I disagree with this statement that social skills are extremely easy to learn. Relating to others with different intentions, personalities and nationalities in various situations is difficult. It takes a lot of skill and practice. What it takes to sell someone a drink in a coffee shop is quite a bit different than trying to negotiate a deal with a Japanese Business man while playing golf. Relating in different social scenarios differ greatly, and can be treated as art.

I respectfully disagree. I don't think that you can say that it was necessarily God's will that a church be destroyed in Minneapolis. In Luke 13, Jesus touches on a disaster story of the day, which could parallel your story of the church being struck in Minneapolis. Jesus mentions a disaster story in which the Tower of Siloam fell killing 18 Jewish people. His commentary on this, was not that these people had done something wrong and deserved judgment more than the rest. But unless they had a change of mind, they too would pass away.

One of the tragedies of the Christian Church today is the lack of understanding regarding the power of God. One powerful scripture on faith and the power of God is in Matthew 17:20, Jesus states "If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you." I believe that if one were educated in the power of God that this disaster could have been averted.

FreeNX has been around for quite some time and that hasn't killed NoMachine off. However, Google being involved may create more OpenSource developer interest in NX and perhaps someone will create a good Windows NX Server, Windows NX Client and better management tools. If Google rallies that much developer support it could mean an end to NoMachine.

I really like the IronKey Enterprise features -- remote destruction, management console, etc. It sounds like mac support is in it's infancy. Are there any enterprise level mac alternatives to IronKey?

Agreed. Kudos to Mark and the Ubuntu guys. They're doing a great job. Now, if we can get a majority accepted UI kit (stealing Apple's design philosophy wouldn't hurt), and a much better GUI back-end (or make X11 much better), linux on the desktop would rock.

Linux' problem is the endless competing projects and the mis-management of developer's time and resources. Many developers want to create and lead new projects The whole too many Chiefs not enough Indian problem. If we could developers to improve someone else's project, rather than starting their own, it would really help Linux. Secondary, it sucks when many of the Chiefs are pig-headed and are not open to criticism or contributions. What ends up happening is that applications end up performing better and looking better in Windows and Mac OS X rather than in Linux. And thus most users end up going with a better Workstation Product -- Mac OS X and (*ugh*) Windows. I know that it seems like a shot in hell to get developers to change... but problems like these are keeping Linux on the desktop from taking off.

Apparently anyone who adds onomatopoeia to this string gets modded up as insightful! Let's see!

PING!!!!!

I agree with most of the tips here... Just one last tip that I think will really help. Having a Staging / Testing Environment that is similar to your production setup. Whatever you do (i.e. install tools, new scripts, new packages), run it through your Staging Network and let it cook for a few days. If it blows up, that sucks, but at least it didn't blow up production.

Lastly, I've read a couple of people who endorse CFEngine / Puppet. I've been running slack, which is great, it's easy to set up, runs great, and easy to understand. I recommend people check it out.

http://www.sundell.net/~alan/projects/slack/