Webfaction.com - $9.95 monthly (cheaper with longer commitment).

Run by serious techies. Nginx as a frontend-server, Apache/whatever you want on the backend. MySQL, Postgres, whatever for a DB. Python (Django is a one-click install), Ruby, whatever. Long-running processes. Cron jobs. Better-than-average admin panel.

All in all, a great hosting company for smaller sites.

I'm not a shill, just a happy customer. I have several customers' websites there.

A little more specifically: if there was prior art pertaining to Apple's patent, then the patent itself can be held to be invalid. If the patent is invalid, then there cannot be infringement. That extra step in the middle is important.

When we bought our house (2003) the guy helping me thought I was insane to pull dual CAT5e to each room for phone/data (we have a great crawl space) and 8(!) CAT5e to my new, detached office. But we're in Sebastopol, CA (in Russian, Sebastopol means "gopher") and the little f*ckers have already chewed into the Schedule 40 PVC conduit and destroyed 4 of the 8 CATe cables.

You can never have too many extra cables / conduits. Cable is cheap, retrenching is expensive.

One step beyond this: Use Ultra VNC's Single Click mode (free). Set up the config file to automatically connect to your listening VNC port. I've fixed email in Paris, my sister (and her machine) in Tucson, and a niece in Sydney, Australia. All they do is download a 200KB EXE file from my website. I even have Office 1 and Office 2, so if I'm in my wife's office they just click on that. The whole thing takes less than ab out 30 minutes to setup and no one else ever has to deal with anything complicated.

The first thing that came to mind was a classic Cold War movie called Seven Days in May (1964). There was a shadowy group within the Pentagon called ECOMCON. Watched the movie and see if any parallels jump out at you.

This.

My wife and I have dealt with all 4 of our parents passing away, and the one thing that is certain is that as soon as the bank/brokerage/whatever knows that the primary account holder is dead, they go hypervigilant. Either have the various accounts and safety deposit boxes in joint ownership, with rights of survivorship, or have unambiguous beneficiaries set for all for your/their accounts.

The courts can take months or years to get things straightened out, but if you need the money to keep paying the mortgage on their house you may not have that much time.

One last thing, make sure that they have given Medical Power of Attorney and Full Power of Attorney to one(!) trusted child / friend while they are still legally competent to do so! Almost worse than losing your parents altogether is watching a 6-way train wreck happen as people begin fighting over the spoils ... before there are any spoils to fight over.

It can get ugly. Be prepared.

The most over-the-top DB God I know started in Pick-land (ca 1972?). Although he does (is forced to?) use SQL nowadays, he thinks in ways that do not come out of any SQL DBA handbook. As a result he gets DBMSs to do things that are ... unnatural.

He is currently doing some data-cubing stuff for us that I didn't think could be done with something less than a DOD budget. He says his touchstone is thinking in Pick and then 'translating' to SQL.

I still think that the 2 missing courses from any CS degree program are 1) how to debug, and 2) history of computing.

I snorted coffee through my nose when I saw: I read the internet for the articles.

When I left Tymshare (as an employee back in 1978) I told them they could call for help, but that the amount I would charge was based on who had been working on (i.e. f*cking with) the code since I left. I quoted $50/hour (remember, 1978), but there was one person who was a six-dimensional train wreck, and I said if I had to fix any of his bugs it would be $10/line of code.

Sure enough, about 9 months later they called. It was Train Wreak Guy® and it cost them about $30,000 for 3 days of my time to de-f*ck the database code.

Because I had told them ahead of time what it would cost there was no argument. I got my check and they were happy.

You must know my sister! She went on for 45 minutes about what she did and did not want, but then said it just *had* to be available in pink! I was thinking of getting her a cheapo Toshiba and can of spray paint.

I don't know where this "30 minutes" number came from. Maybe it was 30 minutes today, but all together it was at least 2 or 3 days, maybe even 4.

It's interesting to note that the only reason it took them that long was because the jury foreman was the only hold out in favor of Oracle. Apparently he was the one responsible for many of the questions that the jury kept sending to the judge.

Anyway, glad this is (almost) over. The only real thing left is for Judge Alsup to determine if the APIs are copyrightable at all. My personal bet is that he will rule that they are not and that this will drive a stake through the heart of Oracle and (hopefully) Larry Ellison.

But as PJ at GrokLaw keeps telling us: never make a bet on a legal ruling.

I'm about 2 blocks south of town and I figure we'll see this in a few decades or so.

... what a bunch of maroons!

Oh God! The flashbacks are killing me! Back in the mid-70's I worked for Tymshare (sister company/parent/?? of Tymnet) doing load testing on a project called OnTyme (commercial email). I was hip-deep in the Tymnet protocol trying to record and then re-create realistic pseudo-user-loads from different points in the country. Massive PITA.

We have a niece in Australia who is using HideMyAss.com with Netflix and Hulu and she says it works great. Her boyfriend is German and he tested it at home before meeting her Down Under. They have proxy servers all over the place, so this doesn't just work for content on U.S. servers.

HMA is under US$7/month if you do a yearly contract. A lot easier/cheaper than setting up/maintaining your own.