No wonder I didn't get the cucumber joke in your signature! It's obviously an error only present in the female model.

You're sort of arguing my point for me and trying to disagree at the same time.

I think the *person* that lets that kind of stuff happen is to blame -- not the tool. It sounds like an awful lot of people here are bashing Filemaker because it isn't being used for it's intended purpose. I'm merely making the point that it's the idiot trying to use a hammer to bust up pavement when a jackhammer is more suited to the job.

If you're letting your superiors get away with driving the choice behind inferior tools for a given job, well... can you really blame the tool? Maybe the person in charge of development isn't making their case properly or management is way out of line. But I don't think the tool is to blame in those scenarios.

If you're the type of person that does "development projects" than yeah, Filemaker is a severely misguided choice of database software. You aren't the intended market for that product.

It's meant to make ad-hoc databases on-the-fly (minutes or hours, not days). The right tool for the right project and all that. It's strength is in letting someone with little technical know how juggle data in ways that a spreadsheet can't.

Bash Filemaker all you want, but it does what it's intended to. It's almost like the equivalent to a one-off scripting language with a GUI and database backend. I find it invaluable in throwing together quick databases with customer data for various print routines. I've yet to find a tool that can do it as well, even with the horrible printer support Filemaker has.

I bet the netbook market has their attention. I can walk into a Target, Best Buy, or Wal-Mart and purchase a sub $300 netbook loaded with Linux. That's damn near the cost of Vista Ultimate -- sans computer.

Process Explorer is definitely a good tool to use for troubleshooting purposes. I find it invaluable when trying to view DLL and/or file usage for a given process. The process target is pretty slick too: drag a target onto a window and the controlling process is highlighted.

There are a slew of other sysinternals tools as well, many of them would probably be perfect for troubleshooting system bottlenecks.

This is just FUD meant to scare people.

Depending on your position in an organization, there is a good possibility you've been tasked with snooping on someone as part of your job. At the very least, many of you have probably been asked to help a member of management snoop on someone.

How many people monitor internet traffic at their company? How many people are in charge of sensitive DB's? Call monitoring?

Snooping on employees has become the norm in organizations since any technology that enables it has been developed. As much as I hate to admit it, there really is no expectation of privacy when you are using resources that are owned by someone else.