Interestingly enough, Roger Ebert interviewed Miyazaki when he attended the Toronto festival a couple of years ago before the production of this film. Miyazaki told him that Princess Mononoke would be his last major film. Last week, Ebert said that Miyazaki was so moved by Spirited Away's story that he decided he just had to make one more.
Incidentally, whether you like Ebert or not, he is a particularly big anime fan and has given this movie rave reviews.
Just a intersting tidbit that mike make a difference to some of you: the 3 or 4 minutes of promotional clips I've seen of this move have been DUBBED in English, not sub-titled as this posting reports.
There may certainly be a sub-titled version out there, but I must say that I was very impressed with the dubbed clips I saw - very well done.
NTS uses real-time video and neural-network technology at traffic intersections and railroad crossings to predict traffic accidents and enforce traffic violations (bad news for you guys who blow red lights) - kind of similar to the situation in the article...instead of predicting the actions of people, it's predicting the actions of automobiles. There are already many deployments nationwide and lots more being installed.
BTW, the same predictive neural network technology is used to predict all types of financial fraud, including credit card fraud and money laundering.
A group of colleagues and I have had an email server of our own for almost 7 years now and have always had the same email addresses. Between years of USENET post and webpages with our email addresses on the, our SPAM intake got out of control. In a sampling taken in October of last year, we were getting about 350 pieces of SPAM per day between only *4* people with account on the box.
We had previously tried a number of anti-spam solutions, including combinations of RBL, ORBS, locally-maintained blacklists and lots of Sendmail hacks.
We had very little luck until November, when we implemented Spam Assassin on all of our mailboxes. After turning on Spam Assassin, the SPAM seemed to just go away. In the first day alone, we caught over 300 pieces of SPAM with ZERO false-positives with less than 10 pieces of junk making it through to the end user's mailbox. The program is, simply put, amazing.
It's multi-faceted approach works very well. It uses a combination of simple logical string checking, in addition to things like distributed databases like RBL and Razor.
The program can also place SPAM's in a dedicated mailbox file so you can see what got rejected. Each piece of rejected mail contains a report that includes the reasons that contributed to the rejection. Each reason has a weighted value that contributes to the final "good" or "bad" disposition. All of this is highly customizeable, but it does work very well out of the box without any tinkering.
I highly recommend this program. Take the time to sit down and install it on your mail server.
The only thing to note is that Billpoint is orders of magnitude smaller than PayPal in terms of the amount of payments they accept. They have never posed any real threat to PayPal in the past.
However, it should be noted that Billpoint is backed by Wells Fargo, who is a major component to the banking lobby. The lobby may play a big part in slowing down PayPal's business in the near future, which may fuel Billpoint's growth.
Good service, Great people - but trouble is coming
on
PayPal Goes Public
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I worked very closely with senior management at PayPal, including their founder, for over a year. From a pure business perspective, PayPal has a lot going for them:
1. They have an excellent group of talented people and an excellent corporate culture. Talented, bright people who are dedicated to their jobs...what else can you ask for. They have excellent management and have the ability to move fast and adapt to change quickly.
2. They've found a business model that works. It seems that anyone making or taking a payment over the Internet these days has a PayPal account. Most importantly, however, if you take a look at their growth rate and their balance sheet, you will see that they are on track to start making some real money very quickly.
I am a fan of their service and a fan of the people who work there, but it saddens me that they may be in a good amount of trouble in the times to come. As a number of people have pointed out, several states are threatening to shut them off for doing business as an unlicensed bank. This causes a number of problems for PayPal and they need to address them soon:
1. The states are right: PayPal is doing business as an unlicensed bank. You may have noticed that PayPal is not protesting any of the allegations made by the states - that's because they know if it came down to a fight in court, they would lose. They are a bank...no question about it. In fact, they've already had to give in to a few states, as they actually ARE regulated in few (3, I think)
2. "So why don't they just get licensed as a bank?", a number of people ask. There are a number of things that make this difficult. First, the license process must occur in each state - this takes a lot of time and money. Second, this may greatly change their internal cost structure, as there are a number of regulated practices that they would have to adhere to if they were considered a bank in all the states they did business in. PayPal's margins are low and their real money is made on volumes - a major change in their cost structure and, particularly, how they hold floating funds may be lethal to their business.
