good look at the executive layer. Especially of small companies. If the executives - most critically the CEO and CTO - are "high touch" individuals, you're in trouble. The worst thing in tech is an engineer CEO who won't let the various division heads (sales/marketing/QA/channel/etc) do their jobs unhindered.

High-touch CEOs are a screaming alarm bell warning about oncoming icebergs.

Tech is a tricky business, and I find more companies getting the "people" part of it wrong than those that get it right. Oddly enough, getting the "technology" part right seems easy. There are lots of companies with great technology. It is in managing staff, customer and community expectations - and coping with extremes of emotion from all sides - that tech companies fall down.

Unfortunately, too many in tech think that "the human factor" is irrelevant. Until, of course, it isn't. At which point it's probably too late.

I'm sorry that I don't have a "valid, scientific definition", but I do have this. It's the closest I've come to trying to explain the marketing terms and the history surrounding them. I hope it helps.

Bingo

Nail on the head. And this is why I feel that more than just synthetics are required for a full testing suite to be accurate for this space. Maybe you should be out there doing testing, eh?

Re: A few points...

Including this comment, there are 30 comments on this board. ****11 are from Trevor**** WTF?

It's really not that hard to understand: The Register is my digital lawn. I've been a commenttard - and quite frankly, troll - about these parts for roughly a decade. That gold badge my posts sport? Only 10 of us have them.

In addition, I write for The Register, so I have even more reason to hang out on the forums. Add in the fact that storage and virtualization have been my areas of research and specialty for the past 3-ish years and, actually, it would be pretty odd if I weren't all over this like white on rice.

Now, normally, I'd make a few pithy comments and leave. Some people made replies worth replying to, so that ups my count a bit.

Now you, you seem to get angry if I post. I"d say I'm sorry you don't like me, but the truth of it is you're really quite being a dick, so I'm actually quite happy that I upset you. It's not like someone is forcing you to read the forums. Or The Register. Or to sit in front of the computer at all.

It's not like you are forced to acknowledge my existence or tolerate my opinions. You have infinite choices regarding how you might ignore me. You can shape and craft your own world so that no dissenting opinions enter your consciousness.

Hell, there are seven billion people on this planet: you can choose to shape your whole life such that you never encounter any opinion that you don't like. You choose to put yourself in situations where you are exposed to ideas and individuals who upset you.

And so, I'm going to keep posting. You don't intimidate me. You don't shame me. You don't make me feel guilty. But it's absolutely crystal clear that I have struck a nerve. And that means I should keep digging, because the more ardently someone wants me to not talk about something the more important is usually is that I do.

Cheers, and thanks for helping me set my research priorities for the next several months.

I'll be sure to be quite loud about broadcasting my results.

Re: A few points...

If you deride someone by name then go on to attempt to deride others without listing their names it helps for clarity to either be explicit that you aren't continuing your derision of the first person or to clarify whom you are now deriding.

It's also generally considered good form to use your real name when you deride someone, otherwise you really do just come across as nothing more than a petty Anonymous Coward.

Also: this "message board"? It's my back yard. I'll do what I like on my own lawn mate. Go get your own.

Re: Testing shmesting ..

Perhaps Trevor could do an article on the benchmarks in question, and how well what they tested reflected the sorts of things which customers actually cared about.

Well, I was going to. But both VMware and Nutanix have potentially disruptive offerings coming out in the near term. I think I'll wait until those land, then throw a month or two at it.

Re: One for the weekend -

Ceph. Oh god. So many brokens. So much slow. So much potential. So terrible right now.

Re: A few points...

1) Trevor, great feedback but this isn't about you. You have the benefit of writing a post on The Register any time you want so I don't understand why you would empty your laundry on a message board. Grow up.

Why would this be about me? Where did I say it was about me? In pretty much every single post in this thread I have stated explicitly that I am a nobody and that I both understand if vendors don't want me to test things and am entirely okay with that, so long as there are other, more important, and - most critically - credible independent testers who are allowed to do the testing.

I don't see how relating my experiences makes this "about me". It is simply providing more data.

If you average all the readers I have across all the places I write I have an audience of about 15 million. That may not be a lot, but it's enough that I could have been much louder and more dickish about this issue. Still, I felt that the discussion needed - and does need - to be had.

