It takes a big person to recognize their limitations and do the right thing in the face of them. It took me a long time to dial my participation back to a reasonable level so I can imagine how hard it would be given your passion to do the same. Thanks for the example of putting what is truly important first. If you're ever back in Iowa City, look me up and we'll have a beer and swap some stories. I'm sure yours will be more interesting.

I'm happy to leave the management of the box and the network to our sysadmins, though less so when I find that I'm unable to do simple tasks. My beef is with those, fortunately few at my place of work, sysadmins who seem to think that keeping the machines running is the point of the exercise and not simply a pre-requisite to the real work the system is doing (my app). "Yes, I know that those three VMs all have low CPU usage and it would be easier to manage just one rather than all three, but that's not a good enough reason to introduce otherwise non-existent service dependencies. I'd rather that my billing service not go down just because your licensing service went wonky." The best sysadmins, and developers for that matter, are the ones who remember that the end user is the real customer and think about their requirements from the user's perspective and not with a purely "machine"-centric mindset. Another aspect which, perhaps, blurs the lines is the role of an application administrator. Application administrators often need more leeway than developers with respect to system access. Often I wear both hats -- app admin and developer -- on the same project and if I know my app isn't behaving properly and I need a system reboot or IIS reset to clear it, I'd prefer to be able to do it in the situations where my sysadmin isn't readily available. The best scenario in that case is to have the ability but also to have a defined protocol for what I will and won't do with it and when. All-in-all both sysadmins and developers need to learn to trust one another to do their jobs and put the customer first. I'm lucky to have a group of system (and database) admins that get this and are nearly always :-) a joy to work with.

It's a movie. She rejects him, not because of some inherent failure in the method he uses, but because it was written that way in the script. While it may be our (or the author's) idea of the "purest form of A/B testing imaginable," it's not real. If the author had chosen a different outcome, would you then change your opinion of A/B testing? I know it would have changed your opinion of the movie. In the end the author chooses to have Rita reject Phil because on a fundamental level we want A/B testing to fail. We want to believe that we operate on some higher esthetic than our base instincts. We want to believe that we can't be manipulated by the satisfaction of our material desires. The success of companies like Amazon, Google, EBay that use it, though, belie this hope. In the end, we are all self-interested beings that only occasionally act outside those interests.

A strong candidate for article most forwarded to one's boss.