There are already plenty of phones that you can install your own software on and not have to pay for ringtones (I can't believe that people are stupid enough to do that). For example, I have a Treo (Windows Mobile) - I can install any software I want on it, and easily create my own Compact.NET Framework apps for it if I want to - it doesn't have to be signed by the carrier or anything. I believe I can use any MP3 file as a ringtone, though I just use one of the MIDI's that came with it. Song ringtones annoy the hell out of me. Text messages aren't free - but that obviously has nothing to do with the phone and isn't going to ever happen. You'll always be paying a service provider for text messages - whether its per text, for unlimited text messages, or bundled in with some plan.
If Google is really successful it'll be because they are able to lower the price of smartphones from several hundred dollars to where the cheap toy phones (that don't let you install software/ringtones/etc) currently are. While I do not know how much of the cost of smartphones is for the OS, I highly doubt that a free OS will make smartphones that much cheaper. Maybe they'll subsidize some of the cost through AdSense or something, though I personally would hate to have a phone that forced me to look at ads.
More competition is a good thing though, at the very least it'll hopefully drive prices down a bit.
Honestly, using.doc makes sense. It is supported by *everything*. All versions of MS Office, all versions of OpenOffice/StarOffice, and by pretty much every other office suite as well. It's not necessarily a wonderful format, but its the least common denominator. You're not going to have to worry if the person you're emailing it to can open it. The same thing can be said for PDF's(which I think is probably a better choice for finalized documents or documents that are being given to the public).
I'm not necessarily sure what spear phishing has to do with open/proprietary document formats. And using Linux isn't going to stop people from replying to phishing emails.
It gives other people less incentive to implement ODF in their own products. If there is an non-biased organization backing it, the makers of other office suites would be more likely to consider implementing it themselves.
How exactly would you "brick" your system by installing OS X on it? You cannot "brick" a computer by installing anything on the harddrive. Bricking the computer would require something like trying to flash the BIOS and failing. Worst case scenario, if OS X doesn't work on your Hackintosh, then reinstall Windows/Linux. No bricking involved.
First of all, SSH isn't included in any other version of Windows, so why would you think it needs to be specifically mentioned on Wikipedia? In other news Windows Server 2008 also does not ship with support for ext3, or X.org.
And secondly, why do people actually care so much? Even if there was SSH access to it, its not as if it would magically become some sort of a Linux box. All of the commands would be the same. And you can still access server core through remote desktop to get to the command line (it just takes you to the command line instead of starting non-existent Explorer). And if you want to use SSH so much, there are plenty of third party SSH servers that will run on Windows.
What kind of Administrator would actually do upgrades? Upgrades *always* cause far more issues than they would solve, both on Windows and Linux. Clean installs are by far the best choice. Especially on a server where you want to make sure that there isn't some small problem somewhere in the install that will bite you in the ass later.
The first version of the Windows NT kernel was 3.1 (or 3.5, I don't remember). It started there instead of 1 because the non-NT OS's versions numbers were around there at the time (Windows 3.1). Windows NT 4 was the next major version of the NT kernel. Windows 2000 came with the NT 5.0 kernel. XP was 5.1, and Windows 2003 Server was 5.2. Windows Vista is 6.0 and I *think* that Windows Server 2008 is 6.1. So, other than starting it at 3.1 instead of 1, it is fairly straight-forward. They increment.1 for minor releases (as far as the actual kernel is concerned) and 1 for major releases/changes.
Windows 1, 2, 3/3.11, and Windows 95/98/Me are an entirely separate line than the NT based OS's. They do not have the same kernel. Windows 95/98/Me had version numbers of four point something IIRC.
Wow! I have no intention of getting an iPhone but that is just pathetic. Apple can't even implement 802.1x? And yet some people keep pushing Apple's equipment for businesses... (I am aware that OS X and Apple's computers support 802.1x, but not supporting it on the mobile device is just laughable.) I can't think of any device I've used in the last three or four years that did not support 802.1x (Having to manually set it up on Linux notwithstanding).
