Facebook is a great 'buzz' generating tool... especially if you are willing to put some money into it.

Yes, drive the traffic to your site as many Corps do (a good example is 7-11 or Subway)... they offer contests and post them on their facebook pages and market the hell out of it (not just on facebook), in order to:
1) gather your information (through the contest signup) in the event Facebook does fall off the face of the planet and market research and
2) keep their brand on your mind

The customer thinks "Ooo! Free stuff! Must enter contest!" and the brand sits in the back of their mind... so after they hit the bong later and get the munchies, Subway or 7-11 comes to mind.

Mr. Cuban is doing something wrong.

Offer flat JPG in medium quality as an "end result". Maybe even include a digital metadata watermark?

Require high quality JPEG and PSD for assignment. First check for metadata watermark, then compare quality of JPEG. If it looks too close then open up the PSD and check the layers.

... have you ever actually used Linux as a "Desktop OS"? All* of them?

If you've just "tried" one, then you really have no room for an opinion.

* by 'all' I mean the variations in desktop UI's... KDE, Gnome, MATE, XFCE, Fluxbox, Windowmaker, and so on and so forth.

I see no reason it couldn't work, provided they had the resources (developers and testers).

The only down side is Microsoft has the advantage here with their usual "lets create and use undocumented system calls to make this really hard to reverse engineer" tactic.

I love the WINE project for their effort but there will come a time that businesses will simply start development with cross platform in mind. With projects like wxGTK, Qt, and OpenGL making that process easier I see no reason why they wouldn't utilize them.

You're confusing the management UI with the virtualization/containerization technology.

Also, as stated, the poster wants something he can fiddle with on a Windows host and a possible move to Linux in the future.

KVM recently introduced PCI passthru. If you buy a second card you can pass it through to the guest and it can utilize it 100%.

The downside is that you either need a second monitor, or have a monitor with multiple inputs and will have to manually switch your screen input (not a bad solution though).

I honestly don't know how stable this is nor have i tried it.

He's using a Windows host machine. Also plans to use multiple Windows Guest VM's... OpenVZ doesn't work for either situation.

KVM is as bare metal you can get, but setup isn't always easy and requires a Linux Host. KVM is my personal preference but VirtualBox is probably best for his use case. VMware Workstation is great too but not free (last I checked - may have changed).

A childhood friend of my wife with mental disabilities (I don't know exactly what it was, I'm going off memory from what my wife told me a few years ago) who cant distinguish right from wrong, exposed himself to girls in his group home when he was a teenager is a registered sex offender.

This is a person who was virtually forced out of his home by his parents because they didn't want to deal with his illness anymore, and stuffed into a group home when he was prepubescent... a few years later mix in hormones, possibly interfering medications and a brain that doesn't quite process things right and all of a sudden he's a registered sex offender. He now can't be within a certain distance from schools and has to walk on eggshells while dealing with a mental disorder.

The whole sex offender system is useless without proper investigation or classification.

You can't pack 64 cores in a 1U server for ~$5000 (with moderate RAM and HDDs) with Intel.

If you need massively parallel, high density, x86_64 compatible servers then AMD is king.

Yes. Still the same.

I remember a few months ago that booted a linux kernel in Javascript.... now THAT was impressive. Didn't have network access when I last looked at it.

I am sure there are better terminal emulators out there for in browser administration, because I've seen them in many VPS control panels... although I've never furtherem or looked unto them further.

I've had bad luck in this department, one company always said they would always provide me with what I needed, but every time I asked for the proper tool, I never got it. This business was of reasonable size, 7 locations across 3 provinces. Total staff was around 55-60 people. One example, I was in need of a new coax compression termination tool, and they kept telling me to use the screw on ends. Their honest reason behind it was that we could cut them off later and reuse if we had to :-/. While they do work, I always had a hard time with them. Risking shorting out equipment was not something I wanted to do.

Now I run my own business and do my best to separate work from business, but costs wise is tough. A lot of my equipment i owned before i started up, buying a second laptop at this stage in my business is a cosr issue, but on my list of things to sort out before i incorporate. Confidentiality agreements are key here though. I do web design and web app development, so its less of an issue than dealing with their machines directly, qith direct access to their personal information.

I've had decent success with IE7 simply using PIE.htc and littering my css with behavior: url('/files/PIE.htc');
Also using
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EDGE"/>
Helps in IE7/8/9 to force IE to not allow compatibility mode.
PIE works in IE6 but IE6 is so old a lot of the css stuff simply doesn't work.

I have done a few small custom intranet projects for local SMBs but always built on Standards compliance, so it should work in recent IE, FF, Chrome, etc. I develop on Linux as my main workstation and test across all browsers over various Windows versions.

I understand where you are coming from, my primary point is that the IT people at the companies need to start sticking up to these moron execs. I can imagine the time being put into maintaining XP & IE6 is near thay breaking point where it would be better to upgrade to something compliant with standards (IE7+[sorta], Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc.)

Security wise it is not safe to run IE6, especially since Microsoft abandonded it a very long time ago (and WinXP, for that matter). Thereare no security patches for the horribly broken IE6.

In my line of work, if IE6 compatibility is important to the client, I charge a premium to bring all same features and similar rendering in comparison to IE7 (using various JS & CSS hacks)

Tell them they are putting their company at risk by forcing IE6 and that you do not want to be the one to blame when shit hits the fan (assuming you are either the person performing the work or the guy in charge of the person doing the work).

As a web developer I can tell you very few developers still cater to IE6. Many have even dropped IE7. Most now use conditional comments to display a "Upgrade your browser" or "use a standards compliant browser" error message.

I've been converting my website clients to Stripe, now that they are available in Canada.

These are clients I set up when they were just starting up and had no other means of accepting credit cards. Most now have merchant accounts, but some have transaction fees through the roof, Stripe has better rates in most cases and no monthly fees.