3. The Internet has no boundaries: If PayPal is shutdown by even one state they are in major trouble. If Louisiana, for example, shuts them down, PayPal must ensure that they do not mediate payments between any parties that live or do business in Louisiana. PayPal currently identifies individual's location by verifying (via US Mail) the address associated with a credit card or bank account. This presents a number of problems: What if the billing address of my credit card is a Mississippi address, but I actually reside in Louisiana - how will PayPal know they are performing transactions on behalf of a Louisiana resident? What if the routing number relates to a bank branch in Mississippi, but I reside in Louisiana, where that bank also has a branch (making it possible for a Louisiana resident to do business in Louisiana with a Louisiana bank through PayPal)? This is just a Pandora's box waiting to be opened.
4. The banking lobby is strong: And they don't like non-banks getting into their space. Worst of all, PayPal has proven that this business model will work. A number of "real banks" are salivating to take this space over.
Continue to use PayPal...it's a great service (Yes, there are the stories at www.paypalwarning.com and such, but any service with 1mil+ customers will have some unhappy people). Be cautious, however, if you are thinking of investing in them.
No, total experience is not the only indicator of talent or ability. My only point is that the prior job market spoiled some people into thinking that they are worth more than they actually are. The end result is that they wind up rejecting lower paying jobs and complaining about the "lack of well paying jobs" because they think they should be making the bigger buck.
It happened to me, too....I got very high, inflated job offers during the dot.com revolution, but have been brought down to earth by the recent market conditions. Rather than wondering the planet looking jobs to match those prior inflated offers, I settled on something that paid less, but was challenging and let me develop my skills.
I'm not saying "don't give people a chance". I'm just saying that some people need to re-evaluate what they want to get paid vs. what they are really worth in the market.
Delusions of Grandeur for Some...
on
The Laid-off Techie
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
One of the things that the Dot.Com revolution did was create a lot of techie jobs for people that were never techies in the past and probably shouldn't be techies in the future.
One of the things that really amazed me a few years ago was the abundance of well-paying entry level tech jobs. Companies were paying $40, $50K, $60K and higher for people that had little to no experience in the tech industry. The result of this is a tainted job market of many people who still don't have a lot of experience, but feel that they should be making a decent salary because of what they made in the past....true delusions of grandeur. So many techies who complain there are "no jobs" are wrong - there just aren't any jobs to support their overly high salary requirements and their undeveloped skill sets.
I'm an adjunct at a local major university in New Jersey and part of my duties include teaching classes in the CS department's continuing education arm. At times, it is difficult for me as an educator to make students face reality. Many students that enroll in our certification programs believe that all you have to do is sit through some classes to become a tech wiz and get a great paying job. The reality is that many of them don't have what it takes to become a good technologist. A student recently told me that he was very discouraged in his job hunt because he "spent three years making between $65K and $80K as an HTML coder". He now seeks a similar job with similar pay, but the fact is that he's has not demonstrated to me that he's even worth half of that salary in any technical position. While I am often tempted to use a "Here's a dime...use it to call your mother and tell her you'll never going to be a lawyer (or techie)" speech, I still must encourage my students to work hard to improve their skills. But it becomes difficult trying to get them to believe that they'll no longer get high-paying short-returns in this over-hyped market.
Yes, times are bad. A lot of people out of work - even the good ones. But the moral of the story is that many so-called techies need to re-evaluate their career path and their place in the industry.
I'm a computer scientist now, but I've been very interested in medicine since I was about 8. I watch those emergency room reality shows on Discover Channel and ER every week.
While I can probably become a nurse's aid, I see myself hitting a brick wall in the medical field if I don't have an M.D.. Does anybody know of a fast-track medical degree that I can obtain in a year or so? I really want to be a doctor.
There is a misconception among some hobby programmers and hackers that a CS degree is like a certification course - i.e. master a certain set of hands-on technologies, take a few tests and you get a piece of paper. This certainly is not the case.
There is a major difference between what is taught in Computer Science programs and what is taught in certification classes and the thousands technology books that line the shelves of the Barnes and Noble. CS programs are designed to teach you the theoretical concepts that will allow you to tackle any technology-related program - no matter what the programming language, operating system, etc. is. Thus,the true value of the degree is not the specific technologies a student has been exposed to in his 4 years, but the more theoretical concepts he is exposed to (operating system concepts, programming language theory, all the mathematical stuff, etc.). There is no way that you can fully absorb all of this stuff in a year with a mythical one year, "fast track" CS degree.