Have you ever heard of Evolution? I've not used Linux on a desktop/laptop for about a year, but I found Ev to be the best email client by far. Honestly, I'd much rather use Evolution than Mail.app or Entourage.
When I used Netware in VMware I just created a virtual machine in VMware and then went through the normal installation process for Netware(I don't remember any caveats, but it's probably been a year or two since I installed them.) I doubt that you could find a pre-made Netware VM, since you can't distribute Netware for free. Novell has some information on installing Netware as a VM under OES 2 here. I think there are sections for both VMware and Xen. It looks like their documentation is walking you through installing OS from an ISO - not using a pre-packaged VM. Hope that helps.
I can't speak about the Xen stuff that Novell has put in OES 2, but I have ran Netware 6.0 and 6.5 in VMware (6.0 in VMware Server, and 6.5 in Workstation), and they work fine.
Since then, the iFolder project has struggled, with people leaving, some wanting to rewrite the whole thing in C again (mono had some scalability issues), etc. Finally when they've managed to put in some of the features people have been wanting (multiple ifolder-servers, encryption etc), Novell in all its wisdom has decided again to make iFolder exclusive to OES2.
That's right: if you want to setup an iFolder server with the new 3.6 features, you need to buy OES2 at the premium price Novell is asking (and besides OES2 is full of other stuff many people don't want). So for Red Hat and any other distro, 3.4 is the latest version..
That's not entirely correct. You can download the iFolder 3.6 server from: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/dl9pf/. That is linked to from the iFolder site (www.ifolder.com). Now admittedly, I don't think there has been a whole lot of community involvement with iFolder 3, Novell has mostly been doing their own thing with it. But you can get source RPM's for iFolder 3.6 from the link above, along with RPM's for Fedora and OpenSuSE/SLES. They do need to do a better job of giving information to the community about what's going on with iFolder though. The website doesn't really have much on the new version - it seems like there are just occasional announcements out of the blue. There are also several different versions of iFolder mentioned on the site (3.2 - which came with OES 1, 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6). Hopefully Novell will do a little bit better job managing iFolder now that OES 2 was released. I love iFolder and use it a lot. It's great for people with laptops that need to have access to their files while off the network, but still want to have all of their files stored on a server to share with other people or run centralized backups, etc.
I briefly played around with OES 2 in VMware last night, and it doesn't seem too bad. I haven't been able to try out too many of the new features, but the installation was pretty smooth (especially in comparison to OES v1).
The good thing about what Novell is doing is that they are making Linux a viable option for a lot of midsized companies. RH or other distros work fine for small companies or large companies that have the technical people to make the glue to put everything together. But midsized companies need something more than RHEL/Fedora would provide out of the box, and may not have the expertise to put together a home built/3rd party solutions for directory services/groupware/web based file access/etc. You can certainly do those things with RHEL/Fedora, but not out of the box. With Novell (and MS, and maybe IBM & Sun too) you can get software to do all of that that works together without having to spend a lot of time putting together bits and pieces of software from different places.
If Apple's control over its releases is so loose that something that can potentially break compatibility with other software (how do older versions of iTunes handle iPods with this hash?) and changes the structure of the database is accidently turned on and nobody at Apple realizes it, then that is probably worse IMO than them intentionally doing it to lock out Linux users. If that's the case then it could explain why iTunes on Windows sucks so badly (slow, freezes/hangs occasionally, uses totally non-standard (for Windows) widgets, etc).
According to TFA someone posted on a MS related forum that this was 'update' was for consumers updating directly from Microsoft - not for people or businesses using WSUS. Do you use WSUS?
From their descriptions, it sounds like they think Ubuntu would be more for individual/home users, while Novell/SuSE would be better for businesses. And I would have to agree with them.
I'm sorry, but when they are not broadcasting a TV show/commercial and this is not planned or scheduled, then it is downtime. It does not matter what part of the system is not functioning properly. If I can ping my server, but the application on it that people use is not functioning, then that is downtime. The association that is bitching includes companies like ABC and Disney according to TFA, so it is not like these are separate entities that are just broadcasting what some other company gives them.
