Columnist’s corner: An IT cowboy, who once reset an entire corporate file server system granting only himself rights to all files, surfaced at our Off the Record author’s company. “Bill was a Texan through and through and claimed to have served black ops for the government since he was about 15. He said he had been hand-picked by the then-President George Bush Sr. for a secret mission.” That was only the beginning. Two years of tall tales, including a Purple Heart from Bill Clinton, dinner with Bill Gates, and some $6 million in the bank, resulted in a paint ball game gone wrong, replete with Saddam masks. “Our masks and his early defeat caused him to never came back to work. He e-mailed his resignation, claiming a hostile work environment.” Hands-on preview: E-mail has never been a good way to transfer large attachments. Then again, FTP has its own set of issues. Accellion’s Secure File Transfer Appliance, however, is “an effective solution that combines the use of e-mail attachments with efficient data transfers and robust monitoring and security features,” Mario Apicella writes. “It may not come cheap but the Accellion Virtual Appliance solves the thorny problem of large e-mail attachments with responsive and efficient agents and well thought management tools.” The hitch, if you will? Companies that can already handle such transfers via e-mail won’t find it useful. “Otherwise, you should give some thoughts to reserving a virtual machine and some disk space on your VMware servers for this intriguing virtual appliance.” Read the full preview. Reality check: If you buy software every 10 years and pay 25 percent in maintenance fees then you’re ultimately paying 2.5 times the original license just to maintain the app, Ephraim Schwartz reports in Stop overpaying for support. If that sounds familiar, “you are burning a big wad of cash,” Schwartz asserts. There is an alternative, though, in the form of third-party support from the likes of Rimini Street and TomorrowNow. A Forrester analyst says that customers get the same or better performance from such third-parties. Schwartz offers this to consider: “Remind those vendors that when the time comes to adopt that next generation of enterprise software, your company will have a long memory of who its friends really are.” Careers