No matter how good your product is, one should never scoff at competing with the world's biggest company.

Err.. wouldn't Apple's iCloud be the best, since that's what it was designed to do? Sync photos, set and forget style?

If they can pass the test using only google, then they're certainly what in the eyes of that test passes for a good programmer. Of course, one might question the reliability and usefulness of a test that can be passed using only google, but the test was as useless before as it would pass 'crammers' who may have as little understanding of the subject as the 'googler'.

I suspect that a lot of complaints about 'internet assisted' cheating are partly due to the educators getting caught with easy but low value methods of testing and assessment.

Reaching for a justification to not buy a Mac.

As I mentioned in my original post, I own Macs - 3 of them to be precise.

Lack of right-click-drag when running Windows programs that aren't available in Mac form is probably not in the top 100 on anyone's priority list.

Probably not, but that's because anyone who uses it will simply assume it will work.

Unfortunately, most "professionals" these days have never heard of "plain text" and insist on producing documents in proprietary, not-easily-diffable formats.

There's also "Western" in the "NATO, not Soviet" sense that the GP could be thinking of (even if Tolstoy predates that concept).

Lastly, CFL bulbs need to be in clam shell packaging as it protects the product fairly well...

I've bought 12-packs of CFLs that came in a cardboard box; that worked just fine.

Bandwidth contention on the host's fiberchannel card (in most cases) is between traffic that's addressed to different physical disks in the SAN, meaning the different guests don't have to sit around waiting for each other's disk seeks to complete, the way they would if they had concurrent access to 2 virtual disk images on one physical disk.

Yes, but spindle contention has nothing to do with bandwidth (which is why even 1Gb iSCSI is rarely a bottleneck in most scenarios).

Also, it's quite common - particularly at the high end - to configure only a handful of LUNs/Arrays/RAID Groups/whatever, point multiple (dozens/hundreds) of VMs or servers at it and let the SAN controller intelligence and caching deal with the physical device contention.

The host's kernel can help a bit with disk caching and I/O scheduling/reordering to minimize the amount of disk thrash, but that's still a far cry from SAN performance.

If I attach a couple of dozen spindles to a local machine, it's going to deliver roughly the same (depending on the quality of the SAN and local RAID controller) performance as a couple of dozen spindles on a SAN.

We virtualized SQL Server 2008 R2 and ended up going back to Microsoft clustering. With clustering we still get HA but do not have to pay for VMware licenses. On VMware we were dedicating entire hosts to a single guest due to the high RAM utilization. In addition we were also taking the virtualization hit on the resource level by abstracting out disk and CPU access.

You're running clustered SQL servers, but VMware licensing was cost prohibitive ?

The "virtualisation hit" is minimal - a few percentage points. If it was a problem in a VM it would have been a problem on a physical box.