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With the built in Windows tools you can disable the use of USB thumb drives while still allowing USB keyboards and etc. You just have to know how to use Group Policy and a small handful of Registry settings.

In Windows XP you simply go into RegEdit and go to this registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control

Next, make a new key called StorageDevicePolicies. In there make a DWORD called WriteProtect and give it a value of 1. Now you can allow people USB keys but they can't write to them. Want to disable reading as well? Just add the appropriate DWORD.

For a non-built in method I hear good things from a friend that has used this in the past.

Why do I have the feeling this could be easily Google'd?

They sure keep a lot of them in stock at Walmart, Frys, Office Max, and every department store I've been in lately. I would think they wouldn't do that for such rapidly depreciating merchandise unless it was moving quickly. Do you have figures? Citation please.

Can you not read? You stated 4TB NAS's are flying off the shelves, and you stated it while referring to home-based use of video. The inference you were trying to make is that 4TB NAS's are selling like hotcakes because people are busily filling up their drives with legal (and illegal) content.

I stated these NAS devices are flying off the shelves not due to average consumer demand but instead because of demand from businesses of all stripes. Small businesses in particular are snapping up NAS units at a record pace. I consult for a living so I see this, but if you want exact figures, Google is your friend. I found this in about ten seconds. There's far more where that came from if you care to look.

For the Grammar Nazis and the "I hate idiots who put the entire URL in as the URL text" people...

Processor Magazine is reporting that developers at Steelcape have developed a new solution [for] sending data without opening ports on the firewall. Will this work with embedded devices?

Processor Magazine http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?art icle=articles%2Fp2913%2F54p13%2F54p13.asp&guid=&se archtype=&WordList=&bJumpTo=True is reporting that developers at Steelcape http://www.steelcape.com/has developed a new solution sending data without opening ports on the firewall. Will this work with embedded devices?

According to processor.com http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?art icle=articles%2Fp2633%2F06cp33%2F06cp33.asp, "one nine" uptime means that you can have up to 876 hours downtime per year.

That's more than a month of downtime, slightly more than sourceforge's 4 days..

Everything is looked at through the lens of the Dollar. As management listens to whatever research and advisory firms already output, let's see what Gartner, as an example, has to say on the subject.

Processor.com, July 2, 2004:
As vice president for research firm Gartner, the world's largest IT research group, he's studied the question at length and learned that just because a new technology makes something possible, it does not, sadly, make that very thing probable... "I can point to clear examples where call centers are highly virtualized," says Raskino, "with agents working almost entirely from their homes." But when he speaks to other managers about how virtual technologies are being used, they look at him in utter disbelief. "They say, 'Can it be possible? I'm sure our unions won't accept it.' The forces of inertia get in the way. They don't stop the change, of course. They just slow it down."
Gartner.com, 30 Oct 2001:
In his October 30 address at Symposium/ITxpo 2001 in Brisbane. Gartner vice president and research director Simon Hayward... enjoyed poking fun at today's cubicle environment, using the cartoon character Dilbert to help him out. "It's not just the workers who are objecting to the cubicle culture," he told his audience. "Managers also recognize that people will be more effective if the environment is better adapted to the reality of work."
CFO.com, October 01, 2006: Another factor pushing companies to reconsider office space is the widening gap between what workers need and what workplaces provide. At one time, office employees labored primarily in solitude; today, they spend two-thirds of their time collaborating, according to Gartner. But offices are still set up for the old style of work. "In most companies, you find that conference rooms are overbooked while offices and cubicles are empty," says Mark Golan, Cisco's vice president of worldwide real estate and the chairman of CoreNet. "It's insane. Not only is it wasteful, it doesn't suit the needs of your workforce."
Even if you can build the case against cubicles, you still need to be able to communicate with management. That means, y'know, diplomacy, communication skills, a lil bit of cunning, and what not.

Nevertheless, you might be heard, but don't expect them to listen.
Of course, if they've already invested in cubicles, tough luck. Nothing's gonna change their minds. Cubicles might be less productive than other office layouts, but dumping an existing design == dumping money. Bad ROI.

As for Aeron chairs? Why not demand an onsite spa and inhouse office-desk pizza delivery while you're at it?

The companies who are really serious about servers are particularly interested in CPU power compared to heat dissipation -- thermal density. This new Intel CPU is high performance with high heat--more of a gamer chip. At least so far it is; it's a very early sample and Intel hasn't had time to tune the power management features.

Intel's latest chips are fabbed at 65nm, while AMD is still only shipping chips fabbed at 90nm. This should give Intel a serious edge in the performance/heat ratio, but AMD's chips are so much more energy efficient that they are still competitive. (The current best performance/heat is the AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ ADD chip.) When AMD finally ships 65nm Opterons, those ought to be really great for dense server installations.

It's telling that even Dell is planning to ship servers with AMD chips. They announced a 4-core server; two dual-core Opterons. It wouldn't surprise me if they will be 65nm Opterons when they finally are released.

The article says that Intel is going to transition from 65nm to 45nm sometime in 2007, and to 34nm sometime in 2009. They beat AMD to 65nm big-time. They may well be at 34nm before AMD can make it to 45nm! Just imagine some sort of server chip with 16 cores... or more likely, 8 cores and a whole bunch of cache.

But we shouldn't count those chickens before they hatch. Right now Intel is at 65nm and AMD will be there soon.

steveha

Ok: 99.886% is three nines, but it is not four.
99.886->99.9->99.89. /me ducks

Rounding is not a privilege you can just apply at will. If you've studied engineering or physics (chemistry?) you know you that the amount of rounding you have to apply is precisely dictated by the precision of your input values and the calculations done on those numbers. Either rounding too much or too adds unnecessary inaccuracy.

If you've had 10 hours of downtime, you'd know it sufficiently exact to have less than 0.5 hour error, but let's assume 9.5...10.5 hours -> 99.880%...99.892. Less than three nines even in the extremes of your measurement error.

You need less than 8.8 hours downtime to get three nines, which is quite a chunk less downtime than 10 hours (12% less, duh)...

See also here http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?art icle=articles%2Fp2633%2F06cp33%2F06cp33.asp&guid=& searchtype=&WordList=&bJumpTo=True

If you have to get there by rounding, you're cheating if you ask me. If you know it's 99.886%, then you know it's less than 99.900%, so you know it's not three nines.

Anybody who knows they are/have been down 10 hours in a year know they didn't get to 99.900%, so if they round it and call it three nines, they are lying.

Try the ads in Processor Magazine.

It doesn't take a million dollars to play with a S/390, it doesn't even take $100k. Chances are there are dozens sitting out in system recyclers inventory right now.

IBM had way back grafted a S/390 processor card into a PC Server 500. The S/390 card had full processor and seperate memory support. It emulated the mainframe connectivity via the underlying OS (usually OS2 as the host). An IBM web page talking about it is PC Server 500 System/390 technical overviewThe full search results at IBM.COM show 100 pages Search for PC Server 390

I checked eBAY and don't see any available now, so the best bet would be through the used IBM channels like the advertisers in TheProcessor