Ouch; I think you've upset His Holiness with your wanton rant. No iPod for you this holiday season!

I think, sir, you vastly underestimate Google.

Touche.

I didn't rule that out nor did I discount it. Trust me, I'm the last one to rule that out. I was going for the statistical majority rather than ethical/personal constructs.

But point well taken.

While I understand the need to deter theft and misuse of the school district's property by a group of users that are less than 'computer savvy', prone to loss of expensive capital, and pretty smart about the opportunity to sell something like this on eBay -- this instance is a pure privacy violation.

If the school district did not have the laptop reported to it's IT department as stolen or missing, why were the cameras even activated? There have been reports around that the 'privacy light' indicator that the web cam is working was on so frequently that the students would put tape or sticky notes in front of the camera to avoid being spied on.

While kids can be pretty naive about some things, this generation and the one before it is probably quite a bit computer and Internet savvy; not to mention the fact that kids are generally more intuitive than adults -- they have less of a 'societal filter' than jaded adults do.

If the kids were blocking the web cams, and if the principal saw a student eating candy -- I'm pretty sure that these web cams were activated.

My question, is why? Especially if the capital had not been reported as stolen or missing? Perhaps some IT dude has a jones for young girls and thought he could catch one 'indisposed'?

There is more than meets the eye here.

But, the kicker is that the eReader is highly likely to be a device which grows up into the tablet sector and therefore become part of the PC( personal computer ) segment which is Microsoft's territory.

While I agreed with the majority of your reply, I was taking it more in the direction of using Microsoft Mobile 7 on a tablet device as a stepping stone and the implications that the Amazon deal brings into the picture. If indeed Microsoft is going for an answer to the iPad, they need a symbiotic relationship with a content provider (along the lines of what Apple did with McMillan/Simon and Schuster/New York Times/etc).

For example:

Smartphone (using Windows Mobile 7) -> Tablet/Slate incorporating eReader hooking into Amazon's ecosystem of eBooks (using Windows Mobile 7) -> Desktop/Laptop with Windows 7.

This is similar to Apple's play of the iPhone -> iPad -> MacBook/MacDesktop

This way they get the full spectrum/continuum of exposure through all form factors.

TLDR; I think this is more about a response to the iPad and a content supply chain than a OSS/FOSS play or something as lame as Amazon's one-click-purchase patent

Microsoft isn't stupid. They know that if iPad adoption with this generation (or future generations if Apple is able to bring them to market fast enough) catches on even remotely as close as the iPod/iPhone did -- and publishers are able to see it as a viable content delivery platform that still enforces all the goodies that they like (DRM), it pushes Windows Embedded or Windows Mobile as a second-tier platform -- think the iPod vs. the Zune.

They learned thier mistake with the iPod and the Zune. They want to make sure that they don't make the same mistake again with an answer to the iPad -- especially since Apple didn't hit a complete home run with it this generation. There is a chance for Microsoft to give an answer that is more palitable.

Microsoft's traditional play of "Extend, Embrace, Extinguish"..

This most likely has something to do with a Microsoft play towards Windows 7 Mobile and a slate device as an answer to Apple's iPad . Pundits are spewing about Windows 7 Mobile and the fact that it sucked less in comparison to Windows Mobile 6 (in the vein that Windows 7 sucks less than Vista). Said device would be hooked into Amazon's range of eBooks for the Kindle.

As always YMMV; and this is coming from an American perspective. If you are in Europe or the rest of the civilized world, I envy you..

I have ran my own company for the last five years after I had got married and started a family. At the time, my wife carried the insurance and it was never a problem being joint on her health care insurance. However, that being said, she worked for HUMANA at the time and we had reasonable coverage for a reasonable price.

About six months ago, she left HUMANA to start her own company as well. We knew that it would cause a lapse in our coverage and agreed to plow ahead.

Boy were we stupid!

I signed up for a small business group coverage plan through The Hardford who had subcontracted out their health care insurance to United Health Care. The premiums, while not outrageous were definately on the higher end of the spectrum from what I was expecting (complete coverage for two adults in their early-thirties -- at $675 a month). Things progressed along and we went to our normal amount of doctors visits and trips to the Pharmacy. My wife takes one maintenance medication for Thyroid problems (synthroid), and I take a blood pressure medication (Mycardis). Not exactly a high-risk category and not exactly what I would say was a 'strain on the system'.

Then, one doctors visit I needed to get an EKG (it was routine; I won't go into the specifics here). No diagnosis was made that wasn't already known, and no new ICD-9 codes were submitted to United Health Care that hadn't already previously been submitted.

I received a letter in the mail from United Health Care a month later stating that they were dropping our coverage because although the physician did not see or diagnose any new health issues, the "patient review physician" had requested a copy of the EKG and had made a diagnosis outside of my physicians that I was now a 'high-risk' patient and should expect to be a walking-time bomb in regards to claims for United in the next year.

After loosing our coverage through United, I received our "Certificate of Prior Coverage" and started shopping for a new policy. Only to find out that everyone I contacted would now not touch our family with a twenty foot pole. I was rejected from countless other insurance companies, and as it stands right now my wife and I are currently uninsured.

