Might want to dig a little deeper and see if "no support" really just means "we don't know if it works and don't know how to support Linux." Hopefully some folks further down will have info on the other services.
Disclaimer: I happen to work for one of the companies involved with EVDO.
I would tape songs for more mobile playback and label them "Computer Music." Later, friends would see and either think it would be Atari 2600 sounding or WAY fringe.
"Hey, that's pretty cool sounding! Kinda weird, but cool. What album is that from?"
-Ducky "Uh... it's not. It's the theme song to Arkanoid for the C64." Ah, Galway, Hubbard, absolutely amazing. The days I spent in front of sideditor found in part 3 of "All About the Commodore 64, volume 2" by Craig Chamberlain (which I still have somewhere). I guess I owe my DJing hobby to that as well. =)
Oh yeah. In my ANSI Common Lisp book. Something about the real power of Lisp being that everything, including the program itself is just a tree structure.
I guess programming languages really are slowly merging. Java isn't getting macros now, but I suspect in another 5 or 10 years it'll be something else Java will do. =)
Heh, brain-fart on that one, Thanks. I haven't had a laptop in a while - I've been using the smartphone + desktop arrangement for about 2 years. While I miss roaming around while at work, the keyboard attachment for the phone makes meetings bearable at least.
Ok, so how about an AGP cardbus-like form factor. Actually, I'd settle for roughly the same size as the average vid card, just a friendlier package. =)
I've always wanted something like this. PCI is nice, but the whole edge card + screw mounting design carried over from the ISA days always bothered me. Not necessarily PCMCIA, but some end-user friendly form factor that I wouldn't need a static bag and a screew driver for.
The problem with PCMCIA is it's slow compared to PCI and AGP. It was designed for reduced size, not raw performace. But a PCMCIA based machine would at least be a start.
Hard drives are just now starting to lose the ribbon cable in consumer models (Serial ATA), so I'm not going to hold my breath or anything for something only the 2 of us want. =D
I mean, M$ has this history of embrace and extend in technology, and embrace and nuke in corporate relationships.
Everything old is new again =)
I'm absolutely amazed how many times, they've done this to corporate entities. And every single time, just as the ink is drying, someone asks, "So, are you afraid MS will take the tech and leave?" And they respond with, "No! That's impossible! They wouldn't do that to us!"
I happen to work for a company where this exact thing transpired at one of their spin-offs a few years back. MS took all the tech and left the spin-off with nothing to productize. Fortunately for the employees, most were folded back into the parent company.
Truely sad they can get away with it. That, and that others are so naive to sign up for this treatment with their track record.
And people wonder why I have such a distaste for Microsoft. And before anyone asks, yes, I'm MS free both at home and at work. =)
Really? Where's the bug report? I don't see anything on bugs.xmms.org.
Sorry for sounding like an a-hole, but an AC exclaiming a bug in a product, no follow up on the product's web site, and no other info sounds very suspect to me.
-Ducky
Re:Please listen up to my noteworthy advice
on
Professional PHP4
·
· Score: 1
Haven't seen mention of this yet... HTML::Mason is one of a few embedded Perl solutions that operates very similar to PHP/ASP/JSP, etc.
To take your above example, rewritten in HTML::Mason would look like this:
% if ( something ) { Something was selected % } else { Something was not selected % }
HTML::Mason also takes care of the variable collection. All arguments are put into %ARGS, in addition to putting them into declared variables:
<%args> $id => 0 $name </%args>
$id would be assigned 0 if the GET/POST didn't supply it, whereas $name would throw an error if it wasn't supplied.
Also, general printing of variables is easy, too:
Hello, <% $name %>!
In general, a very decent system that addresses what you thought Perl couldn't do. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg for Mason. I won't even go into its inheritance model, it's default handlers, autohandlers, component model... that's worthy of an entire O'Reilly Book. =)
</perl-plug focus="HTML::Mason">
In the end, use the tool you're more comfortable with. If you like canned scripts (mail submit forms, BBSes, etc), PHP has a ton of them. If you want to code more of it yourself, Perl's CPAN is extensive. JSP for... uh, something, I'm sure. And if you're masochistic, there's ASP.;P
Actually, I could comfortably use gestures with an IBM Thinkpad's pencil eraser nub for a pointing device. Well, "comfortably" might be too positive a word... perhaps "without the desire to go gouge my eyes out," was was the case when trying to play quake with the infernal thing.
