"February 2, 2009"? Wow, I didn't imagine it. The 90s did last forever.

So he's right, but for the wrong reasons? How do you know when he's right for the right reasons?

Yeah, this is what they looked like in the 90s.

Actually, it does. It just boots too fast for you to press the key.

No the dirty secret is when IT people are young we are all naive, idealistic Libertarians who couldn't fathom the idea that Labor might need protection from Capital when the Free Market can clearly fix all ills if only the government would get out of the way. When we're older one of two things has happened: we're in management and on the other side of the table, or we're still in the trenches and we'd rather dangle in the breeze than swallow the bitter pill of our own reality or try to convince the new, naive. idealistic, Libertarian junior coworker that he's getting the shit end of the stick on purpose.

Don't listen to him! He sold me a dimension and when I got it home it turned out to be merely a complex vector!

Picking a programming language is like picking an application, though. It's not about picking the syntax. That's not particularly relevant unless you're looking at Brainfuck or INTERCAL or GW-BASIC. You start by deciding what capabilities you need. There are inevitably several choices that meet your technical requirements, so in the end you're picking a language based on whatever set of limitations and issues you're willing to work with.

That seems appropriate considering the topic.

Application support always says to turn off everything that might possibly interfere with their precious application. They would have you shut down the operating system if they didn't need it. Application support lives in a fairy land where the only thing they have to worry about is their application. They don't have to fix anything if the application isn't broken. They have no interest in anything else. A good vendor will program their application to work with the system standards. Most ISVs are not good vendors.

As a system or network admin, you have to protect the application from the rest of the network and protect the rest of the network from the application and protect everything from the users and the Internet. Part of doing that is firewalling the crap out of your core network, and if you can't do that you should be looking at adding more VLANs and controlling traffic that way.

The possibility of a resonance cascade scenario is extremely unlikely!

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.

And what if you have a house fire, break in, or accident?

So, what, all Windows patents are invalidated?

If they actually provide a service that people need, then why are they so afraid of direct sales? It seems to me that, like home realtors, car dealerships ought to be perfectly capable of functioning in a mixed market.

No, I think GP is referring to the $1.2 billion settlement for concealing safety defects.