Regards

Nilma Azeem

This is not “griefing” or being “unduly negative” – it is how IT engineering *operates*. There are certain skillsets you need to bring to the table when you’re dealing hands-on with production environments. This is why developers should stick to the scratchbox machines and not have production access.

I can see a challenge here – and it is complex. Who regulates who, how, and when a developer with a good idea makes it available to the public, and what is that developer’s liability? We don’t want to stifle innovation, but there needs to be responsibility and accountability as well. Outsourcing sucks, as an IT professional, I can imagine why you don’t want to outsource to the server version of a “puppy mill” where a bunch of nameless IT engineers babysit your server with no real involvement in what it is or what it does. But as a startup, you can’t afford a guy like me to be on staff, can you?

A good place to start, though, is knowing your limitations, and I believe Larry didn’t know his until TOO late. He might have wanted to partner up with an IT professional. Ultimately, that is the problem. Ma.gnolia was running in production but was only 75% thought out. This illustrates the basic failure of the cloud, and while fat, local computing will still remain the most viable, frequent model of computing as we move forward.

i understand that burden. i have half a terabyte of data in my macbook although soon i’ll nearly double that with a second drive to replace my optical drive. i use time machine to back it up onto 1.5 terabyte drives.

i am a professional, but if all my data was lost, it’d just be my ass, few people would scream at me. most everything important is somewhere out there. obviously, if i was taking care of other people’s data, i’d take pains to ensure it was safe.

i don’t get it. half a terabyte of data. no backups.

my own personal site uses a mysql database over 130mb in size. it is backed up every day.

i guess half a terabyte of data is just so much bigger… :p

Larry, could you at least let us know if you felt it was due to some MySQL specific issues?

There are also great nuggets of information in this are a broad array of subjects.

I am missing Ma.gnolia, but I like the idea of an iTunes Genius for bookmarks to aggregate link lists (similar to DevonThink, but in my context) and other new related materials I have not seen.

Outsourcing means you pay more everytime you need something different. Having your own unix geek on staff means you have someone who has a vested interest in keeping things going at lower cost, who can identify when your current resources are sufficient to do that new thing you want to do, and most importantly can identify when you can turn things costing you money off.

If nothing else this frank and illuminating interview reveals the ’smoke and mirrors’ nature of emerging social technology.