It's not really crazy, it comes down to what data you have from upstream. It's not like you are swiping a card and have access to the magstripe data. With AVS it's only Amex that bothers with the cardholder's name.
Then maybe jack of some trades, master of a handful or in the process of mastering a handful? If you take front and back end development as an example, you have many different ways to go about things on both sides. However, in terms of simply building software you can probably limit your focus for either side and deliver effective solutions. After all, the end user usually just cares about accomplishing what they need to, right?
This is also what I use on a daily basis. One case where it falls through is where you are trying to capture a screenshot for something that has a certain UI state, like a mouseover. For those cases you can have PrintScreen set to capture your desktop and save it to a file. In OpenBox you would set up a key binding for Print that executes: import -window root filename.png
That should be a good thing, understanding what you are about to fix should be most important. I don't think rushed fixes pan out too well in the real world.
What does one have to do with the other? If you can afford it and it's something you need then you buy it. It's only innovation if there is some significant improvement.
It seems like it would take a really big, promoted initiative with major players behind it to make a shift from IMAP, but it's good to know that other people have thought about it (your comment and its siblings).
This. My experience has been that Linode is very transparent about status messages, and I'd even go so far as to say the most transparent I've seen. Usually if an external service reports a timeout to me and I visit the status page there is often an investigation notice posted regarding network latency.
One of my big reasons for having a few DO instances was the price + having Arch--many of the cheap providers don't provide Arch images. This new Linode plan will be a good option for the lower-end needs.