Pets vs. Cattle

I was at SUSECon 2015 in Amsterdam a few weeks ago, which, aside from being a great conference, was an opportunity to actually interact with my colleagues in person for a change. So I finally got to meet Adam Spiers after working-ish with-ish him for at least three-ish years (strictly speaking we’re on different-ish teams), and one of the first things he asked was for my take on the Pets vs. Cattle cloud computing metaphor, because in addition to knowing my way around high availability, distributed storage and cloud foo, my wife and I actually do farming which means I might be qualified to have an opinion on the matter.

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Wait, What?

Something odd just happened, so I thought I’d better screencap it for posterity.

I’ve had a Twitter account since some time in 2011. It looks a bit like this:

twitter-tserongBy blind accident, I happened to notice something resembling a clone, named @tszrong, which looks like this:

twitter-tszrongMaybe it was petty of me, but I thought it appropriate to report this account for impersonation. This resulted in the following email from Twitter Support (I’ve omitted the part at the bottom with the actual links and whatnot, but you get the idea):

twitter-support-impersonationIncredibly, the name on my goverment-issued photo ID does actually match the name on my Twitter account, but I will not be uploading a copy of this for Twitter to verify. Partly this is because I don’t want digital copies of my government-issued photo ID unnecessarily floating around the aether, and partly it’s because… SRSLY? Just look at the profile pages. Please.