Call me old-fashioned but I shy away from unique platforms precisely because they are, well, unique, as you don't have a lot of vendor choice should you decide to migrate for whatever reason.
Theres definitely that fear of vendor lockin right now, because theres no standard yet. But on the other hand, the possibilities that firebase opens up are definitely worth that lockin for some users. There's going to be other alternatives sooner or later, now its just about determining how much you trust Google to keep firebase alive as is.
It'll be interesting to see what Google does with firebase. There are already alternatives out there - but question is - which of them will succeed next?
I've had very similar experience. I believe it was Oracle 7 and one smart guy tried to install it into the root folder. The only problem was that the install script did 'rm -rf $DESTFOLDER' at the beginning. Luckily for us, the script actually printed the commands on the console and the guy quickly realized what is about to happen. He aborted the install script but by the time /etc and quite a few other things were gone.
It was a Sun OS 5.1 I believe on a pretty big box (for its time) with A LOT of user data. We recovered it using roughly the same steps. We didn't need to write in assembler though since we've had Sun compiler tool chain in /opt that survived. At the end, we used a modem to connect the damaged box to another one with a tape backup. It took about 12 hours to copy the data over.
On Macs, /Applications is probably the first to go. I stopped an rm -rf /* (intended .*) inside /Applications/Adium.app. I'm really glad I wasn't using a SSD!! Adium itself started acting very odd. One of the many issues was that sending a message to a specific person actually sent the message to a group chat. I was lucky to figure that one out before I cursed out the group chat while describing my stupidity.
RT (of course) gives such a different view from Western media, it may as well be a completely different story. Right now, for example, it tells how "armed extremists sent from Kiev tried to seize government buildings in Crimea".
And usually none of the versions is the correct one...
That specific part might talk about some groups of people (not army related) trying to do what some other did in other cities of Ukraine. It's hard to know what's true and what's not.
Comparatively few people will read this story. Even fewer will care enough to continue the crusade against the attacker for any prolonged period of time to raise awareness among the potential future audience that this account was stolen.
High chance the story will be quickly forgotten and the account will be re-used.
On a related note, I've run into a similar problem in C++, but opposite effect. A lambda won't keep my object alive if I try to capture a shared_ptr member, because C++ lambdas, similarly to blocks, by default capture implicit reference to "this", rather than individual instance variables.
This reminds me of a story of Sir Isaac Newton and South Sea Company bubble. He got out early, then watched all his friends get rich, jumped back in again with both feet, lost a fortune. Even smart people are not immune to bubbles.