My only complaint about perlmonks is that once you get to a point where you're offering advice, there's a few very high saints that will chastise you if your answers do not meet their strict criteria.
The last straw for me was when someone asked why a particular piece of his code wasn't working, so I offered his code back with minimal fixes. I was modded down talked down to in the chatterbox because I didn't REALLY fix up his code. ie, add "or die" to the end his open statements, put "-w" in the #! line, and "use strict" towards the top.
So I stopped looking for "community" there. It just wasn't worth it. But it I would say it's good for beginners looking for code snippets.
-Ducky
Re:Er... This doesn't sound right...
on
The Chronoliths
·
· Score: 1
From what I gathered from the statement was:
- The story takes place 20 years into the future - These leaders are even further into the future
I think it has something to do with the location. If you declare "fun time" and hold it at everyone's desks, people just don't feel free from work. But if you have coworkers get together some place generally not associated with work (a park), people put the usual corporate structure aside.
[btw, Colleen landed a position end of March with Eudora. The crew's in R now. Lot closer than bldg I was =) ]
Since I'm an employee of the company that's staffing Kyocera's cdma phone division (Qualcomm), I've seen it first hand.
VERY nice. While I did side by side comparison, I didn't write down dimensions, etc (the general mood was more of "wooo new toy, new toy!"), I can say you're not really losing any size off the width nor the thickness, but it is about 1.75 inches shorter (if not more).
It's WAY faster. I think double proc speed? don't remember. The various apps I played with (mostly games) were very snappy.
The screen it had just felt better to scribble on. Color was very spiffy feature, too - but the only other color palm I've played with was a palm iiic
By far, my favorite features were the fact it can play mp3s, and the memory card slot. My friend could put apps and mp3s on the card, and both would show up when inserted into the phone.
Here are the 10 reasons not to accept, with my own comments:
You have now made your employer aware that you are unhappy. From this day on, your loyalty will always be in question.
You should make your employer aware you are unhappy! How else will anything get fixed? Of course, you should have already brought this up in your last review ; )
When promotion time comes around, your employer will remember who is loyal and who is not.
This can go both ways. Your new employer might question your loyalty because you jumped ship! Or, your old employer might feel you're even more loyal because you stayed.
When times get tough, your employer will begin the cutbacks with you.
Not if you were so underpaid to begin with. Sure, if you were whiny about making so little, when in reality, you were already the highest paid employee, then I agree with that one.
Accepting a counteroffer is an insult to your intelligence and a blow to your personal pride; you were bought.
And what were you before your acceptance, hmmm? Slave labor? Sometimes the only way for even your boss to get you to the level of compensation they feel you deserve, is for them to present the offer to upper management. I would consider the counteroffer a compliment - they thought highly enough of you to actually do something about it!
Where is the money for the counteroffer coming from? All companies have wage and salary guidelines which must be followed. Is it your next raise early?
Early raise? Why wait? Also, in a company with even a few employees ( > 10 ), your increase will truely not have that much of a negative impact when following guidelines.
Your company will immediately start looking for a new person at a cheaper price.
Doubtful. Unless you are in a low-skill position, why would they bother with a counteroffer? They've probably invested time and money into making you a better employee through training and the like. They don't want to start from scratch, that would be far more costly.
The same circumstances that now cause you to consider a change will repeat themselves in the future, even if you accept a counteroffer.
Of course they will! They would have at the new job, too! It's part being in the work force. Part of your responsibility is to let your employer know your concerns. Without change, there will be stagnation.
Statistics show that if you accept a counteroffer, the probability of voluntarily leaving in six months or being let go in one year is extremely high.
Statistics sited of course. =/ I can see this being true, as the folks who are part of the study weren't happy where they were to begin with - the reason for that are probably varied, going beyond simple dissatisfaction with compensation.
