I think Winer's story extends out to a myriad of professions (mainly technical ones, but plenty of others). If an observer doesn't understand the work you do, they think it can't be too hard. Most folks overestimate their own abilities. I run a small IT company - we've got a few employees of varying skill sets but all pretty good at solving network issues. But I still regularly see clients complain about how long a task takes, or how a five-minute fix couldn't have been that hard. Car repairmen still get bitched at by people about a $200 bill to replace a tiny part.

There are good programmers, there are great programmers, and there are assuredly mediocre programmers. But that's what they do - and they are guaranteed to know more about it than virtually any layperson. Just because your car runs does not mean you know how to build a car. If your lawyer gets you off the hook for a crime you didn't commit, does that mean you could be a lawyer?

It takes very little skill to stock shelves in a grocery store. But a person who is doing that for a living definitely is better at that task than we are. More people need to understand this basic fact.

Of course, then people would be convinced that they were better at understanding facts.

I think as a practical matter, any spying done on devices outside of RIM would have to be at the cellular carrier level - and that wouldn't require the handset makers to cooperate at all. Blackberries all get routed through RIM's servers, but pretty much every other smartphone is just an Internet node.

In the same vein, I'd think that if it's on wifi there wouldn't be anything special that a backdoor would get. Maybe I'm just not paranoid enough.

The old "digital delivery service" WAM!NET used to stick a rubber chicken in their non-sealed (but still not supposed to be opened normally) box. In the box was a small 19" rack with the router, communications gear (an SGI box), and a rubber chicken.

They didn't mind you seeing it, it was a little joke on their part. Sometimes their techs would tell me to go in the box.

They sold turnkey communications services to ad agencies, print shops, and media companies for file transfer. Back in the days when a T-1 was a couple of thousand per month. They installed their box and all the gear, stuck it on your network, created user accounts, and hooked it up to the T-1 they'd order. And then you'd be billed by the transfer.

They also gave out hundreds of pairs of purple Chuck Taylors at the Seybold conference in Boston where they debuted. Still have mine.

Having a reverse DNS is a good practice, and anyone with a mail server should be doing it. That said, a lot of small businesses don't have reverse DNS set up, don't know what you mean when you tell them to do it, or have ISPs that are a pain to deal with. I'd mark up the spam score on a message without reverse DNS on the sending server (and I do on my own server) but I wouldn't block it entirely unless it sets off a lot more flags than just that one.

I use Kerio Connect on my server - I add 2 points for lack of reverse DNS. 3.5 points drops you into the junk folder, 5 blocks you completely. Doing that I get pretty much no false blocks, a false positive every few days, and about 3-5 spams that make it to the junk folder per day. I block a few hundred.

"Hey, I hope you don't mind, I got up a little early, so I took the liberty of milking your cow for you. Yeah, it took a little while to get her warmed up, she sure is a stubborn one, whew."

"We don't have a cow. We have a bull."

"I'm gonna brush my teeth."

You know, I have to give Apple all these props (yes, my life is filled with iThings, but still), but once again they set the standard. Macs have been mounting ISO images and DMG files for the last decade - I was really surprised when Vista dropped without this basic native ability and even more so when it didn't make the cut for Windows 7. Sure, most PCs still ship with optical drives but it's been more convenient for years now to ship image files than .EXE installers or zip files in most cases. You'd think that Windows would have gained this ability before now.

As said earlier in this thread, the App Store model now will begin to take over for most packaged software and for Windows as well. Linux users have downloaded from repositories for the better part of 20 years (ever since the RPM). Mac users have downloaded DMG installers forever, and now have an App Store. Retail software distribution is going down the toilet.

The only wildcard is bandwidth capping - the carriers all want it, none of the users and none of the content providers want it. More and more things are going digital. Something's got to give, and within the next year or so we'll know which it is.
 

The trend in IT since day 1 has been to alternate waves of centralization (Mainframe, client-server, cloud) with waves of decentralization (PC, workstation). Really, it'll probably be like it is now, just more so. Firms with very simple needs will use cloud-based mail and sharing solutions, firms with more need for customization and/or performance will run their own servers. If they are large enough to justify the expense, they'll hire an IT staff, otherwise they will use companies like mine when needed. Computers themselves will still need support, even if all the data is in a server farm somewhere. Not to mention that cloud computing assumes Internet that's always there and always working.

