If it works, don't fix it.

In the real world, the risk of unnecessarily perturbing working systems is often higher than the risk of those systems breaking on their own. (Think about the longevity of Netware 3.12.)

Not just kids. Some people have managed to go for decades as cowboys, hacking crap together that barely works but doing it fast enough and visibly enough and in the critical path often enough that they always look like heroes. The worst is when they start believing their own bullshit and stop acknowledging that any other way exists. See also: Asshole Driven Development.

"We need things to cost less"

Take a look at the prices of consumer goods from 50 years ago. Stuff was *expensive*. Example: A friend of mine showed me an ad from a discount store in 1960 advertising basic two-slice toasters for $8.88. That's a little over $70 in today's dollars. The day he showed me that, you could buy a basic two-slice toaster from Target for $7.99. That's a little under $8.00 in today's dollars.

The only things that really need to cost less are health care, housing and education, the costs of which have risen faster than the CPI for decades.

People talk about "gifted" kids as if they're simply a normal kid turned up to eleven. Our school system has a pretty good program for those kids (and they're also good at filtering out the normal kids who have whip-cracking tiger parents). Where they completely vapor-lock is when they're presented with a kid who's gifted in some areas, but normal or even below normal in others. My daughter is in the gifted class but also has an IEP. You'd think her teachers were trying to accommodate a silicon-based methane-breathing life form. It's not that they're not willing to try, it's that there's no pigeonhole already there, so they don't know what to do, and they have to make it up as they go along, all the while dealing with the entrenched bureaucracy.

Or "bald" is a hair color, or "off" is a TV channel.

It also matters why he's backing it up. If it's primarily for disaster recovery, you would use a different strategy from what you'd use to deal with accidental deletion. Snapshots a almost always sufficient for the latter.

True story: At one place I worked, if you typed "quit" into nslookup, it came back with "exit.not.quit.stoopid.oursite.ourcompany.com".

You forgot all the steps it took to evolve the civets.

You're talking about "cost of time" to a bunch of Slackware users?

Less traffic in the suburbs? In what country? In US suburbs, nobody can take public transportation anywhere, so the streets and highways are choked with single-occupancy cars. The transit infrastructure is all about getting from the inner suburbs to the city center. Suburb-to-suburb commuting by public transit means turning a 30-minute drive into a three hour trip downtown and back.

Back when the transit systems were designed, they never anticipated the commuting patterns we have today.

Also, reverse commuting isn't just for hipsters. Outer-ring suburbs are too expensive for low-wage workers.

I did that too, at the last startup I worked for. After months of 100-hour weeks, a 60-hour week *did* feel like a breeze. And that's how I knew how messed up I'd become and that it was time to get out. That was ten years ago. No more startups (or pretend startups) again, ever.

I work 40 hours a week unless *I* feel like putting in extra time on a particularly fun assignment, and I'm happily pissing away all those extra hours by having a life instead of killing myself to make other people richer.

We had to fight HARD to keep our critical servers from being moved to Atlanta. There's plenty of bandwidth, but the latency would kill us. But every time we need anything, it's like Oliver Twist asking for more gruel.

No, this is what happens when you underTHINK the IT budget. HP and other services organizations want you to believe that all you have to do is write them a check, and all your IT troubles will magically disappear. Instead, what really happens is that all your problems are still there, with one more layer of bureaucratic delays and miscommunications thrown in. The company I work for outsourced their IT to HP, going so far as to sell a lot of their server infrastructure (the actual hardware) to HP, and it's been a disaster, only part of which is HP's fault.