If you run a small/medium business, it makes perfect sense to outsource your IT as long as you do it locally. Also, if you're an IT technician, then you need to start your own IT firm or work for an existing firm. Most small businesses don't need to hire an IT guy for $50,000+ a year just so he spends 8 hours trying to remove the malware from some unimportant employee's laptop. You can pay half the cost for a local IT company to proactively manage your network, provide remote and on-site support, and in-shop repair services. Not to mention, your IT firm can hire dozens of local IT techs and give job opportunities to many people. You make more money, and companies save money, and IT techs actually have the opportunity to grow and learn more about bettering the services they offer their clients. It just has do be done locally.

was the biggest piece of crap ever made. After working with tons of residential customers who need their computers cleaned up and ask for an explanation as to what caused their machine to take so long to boot, Kodak Easy Share was the culprit in many cases. I know they're simply trying to make it easy for old people to just plug in their camera to the computer and magically have all their photos transferred to the All Users\My Pictures folder (which is stupid btw), but the software is just pure autorun garbage and why on earth it needed to execute during start up, I have no idea. Regardless of the quality of the cameras, having any negative response on your product cannot be a good thing. I don't think it's the main reason Kodak is filing bankruptcy obviously, but I do think it may have contributed to Kodak's negative consumer image.

I read a lot of people talking about PC-BSD on here, so I decided to give it a shot in a VM. They have have release 9 coming out which you can download to try out. Installation was graphical, and ridiculously easy. You can use whatever window manager or environment you want. I went with KDE4 which looks like the default. It comes with a fantastic program called the AppCafe which uses PC-BSD's very own installer packages called .PBI files. They contain everything you need to install a program without any hiccups. Not to mention once you install a program via the AppCafe, it remains up-to-date. First thing I did was install FireFox. Required two clicks of the mouse, and I was watching YouTube videos in a matter of seconds. No bullshit required. I've used PC-BSD in the past and was never too impressed. But holy hell they have come quite a long way over the past couple years. This is an AMAZING desktop OS that I think everyone should try just for shits. I'm so surprised at how well this works. If there's something that's going to make *BSD a good desktop OS, this is what's going to make it happen. Fantastic job.

Honestly, have you ever asked for help in a #linux IRC channel? If the level of support you receive from the community is why you chose to use a specific system, then why in the hell did you chose Linux? There's so many inconsistencies, and package nightmares among the various distros I can't even begin to describe it. Regardless, the flame war is stupid. FreeBSD has never sought out to be a Desktop OS. It can certainly make one, but there's nothing to base your experience on besides having the tools necessary to create what it is you want. Preference is preference. I could scream all day about why I think it makes a good desktop OS, however I don't even use it as a desktop OS. I'm just posting because I'm tired of seeing this same argument brought up all the freakin time. Use whatever the hell you want for whatever reasons you want and stop trying to be zealots.

no. i like it down here. it's moist. and i like feeling closed in. bring cake down here. along with hot pockets.

Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of Mainframes.

after using FreeBSD for over 10 years, I've never once seen "FreeBSD code" cause problems with a mouse not working.

did Slashdot get taken over by ADD/OCD redditors? FreeBSD is not hard to install, use, and configure. It has the best documentation out of any *NIX I've seen. It can easily utilize resources, great for server daemons, clusters, DB, and can run Xorg. There's so many damn distros to choose from nowadays, people see it for 30 seconds, download a new ISO of something completely different, install it, get bored, try another, etc. Maybe if you actually put some time in to making the system just the way you want, and RTFM, then you might be happy with the results you get from FreeBSD, or any other OS for that matter. Just tired of the ADD. Pay attention!

This is simple stuff here. Firstly, it verifies ownership of the domain. I will never accept email from a host that does not resolve. Doing so will of course allow a ridiculous amount of spam from infected computers around the globe from regular IP addresses. The email address needs to match the host in which it is sending from as well. It requires hardly *any* work. Why are we even talking about this?

HELO, ELO, wants the hostname as well. Are we expecting millions of mail servers to simple change the way they're doing things? More importantly, if spam is a problem for you, I've had great luck with filtering services such as Postini and SpamSoap. Both excellent providers and have better resources than anything you can whip together on your little email server. It costs pennies as well.

I don't want to sound like one of those stoners preaching for legalization, but I truly believe the debate on the legalization of Marijuana is at the core of this whole fiasco. Here's why. We've already scientifically proven it doesn't have any long term negative health effects, besides when you burn it creating carbon monoxide which when inhaled could potentially give you lung cancer, yet there are things in this country much worse for you that are perfectly legal. Alcohol, fast food, etc. Not trying to say we should ban one thing or another, just let people decide what they want to do.

So the answer to the question, "why is this plant illegal to grow and consume?" is simply because of the huge industries that influence the rules, regulations, and laws in this country. Therefore, everything you and I are allowed or not allowed to do is most likely stemmed from some industry or conglomerate that has lobbied long enough and dumped enough capital in to the government to create the legislation. All I really want is for the Federal Government to just leave business alone. And the businesses need to leave the government alone. Businesses are not supposed to run our democracy. People are supposed to run our democracy. Small businesses have an incredibly difficult time staying afloat thanks to payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, sales tax, etc. They are the lower and middle class of the business world and they too are being treated like shit in this time of economic turmoil. I only bring up the Marijuana thing because it is a perfect example of how businesses influence the law and it has to stop. If you want certain laws to regulate what businesses can and cannot do, then it needs to be controlled on the State level, not the Federal level. Stop wasting our time and money.

Here's an interesting slanted article written by our ol' pal Knorr, in which he uses the phrase, "Take that Google!" - Microsoft's either in his back pocket, or he's just like every other slanted writer that just spouts off their annoying opinions. If you want to provide good tech news, at least do the proper research.

The proof is in Eric Knorr's large amount of interviews with Microsoft employees and execs. I don't think I've seen one article of his with an actual Google employee.

Google Docs is far from useless. You obviously haven't seen live edit simultaneous Document Sharing yet. Makes SharePoint look like a flippin' toy.

I agree with you. InfoWorld has composed a barrage of Anti-Google articles for years now mostly because of Microsoft's hands being in their back pocket. Sorry but I'm getting tired of hearing their same crap. Google is simply not going anywhere. Especially when on the other side of the spectrum, you hear news about 25 million people signing up for Google+ in the matter of just a couple weeks. AdWords alone will grow substantially thanks to G+.

My doctor says I need weed to get high...