Once the word gets out, the relationship that you now enjoy with your co-workers will never be the same. You will lose the personal satisfaction of peer group acceptance.
If you are making significantly more than them now to start with, I can see things going sour. But, if after the counteroffer acceptance you are end up making about the same as the rest of your peers, it might actually improve, and earn more respect!
What type of company do you work for if you have to threaten to resign before they will give you what you are worth?
Who said anything about threats? In larger organizations, radical alterations in pay need extreme justification - where even Montgomery Scott-like performance (miracle worker) doesn't cut it to upper management.
YMMV, but if monetary compensation was the only issue, I can't find a reason not to accept a counteroffer. The reasons not to accept just seemed like a lot of FUD to me.
I wasn't too keen on this text, either. Early on he states how procedural programming differs in that functions are used for their side effects where as functional programming uses functions for the values returned. Then he turns around does a print inside of a map block - using functional constructs to do side-effects? bleh.
I much prefer the approach taken in Randal Schwartz and Joseph Hall's Effective Perl Programming... which has a wonderful "idiomatic perl" chapter, I must add =)
The old sed/awk/sh scripts? They're stuck behind a firewall of a former employer. =) The single perl script replacement is much cleaner but currently runs only under linux (doing some ioctl stuff that uses hardcoded numbers. I know... bad Ducky). So, I'm hesitant to just post the beastie.
Allow me to clean up the file a tad. =) Check back later this week and I'll post it somewhere... probably on at the above url.
Somewhat akin to converting your gifs to jpeg, I suppose. =) Both are lossy, the former being lossy in the color depth while the latter is lossy on the image pattern. The result: Yick. But good enough for most people.
Though thinking about it... they both get to their results in similar ways (hence Fraunhofer's suit against Xiph). So I'm curious as to what the audio artifacts left over from such a conversion would be. My guess is... good enough for most people who will be listening to them via 2" computer speakers anyway.
Since I'm at work it's an experiment that I'll just have to wait to listen to in full clarity. =)
As a matter of fact, mp3 is a compression scheme for wav format. So it _must_ be converted from wav. Any cd ripper that skips that probably does it as an illusion. For example: rips a 32k buffer, converts to wav while in memory and then to mp3 without saving the entire song as a wav on disk first.
Actually, the mp3 format has nothing to do with wav format. As long as you have an audio stream to compress, you can encode it in mpeg2-layer3.
I used to maintain a Solaris machine with a number of odd sized external disks attached forming a 32gig array that housed all our mp3s on it. Every mp3 was encoded in-house, nothing from napster or what have you. I wrote a handfull of scripts to that pulled all the audio off of a cdrom, dumped them to a shared directory where a farm of Ultra-I and Ultra-II's encoded them to mp3. But that first step entailed ripping to.au because these were Sun machines after all! =P It wasn't until we got an updated ripper that would do wav and a bunch of win folk asking if they could contribute audio that I changed the system to use wav.
What'd we do with all those mp3s? Uh, listen to them. =) They also made a good base of large data when stress/performance testing new hardware!
From what I'm told, the machine is still there, serving away music to those who put music in (the rule I put forth - can't pull from the "archive" unless you've "archived" something to begin with).
And to be a little more on-topic: I've repeated the above process at home earlier this year... with a few minor changes. Replaced the handful of sh/awk/sed scripts with 1 all-purpose, all-powerful, yet rules-with-a-benevolent-hand perl script, and it now finishes up with ogg vorbis instead of mp3.
Why? Because Sonique supports it! I use Sonique because it handles audio streams better (as one song is almost done it starts buffering the next - a must for electronica mix compilations). MXAudio does the continual buffering thing, too, but since I'm stuck with a windows desktop (it's the games, man!), Sonique's what I'm gonna use.
We've got a beta of the RLX Razor at my work. For a managed services company, this thing is sweet!
For that first slot "control tower" one can do all sorts of nifty things with the other blades from power cycling to bios settings... which inclines me to want to have that first blade not be generally accessable to the outside world. This reduces your available work horses to 23 per 3U density. That's still a rackspace bargain, though!