Would the sledge-hammer actually destroy the platters themselves though? Obviously the drive as a whole would not work, but even if the platters were physically broken into a few pieces, I assume that a lot of the data itself would be intact on the disk. I doubt that there's any off-the-shelf tech that local law enforcement has that would be able to do it, but it wouldn't entirely surprise me of FBI/CIA/NSA/etc, have some sort of capability. Does anyone know any more about this sort of thing out of curiosity?
I sometimes use a little program called BookmarkBridge(http://bookmarkbridge.sourceforge.n et/index.html). By itself it can only sync between browsers on one computer. I find it pretty useful (because I use IE, FF, and Opera on my laptop), but YMMV. It can sync between Opera, FF, IE, and I *think* that I read that it works with Konqueror. That could be my imagination though. It can run on Linux and Windows.
I use it on my Windows laptop. It has a GUI, but it can also be run from the command line. I have a scheduled task that sync's the bookmarks every half and hour or something. BookmarkBridge stores the bookmarks as an XML file. I also have my scheduled task copy the XML file to my web server, so I can access it through the web (via an XSL stylesheet).
It's not a perfect solution, but it works well enough for me and I would much rather use it than have my bookmarks controlled by Google, or del.icio.us. Since BookmarkBridge is OSS, it probably wouldn't be too hard for someone to make it natively support storing its XML file on an FTP server or something.
It may not be an optimal solution, but you could use remote desktop (maybe using VNC to start the appropriate VM in VMware on your iMac). You could maybe tunnel RDP and VNC through SSH for better security. It wouldn't help you if you didn't have connectivity, but since it sounded like you may have been just using them for the VPN client that may not be a huge deal.
You could also look at getting a 2.5" portable USB or Firewire drive and storing the VM's on there. While it would be an extra thing to carry with you, I would personally rather do that than have to start up my laptop and make sure it has synchronized the latest version from my desktop every time I wanted to go somewhere.
Considering that Cisco's market-share is something around 80% in LAN switching (not sure off the top of my head what they have in Enterprise routers), I think its safe to say that knowing how to do basic stuff in IOS is pretty important to have a career in networking. That's not to say you shouldn't know the OSI model or subnetting, etc. But CCNA covers that, especially in the basic/intro CCNA, part one (of four). While 3com, HP, Juniper, Extreme, etc, have some good products, chances are that most businesses have a Cisco switch, router, or access point somewhere in their network.
Now, if you are talking about knowing whether there is a dash in some obscure command or not, then I agree. That is (almost) entirelly irrelevant, because you can find out so easily by just using tab/? or not entering the full command. The only case it would matter would be if you are writing a config from scratch in a text editor to upload to a router.
Some people (granted, not many) paid $10k to fly across the Atlantic in three hours in the Concorde. NYC to LA is roughly comparable to NYC to UK distance wise. For about a sixth of the time, and only three times the price, its a better deal than the Concorde.
I don't think you were using Offline Files the way it was meant to be used. Yes, if you set files to be available offline, then you can see them all (w/ no hierarchy) in the Offline Files folder/shortcut that you can place on the desktop. The point of offline files though is for files to still be accessible when you go to the mapped drives that they were on. For instance, lets say you have a file such as Z:\folder\document.txt (stored on a mapped drive), and it is set to be an offline file. When you are not able to connect to the file server, then document.txt will still show up in Z:\folder. When you open it you will open the copy of it that is cached on your computer (in strange looking files in C:\windows\csc). You actually don't even have to use mapped drives, I'm pretty sure that Offline Files will work with UNC addresses (like \\server\share\) as well.
I've used Offline Files on my laptop for the past year for my home directory. While I've always sort of been skeptical of it, it has actually always worked fairly well. Additionally you can have the files encrypted on the client's harddrive, to make it difficult for someone to get them by booting to Knoppix or something.
