I couldn't disagree more with that statement, and not just for ideological reasons. By the time that Sun started really embracing open-source, Sun had been abandoned by everybody except for its longtime customers who already had a very substantial investment in the platform.

A lot of Sun's open-sourced projects attracted a great deal of attention by myself, and many others in the Sysadmin world. Projects like ZFS, and Xen/xVM made it pretty clear that Sun had some of the best people in the industry working for them, and that Solaris was probably worth reconsidering, even if it meant being coupled with Sun's expensive hardware (which is a drop in the bucket compared to the extra staffing costs associated with a high-maintenance server platform). Also, the existence of OpenSolaris meant that we could take the platform for a "test drive" on some old hardware before taking the plunge.

By the time that Sun had won us over, the writing was already on the wall w.r.t. the Oracle acquisition, and nobody would go near Sun with a 39 1/2 foot pole (which, as we've found out, was a perfectly justifiable paranoia).

Except that Google brought some reps from Citrix up onto the stage to demonstrate exactly that.

I actually thought that the Citrix demo had the potential to be game-changing. They almost completely divorced business applications from the platform that they run on, and used a dead-simple Linux-derived OS as the client. The idea that corporate users could deploy *any* app, regardless of the OS that it natively runs on to almost *any* end-user is pretty tantalizing. OS lock-in is suddenly no longer an issue, no software needs to be rewritten, and client maintenance got a whole lot simpler. It'd be hard to pitch a more appealing proposal to a corporate sysadmin/beancounter.

(Of course, you could take care of the caps lock thing at the terminal emulation level, by remapping an unused hotkey combination as a Caps Lock toggle. It's a non-issue, and I'm sure there will be other hardware that has the button included. Unlike iOS devices, the platform is open, which I suspect will be a very important thing to the corporate world, as vendors can customize hardware to fit their customers needs.)

It's one thing to complain about the rule of law being followed, but do you really give a damn about what some guys who were born 300 years ago thought?

Personally, I thought they were damn good ideas, but "sticking to founding ideals" for its own sake personally sounds like a horrible idea to me. The founding fathers were innovative politicans...not prophets.

[citation-needed]

Apple Basestations are marketed to consumers, but are assuredly not consumer-grade hardware. At the very very worst, they occupy a space between consumer gear, and the (MUCH) more expensive Cisco/HP stuff.

In other words, perfect for a small, 20-person business. Try to have enough overlap that you can lose an access point without catastrophically effecting the network until it can be replaced.

I'm not an Apple fanboy, and initially raised an eyebrow when I was asked to deploy an Airport-based network. However, after doing it, I'd absolutely recommend it to any organization that is on a budget.

Fortunately, they're both publicly-traded companies who are required by law to disclose their financials. Google and Amazon are both doing fine, and wouldn't simply pull the plug on any of their managed services if they wanted to retain any of their customers in the future, no matter how bad their financial situation might get.

You'd be better off writing a contingency plan for what your business will do if a plague of locusts arrives, or if the US is invaded by Zimbabwe. The idea of Google or Amazon going belly-up with no warning is completely and totally outlandish. You cannot control for every variable -- you're best off focusing on your most likely, and most easily manageable sources of failure.

Managers need to let go of their "control freak" mentality. More often than not, it hurts the people that they are supposed to be managing, and does nothing to improve productivity. (See Also: Lotus Notes. It's infinitely customizable, so there's really no limit to how bad it can get.)

In my experience, it's exponentially more likely for an internal network to be hacked than it is for Google/Amazon to have a major security breakdown or intrusion themselves (which has, as far as I know, never happened).

Google mines data so that they can display ads, not so they can learn your company's secrets. And, let's be honest. Unless you're sitting on the Cure For Cancer, Google or the Black Hat crowd probably don't care about your IPO.

Stop referring to all people as taxpayers. It's creepy.

I was pretty excited when I heard that Apple was releasing a new 12-ish inch laptop.

Back in the day, my 12" Powerbook was a full-featured, state-of-the-art machine crammed into a teeny-tiny lightweight chassis that also happened to have great battery life. I still own one, and use it regularly -- it's an absolutely fantastic, and very capable little machine; arguably the best small laptop ever produced.

5 years later, it's back, and.....the processor has a lower clock speed, there's less built-in storage, fewer ports (no Ethernet!), no optical drive, and the standard amount of RAM is barely sufficient for a modern OS. The battery is only (barely) better, and can't even begin to compete with the truly awesome battery life on the MacBook Pro line.

Yes, I get that it's thinner, lighter, and that the loss of the Firewire port and optical drive are not exactly a dealbreaker today. And although the Core2Duo is indeed a better processor than a G4, it's also not anywhere remotely near state-of-the-art, and 1.4GHz is the slowest-clocked machine I've ever seen to carry that architecture.

Good design is a very big deal in laptops for portability, durability, and usability, which is why I've been buying from Apple for so long. They have virtually no competition in this regard. However, the tech specs keep slipping further and further, and I'm finding it difficult to take Apple seriously as a hardware manufacturer. The 13" Macbook Pro is a beautiful machine, but is similarly anemic in terms of performance and features. I also own a Mac Mini, the current lineup of which is inexcusably overpriced and underpowered. Apple's also gotten into the habit of putting incredibly low memory caps on their machines. The new Airs go up to 4GB, which is adequate for today, but definitely not the future. My 2006 Mac Mini maxes out at 2GB, which is killing the performance of an otherwise great machine.

There's a difference between publicly refusing to speculate on the future, and reneging on previous promises. If Apple locked down OS X, there would be one hell of a lawsuit.

Or they could start buying them off of IBM, MIT, GE, Apple, Ford, Boeing, or any of the other companies who have at least 16.7 million addresses allocated to them.

I'll bite: The Zune was fine, and way better than the equivalent Apple products at the time. Microsoft's only misstep was attaching their own name to it. (And I say this as a happy Mac/iPod user)

Ronald Rivest might be an incredibly intelligent person, but he's still just one guy. Just because he thinks that internet voting is currently a bad idea does not make it a "fact"

(Also, the summary is light on details: The system was only being used for DC's ~900 registered overseas voters. Overseas voting is already notoriously insecure, as it's impossible to establish a legally-liable chain of custody of the ballot as it proceeds through the international postal system in a big fluorescent-yellow envelope marked "ELECTION MAIL" . Having done it once, I can also say that it's an incredible hassle.

The fact that DC put the system online a week before the election to test for flaws, openly acknowledged a successful attack, and took the system down suggests that they did the right thing. We should be cheering them, and helping to make sure that the thing is secure the next time they put it up.)