When we did our disaster recovery and business continuity plans, we discovered that along with our financial data (we are a financials company) email was the only app that we actually HAD to have. Along with phones and fax, email is an absolute necessity for most forms of business today. Hell, we just got an employee put in jail for trying to sell our contact list (over 100,000 clients). It's that important.
On the the questions of authentication, encryption, and attachments. Uh, Exchange, Exchange, Exchange.
There are three huge problems with linux in business as a workstation and as an infrastructure base. One, lack of a coherent and consistant interface throughout all apps and the OS. Novell is getting this one going. I think the KDE4 project is starting to address this, too. Two, most drivers need to get the hell out of the kernel. It's time for Linus to wake up to the fact his baby is becoming a commercial beast and that companies that invest billions into their software IP are never ever going to open it up for any reason. There is no longer any compelling technical reason to keep all the drivers as kernel modules anymore. Just look at OS X. They got it right on this one (mostly). Three, the big one for busines, a lack of enterprise thinking towards infrastructure. Yes, you can do single sign on (painfully). Yes, authentication/authorization is robust and do have some interoperability. And, yes, there is LDAP, X400, DAP, etc. available for a directory structure. The problem is that no one entity has brought it all together in a single package that works from the desktop to the router to NOC to the SAN to, well, you get the picture. Novell has superb infrastructure products although lacking at the desktop integration level. IBM has some really great stuff at the big iron level. Microsoft has this nailed. It is very nearly perfect with the 2003 products. No, it's not the end all be all, but they are definitely writing the book on this one.
For rolling out linux/bsd at home, really the only thing that is left to do is roll a good distro (Ubuntu, Sun JD, Novell/SuSe) and fix the driver model. Drivers really are the biggest hurdle. I would like a consistant UI, but that is something that will probably come from competition and not a mandate. I can't believe I am excited about a KDE project (KDE4).
Well, FAB 36 is open and doing preliminary production runs on 300mm wafers at 65nm. It is supposed to be at 13000 wafers per month by 1Q 06 (or sooner) and 20000 wafers per month by 4Q 06. FAB is supposedly being retasked to do 300mm at 90nm and chipsets for both AMD and its partners.
Those quantities should get AMD to about 25% of the worlwide supply of x86. They are at 19% right now for comparisons sake.
Yes, the last election was ugly, but the whole "get behind the President" mentality is core to how leadership works in the US. The government here gets its power and ability to function from one and only one idea: an implicit mandate from the citizenry. Get about 52 million citizens together to agree that this government has got to go and BOOM, just like that...it's gone. Without a clear mandate, the entire idea of what the US is starts to fall apart. So yeah, it is important to get behind the President quickly and decisively.
I hate the fact I have to defend the last election. I was a campaigner for Dean. I hate this current asshat.
I know it has been a while since I was in a classroom, but the last time I was a student it was a part of the learning process to get destroyed by a prof in front of everyone at least once. It's nothing compared to what a CIO or other exec can and will do to you on a daily basis.
The Davy was a recoilless rifle that fired 1 kiloton nukes and was developed years ago. Yes, there are 155mm nuclear rounds (some are rocket propelled and laser guided) in addition to VX, blister, mine deploying, etc. Do not be surprised at the disgusting genius of weapons designers. There exist some truly horrific means of mass murder and nuclear munitions is just one. Personally nukes don't scare me as much any more. They are fairly easy to track, difficult to build and deliver and suffer from scalibility and engineering issues to make the big ones. There is also a certain stigma attached to them.
Biological weapons scare the living shit out of me. They are difficult to develop, but can be easily mass produced and delivered. They kill indescriminately and can be made self sustaining. What is worse is that to defeat them, you have to devlopment them in the first place (this is the conundrum of any weapons research).
Apples business was less than 2% of IBMs output for their Power chips. It has a long future ahead of it and is doing fine...better now that they do not have to satisfy Apple's design targets.
As for the sordid history of PA-RISC and Alpha. Well, HP and Intel got into an agreement to develop Itanium. HP did much of the work (billions went into Itanium development and marketing) and when it came time they switched from PA-RISC to Itanium. Also, when HP and Compaq merged, HP killed Alpha for obvious reasons (it kicked Itaniums ass).
