Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh. In other news, scientist have proven that sticking your hand in a blender may produce dexterity issues down the road.

Look at Citrix XenServer5. Take an awesome open source product. Add some awesome features closed source, sell it.

On the FOSS adoption side without service contract:

My boss is terrified of having something go wrong while the people that know what they are doing are out of the office. If there is not a 1800 number to call if it breaks, or requires normal operation beyond the remaining staff's knowledge level, he ain't doing it. Spend the money he says.

Rightfully so, in the event that several people were simultaneously hit by the same bus or were on the same plane that crashes. Now you have a free solution that is completely awesome but without some serious documentation (previous guys used google, experience, trial and error) you're up a creek.

I know, I know, a real IT person would document the hell out of it. Unless they were jumping from project to project with a large queue and no end in sight...then not so much.

I think the guy was talking about infiltrating the command-control network and commandeering the robots.

On the corruption side of things, he with the most money wins. Do you think anyone in Iraq can outspend Exxon? It could be argued maybe that Saudi interests could outspend Exxon, but its not like those guys agree on anything enough to form a viable plan of action...sort of.

I think as far as buying influence America has proven the most susceptible and the most influential simultaneously. You wouldn't need to buy the programmers when you can buy their bosses boss, or just the boss of all of the operators anyway.

Sorry for the late reply. Windows RDP only shares app memory as well as the application does. So maybe shared libraries get loaded once, but application data like a cache-glut of email and calendar items are process specific. That is the majority of the problem with Outlook. People that have 3000 items in their inbox and IT bosses without the backbone and/or policy backing to nuke 'em.

XenServer5 has a mode that is essentially custom made for this. It "streams" the OS and applications from a single image to multiple VMs. Clients connect to the VMs via RDP on thin clients. They're blending some of the Citrix Metaframe stuff with Xen VM and some apparently something else for the storage layer. There are a few modes for storage, one writes changes locally to attached storage on the VM Host. Another uses a RAM Disk. I think the last streams back to a difference/snapshot on the central SAN/NAS. From their propaganda, which I kind of like, you can upgrade an application, say Acrobat Reader or even AutoDesk stuff and it gets pushed to the ppl on reboot. The only issues I've had with RDP thin clients (Neoware/linux, now HP) is attaching peripherals other than a keyboard and mouse. We have managed to put cash drawers and receipt printers on them though. Had to do some custom scripting to get the terminal server to act correctly though. It also occasionally gets pissed off with thumb drives on public machines. You still don't save much on hardware with any large workloads. Its not like that 150MB instance of Outlook gets any smaller on a VM, you just have multiples of it on a single server.

Just by looking around on the road you can tell people are chomping at the bit to drive a tiny tin can looking car, especially if that car is also slow as hell. In fact, the less likely (real or perceived) someone with boobs will give it a second look, the better.

Wait, scratch that, the exact opposite is true.

How about something between the Tesla Roadster and the Smart car. A mid-sized sedan style vehicle that is a plug-in hybrid with a constant RPM diesel generator when needed. Or fuel cells whenever Hydrogen refueling becomes a reality.

0-30 in 6.5 seconds? Sheesh. Better buy a dorky bumper sticker right off the showroom floor. This will give the people waiting behind you at the green light something to laugh at while they try furiously to pass you.