I would agree, being on your own is either something that appeals to you or it doesn't. I think it is fairly self evident in that the the fear of being without a guaranteed paycheck or the discontent of having to do things someone else's way will tell you soon enough which side of the fence you belong. I've been a successful consultant for more than 15 years and wouldn't want it any other way. That being said I've certainly worked for plenty of companies throughout my career and it's not horrible if you can do what interests you and like who you work with. It's also a great way to gain further education and pay the bills while you gather enough customers on the side to be able to support yourself. You will need a portfolio of sorts to show to potential employers so get to building, display what you know and even learn as you go but there needs to be some tangible examples of your work.

As an ex-VAR engineer who focused on Sun I can tell you we called Oracle the sales prevention dept. They changed the T's&C's to the point you were basically saying that if there is something wrong with an order it was your fault. State/Local gov had a very hard time with this. Also, as someone else mentioned they removed all support levels except for 24/7 Premium. If you decided not to buy support but wanted to get it a year or two later, say you decide to move a server from dev to prod, you have to back pay for support from the day the server was purchased! They also cut the product line substantially and did raise prices some but nothing outrageous, it was mainly the support that got you. I wouldn't say that most of our customers ran screaming from Sun hardware, we still sold a lot of it, but people are rethinking something they were quite comfortable not thinking about.

Well the real advantage is the computer can "press" the buzzer in a pico second. The poor human reflexes could never keep up.

Hmm, I stand, err, sit, corrected!

Yes but Solaris handles 100's of CPU's without any problem today. Linux and Windows, not so much.

That ought to do it. I just plugged my toaster into the network, now just let me turn it o.........

Not sure about the link to intelligence but I think you could replace 'rodents' with just about anything in this quote, "Sexually active rodents also seemed less anxious than virgins, Princeton scientists discovered." And I don't think it takes a Princeton educated scientist to figure that one out!

I believe newer cars don't really use much gas to start up. The question might be more about wear and tear as starting your car is fairly hard on the engine. Maybe not so much once it's warmed up but still a consideration.

Funny I think you'd have a hard time finding a more expensive bike than the ones they use in the Tour De France and I seem to recall a few hills in that race. Track bikes on the other hand have one gear and are not nearly as expensive. Granted, weight or the goal of reducing it is the basis for cost, your comment about lack of gears and being intended for flat ground is quite wrong. Modern road bikes have 20-30 gears to chooses from.

Thunderbird, Firefox, Word, VMware VI Client, nLite and I'm guessing Windows Update jumps in here and there.

Sounds fine if all my apps run in a single browser. Just another reason not to buy MS apps.

When we were looking for rings the jeweler showed me his and he had it made out of Tungsten. He mentioned that it was one of the hardest materials next to diamonds. It was heavy too! I was thinking Titanium as well but he said it would scratch fairly easily and couldn't be polished like Gold or Silver. Is this the case as you have found it to be? I would dig a Ti band as I'm a serious mnt. bike racer. P.S. a nice Ti frame can run as much as $5000.00 or more!