No, you don't.

Need?

No, you don't. I buy them as tools and carefully measure their return over the years. I use these machines in my business.

Keep it classy.

Yeah, because not having SATA 3 makes a machine ununsable...

Yeah, because if a NIC dies then it doesn't matter that it's probably part of the motherboard chipset and all of a sudden you have an expensive repair bill. Not to mention that wireless cards *are* plug-in PCIe cards on these mini form factor PCs...

I think you might be havign problems understandnig/empathising with what a 'normal' person is going to want out of a PC. Not only that, but even us geeks get bored of the PC treadmill after a while. The last desktop I bought was an iMac in 2007. It's old, it's tired and it just stopped working reliably this past week or so. I cant' easily fix it, but you know what, I got five solid years out of that workhorse. I don't care that I couldn't upgrade it -- despite being a programmer, and therefore as much of a 'power user' as anybody, 2GHz of Core2 Duo has been plenty fast enough -- and, if repairibility had been an issue, I'd have bought 3 years of Applecare and retired it when the warranty expired.

The MacMini is an excellent computer if you want a small, silent machine that keeps out of your way. If you want a toy to upgrade and play with, it's not so great.

While I'm no expert on Android, I am a developer and I have worked on a pretty major Android app. We found that Android 2.2 and earlier had some bugs in the version of HTTPClient that Android uses, and this bug caused certs from one particular root authority (Verisign, IIRC) to fail. It was a major problem. It was a while ago now, but I think the work-around we went for was to effectively enable untrusted CAs on 2.2 clients. I can happily believe that the apps being talked about here, those with weak SSL, were all modified in this way to work around the Android bug -- the authors probably just made the 'weak-ssl-is-better-than-no-ssl' trade-off and shipped their apps. What else are you realistically going to do?

As it becomes less important to target Android pre-2.3, this particular bug will hopefully become a thing of the past. According to Google, 2.2 is now on 13% of devices, so we're almost at that point. 13% is still a lot though...

Maybe you have poor memory? These were big news.

I worked on a second-level support desk during the iloveyou outbreak, and a great many companies that we supported were affected. Likewise blaster and codered. I was a programmer by then, but I saw the damage on several servers that weren't firewalled.

I hear this a lot, and in some (but very few) circumstances it's certainly true. However, mostly it's not. Most internal web apps run just fine on IE7, 8 and 9 too. My feeling is that these businesses don't want to upgrade because the current tool (usually a Dell Pentium 4 with XP) is working just fine. Why would any sane businesses want to spend money replacing something that works perfectly well? Well, you and I know a few good answers to that, but we're not the decision makers here.

BTW, I'm a developer, and I wrote a lot of those apps that originally ran on IE, so I've seen this all the way through. There aren't truly that many apps that are genuinely IE6 only. Most run just fine on newer versions of IE, and often times FF and Chrome too. As a developer, even though I was targeting IE only back in the early 2000s, I actually used Firebird (which then became Firefox) to do most of my testing -- and I don't think I was alone.

Spoken like someone who has never paired a bluetooth keyboard with their tablet/smartphone. If you're typing and you need a keyboard, use a keyboard.

I hope that Slashdot aren't getting paid for that, because if it truly is an advert, it's one of the crummiest adverts I've ever seen.

I mean, I'm pretty up on 'cloud' stuff. I use EC2 extensively. I'm up on Java, I write quite a bit of that stuff. I recognise many of the buzzwords in the post but I don't have the slightest clue what they're talking about or what exactly HP are offering. And I don't care enough about this gap in my knowledge to click any of the links and find out, because I suspect it'll be a waste of time.

Apple use Microsoft's CDN quite extensively, along with theother usual suspects (particularly Akami). It makes sense -- between iTunes and their software downloads/updates they need to transfer a truly vast amount of data every day, and Apple aren't shy about using another service if someone else can do it better. I'm not aware of Apple using any other part of Microsoft's cloud (or any other cloud for that matter) -- e.g., servers, but maybe they do now days. Just as a side note/question, are CDN's considered cloud? Certainly akami pre-dates what we now call clouds, IIRC.