The hard drives may be a point of contention for some people, but the way I envision these is to boot them via net and have your web cluster get data from network attached storage rather than local. This way you may boot these diskless and reduce the power consumption by about half! A fully populated chassis will then suck less than 200 watts.
All in all, a very tasty product. Can't wait to throw these in our colos =)
There is hope for alternatives, though! While not a free solution, Corporate Time by Corporate Software and Technologies is a pretty good calendaring product that has client and server products for NT, Solaris, and Linux.
But they've got an Outlook connector where you specify an IMAP server and a CST Calendaring server and together appear to outlook as one Exchange server. Pretty nifty. Reliability and you keep the MS crowd in check.
Where I work, we tried this connector when it was version 1.0 and while it worked, it had issues. CST is now at version 2.0.3 but we haven't tested this version because we haven't upgraded our CST server to the latest. So I can't tell you how well that version works.
This isn't the first time we've heard of hardware being just shy of unusable (I'd actually say this isn't usable). Anyone remember what Intel was saying about the original Pentium before its release? Eventually, Intel figured out how to engineer it to not need to liquid cooling.
Give it a few months and it'll fit in standard (for intel, anyway) hardware, ready for the masses. Otherwise it just won't sell enough to justify the cost of development.
True. Very obviously the author comes from a Mac-centric background. And like everyone else says, nothing bad about that, but I just have to disagree with his view that everything that came with your computer is the Operating System.
He really blurs the definition of app and OS. I've always believed that the OS is what made your system work right. You remove Netscape - does your system stop working? Hmmm... Not really. But what if you were to remove grep? Ok, now things really stop working right. Things are built on grep - it's expected to be there. It's part of the OS.
When browsers and media streamers/players stop having logos afixed to them, are not their own window, and applications rely on them to function, then I'll consider them part of the Operating System. Until then, It's just an app. Something that, while nice to have bundled, isn't really part of the OS.
Apple is making a unique OS using a BSD kernel. That's great! The unix kernel (and philosophy, really) has a strong, proven history of reliability, scalability, and extendability. But what David Everly has to say about it makes him sound as if he's had a short and sheltered time behind only his Macintosh.
Slashdot Mirror
At least for Verizon's EVDO we've got a horde of folk in our IT dept. using it thanks mostly to Phil Karn's notes on getting the card working in Linux.
Might want to dig a little deeper and see if "no support" really just means "we don't know if it works and don't know how to support Linux." Hopefully some folks further down will have info on the other services.
Disclaimer: I happen to work for one of the companies involved with EVDO.
Yeah, I'd have to say I'm in the same boat. =)
I would tape songs for more mobile playback and label them "Computer Music." Later, friends would see and either think it would be Atari 2600 sounding or WAY fringe.
"Hey, that's pretty cool sounding! Kinda weird, but cool. What album is that from?"
-Ducky
"Uh... it's not. It's the theme song to Arkanoid for the C64." Ah, Galway, Hubbard, absolutely amazing. The days I spent in front of sideditor found in part 3 of "All About the Commodore 64, volume 2" by Craig Chamberlain (which I still have somewhere). I guess I owe my DJing hobby to that as well. =)
I've heard that somewhere before...
Oh yeah. In my ANSI Common Lisp book. Something about the real power of Lisp being that everything, including the program itself is just a tree structure.
I guess programming languages really are slowly merging. Java isn't getting macros now, but I suspect in another 5 or 10 years it'll be something else Java will do. =)
-Ducky
PCMCIA is ISA. Cardbus is PCI.
Heh, brain-fart on that one, Thanks. I haven't had a laptop in a while - I've been using the smartphone + desktop arrangement for about 2 years. While I miss roaming around while at work, the keyboard attachment for the phone makes meetings bearable at least.
Ok, so how about an AGP cardbus-like form factor. Actually, I'd settle for roughly the same size as the average vid card, just a friendlier package. =)
I've always wanted something like this. PCI is nice, but the whole edge card + screw mounting design carried over from the ISA days always bothered me. Not necessarily PCMCIA, but some end-user friendly form factor that I wouldn't need a static bag and a screew driver for.
