Get with some of your local ham radio geeks. Those guys are amazing. Granted, their radio bands and equipment are not approved or licensed for commercial use, but they can probably at least point you in the right direction. Once they get the equipment (which is way less than $30k) and license, they can toss packets all over the place for free. I don't know what the bandwidth or latency is like on their systems, but I do know that when it comes to getting information from point A to point B, they get pretty creative. Certainly they can help you come up with something that will fit your needs (for a nominal fee). Worth a shot!
Share just about any digital media you want, make money for sharing it, and the artist(s) and copyright holder(s) get paid as well. Bitmunk is a great system that's been around for a while, so it's good to finally see the big guys catch on and get on board.
The NSA already has all of this information stored and indexed anyways. Why not just partner up with them? Shouldn't be too hard to integrate since the NSA will already have their hands in the FBI network to police it (according to http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/22/0340219).
They set up shop on the far side of the moon and launch interstellar spaceflights from there. That's why. Didn't you see that in Star Trek IV when Kirk and the gang used the moon to hide their warp signature from the Vulcans as their ship headed off towards the sun to travel back to the future?
From what I've seen from lunar landing footage and descriptions of the lunar surface, I have about a pound of material that would make a great substitute. It's caked on my video card and motherboard inside my computer case. I'll just scoop it up into a ziplock back and mail it to NASA. Perhaps if the other two million Slashdot readers can empty theirs as well, they would have enough to complete their mission. Where should we mail this stuff to?
It's been a while since I lived in the greater D.C. metropolitan area, but from what I can remember there are two major newspapers in D.C.:
Washington Post: Left-leaning, liberal
Washington Times: Right-leaning, conservative
Something tells me that if a similar story were to appear in the Washington Times, it would have a different slant and possible even tout the advantages of this crime database.
You definitely have a point, but I don't think it would be forceful at all. It's more like forcing the ability to choose than forcing a particular choice. Plus, compliance in and of itself is still a choice. Companies choose whether or not they want to try to achieve a certain ISO compliance-standardization-level-thingy. My company is not, and probably never will be, ISO-anything compliant. Not because I can't follow their rules, but because I am (for now) a one-man show and don't really need to be ISO-anything compliant whether it be 9000 or 9*10^10.
I'm just thinking that somewhere, someday, some ISO standard will include information interchange of complex documents as part of the compliance requirements. When that day comes, here's to hoping they decide to require ODF or [insert cool open format here] as the format./me raises his glass
Now that it's an ISO standard, perhaps the ISO would be so kind as to make its use part of one of those big compliance standards. This way, companies that want to be ISO 31337 (or whatever number they're up to now) compliant will have to use ODF as their primary means of storing and transmitting documents. After all, what's the use of a new standard if nobody feels compelled to use it? In addition to encouraging the use of open formats, it will give companies a reason to explore their options as far as office automation software.
Let's see some mass migrations from MS Office to OpenOffice.org and other such Open Source office suites. A few large corporations making the switch will produce case studies and some of those nifty ROI projections the suits always drool over. A snowball effect would be nice. One company makes the move and triggers a chain reaction in all of their vendors, suppliers, distributors, subsidiaries, etc. etc.
Jah-Wren beat me to it, but it's good to see that the portable employment idea works. I'm considering offering the same sort of arrangement. If anyone has any pointers on how to get a co-op of this sort started, I'd love to hear some input.
I've been thinking about this for a while. I know it sounds crazy, but come join my company. I'm an independent contractor as well, but I'm incorporating as of Jan 1st strictly to take advantage of group health care rates for me and my family. One of my first thoughts was that there have to be other independent IT contractors out there who are in the same boat I'm in. If we cooperate and work together, we can each continue to do our own thing but get better benefits out of it for the long term.
Just funnel your work through the company and for a modest percentage of gross revenue, we'll...
