. . . . and I am one of the thousands!

Thanks for a great system and site used for the benefit of all.

I'd suggest that this thread would be better off in "Chat Room" rather than "Caring and Sharing."

But that aside, I believe that there are so many self-declared "IT experts" around - some even with apparently-reputable degrees - who basically have very little more than a superficial IT knowledge - enough to pass exams, and no more.

Employers trust these people - boosted by their own "knowledge" having successfully designed a spreadsheet and describing themselves as hot-shot programmers and database designers as a result.

These people are paranoid since they know so little they can make blunders that will be obvious to all - and could lead to their dismissal. Hence anything they don't understand will be instantly classified as "dangerous," derided and dismissed.

Case in point: My assistant at my last job was supposed to be performing "network manager" tasks - an area with which I am not familiar. She refused to implement automatic virus-scanners and it was obvious that despite her IT degree she simply didn't know how.

But there was actually a more sinister reason. She could spend half of every workday making a "manual scan for viruses" - or so she claimed. The remainder of the workday consisted of monitoring what the users were doing - making sure that they were only visiting sites that she assessed were associated with their jobs and not doing their internet banking for instance.

The "virus scan" was in reality a detailed examination of what the users believed to be their "private" areas - looking for people using company computers to apply for other jobs, for instance (and reporting these abuses to "senior management.") And the main reason was that a virus scanner can't determine what the content of a graphics file was. It could be a graphic of the company's products, or of a bowl of flowers, or maybe a customer's order (some would print, sign, scan and send a JPEG) - but mainly it was to detect anyone downloading objectionable material.

This monitoring task she had turned into a full-time job, not actually trying to figure out why the server crashes were occurring, of course.

But then her husband was the assistant-general-manager, so she was fireproof and her every word had to be taken as gospel - she had an IT degree, after all, and was studying for a PhD.

If I'd still been there, we'd have another 200 cores crunching, but I'm not.

Amen.

Ms. PhD supported hubby-agm's view that the accountant and the IT clerk (amongst others) should have compile privileges, and be able to randomly re-compile whenever they felt the need. Not that this security-expert felt the need to remove the post-it notes plastered on monitors showing the system master username and password...

Same woman's solution to an inadequately-sized multidimensional array (I should add I inherited this system, I did not design it) was to simply change the OCCURS clauses and recompile the 600+ programs and all would be well. She condescended to spend two whole days of her valuable time testing before the new programs were released.

Still - both she and hubby still had their jobs last I heard...

It seems that your neighbor understands as much about security as you to pizzas (I am not sure that Sekerob would enjoy eating a pizza made in a "pizza pan" ).
I have used those disk drives (5 attached to a 360-40 with 128 kB of memory) and I can tell you their type (2311), the organization of their disk packs (200 cylinders of 10 tracks of 1920 bytes, wow almost 4 MB per pack!) and still, I am leaving my two PCs running even when I am away.

Teach him a few basics about security protection. Jean.