Several other sites showed up on Google when I searched for shuttle, fleck of paint, windshield
Considering how small the mass of the paint must have been, I could easily see how a small pebble sized object could cause major damage, but I'm not a rocket scientist. I think there has also been some general concern about all of the debris from China's ASAT test earlier this year. I think they are tracking most of the thousands of pieces of debris, so they would hopefully have an idea if something was coming, but I'm sure that they can't track the smallest pieces of debris. There are some animations on the web that show how the debris spread out from that test - its really amazing.
When you're traveling at 7 km per second, hitting anything that is not traveling along with you on a similar orbit (they would have similar velocities and wouldn't be moving as fast relative to you) has got to be seriously bad news.
There is something that computer labs and libraries swear by and not at: Faronics' DeepFreeze
Have you ever worked in a tech department that had to support frozen computers? It turns a project that would maybe take fifteen or twenty minutes per lab into something more like and hour long. The school district that I work for used Deep Freeze on most of the desktops at the high school up until about a year or two ago. Taking DF off made it a lot quicker to make minor changes to the computers during the year, and there hasn't been any significant problems. Students and teachers are also happier with it because it prevents stuff that people have saved in My Documents (yes, the kids are told over, and over again to save to their mapped home directories - but occasionally they don't) from being wiped out.
About the same time as that we also took students out of the Admin group (I'm not exactly sure why they were in there in the first place - no apps have had any problems with it), so that mitigated any significant problems as well. We also have McAfee managed AV and 8e6 web filtering, but AFAIK its fairly rare that any viruses or malware are found on the student computers. The laptops that the teachers have(and have admin rights on) are another story. But they would whine if they couldn't add weatherbug and have five different toolbars in IE. Deep Freeze is really just a crappy way of avoiding the problem instead of dealing with it and fixing it. Students/regular non-admin users should not be able to cause damage to the OS. In a well run environment there shouldn't be tons of problems with malware. Yeah, there is going to be an occasional piece of malware that exploits a security vulnerability that could screw up the system. But it is not that hard to lock down boxes properly, with group policy and using the default Windows groups.
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There are already plenty of phones that you can install your own software on and not have to pay for ringtones (I can't believe that people are stupid enough to do that). For example, I have a Treo (Windows Mobile) - I can install any software I want on it, and easily create my own Compact .NET Framework apps for it if I want to - it doesn't have to be signed by the carrier or anything. I believe I can use any MP3 file as a ringtone, though I just use one of the MIDI's that came with it. Song ringtones annoy the hell out of me. Text messages aren't free - but that obviously has nothing to do with the phone and isn't going to ever happen. You'll always be paying a service provider for text messages - whether its per text, for unlimited text messages, or bundled in with some plan.
If Google is really successful it'll be because they are able to lower the price of smartphones from several hundred dollars to where the cheap toy phones (that don't let you install software/ringtones/etc) currently are. While I do not know how much of the cost of smartphones is for the OS, I highly doubt that a free OS will make smartphones that much cheaper. Maybe they'll subsidize some of the cost through AdSense or something, though I personally would hate to have a phone that forced me to look at ads.
More competition is a good thing though, at the very least it'll hopefully drive prices down a bit.
Honestly, using .doc makes sense. It is supported by *everything*. All versions of MS Office, all versions of OpenOffice/StarOffice, and by pretty much every other office suite as well. It's not necessarily a wonderful format, but its the least common denominator. You're not going to have to worry if the person you're emailing it to can open it. The same thing can be said for PDF's(which I think is probably a better choice for finalized documents or documents that are being given to the public).
I'm not necessarily sure what spear phishing has to do with open/proprietary document formats. And using Linux isn't going to stop people from replying to phishing emails.
It gives other people less incentive to implement ODF in their own products. If there is an non-biased organization backing it, the makers of other office suites would be more likely to consider implementing it themselves.
How exactly would you "brick" your system by installing OS X on it? You cannot "brick" a computer by installing anything on the harddrive. Bricking the computer would require something like trying to flash the BIOS and failing. Worst case scenario, if OS X doesn't work on your Hackintosh, then reinstall Windows/Linux. No bricking involved.
