Will we see more organizations outsourcing email services? Having run my own personal mail server for a few years, I'd be quite wary of purchasing and operating your own mail servers. Yes, if you own your mail servers, you can make them as secure and redudant as you want if price is no limit. But there's always a budget, and it will always not be enough to provide the uptime, redundancy, and backups that someone like Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft can provide. Plus, you can't really put a price on being able to sleep at night, free of worries that your server will be hacked, relay spam, or hard drive will fail.

If you are a non-profit, and even if you are not, Non-Profit Tech Blog wrote a three part series on

setting up your organization with Google Apps for your Domain.

Have you outsourced email servers? What led to that decision? Any positive/negative feedback about email hosting providers?

Report: Gmail about one-third as expensive as hosted e-mail

Despite the confusion, a lot of companies realize that e-mail has become expensive for two simple reasons: spam and malware. Nearly half of those surveyed were evaluating off-site solutions because e-mail costs had risen, while another 30 percent were performing the evaluation as part of an upgrade or service consolidation process. Fully 85 percent of these companies were leaning towards moving some of the services off-site.

I just read Easy, Efficient Hi-Def Video Playback, and after reading through all the "Convenient" steps required to rip and watch a movie, I'm left shaking my head. This is more convenient than putting a disc into a player? You also lose DVD chapters and menus this way, so good luck watching part of a movie one night and picking up where you left off later. I guess that's why I still prefer Tivo to building my own MythTV/DVR box. By the way, we watched our first Netflix "Watch Instantly" movie this weekend, and I was impressed. I had to queue it up via netflix's web site, but it streamed to the TivoHD with no problems and we could pause/resume/rewind just like any other TV show. It doesn't have chapters either, but if you stop/pause it remembers your place in the movie. If you google, you can get some pretty good deals on new or refurvished TivoHDs.

Unfortunately, on a dual core Athlon -- even overclocked to 2.3 GHz -- the Planet Earth rips are on the ragged edge of playability under Windows Media Player. CPU usage is well north of 80% all the time, and some peaks at 100% mean video stuttering and sound breakup at least a few times in each episode. This is unacceptable.

So far, the article I've learned the most from in this year's edition of PHP Advent is PHP Advent 2008 / MySQL Client Tips.  Did you know you can use your favorite text editor from the mysql command line client? Or get help on the syntax for SQL commands? I didn't before reading this article, and I prefer using the command line interface whenever possible. Every developer should be familiar with it, one day you'll have to diagnose a poorly executing query without phpMyAdmin.

The mysql client is an interactive command-line client that works directly with your MySQL server. Many PHP developers prefer to use phpMyAdmin, a web-based client, when working with MySQL. It is easy and rather intuitive to use, doesn't require you to know much SQL to fetch information, and is a whole lot less intimidating than a blank command prompt blinking at you. It is an application that sits between you and the database, providing a layer of abstraction. Sometimes that extra layer gets in the way. Sometimes, you need information that is not readily available from phpMyAdmin. Enter the mysql client.