I know you won't like it, and I agree with everything you say and more -- in fact, I'm a programmer, and when I see a problem (especially involving a CSV file) I'll quite often go so far as to write a one-off bespoke program to solve it. But we're at the very edge of the edge cases.

But we're different. Most people want their data to remain in the app they used to create it, because that makes most sense. That means they can find it again. Want to re-print that letter you wrote last year to your electricity company? Great! Just open the app you used to write it and boom, there it is. That's about as complicated as computers need to be for most people, and to be honest, they'll actually get more out of their computers as a result.

Thankfully, complicated desktop operating systems aren't going anywhere soon, so we'll still have our way (Linux and BSD will see to that, thankfully). It just won't be how most people do it.

It's pretty simple really: You open an app, you get a list of your documents that have been created in or imported in to that app. If you get an attachment you want to open, it offers apps that are registered for that file type. There's no browsing of disks or folders. It's up to the individual apps to let you group and sort documents by metadata (which will be tailored to the type of data the app deals in, of course). It works pretty well, even if there are some frustrating limitations.

The cloud part is (or should be) transparent -- you open Pages on one device and create a document. Next time you open Pages on another device, it should be there as if by magic. It's still early days, and they haven't got it right yet, but they're working pretty hard on this stuff.

You can very easily see what they're doing. As geeks, we probably won't like it as much as the way things currently work, but it makes sense for an awful lot of use-cases, and it'll probably help them earn boatloads more money in the next decade or so. It'll also create a good deal of vendor lock-in, if they're successful.

Man, when you put it like that, it that sounds so dull and realistic. Can't you rephrase it to make it more exciting and inflammatory?

It wasn't the way they 'included a browser', it was they way they attempted (and succeeded) to entirely destroy a competitive market by using the thermo-nuclear option of abusing their Windows monopoly.

And it wasn't the way they did it with the web browser, it was the way they did it time and time again (Dr-Dos, OS/2, DiskStacker, WordPerfect, Netware, Netscape, DirectX) and certainly more than that. They even tried to create a proprietary internet (and thankfully failed).

They don't seem so evil these days, but I'm sure they would if they could. Or maybe Ballmer's just a big softy compared to Gates? I don't know, I suspect that the competition in mobile and from Google has really dented their ability to be really evil.

Why not? It's not friction that'll turn a 1 in to a 0, but simple entropy or cosmic rays (seriously). ECC RAM is designed specifically to guard against that kind of problem.

Friction can kill anything that moves -- fans and hard-disks. If a fan dies, either in the PSU, the case or on the CPU, you could end up with a server that crashes and has all kinds of problems. That's why real servers beep incessantly to let you know if a fan is dying.

And software can crash over time. I write software for a living, and a few months ago I had to change a bit of code I wrote in 2005 -- it was broken by a security update Microsoft released in November last year.

Anyway, OP is asking about cheap-skate ways to emulate Microsoft's expensive fail-over clustering options. The only real answer (I can think of) is replication/log shipping and something in the software that detects the fault and enables the fail-over without any on-site technical expertise. But he's going to need to talk to the ISV about that, not us.

Firebird is an open-source embedded database project that was already quite mature when they renamed Pheonix. They didn't threaten to sue, they just asked nicely.

I think I read somewhere that the $100M Microsoft injected would have made little difference to Apple's bottom line/survival, but was an important show of confidance. More important for Apple was the Office deal (and in return Microsoft got IE5 bundled as the default Mac web browser).

Out of that period came my favourite Steve Jobs quote of all time, when he told the Apple faithful at WWDC "for Apple to win, Microsoft don't have to lose". The same is still true today -- even more so -- there's plenty of room for a huge ecosystem of competing products. The constant arguments in blogs and on sites like this about whether Andoid or iOS is winning are futile -- there doesn't need to be one clear winner.