First of all, SSH isn't included in any other version of Windows, so why would you think it needs to be specifically mentioned on Wikipedia? In other news Windows Server 2008 also does not ship with support for ext3, or X.org.
And secondly, why do people actually care so much? Even if there was SSH access to it, its not as if it would magically become some sort of a Linux box. All of the commands would be the same. And you can still access server core through remote desktop to get to the command line (it just takes you to the command line instead of starting non-existent Explorer). And if you want to use SSH so much, there are plenty of third party SSH servers that will run on Windows.
What kind of Administrator would actually do upgrades? Upgrades *always* cause far more issues than they would solve, both on Windows and Linux. Clean installs are by far the best choice. Especially on a server where you want to make sure that there isn't some small problem somewhere in the install that will bite you in the ass later.
The first version of the Windows NT kernel was 3.1 (or 3.5, I don't remember). It started there instead of 1 because the non-NT OS's versions numbers were around there at the time (Windows 3.1). Windows NT 4 was the next major version of the NT kernel. Windows 2000 came with the NT 5.0 kernel. XP was 5.1, and Windows 2003 Server was 5.2. Windows Vista is 6.0 and I *think* that Windows Server 2008 is 6.1. So, other than starting it at 3.1 instead of 1, it is fairly straight-forward. They increment .1 for minor releases (as far as the actual kernel is concerned) and 1 for major releases/changes.
Windows 1, 2, 3/3.11, and Windows 95/98/Me are an entirely separate line than the NT based OS's. They do not have the same kernel. Windows 95/98/Me had version numbers of four point something IIRC.
Wow! I have no intention of getting an iPhone but that is just pathetic. Apple can't even implement 802.1x? And yet some people keep pushing Apple's equipment for businesses... (I am aware that OS X and Apple's computers support 802.1x, but not supporting it on the mobile device is just laughable.) I can't think of any device I've used in the last three or four years that did not support 802.1x (Having to manually set it up on Linux notwithstanding).
Have you ever heard of Evolution? I've not used Linux on a desktop/laptop for about a year, but I found Ev to be the best email client by far. Honestly, I'd much rather use Evolution than Mail.app or Entourage.
When I used Netware in VMware I just created a virtual machine in VMware and then went through the normal installation process for Netware(I don't remember any caveats, but it's probably been a year or two since I installed them.) I doubt that you could find a pre-made Netware VM, since you can't distribute Netware for free. Novell has some information on installing Netware as a VM under OES 2 here. I think there are sections for both VMware and Xen. It looks like their documentation is walking you through installing OS from an ISO - not using a pre-packaged VM. Hope that helps.
I can't speak about the Xen stuff that Novell has put in OES 2, but I have ran Netware 6.0 and 6.5 in VMware (6.0 in VMware Server, and 6.5 in Workstation), and they work fine.
Since then, the iFolder project has struggled, with people leaving, some wanting to rewrite the whole thing in C again (mono had some scalability issues), etc. Finally when they've managed to put in some of the features people have been wanting (multiple ifolder-servers, encryption etc), Novell in all its wisdom has decided again to make iFolder exclusive to OES2.
That's right: if you want to setup an iFolder server with the new 3.6 features, you need to buy OES2 at the premium price Novell is asking (and besides OES2 is full of other stuff many people don't want). So for Red Hat and any other distro, 3.4 is the latest version..
That's not entirely correct. You can download the iFolder 3.6 server from: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/dl9pf/. That is linked to from the iFolder site (www.ifolder.com). Now admittedly, I don't think there has been a whole lot of community involvement with iFolder 3, Novell has mostly been doing their own thing with it. But you can get source RPM's for iFolder 3.6 from the link above, along with RPM's for Fedora and OpenSuSE/SLES. They do need to do a better job of giving information to the community about what's going on with iFolder though. The website doesn't really have much on the new version - it seems like there are just occasional announcements out of the blue. There are also several different versions of iFolder mentioned on the site (3.2 - which came with OES 1, 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6). Hopefully Novell will do a little bit better job managing iFolder now that OES 2 was released. I love iFolder and use it a lot. It's great for people with laptops that need to have access to their files while off the network, but still want to have all of their files stored on a server to share with other people or run centralized backups, etc.