Sparc is still going with Fujitsu being Suns partner.
uh...you mean like the entire Cray XT3 line that scales from 1 to over 30,000 processors. Granted this is a pseudo cluster but that is generally what all big iron is now-a-days.
Actually hurricanes and flooding were common in the Netherlands until the late 1500's when abbeys started building the dykes. A big storm submerged several areas for decades in 1530. The worst storm and flood was in 1952 when 1836 people drowned. They started to completely rebuild the dykes and the first piece was finished in 1986...yes it took that long. Their dyke system is estimated to have cost 1.5 trillion in todays US dollars over the last 500 or so years. Remember though that their dykes protect a huges chunk of their country, not just one city.
$500 Laptops...Apples start at $999 but there are several x86 laptops at or around $500. I like Apple plenty (I used to work for them), but the zealotry has got to stop.
When they levies were built it caused siltation to build up in the Gulf instead of where it is supposed to, the banks of the Miss. They really have been asking for it. This type of development was done solely for the purposes of commercial development. FEMA forced thousands of people to move away from other parts of the Miss after multiple floods. They should do it again. Get used to this people. We are at the beginning of a 27 - 50 year cycle. Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, etc. are all going to get smacked by at least 6 category 3 or above storms per year for decades. This cycle has happened several times before and we knew it was coming.
Remember Creative is the company that sued their competition into oblivion and then purchased their assest from the bankruptcy court. OBTW, they LOST the suit but still managed to bankrupt Aureal. Granted, Apple has a hell of a lot more money, but good luck going after one of the darlings of Singapore.
Actually, there's already a push to outsource radiology (radiologists are MDs) and other analytical services. Many hospitals outsource lab work. It is always better to have somebody on site, but cost controls will always seek the bottom...usually to the detriment of the client. I am all for open and competitive markets, but some things need protections. That's really the reason why there is licensing. To allow competition without compromising quality too much as would happen with complete deregulation.
If its a CISSP or CCIE, then yeah, it matters. SS7 and SANS are pretty good, too. Personally, I am praying for the day the IT pros have to take state licensing exams like architects, medical personnel, lawyers, engineers. You notice their industries are not being outsourced...wink, wink.
The P4M is pretty much gone. Everything shifted to the Pentium-M a while ago with Apple looking to the the Merom for their Intel generation computers. The Merom is dual core @ 35W max with 1-2W nominal @ 65nm. I'm not a rah-rah Intel kind of guy (I own stock in AMD), but they really got something with this next line if they can deliver on their 65nm process.
Hey now, we are building a giant new convention center due in '09. GenCon is scheduled for '06 in Indy, but they don't have it listed for '07 yet. Next time everyone comes to town, I'll have to put up a list of places to go. If all you guys saw was the Ram, then you missed the entire Warehouse district right down the street where all the bars and clubs are, not to mention Broad Ripple in midtown where all the college age people are. We enjoy you guys, so keep coming back.
"Now, calendaring and conflict resolution over cellphone- I'm not exactly sure what this is about, perhaps you can reply and explain."
Sure. This is just a small example of something that happens many times a day. Someone requests a meeting using specific resources (projectors, laptops, the room, video teleconferencing, etc.) with specific people (could be an established group in the company,eg. sales) at a time and place. All of those pieces are in the Exchange system and when a request is made, all conflicts (that is, if anyone else has scheduled the any of the same people or resources) are brought up and can be resolved. It isn't easy and it took a lot of planning for it all to get in there and it isn't automatic, but the secretaries lives are much easier and staff take it for granted that it "just works" now and get on with making the company money...which is kinda the point. It's all just logistics and most of the costs of doing any kind of business are in getting resources to work together so it's a big deal.
You can use pre-existing LDAP directories with Exchange, too (so can any decent mail server), but it's all the integration of the Active Directory infrastructure that is the big deal. You CAN do that with LDAP, but I hope you have a very large staff of very talented programmers to do it and maintane it. AD is the basis for single sign-on, identity management, policy management, etc. I have yet to see anything else out side of products costing a heck of a lot more that can handle the scale that AD does...that's probably MS's biggest problem...scaleability.
