As an IT Pro, that´s a question I sometimes get asked and although I have to advise them from a IT point of view taking into account security issues, I am primarily a web developer and so have to consider that as well. Well, here´s my advise from both points of view. Read it and do what you think is best.
 
Firstly, there are two main types of cookies - First- and Third-party cookies. First party I will deal with in a moment. Third party cookies are cookies that are loaded and saved by a domain other than the one you are on, and are primarily used for advertisement tracking to allow advertising companies to track the types of sites you look at and then when you visit a site that has one of their adverts on, they will display one that is more relavent to you.
 
Although in a security sense these are nowhere as near as dangerous as a virus or peice of spyware, I generally disable them as they could be a nuisance. Some browsers and IE6 by default now allow first-party cookies and block third-party cookies so you don´t really have to worry about them too much these days.
 
So, on to First-party cookies. These are a text file containing bits of information placed there and accessible only by the domain you are currently visiting. From a security point of view, I still think they are pretty much harmless. They can´t do anything destructive to the PC, they´re a text file…. But what are the downsides? Well, they can be used to track your progress around a site, but any half-capable web developer can use session tracking to track your progress through the URL anyway.

 
There is also the fact that they can be used to identify you when you return to a site. Some might consider this an invasion of privacy and want to disable cookies based on this, but in this case I would consider it from a web developer point of view and consider the benefits. Cookies are highly useful for tracking you for other purposes such as login scripts on membership sites or for shopping baskets on online ordering sites.
 
So my advice is to disable Third-party cookies, enable First-party cookies and if you´re worries about privacy, just delete all your cookies once in a while.

Yeah right. We had one in the office that we were using for milk and lunch stuff but it was mine and I needed it at home so it disappeared. While up at Asda getting our morning MacDonalds we decided to get another but we had walked up so we had to carry it back. It´s only three quaters of a mile but it was bloody hard. Anyway, back to the point.

While we were up there we had the usual morning meeting and today´s raised a few interesting things for me to do next year. The meeting was about how we were going to grow the business next year and therefore had a strong marketing and sales focus. Since it was me (IT and Web), the MD (Marketing focused) and our new Market Researcher, there wasn´t too much for me to input from a marketing point of view. When this happens I tend to switch off slightly but keep one ear open in case there´s anything that crops up that might be a technological problem or something where I can provide some technology to make the job easier. Today´s meeting raised two interesting challenges for next year.

The first was that as a company we should always present ourselves in a professional, capable way, not purely focused on "gettin the sale". As such we decided to improve our support for the websites. This will involve replacing the "Contact us" page on most of the larger sites with a "help and support" section. This will be basically be a set of FAQs with contact forms that will be routed to the relavent person if the answer isn´t there. Also I plan on implementing an AJAX "chat" system similar to an instant messaging program so they can ask us for help as and when we are online.

The other challenge will be to shift onto a dedicated server for one of our main projects. It´s currently not launched but still receives a fair bit of traffic. The only problem is that it´s already pushing the database on our shared hosting package. Looks like a lot of messing about with root access and then a few sleepless nights with DNS getting all the domains shifted across with the minimal of downtime.

Interesting couple of months after the holidays then.

Hmmmm…. If you press F6 then it highlights the search box on the Google toolbar.

I was just watching T3: Rise of the Machines and noticed something that I must have missed last time I watched it. The Arnie Terminator gets taken over and controlled by the sexy T-X baddy. He manages to fix himself by doing a restart.

Since most of the IT problems I have to go and fix are done through a simple restart of the program/computer/appliance maybe I should get all the users to watch this since they don’t listen to me but might listen to Arnie. Worth a try?