This is probably a bad example because the end result was the invention of Git, and so you'd have a hard time these days convincing people that Tridgdell's actions had a bad outcome.

What are you doing bringing objective facts into a Slashdot debate, I mean SWJdot?

Gas lines need nonconductive sections to protect from becoming long ground loops.

It sounds like this transformer had its center tap grounded and was the path to ground on one side of a ground loop as the geomagnetic field moved under pressure from a CME, inducing a common-mode current in the long-distance power line. A gas pipeline in an area of poor ground conductivity in Russia was also destroyed, it is said, resulting in 500 deaths.

One can protect against this phenomenon by use of common-mode breakers and perhaps even overheat breakers. The system will not stay up but nor will it be destroyed. This is a high-current rather than high-voltage phenomenon and thus the various methods used to dissipate lightning currents might not be effective.

In March 1989 much of Quebec lost power for the same thing.

They lost power because the common-mode breakers tripped, not because their system was actually damaged.

Sure. Here's a transcript of the earnings call. (You may need to register to read it.)

Nadella does say, early on in his prepared comments, that, "We will streamline the next version of Windows from three operating systems into one single converged operating system for screens of all sizes."

Later during the Q&A session, however, he was asked about how this "one version for all devices" would change the number of Windows SKUs that are available, and he said this:

Lots of hedging in there. You don't need a single, converged OS to give developers "one store, one commerce system, one discoverability system." Those are all ancillary functions. A "team with the layered architecture" doesn't sound like every version of Windows is going to share the same layers. And clearly nothing about Windows is going to be simplified from the customer's perspective; there will still be six or eight SKUs, with each offering different benefits.

Rather, I take Nadella's comments to mean he's streamlining the OS engineering group so that the people working on each Windows platform work in tandem with the others and they all have similar goals, milestones, etc (good).

I also take it to mean that Microsoft will offer developers who are building so-called Modern apps a common set of APIs that will be available on the various form factors, so they eventually should only have to write their apps once and they will run on every kind of device. That sounds OK, but it's only going to be true for Windows Store apps -- and to achieve that, you don't need every device to be running an identical OS.

In other words, no Holy Grail here, but Microsoft is streamlining and rationalizing its OS engineering efforts, which makes good sense at this juncture.

This story was not accepted for publication by Slashdot, and I am submitting it to another venue for consideration. - Bruce

No, they're really more talking about the interface. The underlying nuts and bolts are already pretty much the same, in that Windows, Windows RT, and Windows Phone all share the same NT kernel. But above that there is plenty that's different from platform to platform. What Nadella wants to do is unify the development model and allow developers to create apps with UIs that react and readjust depending on the screen size of the device they're running on, much like how modern websites can support multiple screen sizes. All this talk about "one version of Windows" stems from a single, oversimplified comment Nadella made on the earnings call. When asked about it later, he completely backtracked and said there would not be any such thing.

Unfortunately for you, the actual article says the exact opposite of the summary (so what else is new on /.?): Other than the kernel and the app development model, there will be no unified version of Windows. There will always be different flavors of Windows for different kinds of devices and even multiple SKUs of the same version of Windows for different markets (consumer, SMB, enterprise, etc.)

The school district wasn't blindsided. The county was.

I work at a school district, so let me tell you how public schools get their Internet. Obviously it's going to vary, but from what I've seen our situation is the most common.

Every building in a district runs fiber between their buildings to a central building where the district's servers are kept. It could be in the basement of the high school or some administrative building, but that's what happens. It's easy enough for the district to do capacity planning. Each school district may then connect to an intermediate school district, but ultimately then connects to the county's municipal network. This network is the ISP that connects every municipal office, such as city, village, police, fire, public works, etc. to the Internet. In my state, Michigan, the county connects to a statewide municipal network originally put in place to connect the public universities to the proto-Internet for research (our ISP, Merit, was founded in 1966).

In this story, the problem is at the county level, the middle man between the school and the state-wide network. This is not particularly surprising, since since in every case I've seen, the county is a) poorly funded, b) poorly staffed, and c) tends to be forgotten about. When a neighboring district went 1-to-1 at the high school level with lots of online classes, they did reasonable capacity planning for the district's small network and quadrupled the bandwidth from the high school to the district servers, and the district to the county (the district consists of 3 buildings on the same plot of land, so it was fairly simple). What they didn't do was consider that the county level needed upgrades as well. My district is about 8500 students across more than a dozen buildings, and this was about 200 students in just one building (grades 9 and 10). They were using about 90% of the bandwidth on our connection. That district got moved to a different connection pretty quickly, but until then nobody in our district could use the Internet during the school day.

I think it's more likely that more people are becoming obese because of exactly one factor: age. They are living artificially prolonged lifetimes due to access to adequate food and to medicine. It's easier to get fat when you are 50 than when you are 30 because of the natural changes in your metabolism.

:-)

You make it sound like starving people are getting fat too.

If they are becoming obese, the particular individual has a surplus of caloric intake, if only for this year or month. This is not to say that they have proper nutrition. So I am not at all clear that the fact that there is obesity in the third world is confounding evidence.

For most of the existence of mankind and indeed all of mankind's progenitors, having too much food was a rare problem and being hungry all of the time was a fact of life. We are not necessarily well-evolved to handle it. So, no surprise that we eat to repletion and are still hungry. You don't really have any reason to look at it as an illness caused by anything other than too much food.