i did end up fooling around with virtualbox. not bad at all. actually opens vmdk files with slight modifications. has snapshot capability and so on.

fills a nice gap too because vm server, though it can be ran on a workstation, isn’t really meant for that. and vm player allows no snapshots or creation of vms. maybe after a few more versions of virtualbox come out i’ll consider moving to it completely.

stumbled across a website – osalt.com. it lists open source alternatives to popular commercial products. now this has been a goal of mine for quite a few years. i chose 7zip for winrar, filezilla for cuteftp, audacity for cooledit/audition, and so on. i mean anything i use for basic productivity has an open source alternative. anyways, i’m mentioning this now because i was surprised to see equivalents of software i didn’t really think about…such as crystal reports, ms project, sharepoint, etc. so wow really why couldn’t you run a business off an open source stack.

executives seem to have it in mind that you always have to buy software, otherwise the software must not be useful and/or crap. it’s a mindset that microsoft has somehow conned the business world into believing. and microsoft has succeeded in accomplishing this by fear tactics, aggressive salesmen, and no doubt bullying.

one last thing – standards. and by that i mean open standards, not one vendor’s obviously biased idea of standards. it’s always interesting that the default response to becoming standard compliant is to bend or customize the standard to fit the environment. well, hello! if you are throwing in customizations to match your environment, then you are following some type of bastardization of a standard.

however, it’s probably fairly difficult to follow a standard down to the last detail. and that’s fine…they’re guidelines. but when you stray too far away you’re an abomination.