We have two categories of machines here; let me call them appliancesand systems. Systems are machines that users have access to or thatprovide complex, general services to the Internet; our login and computeservers, our IMAP server, and so on. Appliances are not user accessible,are more or less hermetically sealed, and generally only expose thespecific service that they're supposed to provide.

We keep systems up to date on patches. We have to; they're exposed. Butwe almost never patch

Recently, I've started actually doing things with my Facebook account,and I've done a bit with Twitter, and of course I've used LiveJournalfor a while now. All of which, especially Facebook, has recently givenme a bit of additional perspective on something.

You know all that stuff that I wrote aboutwhat makes social networking sites sticky? Sure, it's accurate as far asit goes, but I missed a big bit of it: time. Namely, the sheer amount