Exactly. The police are criticising Verizon here, but it took the police 11 hours to sort this out themselves. What makes them think it was any easier for Verizon?

The chances are Verizon have a computer system that simply doesn't have the flexibility needed to do this. There probably wasn't an easy way around it without getting that bill paid.

I would have thought a police department, faced with an 11 hour search involving multiple people, could have just stumped up the £20, and maybe asked Verizon for the money back later.

Hell, even if they didn't get the money back they'd have probably saved a few thousand pounds that way.

Spending £20 to save several thousand pounds of man hours and possibly somebody's life? Sounds like the kind of decision you would expect the police to be able to make.

No, I'd agree with lack of apps. Don't get me wrong, there are some good ones for Linux, but in general you don't have the polish or ease of use with Linux apps.

I can put up with the differences and work around things, the average user expects everything to be smooth, and consistent between programs.

Linux is getting there though, and the beauty of open source is that it's hard to stop. Slow & steady should win this race in the end.

Bear in mind folks that this is the same government who admit to an 86% infection rate *each year* among the 5,000 odd computers used at Westminster:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/15/mp_malware_leak_risk/

Yes, that's 4,300 infected machines a year, with 400 hit badly enough that they get cleaned manually (and I hope to god manual intervention means wipe and start again, but I doubt it somehow).

So, that's a nigh on certainty that the login details for the database are already well known to 3rd parties then...

The biggest concern I'd have with single disks is that disk fail. Regularly.

I can see the point of wanting to store to disk - plenty of space, easy to use, and fast. But I'd really want some kind of redundancy. Have you thought about buying an external raid array? Possibly the easiest to use is the Drobo - just fill it with as many disks as you want, and it'll ensure your data is protected:

http://www.drobo.com/

They're more expensive than just buying disks (£300 empty), but that's well worth it if you'd like your data to still be accessible when you come back to use it.

Authoritative comments, on Slashdot? Are you sure you're on the right site?

Here's the point - if they're offering to buy you, they may well be doing you a favour. They could almost certainly do this on their own, and out-compete you.

You can tell by this move that they're interested in what you're doing, and if they have the kind of money you're implying to set up a team working on this, that money is there whether you guys come on board or not. So, much as you like being independent, can your little startup compete against a well funded competitor with a big name behind it?

Have a long hard think about that question, and try not to get emotionally attached to your company as you answer it.

As much as you like being independent, it may be better to take this opportunity, and move onto other things if you find it doesn't work out.

What I would suggest is to make a list of the things you really enjoy about being independent, and speak to this company about them. See if they are amenable to you guys having autonomy and control over this project. Find out what their long term goals are for it, and whether they align with your own. Get them to put in writing their commitment to the project and their goals, and to having you guys in charge - that way you should at least have a few years whereby you know where you stand, and can be confident of running the project the way you want, in the direction you want.

If that can work out, see this as a huge opportunity. Firstly you get the money and a bigger team to drive your project forward faster than you could have done before. You'll also get to make some good contacts, and probably learn a lot about how to run things like this, oh, and you get the cash too (depending on how big you think this will be, it might be worth insisting that your deal is partly profit related)

Then, if it does go titsup in a few years, and you don't like the way things are going, you're all in a good position to leave the company and startup on your own with a new project.

Exactly, Microsoft's behaviour killed the market, removing a damn good product from us customers. Sure, Stac made some money out of it, but we'll never know what we lost as a result.

I used to use Stacker regularly after finding that it coped with disk errors better than Microsoft's FAT filesystem, or Microsoft's Doublespace. Errors that would routinely loose entire disks with Microsoft's code were quietly fixed with Stacker, allowing me to move data to new disks. I was even able to recycle known bad disks since Stacker could handle the bad sectors just fine.

In contrast, Microsoft's Doublespace could loose data on good drives, it was truly, truly awful.

Microsoft's behaviour effectively removed one of my favourite software tools from the market, and they've done it many, many times since to other programs. I may be a Windows network admin, but I am definitely not a fan of their business practices or their software.

Yup, damned impressive worm, if you read some of the detailed writeups it really highlights just how professional these things are now.

It's doing us the world of good here - we've got pretty good security already, and getting budget for the next set of steps I want to take should be a whole lot easier now. All I'm having to do is point out just how widely Conficker spread, show some of the big names it hit, and then point out just how long it took them to clean their networks after the fact.

All of a sudden a few pounds spent protecting the network look like a good idea :)

If you don't have the budget to be buying rugged systems, you might want to look into IP rated enclosures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Code).

IP56 or IP67 would probably work for you, you can buy IP rated industrial computers, but you might even be able to just buy a big cabinet and stick regular computers inside it.

The only problem then is cabling into it, but it's definitely possible to get IP rated cable glands:
http://www.industrial-enclosures.com/html/cable-glands.htm

Your biggest problem may be heat. You'll almost certainly need either active cooling inside the cabinet, or a decent size heatsink as part of it.

So how did that happen exactly? No DRM I can understand. No control over who connects to your servers is just dumb.

It's not exactly difficult to have a serial number inside each copy of the game, and register that to the user account. It's even possible to build that mechanism in a way that allows resales.

Voila! No DRM, and no pirates on your servers either.

Perhaps because they've done the studies that show calorie intake is actually wildly different according to the bacteria present, regardless of the food eaten. Seriously, go read the articles attached to the original slashdot story, they're fascinating reading.

I for one am watching this with interest since it's the first research I've seen that adequately explains why somebody like myself can eat without putting weight on, while other have to carefully monitor their intake.

I eat absolute garbage, in quantity, and do little exercise, yet haven't put on more than a stone in the last 15 years. For the best part of a year I bought lunch from the chip shop 5 days a week, and ate that on top of regular snacks (2-3 bags of crisps, chocolate bars & fizzy drinks), plus a full breakfast and dinner every day, without putting on any weight at all. I eat more than double the amount of food my boss consumes, yet he's a good 3-4 stone heavier than me, goes to the gym every morning, and still struggles to keep weight off.

You're on the right lines, but when it comes to Microsoft, you're probably closer with:

"That's no puppy, it's a sodding crocodile, look, it just tore your arm off!"

Microsoft fans remind me of Monty Python's Black Knight: "It's just a scratch..."

Yeah, right. You might want to update your knowledge on 3 wheelers a little:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38TFetQAe2o

Yup, and I'd love to see how it manages an emergency stop!

A far better design would be two electric drive wheels at the front and a simple free steering wheel at the back. You've got all the advantages of this when it comes to size & simplicity (no complex steering rack), but you then don't need all that complex balancing software, it's more stable both at rest and in motion, it uses less power, and has far better emergency brakes.

Oh, and it doesn't fall on its arse when the battery runs flat.

If you look though, I don't think there are many screws in that design, both the power supply and the hard drives seem to use a velcro fixed strap, which looks to be an inspired idea. And I've heard before that google don't service servers in place, if one goes bad, they simply pull it out, fit a replacement, and send the bad one off to a dedicated repair desk.