The problem with PCMCIA is it's slow compared to PCI and AGP. It was designed for reduced size, not raw performace. But a PCMCIA based machine would at least be a start.
Hard drives are just now starting to lose the ribbon cable in consumer models (Serial ATA), so I'm not going to hold my breath or anything for something only the 2 of us want. =D
-DuckyEverything old is new again =)
I'm absolutely amazed how many times, they've done this to corporate entities. And every single time, just as the ink is drying, someone asks, "So, are you afraid MS will take the tech and leave?" And they respond with, "No! That's impossible! They wouldn't do that to us!"
I happen to work for a company where this exact thing transpired at one of their spin-offs a few years back. MS took all the tech and left the spin-off with nothing to productize. Fortunately for the employees, most were folded back into the parent company.
Truely sad they can get away with it. That, and that others are so naive to sign up for this treatment with their track record.
And people wonder why I have such a distaste for Microsoft. And before anyone asks, yes, I'm MS free both at home and at work. =)
-Ducky
Really? Where's the bug report? I don't see anything on bugs.xmms.org.
Sorry for sounding like an a-hole, but an AC exclaiming a bug in a product, no follow up on the product's web site, and no other info sounds very suspect to me.
-Ducky
Haven't seen mention of this yet... HTML::Mason is one of a few embedded Perl solutions that operates very similar to PHP/ASP/JSP, etc.
To take your above example, rewritten in HTML::Mason would look like this:
HTML::Mason also takes care of the variable collection. All arguments are put into %ARGS, in addition to putting them into declared variables:
$id would be assigned 0 if the GET/POST didn't supply it, whereas $name would throw an error if it wasn't supplied.Also, general printing of variables is easy, too:
In general, a very decent system that addresses what you thought Perl couldn't do. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg for Mason. I won't even go into its inheritance model, it's default handlers, autohandlers, component model... that's worthy of an entire O'Reilly Book. =)
</perl-plug focus="HTML::Mason"> ;P
In the end, use the tool you're more comfortable with. If you like canned scripts (mail submit forms, BBSes, etc), PHP has a ton of them. If you want to code more of it yourself, Perl's CPAN is extensive. JSP for... uh, something, I'm sure. And if you're masochistic, there's ASP.
-Ducky
True, AFS uses kerb4 based authentication, however it doesn't use kadmind, which has the buffer overflow.
If all you are running is AFS, and not MIT kerb to boot, this doesn't apply.
-Ducky
Actually, I could comfortably use gestures with an IBM Thinkpad's pencil eraser nub for a pointing device. Well, "comfortably" might be too positive a word... perhaps "without the desire to go gouge my eyes out," was was the case when trying to play quake with the infernal thing.
-Ducky
My only complaint about perlmonks is that once you get to a point where you're offering advice, there's a few very high saints that will chastise you if your answers do not meet their strict criteria.
The last straw for me was when someone asked why a particular piece of his code wasn't working, so I offered his code back with minimal fixes. I was modded down talked down to in the chatterbox because I didn't REALLY fix up his code. ie, add "or die" to the end his open statements, put "-w" in the #! line, and "use strict" towards the top.
So I stopped looking for "community" there. It just wasn't worth it. But it I would say it's good for beginners looking for code snippets.
-Ducky
From what I gathered from the statement was:
- The story takes place 20 years into the future
- These leaders are even further into the future
-Ducky
I think it has something to do with the location. If you declare "fun time" and hold it at everyone's desks, people just don't feel free from work. But if you have coworkers get together some place generally not associated with work (a park), people put the usual corporate structure aside.
[btw, Colleen landed a position end of March with Eudora. The crew's in R now. Lot closer than bldg I was =) ]
-Duck
Since I'm an employee of the company that's staffing Kyocera's cdma phone division (Qualcomm), I've seen it first hand.
VERY nice. While I did side by side comparison, I didn't write down dimensions, etc (the general mood was more of "wooo new toy, new toy!"), I can say you're not really losing any size off the width nor the thickness, but it is about 1.75 inches shorter (if not more).
