"The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it."
P. J. O'Rourke

Spamhaus has gotten into bed with big companies and they tell everyone to ignore all email from anyone using a cable modem.

Yes, a conspiracy against those oppressed cable modem users is obviously the most reasonable explanation. The Spamhaus PBL is a great list, the ham/spam ratio on end-user IPs is infinitesimally small. In addition to all the zombie PCs spewing out spam you have the "I'm going to setup my own sendmail server!" crowd who follow how-tos from 1995 which set the server up as an open relay.

The PBL (and home ISPs that block outbound TCP/25) are a great example of a passive failsafe - if you can't figure out how to relay through the ISPs SMTP server maybe you shouldn't be setting up mail servers.

Welcome to the future baby! Settings -> Applications, allow Unknown Sources. I enabled that to install Android Scripting Environment and Pandahome on my Droid.

Unless your small business gets free IT support, I'm not sure how you can claim Microsoft's offerings are overpriced. SBS retails at $600 with 5 CALs, OEM is cheaper. Service ends up being the major cost regardless of platform and much as it pains me to give props to Microsoft, SBS runs pretty darn well.

I would never run a Mac server at this point because it can't be virtualized. For a small business virtualization is a godsend (your server is no longer tied to a particular piece of hardware.) The fact that Apple is still obsessed with their sexy hardware suggests to me that they're about to miss the biggest change in IT in quite a while.

Now a small server appliance that's simply a bridge to "Other People's Servers" (i.e. cloud computing hype) and you have something - that may be the direction they'll go.

The previous generations of multi-core CPUs weren't 2-core and 4-core, they were dual and quad-core. These new chips should pretty obviously be called sex-cores. Not since the 667MHZ PII have I been so disappointed.

This is a huge sucky problem already. I don't deal with robots per se, but with all kinds of other manufacturing tools which are all controlled by PCs (or by PLCs which connect to PCs.) Some have the PCs built into the body of the tool.

Making a tool designed to last 20 years dependent on a PC designed to last 5 and an OS supported for 3 insures lots and lots of problems. This would be a great place for Linux, yet all the tools I see use DOS or Windows PCs (even the new ones.) What this means is that companies with these tools have to deal with the logistics of finding replacement parts for 286's, or keep Windows 95 install media around because the app won't run on anything newer.

I've found that this seems to endure (at least in part) because by and large people don't seem to give a shit about problems that won't crop up for 5-10 years (they assume they'll have moved on to another position or company by then.) It's pretty frustrating to deal with though. It would be nice if in addition to a general purpose OS, there was general purpose hardware that remained stable over a longer time frame.

Yes, thank you! LogicMail rocks.

I have not worked with BES 5, but it was certainly commonplace on 2.2, 3.6, and 4.0 to have to reset the devices on occasion because they would just stop syncing. I was present for numerous calls involving a help desk person, RIM support, and the carrier to try to get some traveling exec's blackberry working.

The BES is a steaming pile of shit layered upon several other steaming piles of shit. It hammers the crap out of mail servers. The install process involves magical incantations and occasionally modifying the AD schema (this one admittedly is the fault of MS and lazy admins who use domain admin accounts for their mail.) The upgrade process involves something called a "knife edge cutover" I think because slitting your wrists can seem like a practical alternative. There's no reason removing a user from the server and then adding him again should require mucking with the DB tables directly with osql, yet that was the recommended procedure for a while. Wireless activation was a total game of chance well into when activating a Activesync device took a couple minutes and then it never had to be looked at again.

RIM's architecture made sense in 1999 when you couldn't get Internet access via cell. At this point though its an anachronism. I can appreciate the security features and policy management, but there's zero reason that this huge extra infrastructure be required in the days of unlimited mobile Internet access. Why install a BES, an MDS, a bb router, only to send your traffic to RIMs network (which has suffered several outages recently) which then goes to the carriers and to the devices?

BIS pisses me off even more. Why provide an IMAP client when you can force people to provide their login credentials to their honest and trustworthy cell phone carrier? Not to mention that well into 2008 the idea of syncing e-mail (as opposed to POP3 download) was looked at as some sort of freak request. It's not like anyone would want to get their mail from both their phone AND their PC.

I can't speak to what happened in your particular scenario, but yes, staff, power cooling, etc. are big drivers for virtualization. I've seen multiple racks of servers condensed down into two servers and a SAN running in about 20U. You can get to everything remotely (out-of-band) without needing an IP-KVM and can restart hung servers without needing an IP/Serial PDU.

Setup time for new servers is orders of magnitude faster. fill out a couple screens in a click-and-drool GUI and you have a new server up and running.

Redundancy and reliability are also quite a bit better. While you're right a catastrophic failure of physical server hardware will bring down the VMs hosted on that server, they can immediately be powered on again on one of the other physical hosts. (Of course if you use local storage with virtual servers, you're playing with fire and will get burned eventually) Virtualization also makes it reasonable to cluster services for HA since you don't need 100% more hardware for failover. VMotion or XenMotion (which I haven't yet tried) will let you move running VMs off a physical box you suspect of failing or need to service which is damn handy, though I don't know that it's worth the price VMWare charges in most cases.

Virtualization means NOT needing to buy new hardware since the hardware becomes a commodity, run it till it fails and then replace it. You get out of proactive replacement cycles and expensive 7x24x4 support contracts. When you need more capacity, you just add another node and redistribute your VMs rather than having to deal with the headache of migrating an overutilized server to new hardware.

I don't know why you'd run Windows on top of Linux (or vice-versa) outside of test-dev (a sales laptop running a 3-tier application on 3 VMs via VMWare Player or Workstation for example) Server-based hypervisors run on bare metal.

This is certainly a big step forward for what are otherwise niche also-ran hypervisors. I'm certainly glad to see competition to VMWare, but there's still nothing that actually comes close to it in terms of real-world performance. (specifically stability and manageability)

One feature that it would be interesting to see incorporated into server virtualization products is storage abstraction and network RAID. Right now you can do it with a VM (LeftHand's software iSCSI SAN or Openfiler) but it would be cool if that were a built-in feature of the hypervisor. Currently if you're not using shared storage (SAN or NAS) virtualization presents some pretty serious risks if you suffer hardware failure. Instead of hardware failure taking down one server now it takes down five. If one of the competing virtualization products gave you the ability to mirror local storage between two physical servers, that would be a killer feature for branch/small office settings where the budget doesn't justify a SAN. I don't see VMWare doing this because they don't want to piss off their expensive SAN hawking partners or parent company.