Hi again John C. I'll toss my couple cents in on this one as well. Seems you have the questions that I just have to say my piece about. I've known a number of good programmers who lurk on odesk.com and elance.com. However, they are greatly overshadowed by the folks who simply shouldn't be offering a professional service. Barring that, I think one of the best ways to find global talent is message boards related to the chosen technology. Identifying a knowledgeable or respected individual is fairly trivial if you look over the right sources. People who are passionate about a subject are generally found in places where you talk about that subject. IE. If you need a small windows mobile phone application, I'd absolutely check xda or ppcgeeks (depending on gsm vs cdma). Need some Silverlight work done? Silverlight.net identifies right on the homepage users who have reached higher level of status through good posting. You get the idea. Minimal leg work into researching a user's posts can identify the right candidates, with no cost to the client other than time. If you want to point a client in the right direction and wash your hands of it, aim them at a location where hobbiests and professionals alike gather, and step back. Should you really want to help the client out, you can always go a step further and ask around in a board's chat room (if they offer one). I know thats how I've been snagged for a few word of mouth projects myself. Personally, I'm of the opinion that good consultants are very receptive to being approached in the right way, when they are found discussing the things that are of interest to them. In fact, some consultants make it a point to be active in a niche community with the sole purpose of hoping to increase interest in their offerings. Blogs are often used for this as well. On a side note, I think I missed a part of the conversation. What API / offering were you referring to when you talked about providing developer licensing? Oh, and I guess I should put my name in the hat as well. Best of luck, - BK

For me, the time came many moons ago. On my current box, I run a quad proc with 8gb and 1.25 TB split over 5 drives. The separation of drives and RAM is vital. My host is either A 64bit flavor of Linux or Vista x64, depending on what I need done on the main box. Choice of VM software is split for me as well. I have some boxes running under VirtualBox (*the* choice for speed. Seriously, wow) and others under VMWare Workstation 6.5. There's pros and cons to both, but for me it breaks down as: -- VMWare gives Directx 9.0 support, which works 'okay' when needed. Teams are a life saver for legacy apps split over multiple boxes (I have an environment I bring up that requires each of 4 servers booted in a specific order, specific services started, etc. The team and some AutoItX apps running at startup make sure everything is timed beautifully when I hit 'Play'). The Unity feature's UI ... not performance... is 1000x better than Seamless integration on VBox, especially when running multiple VMs at once; I run 2 VMs or more at all times. -- VBox is fast. Really fast. It runs Win2k and NT4.0 boxes faster than any native hardware they ever supported. It makes VMWare Workstation look like the tortoise compared to a hare with a jetpack. Did I mention it is fast? While the Seamless integration takes an approach I don't like under 90% of circumstances (it eliminates the background but leaves the start bar across the bottom), I've found it to not cause a performance hit the way that VMWare's Unity does, and to have much better redraw rates. When running under Gnome, VBox's Seamless is even more drastic. (Anecdotal findings by experience only). Because of it's speed, it provides a much smoother experience on lower-end hardware. My personal experience has lead me to always run a VM under some form of Seamless or Unity, even when I'm not developing. This lets me comfortably test out tools and other software before it hits my Host. When I am developing, the Host integration tools make for a really comfortable experience during development, allowing me to interact with a server, dev box, and host all at the same time, while fully utilizing my multi-monitors, and not having to spend much time thinking about which box I need to 'switch' over to. The less brain power expended on non-coding and problem solving tasks, the better. Being an anti-modal UI guy, this is an almost perfect choice for multiple machine interactions without breaking my train of thought. Just my $.000002, - BK