Now, my wife is a social worker and very well versed at finding coverage information and programs for uninsured or under-insured patients..

We still as of yet have any coverage.

Caveat Emptor my friend. The health care system in the United States blows monkey chunks.

After hosting (and continue to host) 25+ websites, and gone through at least 5 providers, here's my list of 'have to':

• SSH access.
• The ability to edit the php.ini file (believe it or not, some hosting providers do not allow you to edit your php.ini variables within your instance for security reasons).
• Decent logging/statistics generation
• A decent helpdesk/ticket submission process.
• Live chat (either through a program or via telephone. I prefer the 'IM' style approach.
• The ability to modify your DNS records/MX records./
• Fantastico can be a huge time saver.
• CPanel can be the bane of your existence or your friend -- depending on how your provider has it implemented.
• Decent connectivity/uptime statistics
• The ability to modify your hosting plan in case you want to expand in the future with little-to-no effort or downtime.
• A decent webmail program
• IMAP/POP3 access to your e-mail accounts
• The ability to add/remove/modify e-mail accounts on the fly.
• FTP Access
• The ability to modify Apache .htaccess directives.
• The ability to use/modify mod_rewrite.
• Secure MySQL implementation -- meaning that your MySQL instance ports aren't available to the whole world.
• And others..

My current choice of provider is HostGator. They've been pretty on-the-spot with most things and haven't let me down yet. RackSpace is also nice, albeit more expensive -- but has more enterprise and redundancy features. If your looking to do (or eventually) do hosting of enterprise applications (i.e. Line of Business) such as:

• Exchange
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• SharePoint
• Oracle
• etc

Stay away from Microsoft Live and small Mom-and-Pop type outfits. Their implementations are generally not well thought out or secured, and the up time somewhat depressing. Stick with the big guys (such as RackSpace), and make sure you have things spelled out in your service agreement as to access, up time, overage charges, bandwidth control, etc.

Just my $0.02.

While I have never considered InfoWorld the pinnacle of journalism nor anything more than a regurgitation machine, I say good for them.

It takes balls to publicly retract something like this.

However, the 'damage' to InfoWorld's 'credibility' with Mr. Kennedy as a contributor/blogger is immense. They washed their hands of him faster than a John squirting himself with hand sanitizer after a nasty romp with a meth-induced hooker.

I am somewhat mystified how Mr. Kennedy thought that spreading FUD would actually help his career. Interesting tact..

how do patents work in america?

Not very well.

If you were asking me personally, I would ask you two questions -- and that would determine what I would recommend.

Before the flames let me explain...

* If you were looking towards the 'Enterprise' environment, I would recommend CentOS. There is reasoning for this -- while it's geared towards more Linux central users, it's also the most compatible towards Enterprise applications.

* If you were looking towards the Enterprise 'Desktop' I would recommend Ubuntu; with the caveat to understand that some packages that people understand as standard (i.e. MySQL) have historically have had problems with the versions that were included in a distribution. Historically, I could name MySQL and Ubuntu 8.10->9.

* If you don't have an infrastructure that already depends on a common distribution -- look at SuSE and Redhat. The (dis)similarities are somewhat minimal but there. If you have a Windows (TM) infrastructure already present, give a serious look to SuSE's offerings; good or bad with what they have done to the community.. they are in bed with Microsoft and do have some compelling offerings with integration with the SuSE Enterprise Server/Open Enterprise Server lines.

* If I was starting from scratch with infrastructure -- look at (and evaluate) FreeIPA/Samba/CUPS. Think about your client desktop however -- Windows? SuSE? Ubuntu? It makes a difference. If you have disparaging Linux distributions you have to reconcile the naming/user conventions in your LDAP directory.

Pick one distribution for the server and one for the desktop -- hopefully they are the same derivative. For example, Debian for the server and Ubuntu for the desktop -- or CentOS/RHEL for the server and Fedora for the desktop. This way you maintain the user/group LDAP portability between the distributions.

While catering to the Apple fan-base a little too much for my tastes -- hits it right on.

It is scaremongering.

.

Cache is there for a reason -- idle RAM is useless RAM. Now, do I think that Windows allocation mechanism for idle RAM is right on? Of course not. It could use some tuning. It could have used some tuning since XP -- but is idle RAM stupid? Yes.

Anything that can update the pipeline between process/thread interaction with data before it has to go to disk -- is preferred.

However, Windows needs to be smart about what it caches and keeps in the pre-fetch. Frequently used and accessed rather than conditional stale.

That's the point.

I understand your reasoning for being concerned. However, sometimes there are certain things that we must do in the modern workplace to maintain/continue/engage employment. Sometimes that means giving up something like your fingerprint. However, I would recommend that you ask student services and/or your student rights council as to how this information is going to be used or disseminated and if your biometric information will be deleted upon you leaving your work/study position. But be assured -- this type of information is not uncommon in corporate situations. Biometrics as an additional authentication mechanism besides passwords (one time or otherwise) are not uncommon. I've had OTP passwords/Secure Certificates/Biometrics all on one card many times in the workforce.