If you don't have a decent amount of corporate experience, a lot of what Exchange is for may seem alien or useless, but I would have to say along with our document management system it is the core of IT infrastructure for where I work (a multibillion dollar, multinational financial services company). Simply, Exchange provides for email service in all its forms (pop, mapi, imap), news server, webmail backend/front end (along with IIS), public folders, collaborative contacts, mails, document checking, etc., global contacts, shared calendering, shared tasks, etc.
What makes it so special is that it is tightly integrated with MS Office (stuff like round robin document collaboration needs Exchange to work well...it's nifty) and Active Directory integration for management, contacts, policies, etc.
There are a lot of things to get on Microsoft about, but Exchange (at least from version 2000 on) is mostly a thing of beauty. I wish my users only needed straight email, but they need to be able to things like schedule a meeting on the fly from their cell which notifys all the attending, their secretaries, etc. wo can all weigh in and do conflict resolution and get a meeting time set all while the principle in the field is talking to a client in seconds. I haven't mentioned how it all plugs into our document management system and the archiving necessary for NASD, SEC, and IRS compliance that I haven't seen from any other vendor.
If all you need is mail, you'd be insane to go the Exchange route, but if you are already building a Windows infrastructure, you'd be just as insane NOT to have Exchange.
Without full AD integration it's still kind of pointless. Not to mention the hundreds (thousands?) of programs that need Exchange. The closest I have worked with administratively is Domino and that was an admins nightmare. I run Exchange 2000 servers (again) and I tell ya, other than the dollar cost, these things are great.
Microsoft has had deals for years with IU, IUPUI, Purdue, Ball State, et al. for their products. Basically, you get all their products in a few different packs for $5 each. Everyone I know in Indianapolis got their XP from an IUPUI student. Viral marketing at its finest...heh.
Slashdot Mirror
When we did our disaster recovery and business continuity plans, we discovered that along with our financial data (we are a financials company) email was the only app that we actually HAD to have. Along with phones and fax, email is an absolute necessity for most forms of business today. Hell, we just got an employee put in jail for trying to sell our contact list (over 100,000 clients). It's that important.
On the the questions of authentication, encryption, and attachments. Uh, Exchange, Exchange, Exchange.
There are three huge problems with linux in business as a workstation and as an infrastructure base. One, lack of a coherent and consistant interface throughout all apps and the OS. Novell is getting this one going. I think the KDE4 project is starting to address this, too. Two, most drivers need to get the hell out of the kernel. It's time for Linus to wake up to the fact his baby is becoming a commercial beast and that companies that invest billions into their software IP are never ever going to open it up for any reason. There is no longer any compelling technical reason to keep all the drivers as kernel modules anymore. Just look at OS X. They got it right on this one (mostly). Three, the big one for busines, a lack of enterprise thinking towards infrastructure. Yes, you can do single sign on (painfully). Yes, authentication/authorization is robust and do have some interoperability. And, yes, there is LDAP, X400, DAP, etc. available for a directory structure. The problem is that no one entity has brought it all together in a single package that works from the desktop to the router to NOC to the SAN to, well, you get the picture. Novell has superb infrastructure products although lacking at the desktop integration level. IBM has some really great stuff at the big iron level. Microsoft has this nailed. It is very nearly perfect with the 2003 products. No, it's not the end all be all, but they are definitely writing the book on this one.
For rolling out linux/bsd at home, really the only thing that is left to do is roll a good distro (Ubuntu, Sun JD, Novell/SuSe) and fix the driver model. Drivers really are the biggest hurdle. I would like a consistant UI, but that is something that will probably come from competition and not a mandate. I can't believe I am excited about a KDE project (KDE4).
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product_listing.gsp ?cat=231791&path=0%3A3944%3A3951%3A41937%3A231785% 3A231791
There ya go. Walmart sells clean PCs. They also are the main distributor of Linspire machines.
Well, FAB 36 is open and doing preliminary production runs on 300mm wafers at 65nm. It is supposed to be at 13000 wafers per month by 1Q 06 (or sooner) and 20000 wafers per month by 4Q 06. FAB is supposedly being retasked to do 300mm at 90nm and chipsets for both AMD and its partners.
Those quantities should get AMD to about 25% of the worlwide supply of x86. They are at 19% right now for comparisons sake.
