This made me laugh. It's so true on so many levels.

Are you sure? Citation? I am genuinely curious about this. But it doesn't seem to agree with my experience driving various automatic cars.

Consider moving your access 2003 executable into a cantral server-side VM, using VMWare View. Your VM can be Win XP with Access 2003 or whatever is needed to run that app, along with whatever weird hacks are needed on the client side. You could even use a hosts file for those server names if you want. Changes to the client image happen in one place for all users. Easy. And the users get to move on to Win 7 with newer office etc etc without worry of conflicts or convoluted configurations every time someone gets a new desktop, to support this one app. Clearly you'd prefer to get rid of that app altogether. Good luck with that! But if that doesn't happen, this could be your plan B. I've had success with it.

I don't think he's an idiot. Why the attitude?

Smooth pavement? I think when the AC poster wrote "normal" in quotes he was implying that it would require some modifications to handle the speed as well as the automation. But this wouldn't require anything magical.

Citation needed. Is there some limit around 200 where the physics change dramatically, like it's the speed of sound or something?

It seems you are referring to drag race tires? That's because they are engineered that way, and race teams can afford to throw them away after every run to get every .001s of speed. Not to mention that in some cases they handle thousands of HP. That doesn't mean they couldn't be engineered for longevity instead. Consider also Indycar or Nascar tires which go ~100mi at 200mph, under RACE conditions, and then only wear out because they are made so soft to begin with. Or whatever tires they use on the Bugatti Veyron. Z and Y rated tires are widely available. I don't think it's a stretch to think that a 200mph rated tire could be mass produced if there was some demand.

This, times 1,000. I'm amazed more people aren't talking about this.

All the cool BES security and management stuff is amazing, in theory. But in reality, BES is cumbersome, overly complicated, and downright unreliable, with crappy support. As just one particularly infuriating example: I used to run a BES server for about 100 users, and I couldn't migrate any Exchange mailboxes between mailbox databases because BES would corrupt the users' blackberry contacts. I had a ticket open with RIM support for well over a year, and now I've moved to new job, but AFAIK they never fixed that bug. When I complained through their sales channel at contract renewal time, their sales person said it was a feature request, and they couldn't be bothered. What IT department wants to support that? We like happy users, not angry users with broken phones and no help from the vendor. Forget not keeping up with new market trends -- RIM has driven away those who used to be its core supporters in what is supposedly its core market. And we're not coming back.

Because any competent IT manager realizes that a computer that's locked down yet works consistently for it's intended purpose is clearly better than a computer that's not locked down and is virtually non-functional.

They are middle school students!! 90% of their generic catch-all insults are "of a sexual nature." I'm guessing that, in their minds at the time, without having thought things through completely, they thought that calling the teacher a pedophile was no more serious than calling something they don't like "gay." IMO the conclusion you jump to is completely unfounded.

U3 enabled flash drives emulate a CD-ROM from the *hardware* level - it's not just software on the drive, but actually seems to appear on the USB bus as a CD-ROM as well as a flash drive. So a virus on a standard flash drive couldn't do this. Perhaps the contents of the emulated CD-ROM on a U3 drive could be hacked to load a virus, but that part of the drive is not user-writable in any apparent way, so it wouldn't be trivial.

He didn't "make anything up." If you're going to disagree, don't do it by being pedantic. The government took $78k, plus several thousand more, so let's call it $85k. That's 42.5% (while we're being pedantic) which most would agree is "half" when the word is used in imprecise terms, and even if you want to be technical about it that 7.5% inaccuracy doesn't invalidate his argument. It's not like it was actually only 10% but he was calling it "half."

Not likely, unfortunately. They'll just write it off as another technology change they don't understand, and get a new TV so they can keep watching Desperate Housewives.

I can't help but notice that, in in a thread suggesting the avoidance of money and "smoke and mirrors" investments, you've just suggested taking payment for work in... gold futures. :-)

If I had mod points, I'd have a hard time deciding whether to mod you Funny or Insightful! I agree 100%.

I work on cars sometimes as a hobby, but I'm sure I'd soon come to hate it if I had to do it for a living. It can be fun when you don't care if it's still not running at the end of the day, and you can come back to it tomorrow, or next weekend, or whenever.

But when you HAVE to do it, and QUICKLY, because the user/driver is complaining because they can't work/get to work until you get their email/starter fixed, and there are 10 more frustrated people in line behind them, it can eventually become somewhat of a drag. And you start to REALLY question why software/car companies have to make such simple things so damn much work to fix! (Seriously, though, why do they? I'd think car manufacturers, at least, could save some money on warranty work by designing cars to be more serviceable. Dell IMO does quite a good job with this.)

Only being able to get 3 years max of warranty/support probably doesn't fly well, either.

Really?? Outlook 2007 does of course have that functionality, as well as that same ability to set itself up automatically. Perhaps your Outlook was set up before your company moved you over to Exchange 2007, which made the automated setup possible.

I'm pretty sure he meant that his company network enforces a policy that instructs Windows to update - meaning he CAN'T change the setting. It also likely means he only gets updates that his company has released, so he might be spared from this one.