I know from experience that if I reply to a major article in The Register those comments will be read by relevant people at those companies. Social media teams are actually quite good these days. So I chose this method because of the limited scope of impact it would have while still getting my point across to the relevant people. It seems like an acceptable compromise.

2) About the test: VMmark (the test Storage Review uses) is a VERY GOOD measure of real world environments and is as close as you are going to get in a test environment. Those who say you cannot effectively test for real world results are spewing vendor FUD. You clearly haven't used VMmark.

Where did I say VMmark wasn't good? It's not the be-all and end-all of tests, but it sure is a great synthetic! I heartily approve of its use as one part of a larger suite of tools.

3) Nutanix response to the testing is abhorrent and they deserve all the backlash they get. It speaks about the company, their technology, their culture and yes, their employees. There is never a shortage of Nutanix employees talking badly about the competition and, like roaches, they disappear when the light is cast on them.

VMware is not remotely immune to talking smack about competitors...even when they aren't willing or able to fully back it up. The whole industry is a clusterfuck of egotism and douchebaggery.

Hence the need for independent testing.

P.S. If you're going to cast aspersions on someone have the genitals to use your real name.

Re: E-mail reply from Chuck Hollis of VMware

Might it be so that because, in your own words, you are a nobody, that both Nutanix and VMware don't really want to spend valuable marketing $$'s on you performing tests that no sizeable crowd is ever going to read?

Absolutely. I 100% accept this as plausible, and I don't honestly take issue with either or both companies deciding that I am irrlevant.

I absolutely do take issue with them not working with the more important members of the independant testing community, and I haven't talked at all here about what they tell me about interacting with either company.

This is just my polite way of saying that you maybe should tone it down a little?

And as such I'm not basing my purchases on FUD from any website, or person but just test the stuff myself before any PO leaves my desk.

Where did I ask you to base anything you're doing on what I wrote here? I asked that you - and everyone else - test for yourselves. I asked that you ask hard questions. I am listing here my issues, just as others are starting to do, in the hopes that when it comes time for you to make purchasing decisions you take the time to remember these events and you to a more rigorous POC than maybe you otherwise would have done.

This isn't about my ego. Nobody with self-esteem as low as I have can really have much of an ego. This is honestly about just wanting to do well by others. I'm sorry you feel offended by that.

If I'd wanted to make a gigantic mess out of this I could have posted an article on The Register and put this in front of 9 million readers. As it is, less than 1% of The Register's readership uses the comments section.

By choosing to talk about this in the comments section of an article I know that the major players at both companies - as well as most of the independent testing community - will read, I am restricting the impact of my being shouty whilst still making my point to the right people.

We'll have to disagree here. I don't believe VMware are going to be in the pole position, because I don't believe VMware have an awareness of the market required to make the cultural changes that will allow them to take that position. Nutanix, for all their flaws, are the dominant play by a country frigging mile. And they are not lax. You seem to have a real hate on for them, but there's nothing at all to indicate they will crumple up and die, as you seem to hope.

Re: Howard Marks?

Storage Howard Marks has a mightier beard than Weed Howard Marks.

Also a wizard hat. The wizard hat is important.

In theory I agree, but there's two problems.

1) Where do you get the money for a "sizable budget"?

2) When reviewing technology products you are bound by the EULAs of those products - especially in the United States - which often state that you are not allowed to review that product without permission.

You don't own VMware's ESXi just because you bought a license. And they can come after you with a fist full of lawyers if they don't like what you write.

We all have to make compromises in order to review things. The compromise I choose to make is that I will sit on endless briefings and play politics and try to work with vendors to find testing regimens that both meet their requirements and that I, in my professional capacity, feel adequately represent the product.

I don't let vendors push me around on my reviews and water them down. If I find bad things, I report that.

Unfortunately, it also means that sometimes vendors exercise their right not to engage with me or to prevent me from publishing. So there are hardware and software items which I have reviewed which never got published. I don't like it, but that is a better choice than compromising my ethics and publishing cherry-picked reviews.

Now, I don't have the clout or pull of Storage Review, or Howard Marks or any of the other big names. I still have to fight and claw and politic. But there are people out there who absolutely do try their damnedest to be independent. Hans De Leneer's take on this is really worth reading, as he discusses this concept at further length.

