Perl and Ruby and VBA (to name a few from the article) are dead and dying?

Author has their head up their arse.

Perl isn't going away anywhere close to soon. Citing perl 6's long development cycle is hardly proof.

Ruby is being used by more and more devop style projects. Puppet and Chef are hardly small time in that sphere.

VBA will continue to be used in corporate environments.

Then they need to take their suspicions to the relevant authorities and obtain a legal warrant. You know, due diligence? Innocent until proven guilty?

And since when is "candid" equated to porn? OMG Candid Camera was a TV show about pornography!

You mean like a wiki?

Yeah, we have those too. And they are being used to keep an encyclopaedia, if you will, of knowledge! How about that!

OK, so maybe Apple isn't using the data to track people but who else has access to the data that might be?

They're not just grabbing this data for the hell of it, surely?

They're looking at selling or offloading it?

Who in their right mind decides to fire the entire staff and inhouse knowledge base of an asset they are looking at potentially trying to maximise the return on? Doesn't that kinda devalue the asset immensely?

All they have currently is the domain, database and what ever infrastructure has been assigned to the project. Anyone looking at acquiring it would need either get their inhouse staff up to speed very quickly on the entire setup once they got their hands on it or go out looking to lure back the laid-off and possibly jaded staff the Yahoo has let go.

Sounds like a whole lotta back peddling to me.

One of the most important things you can do is to get your cabling right now. Put in more than you need currently. Keep the cabling runs accessible.

You know that classroom that isn't currently designated as a 'computer room' - it's now 5 years later with a different school head and they want it to be one.

Even if you don't run 20-30 cables per room (that would be very expensive, I know) make sure there are at least 5. If your school has money, which it seems to do (atm at least), then at least do that now. There will be possibility of a phone, PA/Fire Alarm system (now coming to you over VoIP), teacher's laptop, teacher's permanent desktop, interactive whiteboard, projector, network printer and any other of an array of goodies that could be fitted in to that room.

People tend to focus on the visible stuff in a room ie the computers. It is essential that you keep in mind that all of those computers require infrastructure to keep them operational. And keep reminding the people with the purse strings of that. It should become second nature to all of you every time you want a room with computers in it to then think to yourselves "OK, now how about the cabling - how much network cable will we need and where is it going to run to. How much power is this room going to need?"

And that brings me to another point. A classroom isn't like an office building. Electricians tend to plan things out as if it is an office. They can overlook the fact that in a classroom environment *all* of those computers could be booting up at once. Is that going to trip a circuit breaker? Remind them that it is a school, not an office where people roll in one after the other and boot things and do things a few at a time. Also if you are putting in heat/cooling stick it on a different circuit - assume that everything will be running all at once at full capacity even if only for 15 minutes at a time. Also keep thing in mind for future proofing the place - even if wiring it all now will be prohibitively expensive make sure that they leave enough leeway and access to allow for more future expansion.

I shouldn't have to point out now that similar principles should be applied to the networking and server side of things in the back end? All of those cables will need to plug in to something somewhere along the way. Right now it is safe to have a 100mbit connection to each computer (unless they are video editing and saving Gbs of data to the network) - but for the love of god please ensure that your core network is gigabit and redundant. A few classrooms of students all streaming video is going to bring the entire network to a grinding halt if it isn't.