I briefly played around with OES 2 in VMware last night, and it doesn't seem too bad. I haven't been able to try out too many of the new features, but the installation was pretty smooth (especially in comparison to OES v1).
The good thing about what Novell is doing is that they are making Linux a viable option for a lot of midsized companies. RH or other distros work fine for small companies or large companies that have the technical people to make the glue to put everything together. But midsized companies need something more than RHEL/Fedora would provide out of the box, and may not have the expertise to put together a home built/3rd party solutions for directory services/groupware/web based file access/etc. You can certainly do those things with RHEL/Fedora, but not out of the box. With Novell (and MS, and maybe IBM & Sun too) you can get software to do all of that that works together without having to spend a lot of time putting together bits and pieces of software from different places.
Why not spend the money improving public transit to make it more of a realistic option to the people who drive to work everyday?
If Apple's control over its releases is so loose that something that can potentially break compatibility with other software (how do older versions of iTunes handle iPods with this hash?) and changes the structure of the database is accidently turned on and nobody at Apple realizes it, then that is probably worse IMO than them intentionally doing it to lock out Linux users. If that's the case then it could explain why iTunes on Windows sucks so badly (slow, freezes/hangs occasionally, uses totally non-standard (for Windows) widgets, etc).
According to TFA someone posted on a MS related forum that this was 'update' was for consumers updating directly from Microsoft - not for people or businesses using WSUS. Do you use WSUS?
From their descriptions, it sounds like they think Ubuntu would be more for individual/home users, while Novell/SuSE would be better for businesses. And I would have to agree with them.
I'm sorry, but when they are not broadcasting a TV show/commercial and this is not planned or scheduled, then it is downtime. It does not matter what part of the system is not functioning properly. If I can ping my server, but the application on it that people use is not functioning, then that is downtime. The association that is bitching includes companies like ABC and Disney according to TFA, so it is not like these are separate entities that are just broadcasting what some other company gives them.
Would the sledge-hammer actually destroy the platters themselves though? Obviously the drive as a whole would not work, but even if the platters were physically broken into a few pieces, I assume that a lot of the data itself would be intact on the disk. I doubt that there's any off-the-shelf tech that local law enforcement has that would be able to do it, but it wouldn't entirely surprise me of FBI/CIA/NSA/etc, have some sort of capability. Does anyone know any more about this sort of thing out of curiosity?
I sometimes use a little program called BookmarkBridge(http://bookmarkbridge.sourceforge.n et/index.html). By itself it can only sync between browsers on one computer. I find it pretty useful (because I use IE, FF, and Opera on my laptop), but YMMV. It can sync between Opera, FF, IE, and I *think* that I read that it works with Konqueror. That could be my imagination though. It can run on Linux and Windows.
I use it on my Windows laptop. It has a GUI, but it can also be run from the command line. I have a scheduled task that sync's the bookmarks every half and hour or something. BookmarkBridge stores the bookmarks as an XML file. I also have my scheduled task copy the XML file to my web server, so I can access it through the web (via an XSL stylesheet).
It's not a perfect solution, but it works well enough for me and I would much rather use it than have my bookmarks controlled by Google, or del.icio.us. Since BookmarkBridge is OSS, it probably wouldn't be too hard for someone to make it natively support storing its XML file on an FTP server or something.
It may not be an optimal solution, but you could use remote desktop (maybe using VNC to start the appropriate VM in VMware on your iMac). You could maybe tunnel RDP and VNC through SSH for better security. It wouldn't help you if you didn't have connectivity, but since it sounded like you may have been just using them for the VPN client that may not be a huge deal.
You could also look at getting a 2.5" portable USB or Firewire drive and storing the VM's on there. While it would be an extra thing to carry with you, I would personally rather do that than have to start up my laptop and make sure it has synchronized the latest version from my desktop every time I wanted to go somewhere.