The short version is: no, nobody is truly independent because our laws prevent such independence. Beyond that, the part where there are no independently wealthy people willing to spend a few million a year buying and testing equipment is a damper on absolute independence as well.

Within the constraints of those two issues, however, I (perhaps egotistically) like to think many of the reviewers available in the storage and virtualization space do a damned fine job of maintaining their objectivity.

I say the above not only as a reviewer and a writer, but as an editor for my own technology outfit who has had to go to the mattresses for one of my writers. That writer bought a device with his own cash, wrote a review that absolute panned the device, and the company freaked out. Fortunately, there was no EULA item that allowed a legal avenue of attack at the time. But there are few things that will make you sweat quite so much as having to play that game of chicken, I promise you.

I'd be a bit obsessed with any company that was this much of a pain in the ass on a daily basis.

Except that's crazy. I can't think or be like that. I'd go mad in very short order.

There are a bunch of storage and virtualization companies that are decent to work with, but make no mistake most tech companies are horrible to work with. Working with tech companies is my job. No matter how dickish they are, it is my duty to my readers to suck it up and work with every vendor, regardless of my personal feelings.

No one is 100% objective, but it is my job to try as hard as I possibly can to be so. That means I can't allow myself to become "obsessed" with any company.

Though, following on from the previous thread and discussion, Nutanix is a big deal and you need to learn to deal with that. They are a huge company that is actually selling rather a lot of gear to a number of different clients. They will be around for a long time. And unlike many others they are more than their initial base product (hyperconvergence) and are putting a lot into R&D.

I know you want to dismiss them - and HCI in general - as irrelevant. Too bad. They're not. Nutanix may be a pain in the ass, but they're here to stay. Saying this isn't "obsession", it's objective assessment of the facts.

Where is storage review - or any of us - going to get the money to buy a Nutanix node on the open market? Also, you do realize that VMware will sue you into oblivion if you publish test results that they don't approve of.

I tried to work with VMware. My lab is here. I built much of it in order to test Maxta and other HCI vendors. I tried to get permission from VMware to test VSAN. They didn't want me to test on VSAN unless I replicated their internal configurations exactly, including CPUs much faster than i could possibly afford.

I told VMware that I couldn't do that. Money was a very real issue. I was subsequently given a not-at-all-subtle warning against YOLOing testing on VSAN.

Now how am I, or Storage Review, or any of the other analysts supposed to afford to buy a Nutanix cluster? Or EVO:RAIL? Or SimpliVity? If the vendor doesn't play ball and send a unit in for testing we just can't do it. (Unless they are software-only. Most of us have or are building HCI-compatible labs that can do software-only solutions for multiple vendors.)

Nutanix and VMware are the HCI companies that are hard to work with regarding reviews and testing. The rest have proven to be amazing. (Though to be fair, Nutanix has a great relationship with Storage Review that they don't seem to have with many others, so go Storage Review!)

Make of that what you will.

Re: WHY WHY WHY

WHY WHY WHY can't I buy a 10Mbit upload for less than $500 a month, or $5,000 a month is I want to actually use the bandwidth?

Re: 10Gbs fibre to 4*1Gbs ethernet

The questions is more how to make a service like this pay.

Simple. You charge $250 a month for "access to" the 10Gbit fibre, with a "generous" "free" bandwidth allocation of 100GiB. Then you charge them $50/TB over the limit. If they complain, you have them rounded up as terrorists and thrown in jail.

Yes, I live in a country where protesting is illegal and can be classified as terrorism at the prime minister's whim.

So you want us to just turn off the internet and pretty much our entire manufacturing and power generating capacity, not to mention all of our tanks, jets, warships, satellites and our entire bloody society?

That'll go over well...

Re: Thanks for the info and intel for phishers and phormers of novel agents

IBM has evolved SoftLayer into their first IEM” …… rather than “IBM has evolved SoftLayer into the first IEM”, for the latter is surely one of those known unknown things

You are right, your version is clearly more precise to mine. Pint to you.

Such prognostications about the future of economies and financials is what the likes of Mark Carney and governments do all the time to fool themselves

Don't disagree. I believe that's covered in the preamble where I say, essentially, "so I realize that by making predictions in public I am setting myself up for future humiliation if (and maybe when) this all proves to be utter bollocks". I know I'm sticking my neck out.

