This is all great, until the desk fan blows an empty carton onto the tube sealing machine, which causes the entire factory to go up in flames, destroying the business and livelihood of all of its employees.

This is much akin to a “smart” end-user “innovating” by putting a Linksys wireless access point at their desk, so they can work around the office on WiFi. Without the proper controls, this can lead to easy back-door entry points into corporate networks. Yes, the leaf-nodes can be smart, but they can also be ignorant of the larger picture…something which the engineers are usually acutely aware of.

And as for the network as a whole being a big, dumb machine, I have serious questions as to your expertise in this matter. If you’ve ever seen how a routing table is computed and maintained, or how networks are meshed together to ensure availability, speed, and accessibility, I think you’d change your mind VERY rapidly on how “dumb” they are.

(via mkhl)…

“That’s some money well spent!” – he says, before looking closely at the other statistics in the report….