I agree wholeheartedly. I always facepalm when people aren't able to work because the internet is down (read: no github access). Just start an SSH server, netcat some keys around (or use an USB stick), and get back to work again :)
Transmitting files via Google's email servers from two computers on the same network in the same office in the same room, especially if you're in europe (ridicilously far away from GMail's servers) instead of directly between the computers on the local network is one of my main pet peeves..
While GitHub's uptime has improved immensely, it was a serious problem. It's not as simple as pushing your repo someplace else when you use submodules. If anyone has a fix for that I'd love to hear it. I've ceased using submodules in most cases precisely because GitHub used to go down so frequently, but now I have the same problem with anything that's a :git entry in my Gemfile.
One workaround for submodules would be local DNS entries, i.e. edit /etc/hosts to make github.com the temporary local github.com. Also, I generally mirror submodule repos and use those. But neither of these "solutions" fixes the actual issue of course. Not using submodules sounds like the best solution to me :)
LANs are broken. Why is it that we have usable tools for connecting halfway round the world, but find it massively hard to coordinate ourselves across a small office when the internet is down. It is total madness.
I guess it's just about familiarity. We do have the tools (mdns/avahi/bonjour, tcp/netcat, ...). But the internet is usually up, so we don't need to learn how to set up our own local servers, and there's no punishment for transmitting a file across the atlantic when it could have been transferred to another room in the same building and back again.
The fact that there is not persistent caching of mission dependent code and data as a fundamental commercial standard shows how badly we as a species in general can judge risk, even when the stakes are really high.
We...don't? I mean, if you're reliant on cloud services, yeah, you'll have problems--that's obvious. But if you self-host your important stuff (I run my own redmine instance off a local machine) and know how to use SSH, you should be fine in the majority of cases where the LAN is fine but has no Internet access.
It seems so. I freelance, so have to jump into various different offices. And on the whole, a hell of a lot of small companies that shouldn't need to be that net-dependent seem crippled these days if their net connection is being flaky.
99.9% of the time, tools which work for communicating over the internet work very well for communicating locally. It's not worthwhile for most people to devote the time to building, maintaining, or learning a second tool for the LAN side for that 0.1% of the time when your internet connection is down.
True, but they are rarely set up properly. Also, when they are set up they are often only used for things that are thought of as 'local tasks' such as a media store or printer server and not for replication of the online system that you have for some insane reason decided should be hosting your accounts or whatever.
Transmitting files via Google's email servers from two computers on the same network in the same office in the same room, especially if you're in europe (ridicilously far away from GMail's servers) instead of directly between the computers on the local network is one of my main pet peeves..