This, totally this.

I just rolled 40 years in this ridiculous industry, and the one thing that keeps coming up over ... and over ... and over again is that the total throughput of a system is often controlled by one or two locks / blocks (thread/process, disk, network, ear wax, etc.) buried deep, deep inside. You can micro-optimize code to your heart's content, but when you finally get around to profiling what's actually happening in the system that didn't scale from 100 hits/sec to 1000 hits/sec (or whatever) you arrive at an "Oh, shit!" moment when you realize that an assumption you made 6 months ago (Hey! This will never be a problem.) is now biting you in the ass.

I don't know if this was deliberate or not, but it is now in my Phrase List and I hunger for a chance to use it.

This!

I checked the codes and they actually do mean that.
Elegant, classic, subtle, in-your-face.

+10!

ROFLCOPTER! Being the Geezer Geek® in our family/neighborhood I get the calls for ... almost everything. I had one woman (who shall remain nameless (except she's my older sister)) who complained of all sorts of horrible things happening. Turns out it was an out-of-disk and there was a huge number of ~whatever files all over her filesystem. Cleaning them all up gave her about 40% free disk.

Shouldn't that be: Automattic software?

Webfaction.com - $9.95 monthly (cheaper with longer commitment).

Run by serious techies. Nginx as a frontend-server, Apache/whatever you want on the backend. MySQL, Postgres, whatever for a DB. Python (Django is a one-click install), Ruby, whatever. Long-running processes. Cron jobs. Better-than-average admin panel.

All in all, a great hosting company for smaller sites.

I'm not a shill, just a happy customer. I have several customers' websites there.

A little more specifically: if there was prior art pertaining to Apple's patent, then the patent itself can be held to be invalid. If the patent is invalid, then there cannot be infringement. That extra step in the middle is important.

When we bought our house (2003) the guy helping me thought I was insane to pull dual CAT5e to each room for phone/data (we have a great crawl space) and 8(!) CAT5e to my new, detached office. But we're in Sebastopol, CA (in Russian, Sebastopol means "gopher") and the little f*ckers have already chewed into the Schedule 40 PVC conduit and destroyed 4 of the 8 CATe cables.

You can never have too many extra cables / conduits. Cable is cheap, retrenching is expensive.

One step beyond this: Use Ultra VNC's Single Click mode (free). Set up the config file to automatically connect to your listening VNC port. I've fixed email in Paris, my sister (and her machine) in Tucson, and a niece in Sydney, Australia. All they do is download a 200KB EXE file from my website. I even have Office 1 and Office 2, so if I'm in my wife's office they just click on that. The whole thing takes less than ab out 30 minutes to setup and no one else ever has to deal with anything complicated.

The first thing that came to mind was a classic Cold War movie called Seven Days in May (1964). There was a shadowy group within the Pentagon called ECOMCON. Watched the movie and see if any parallels jump out at you.

This.

My wife and I have dealt with all 4 of our parents passing away, and the one thing that is certain is that as soon as the bank/brokerage/whatever knows that the primary account holder is dead, they go hypervigilant. Either have the various accounts and safety deposit boxes in joint ownership, with rights of survivorship, or have unambiguous beneficiaries set for all for your/their accounts.

The courts can take months or years to get things straightened out, but if you need the money to keep paying the mortgage on their house you may not have that much time.

One last thing, make sure that they have given Medical Power of Attorney and Full Power of Attorney to one(!) trusted child / friend while they are still legally competent to do so! Almost worse than losing your parents altogether is watching a 6-way train wreck happen as people begin fighting over the spoils ... before there are any spoils to fight over.

It can get ugly. Be prepared.

The most over-the-top DB God I know started in Pick-land (ca 1972?). Although he does (is forced to?) use SQL nowadays, he thinks in ways that do not come out of any SQL DBA handbook. As a result he gets DBMSs to do things that are ... unnatural.

He is currently doing some data-cubing stuff for us that I didn't think could be done with something less than a DOD budget. He says his touchstone is thinking in Pick and then 'translating' to SQL.

I still think that the 2 missing courses from any CS degree program are 1) how to debug, and 2) history of computing.

I snorted coffee through my nose when I saw: I read the internet for the articles.