I live in an area where many intersections are being circled.

The immediate result is that those unfamiliar with them panic and stop inappropriately. Once the regular users of these intersections grow accustomed to the new flow pattern, throughput is greatly improved.

IMHO, the short-term pain is more than offset by the long-term gain.

They killed it when they decided you could no longer download patches without a support contract.

It's theirs to do with as they please, certainly... but not having immediate access to the support contract number shouldn't force a choice between taking a server off line or running it unprotected against newly discovered vulnerabilities.

Gracious, even Microsoft doesn't require that.

Besides, the nostalgia is gone -- CDE is deprecated, bash is installed by default, by the time you look at what they're doing with it, the look and feel is nearly Linux anyway (not that that's all that bad, but hey...).

It did have the edge under heavy stress, usually. Given the standard current approach of massively redundant clusters, even that isn't terribly relevant given proper engineering.

The bottom line is, even Windows can now serve in what used to be the exclusive domain of genuine AT&T-derived code. We may decry the loss of flavor, or even the loss of elegance... but by and large things are working better.

While I find the discussion interesting, from an implementation perspective... it just doesn't matter that much any more. This makes me wonder what Ellison & co. were thinking, but I frequently wonder that.

A few years ago I tested "Agora" with Sakai.

This might be massively overkill for your application, depending on whether Sakai does anything you want (soup-to-nuts higher-ed online classroom application) but it's entirely freeware.

Agora did not, at that time, work with any non-Windows platform that I tried, but that was 2008 or earlier.

You've had a lot of good advice, that boils down to "you get what you pay for"... ... but consider: most likely, all your intellectual property worth having would fit on the MicroSD card in my phone with a huge lot of room left over.

The biggest issue with remote administration isn't the administrator, precisely, it's that there's a path intentionally maintained to permit remote access. That's the vector that needs to be secured.

I'd be more concerned about the remote admin's competency than his honesty (though I must agree with many upthread -- if you can't trust 'em, you shouldn't have hired 'em!).