Mechanical keyboards only require more force to use if you are using them wrong. As you depress the mechanical switch, there is a tactile click as the switch engages but before the key bottoms out. A proper touch typist will begin to let up on the pressing down motion as soon as that click is felt. There's no need to mash the keys all the way to the bottom.

The other reason that mechanical keyboards can feel tiresome is that people do not position their wrists properly (keep them off the desk!), or fail to tilt the keyboard.

If your mail system doesn't strip out executable content from attachments (especially the low-hanging fruit like EXE, DLL, SCR, etc.) -- then your IT folks need to be beaten with a clue bat.

Heck, that rule should have been in place almost two decades ago at this point once the various VBS / SCR trojans first started hitting mail user's inboxes.

Modern versions of Linux - you don't need "noatime" for ext4. The "defaults" uses "relatime" by default, which does a fake atime and doesn't break applications that are looking for atime.

I've taken vendors to task for making changes to their site that required that I allow dozens of sites. They had a simple choice - fix things, or I take my business elsewhere.

If you don't complain - then they will keep doing what they are doing.

You're young. Early PCs cost 4-5k. Individual hard drives were in the $1000 range back in the 80s.

For someone who absolutely needs 10TB of zero-wait storage in a 2.5" form factor, 4-5k is not a big deal. Because pretty soon it will be $2000, then $1000, then $500.

Inexpensive enterprise SSD is having a big impact on how you spec out servers now. Do you build something with a bunch of 15k RPM drives in a RAID 0+1 array, short-stroked and end up with about 1TB of useful space? Or do you simply put 2x1TB in a RAID-1 array in a much smaller unit?

I paid about $650 per drive last week for 1TB enterprise quality SSDs. I expect them to be below $400 by this time next year. By 2016, I suspect you will not be able to buy a 15k RPM SAS drive as the enterprise SSDs are crushing them from above on price/performance.

(shrugs) your IT is definitely stuck in the 2000s (i.e. 5+ years ago).

Cost per TB (raw storage, the hardware to hold the storage, plus the backup tapes / disks) for bulk storage - is definitely more like $800-$1000 per TB these days and not $10k. The sweet spot for bulk storage these days is the 3TB 3.5" enterprise SATA drives at about $230 each. Add in the loss of capacity due to RAID + server costs and you're at about $500/TB of actual storage.

Primary storage is still much more expensive at $1500-$2000 per TB. But primary storage is using SSDs (around $1/GB) or 15k SAS drives (about $0.35/GB to $0.50/GB). And not the relatively inexpensive 3TB enterprise drives at $0.08/GB.

After all those years of the big sweaty one Nadella is just the breath of fresh air that MSFT needed!

I'll believe that once they spin off some divisions and simplify licensing costs for corporate users. And release all of their applications on Android + iOS + OS X.

This is just a retrenchment. Their game plan is still "lock-in lock-in lock-in", also known as "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".

In practice, SSDs have only 20-100x the IOPS of a similar number of spinning platter drives. Which is still a huge improvement, but not three orders of magnitude (1000x). The bigger advantage is that when you have more workers accessing the drive, latency performance doesn't dive off a cliff like it does with spinning platter drives. It instead degrades gracefully on the SSDs.

SSDs are definitely edging 15k SAS drives out of the market. SSDs do everything at 15k SAS drives can do, with at least an order of magnitude more IOPS/drive, for only about 2-4x the cost of the 15k SAS drive. And putting a writeback SSD cache in front of a spinning platter drive array is even more economical.

A powered-down SSD that has been written once should be able to retain data for ~10 years or so. Longer if kept in a cool place.

Nope. Most MLC SSDs will lose their data in about a year and the TLC SSDs in about 6 months of being powered off. (Don't confuse older flash media which was probably SLC with newer MLC/TLC media. Or which had larger feature sizes.)

As the size of the feature that stores your bits shrinks, so does the archival lifetime before something bad happens to one or more of the bits. That holds true for everything from tape, to hard drives, to CDs to flash drives.

Also incorrect assertion that drives don't go faster than 7200 (there are 15k drives, just they are pointless for most with SSD caching strategies available).

With Enterprise SSD drive prices hitting $1/GB (granted some are still $2-3/GB), the days of 15k RPM drives are definitely numbered. You get 50-100x the IOPS out of SSDs compared to the 15k RPM SAS drives. That means for a given level of IOPS that you need, you can use a lot fewer drives by switching to SSDs.

I'd argue that if you are short-stroking your 15k SAS drives to get increased IOPS out of the array, it's past time to switch to enterprise SSDs.

Using rdiff-backup, rsnapshot or rsync across the LAN via SSH in a "pull" configuration is the safest. The server pulls the files from the client PC. Alternately, you could do the above in a push configuration and limit where the origin PC can write to on the backup server. Even in a "push" configuration, I don't know of any malware currently capable of figuring out that there is an rdiff-backup script which stores data on a different server.

The server then sends files to tape / disk / offsite.

Basically - you need to have a centralized backup solution with multi-generation removable media.

For immediate restores, you pull the files back off the backup server. The next level after that is pulling files off of removable media which has been kept offsite or disconnected.

microsoft is one price and you get a server and tools and all the features

That's a good one, go ahead and pull my other leg while you're trying to spin that for Microsoft.

Microsoft licensing is a nightmare. Just look at the segments for the desktop operating system. Or try to figure out which version of MS Office you need and whether a volume license will save you money (and whether you'll be in compliance). The server-side is no different with the different restrictions on the different variants of Windows Server, SQL Server, etc.

(They're still a babe in the woods compared to some other vendors like Oracle, but they're trying to catch up.)

That meme "security through obscurity" only really applies in cases of improper reliance on "security via obscurity", once the secret is known - the system is insecure and anyone can access it.

Examples of this would be "hand rolled encryption algorithm that we hide in a black box", "secret handshakes", "back doors which are left unlocked".

I'd argue for Seafile as another option. It does what it says on the tin (file sharing / sync) and does it well.

Short answer: no it's not possible to detect that with the current system

The slightly longer answer is either browser pinning of certificates, or better, DANE. With a system like DANE, it's much harder to impersonate large swathes of the domains like you can today.