When good document control systems exists, its mind-boggling that anyone still uses network drives to share documents.  While just saving a file is super convenient, you are punting on activities that provide long term value.  These include version control (no more versioning via file names1), retention policies, and better management of the collaborative editing process (who has it open?).

Much like my dad has done, another Windows Vista customer has "upgraded" a Vista machine to Windows XP.  So, I guess the PR Lady was somewhat correct? BTW - annoying that apple doesn't let you link directly to one of its ads -- its free advertising, mactards!

On our way to dinner Friday, my Dad and I were wondering what is the exact difference between a router and a switch.  Sounds like something basic most anybody with a home network should know, but at best all we could do was guess/BS our way through the answer.  Wikipedia to the rescue.

As much as we'd like to bash Microsoft, or whatever software vendor is affected by exploits, the truth is that user behavior also contributes to the poor security on some machines.  Jeff Atwood details his own experience with a PC that was infected because he surfed 1 website with an old version of IE6.

Before reading Jeff Atwood's post about Hard Drive Temperatures, I would have thought the the CPU is the most temperature sensitive component in a PC.  That's what I focused on, when I was selecting parts for a new desktop at home.  Jeff's article is full of details but he makes a solid point that is often overlooked - if your CPU or video card are fried, its not a huge deal.  Sure its an inconvenience and a hassle to order new parts to replace them.  I

Dad passed me along the link to the slashdot discussion of Microsoft's partnership with Novell.  (Usually, its me sending him the slashdot link).  On the face of it, the major part of the announcement concerns patent rights MS holds - specifically that it will not assert them against open source developers.  The Technology Liberation Front has a good overview of this angle.

Firefox 2 comes out tomorrow (Tuesday) and IE7 is slower rendering some pages, particularly if they use AJAX, than Firefox.
 

Sandy made some excellent points, as expected, arguing for a Mac - "So count that as $150 for a really good environment and some nice apps, which retail all together for about $200." No doubt cause he just bought himself a shiny iMac. OS X is definitely a very nice operating system. After 2 years with a Powerbook, its worked great. iLife is definitely a nice suite but if I want to do some comfy video editing, its either get an iMac, and render my current dual LCD system useless (Staci could use one, I'm sure) or go up to a Mac Pro (or whatever the top of the line is called).

I stayed up way too late last night researching a potential desktop replacement. I'm torn between a DIY AMD64 PC vs an Apple. Up front, the biggest decider will be price, as I want to keep the price at or below $1,000. That rules out iMac's and MacPros, leaving the Mac Mini as my choice from Apple. That fits nicely with my plans to keep my current LCD displays, and keyboard and mouse. The only other real requirement, is that World of Warcraft has to run nicely on it.

Both of Mozilla's calendaring projects have reached 0.3 releases. Sunbird is a standalone calendaring application, while Lightning is a Thunderbird Extension. Changes of note include improved reliability "makes it much more difficult to lose data" and basic handling of events received in email using iMIP.