* Get you in on the group healthcare plan and rate (Anthem PPO)
* Handle your invoicing and accounts receivable for you
* Let you manage all of your incoming revenue and disperse it (legally) as you see fit from your own internal holding account:
* Calculated payroll including federal/state witholdings
* Expense account for whatever you need to reimburse yourself for (equipment & such)
* Pay full healthcare benefits pretax
* Simplify your taxes come tax time by providing a W-2 instead of having to itemize and report a schedule C for business profit and loss.
* Try to toss each other some business when we can.
The beauty of the arrangement is that you continue to do your own work for your own customers, but have the convenience of a business behind you (and some legal protection as well). Perhaps down the line we can look at adding other benefits like a 401K plan.
If you're interested, just follow the link in my sig to my lame-ass website and hit that contact us form or email me at gunfighter AT gmail DOT com.
Depends on the application needs. Citrix servers can operate in load balancing farms, so you don't need one big server when a bunch of little ones will do. Basically, you're taking the computing horsepower off the desktop and loading it up on a server farm. If the computing is that intensive to where you have many people crunching many large files, they may need to re-evaluate their data collection and storage methods to better suit the intended end result.
To determine if a remote desktop solution is the best fit will require some studying to take into account the recurring increased bandwidth costs and costs of time delay (idle workers waiting for file transfers to complete?) vs. the one-time costs of a remote desktop solution.
If we're to help the original poster any further, we'll need more information.
If possible, write the app to run centrally and then use a remote desktop solution like LTSP, Citrix, or Windows Terminal Services to feed access to the app out to clients.
... because once you master discrete mathematics, you're {s, e, t}. Careful though, because if you don't pay attention and concentrate on what you're learning, you'll end up with Ø.
Sorry... couldn't resist. On a more serious note, I started on the BSCS path at Virginia Tech over a decade ago and had to stop a few months into my sophomore year. Now I'm enrolled in ASU's BSCS program after not doing a lick of calculus for 10 years, and the math is kickin' my arse. It's true what they say: if you don't use it, you lose it. My advice for aspiring CS gurus is definitely "stick with it once you start." Picking up the pieces years later to continue your education can be a little mindblowing.
I'm actually quite comfortable w/ my IT career. I've been self-employed since 2002, and I've done everything from custom programming to network administration and project management. Picking up my CS degree is something I decided to do because I want to do it, not because I need to do it to get a better job. For me, CS is still worth it because I want to take my programming and software engineering skills to the next level. I've been programming since I was 8 years old, and I feel like I've hit a plateau in my programming skillset. The one thing I want to develop from my CS studies is how to put all of the little pieces I've learned over the years together so I can contribute to the development of larger, more complex software projects. Perhaps I'll even try to start cranking out some Linux Kernel modules or something.
Once an individual finds a little responsibility and establishes some equilibrium in his or her life, leisure time spent gaming online can be rewarding and satisfying without becoming a problem. The key is to maintain a healthy balance and resist the urge to powergame your way to the top. I played SWG for a year and then WoW for a year. Before that, I was an FPS player off and on for 8 years. Throughout the course of the past decade, I had to take extended breaks from online gaming for real life events. Each time I returned, it was always a welcome addition to the daily routine for myself, my family (who, despite my good looks and charm still need a break from me every once in a while), and my friends/guildies.
Have I overdone it before? Yes... there have been times where my online gaming interfered with and had a negative effect on other aspects of my life that deserved my attention more than some pixels and a few voices at the other end of a Ventrilo channel. My first venture into the world of online gaming sucked up waaaaaaay too much of my time and cost me dearly. Years of experience later (after I became a "family man"), I learned to control it a little better. My first MMO (SWG) sucked up a little too much time, but not so much that it had a negative effect on my work or family. I pretty much stuck to playing at night when most people would be vegetating in front of a television. After SWG, WoW took even less of my time because there was less to learn about the game, no stupid houses to decorate, etc. WoW is appealing to me because Blizzard figured out that some people want the RP taken out of MMORPG. Just log on, kill stuff, and have fun.