Yes, the last election was ugly, but the whole "get behind the President" mentality is core to how leadership works in the US. The government here gets its power and ability to function from one and only one idea: an implicit mandate from the citizenry. Get about 52 million citizens together to agree that this government has got to go and BOOM, just like that...it's gone. Without a clear mandate, the entire idea of what the US is starts to fall apart. So yeah, it is important to get behind the President quickly and decisively.
I hate the fact I have to defend the last election. I was a campaigner for Dean. I hate this current asshat.
I think I would be more than happy to splice directly into the display circuits of an LCD to get around this. Now where's my soldering iron?
I know it has been a while since I was in a classroom, but the last time I was a student it was a part of the learning process to get destroyed by a prof in front of everyone at least once. It's nothing compared to what a CIO or other exec can and will do to you on a daily basis.
When did students become such wussys?
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Davy-Croc kett-(nuclear-device)
The Davy was a recoilless rifle that fired 1 kiloton nukes and was developed years ago. Yes, there are 155mm nuclear rounds (some are rocket propelled and laser guided) in addition to VX, blister, mine deploying, etc. Do not be surprised at the disgusting genius of weapons designers. There exist some truly horrific means of mass murder and nuclear munitions is just one. Personally nukes don't scare me as much any more. They are fairly easy to track, difficult to build and deliver and suffer from scalibility and engineering issues to make the big ones. There is also a certain stigma attached to them.
Biological weapons scare the living shit out of me. They are difficult to develop, but can be easily mass produced and delivered. They kill indescriminately and can be made self sustaining. What is worse is that to defeat them, you have to devlopment them in the first place (this is the conundrum of any weapons research).
Let's all just try to get along, okay?
Apples business was less than 2% of IBMs output for their Power chips. It has a long future ahead of it and is doing fine...better now that they do not have to satisfy Apple's design targets.
As for the sordid history of PA-RISC and Alpha. Well, HP and Intel got into an agreement to develop Itanium. HP did much of the work (billions went into Itanium development and marketing) and when it came time they switched from PA-RISC to Itanium. Also, when HP and Compaq merged, HP killed Alpha for obvious reasons (it kicked Itaniums ass).
Sparc is still going with Fujitsu being Suns partner.
uh...you mean like the entire Cray XT3 line that scales from 1 to over 30,000 processors. Granted this is a pseudo cluster but that is generally what all big iron is now-a-days.
5 _cray.html
http://www.psc.edu/publicinfo/news/2004/2004-10-2
Actually hurricanes and flooding were common in the Netherlands until the late 1500's when abbeys started building the dykes. A big storm submerged several areas for decades in 1530. The worst storm and flood was in 1952 when 1836 people drowned. They started to completely rebuild the dykes and the first piece was finished in 1986...yes it took that long. Their dyke system is estimated to have cost 1.5 trillion in todays US dollars over the last 500 or so years. Remember though that their dykes protect a huges chunk of their country, not just one city.
April Fools?
Caveat Emptor
o ductivity-Suite/3000-2144_4-10430237.html
http://www.download.com/Foxie-Privacy-Security-Pr
$500 mini PC (again I ask...why?)...it's not out yet...next month I guess. There is also a strong possibility that this will be the x86 Mac Mini base.
$500 Laptops...Apples start at $999 but there are several x86 laptops at or around $500. I like Apple plenty (I used to work for them), but the zealotry has got to stop.
When they levies were built it caused siltation to build up in the Gulf instead of where it is supposed to, the banks of the Miss. They really have been asking for it. This type of development was done solely for the purposes of commercial development. FEMA forced thousands of people to move away from other parts of the Miss after multiple floods. They should do it again. Get used to this people. We are at the beginning of a 27 - 50 year cycle. Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, etc. are all going to get smacked by at least 6 category 3 or above storms per year for decades. This cycle has happened several times before and we knew it was coming.
Remember Creative is the company that sued their competition into oblivion and then purchased their assest from the bankruptcy court. OBTW, they LOST the suit but still managed to bankrupt Aureal. Granted, Apple has a hell of a lot more money, but good luck going after one of the darlings of Singapore.
Actually, there's already a push to outsource radiology (radiologists are MDs) and other analytical services. Many hospitals outsource lab work. It is always better to have somebody on site, but cost controls will always seek the bottom...usually to the detriment of the client. I am all for open and competitive markets, but some things need protections. That's really the reason why there is licensing. To allow competition without compromising quality too much as would happen with complete deregulation.
