if you're going to sync nightly anyway, why bother with a cloud service? just sync at night.

PerconaDB is a drop in replacement for MySQL. If you don't know who Percona are, you're missing out on some magic - these guys are MySQL tuning and recovery experts. I'd trust this over MariaDB - never even heard of MariaDB until I saw this article. http://www.percona.com/software/percona-server/downloads/

If you have any expectations of maintaining confidentiality for yourselves or your clients, a cloud service is not for you. All cloud providers make claims as to the privacy of your data - when put to the test they'll hand it over to the wrong people in a heartbeat.

I'm assuming no one has yet noticed that the $99 fee is not going to last forever. From Microsoft's sysdev portal:

Microsoft is pleased to announce that, for a limited time, VeriSign is offering the ‘Microsoft Authenticode’ Digital Certificate at a substantially reduced price by following the link below.

Moreover as others have mentioned here, it's not guaranteed that any hardware manufacturers will include the capability to register one's own keys. I certainly haven't heard of any yet.

Ain't that the truth.

In a recent interview with an Iranian Linux publication, RMS had this to say about the very issue addressed here - it's an opinion I share.

"LR: What's the best way to advocate Free Software? Some Free Software users engage in technical debates with Microsoft and Apple fans, trying to convince them GNU/Linux is more powerful. Another group focus on philosophical and cultural aspects of Free Software and try to make people care about their freedom. Which of the two mentioned approaches are more effective?

RMS: They are both "effective" but they lead to different results.

If you convince people that some free software is technically superior, they might run some free software, but they will remain ready to use nonfree software in the areas where that is technically superior. They will continue to judge an important question based on superficial issues. This is just a partial success.

However, if you convince people that they deserve freedom, they will start rejecting nonfree software whether it is technically inferior or technically superior, because they will see that free software is ethically superior. They will understand the important question and judge it right. This is a full, deep success.

Another weakness of technical arguments is that nontechnical people probably won't care about them at all. But they can understand ethical arguments. Ethical arguments are the only way we can convince nontechnical people to become free software supporters.

I figure that users can judge for themselves whether program A is more convenient than program B. So I don't try to convince them about that sort of question, except when someone has preconceptions about free software and has not tried it. I focus on talking about freedom. "

Their GIT was updated as recently as last month. I'm excited!

I recently resumed using WindowMaker and I've been asking myself why I stopped. My current desktop consists of WindowMaker's 0.95 GIT snapshot and various XFCE components (filemanager, CD burning utility, etc) in addition to the usual mature selection of apps for every day use. WMFire even supports multiple cores (one dockapp per core looks really nice on new systems). Menu is all set up using the XDG standards. I'd say I have all the functionality I have under GNOME 3, though it of course requires some preconfiguration. I even found my old theme from 10 years ago. Hee!

Check out the newest 0.95 GIT snapshot. Its wmmenugen utility generates the menu from the contents of /usr/share/applications. Quite nice.

I doubt the iPad is going to be sturdy or rugged by any stretch of the imagination.

I've been using the HP EliteBook 8540w and it's been hard to destroy. I ran an HP demo unit through the mill too (dropped it from six feet on all corners, etc) - it's rated for military use, and I'm pretty sure it's one step below the ruggedized laptops you can get with armor plating.

A small 25 user company would best take advantage of Windows 2008 Small Business, which allows for up to 75 users and includes both Exchange and SharePoint. After that you only deal with OEM licenses of Windows. Outlook is optional, as Exchange provides capable webmail services, but again, Office Small business edition provides reasonable pricing for a small shop.