I am a product of a CS program and teach CS at a major University and - I might get slapped by my colleagues for saying this - you do not necessarily have to obtain a CS degree to be a good technologist. I have hired a number of good tech people that did not have CS degrees and some of them have been very successful, "climbing the corporate" ladder in the technology sector. With that said, there'd be no reason to fast track a CS degree anyway- take your time with it. If you're happy with your job now, stick with it and earn your degree along the way. If you're good at what you do, your current employer is well aware of it - CS degree or not.
Nope - you didn't miss anything. If you have access to my LAN, you can send out an SSDP request to get the IP and the port the server is running on. Assuming you are familar with the format of the URLs requested by the Rio receiver, you can simply request those same URLs using any web broswer - and yes, it does work.
You bring up a good point....if you're going to use one of these things, you better make sure it's behind a firewall.
Not sure where the MAC address lives...probably on the board, just like an Ethernet card.
However, to address your last question: Yes, you can buy more than one of these units and use them on with a single MP3 server. The software clearly supports this.
No, it's not $10 revenue. PayPal separately quotes how much money they "move", which I believe is in the billions every year. The revenue is what they make off moving that $10, such as the float interest when you keep it in your account, or any charges associated with moving the money.
Not surprisingly, a lot of Slashdoters doubt PayPal...which is understandable, since it's so difficult to believe that any pure-play dot com can survive these days.
However, I've had the pleasure of working closely with many of PayPal's senior management over the past two years, back since they merged with X.com. I can tell you three very important things:
1. The P2P space is actually a loss leader. Most of their profit is made in the B2B and B2C space - not pure P2P as most people believe. They do very well in these spaces and recent analysts predict that their revenue was between $80 and $100mil last year. That's a heck of a lot better than most of the not-coms we've seen over the past several years.
2. They have an incredibly intelligent, dedicated and savvy staff that understands their market and industry.
3. They have a business model that works.
In my opinion, these three items equal success.
I love their service and I enjoy working with the company. If I didn't enjoy my current job so much, I'd probably apply for a job with them.
Number portability is currently a hot topic in the various telecom sectors, especially cellular/mobile and there's a lot of research currently being doing in that area.
It's not just limited to cellular, though. If I move from NY to LA, why do I have to give up my phone number? (OK, all us tech-heads, know why).
But there may just be a day when the phone number you have now is the last one you'll ever have....but don't hold your breath.
But IP addresses are useless without coherent routing schemes. How would individuals utilize these addresses? There's really no such thing as single-IP address portability, so it's not as if you could just take the address anywhere (to any telco/provider, etc.) and use it.
It's an interesting concept, but at the same time very alarming. Seems like a standardized communications identifier will just be an entree for spammers, telemarketers and con artists to get in touch with their victims in an easier manner.
I'm wondering just what true benefit this actually provides? I've seen a few independent telephone companies who have tried to offer single-number unified messaging, voice and fax without much success (i.e. your phone AND fax number is 2125555555, your email address has an alias of 2125555555@phonecompany.com and your homepage has an alias to 2125555555.company.com). At the end of it all, you still need to ask a person what his/her unique number is, just like you have to do with a phone number today.
And who's going to fund this? Who's going to use it? Assigning me a government-issued email address is not going to make me stop using my current email address.
It does seem like an interesting way for the government to get in touch with people when they need to (maybe for emergency information, urgent messages, etc.), but what about infrastructure? If the government gives a sheep herder in remote parts one of these unique numbers, who's going to make sure the infrastructure is there for him to actually do anything with it?
Seems like there's a whole lot more thinking to be done about this one.
I'm not sure that this would be an acceptable solution for a real business that has the $250K to spend on a server of this class. I purchase a large amount or enterprise-level hardware and I know I would have a very difficult time selling a solution by some unknown company name Engenra.
I've always believed that supportability was one of the most important "-ilities" when evaluating hardware and software (i.e. scalability, reliability, supportability, etc.). I would have great concerns that the company who manufactured my $250K refrigerator wouldn't be around in a couple of years to support it.
While it is exciting to see new Linux-based platforms emerge, I know that I would have a very difficult time getting my CEO to cough up $250K for this box. Even the technically un-savvy would have to ask "What about solutions from IBM or Sun?".
We've already seen several examples of high-end boxes that have the capabilities to run Linux from more established manufactures. We're familiar with the S/390 and the Sun E10K. There are also lesser-known high-end solutions from other behemoths like Unisys. It may be unfair because Engenra's technology may be far superior to any of the others (but I couldn't even make a premature judgment...their website doesn't give too much detail).