It's WAY faster. I think double proc speed? don't remember. The various apps I played with (mostly games) were very snappy.
The screen it had just felt better to scribble on. Color was very spiffy feature, too - but the only other color palm I've played with was a palm iiic
By far, my favorite features were the fact it can play mp3s, and the memory card slot. My friend could put apps and mp3s on the card, and both would show up when inserted into the phone.
Yup, definately on my purchase list.
You should make your employer aware you are unhappy! How else will anything get fixed? Of course, you should have already brought this up in your last review ; )
This can go both ways. Your new employer might question your loyalty because you jumped ship! Or, your old employer might feel you're even more loyal because you stayed.
Not if you were so underpaid to begin with. Sure, if you were whiny about making so little, when in reality, you were already the highest paid employee, then I agree with that one.
And what were you before your acceptance, hmmm? Slave labor? Sometimes the only way for even your boss to get you to the level of compensation they feel you deserve, is for them to present the offer to upper management. I would consider the counteroffer a compliment - they thought highly enough of you to actually do something about it!
Early raise? Why wait? Also, in a company with even a few employees ( > 10 ), your increase will truely not have that much of a negative impact when following guidelines.
Doubtful. Unless you are in a low-skill position, why would they bother with a counteroffer? They've probably invested time and money into making you a better employee through training and the like. They don't want to start from scratch, that would be far more costly.
Of course they will! They would have at the new job, too! It's part being in the work force. Part of your responsibility is to let your employer know your concerns. Without change, there will be stagnation.
Statistics sited of course. =/ I can see this being true, as the folks who are part of the study weren't happy where they were to begin with - the reason for that are probably varied, going beyond simple dissatisfaction with compensation.
If you are making significantly more than them now to start with, I can see things going sour. But, if after the counteroffer acceptance you are end up making about the same as the rest of your peers, it might actually improve, and earn more respect!
Who said anything about threats? In larger organizations, radical alterations in pay need extreme justification - where even Montgomery Scott-like performance (miracle worker) doesn't cut it to upper management.
YMMV, but if monetary compensation was the only issue, I can't find a reason not to accept a counteroffer. The reasons not to accept just seemed like a lot of FUD to me.
-Ducky
I wasn't too keen on this text, either. Early on he states how procedural programming differs in that functions are used for their side effects where as functional programming uses functions for the values returned. Then he turns around does a print inside of a map block - using functional constructs to do side-effects? bleh.
I much prefer the approach taken in Randal Schwartz and Joseph Hall's Effective Perl Programming... which has a wonderful "idiomatic perl" chapter, I must add =)
-Ducky
The old sed/awk/sh scripts? They're stuck behind a firewall of a former employer. =) The single perl script replacement is much cleaner but currently runs only under linux (doing some ioctl stuff that uses hardcoded numbers. I know... bad Ducky). So, I'm hesitant to just post the beastie.
Allow me to clean up the file a tad. =) Check back later this week and I'll post it somewhere... probably on at the above url.
-Ducky
Somewhat akin to converting your gifs to jpeg, I suppose. =) Both are lossy, the former being lossy in the color depth while the latter is lossy on the image pattern. The result: Yick. But good enough for most people.
Though thinking about it... they both get to their results in similar ways (hence Fraunhofer's suit against Xiph). So I'm curious as to what the audio artifacts left over from such a conversion would be. My guess is... good enough for most people who will be listening to them via 2" computer speakers anyway.
Since I'm at work it's an experiment that I'll just have to wait to listen to in full clarity. =)
-Ducky
As a matter of fact, mp3 is a compression scheme for wav format. So it _must_ be converted from wav. Any cd ripper that skips that probably does it as an illusion. For example: rips a 32k buffer, converts to wav while in memory and then to mp3 without saving the entire song as a wav on disk first.
Actually, the mp3 format has nothing to do with wav format. As long as you have an audio stream to compress, you can encode it in mpeg2-layer3.
