I couldn't agree more; BackupPC is really great. Not only does it support Tar over SSH and SMB, but it also supports rsync over SSH, rsyncd and now in the new beta, FTP. I backup everything to a NAS and then rsync that every weekend to another DR disk (you have to be careful about hardlinks when copying the pool, since it uses them in the de-duplication process). There are several variants of scripts available on the wiki and other sites for initiating shadow copies on Windows boxes, and with a little tinkering you can even get that working on Server 2008, though of course it really shines with *nix boxes. Highly recommended - the only drawbacks are that, as the parent mentioned, the learning curve can be intimidating at first, and the project has been pretty quiet the past few years since the original developer stopped working on it. Amanda (the MySQL backup company) seems to have picked it back up and they are the ones who released the most recent beta. Did I mention it has a really convenient web interface, emails about problems, auto-retries failed backups (while it's not in a blackout period), and somebody wrote a great Nagios plugin for it? I'm pretty sure I did, oh yes definitely.

I used OpenOffice for 7 years of college and had zero issues, and probably about 75% of submission had to be in electronic form. What do you use Word for that you can't use Wordpad.exe for? Why can't you do the formatting in Mediawiki and then export to PDF?

On my school campus

Ok, it's pretty easy to see why you don't understand why email is still (unfortunately) relevant, but give it a couple years in a corporate or medium business; none of the services you mention have even half the features of email.

Word is still instruemental

Oh if only you had used Word (or Firefox, or OpenOffice) to compose this message it would have been spell checked!

I mean, I guess that's how we all feel about Windows ME. Right? Totally.

What? What if they do some kind of heavy duty number crunching and he's talking about his Beowulf cluster? What if they're a small, high-priced CGI company and they have three render farms of 10 boxes each and ten regular servers? What if they're a web hosting company and those are the hosts?

I live in Baltimore, and I'm about to hop on I-83 to get to work, which has a 40mph minimum and a 50 mph maximum. As in there are signs that say "Minimum speed 40mph"

Maybe unheard of to you. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123484.aspx I count well over 100 group policy settings that can be applied through Activesync to a Windows Mobile 6.1 device. Some of these actually do work on an iPhone as well, such as the password and phone lock policies.

Windows Mobile + Exchange 2003/2007 have had this functionality since 2005 at the release of Exchange 2003 SP2 http://www.microsoft.com/DOWNLOADS/details.aspx?familyid=535BEF85-3096-45F8-AA43-60F1F58B3C40&displaylang=en. It even works on an iPhone. I'd hardly call 2005 "recent" in the IT world.

Uh... because when you're getting wrecked by those goddamn green hopping jerk bug things, you can't press "start," type in "Justin Bailey," kill them, turn the cheat off and then continue on.

Correct, it does not count. You can only activate it at the very beginning of the game, just like with Justin Bailey; you can't turn it on, pass a hard part, and then turn it off. That's what the summary is talking about.

You're missing the point, which is that whether or not you're connected to the VPN, chances are good that your browser stores some credential information. If you're on a LAN that's the same subnet as your VPN endpoint, then once you disconnect, a malicious local user would be able to coax your browser to give up cookies about the VPN-accessed pages. Your browser uses IP addresses to associate a cookie with a host, which is what makes this possible, and explains why the certificate model of HTTPS on the corporate Intranet foils this attack.

First of all, any good VPN client allows the admin to prevent that (i.e., I don't consider the built in Windows PPTP client to be an example of a "good client"). However, that being said, for almost any circumstance I'm pretty confident the number of users who would know to do that would be 1%.