But there's one thing I do know: spending $250K on mission-critical hardware from an unknown startup is a tough pill to swallow for the people who sign the checks. (Remember back in the late 90s when companies used to do things like that - we used to call it venture capital;)
You're right. (and brave...posting something like this on in such a pro-Linux environment;)
I'm the opposite of you. I have years of UNIX and Linux experience. I understand Linux and use it about half as much as I do my Windows boxes.
To your point, there are many times that Linux is just not a viable alternative, so you're forced to do Windows (not to mention the use of proprietary Windows-based business apps).
Even if there is suitable equivalent application in Linux, the real problems seem to pop up in the collaborative business environment, where I have to share and modify Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets with colleagues.
If worked in a box by myself, Linux would be my only choice. But I don't, so I have a Windows box on my desktop at home and in the office.
Good to point out that the XP encryption, of course, is only local to the box and doesn't provide any type of network-based encryption without using some other suitable protocol.
However, I'm curious how XP's encryption works in a file server environment, where multiple users or applications are shuffling bits on and off the disk using SMB or NFS, for example. It might be very useful.
There have been far too many cases of data hijacking these days and I suppose it would be advantageous to have a central file or database server encrypt data on disk, regardless of whether the client is a user or an application. There is an overall lack of regard for storing data in an encrypted format today, even though this is the place where the bits will live the longest (as opposed to the network, per say).
Slashdot Mirror
Incidentally, whether you like Ebert or not, he is a particularly big anime fan and has given this movie rave reviews.
There may certainly be a sub-titled version out there, but I must say that I was very impressed with the dubbed clips I saw - very well done.
Chris
NTS uses real-time video and neural-network technology at traffic intersections and railroad crossings to predict traffic accidents and enforce traffic violations (bad news for you guys who blow red lights) - kind of similar to the situation in the article...instead of predicting the actions of people, it's predicting the actions of automobiles. There are already many deployments nationwide and lots more being installed.
BTW, the same predictive neural network technology is used to predict all types of financial fraud, including credit card fraud and money laundering.
Please check out my review on this product late last year, as featured on Slashdot last November.
We had previously tried a number of anti-spam solutions, including combinations of RBL, ORBS, locally-maintained blacklists and lots of Sendmail hacks.
We had very little luck until November, when we implemented Spam Assassin on all of our mailboxes. After turning on Spam Assassin, the SPAM seemed to just go away. In the first day alone, we caught over 300 pieces of SPAM with ZERO false-positives with less than 10 pieces of junk making it through to the end user's mailbox. The program is, simply put, amazing.
It's multi-faceted approach works very well. It uses a combination of simple logical string checking, in addition to things like distributed databases like RBL and Razor.
The program can also place SPAM's in a dedicated mailbox file so you can see what got rejected. Each piece of rejected mail contains a report that includes the reasons that contributed to the rejection. Each reason has a weighted value that contributes to the final "good" or "bad" disposition. All of this is highly customizeable, but it does work very well out of the box without any tinkering.
I highly recommend this program. Take the time to sit down and install it on your mail server.
The only thing to note is that Billpoint is orders of magnitude smaller than PayPal in terms of the amount of payments they accept. They have never posed any real threat to PayPal in the past.
However, it should be noted that Billpoint is backed by Wells Fargo, who is a major component to the banking lobby. The lobby may play a big part in slowing down PayPal's business in the near future, which may fuel Billpoint's growth.
- 1. They have an excellent group of talented people and an excellent corporate culture. Talented, bright people who are dedicated to their jobs...what else can you ask for. They have excellent management and have the ability to move fast and adapt to change quickly.
I am a fan of their service and a fan of the people who work there, but it saddens me that they may be in a good amount of trouble in the times to come. As a number of people have pointed out, several states are threatening to shut them off for doing business as an unlicensed bank. This causes a number of problems for PayPal and they need to address them soon:2. They've found a business model that works. It seems that anyone making or taking a payment over the Internet these days has a PayPal account. Most importantly, however, if you take a look at their growth rate and their balance sheet, you will see that they are on track to start making some real money very quickly.
