...longer than a search query in Google. And then you reach for your terrible Bluetooth keyboard/dock with it's equally-terrible leatherette cover and try to juggle the thing on your lap, all the while wondering why you didn't just get a thin laptop or a netbook.

get a $2.99 a month VPS running whatever flavour of *nix you want. I have two of them. I use one for a proxy (for hulu.com access; I'm in Canada) and my personal websites. The other is for friends and family websites; both are from different providers, both run MaraDNS for redundancy (ns1 and ns2).

Matrix has been re-releasing the games at full pop ($49!) with minor-to-moderate bug fixes and a few enhancements. I can see how that can fly with newer games in expansion packs (with arguably more work in creating new assets, campaigns, etc.), but 10-15 year old games? They should just release the source code and stop milking cash out of an ancient game series.

And as if that's enough money to shut them up too. They'll be zero-day'ed before the check clears.

I know this is an obvious troll but you really have no idea what you're talking about. For a consultant, you're at the mercy of the billable hour, of which there's a finite amount in any given week. What this means is that there's a real opportunity cost associated with every job you take on, and it has to be profitable for the business to function, just like any business, and that means margins: you need to bill out enough to cover your own salary, other people's salaries (we have bosses and accountants too), expenses (who do you think picks up the tab at lunch?), plus have enough leftover to turn a profit. Some consultancies turn more profits than others, like any other business, but a consultant's billable rate != consultant's hourly salary.

A friend of a mine recently left RIM. He was high-up/involved enough to know that RIM's losing all their big accounts because a) nobody's buying Blackberries on their own; everyone's buying an iPhone or an Android phone b) executives know this, so it's cheaper for them to have their staff buy the phone they want, and expense a percentage of their data/voice plans to the company instead.
I will say that from a stability/security/durability perspective, you can't beat Blackberries: being able to remotely brick a phone, knowing that their phones have been built with security in mind, and having personally dropped various Blackberries I've owned down flights of stairs, backed over it with my car, and stepped on it, only to have cracked the screen once, is proof of this, IMO.

*whooosh*

I buy business machines from a local, privately-owned retailer: I get the same 3-year next day warranty that big boys give, quality Intel motherboards/CPUs with Kingston RAM; quality StarTech PSUs and cases, assembled by knowledgeable technicians.

If/when there's a hardware issue, I drop it off, they handle the RTM and have in-stock spares to get the machine up-and-running again quickly. Sure beats going through the usual scripted interrogation with a Dell rep on the other end of the line or having to ship it back.

Best of all, no bloatware.

Why not just grab a fit-PC2? http://www.fit-pc.com/web/

EVERYBODY sells cheap Linux instances and it's not going to stop, but what I suspect is that Amazon will eventually restrict outgoing SMTP traffic to only the Simple Email Service hosts (much like ISPs do) in order to funnel/filter spam before it leaves their network.

Sigh. Blacklist Nazis. I just put up three new EC2 instances tonight for my clients: one's running a maintenance tracker Website for a construction firm, the other's for a realtor, and the third is for a recruiting firm. . All of them send out email now using Postini's smarthosts to send mail but I'll definitely be looking into this new Amazon service as an alternative. However, If everyone blacklisted like you do, my legitimate (and very much wanted) email notifications would never get through.

It really is a nice product. During a recent "outbreak" of Conficker (all machines were patched thankfully and not vulnerable), AVG did jack, MSE cleaned it up immediately. We're moving away from AVG for all deployments; too many missed viruses (see, "Every Fake Antivirus in the wild since 2009").

Was just about to write an identical comment. The summary read like someone who's never programmed before; I stopped reading after that and assumed the article was bunk. Sounds like I was right.

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.