I know that a few years back at my previous employer the only reason I was able to get HP blades into the DC was due to the inclusion of Cisco switches in the blade enclosures. I wonder if HP will continue offering Cisco switches, and if not how badly will it hurt their sales? I think it's a lot easier for a networking guy to bring in a foreign x86 server than it is for a server guy to bring in a foreign switch to the DC. Round 1 goes to Cisco.

People tend to love government tinkering and interfering and generally overstepping their bounds a whole lot when the result happens to coincide with their own personal views and feelings. The criteria that should be considered are the laws and the constitutions concerning each governing body, no more or less. The last thing in the world I want are politicians violating their charter because they know what's best for the rest of us.

That's a valid point, but has no relevance on what a government body should use for criteria when deciding a matter such as this. Potential is everything you haven't done. Taking it to the extreme, there's no law or principle that dictates that Oracle may not buy Sun and promptly dismantle MySQL entirely. With the presence of IBM's DB2/UDB and MS SQL in the marketplace, there's no rational argument that Oracle+Sun with MySQL creates the risk of a monopoly. It's easy to argue that the marketplace is 'better off' with MySQL independent from Oracle, and it's valid to point out that 'someday' MySQL could rival Oracle. Neither of those arguments are valid decision making criteria for governmental restrictions. Businesses have the right to buy out the competition so long as in doing so they don't create a monopoly. The EC is trying to play Robin Hood instead of acting like a responsible, by-the-book government entity.

This is somewhat like preventing Mercedes-Benz from buying Kia in order to prevent a monopoly. As well-stated earlier, Oracle doesn't compete against MySQL often if at all. IBM and Microsoft appear to be the most legitimate competition Oracle has in their DBMS space, and MySQL wouldn't seem to impact the competitive balance all that much. Having said that, who would want MySQL? Cisco, HP, and EMC don't seem like good choices because they all have product families that each would hate to have to tie to a 'Runs Best with MySQL' campaign. Red Hat makes sense from a certain point of view, but I'm not sure they want to diversify into the DBMS space.

I happen to use two on different systems. On my work system I use Roboform, and on my home system I use the password manager included with Norton 360. IMO either one is fine. They both function almost exactly the same. I actually give a slight nod to Norton for providing an easier method to organize and manage the entries.

There are several common themes presented in the collective wisdom above. Here are my 2 cents.

You are not a sysadmin. You are a businessman and a salesman. Never lose sight of those two responsibilities. Your company is not in business to run computers. Your company uses computers to run business. Everything must have a relationship to your business mission.

Everyone is in sales. Period. You have to sell your skills, projects, ideas, worth, etc. every single day, no matter what job you have. Your goal is to ensure the business leaders understand the value you contribute, not by the details you provide, but by your insightful way of connecting the techie stuff (irrelevant) to the business goals (important).

My advice is to keep the reports high level, with a structured format that makes them time-efficient and easy to digest. Include a project summary dashboard - what is going on and how is it going? Red, yellow, and green are excellent status indicators. Highlight any items that cause a business risk, especially to revenue. Understand how to express opportunity costs. How much more revenue or productivity could be driven if your ideas are implemented.

Quite simply, at some point you hope your 20 person company is a 50 person company (and beyond.) At some point the executives will look at you and decide if you are the right person to continue to connect with the business, or are you a techie person who needs to be managed by someone who can more adequately bridge the gap between business and technology. Your own self-impression can influence this greatly. If you wake up every morning feeling like a sysadmin, then you will soon find yourself with a new IT manager that you report to who basically makes twice what you do and yet you still do all the 'work'. Or you could become an essential business partner who knows how to communicate with the executives using language they speak.

It sounds to me like you're in an ideal spot to manage your career forward given your hands-on activity and yet your interfacing with pure business folks. My advice is to take this as a wake-up call to become more fully-rounded by better understanding the business and sales aspects of your role. If you don't fit into those shoes, someone else will sooner or later.

Winkey+L is your friend. BitLocker + a printed sign on the outside of your CPU case 'contents copyright [yourname / date]. Now you've made it a crime to circumvent your encryption of copyrighted materials. All my illegal stuff is on an external USB drive, labeled 'illegal stuff'. It is of course encrypted and every time the SWAT team rolls through my neighborhood I pull the USB cable so that if plugged back in I have to unlock the illegal stuff with a strong password (that I have written down on a sticky note so that I don't forget it.)

I'm a charter member of PETA (People Eating Tasty Animals), and have to express my outrage at this insensitive comment. I am a devout 50% vegetarian. Please support my online initiative to have bacon reclassified as a vegetable by the FDA at www.baconmakeseverythingbetter.org.

I think there's a reasonable expectation that when you attempt to resolve 'foo.com' through the domain name system, that you are returned an address that was in fact registered properly as 'foo.com' using the accepted methods for doing so. I think there's a reasonable expectation when you use the DNS protocol that protocol compliance is expected. Substituting a DNS query response with an IP address that is not registered under the name queried breaks protocol and is fraudulent. The fact that in the use case described the activity is for merely annoying advertising is somewhat beside the point. By participating in DNS your ISP is part of the Internet, and certain standards should be upheld. If your ISP wants to run a private namespace they should either sell it as such or make it obvious that it's not the world wide domain name system we all expect it to be.