Take me to your leader...

"Astrophysicist Mazlan Othman". Since when did we put people who actually know something about their particular subject in charge? Outrageous. I put forward Tony Blair instead, he's interested in foreign relations recently I hear.

Search Term != Porn

The article context makes it seem as if there are 116k pedo's searching for images of child abuse every day. Let's remember there are numerous reasons why someone may use the search term "Child Pornography" which have nothing to do with wanting to consume porn. Maybe I've been the victim of child pornography, maybe I'm studying the psycho/social issues around it, maybe I'm researching it's prevalence on the web...

Why so complicated?

"With a normal SDV, the frog-trooper isn't inside a pressure hull - he is immersed in the surrounding water. This can be a problem, as hours spent unmoving in cold water can sap the strength of even the steeliest underwater warrior."

Why not just heat the water inside the SDV?

Excellent article!

Excellent article. As a previous commentator mentioned perhaps a dash more biting humour would have been nice, but it's intelligent, interesting, relevant and well written. A world away from the tabloid garbage we've been seeing recently on El-Reg, like the inspired report a few days ago of "fat people falling through floor".

Coming to the pub for a quick pint lads?

"Womb-coked simians in banana-pellet munchies frenzy"

There's creativity, and then there's drunken babble. I think the juries still out on exactly which side of the line this headline falls.

You wouldn't exactly need to be Miss Marple.

"the secret supertroopers of SOCOM may be able to cause [...] a single person to inexplicably be incinerated"

Oh look, there's Dave's smouldering corpse. How odd. Surely only a laser weapon could have done such a thing. If only we knew who owned such a dastardly device. Oh, wait...

Idiots with our private data

At least we're all clear on why a "trade association representing car repair companies" requires information on peoples driving convictions. Aren't we?

Doesn't know who he's messing with!

This poor guy doesn't understand the organisation he's messing with. The next thing he knows the Foxxconn security chief will be popping around asking him if he wants to take a tour of the roof...

Small company benefits?

We are a small company, around 50 employees. We've used VMWare Server (and before that VMWare GSX Server) to consolidate hardware, simplify server maintenance, allow the introduction of alternative operating systems and dramatically boost the effectiveness, speed and reliability of our disaster recovery solution.

For hardware consolidation we have 15 virtual servers (Windows/Linux) running on only 3 Dell Poweredge servers. That's MS Exchange, domain controllers, file servers, web servers, print servers, etc.

Server maintenance is helped a great deal. The sysadmin can try ill advised "upgrade" ideas on an offline copy of the production server before trying it on the real thing. That's helped us avoid quite a few problems in the past.

We had no Linux servers before virtualisation. The skills to manage Linux running directly on the hardware for mission critical services just weren't there. Nor was the confidence (in some quarters) that Linux was suitable. Virtualisation has allowed us to introduce Linux gently. It's allowed a server to be built which the sysadmin could treat as a "black box", starting, stopping and backing up via the familiar Windows UI. These days (several years later) we have in house Linux skills and Linux running directly on hardware for our most important mission critical servers.

The benefit of virtualisation to our disaster recovery solution can't be overstated. We backup virtual machine folders on to disk and tape. Simple, fast, no expensive "backup agents" or other complexity required and can be restored onto any hardware. To restore our entire Exchange server from backup is just a case of dragging a folder in Windows explorer, compared to the previous hell of being faced with a "system level" backup tape and some hardware and weekend in the office.

I can't imagine being without VMWare.