That said, I think every now and again we need people to take that risk and talk about where things are going. This allows us to all have a think about things and then have discussions. Is the scenario presented possible? Is it likely? What are the implications? Do we like the scenario presented?

If we feel the prognosticator is right, how can we adapt to best take advantage of the changes discussed? If we like the changes discussed, how can we encourage the future to unfold in this manner? If we don't like those changes, how can we try to alter the outcome?

I have a visibility of IT as a whole that few people have. By and large, it's my job to get that visibility and I pay for it in endless briefings and presentations.

I am good at seeing patterns. Tracking thousands upon thousands of variables and assembling the jigsaw puzzle of possibility. This is what I see coalescing out of the spinning fragments of effort from dozens of organizations and thousands of engineers, all working separately but (unknowingly) towards similar goals.

There are a lot of unknowns - known or otherwise - but IT is actually a fairly predictable industry. It's run by nerds who rather like logic, after all. ;)

This for one.

Here is another worth reading.

What I discussed in the article itself - and in associated articles - is more than "just a hyperconverged solution", which you seem focused on believing I'm talking about. It's more than just VMs. It's the ability to consume applications through an application store/virtual appliance library/etc.

Legacy applications may need care and feeding, but that whole style of application design is going away, and fast. Cloud native application development models are the norm amongst younger developers and there are rapidly becoming more of them than there are of us.

Developers are largely able to maintain infrastructure on their own. They are being trained to code in monitoring, make failure-tolerant applications, and interact with all infrastructure subsystems from disaster recovery and backup to storage.

Right now, today, and for the next five years or so, there is a lot of money to be made automating legacy software. But once that's automated, it's mostly done with. Entire teams of sysadmins and specialists can be wiped out and replaced with a single maintenance drone as the new applications are developed against infrastructure that is addressable by API.

Developers will blossom in the datacenter of the 2020s. Operations is already dead, it just hasn't accepted it yet.

Security will blossom in the datacenter of the 2020s, and if operations don't convert from their existing specialties to security, they'll be out of a job.

In large enough or niche companies there may be room for teams of operations admins. But in most companies - including most enterprises - the operations team circa 2025 will be a fraction the size ti is today. The developers will explode in size. The security teams will explode in size. The operations teams will consist of the proverbial "man and a dog".

And yes, the first IEMs will start rolling out by 2020. By 2025 enterprises will have finished reorganising their IT teams such that operations functionally no longer exists. By 2030 IEMs will be cheap enough for the SMB, and so much new software will exist that SMBs can run this stuff on their own, without nerds.

What I think you don't grok is that how applications are build has changed. It used to be that automation, high availability, backups, disaster recovery and so forth were all done by operations teams. This is increasingly not the case. New applications have this stuff built in, and this is the model of design being taught to new developers.

Tomorrow's applications won't need the sort of care and feeding that today's do. They will just need (relatively) stable APIs. We'll spend the next five years automating our legacy software, 5 years after that realizing that operations is not doing anything for the money we pay them and then it's "man and a dog" time.

Meanwhile, one at a time, those legacy applications will be replaced.

Operations is already dead. But feel free to bet your career on its continued viability if you so choose.

Re: Who or what could ever be trusted that much?

Nail on the head.

I can tell you how the pieces are aligning. I can't tell you yet who will win, or whether open standards (read: OpenStack, most likely) will win. I suspect that if two proprietary IEMs appear that are mostly interoperable (where "interoperable" can be achieved with some minor conversion of automation/orchestration runbooks between the IEMs) then enterprises won't care. They only ever needed EMC and Netapp to play off one another, (or Oracle, DB2 and SQL)...why would they need more than two, possibly three IEMs?

Interesting few years ahead...

Except that an SDI block I describe is more than just hyperconvergence, mate. Maybe you should read the article and the links.

There's more to what's under discussion than just a new way to do virtualization.

Sorry, but I must disagree. The old specialties will go away as they are simply no longer needed. Technology is adding ease of use as a core competency, even at the infrastructure level. That is removing the need to have all these niche infrastructure specialties running about. You really just need capable developers. They can make competently designed infrastructure go.

The only other specialty most organizations will need is SecOps. Though I suspect most won't believe they need SecOps until breaches inevitably happen to them.