Here is the best piece of WoW advice I can give any WoW player: you can play the game and have fun doing it at your own pace, without all epic gear, without raiding, without farming, without powerleveling, and without mastering every endgame instance in Azeroth. You don't need to be Grand Marshall. You don't even need an epic mount. I loved, and still love, playing WoW after a year; and I've only seen the inside of Molten Core (past the first mob) one time. One of my level 60 characters has two epic pieces of gear: one a friend sold me, and the other I happened to luck out and be the only other mage on an Onyxia run when a purple mage headpiece dropped even though I was at the bottom of the suicide kings list (other guy already had it).
The key is to establish how much leisure time you have and stick to it, then decide what you want to do during that leisure time. As many other posters pointed out, the "taking a hobby too far" thing can wreck lives no matter what it is applied to: drinking, golf, gambling, playing poker (which is a game of skill, not gambling:P) billiards, playing tetris, drugs, bowling, painting, music, racing, chatting, browsing the Internet for pr0n, and yes.... playing games online. When you feel like you have to do something rather than wanting to do it, that's when you need to step back and evaluate. I hit that point with SWG and vowed not to let it happen in WoW. Running the guild + levelling + running an in-game business in SWG literally felt like I was working two jobs even though I only played at night. In WoW, I play when I want to and have the time to. Case in point, a character I created this past spring is stuck at level 36 and has been for months because I don't have time to play right now (recent new addition to the family takes precedence over playing WoW). The character can wait. Life, both in the game and outside of it, goes on. When I have time to log in to run some quests, I will. Until then, I have plenty of stuff outside WoW to keep me occupied, and I'm very happy and comfortable with paying my $15 a month while I take my break... knowing that when I do have time to play again, I will be welcomed back by my guildies with open arms even if I don't commit 6 hours a night to running endgame raids.
Very well, just take the "Luckily" out of that statement and re-read it.
I imagine for most slashdotters, it's not so much a "lucky for us people who support FLOSS/Windows security and can still make money off of it" as it is a "lucky for us people who believe the security of Microsoft products is flawed by design and them releasing yet another buggy, unsecure OS proves correct what many people have been saying for quite some time: if you want hardened systems, stay away from Microsoft products and go with something a little more bulletproof."
I'm all for Microsoft doing a ground-up rewrite of their Operating System with security as the top priority. I hope they do it some day. After I posted that post, I went and looked at my accounting records for the past year because I was curious how much time I had actually spent helping customers with Windows security measures. From the numbers I crunched, it probably wouldn't affect my little slice of IT consulting revenue one bit if Microsoft were to roll out the Windows 2009 Holy Grail of Security Edition. As a good friend of mine once said when he first opened his IT consulting firm a few years ago, "There will always be someone out there willing to pay me to show them how to set up macros in Microsoft Word."
P.S. Security isn't a problem or a feature. It's a process;)
There's actually a lot of truth to this statement. Success for Microsoft can mean an overall decrease in long term recurring revenue for a variety of service providers (even Microsoft Certified Solution Providers). If Vista is more secure, it means less need for "more secure" alternatives. For those of us who base our living off of maintaining and supporting said alternatives, this is a bad thing.
Personally, I support homogenous networks; so I will see a spike in revenue from any XP->Vista upgrades. In the long run, there will be a decline in revenue if Vista is more secure. A more secure OS means fewer customer calls for security related issues and a decrease in the sales, installation, maintenance, and support of security related products. Initially, the antivirus/antispyware/firewall/IDS/etc. sales and support would stay the course. People have it engraved in the back of their heads that they need all of these things when they're running a Windows environment. Over time, the perception and realization would be that such preventative measures are no longer required.
