NoScript is a good one. Kudos to Mozilla's foundation on that.

I'm not trying to rag on Firefox, by the way - I use it a lot (especially on Linux). I just find leaking memory to be particularly annoying, given how many machines I have south of the 1 gig equator.

I regularly use a lot of the Mozilla suite beyond just the browser - Bugzilla, Filezilla, Thunderbird, etc.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

Thunderbird is great...I really hated to see the IT guys in the sister group (My company uses IT guys and shares server resources with 4 other companies) choose outlook via an exchange server. It S U C K S.
Slow, painfully slow searching for mail (my box will contain 4-5000 emails on average as I get 60 - 70 legitimate emails a day) it freezes with no apparent reason sometimes. We had thunderbird before (my choice) liked it a lot. Only trouble with it was you better backup your mail box db's when updating.

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The government cannot give without first taking.

Can Thunderbird link up with the exchange server? I've never been sufficiently annoyed by outlook at my office to try it. I use Thunderbird for tasks related to school (managing email and newsgroup subscriptions).

By the way, if you don't mind me asking, why is your IT consulting agency letting their other customers dictate your email arrangement? If I were in your shoes, I'd say it's time for a new IT consulting outfit (unless I'm misunderstanding the arrangement).

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

I have a lot tied in.
My front-end system is a browser-based system running on RH server. (you might remember me talking to you about this last year) - I have forgotten a lot of linux commands since I have been out of the MIS business. They have one guy there who is pretty damn good.
Also I store mega GB's of images and Hi Res PDF's on shared servers that are backed up.
They have redundant T1 lines and solid power backup.
Saves me a ton of dough.

That and there is only one other IT business in the area here..and they are MS lovers..so...

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The government cannot give without first taking.

BTW Doc...I have often thought about why are there not more small server farms around.
Seems like a good business to me...maybe the insurance is hefty I don't know.
Are there a lot in Chicago?
I know of several LARGE farms there...but I am talking about smaller firms with a couple good IT guys with a blade file server...redundancy etc.
Wouldn't take a ton of money to start one.

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The government cannot give without first taking.

I reckon you could always decouple your email from them (unless there's some kind of tie in to your operating software and your company email). Let them keep hosting/maintaining your data and applications, but farm the email out to whoever. You could have an exchange server running in Bangalore for all the difference it would make. Of course, none of that speaks to your relationship with this group.

OTOH, I'm not advocating that, since I have no real problem with exchange. And, having hosting companies bid on your email is a lot of hassle just so that you can use Thunderbird again.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

I don't do a lot of interaction with IT consulting firms (except when I'm at a customer site and I have to deal with them, which is nice because it's much better than dealing with whatever passes for IT at most shops), so I'm not an authority here.

I suspect that the barrier to entry is economies of scale. I have a Linux server running in my office at home. If I were so inclined, I could charge you some nominal monthly fee to host a minimal website with your product offerings. My P2, 384 Meg Linux box would handle that. I could duplicate this process a few times before maxing out.

Now, doing that, I could probably only reasonably collect enough money from you and the others to pay for my static IP and buy beer. So, then I'd need to go out and buy an actual server and virtualize it. Even going the ebay route, I'm probably looking at a few grand and the time and effort to virtualize it. Now, if I get on my stick with marketing, I can have a few dozen customers, and maybe they're each paying $50 per month or something, putting let's say $2000 per month in my pocket, less operating expenses. That's not nearly enough money for me to live on, so I could do that as a side gig, perhaps. Of course, with my schedule and working full time, problems arise when I get a call at noon and have to tell my boss that I need to take an emergency call about my side business. (Edit: I could help my profits by designing all of your websites, but then I'm no longer strictly and IT shop)

So, I decide to make a go of drgoodtrips one-stop IT shop. I introduce a fully functional web service to let companies like yours route orders through my virtualized server - that way I can up your buyin to a few hundred per month. Of course, now I have enough to live on, but now I'm not just responsible for your content that might go down, but also for your company's bottom line. A single virtualized server won't cut it, so I have to pay out of pocket for more servers. Now let's say I'm pulling in 7K-10K per month. But, buying additional hardware and redundancy is eating into that, as-is the cost of my bandwidth. I'd also probably have to hire someone to help, since answering calls 24/7 isn't good for the old blood pressure.

So, I'm kind of running in place. The solution to all of that would be a lot of startup capital. Now, if I've saved money over the years and can sink 20-30 grand into equipment and have no income for a while, that's fine. Otherwise, I go looking for venture capital and, with what? I say to someone, "I'm going to do the same thing that many, many large companies already do a lot better than me."

That's my best guess anyway. Beyond simple hosting, it's hard to get a toehold in the market without significant time and startup capital, and it's hard to raise that capital out of pocket.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

You'd think. But I just went to my local Best Buy store and it turns out the best isn't what it used to be. For example: Mcafee used to have one of the better virus scanners/firewalls/protectors. Now it's supposed to be the worst and Norton, the old one I thought sucked really bad, is supposedly the best. But that's coming from the worlds worst electronic retailer #last in customer service so w/e.

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"Hard work without talent is a shame, but talent without hard work is a tragedy." -fortune cookie

Incidentally, in the line of the earlier browser discussion, google is releasing a new version of chrome. Chrome is already faster than firefox, but this version claims to be 30% faster. Early benchmarking indicates that it annihilates Firefox (and IE).

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

Where does Opera stack up in all this? It's what I use, but the latest, v 10, is sorta crashy.

I don't run it myself, so I have little firsthand experience. There are a lot of categories that are benchmarked for speed (without getting too in-depth, it has to do with speed on different types of page content, and the number of open tabs/instances). From what I've read, Opera 10 stacks up favorably against Firefox and IE (which I think is the worst), but is not as good as existing Chrome, to say nothing of this zippier version.

Of course, you can find speed tests that favor just about any browser you like, since there are so many variables. You could also set up scenarios in such a way that favors any of the browsers. I'm just reporting, anecdotally, my take from reading lots of these types of studies.

Firefox is getting slower and slower because it's suffering (as many open source projects do) from feature bloat. Google is focussed on making chrome progressively faster. The open source community contributing to Firefox is focussed more on creating endless plugins that do cool things. However, the tradeoff is that more plugins means more to load in memory and bog you down.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

Here's a nifty little Finnish online test I just found. Peacekeeper

I've got it running in a separate tab (which is making this one run like shit, not surprisingly). I'm curious to see the reporting.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

Or one could just build their own laptop, which is 8 billion times easier than building a desktop (which isn't that difficult to begin with) and much cheaper than buying from a computer company. Traveler, back me up!

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“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” - Carl Sagan

Remember to submit your nominations for the U.S. Politics Online Alternative Awards!

Ha! I did that too, and then noticed the little adviso "Do not run this with other tabs or windows open".

I got impatient (but I like the pretty colors!) and quit.