Or if you really want to get retro, (and remove any risk of propagation by netwok), get some DOS boot disks and the Pakistani Brain Virus.

(For history buffs: the first "real" PC virus evar, which I hand-disassembled on legal paper so I could write what might have been one of the first virus removal tools - a simple hex edit of the boot sector to skip over its code. :)

Oh, yeah, and get offa my lawn!

"...we needed to store ALL the account information, and we needed fast access to ALL of it ALL the time."

Which is why decent needs analysis is critical. In other situations that would not be the case.

I must say this line at the end of the article does more to reflect the ignorance of the author than anything else, "...why on earth did we squander so much money by not thinking this way until now?"
      Who is this "we", kemosabe? Smart IT people have been thinking this way since the dawn of computers. Think of the huge storage rooms of archive, (not backup!), tapes that were around back in the mainframe days. We might store a higher percentage of it online nowadays but there's still a brisk market in optical storage arrays, high-speed tape libraries, various utilities for automatic email and database record archiving etc etc

Here, let's just give him some answers:
- normalize everything for consistency
- denormalize everything for performance
- index only key fields for performance
- index everything for performance
- date index everything for logging purposes
- don't date index anything for performance reasons
- sanitize your inputs at the db level instead of the client for security and performance
- sanitize your inputs at the client level instead of the db for security and performance
- use Postgresql because MySQL sucks
- use MySQL because Postgresql sucks
- use [favorite db engine] because [some other engine] sucks

There, HTH!

Yep, pfSense fer shure. It's being used in environments a lot bigger than 1000 users. (Without naming names, think major news sites :).

Wait, it's only compatible with Valve products?!?

Gamers think it's really hot!

Tired of the VI vs EMACS war? Try the new Vyatta vs pfSense conflict instead! :) (pfSense is great...)

RIM-shot!

On the consulting side people do notice when things are running well because they aren't getting billed!

For what it's worth I've been using Windows since 2.x, (back when it only came bundled with specific apps), Linux since 1.x, OSX since it came out and various other 'nix flavors all the way back to AT&T System-V, (as well as OS/2 since 1.x, not that anybody cares any more...)

And you know what? They ALL suck!

The key is to figure out which one sucks least for the job at hand. In the real world (i.e. non-IT), nobody really gives a rat's ass what the OS is, or even the applications. The only question on most people's mind is, "what lets me get my job done with the least amount of pain?"

E.g. my work machine is a MacBook Pro with VMs of various flavors of Windows, Linux and BSD, because there are certain apps I have a personal preference for as a consultant which have differing system requirements.

But when an individual asks me what hardware or OS I recommend I just tell them , "it depends", and if I have the time I'll help them figure out the right answer, and if I don't have the time I just tell them to get whatever they had before that worked.

(Now get off my lawn... :)

This usually happens if the drive used for burning is being asked to burn as fast as possible. Whatever speed that might be, drop it a notch and you'll have closer to 100% success rate.

This article needs a "Schroedinger" tag. :)

I'll add a thumbs up for Norhtec. Good, solid design at the right price. If you're in the US it'll be a little less expensive from these guys after you factor in the s/h. (The MicroClient is rebranded as one of the eBox series, I forget which one).

"that's an unabashedly self-modifying database" Not to mention that ID 15 -> 21 re-mapping in one of the excerpts. Why would an ID of any kind ever need to be remapped on the fly like that? Heck, I used to do a little SQL programming back in the day, I might just have to dig into it a bit myself! :)