I used to maintain a Solaris machine with a number of odd sized external disks attached forming a 32gig array that housed all our mp3s on it. Every mp3 was encoded in-house, nothing from napster or what have you. I wrote a handfull of scripts to that pulled all the audio off of a cdrom, dumped them to a shared directory where a farm of Ultra-I and Ultra-II's encoded them to mp3. But that first step entailed ripping to .au because these were Sun machines after all! =P It wasn't until we got an updated ripper that would do wav and a bunch of win folk asking if they could contribute audio that I changed the system to use wav.
What'd we do with all those mp3s? Uh, listen to them. =) They also made a good base of large data when stress/performance testing new hardware!
From what I'm told, the machine is still there, serving away music to those who put music in (the rule I put forth - can't pull from the "archive" unless you've "archived" something to begin with).
And to be a little more on-topic: I've repeated the above process at home earlier this year... with a few minor changes. Replaced the handful of sh/awk/sed scripts with 1 all-purpose, all-powerful, yet rules-with-a-benevolent-hand perl script, and it now finishes up with ogg vorbis instead of mp3.
Why? Because Sonique supports it! I use Sonique because it handles audio streams better (as one song is almost done it starts buffering the next - a must for electronica mix compilations). MXAudio does the continual buffering thing, too, but since I'm stuck with a windows desktop (it's the games, man!), Sonique's what I'm gonna use.
-Ducky
We've got a beta of the RLX Razor at my work. For a managed services company, this thing is sweet!
For that first slot "control tower" one can do all sorts of nifty things with the other blades from power cycling to bios settings... which inclines me to want to have that first blade not be generally accessable to the outside world. This reduces your available work horses to 23 per 3U density. That's still a rackspace bargain, though!
The hard drives may be a point of contention for some people, but the way I envision these is to boot them via net and have your web cluster get data from network attached storage rather than local. This way you may boot these diskless and reduce the power consumption by about half! A fully populated chassis will then suck less than 200 watts.
All in all, a very tasty product. Can't wait to throw these in our colos =)
Yes, the main benefit of running an Exchange shop is the integration of calendaring and messaging.
Check out www.cst.ca
There is hope for alternatives, though! While not a free solution, Corporate Time by Corporate Software and Technologies is a pretty good calendaring product that has client and server products for NT, Solaris, and Linux.
But they've got an Outlook connector where you specify an IMAP server and a CST Calendaring server and together appear to outlook as one Exchange server. Pretty nifty. Reliability and you keep the MS crowd in check.
Where I work, we tried this connector when it was version 1.0 and while it worked, it had issues. CST is now at version 2.0.3 but we haven't tested this version because we haven't upgraded our CST server to the latest. So I can't tell you how well that version works.
Hope this helps!
-Ducky
This isn't the first time we've heard of hardware being just shy of unusable (I'd actually say this isn't usable). Anyone remember what Intel was saying about the original Pentium before its release? Eventually, Intel figured out how to engineer it to not need to liquid cooling.
Give it a few months and it'll fit in standard (for intel, anyway) hardware, ready for the masses. Otherwise it just won't sell enough to justify the cost of development.
-Ducky
http://duckpond.org
Of course this is assuming they *did* agree to the EULA or even bought the product in the first place! :>
-Ducky
http://duckpond.org
True. Very obviously the author comes from a Mac-centric background. And like everyone else says, nothing bad about that, but I just have to disagree with his view that everything that came with your computer is the Operating System.
He really blurs the definition of app and OS. I've always believed that the OS is what made your system work right. You remove Netscape - does your system stop working? Hmmm... Not really. But what if you were to remove grep? Ok, now things really stop working right. Things are built on grep - it's expected to be there. It's part of the OS.
When browsers and media streamers/players stop having logos afixed to them, are not their own window, and applications rely on them to function, then I'll consider them part of the Operating System. Until then, It's just an app. Something that, while nice to have bundled, isn't really part of the OS.
Apple is making a unique OS using a BSD kernel. That's great! The unix kernel (and philosophy, really) has a strong, proven history of reliability, scalability, and extendability. But what David Everly has to say about it makes him sound as if he's had a short and sheltered time behind only his Macintosh.
-Ducky
http://duckpond.org