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Ok... so we haven't had the best of luck with Sprint (see here, and here) and while our company is slowly moving toward AT&T due to "some device" that came out in the last few months, I do have to hand it to Sprint for be one of the first companies to actually release a "why hasn't somebody thought of this sooner" product.

A few days ago, Seagate released a statement about some new technology that they have dubbed "DAVE" (Digital Audio Video Experience).

From the release:

Well, we were and are giving Comcast a shot for our new office's internet access. While I am personally averse to Comcast's service and reputation, their product offering of 8Mbps/1Mbps throughput with a static IP is too much to resist. That is, it would be if we were actually seeing that. We've only had our firewall up for 6 hours, and here are the speeds I am seeing to our server in Dallas:

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Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
  

Nearly everyone that has worked in tech support before (or even those that haven't) has a joke or story about some naive end-user calling about a routine problem but describing it as "the Internet is down!" -- when really all they needed to do was reboot or something. It's funny, and we nerds all get a laugh, but what happens when it's true and you have to explain it to a customer?

This happened to me a few months ago. We had a customer calling to ask why they were being flooded with calls from their users about their web application (which we host) was down.

One of our clients called and reported an issue with a MS Access database. The user was able to open a network based .mdb file, but when they tried to click on a switchboard button they received the following error message: "Disk or network error." There are many resources that deal with this error, but none of them provided the needed solution. The TMP/TEMP directories were set properly, the JET Engine was updated, and the .mdb file was not corrupted (verified on another computer).

We had and have a lot of non-profit clients, and this article at TechSoup is a great primer on planning for technology needs for non-profits. Check it out.

If you have an FTP server that you're constantly uploading to and downloading from, it can be a pain to use an FTP program to manage everything. Novell's free program, NetDrive, let's you instead map your FTP server to act like a local hard drive, so that all your remote files are accessible through the file manager that you're used to. All of the uploading and downloading will be done in the background -- almost seamlessly.

My hometown of Madison, WI has just announced that they'll be rolling out a free Wi-Fi network to the whole city. They join just a few other cities nationwide (San Francisco and Philadelphia included) to move in this direction.

Securityfocus has part 2 of their series on software firewalls up, including a good intro to how LSP trojans can easily circumvent and piggyback on top of a software firewall's protection.

Our firm has many clients in the education sector, many of which that want us to design their websites. Interestingly enough, we haven't had to get a domain name for a single one of them - they always have them by the time they hire us. Today, we found a client with a really hard to remember domain name - so on a whim, we decided to look for another domain name for them. I was amazed that none of my favorite domain registrars listed the ".edu" domain as available.