Luckily, I don't think Microsoft is releasing a more secure OS. Just like every Microsoft Operating System to date, I have a feeling they will roll it out with trumpets blaring and decree how secure it is.... only to have some black hat cracker show up at a hacker conference with an arsenal of exploits and blow holes in their hard work. We all know that there is no such thing as a completely secure networked computer; but I would caveat that with "especially a Microsoft-powered system." I don't see that caveat changing any time in the near future.
When you plan your software product roadmaps, what feature requests do you pay more attention to? Enterprise customers want scalability, reliability, redundancy, and security; but some database programmers are looking for features such as solid transaction support, stored procedures, and more functions. How do you rank which feature requests get attention first?
... they should expand on the Google Apps for Your Domain idea and start offering all of this stuff in a nice, big bundle along with a registrar offering. Imagine if, for the low, low price of a domain registration, you were able to get the following in one, nice, dashboard-style interface:
Domain registration (don't think they offer this one yet)
Website hosting (Google Pages) (Note: Need to expand on this one and offer some programmability via PHP or Python or something)
Database (Google Base)
Message boards (Google Groups)
Image hosting (Picasa Web)
Office apps (Docs & Spreadsheets)
Email (Gmail)
Instant Messaging (Google Talk)
Calendaring (Google Calendar)
File storage (GDrive)
Video (Google Video/YouTube)
News aggregation (Google Reader)
Revision/code revision management (Google Code)
etc. etc. etc.
The key is to bundle them all together in an easy to use interface. Perhaps even a desktop client. Heck, with their resources, they could probably wrap it all up into that Google Operating System everyone was all giddy about a while back. Right now, everything (with the exception of the existing Google Apps for Your Domain suite) is pretty spread out as separate products. If they could tie all of these together and make collaboration and integration a little better, it would be the ultimate groupware suite. Just throw in an accounting program (Google Financials?) and you're all set. Charge monthly/yearly fees for companies/domains that go over the maximum storage (perhaps offer a combined storage limit for all of the products put together?) or need more users/groups.
Slashdot Mirror
Subtitles would greatly benefit viewers who are deaf or suffer from hearing loss. Copy/paste from the transcript, perhaps?
9600 baud limit is for HAM operators. What about commercial use/licensing?
Get with some of your local ham radio geeks. Those guys are amazing. Granted, their radio bands and equipment are not approved or licensed for commercial use, but they can probably at least point you in the right direction. Once they get the equipment (which is way less than $30k) and license, they can toss packets all over the place for free. I don't know what the bandwidth or latency is like on their systems, but I do know that when it comes to getting information from point A to point B, they get pretty creative. Certainly they can help you come up with something that will fit your needs (for a nominal fee). Worth a shot!
Not only has this already been done, but it's also been worked into a P2P infrastructure (including payment methods, I believe).
http://bitmunk.com/
Share just about any digital media you want, make money for sharing it, and the artist(s) and copyright holder(s) get paid as well. Bitmunk is a great system that's been around for a while, so it's good to finally see the big guys catch on and get on board.
Luckily, some of us sleep in so our "morning" may occasionally coincide with your daily lunchtime dose of Slashdot.
The NSA already has all of this information stored and indexed anyways. Why not just partner up with them? Shouldn't be too hard to integrate since the NSA will already have their hands in the FBI network to police it (according to http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/22/0340219).
(it's funny... laugh)
Ahh yes... that's the one! I knew it was in there somewhere.
They set up shop on the far side of the moon and launch interstellar spaceflights from there. That's why. Didn't you see that in Star Trek IV when Kirk and the gang used the moon to hide their warp signature from the Vulcans as their ship headed off towards the sun to travel back to the future?
[5. LookingForGroup] [Opportunity] LF3M for VC run. Need healer/tank. PST
From what I've seen from lunar landing footage and descriptions of the lunar surface, I have about a pound of material that would make a great substitute. It's caked on my video card and motherboard inside my computer case. I'll just scoop it up into a ziplock back and mail it to NASA. Perhaps if the other two million Slashdot readers can empty theirs as well, they would have enough to complete their mission. Where should we mail this stuff to?
