> It did happened before, but not on this scale and speed.

Check out Meltwater Pulses 1a and 1b.

They generally use a primary and standby system, just because it's a lot harder to avoid consistency problems with multiple primaries. This means that you need to direct traffic to the current primary, and redirect it to a standby when necessary, which is fine except that the system you're switching away from and the configuration interface for your DNS provider are both in us-east-1, because everything normally is. That's why they're looking for the ability to make a different region primary specifically during in AWS outage.

"a do no harm oath, just like most other industries"

Like which other industries?

First, an MBA is not an industry. Most likely they are not even industrialists. They are cogs in the machinery,

Second, again, what other industries have a 'do no harm oath'? Doctors claim to subscribe to this, Realtors purport to adhere to an ethical standard that could be confused with the do no harm mantra, Professional engineers have professional responsibilities to do work 'correctly', for lack of a better single word.

Do you think pharmaceutical researchers even bother with pretending to adhere to such an oath? recent experience would seem to deny this. Same for much of the food industry, certainly the financial industry (such so that we need copious law to restrict their behavior), and there are other examples. Even if you exclude sales, which if they followed such oaths would be in a position of serving two masters...

The premise is flawed, and demonstrably false. We wish everyone else treated us so, but in reality we often do not ourselves, out of self-interest. Which is sometimes understandable, and sometimes excusable. But not always.

> It used to be my go-to site for all things computer related.

Me too.

They were slightly cheaper than Amazon for the same product, then I did a big project which got slightly downsized and I wound up with $400 in "restocking fees" for a couple of pieces of factory-hologram-tape sealed network gear, after I paid $100 in return shipping.

Learned my lesson real fast.

Joe! for the win.

Why wait for MS? Just call the fake Amazon customer service line and ask them for help...

Interspersed with the occasional foray to the back porch, the better to put a few shells through the 12 gauge towards the cross-country skiers averting their eyes from the glare of the basement windows on Thanksgiving Eve... And blissfully somewhat out of range of #6, since Bill is too cheap to buy 00.

I'd happily use Joe, even in Windows, but alas even many Linux distros consider it unworthy of inclusion. Ya have to go get it

And I remember WordStar, the somewhat-less-obtuse-than-and-inspiration-for-Emacs editor...

And you, in particular, can be assured that few of the billion+ users of Windows care at all about this. Your low 6-digit UID notwithstanding.

You overlook WInME...

Them: Why don't you act your age?
Me: Well, I've never been this age before.

Like buying booze, renting a car, purchasing a handgun, buying a lottery ticket, getting a tatoo?

(some of these vary by state)

I don't see how you're too immature to order a Chianti with your steak dinner but you're mature enough to go $200K in debt based on a sales pitch of returns after investment.

These aren't even reasonable equivalents from a neuroscience perspective.