OK start with the Red Hat License agreement. Have any of you read it? In a nutshell, it says that anywhere you run Red Hat on a server it requires purchase of a subscription. And you can't buy a workstation subscription for a server, it has to be a server subscription. Subscriptions are based on 'sockets', which means CPU in real terms.

A 2 socket RHEL license costs $349/year on the 'self-support' model, and a 4 socket license costs $1,598 per year for standard subscription. Compare that to Windows Server 2008. The cost is $722.99 on CDW right now for W2K8R2 Standard. BUT, that's a one-time cost. And you get patches for free, regardless if you have a support contract or not. Figure that a Windows Server version may be supported for 10 years or more (2003 will run through 2015.)

Red Hat: $350 per year for 12 years = $4,200
Windows Server: $722 total, for 12 years = $722

That ends up costing you six times as much in license and support to run RHEL. Extrapolate that across hundreds of servers, and it becomes a monstrous expense. 500 servers = $174,500 per year. And yes, I assume you are going to re-buy a license for the new Windows Server one or two revs into the future.

THIS is exactly why we are not using RHEL in a highly compliance-oriented industry, and why we elected to go with CentOS. In the end we're going to be doing the support ourselves anyway, and Red Hat's cost structure is outrageous for what you get.

Wiping your cookies, adblock, flashblock, etc - it's all worthless.

Even if you remove all cookies, the iframe that is the 'like' button will set a new cookie. Facebook tracks these new 'anonymous' cookies centrally, and then when you DO login to your actual account, they can read this cookie and marry up your previous behavioral habits and sites you visited. The advice here leads people to believe you can fight this simply by erasing cookies. The only way to really make that effective is:

1) Log out of Facebook
2) Remove all Facebook cookies
3) Browse around to other sites
4) Clear all Facebook cookies AGAIN
5) Log in to Facebook

Without step #4 the rest of it is not doing you any good.

The same is true of new signups, where your browsing history (before you even had an account!) is correlated to the new account to help build a profile of your activity.

Check out the password reset form in Chrome on a Mac - it's not rendering properly.

It does work, the theme is off.

All I have to say is http://www.authsmtp.com./

I have no relationship to them other than a happy customer, but it took me WEEKS of effort to find a good mail relay from the cloud that could hit the inbox of all of the major e-mail providers (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.) They do it every time and for very little.

It sounds like you are interested in something more along the lines of batches of data and not a realtime API.

Banks / Credit Unions / FIs do this now to send transactions between their own networks. I'm not aware of a consumer-oriented version of this, but that's not to say it shouldn't exist. PayPal is starting to move that direction with their x.com API. But you are going to be hit with more charges routing through PayPal than you would otherwise.

Drop me an e-mail. I'd like to hear more about it.

OK, but that's talking about a few things -

* A solid and modern online banking application
* Easily understood fee structures
* Home/mobile capture
* One time credit card purchasing

This is great from the perspective of a single 'end customer', but what I am getting at is more of an API that allows developers to tap in to certain types of information that might be stored at a financial institution. What type of APIs would be available, and what would be the use cases for each of them?

I'll state at a high level that I work for a Credit Union, and there are a lot of us that believe in a model such as the one you are describing. Can I take this discussion in a slightly different direction? Rather than "where can I get this today", how about "what would you want from a service like this"? Reply with a list of features and describe the problem you are trying to solve.

Do you want to only access your own account, or offer a service to multiple customers of the financial institution?
Are you thinking along the lines of web services?
What type of transactions would you want - realtime (i.e. what's my account balance now) or batch (show me all transactions for the last 6 months)?
Are you talking about wire transfers, ACH, checks, etc?
Are you thinking a pull model, where you query into the data or a push model, where you are alerted when things happen?

Don't get dragged down in any pricing or cost at this point - just tell me in more detail what you want.