Wireless will become more important, but wired will still be used when viable because it's faster and more reliable (plus every wired computer is one less tapping shared spectrum). Windows will continue to suck less, Macs the same, and Linux will keep being just a couple of years away from desktop usage.

The wildcard is the emergence of the iPad (not tablets in general yet - the market so far has decreed that no tablet other than the iPad matters thus far). iPads alone won't redefine the IT business, but if any other platform takes hold to even close to the degree the iPad has thus far then tablets may finally become a viable part of the IT environment - ant that has the potential to redefine how applications are used and support is provided.

Kerio Connect is based on a lot of open-source technologies, and they do contribute back - but it is in itself a commercial product. For a small number of users, though, it's still a good value for those looking to DIY.

(disclaimer: Though I'm a user of it, I'm also a fairly large reseller by Kerio standards and my business gets a lot of our revenue from it)

The minus of Kerio is that it's commercial software and therefore not roll-your-own in nature. Limited tinkering is available. And to get updates after year 1, there's a subscription charge. The webmail is good but a little dated compared to some of the latest stuff out there.

The pluses, though, are these (in my non-biased opinion):

- Good antispam tech (blacklists, SpamAssassin, Bayes filtering). Not state-of-the-art, but traps most of it.
- Uses built-in Sophos engine and/or your own AV for filtering
- Easy to administer with web GUI, plus it's extensible with an API.
- Mail and config files are stored in plain text and can be accessed and edited by hand if needed.
- Supports native client for pretty much everything (Outlook, Mac apps, Sunbird and Thunderbird, etc.). Supports IMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV.
- Integrates with AD or OD if needed
- Supports ActiveSync and if you have a Windows server it can support Blackberries (you have to run BES to do that, and BES is Windows-only)
- Easy to manage SSL, and it'll automatically use SSL for SMTP transfers if the target server supports it as well (so you get encrypted transmission)
- Runs on Mac, Windows, or Linux. Plus it comes as a pre-packaged VM for VMware or Parallels for appliance use. That's kind of handy.
- Scales well. It'll go from 5 to 1000 users pretty well on good-enough hardware. My largest client on it has an Xserve with an SSD boot drive and a RAID 1 mirror to support 1000 users.

They'll give you a 30-day trial if you want for free. And if you try it and like it, feel free to buy it from someone other than me - I don't get referral fees or anything for that but I'm not pimping it on my own behalf here.

I've got a Mid 2010 i7 15" MBP, 8GB RAM and an SSD. It's got a NVIDIA GT330M card in it, and I've been running Lion full-time since the GM seed was put out on 7/1. I've also used all the DPs from another boot drive I have in it (I took out the DVD drive and installed a smaller SSD). Lion has had some issues, but never a graphics-related lockup. That's both using the built-in display and also connected to a LED Cinema Display. No graphics issues at all.

In fact, the only problems I've really had were that Pogoplug's software doesn't work, my older copy of PDFpen Pro crashes, and the Cinema Display now makes a "popping" noise the moment it initializes when I hotplug it (that wasn't the case on Snow Leopard). Otherwise Lion's easily the most solid 1.0 release I've ever used.

It's a cool idea and the YouTube video is neat, but requiring Chrome? Non-starter. I'm sure it's because they're pushing WebM video out, and so it's just another shot in Google's War On Apple (the WebM vs. H.264 battle again). No thanks. I use Chrome on occasion, but I refuse to use websites that require one specific browser even when it's supposedly up to standards.

Last summer when Arcade Fire did their Chrome Experiments video (the interactive film for "We Used to Wait"), it rendered really well on Safari and Chrome, OK on prerelease Firefox builds, and not really on IE8, but that was because it really was built in HTML5 and made concerted efforts to be neutral.

They made one server-grade piece of hardware. It was the Xserve. Rumor has it that the next Mac Pro will be convertible to a rack setup, but I wouldn't bet on that coming true (as much as I'd like it). Snow Leopard Server on an Xserve was the high-water mark for the enterprise Mac server. Apple just didn't sell that many.

