It's a decent product, takes some mucking about in the station settings to get it just right, but man, bloat-city. I can't believe how much crap they keep piling on: there's now an AVG "gadget" that floats on the desktop with amazingly intuitive features like a big "Fix" button. Umm, really? A gadget for anti-virus?

Also, this isn't the first issue: we had dozens of SBS 2003 servers run out of non-paged pool memory and crash. Guess what the culprit was? AVG's network IDS driver from AVG 8 that didn't properly uninstall after an upgrade and had to be manually removed. That was alot of fun troubleshooting. So we've decided not to renew any clients with it. It's a shame: it was so promising prior to version 8: it was lightweight, inexpensive, centrally-managed (essential for businesses), etc.

I game, but I'm about a year behind the curve on most games, sometimes two, because I'm generally busy doing other things. However, the benefit of this is pretty substantial: my "new" tower exactly two years ago (Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM) with video card (HD4850) was $800, and I'm just working through 2009 games now (Fallout 2, Dragon Age: Origins) that cost me less than half the price than the original retail sticker price. Not only that, but the games are fully patched, there's plenty of mods and community information out there about both games, so I can play through the story without wondering if it's going to crash, perform poorly, or hit a logic goof on some quest that ruins the rest of the game for me.

I love Linux/open source as much as the next guy, but c'mon: Small Business Server 2008 R2 on a Dell/IBM server with big SATA disks and hardware RAID1 and all the CALs you need would be about $5000 with tape backup.

Comes with Active Directory, Exchange, Sharepoint, Remote Web Workplace (Outlook Web Access and terminal services/RDP to the desktops), quotas, roaming profiles, group policy, you can throw Blackberry Enterprise Express on it if they require smartphones. Simple to manage, reliable.

It's pretty hard to beat for a ~75 user network; have dozens of clients running SBS 2003 and 2008 and it's a no-brainer.

I'd stay away from web hosting in-house though: unless you have some back office integration concerns, there's no value to having your website running off your office's Internet connection (think DoS or web vulnerability and the added complexity of another server configured in a DMZ) for the average brochure website, a $10-20 a month web hosting package is more than sufficient.

Damn, that really blows: drop.io saved me a lot of giant attachment woes from my FTP-challenged clients out there. Any good alternatives? drop.io was great because the interface was simple (literally create a unique drop.io URL and click Upload) and didn't require registration.

I felt the exact same way until I stumbled across Project Reality, a Battlefield 2 mod. If you can get past the 2005 graphics (I don't find them bad at all, actually), you're in for surprise:

Honor system: you can't spawn rape. Kick/ban in effect; noobs can't fly aircraft or vehicles if they don't know what they're doing; there are training servers for that, kick/ban in effect.

Teamwork: No really, you can't win the game by yourself. The scoresheet rewards those who provide team assistance; a good medic or squad leader can easily have the top score. on that note, you have to join a squad; almost all require you to use VoIP. All heavy assets below to squads, first come first serve, so some noob can't take a chopper and crash it into the ocean every time it respawns; you need the heavy and logistics squads to run troop transport and drop supply crates -- you can't build a Forward Observation Base (FOB) where you can respawn without crates; you can't deploy TOW or .50 CAL emplacements without two supply crates.

Moderation: at least in the servers I play in, there's always at least one player/admin in the server at any one time enforcing everything I just mentioned. And no, they're not assholes, they do a great job keeping the game going.

I've played entire maps, completely engrossed and satisfied in the game (even when your side loses a round), without having fired a shot -- it's actually frightening moving up some dark streets with your squad trying to take an objective when you hear the "clankety clank" of a tracked vehicle and the Cobra attack chopper squad just got shot down.

Which was released over a year ago. For those of you wanting to do syslog email alerts, grab the latest .deb from Debian Squeeze.

Egress filtering at the perimeter FTW. It's amazing what people let *out* of their networks...

in an "open" LAN environment: an exploited machine sets up a share, emails links to others in the contact list, remote exploit ensues. But who's allowing egress (outbound) SMB, WebDAV (at least not to a whitelist of remote hosts) on their network? Putting Windows Firewall up on all the workstations to drop ingress SMB traffic (with a few host exceptions for those pushing out updates via SMB) would be a smart thing to do as there's really no reason for workstations to be sharing files in a network with file servers.

Pick a random day in a random month, choose a password like, "Expense Report due today!". All you need to remember is the month and day.

1. Could be just a Tiger thing, but TAB doesn't cycle through OK and Cancel on native pop-up modal menus.

2. Minimizing kills ALT-TAB's Window focus; you get the empty Application Bar of Shame (tm) while the application window you actually care about cowers below, requiring (yet another) mouse click to restore.

Nice! Although 1/32 time was not as cool as I thought it was going to be.

have you looked at the source? All the white space has been removed; it needs to be reformatted.

As it stands now, the TFA might've just wrote:

$(".notation").css('background-image','url(/img/screw-you-slashdot.jpg)');

You mean, in our tidy little world of 1s and 0s, where bugs don't exist, computers work perfectly, just like how Hollywood portrays them? Time to come to grips with reality. The World Isn't Perfect (tm), film at 11. People will continue to get pwned on their computers, just like how convenience stores will continue to get robbed, and how funds will be embezzled, and assets seized by a coup, and on and on.

Have a look at stunnel (stunnel.org): it's a generic SSL wrapper for TCP connections. Found this Google forum post where it's being used specifically for MFP and scan-to-email via Google's SMTP servers: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?tid=1780781e814d05e6&hl=en

This is why I use Postini and tell it to drop any email with mail from *@mydomain.com because unless you have an off-site mail server (for your Web site or whatever) sending out mail from *@mydomain.com, you should never see an email from your domain come into your network from the outside; it would never leave your internal mail server.