Who's watching the watchers in this case? Does this fall under some sort of bureaucrat-stuffed intelligence oversight committee on Capitol Hill?
It's been a while since I lived in the greater D.C. metropolitan area, but from what I can remember there are two major newspapers in D.C.:
Washington Post: Left-leaning, liberal
Washington Times: Right-leaning, conservative
Something tells me that if a similar story were to appear in the Washington Times, it would have a different slant and possible even tout the advantages of this crime database.
You definitely have a point, but I don't think it would be forceful at all. It's more like forcing the ability to choose than forcing a particular choice. Plus, compliance in and of itself is still a choice. Companies choose whether or not they want to try to achieve a certain ISO compliance-standardization-level-thingy. My company is not, and probably never will be, ISO-anything compliant. Not because I can't follow their rules, but because I am (for now) a one-man show and don't really need to be ISO-anything compliant whether it be 9000 or 9*10^10.
/me raises his glass
I'm just thinking that somewhere, someday, some ISO standard will include information interchange of complex documents as part of the compliance requirements. When that day comes, here's to hoping they decide to require ODF or [insert cool open format here] as the format.
Now that it's an ISO standard, perhaps the ISO would be so kind as to make its use part of one of those big compliance standards. This way, companies that want to be ISO 31337 (or whatever number they're up to now) compliant will have to use ODF as their primary means of storing and transmitting documents. After all, what's the use of a new standard if nobody feels compelled to use it? In addition to encouraging the use of open formats, it will give companies a reason to explore their options as far as office automation software.
Let's see some mass migrations from MS Office to OpenOffice.org and other such Open Source office suites. A few large corporations making the switch will produce case studies and some of those nifty ROI projections the suits always drool over. A snowball effect would be nice. One company makes the move and triggers a chain reaction in all of their vendors, suppliers, distributors, subsidiaries, etc. etc.
Jah-Wren beat me to it, but it's good to see that the portable employment idea works. I'm considering offering the same sort of arrangement. If anyone has any pointers on how to get a co-op of this sort started, I'd love to hear some input.
I've been thinking about this for a while. I know it sounds crazy, but come join my company. I'm an independent contractor as well, but I'm incorporating as of Jan 1st strictly to take advantage of group health care rates for me and my family. One of my first thoughts was that there have to be other independent IT contractors out there who are in the same boat I'm in. If we cooperate and work together, we can each continue to do our own thing but get better benefits out of it for the long term.
Just funnel your work through the company and for a modest percentage of gross revenue, we'll...
* Get you in on the group healthcare plan and rate (Anthem PPO)
* Handle your invoicing and accounts receivable for you
* Let you manage all of your incoming revenue and disperse it (legally) as you see fit from your own internal holding account:
* Calculated payroll including federal/state witholdings
* Expense account for whatever you need to reimburse yourself for (equipment & such)
* Pay full healthcare benefits pretax
* Simplify your taxes come tax time by providing a W-2 instead of having to itemize and report a schedule C for business profit and loss.
* Try to toss each other some business when we can.
The beauty of the arrangement is that you continue to do your own work for your own customers, but have the convenience of a business behind you (and some legal protection as well). Perhaps down the line we can look at adding other benefits like a 401K plan.
If you're interested, just follow the link in my sig to my lame-ass website and hit that contact us form or email me at gunfighter AT gmail DOT com.
Depends on the application needs. Citrix servers can operate in load balancing farms, so you don't need one big server when a bunch of little ones will do. Basically, you're taking the computing horsepower off the desktop and loading it up on a server farm. If the computing is that intensive to where you have many people crunching many large files, they may need to re-evaluate their data collection and storage methods to better suit the intended end result.
