Probably upwards of 20 times in the past year I have heard co-workers, acquaintances, relatives and others bleat "My Email Account Got Hacked!". These folks included AOL, Gmail and Hotmail users.

They didn't get hacked. They were naive. They got hoodwinked. They gave up information to some trojan or phishing email or keylogger. And, yes, meny were using the same weak or semi-weak password on multiple sites including their email and Facebook and Amazon and such. They were for the most part completely oblivious that doing that was a Bad Idea.

I am about as far from a Microsoft fan or apologist as it is reasonable to be. I'll also allow that there may be problems in the Hotmail and Live! monoculture (that I am not the world's expert on as I don't use them). But when I read the author admit that he used a fairly weak 7-character, all-lower-case password how can I give this story any credit? Doesn't sound like a very diligent techie to me. Rather, it makes me wonder where else he used that password.

I have to say that the general proposition -- "Ideas for a great control room?" -- makes me a bit nervous.

If I saw a post on Slashdot asking "Ideas for a Formula One race car?" or "Ideas for brain surgery?" I think I could be forgiven if I wondered if the folks asking the question/s were qualified to do so.

Jim

"Assuming that you have to rewrite his software, make it all web based"

Making things Web-based is a great general goal but is it worth it for a 2-node business system? Not likely.

And does it really need to be rewritten? If it is doing the job now, I'd look a little harder at the existing DOS spplication. If you discover that is some old dBaseIII-Plus (or Foxpro or Clipper) application, you might be able to just transplant it onto a Linux box with something like Flagship or Harbour.

try "Cuba Libre"