You're right, synchronous is definitely the better option for local fail-over. I was confused about which option was available in Standard Edition...which only supports synchronous.

Exactly. FWIW, he could also do asynchronous DB Mirroring with SQL 2008, and have pretty good fail-over if his POS software supports the necessary connection string options. I'm having a hard time understanding the option with VMWare. Is he talking about having two nodes with bare-bones ESXi (and no VMotion)? He's still going to need shared storage to bring the SQL guest up on the other node even without VMotion). But seriously, is he really having problems with uptime? I've seen single-node SQL Servers that have been up for a year or more without a single reboot....and that was even in the SQL Server 2000 days. A decent mid-range server with a few redundant systems (fans, drives, PSU, etc) should suffice.

Ditto. I recently bought a Mac Mini (mid 2011) model. Got the 500 GB Momentus XT at Best Buy on sale for $100. I notice a pretty significant increase in performance over the crappy stock 5400 RPM drive that comes in the Mini. I attribute this to the 7200 RPM, but I'm sure the 4 GB SSD cache also helps with the read speed. I already happen to have an 80 GB Intel SSD handy, but with the limited drive space and two drive bays in the Mini, I didn't really thing this would be a good fit. A 512 GB Crucial SSD goes for $780 GB on NewEgg right now (more than I paid for the Mini!), so the Momentus is a really nice compromise between performance and drive space. Your mileage may vary.

The Streamlined Sales Tax Project was supposed to solve (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streamlined_Sales_Tax_Project) was supposed to solve this. I don't believe every state has signed on yet, and having consulted for Revenue departments in 4 different states, you're right about the integration nightmare this is going to be. I'm not even sure if the revenue gained from taxing Internet sales will recoup the investment cost from system upgrades and rewrites.....projects that have the potential to span an entire decade, and not even be assured of success.

I happen to have an old Enorex box that uses an Alpha CPU. It was running Windows NT 4.0 on it when I got it (although it has since been switched over to Linux). The only way to get x86 Windows code running on this box was to use FX!32 from DEC, which was an emulation layer. You took a huge performance hit when trying to do this, and not all software worked correctly. Granted, things have come a LONG way since then, but I'm not sure that emulation/virtualization is the way that we'd want to go.

I've been wondering the same thing. What about SDK's? Will there be a separate version of Visual Studio strictly for ARM? I know Visual Studio is mostly targeted towards .NET, but for native apps, will you be able to compile ARM code on the x86?

XBox? DirectX?

Since you have to pair it with an existing BlackBerry for 3G connectivity, I'd assume that subsidized pricing can be ruled out....unless they offer it alongside phones with new contracts (much like AT&T giving out free Netbooks with new contracts).

"I've not considered having sex a goal"

Going on the assumption that you're male, I hope you do understand that sex is the goal of EVERYTHING that you do. It was one of Freud's basic pleasure principles. Sure the guy may have been coked up, but he did have some pretty good insights into the human psych.

Well that really doesn't answer the question....if we didn't go to war, what should we have done? Certainly we couldn't just do nothing.

"What about an entire Afghan society that can't make any progress because we invaded their country in order to go after a few terrorists?"

I can't think of any time during the past 30 years where the entire Afghan society was making any progress, especially under Taliban rule. It's not like they were on the road to economical and social recovery when the US invaded.

"There was more justification for invading Afghanistan than there was for invading Iraq, but that ain't saying much"

It's saying quite a lot actually. Are you suggesting that we shouldn't have invaded Afghanistan to put down Al Qaeda? If not, then what are you suggesting?

Sure about that? In 2009, defense accounted for 23% of the federal budget.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Federal_Spending_-_FY_2007.png

It's amazing how 90% of the people flaming Google about this haven't tried to actually visit google.cn for themselves to see this first hand. Even the big news outlets don't seem to have tried this.

The whole thing is actually funny, and I'm surprised that the Chinese government is fine with the manual-redirect. I think what Google did is very clever and is a big win for them.

"And this is important...in what significant way?"

In the way that it's the largest search engine getting to stay in the largest search market in the world. Maybe these things aren't important to you, but I think that the outcome of this would have a large impact on the tech industry as a whole.

As reported elsewhere, the problem also exist on earlier models as well.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84Lpt2YkF3Q