To determine if a remote desktop solution is the best fit will require some studying to take into account the recurring increased bandwidth costs and costs of time delay (idle workers waiting for file transfers to complete?) vs. the one-time costs of a remote desktop solution.
If we're to help the original poster any further, we'll need more information.
If possible, write the app to run centrally and then use a remote desktop solution like LTSP, Citrix, or Windows Terminal Services to feed access to the app out to clients.
... because once you master discrete mathematics, you're {s, e, t}. Careful though, because if you don't pay attention and concentrate on what you're learning, you'll end up with Ø.
Sorry... couldn't resist. On a more serious note, I started on the BSCS path at Virginia Tech over a decade ago and had to stop a few months into my sophomore year. Now I'm enrolled in ASU's BSCS program after not doing a lick of calculus for 10 years, and the math is kickin' my arse. It's true what they say: if you don't use it, you lose it. My advice for aspiring CS gurus is definitely "stick with it once you start." Picking up the pieces years later to continue your education can be a little mindblowing.
I'm actually quite comfortable w/ my IT career. I've been self-employed since 2002, and I've done everything from custom programming to network administration and project management. Picking up my CS degree is something I decided to do because I want to do it, not because I need to do it to get a better job. For me, CS is still worth it because I want to take my programming and software engineering skills to the next level. I've been programming since I was 8 years old, and I feel like I've hit a plateau in my programming skillset. The one thing I want to develop from my CS studies is how to put all of the little pieces I've learned over the years together so I can contribute to the development of larger, more complex software projects. Perhaps I'll even try to start cranking out some Linux Kernel modules or something.
Once an individual finds a little responsibility and establishes some equilibrium in his or her life, leisure time spent gaming online can be rewarding and satisfying without becoming a problem. The key is to maintain a healthy balance and resist the urge to powergame your way to the top. I played SWG for a year and then WoW for a year. Before that, I was an FPS player off and on for 8 years. Throughout the course of the past decade, I had to take extended breaks from online gaming for real life events. Each time I returned, it was always a welcome addition to the daily routine for myself, my family (who, despite my good looks and charm still need a break from me every once in a while), and my friends/guildies.
:P) billiards, playing tetris, drugs, bowling, painting, music, racing, chatting, browsing the Internet for pr0n, and yes.... playing games online. When you feel like you have to do something rather than wanting to do it, that's when you need to step back and evaluate. I hit that point with SWG and vowed not to let it happen in WoW. Running the guild + levelling + running an in-game business in SWG literally felt like I was working two jobs even though I only played at night. In WoW, I play when I want to and have the time to. Case in point, a character I created this past spring is stuck at level 36 and has been for months because I don't have time to play right now (recent new addition to the family takes precedence over playing WoW). The character can wait. Life, both in the game and outside of it, goes on. When I have time to log in to run some quests, I will. Until then, I have plenty of stuff outside WoW to keep me occupied, and I'm very happy and comfortable with paying my $15 a month while I take my break... knowing that when I do have time to play again, I will be welcomed back by my guildies with open arms even if I don't commit 6 hours a night to running endgame raids.
Have I overdone it before? Yes... there have been times where my online gaming interfered with and had a negative effect on other aspects of my life that deserved my attention more than some pixels and a few voices at the other end of a Ventrilo channel. My first venture into the world of online gaming sucked up waaaaaaay too much of my time and cost me dearly. Years of experience later (after I became a "family man"), I learned to control it a little better. My first MMO (SWG) sucked up a little too much time, but not so much that it had a negative effect on my work or family. I pretty much stuck to playing at night when most people would be vegetating in front of a television. After SWG, WoW took even less of my time because there was less to learn about the game, no stupid houses to decorate, etc. WoW is appealing to me because Blizzard figured out that some people want the RP taken out of MMORPG. Just log on, kill stuff, and have fun.
