That is true as of this moment, in my opinion. However, if everyone switched to open source then the open source movement would have a lot more money infused in it (open source is not free) and things would quickly change. More people would get certifications, more people would learn to support it through college courses.

In the long term, things would be different than they are now.

We have an eSafe gateway with the antimalware/antispam piece which does stop communications with known malware sites and botnet controllers. I point that out as a solution to this problem. There are others.

A large number of the e-mail viruses I see have links to a Google Groups site, which then play a video or have other embedded content that utilizes and exploit to try and load malware. Often, XP Antivirus and the variants. Many of these are showing up in Google results too.

What do you think are the odds that exploited documents will be published to these documents too?

Do you have remote access capabilities onto your Network? VPN, Citrix, not blocking GotomyPC? Has anyone at your company done the same thing, offering the competition direct access to your systems?

We run VMWare ESX in cluster mode with vMotion. We also have Citrix's XEN on a couple of boxes. We also have Microsoft's Hyper-V. Each has their pros and cons.

I'm not sure why using Hyper-V is a horrible decision. There are some excellent benefits to using it. For example, if you purchase 2008 Datacenter edition, you can run unlimited Windows 2008 guests on that one physical server. It is licensed per core, so load it with 6 way cores. You can end up with a very inexpensive solution to server consolidation, relatively speaking.

With Xen and VMWare you have to purchase each server guest a license. Microsoft doesn't allow the licensing benefits to flow into VMWare or Citrix XEN. In fact, you basically can't run SQL Server in VMWare ESX due to the insane license requirements of Microsoft. For example, if you go with SQL per processor license and give the VM Guest 1 of 20 cores on the server, you still have to license all 20 cores in your per processor license to be legal. Until recently, vMotion required each Windows Server guest to have a Windows Server license for each physical host, even if it on only one at a time.

Vendor lock in, baby.

>>cost so much is FDA regulations and the higher standards to which they are held

So is that why my wife's first insulin pump failed, was replaced, failed, was replaced over and over? From failed motors, the crappy plastic they used that broke, to the fact she spent over $5000 on a water proof device (to something like 6 feet) to "oops, we were wrong, sorry"? Where is the FDA here?

She switched to another vendor and it was the same story. The again, the pump motor would fail after several months, the plastic break, replacement after replacement. Then the Pod device. The consumables are much more expensive on this. The pods are cheaply produced, so sometimes they don't insert correctly. Sometimes one has to try 3 pods to get one which will work.

Somehow I don't think that FDA regulations are really worth a crap when it comes to consumer medical devices. The FDA even has rules against patching medical devices running Windows; http://lawfirmit.blogspot.com/2009/05/fda-rule-on-appying-windows-patches.html You have to get approval to patch, which takes around 90 days.

This is something the press would be screaming end of the Internet if they got their hands on it.

What's the reality? Is this easy to exploit and is the Internet going to come crashing down?

This makes me think of a probably not unique idea. Most places that ask my my phone number are the same places asking over and over again. Radio Shack, Toys-R-Us, and Sears for example. What would be great is to memorize one of their phone numbers from the phone book and always give them that. Perhaps a number from a different store. Let their telemarketers waste time calling their own stores.

I think we should adopt to using the right word, not modify the definition of an existing word.

Broadband existed when most people were on dialup. Many people had it too, in the form of their cable line for cable television. I basically means that the coax cable has a broad range of frequency bandwidth able to sustain multiple separate stations/channels.

DSL, thus, wasn't broadband initially. The term was adopted to it. High speed or not, Ethernet isn't technically broadband either. It's a protocol. Typically it runs over Baseband CAT 5 cable, but it could run over broadband Coax as well. So that cable hanging out of your router an plugging into your PC is Baseband.

We need to user the right terms. Use "I have high speed Internet" or "I had low speed Internet." A 128kb/s DSL line would be baseline low speed Internet in my opinion.

$21000000000/294000 homes=71428.57 per household.

That's just launch costs, right? Then you have yearly costs to keep the thing operational. Anyway, $71k over 50 years is $1428 a year not accounting for inflation or yearly costs.

Wow. I'm all for the idea, but the costs just make it seem wasteful. Put $21 billion solar panel and wind farms into production instead.

Are you implying that eBay stores are not "real resellers?" I was implying they are. It's a matter of opinion I suppose.

1 bit is all it takes. Just beam one bit using the Star Trek transporter into the heart of a human and you have a dead human.

Or another way; 0 bits. All humans already die. It is a built in feature. No add-ons are required.

I pay for SkypeIN and SkypeOut. It's a great deal. Unlimited Skype to Skype and 10,000 minutes per month to and from land lines. I have a real local phone number which displays on peoples caller ID if I so desire. Prices vary by locality, so check. It's about the same yearly as many people pay monthly for their cellular plan.

I have incoming calls redirect to my cellphone and office phone after so many seconds. You can load Skype up on your Windows Mobile, iPhone, and iPod touch with the Apple microphone headphones. While this is in no way a cell phone replacement, it's free minutes if you are near a good WIFI and need to place an outgoing call. There are physical wireless Skype Phones, but the quality is not near the level of a cell phone yet.

You can run Skype on many PC's at the same time and answer on which ever one you are sitting at. I have an ASUS EEE BOX PC at home wall mounted as an IPCCTV server, also running Skype. It's also running on my Laptop at work at the moment. My wife and I often video chat through Skype instead of using our phones. The audio is better quality than what my cellular provider offers.

Hopefully more people will see the benefits of the paid services and Skype will continue.

I think the article is right on the marker.

Did you know, one can copy the entire Firefox profile from one PC to another and from the new PC point the profile to this copied one and you have all the shortcuts, history, everything copied.

As an domain admin I can know a lot about my users by doing this, if I wanted to. I can log into any sites they have passwords save as for those are in my Firefox now too. (I should state now that I don't actually do this, other than with my own test profiles on multiple PCs to make a point.)

firefox.exe -profilemanager

So the solution? Be friends with TrueCrypt and integrate this into Firefox. If a user wants to, they can optionally convert their profile into a secure one. Then when they launch Firefox, they either can open the secure profile (valid truecrypt pwd) or the default profile (anything but the valid pwd.) The profile directory becomes a truecrypt volume mounted by firefox, but ideally without mapping a drive letter. Perhaps a junction point?

So two 64GB drives in RAID0, or even on just on different SATA channels are faster than one 128GB drive.

Spread the word! This will change database disk design for decades to come.

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I've got several OCZ 32GB SSD with the partitions aligned. Wildly faster for running my VM's off of. Windows boots in about 10 seconds onto a LAN. Don't really see a notable difference with my *small* database servers. That's likely because they load huge pages of the database into RAM and serve it from there. I have yet to try this on a large database server.