Considering that Cisco's market-share is something around 80% in LAN switching (not sure off the top of my head what they have in Enterprise routers), I think its safe to say that knowing how to do basic stuff in IOS is pretty important to have a career in networking. That's not to say you shouldn't know the OSI model or subnetting, etc. But CCNA covers that, especially in the basic/intro CCNA, part one (of four). While 3com, HP, Juniper, Extreme, etc, have some good products, chances are that most businesses have a Cisco switch, router, or access point somewhere in their network.
Now, if you are talking about knowing whether there is a dash in some obscure command or not, then I agree. That is (almost) entirelly irrelevant, because you can find out so easily by just using tab/? or not entering the full command. The only case it would matter would be if you are writing a config from scratch in a text editor to upload to a router.
Some people (granted, not many) paid $10k to fly across the Atlantic in three hours in the Concorde. NYC to LA is roughly comparable to NYC to UK distance wise. For about a sixth of the time, and only three times the price, its a better deal than the Concorde.
I don't think you were using Offline Files the way it was meant to be used. Yes, if you set files to be available offline, then you can see them all (w/ no hierarchy) in the Offline Files folder/shortcut that you can place on the desktop. The point of offline files though is for files to still be accessible when you go to the mapped drives that they were on. For instance, lets say you have a file such as Z:\folder\document.txt (stored on a mapped drive), and it is set to be an offline file. When you are not able to connect to the file server, then document.txt will still show up in Z:\folder. When you open it you will open the copy of it that is cached on your computer (in strange looking files in C:\windows\csc). You actually don't even have to use mapped drives, I'm pretty sure that Offline Files will work with UNC addresses (like \\server\share\) as well.
I've used Offline Files on my laptop for the past year for my home directory. While I've always sort of been skeptical of it, it has actually always worked fairly well. Additionally you can have the files encrypted on the client's harddrive, to make it difficult for someone to get them by booting to Knoppix or something.
I've read that a little piece of paint made a fairly noticeable "dent" in the Shuttle's windshield. Here's a website that mentions it: http://www.spacetoday.org/Satellites/SatBytes/Spac eJunk.html
Several other sites showed up on Google when I searched for shuttle, fleck of paint, windshield
Considering how small the mass of the paint must have been, I could easily see how a small pebble sized object could cause major damage, but I'm not a rocket scientist. I think there has also been some general concern about all of the debris from China's ASAT test earlier this year. I think they are tracking most of the thousands of pieces of debris, so they would hopefully have an idea if something was coming, but I'm sure that they can't track the smallest pieces of debris. There are some animations on the web that show how the debris spread out from that test - its really amazing.
When you're traveling at 7 km per second, hitting anything that is not traveling along with you on a similar orbit (they would have similar velocities and wouldn't be moving as fast relative to you) has got to be seriously bad news.
Have you ever worked in a tech department that had to support frozen computers? It turns a project that would maybe take fifteen or twenty minutes per lab into something more like and hour long. The school district that I work for used Deep Freeze on most of the desktops at the high school up until about a year or two ago. Taking DF off made it a lot quicker to make minor changes to the computers during the year, and there hasn't been any significant problems. Students and teachers are also happier with it because it prevents stuff that people have saved in My Documents (yes, the kids are told over, and over again to save to their mapped home directories - but occasionally they don't) from being wiped out.
About the same time as that we also took students out of the Admin group (I'm not exactly sure why they were in there in the first place - no apps have had any problems with it), so that mitigated any significant problems as well. We also have McAfee managed AV and 8e6 web filtering, but AFAIK its fairly rare that any viruses or malware are found on the student computers. The laptops that the teachers have(and have admin rights on) are another story. But they would whine if they couldn't add weatherbug and have five different toolbars in IE. Deep Freeze is really just a crappy way of avoiding the problem instead of dealing with it and fixing it. Students/regular non-admin users should not be able to cause damage to the OS. In a well run environment there shouldn't be tons of problems with malware. Yeah, there is going to be an occasional piece of malware that exploits a security vulnerability that could screw up the system. But it is not that hard to lock down boxes properly, with group policy and using the default Windows groups.