Pii's Journal: Holy crap...

Let me preface this with an appropriate quote:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke

So I'm reading this article on IP Address management, and I run into some wannabe networking expert that is advising the origin of the Ask Slashdot topic to "Learn Subnetting," when said wannabe goes on to incorrectly give an IP subnetting example.

Of course I reply to bust his balls because, well, I can.

I get to wondering what other network related advice he's been doling out on poor unsuspecting Slashdot readers, so I start looking at some of his posting history, where I run into this thread on network design, and running a collapsed backbone.

Understand, IP Networking is my wheelhouse. I've made my living for the past 16 years as a network consultant.

So I start reading through the comments on that article, and I swear to god, had the article not already been archived, I could have spent all day and all night going through the whole discussion correcting almost every single post on the page...

This is Slashdot, right? This used to be a technically savvy community, where people that knew were supposed to offer their insights, and the people that didn't know were burned at the stake.

Never have I seen such a collection of ill-informed half-truths, partial quasi-knowledge, and downright error in a single story thread. Maybe it's rampant, and I just don't notice it because networking is my one true discipline.

I guess it's nice to know that I'll always be able to make plenty of coin doing what I do today because to most people, it is obviously a feat of wizardry.