On the other hand, they practically can't make the mini servers fast enough to keep the channel stuffed. I've installed likely 10 or more mini servers for each Xserve I ever set up in all my years in business. They aren't industrial, but they're great SMB servers. The current model adds Thunderbolt so you can finally do good external storage (no more networked flakey FW800 drives) and a quad i7 for a grand. Lion Server has been turned into a small business server for the average shop. It'll sell millions. Might not be an enterprise product now, but when was it, really?

Apple is busy making scads of money in the consumer space. Enterprise IT is a "nice to have", but not a "gotta have" for Apple. Sure Lion is initially available as a download only. And no IT department with any brains will install Lion right away to begin with. That all said, it's easy to download it once, then make it available for mass deployment (just pay the license fees as if you were downloading it a ton for starters - there's no DRM on the download). And next month it'll be shipped on USB stick (like they do now for all the current DVDless Macs).

Besides that, there's plenty of third-party deployment and management tools that are being updated for Lion right now. It's really not going to be that big a deal. They are dumbing down the server software, but they also have a virtualization license that is far more generous than it has been in the past. The App Store is getting a corporate version. Third parties like Apperian are getting opportunities there, too.

Apple's focus from a corporate side is making Lion a good client OS. They've done a lot to advance it. The server is backtracking to be a SMB OS (we'll see how server-friendly the next Mac Pro is, but the mini is pretty slick even if it's not readily rackable). Apple, though, is focused on delivering the features that sell the most units to the most people. Period. Anything they deliver on top of that is pretty much a bonus.

When your Mac sales are considered disappointing because they're "only" up 14% you're doing something right.

My desk at home is a gigantic wraparound IKEA special. I work partly from home, so it's decked out with a 20" iMac, the 24" Cinema Display that I connect my MacBook Pro to, an Officejet, 3 PCs yoked together using a KVM, various chargers, an older Asus EEE 901, my radios, paperwork, and docks for the iPad and iPhone.

Amongst all that high-techery are a batch of diecast race cars, a Newton MessagePad 2100, and a black restored rotary phone. It's in perfect condition, and has been retrofitted with a modular jack. I don't dial it often (obviously), but I answer all my calls on it because it just sounds so much better than any cordless or cell phone that I've ever used.

Whenever I turn on the Newton, I remind myself of how awesome that could be on modern hardware. It's still a great mobile OS.

The Thunderbolt port is physically identical to the Mini DisplayPort interface. Uses the same connector. The cable is a little bit thicker than the MDP connector on an Apple Cinema Display, but by fractions. It does extend out a little ways to make room for the transceiver.

It's actually perfect for the Air more than anything else in the lineup, really. Mac laptops have no docking connector, so with the Air the only things you had previously were a pair of USB 2.0 ports, with enough power to drive the removable DVD burner they sell for it. With Thunderbolt (since it's basically a PCIe interface broken out) someone will soon be selling a docking station for Mac laptops that'll support storage, DisplayPort out, Ethernet, and whatever else makes sense to add.

For the same reason, Thunderbolt has the potential to get rid of proprietary Wintel vendor docking systems.

It's a safe assumption that Thunderbolt will make it into everything Apple sells within the next month or so - in other words, adding the mini, MacBook Air, and Mac Pro. Those are the systems that are due refreshes and by all accounts are waiting in the wings for Lion to go GM.

Apple obviously was thinking ahead to Thunderbolt when they axed the Xserve, but as it stands they probably should have kept the Xserve around a few more months and tried to push either the Mac Pro or mini refresh ahead a couple of months in order to avoid a lot of the flak they took over the Xserve. The kind of folks who bought Xserves would have been a lot less pissed off - and though Apple doesn't explicitly cater to the server crowd, they're still good folks to have on your side.

USB 2 will remain the standard for lower-speed devices, printers, scanners, and casual storage (flash drives, pocket drives, etc.). Thunderbolt will likely compete well with USB 3.0 and also take the role of ExpressCard, FireWire, eSATA, and proprietary expansion docks for laptops.