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+1 for comment above, I also have swap disabled.

Oops, you've done the blog thing, lol - nice one!

This is well known and what keeps the Windows-based PC break n'fix consultants in business most of the time.

I participate in a variety of developer & gaming communities where I've witnessed the desire to do a fresh install every 3 / 6 months - this is quite excessive and costly in terms of productivity without the smarts to automate this kind of provisioning but shows the user apathy to having to continually self-manage their PCs.

A common approach has been to try and isolate according to purpose i.e. preparing custom 'builds' for different tasks and then keeping those up to date and free of superfluous bloat, virtualisation has helped make this easier / more portable.

For the single user or small business this can be impractical without the right talent and resources around. As the earlier chap commented one is cursed with the chores of regular maintenance let alone having to react to zero day alerts.

In contrast, other operating systems can be more cost-effective to manage however the cost of transition and ability to support or delegate support to a service provider is often a fear factor preventing most from moving from experimentation to widespread adoption. 

I'd recommend that organisations struggling with management should start to explore the actual cost of running other operating systems or speak more with their peers who use these alternatives to get the same job done and then evaluate what, if anything, is missing from their portfolio.

I've been mulling over how to curb the call for revolution by explaining the need for evolution - if we can evolve from where we are to somewhere better lets be doing that rather than overthrowing the existing status-quo - my caveat to this thinking has been to evolve the partners one works with and let them bring innovation into the environment in a controlled fashion that can be measured and compared.

Pick the area of least risk and run a pilot project.  Peter, I hope this helps you get closer to working on a Mac and allows you more time to hack the ability for Finextra to publicly syndicate RSS per blog or get those tag clouds implemented - ps. check our cloud searchlet for google.

Agreed and then some ;-)

Security continues to be a challenge that would be better shared through open security solutions, it's hardly the start of the quietest month in the year for most of us and a YAV (yet another vulnerability) has reared its ugly head, on Vista of all beasts.

Security has become so cumbersome now it's no surprise it takes companies like Skyrecon to clean up the mess and help us stay one step ahead of the enemy.

A few years back it was an exec at Sun that was quoted saying "open source is free like a newborn baby". The quick answer is No.  Banks won't anytime soon ditch Microsoft.  Why: training, change management and support costs will increase over the short term i.e. 6 - 18 months so this is what stops most from changing - the change is too great.  Hence why we often here that most CIOs don't know about deployments of open ware.

Where banks have realised there is great opportunity to benefit from opensource is by actually learning from open systems and taking a leaf out of that book.  There are many examples where one bank has developed code, open sourced it and the project has been adopted by other banks and essentially what banks get is a much greater pool of tech resources with banking expertise that help evolve the project - test it on other sites and help with bug resolution.

Although one might see open source components having great success there is already the opportunity to do plenty of bespoke solutions that are industry-grade i.e. one can use Application Lifecycle Management tools (Eclipse etc.) to develop new software.

The most significant application is Microsoft Office - until Excel has a full blown competitor and banks make further strides to weed Excel out of processes through other solutions one will continue to see Microsoft on the desktop.

For any user who just uses Email, Web browsing and general office document work the case is well proven to move to an open source platform - the question is how many users in your organisation really need or even use what you provide - the best thing banks could do right now is focus on how they create, manage and archive data - they still need to get that right and it's quite  a challege to do so while keeping pace with the technology.

In these troubling times banks need to invest in the future, look to disrupt the status quo and take a lead with innovative services that target non-geographic communities i.e. digital.  Banks have been very slow thus far (caution noted) in attacking new finance markets enabled by the web... for example with all the data that banks have one would wonder why they are not smarter at turning their meta-data into a more valuable commodity for trading / consumption in the global markets - don't expect Reuters or Bloomberg to do it for you as they'll do it for everyone else as well ;-)

Here's a profile snapshot of the digital-gen punter:

In Defense of Gen Y Workers

http://www.cio.com/article/157050

In a world where personal service and quality of service become the differentiators as service delivery of core products becomes ever more a commodity affair it will be a bank's ability to protect and nurture its customers through sound commercial advice that will underpin a bank's success - if the customer thinks more of the bank as a partner in their life plan the more important it will be the bank behaves like one - if a bank measure's it's success on it's customers' success we might actually be getting somewhere, wouldn't we!?

Of course many might say this is in place - I doubt that what exists today is working all that well as per the legacy issue otherwise we'd know what to do with the branches :->

Check out Tricerion as well: http://www.tricerion.com

Besides ClearSpeed another one to watch is Azul!

http://www.azulsystems.com/

Indeed, Sun has also done plenty in this area with their latest innovations in chip design.

Ahead of blogging it's always best to seek endorsement from senior officers of the business - if you're going to request their permission then it can help to be ready to suggest you will follow a corporate blogging policy.

Examples here.