- 1. The states are right: PayPal is doing business as an unlicensed bank. You may have noticed that PayPal is not protesting any of the allegations made by the states - that's because they know if it came down to a fight in court, they would lose. They are a bank...no question about it. In fact, they've already had to give in to a few states, as they actually ARE regulated in few (3, I think)
Continue to use PayPal...it's a great service (Yes, there are the stories at www.paypalwarning.com and such, but any service with 1mil+ customers will have some unhappy people). Be cautious, however, if you are thinking of investing in them.2. "So why don't they just get licensed as a bank?", a number of people ask. There are a number of things that make this difficult. First, the license process must occur in each state - this takes a lot of time and money. Second, this may greatly change their internal cost structure, as there are a number of regulated practices that they would have to adhere to if they were considered a bank in all the states they did business in. PayPal's margins are low and their real money is made on volumes - a major change in their cost structure and, particularly, how they hold floating funds may be lethal to their business.
3. The Internet has no boundaries: If PayPal is shutdown by even one state they are in major trouble. If Louisiana, for example, shuts them down, PayPal must ensure that they do not mediate payments between any parties that live or do business in Louisiana. PayPal currently identifies individual's location by verifying (via US Mail) the address associated with a credit card or bank account. This presents a number of problems: What if the billing address of my credit card is a Mississippi address, but I actually reside in Louisiana - how will PayPal know they are performing transactions on behalf of a Louisiana resident? What if the routing number relates to a bank branch in Mississippi, but I reside in Louisiana, where that bank also has a branch (making it possible for a Louisiana resident to do business in Louisiana with a Louisiana bank through PayPal)? This is just a Pandora's box waiting to be opened.
4. The banking lobby is strong: And they don't like non-banks getting into their space. Worst of all, PayPal has proven that this business model will work. A number of "real banks" are salivating to take this space over.
It happened to me, too....I got very high, inflated job offers during the dot.com revolution, but have been brought down to earth by the recent market conditions. Rather than wondering the planet looking jobs to match those prior inflated offers, I settled on something that paid less, but was challenging and let me develop my skills.
I'm not saying "don't give people a chance". I'm just saying that some people need to re-evaluate what they want to get paid vs. what they are really worth in the market.
I'm an adjunct at a local major university in New Jersey and part of my duties include teaching classes in the CS department's continuing education arm. At times, it is difficult for me as an educator to make students face reality. Many students that enroll in our certification programs believe that all you have to do is sit through some classes to become a tech wiz and get a great paying job. The reality is that many of them don't have what it takes to become a good technologist. A student recently told me that he was very discouraged in his job hunt because he "spent three years making between $65K and $80K as an HTML coder". He now seeks a similar job with similar pay, but the fact is that he's has not demonstrated to me that he's even worth half of that salary in any technical position. While I am often tempted to use a "Here's a dime...use it to call your mother and tell her you'll never going to be a lawyer (or techie)" speech, I still must encourage my students to work hard to improve their skills. But it becomes difficult trying to get them to believe that they'll no longer get high-paying short-returns in this over-hyped market.
Yes, times are bad. A lot of people out of work - even the good ones. But the moral of the story is that many so-called techies need to re-evaluate their career path and their place in the industry.
I'm a computer scientist now, but I've been very interested in medicine since I was about 8. I watch those emergency room reality shows on Discover Channel and ER every week.
While I can probably become a nurse's aid, I see myself hitting a brick wall in the medical field if I don't have an M.D.. Does anybody know of a fast-track medical degree that I can obtain in a year or so? I really want to be a doctor.
There is a major difference between what is taught in Computer Science programs and what is taught in certification classes and the thousands technology books that line the shelves of the Barnes and Noble. CS programs are designed to teach you the theoretical concepts that will allow you to tackle any technology-related program - no matter what the programming language, operating system, etc. is. Thus ,the true value of the degree is not the specific technologies a student has been exposed to in his 4 years, but the more theoretical concepts he is exposed to (operating system concepts, programming language theory, all the mathematical stuff, etc.). There is no way that you can fully absorb all of this stuff in a year with a mythical one year, "fast track" CS degree.
I am a product of a CS program and teach CS at a major University and - I might get slapped by my colleagues for saying this - you do not necessarily have to obtain a CS degree to be a good technologist. I have hired a number of good tech people that did not have CS degrees and some of them have been very successful, "climbing the corporate" ladder in the technology sector. With that said, there'd be no reason to fast track a CS degree anyway- take your time with it. If you're happy with your job now, stick with it and earn your degree along the way. If you're good at what you do, your current employer is well aware of it - CS degree or not.
haaa....great catch. tricky bastards they are.
A quick check at Yahoo! Shopping shows a few places that have these available, including CDW.
You bring up a good point....if you're going to use one of these things, you better make sure it's behind a firewall.
The actual file transfer mechanism is HTTP.
