Also, bitching because there's not an OSS platform that doesn't work with Windows proprietary solution doesn't mean that there's a problem with OSS.
No. I am just disappointed that there is no OSS platform that is suitable, because I really want there to be.
I would love for all the code required to implement Enterprise services to be open source, and for them to be scalable, proven, robust, self-maintaining, and not requiring ad-hoc script work and daily attention from highly experienced unix engineers.
I'm not bitching that there's not a satisfactory OSS platform for Enterprise mail, and that the OSS hypervisor's available are not the most cost-effective choices: I am just explaining that is the world we live in, that we are to accept, that causes the decision, and the inherent characteristics of what is available right now, and what Enterprise users demand That make no OSS solution the right choice in some cases.
Because the OSS options are missing the last 20% of the characteristics Enterprises require,
even though the other 80% is there.
Think of it this way: how much unused memory is going to waste in a server that only hosts one instance of something?
The answer is a whole lot, because application owners and novice sysadmins very frequently overestimate or intentionally overstate memory and CPU requirements, thinking more is always better.
So rightsizing, requiring justification for resource allocation, and time spent tuning and studying possible $/Compute improvements are important parts of capacity management.
But page sharing, overcommitment, ballooning, and swapping, as implemented are an extreme help.
"Dynamic memory" technologies such as that in Xen / Hyper-V to a much more limited degree.
since we're talking about VMs, when you have several instances running on your hardware, then yes, all those stray gigabytes do add up.
The Windows GUI is megabytes, not gigabytes, and these memory pages are transparently shared between VMs running on the same host, so the memory for GUI code in memory is deduplicated and "used once" for the benefit lots of VMs it's not that bad.
Most of the memory waste is due to the.NET framework, which leverages Garbage-collection based memory management for both server side and client side applications.
Java has a very similar issue with its Garbage-collected heap.
There is a GB or so of memory per server needed for filesystem cache, a small amount of memory required for server applications, for SQL servers SQL Engine cache memory, and then, for all kinds of clients and servers: many gigabytes for.NET or Java heaps.
Futhermore, the.NET or Java garbage collected heaps do not overcommit as well as "OS GUI memory" or resident Application code memory, because the Cache memory represents data that is specific to a workload, there are fewer memory pages in common.
The bulk of the memory usage is the result of inefficient application coding, or the use of inefficient Software development frameworks such as.NET, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, etc... instead of C++ or Objective C, Not an inefficient operating system.
So spamassassin uses a lot of CPU? Have you seen the resources an exchange DAG requires?
Yes. I have, and Spamassassin/Amavis is orders of magnitude more expensive CPU-wise.
This is probably due to the very massive amount of spam being attempted, and the inability of RBLs and tools such as DCC and Vipul's razor to effectively divert them, before Spamassassin starts chugging away at massive concurrency.
All the more bothersome, when some domains want "wildcard forwarding rules", so brute-force spam attempts at a domain fire off hundreds of messages.
If by enterprise grade, you mean "good enough for an ISP to use", then open source does just fine with a bit of tweaking and fine tuning.
No. I mean good enough to satisfy Enterprise users, and managers of Enterprises, such that they are satisfied of the features, performance, capacity, availability guarantees, and user experience that they have no benefit to running their own mail server.
This by the way includes rapid failover capabilities of all mail-related operation, load balancing, spam filtering, and prevention of "misbehaving users or devices" from adversely effecting server operations -- (per user throttling).
There is Non-MS, Non-GUI technology that might provide many of the things.
But at the end of the day What the users want matters more.
If the end user is insistent on features that can only be provided by a GUI-based server solution,
then that is probably what they will be getting.
Well for starters, ditch Sendmail, use Exim, and then implement DRBD with linux HA
Not happening. Well-justified hate relationship developed with Exim over the years, due to MTA induced failure after failure on large shared hosting deployments, poor logging, and general lack of simple configurability -- I think perhaps the only Linux mail server software to suck more than Exim is QMail; they are pretty much at the same level.
Postfix, on the other hand is great.
DRBD with linux HA
The problem with DRBD with Linux HA; other than the fact that only a unix guru can maintain it and safely execute a disaster recovery (which 98% of the engineering staff are not qualified to do, and the portion that think they are qualified but are not are the most dangerous), is that DRBD doesn't meet acceptable standards of robustness, and requires manual attention in the event of a failover, and for failback: it's active/passive, and failover can really only be leveraged safely in the event of a catastrophe.
In other words: DRBD in its current form is only really suitable to be used as disaster recovery type system, not a host failure response type system.
In testing DRBD has proven to be unreliable in various failure modes, we would wind up with damage to data caused by DRBD itself, or operator error trying to get the failback to work like it's supposed to after a split-brain incident. Also, anything reliant on fencing by "killing" another server externally is not acceptably sane -- robust clustering systems utilize self-fencing nodes and provide additional methods of making quorum.
. If you are doing anything serious (or even moreso if you aren't), you generally don't have the RAM to waste on a bloated operating system that has to start up and maintain a GUI whether you are using it or not.
So there is a bit of this RAM used to provide GUI functionality. It's worthwhile, because it means some maintenance tasks to junior staff whose skills for picking up CLIs are more limited; on the other hand, they can still be trained to manage the server, using remote management tools of course.
There is practically no reason an administrator should be logging into the server and starting up a graphical console, since all administration tools can be installed on their workstation and used remotely.
Furthermore... in 2008, core install was introduced, which no longer includes a GUI for servers, and this is supported with SQL 2012
In Windows Server 2013; with some exceptions, the desktop experience is not required on servers, and generally, there will be no GUI.
Anyways... the success of a hypervisor should not be judged based on the perceived quality of the applications it has virtualized. It is not a more meaningful feat to run MySQL in a hypervisor than it is to run MS SQL in a hypervisor.