Here is the best piece of WoW advice I can give any WoW player: you can play the game and have fun doing it at your own pace, without all epic gear, without raiding, without farming, without powerleveling, and without mastering every endgame instance in Azeroth. You don't need to be Grand Marshall. You don't even need an epic mount. I loved, and still love, playing WoW after a year; and I've only seen the inside of Molten Core (past the first mob) one time. One of my level 60 characters has two epic pieces of gear: one a friend sold me, and the other I happened to luck out and be the only other mage on an Onyxia run when a purple mage headpiece dropped even though I was at the bottom of the suicide kings list (other guy already had it).
The key is to establish how much leisure time you have and stick to it, then decide what you want to do during that leisure time. As many other posters pointed out, the "taking a hobby too far" thing can wreck lives no matter what it is applied to: drinking, golf, gambling, playing poker (which is a game of skill, not gambling
Very well, just take the "Luckily" out of that statement and re-read it.
;)
I imagine for most slashdotters, it's not so much a "lucky for us people who support FLOSS/Windows security and can still make money off of it" as it is a "lucky for us people who believe the security of Microsoft products is flawed by design and them releasing yet another buggy, unsecure OS proves correct what many people have been saying for quite some time: if you want hardened systems, stay away from Microsoft products and go with something a little more bulletproof."
I'm all for Microsoft doing a ground-up rewrite of their Operating System with security as the top priority. I hope they do it some day. After I posted that post, I went and looked at my accounting records for the past year because I was curious how much time I had actually spent helping customers with Windows security measures. From the numbers I crunched, it probably wouldn't affect my little slice of IT consulting revenue one bit if Microsoft were to roll out the Windows 2009 Holy Grail of Security Edition. As a good friend of mine once said when he first opened his IT consulting firm a few years ago, "There will always be someone out there willing to pay me to show them how to set up macros in Microsoft Word."
P.S. Security isn't a problem or a feature. It's a process
There's actually a lot of truth to this statement. Success for Microsoft can mean an overall decrease in long term recurring revenue for a variety of service providers (even Microsoft Certified Solution Providers). If Vista is more secure, it means less need for "more secure" alternatives. For those of us who base our living off of maintaining and supporting said alternatives, this is a bad thing.
Personally, I support homogenous networks; so I will see a spike in revenue from any XP->Vista upgrades. In the long run, there will be a decline in revenue if Vista is more secure. A more secure OS means fewer customer calls for security related issues and a decrease in the sales, installation, maintenance, and support of security related products. Initially, the antivirus/antispyware/firewall/IDS/etc. sales and support would stay the course. People have it engraved in the back of their heads that they need all of these things when they're running a Windows environment. Over time, the perception and realization would be that such preventative measures are no longer required.
Luckily, I don't think Microsoft is releasing a more secure OS. Just like every Microsoft Operating System to date, I have a feeling they will roll it out with trumpets blaring and decree how secure it is.... only to have some black hat cracker show up at a hacker conference with an arsenal of exploits and blow holes in their hard work. We all know that there is no such thing as a completely secure networked computer; but I would caveat that with "especially a Microsoft-powered system." I don't see that caveat changing any time in the near future.
When you plan your software product roadmaps, what feature requests do you pay more attention to? Enterprise customers want scalability, reliability, redundancy, and security; but some database programmers are looking for features such as solid transaction support, stored procedures, and more functions. How do you rank which feature requests get attention first?
The key is to bundle them all together in an easy to use interface. Perhaps even a desktop client. Heck, with their resources, they could probably wrap it all up into that Google Operating System everyone was all giddy about a while back. Right now, everything (with the exception of the existing Google Apps for Your Domain suite) is pretty spread out as separate products. If they could tie all of these together and make collaboration and integration a little better, it would be the ultimate groupware suite. Just throw in an accounting program (Google Financials?) and you're all set. Charge monthly/yearly fees for companies/domains that go over the maximum storage (perhaps offer a combined storage limit for all of the products put together?) or need more users/groups.