Not sure where the MAC address lives...probably on the board, just like an Ethernet card. However, to address your last question: Yes, you can buy more than one of these units and use them on with a single MP3 server. The software clearly supports this.
Other than eBay, I'm having trouble finding the Audrey. TigerDirect doesn't seem to have it on their site anymore. Anyone have any suggestions?
No, it's not $10 revenue. PayPal separately quotes how much money they "move", which I believe is in the billions every year. The revenue is what they make off moving that $10, such as the float interest when you keep it in your account, or any charges associated with moving the money.
However, I've had the pleasure of working closely with many of PayPal's senior management over the past two years, back since they merged with X.com. I can tell you three very important things:
1. The P2P space is actually a loss leader. Most of their profit is made in the B2B and B2C space - not pure P2P as most people believe. They do very well in these spaces and recent analysts predict that their revenue was between $80 and $100mil last year. That's a heck of a lot better than most of the not-coms we've seen over the past several years.
2. They have an incredibly intelligent, dedicated and savvy staff that understands their market and industry.
3. They have a business model that works.
In my opinion, these three items equal success.
I love their service and I enjoy working with the company. If I didn't enjoy my current job so much, I'd probably apply for a job with them.
Number portability is currently a hot topic in the various telecom sectors, especially cellular/mobile and there's a lot of research currently being doing in that area.
It's not just limited to cellular, though. If I move from NY to LA, why do I have to give up my phone number? (OK, all us tech-heads, know why).
But there may just be a day when the phone number you have now is the last one you'll ever have....but don't hold your breath.
But IP addresses are useless without coherent routing schemes. How would individuals utilize these addresses? There's really no such thing as single-IP address portability, so it's not as if you could just take the address anywhere (to any telco/provider, etc.) and use it.
Interesting concept, though.
I'm wondering just what true benefit this actually provides? I've seen a few independent telephone companies who have tried to offer single-number unified messaging, voice and fax without much success (i.e. your phone AND fax number is 2125555555, your email address has an alias of 2125555555@phonecompany.com and your homepage has an alias to 2125555555.company.com). At the end of it all, you still need to ask a person what his/her unique number is, just like you have to do with a phone number today.
And who's going to fund this? Who's going to use it? Assigning me a government-issued email address is not going to make me stop using my current email address.
It does seem like an interesting way for the government to get in touch with people when they need to (maybe for emergency information, urgent messages, etc.), but what about infrastructure? If the government gives a sheep herder in remote parts one of these unique numbers, who's going to make sure the infrastructure is there for him to actually do anything with it?
Seems like there's a whole lot more thinking to be done about this one.
I've always believed that supportability was one of the most important "-ilities" when evaluating hardware and software (i.e. scalability, reliability, supportability, etc.). I would have great concerns that the company who manufactured my $250K refrigerator wouldn't be around in a couple of years to support it.
While it is exciting to see new Linux-based platforms emerge, I know that I would have a very difficult time getting my CEO to cough up $250K for this box. Even the technically un-savvy would have to ask "What about solutions from IBM or Sun?".
We've already seen several examples of high-end boxes that have the capabilities to run Linux from more established manufactures. We're familiar with the S/390 and the Sun E10K. There are also lesser-known high-end solutions from other behemoths like Unisys. It may be unfair because Engenra's technology may be far superior to any of the others (but I couldn't even make a premature judgment...their website doesn't give too much detail).
But there's one thing I do know: spending $250K on mission-critical hardware from an unknown startup is a tough pill to swallow for the people who sign the checks. (Remember back in the late 90s when companies used to do things like that - we used to call it venture capital ;)
I'm the opposite of you. I have years of UNIX and Linux experience. I understand Linux and use it about half as much as I do my Windows boxes.
To your point, there are many times that Linux is just not a viable alternative, so you're forced to do Windows (not to mention the use of proprietary Windows-based business apps).
Even if there is suitable equivalent application in Linux, the real problems seem to pop up in the collaborative business environment, where I have to share and modify Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets with colleagues.
If worked in a box by myself, Linux would be my only choice. But I don't, so I have a Windows box on my desktop at home and in the office.
However, I'm curious how XP's encryption works in a file server environment, where multiple users or applications are shuffling bits on and off the disk using SMB or NFS, for example. It might be very useful.
There have been far too many cases of data hijacking these days and I suppose it would be advantageous to have a central file or database server encrypt data on disk, regardless of whether the client is a user or an application. There is an overall lack of regard for storing data in an encrypted format today, even though this is the place where the bits will live the longest (as opposed to the network, per say).