Whether you are a hosting guru, web developer, or client, it's always interesting and valuable to pick the brain of someone who has successfully made his or her mark on the industry. After all, we all want to gain as much insight as we can into why some business ventures make it while others don't.

If you attended HostingCon.2005, you probably had the chance to meet Chris Wells and his associates at the InterWorx booth. As president and CEO of both NEXCESS.NET and InterWorx, he is in the unique position of having a role in both the hosting and development fields.

Many people bemoan the unceasing bickering and so called "holy wars" in the Free/libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) world. The process of repeatedly redrawing battle lines such as vi vs emacs (and emacs vs xemacs), xfree86 vs xorg, KDE vs GNOME, BSD vs Linux, and the Free Software Foundation vs the Open Source Initiative is an essential part of what makes FLOSS into great software. As painful as it may be to watch, the divisions, factionalism, and emotionalism are fundamental to the process of creating FLOSS and can't be excised without diminishing the software itself.

Most rational human beings would agree that the flame wars over operating systems are ignorant at least and pointless at best. A few of them are, I suppose, somewhat understandable. Windows 3.1 versus OS/2, Unix versus Windows NT, Windows XP versus MacOS--these are all givens in a computing environment with room for different perspectives. That said, the battle between aficionados of Linux and BSD is not only silly but hurts both parties with every attack.

As a commercial website designer, you quickly learn that a business wants a website for one reason: to sell more stuff. To that end, a site you design for a company needs to translate into tangible sales. You can create a quality site with eye-catching images and a lot of relevant text and information. You can learn how search engines work and exploit that knowledge to increase site rankings. You can even pay for an advertising service such as Google Adwords. Everything you do to develop a commercial site, promote it, and increase your client's bottom line is in your control. That is, everything except your inclusion in the Open Directory Project.

A while back, I decided that I wanted to speak to the Loss Prevention District Manager about social engineering. I was a bit nervous about how it would make me look in the company's eyes if I showed them what I could do. After carefully considering the best way to approach the company, this is the story of what happened.

Interested in VOIP? Well, here are the basics from an industry insider.

For some reason, technical aptitude and good interpersonal skills are rarely present in the same individual. There are many brilliant technology professionals with a tomes of knowledge to contribute to the rest of us but--for whatever reasons--they often don't. This was my original motivation for giving a writer's perspective in writing tech articles in two previous articles.

I'd like to continue by focusing this time on how our words can inadvertently say things to our readers that are confusing, irritating, or just plain untrue. Just a few poorly chosen words can cause a reader to hold a grudge against an author or an entire website for a long time. Even worse, the negative comments (on not only your site but the reader's) that may come as a result will discourage other readers from visiting while also discouraging you, the writer.

How much do you pay for technical support and information technology related staff? Regardless of the amount, its probably not what it should be. It is certainly possible that you aren't paying enough, but equally likely you are paying too much, or just not getting as much as you should for that price. This is particularly true for small businesses.

If you want to get the most out of your IT dollar, there are three simple things you can do right now.

Up until now, I often found myself wading through gaming sites where I would skip the review and jump right to the numerical score just to find out if a particular game was worth buying. The reviews that I actually read seemed to be dry and all too verbose.

But with this article, I mark the advent of a new monthly feature on AllYourTech.com that I'd like to call "Game reviews for people who hate game reviews" in which I will mainly deal with graphics and gameplay. While other elements of a game are important to some people, most of us only care about graphics and gameplay, so extended discussion about sound, performance specs and other details would only be more text that the average gamer will have to drudge through.

If you want details on polygon counts and frames per second, you have come to the wrong place. If you just want to know what games are worthy of your valuable time, enjoy.

Any web developer, designer, or webmaster can benefit from having a local web server. Even if that developer has no interest in securing and maintaining the server his or her websites live on, a local server can act as a convenient mirror for testing updates, trying new designs, and other general sand-boxing activities.

Web developers whose hosts utilize the popular LAMP platform (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) are frequently hit with a dilemma. Since understanding Linux is not a prerequisite for website administrators, many of them lack the knowledge necessary for setting up a LAMP server from scratch (or at least they may think so). But thanks to the improved package management on Linux distributions like Debian, installing a functional web server is not nearly the chore it was just a couple years ago.