My former employer suffered more than one very serious work-stoppage (lost scores of manhours) over the whole LAN due to problems caused by a developer whose Windows Domain account (and primary login on the local PC) has Administrator rights on the Domain and (thus) on the local machine. (This is due to Devs *not* being experts in networking, security, application and service mgmt, windows domain policies, etc. If they were, they would not have needed a Windows SA, right?) It was only after this fiasco that the mgmt folks acceded to my plan.

• Put Dev boxes on their own network segment in their own Windows domain.
• Use GPOs for various security/software settings, including Windows Firewall rules.
• Give them VMs on local machines for development\local testing. (Cloning/Point-in-time images are AWESOME!)
• Give them VMs on the network for shared work/testing.
• Give them two accounts on their XP machines, one with elevated privileges. (Their 'admin' account)
• Have them use "RunAs" and their 'admin account' to elevate privs for tasks, like installing software and changing system settings

It was a lot of work to set up, and a lot of pain the first couple of weeks to train/handhold the Devs, but it started to really work. Oh, it should be mentioned we has somewhat unusually high security requirements due to being in the financial sector and handling customer credit/debit card data, etc. But, really, most of this was designed and implemented to actually improve work processes and uptime. And it did.

I was thinking pretty much the same thing. I suspect that there are a lot of overstimulated ADHD kids (people under 35) out there for whom silence is a pretty uncomfortable thing.

I don't use Facebook to expand my existing social network. I use it to have a sort of 'chat room' amongst my friends where we can keep each other updated on the things we are doing with our lives. It's a one-to-many 'sharing' environment. I post about the book I am reading. All my Friends can see that. Maybe someone is reading the same book and has a remark. Or they had meant to read it but forgot the name of it and my posting it reminded them. Or a thousand other options. I can say that I plan to go to that Goth/SM club tomorrow and since it's only Friends that can see that, it's cool - and maybe they want to go with me. But the point is, something like Facebook is a way to stay connected. To deepen connections. To know what is going on with each other without having to make 100 phone calls or address an email to 100+ people, etc. When people send me a Friend invite, I have an easy choice; is this someone I already know or someone I'm acquainted with that I want to know better *and* do I care what they are doing with their life? If yes, I accept the invite. If not, I mostly don't. I don't use Facebook to find old friends. If they are old friends, we probably drifted apart for a good reason - with I think exactly 2 exceptions out of 100+ on my list so far. So it makes perfect sense to me to want to have the option to NOT put up my pic or location to strangers. That said, I do think that having JUST the picture can be forced. That way I can confirm if this is the John Smith I think it is. But, for me, the real, true bottom line is this. GIVE ME THE FUCKING OPTION to control what information I see fit. If I clamp it down so that no one can find me, that might be exactly what I WANT.

Perhaps you'd prefer a nice game of chess or maybe global thermonuclear war?

You're absolutely right. Not many escapes from Earth, last I checked...

But that's great. The governments need to control the general population, not the terrorists. If they wanted, they could remove the causes for "terrorism" all over the world. But then what? Who will buy new weapons? Where will new targets for hostile takeover emerge or come from? From my perspective, they need terrorists to terrorize the general population and thus asure the continuation of certain forces.

What does it look like? The Sims with a cruel twist? Hey, maybe they'll release The Sims add-on... Or nr.4 will be called The SLims... No disrespect to the suffering, though. It just came to me.

You don't have to go far to encounter such stupidity. Slovenia, for example. A friend of mine, who studied law, was required to buy books in amount of 400 and up. Every school year or semester. That's crazy, but many schools require students to buy textbooks. Usually written by the same professors who later require them. I went to Computer and ELectronics college and we also had to buy all the books. THe only good thng about this system is you can ask the author of the book in person, if there 's something in it, that you don't understand :/

While I totally appreciate what it's like to have to expend some adrenaline to stop when I was not planning to, I think we all know that any accidents caused by Car A stopping and Car B hitting car Car A in the rear are completely the fault of the driver of Car B, in cases such as we are discussing.

If you are a) following at a safe distance and b) paying attention to the car in front of you, there's no reason to get into an accident. But most people follow too closely and or are doing other things with their attention, like daydreaming, texting, yelling at the brats in back, etc.

Whether or not that guy in Car A is overreacting and slamming on his brakes when he really does not need to is irrelevent to a conversation about the cause of such an accident. The guy in Car B screwed up.

But, our is a culture that wants to blame everyone else for what we create. *shrug*

Internet has advanced so much in our lives it has actually become part of it. If someone is unable to notice it, it's probably because his/her account is on Myspace ;) The sooner we adapt to that, the better. For someone to post such status, while also being a cop is crazy. I wouldn't want to meet that guy in the street.

Hehe, I know :)

Yeah? ;) I still have the same Windows XP I did when I met my girlfriend almost six years ago. Now, that could mean many things... Yes, I had lots of sex since then. I also partied a lot. But it wasn't all just fun and games. Oh wait, it was. I use this Windows for gaming. Which is probably one of the rest best reasons to use it. But it works fine. The difference probably is in the way you treat it. I am an administrator in a medium sized company and I'm in charge of a complete lifecycle of approximately 500 PC's. All XP or W2K. I have intimate knowledge of Windows (and my girlfriend, but let's leave that) and know, what I can do, not to break it. Since I use Linux for everything else, I am just fine.

Absolutelly right. We just have to wait and see. Unfortunatelly in the meantime, we'll have VMware. They are pricey and milking their customers, but they also deliver their goods.

It certainly is stable and enterprise ready. But, what is enterprise? Some, like Amazon made good use of it. Some didn't and are now worse off. And in our case, we can't yet, because we can't allow downtime on certain services. With Virtual Infrastructure 4 there will be new Fault tolerance feature included, which will allow the virtual machine to run on more hosts, and when one fails, the other takes over seamlessly. Without downtime.

It was the same with us. We could go for Xen and Novell, but when I talked to my superior, who is a cool guy he asked me, how comfortable would I feel, when something went south and entire company was offline. In such context, Vmware offerings look much better. Altough I have good experience with Novell support, I know that Vmware offers a better one for their products.