really.

" its stock price remains remarkably resilient and the company continues to turn a healthy profit"

That's not success, that's momentum. Under the current leadership, entropy will continue to take its toll.

Include all the awesome features everyone wants on the box art, and put an insert inside that reads something like "By the way, we disabled all those nice features for uh, security reasons or something. What did you expect? We're Sony, and that's the Sony Style."

Then they can include a root kit virus on the pack-in demo disc.

Finally. It was a stupid idea to begin with. I should be able to time-shift all my content without renting a crippleware box from the cableco. 2 months for china to make capture hardware, 6 month for an open source driver to mature, another 6 months for support to stabalize in mythtv, plus some time for it to make it into the distros. Maybe a year and a half before I can refresh my mythboxen. Yeah.

Noooo.....

Every time I kill off my "last" Symantec app, they buy something else I'm using. It takes them 12-18 months to kill a product, and it takes me 24 months to swap it out.

Read your mail from a VM. Hand them a jump drive with your .vmdx & .vmx files, and see if they can figure out what to do with it.

Note this is purely for entertainment value, since that is about all an 1d10t wanna-be it staffer is good for. The reality is, they either A: want you to work from home, and will provide whatever is required to do so, or B: They don't want you to work from home, so don't work from home.

First off, no redundant PSU because they "don't have the capacity"? You not only need a UPS, you need an electrician.

Second, no sizing data? What is the peak load at startup per rack? What is the average running load per rack?

What would be your ideal runtime?

How many racks?

Peak Load will tell you how large a UPS you need (in KVA), Average load and run time will tell you how many expansion batteries you need to buy.

Buy the management card for your UPS and configure it to send you email alerts. While you're at it load the client software on your VMs so they know when to gracefully shutdown.

Ask your electrician if you need 3phase or 2phase (my money's on 2 for you)

Then get the electrician to install enough dedicate power circuits to drive your new UPS(s). While you're at it, ground the racks.

Then call your AC guy, because once you've done enough math to buy a UPS you'll have enough data to correctly size the AC in your server room.

When you find out management doesn't care about extended recovery time and data loss, and they shoot down the CAPEX for your UPS project, you can focus on things that really matter: good backups and your resume.

I see this happen all the time, just not usually with something as high profile as a new movie release.

Usually its some CAD/CAM or engineering package secured by some vendor customized variation on FlexLM. Every time they buy a new seat, rev the version, or a product comes up for renewal, we can expect an extended service outage while the vendor tries to issue a valid set of keys. More often than not, the first set they issue doesn't work, the support group isn't authorized to issue keys, and the group/individual that can issue keys doesn't work on days that end in Y, or only during banking hours in india.

Keepass works well, and has been ported to almost every platform. Win, Lin, Mac, iphone, droid, winmo, even the old fashioned blackberry.

http://keepass.info/

Windows 7 will be a huge success for home users that bought Vista boxes and are in desperate need of relief.

I've been running it in an experimental vm since RC, and now thats its RTM I can honestly say it doesn't suck as bad as Vista.

However, it still has the same core flaw that kept Vista from passing our initial predeployment testing. IT staff can't run it. Sure, you can surf the net on it, or RDP into a machine you can actually do work on, but as an IT person its a pretty useless environment to try to work in. adminpak hacks from vista aren't as useful as they used to be, and the rsat is pretty limited unless you've magically replaced every last server with windows2008R2 since last week. (which BTW, you can't because Windows2008R2 doesn't support ANY shipping version of exchange).

If you can somehow bypass IT and give it to end users, particularly the dolts that only run 3-4 apps in their entire work day yet somehow have fantastically overpowered workstations, they might just like it. But then you get back to the original problem: how do you support an OS in deployment that you can't run in IT.