I've heard some good things about halyfax and mgetty+sendfax and respond, but the one thing that neither of them seems to support is DID routing. Where I work, I'd love to use a linux fax server, but we had to go with something else (in our case Optus FacSys, which generally works, but occasionaly really sucks) because we wanted to do DID fax routing with 100+ users. There was one package that I saw that would not only do DID routing, but would OCR faxes, look for a To: field and route based on the name in that field. Does anyone know if there is a linux product that deals with DID's, or if any work is being done on programming drivers for DID boards (the only ones I know about are Brooktrout and Dialogic Gammalink boards)?
I went with a couple of friends. What sums it up to me was that once we got out we went directly to the video store and rented "Psycho" to calm us down some.:) The other thing I noticed about it, everyone I went with said they got nauseous during the movie. I think the reason I didn't was because I play quake with freelook on.
Very good point. There are some other things that I've noticed about windows and unix programs though. Just as a note, I'm not a programmer myself. I'm basically a system admin, but I do occasionaly write things, mostly little scripts in perl, bash, tcl/tk, or when I'm doing stuff on the NT side of things, cmd. I can write "hello world" in a few other things, but I certainly don't claim to know them.
Unix programs tend to be made so that they can be used as a part of a greater whole. Windows programs tend to assume that a person is going to be interacting with them. If I ask someone about a unix program, and how to use it, I get a list of command line switches which offer all the functionality of the program. When I ask about a windows program, I get "well, first right click on...." Which one of these am I going to put in a script? Which one will run unattended in the middle of the night while I'm happily at home asleep?
I used to think that I really liked linux, and really didn't like windows and dos. Well, I was right, but not as much as I thought. What I really didn't like was the way programmers wrote programs for windows/dos. Not that they couldn't have written them in a better way, but there seems to be an assumption started by MS, that has flowed to the people who program for MS platforms, that a required resource for any program is a user sitting in front of it.
even some programs that do have some scriptability miss by just a hair. If I want a list of users on a linux box, it's easy. On my NT boxen, it's also simple. the "net user" command will output all the users. Formatted in three columns. That's bad enough, but then they put three lines of header and a trailer that says "The command completed successfully". What a pain to massage that to the point that I can put it into a script.
The basic difference seems to be trust.
Unix and unix programs seem to trust the user. If you type in rm -rf/, rm assumes that that's really what you wanted to do, and does it assuming that you know what you're doing. And unix users trust their machines to do things while they aren't watching over them. How many unix users know how to use cron, compared to how many NT users know how to use at? This trust between the users and the programs seems to be a common theme among unix applications.
windows and windows programs don't trust the user. It seems like almost everything you do, it's asking you if that's what you really wanted to do. Which becomes self-defeating, as users see it so much that they stop reading it and click the default button no matter what it says. And the users don't trust the programs. I've seen very few, except for a couple of server apps and backup programs, that are capable of being run in any sort of unattended mode.
In short, I'm worried about windows programmers coming into the unix world. I think many of them will create bad applications. Many of them will create good applications. Most of them will create applications which make my life harder. But I'm not all that worried, because there are already a lot of good unix programs out there, and there are already a lot of good unix programmers out there. I'd be worried if we were going to lose those, but I don't think we will.
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I've heard some good things about halyfax and mgetty+sendfax and respond, but the one thing that neither of them seems to support is DID routing. Where I work, I'd love to use a linux fax server, but we had to go with something else (in our case Optus FacSys, which generally works, but occasionaly really sucks) because we wanted to do DID fax routing with 100+ users. There was one package that I saw that would not only do DID routing, but would OCR faxes, look for a To: field and route based on the name in that field. Does anyone know if there is a linux product that deals with DID's, or if any work is being done on programming drivers for DID boards (the only ones I know about are Brooktrout and Dialogic Gammalink boards)?
I went with a couple of friends. What sums it up to me was that once we got out we went directly to the video store and rented "Psycho" to calm us down some. :) The other thing I noticed about it, everyone I went with said they got nauseous during the movie. I think the reason I didn't was because I play quake with freelook on.
Very good point. There are some other things that I've noticed about windows and unix programs though. Just as a note, I'm not a programmer myself. I'm basically a system admin, but I do occasionaly write things, mostly little scripts in perl, bash, tcl/tk, or when I'm doing stuff on the NT side of things, cmd. I can write "hello world" in a few other things, but I certainly don't claim to know them.
/, rm assumes that that's really what you wanted to do, and does it assuming that you know what you're doing. And unix users trust their machines to do things while they aren't watching over them. How many unix users know how to use cron, compared to how many NT users know how to use at? This trust between the users and the programs seems to be a common theme among unix applications.
Unix programs tend to be made so that they can be used as a part of a greater whole. Windows programs tend to assume that a person is going to be interacting with them. If I ask someone about a unix program, and how to use it, I get a list of command line switches which offer all the functionality of the program. When I ask about a windows program, I get "well, first right click on...." Which one of these am I going to put in a script? Which one will run unattended in the middle of the night while I'm happily at home asleep?
I used to think that I really liked linux, and really didn't like windows and dos. Well, I was right, but not as much as I thought. What I really didn't like was the way programmers wrote programs for windows/dos. Not that they couldn't have written them in a better way, but there seems to be an assumption started by MS, that has flowed to the people who program for MS platforms, that a required resource for any program is a user sitting in front of it.
even some programs that do have some scriptability miss by just a hair. If I want a list of users on a linux box, it's easy. On my NT boxen, it's also simple. the "net user" command will output all the users. Formatted in three columns. That's bad enough, but then they put three lines of header and a trailer that says "The command completed successfully". What a pain to massage that to the point that I can put it into a script.
The basic difference seems to be trust.
Unix and unix programs seem to trust the user. If you type in rm -rf
windows and windows programs don't trust the user. It seems like almost everything you do, it's asking you if that's what you really wanted to do. Which becomes self-defeating, as users see it so much that they stop reading it and click the default button no matter what it says. And the users don't trust the programs. I've seen very few, except for a couple of server apps and backup programs, that are capable of being run in any sort of unattended mode.
In short, I'm worried about windows programmers coming into the unix world. I think many of them will create bad applications. Many of them will create good applications. Most of them will create applications which make my life harder. But I'm not all that worried, because there are already a lot of good unix programs out there, and there are already a lot of good unix programmers out there. I'd be worried if we were going to lose those, but I don't think we will.