No, i'm not doing it wrong.

There's no business requirement for us to failover in 5 seconds, or 5 minutes for that matter; so long as we can continue business in an hour we will get by; people do have pens and paper to keep things running.

I'm currently unengineering a predecessors stupid decision to put an Enterprise DB cluster in place, one that costs us around 20% of our cash flow, we can't afford to upgrade and gives the HA levels we do not need.

I recently inherited an application built on .NET, we're a Linux organisation. The devs had typically built it on SQL Server Express with not a care in the world, but it was a core business app.

We bought a single license of SQL Server standard, and put it in Master Slave replication mode. Not having touched Windows for years (as a server) it was a bit of faff to get an Active Directory setup going, but it actually works okay. You don't need to license the failover server for SQL Server.

If there's a failure, it's about 10 minutes on notification to flip the servers over and a bit of manual intervention. You can cut this down by buying a third box to use as an observer, but that seems to be another SPF.

Yes, but everyone knows Duke Nukem Forever hasn't been ported to Linux, BSD or any other of the Unix OS's yet. They'll probably try to get it running on OSX first anyway.

I went to see Avatar at the local IMAX in 3D, and had to leave the movie halfway through with a massive headache. My eyesight is basically okay, but I just couldn't relax and watch the focal point the director insisted you watch - rather my cognition is rather pan and scan, I was constantly looking around the scene and kept on hitting things that I couldn't focus on and strained my eyes trying to compensate.

This is an interesting point, the UK is very highly densely populated compared to the USA. England is 395/km2 compared to the US 31/km2 - that surely has an impact on fuel consumption.

Toyota is in direct competition with whatever shitheap cars your government are building.

You are right, eSATA is better - it's what we are using. The cradle is an eSATA/USB hybrid & the controller is a LaCie eSATA PCI card (only one we could find at reasonable prices with win2k3 drivers)

There's not much need for using something like BartPE on Vista/7 really - you just right click drag folders from drive to drive.

I'm doing this already, it works bloody well. I have my OS and Programs installed on a 120GB SSD, which sits around 50% utilisation and use NTFS junctions (aka symlinks) to map storage for stuff that doesn't need superfast seek speed (aka data) onto a group of 1.5TB drives. It takes a little management, so isn't quite ready for the average user yet - but you do effectively get something like 5TB of online disk space combined with SSD performance.

Interestingly, i've found on Windows 7 that by running OS/Programs from the SSD that the contention issues you would normally get on a spinning disk are mitigated a great deal - and there's no noticeable hit with having the entire user profile (including junk like web cache). The system is booted in 5 seconds after finishing its POST, and the desktop is snappy right from the get go.

As to the hard disks as backup, it works pretty good. At work we have maybe 1.2TB in a full backup - we do a weekly full backup and incrementals onto LTO tapes, and a second weekly backup onto a consumer grade SATA 1.5TB drive in a USB cradle. The SATA drives are taken offsite in case the office burns down, £80 + carrying a few hundred grams around makes for really cheap and fast data transfer.

Another vote for Security Essentials. I've replaced Nod32 at home, and Symantec at work with it. It's light, fast, free and does what it says on the tin.

Madonna adopts them.

"The least-obese area in the UK is London. London has the least people who drive to work, a result of having the best public transport and the most walkable communities."

Is the ONLY thing that differentiates London and the rest of the UK? The highest per capita income is not relevant?