Quote - First, if Bill Gates wanted to take over the world, he would have a good start, but so would other software providers. Photoshop, Poser, and many more will automatically connect to the Internet and check versions, updates and so on UNLESS YOU TURN THIS STUFF OFF.

...that's why the one Windows machine I recently came by (an old P3 Dell laptop that I do compatibility checks with via D|S) isn't even allowed outside the LAN. My (real, not OS) firewall blocks all outbound packets from its MAC address. I only need LAN connectivity for it now. > Quote - Sometimes I miss the old Internet when it was all BBs and text.

Yeah, me too. > Quote - MySQL doesn't really scale well for large databases.

I'd see where the benchmarks you mentioned came from and who commissioned them - Google's main DBs are all MySQL, and they have to be way larger than 3TB. At work I've rigged 8 MySQL synced DB's of a code automation testing suite that's roughly 4.5TB in size total, with two of them in Arizona, and two of them in China -- across a horrifyingly skinny WAN link (you have to use v5.1 or better, coupled with Federated Tables and a bit of iteration rigging to round-robin the SQL replication thread among the 'two-way' DB's (three of the pile are only slaves, with the rest as peers. One of the threads has a 3-hour inbound delay to the archive DB, thanks to a little script built by xprb) - it's the one complaint I have w/ MySQL, though... replication is a PITA unless you're willing to get jiggy with it. Oracle (esp. with RAC) is much, much nicer, but the price tag is evil. MSSQL might handle it, but the price tag is friggin' huge too, and the underlying OS is unsuitable IMHO). That said, I've seen no real probs w/ performance, aside from the initial DB loads (UPS and a few full LTO-3 tapes were my best friends there). Long, ugly story... :) The OSX-X86 link: http://www.osxx86.info/installguide/ I have one specifically for VMWare installs too... I'll cough that up when I get to work :) /P