ABSDaemon

This used to be the Interbase 6.0 database server. They eventually opensourced it to the firebird project. I used Interbase before (Several years ago I worked for a company that deployed a lot of Cobalt servers and this was the DB of choice for that platform)I'm not sure about Firebird. I heard a lot of buzz about it a few years ago and frankly haven't heard much since. Especially since MySQL 4.0 and 5.0 released a bunch of features that MySQL needed to make it a true RDBMS. I'm even using PostgreSQL less these days. (But someone told me that they offer PostgreSQL here so I'm going to get a free account to test a CMS I'm building on a live enviroment to see if it will work without my custom tweaked Apache/Php installs at home).

It depends. For most people's websites and webservers, local is best. I use both. I have a box that is just a database server in my office (to test remote connections) but usually I am developing on a machine with it on localhost. (Either via WAMP or a custom FreeBSD I use to boot from thumbdrive.) However, there are cases where you have to scale. My day job's site currently is on a cluster. It has 4 webservers on a load balancer connected to a MySQL database (a rather beefy Quadcore machine with 8GB of ram), a seperate file server, an Xserve for Quicktime media streaming, and two boxes that just handle email. (One from the server and one for us employees). (Also we have another box as a backup on standby incase the main database fails for whatever reason. Fortunatelly that is all done through a managed service. We pay out the rear for it, but not as much as it would cost to open our own datacenter and hire a full time networking staff. Maybe someday, but for now we're just working on the programming and business development side of things. Granted, We're average a concurrent server load of between 2500 - 12000 users at any given time. So it's a little different situation.

Personally I think the new iMac's are ugly. But that's just me. I have a 17" iMac (Intel Core 2 Duo with the ATI card) I bought last year. Haven't gotten 10.5 yet, figured I walk in to the Apple store and pick it up when I do the rest of my Christmas shopping this year. I've talked to a couple people who swear 10.5 is faster than 10.4. Guess I'll find out soon. I have an old 2Ghz Celeron Dell laptop with XP Pro and only 512MB of ram (Max it would hold). The DVD/CD burner still reads discs, but won't burn anymore and the battery needs to be replaced. I usually end up running FreeSBIE on it most days. I have XP pro on my iMac I run via Parallels so I still have a windows box that runs Falcon 4.0 A:F without any problems.

Wow, AGP now the legacy format. I agree with the others. I am not in to power gaming anymore, I play a couple fight sims but that's it, so I rarely spend more than $120 on a graphics card. Usually it's whatever decent under $100 is more my price range. One of my boxes still runs a Nvidia card of some type that's 64MB and it will handle most of the games I play, save for Falcon 4AF>

I've seen BRD burners, but I've yet to see an HD-DVD burner. I have seen the media (blank discs) at Staples though. Personally I use USB2.0 external Hard drives. I bought one a couple months ago for $130 on sale at Best buy. They may even be cheaper now, who knows.