Some of that is explained here. But most of it boils down to this: no matter how much packaged software exists there will always be the need for custom software that meets the very specific needs of a given company. Even if that "custom software" is little more than parsers or translation layers that take one set of data from one application and feed it into the next.

I'd go so far as to say that not only will demand for developers increase over the coming decade, but that they will become essential to larger small businesses and an unquestioned presence in all midmarket companies. Much like systems administrators had been for the past 15 years or so.

IEMs are really about doing away with the need for dedicated ops teams in all but the largest or most niche outfits. It is a lot harder to get rid of developers.

Operations teams keep the lights on. They build the digital edifice of the business, but it is the business that must occupy that edifice and make profits.

Developers are the business in a very real way. The code they create encapsulates the business logic. They automate mundane tasks. They replace entire departments with code. They can even - and this will become far more common far quicker than you think - program robots to do mundane physical tasks.

Once the building is built you don't need builders. You might keep a maintenance guy around, but how much better for most businesses to simply lease the building and let the landlord handle the maintenance? Or, if they own the building, hire a maintenance company to keep it ship-shape?

We are very rapidly approaching the point where operations simply won't be needed by most companies. I do not forsee a point in my lifetime where developers will face the same problem.

Utopia may be just around the corner, but it seems like a mighty ugly pill...

Isn't it always?

All the work week be done on tablets and internet connectivity will be fast and reliable.

Internet connectivity is fast and reliable for a significant chunk of the parts of the world that have enough money to entire tech companies. 5 years from now it will be better. 10, 15? The first IEMs will start to emerge around 2020. They will probably start to make their way to the SMB space for the first time in 2025. They will be ubiquitous by 2030.

The pieces are all there for anyone willing to see.

Will compliance managers also be replaced by devops, I wonder...

SecOps, actually. I have a piece on that here.

Re: TED talk

No, that's bollocks. In just about any functional marriage, each partner would be properly fucked off about the other cheating on them. Sure, you can find me exceptions - but those are very much outliers. Marriages are substantially always damaged when infidelity occurs.

Sorry, but nope. Marriages have moved past the bizarre religious ideals of monogamy for a great many people. Maybe not the majority, but a very significant number.

Run the numbers. Look at the *fraction* of marriages that are truly open. It's a statistical insignificance. Most marriages where there is infidelity end in divorce in a relatively short space of time. Whether that's healthy or not is for someone else to decide - but it is a fact.

I don't know where you're getting your numbers. They certainly don't line up with any I've seen. Now, infidelity is the most frequently listed reason for divorce, but it has been repeatedly noted in research surrounding divorce that most of those relationships were about done anyways, and the infidelity (or claims thereof, in many cases it's hard to verify) are used to deal with legal issues surrounding divorce and/or to milk the ex-spouse dry.

I am incredulous that you've written that. Look at the history of failed marriages - a vast proportion are due to infidelity. I cannot believe you are naive enough to believe that more than a handful would not care about an extra-marital affair; substantially all cuckolds/cuckqueens really do care, and I am frankly astonished that you could believe anything else.

Your inability to see beyond your own prejudices is your own problem, sir. I have actually researched this topic at quite some length. The number of marriages that don't fail after infidelity are actually quite high. The number of marriages in which infidelity is tacitly (if not openly) tolerated is also a lot higher than you seem to think.

What's more, when marriages do dissolve it is rare that it is anywhere near so simple as "X found out Y was cheating on them and divorce ensued". A) Usually there are all sorts of reasons why the infidelity occurred in the first place that boil down to "marriage in trouble". B) Infidelity is quite often tacitly (if not openly) tolerated until something else in the relationship goes rather wrong.

You seem to personally believe quite strongly in monogamy. That's fine, but I think you need to realize that not only has that not always been the case, people in our culture are a lot more diverse in their attitudes and approaches to marriage than you are portraying.

What's more, you still haven't laid out a rationale for why the fact that some individuals choose to be obsessed with monogamy gives them the right to care whether or not others are, or to pressure those others regarding their marital habits.

To be quite blunt about it, poking your nose into the bedchambers of others uninvited should be of itself illegal, no matter who the individuals in the bedchambers are.

You will not convince me otherwise.

Why should it matter if I have a genetic anomaly or not? Plenty of people don't, are large, and have no more realistic control over their weight than I do. Nice to see you doubling down on your prejudice though. Great to feel superior, isn't it?

Have a super day.