If its a CISSP or CCIE, then yeah, it matters. SS7 and SANS are pretty good, too. Personally, I am praying for the day the IT pros have to take state licensing exams like architects, medical personnel, lawyers, engineers. You notice their industries are not being outsourced...wink, wink.
The P4M is pretty much gone. Everything shifted to the Pentium-M a while ago with Apple looking to the the Merom for their Intel generation computers. The Merom is dual core @ 35W max with 1-2W nominal @ 65nm. I'm not a rah-rah Intel kind of guy (I own stock in AMD), but they really got something with this next line if they can deliver on their 65nm process.
Hey now, we are building a giant new convention center due in '09. GenCon is scheduled for '06 in Indy, but they don't have it listed for '07 yet. Next time everyone comes to town, I'll have to put up a list of places to go. If all you guys saw was the Ram, then you missed the entire Warehouse district right down the street where all the bars and clubs are, not to mention Broad Ripple in midtown where all the college age people are. We enjoy you guys, so keep coming back.
"Now, calendaring and conflict resolution over cellphone- I'm not exactly sure what this is about, perhaps you can reply and explain."
Sure. This is just a small example of something that happens many times a day. Someone requests a meeting using specific resources (projectors, laptops, the room, video teleconferencing, etc.) with specific people (could be an established group in the company,eg. sales) at a time and place. All of those pieces are in the Exchange system and when a request is made, all conflicts (that is, if anyone else has scheduled the any of the same people or resources) are brought up and can be resolved. It isn't easy and it took a lot of planning for it all to get in there and it isn't automatic, but the secretaries lives are much easier and staff take it for granted that it "just works" now and get on with making the company money...which is kinda the point. It's all just logistics and most of the costs of doing any kind of business are in getting resources to work together so it's a big deal.
You can use pre-existing LDAP directories with Exchange, too (so can any decent mail server), but it's all the integration of the Active Directory infrastructure that is the big deal. You CAN do that with LDAP, but I hope you have a very large staff of very talented programmers to do it and maintane it. AD is the basis for single sign-on, identity management, policy management, etc. I have yet to see anything else out side of products costing a heck of a lot more that can handle the scale that AD does...that's probably MS's biggest problem...scaleability.
If you don't have a decent amount of corporate experience, a lot of what Exchange is for may seem alien or useless, but I would have to say along with our document management system it is the core of IT infrastructure for where I work (a multibillion dollar, multinational financial services company). Simply, Exchange provides for email service in all its forms (pop, mapi, imap), news server, webmail backend/front end (along with IIS), public folders, collaborative contacts, mails, document checking, etc., global contacts, shared calendering, shared tasks, etc.
What makes it so special is that it is tightly integrated with MS Office (stuff like round robin document collaboration needs Exchange to work well...it's nifty) and Active Directory integration for management, contacts, policies, etc.
There are a lot of things to get on Microsoft about, but Exchange (at least from version 2000 on) is mostly a thing of beauty. I wish my users only needed straight email, but they need to be able to things like schedule a meeting on the fly from their cell which notifys all the attending, their secretaries, etc. wo can all weigh in and do conflict resolution and get a meeting time set all while the principle in the field is talking to a client in seconds. I haven't mentioned how it all plugs into our document management system and the archiving necessary for NASD, SEC, and IRS compliance that I haven't seen from any other vendor.
If all you need is mail, you'd be insane to go the Exchange route, but if you are already building a Windows infrastructure, you'd be just as insane NOT to have Exchange.
Without full AD integration it's still kind of pointless. Not to mention the hundreds (thousands?) of programs that need Exchange. The closest I have worked with administratively is Domino and that was an admins nightmare. I run Exchange 2000 servers (again) and I tell ya, other than the dollar cost, these things are great.
The X2 3800+ has been out for weeks and is currently at $400. It should be down to $300 by year end or less.
Microsoft has had deals for years with IU, IUPUI, Purdue, Ball State, et al. for their products. Basically, you get all their products in a few different packs for $5 each. Everyone I know in Indianapolis got their XP from an IUPUI student. Viral marketing at its finest...heh.