DISQUS

I personally use MacFusion, which offer a simple UI for mounting remote servers. Also based on MacFuse:
http://www.macfusionapp.org/

What if we counted passion as a feature. Which brand would be cheaper?

Good link Rich. I'm not nearly as methodological as Tom's hardware, but I replace once a year, and every time I research, Macs are about the same as the equivalent PC.

I don't understand the Eee either. I'm either carrying a backpack which fits a 13" notebook, or just enough pocket space for a phone. It's neither here nor there, and not even a tablet you can curl in bed with.

I'm definitely emphasizing your point. Time is money, depending on how much you make, for some people it may not offset the cost of hardware.

Unless you're already looking for quality products to begin with, in which case all the vendors are more or less same price point, and anything you save on TCO is pure profit.

Few months with a Mac paid for early retirement of the not-that-old-just-as-expensive PC, and some of the software I acquired along the way.

Don't get trolled. It's one of those budget 6lb, dim screen models, and probably discounted to clear stock (can't find it on the HP web site).

If you can afford to take care of your back and eyes, you'd be looking at the higher end models that HP (and Dell and others make), which are more into Apple's price/feature territory.

And that is when you start calculating TCO.

Eventually, like Emacs, all these products will learn to read email, browse the web, run a WoW client, and organize your socks. May the product with the prettiest icon win!

I'm going to bet, though, that they'll develop to support different workflows and appeal to different user bases, and for some people that would make the difference.

BTW I'm using both DropBox and Mozy right now. I don't want my entire computer backed up in real time, I don't want my work directory backed up once a night, either.

So far Microsoft's online properties had the life span of a startup with no founders, funding or business model. They're throwing pasta at the wall, I just decided to stick to something better.

If you use symlinks you don't have to organize your directories under the dropbox, just link to them.

It's definitely apples and oranges.

Dropbox is teh awesome for some workflows that, being a web developer, I do a lot of. And it's good for real-time versioned backup of my documents directory.

It's great for that, it's lousy for everything else. Not my first (or second, or third) choice for general backup, not something I'd use for sharing MP3 or my photo collection.

The thing is, all these products are discussed under the "folder synchronization" category which is the equivalent of lumping mountain bikes and minivans under "vehicles".

They all target different use cases and workflows.

Dropbox has been buzzing for a while, I'm using it and it's awesome for what it does. On OS X you can synchronize multiple directories, but the "interface" involves creating symlinks. Lame, but it does let me access directories of my choice from everywhere.

Your previous post about Syncplicity was interesting, I made a mental note to consider it when they add OS X support. I don't need the extra features, though, but if they do what Dropbox does only better, it'll be worth switching.

This post reads like it's going out of its way to bash everything else out there. I always have this impression that if you need to bash, you have nothing interesting to offer. If this was the first post I read about it, I would just remember Syncplicity as another noisy me-too late-comer.

It's easier to get respect by treating others with respect.

@Jake, not yet, I don't have time to pay attention to it right now.

Let's say someone who knows me decides I will be interested in joining a group and sends me a private e-mail about it. The two of us have a relationship, so up to a certain threshold these unsolicited invites are not spam.

The people I know won't cross that threshold. They take responsibility for their private communications and respect my time. If they cross it, I can talk back and ask them to dial it down a notch.

The result is that my private communication with others is spam free, even though I do get more e-mails than I can attend do.

You took that responsibility away from people. Instead of having them communicate with me directly, Mix becomes the mediator that does their bidding.

The reason social networks go that route is precisely because putting a tool in the middle make it easier to send mass unsolicited e-mails to people. Remove the barrier and you encourage the behavior, and right there is your spam problem.

If you want to see less spam, make people responsible for sending their own invites.

Tara, I only used PassPack briefly before reverting back to KeePass.

Some suggestions for improvement:
1. Use my e-mail address, not login name. I rely on password managers to remember all the different login names.

2. Remember me on my main computer, so I don't have to enter my login name. It's annoying and doesn't add security.

3. Allow for login with a short password, see below.

4. With that password I should be able to view most items and create new ones, no need for a second password (packing key).

5. Use secondary, longer, password for accessing high stake credentials, the ones I'm really protective of.

6. Quick copying of passwords to clipboard. I like how in KeePass I can click on an item, and Ctrl-C to copy the password to the keyboard.

Most of my passwords are not for bank accounts or anything sensitive, they're for accessing hundreds of not-that-important sites, so they don't need to be guarded closely.

The weakest link for most passwords is my e-mail account, you can use it to retrieve lost passwords, by being more demanding than my e-mail login, PassPack annoys but doesn't make me more secure.

It needs to be really simple to access credentials for low-stake sites, and only get insistent for high-stake sites.

If you take PassPack for example, all the data is strongly encrypted on their servers and in transit, so I'm not worried about their servers being compromised ... the data is useless to hackers.

PCs and USB keys can be stolen, lost, or hacked into when you leave the room (or if you're running some network services, even when you're in the room). And most people don't encrypt their home directory, password lock their computer, or even close their password manager after using it.

I'm a big fan of PassPack for one reason. It's annoying as hell to use, but only because they force you to follow security practices. The login procedure is complicated for a reason, as is the auto-logout. And by taking you to the login form, they prevent the accidental typing of passwords in clear text, when you focus on the wrong field.

So in terms of usability, they're much more secure than other password managers I tested, which let you break all the rules. Only downside is that you can't use it offline, otherwise, I'd say go for it.

The thing is, there are so many techniques being used by professionals with large computing power, that I don't feel any password you can remember is good enough. The ones I use are large sequences of random letters, numbers and symbols, impossible to remember (unfortunately) but hard to crack.

For low stake sites, variants are good enough. If you're worried about someone stealing NYT passwords and using them to hack WSJ subscriptions, I think a variant is good enough protection. They won't try that hard.

But the most important thing to remember is that "low stake" is very subjective. I don't use Flickr enough to care for a crypto-strong password there, but if you're a professional photographer with a strong presence there, you should be concerned.

The two questions to ask are:
1. Would an account compromise hurt me in any way? Even if it's just a spambot uploading porn to your blog, or someone impersonating you on Twitter.
2. Would someone target my account directly? Spambots go after low hanging fruits, but if someone is targeting you directly, they'll focus all these resources on a single account.

Password managers, as painful as they are to use daily, are much less painful than cleaning up the damage.

Most likely, the bad guy is not targeting you, and don't have time to try your specific combination algorithm on your specific password. They'll just use the list to brute force their way into as many accounts they can, and ignore the rest. Variations are not that bad.

For significant sites, password management tool would allow you to use long cryptic passwords that are hard to brute force, but also impossible to remember, and let you crypt the password list itself.

The analogy is apt, but the projection is all wrong. A better projection would look at the rate of penetration of electricity, compare that to the phone, personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras and Flash 9.

It seems that the rate is speeding up with each new generation of technologies, and is tied to the decreasing cost of infrastructure, manufacturing and delivery.

I have no reason to believe it will be different for cloud computing.