If anything.. with MySQL there are fewer sizing hints, AND the operational metrics provided by the database engine are much sparser than the detailed instrumentation that MS SQL provides -- with MS SQL, you get a heck of a lot better information about the performance and sizing.
At least you didn't go so far as to try to defend MS SQL Server. Who mentioned OSS? I didn't.
MS SQL server is the only backend supported by some applications, and some developers.
Personally, I would favor Oracle, but getting anyone to agree to pay for it, is a problem.
The fact of the matter is SQL server provides robust hitless failover clustering functionality. Postgres and MySQL do not provide this; although they are getting closer. They are worlds apart in terms of features, so it's not really fair to pick one or the other as a dilemma play, now is it?
Some application owners will demand MS SQL, and some will demand PostgreSQL, and that's OKAY.
Despite what you're learned working with exchange, not all MTAs have be the same giant POS as your "mailbox."
It's not MTA functionality. It is LDA functionality.
Sendmail writes a flat file... this results in some limitations
(1) The 'inbox' (mail spool file) cannot exceed 2GB.
(2) Performance with monster sized mailboxes (very large number of mail messages) is extremely poor.
(3) In regards to open source mail clients and IMAP clients; nothing exists that scales satisfactorially.
Definitely not Pine, not wu-pop3, Not Dovecot, not Cyrus, nothing.
Also, bitching because there's not an OSS platform that doesn't work with Windows proprietary solution doesn't mean that there's a problem with OSS.
The first rule is that it has to work.
Whatever the protocol is, it has to be compatible with mobile devices:
it has to provide modern Push e-mail for quick message delivery None of this "Poll the server every 5 minutes" crap.
And must provide some mechanism for enforcing security policy, however.
Neither POP3, nor IMAP, nor open source webmail applications are capable of the very bare essentials, sorry.
Sorry dude, this is slashdot. You lost your epeen contest with the op when you admitted your organisation uses exchange and sql server.
Would it be a good time to remind you that there aren't really any open source e-mail server products that are truly enterprise grade?
Sendmail doesn't work so well, when you are required to allow users to keep 20 Gigabytes in their mailbox, Share calendars / Tasks; access mail on their iPhone or Android device,
Spamassassin's spam filtering sucks even with Bayesian filtering (due to the low kill rate and high false positive rate, and high CPU cost of Spamassassin), and POP3/IMAP connectivity has security issues -- regarding possibility of corporate data being exfiltrated, and inability to remotely wipe mobile devices connecting with POP/IMAP, and ActiveSync is indeed up to the challenge?
Furthermore... i've yet to find an open source webmail platform that works with AD RMS -- Rights management services;
or Windows IRM ( Digital Information Rights Management ),
for encrypting sensitive corporate e-mail to ensure that it is not accidentally leaked outside the organization.
I went the opposite direction. We had been using exclusively Xenserver.... then at some point VMware released a free edition of ESXi; this is huge, and we tested it and found many advantages.
Eventually, we ditched Xenserver.
For the past few years we have been using VMware vSphere, and ditching Xenserver was one of the better choices we ever made.
3 years now. 20 Tb of files; 6 TB of Exchange mailboxes, 500 GB of SQL Server and MySQL data, >1000 transactions per second ,
16 to 1 consolidation ratio, with CPU, Memory, and Storage heavily oversubscribed; 280 VMs on 3 hosts, and no issues..
If it's dying; I am very heavily inclined to believe it's been mismanaged, sized improperly, misconfigured, or deployed incorrectly.
UCS is rock solid. If you have issues with it, get some consultants out to audit and verify the configuration and design of the infrastructure piece by piece
for adherence to best practices;
and attempt to fault isolate to where the issue is.
It's been a few years since Citrix started giving it away, free as in beer.
They gave away what used to be called XenServer Enterprise functionality for free.
What they don't include for free is:
"Hot" snapshot (Snapshot a virtual machine including its online RAM/Memory status) -- using VMware's hypervisor it's a free feature, Citrix makes you pay for it.
Cluster-wide robust per-target resource Storage and Network 'QoS' functionality
High availability. Not included with XenServer free as in beer; Citrix provides it as an addon.
Live migration of virtual machines between backend datastores (E.g. migration between SANs) without shutting the virtual machine down.
DRS-Like Workload balancing
True memory overcommitment -- you get a more limited technology, no transparent page sharing, no swapping via SSD RAM cache or page compression.
Role-based access control and AD integration for login to Xen servers
Resource pools with servers having different CPU versions. (Enhanced 'VMotion' Compatibility)
might be sensible to put them in cold climates rather than hot
People outside cold climates need servers geographically near too.... a datacenter that is far away will have high latency: so far noone's found a way around the speed of light limitation.
How about burying datacenters though... under the ground, where the temperature is more uniform, and, where you can also bury huge copper arrays, and put your servers in thermal contact with the thermally conductivearrays, to conduct the heat away....... using the earth itself as a heat sink?
I think maybe you need to learn more about it. Clever use of Excel can eliminate the need for a lot of expensive data processing computer software, and business software in particular, for many use cases.
I realize that the perceived coolness of Spreadsheets from a technology perspective is pretty low, because it's old stuff, and it is not very shiny.
If you can avoid 10 hours of programming by taking a couple hours to put together a spreadsheet that solves the problem without building a program, then you can be that much valuable to the business....
Those are not skills for this summer, those are skills for several summers ago.
Agreed...
Learn yourself some HTML6, haXe, Zimbu, Opa, F#, Rails 4.0 (released a few days ago), CoffeeScript, Google Dart, Ceylon, , Django 1.5, MS Excel, 'R', Dao,Hadoop, MongoDB, C# 4.0, Python 3,
Not. More seriously:
go buy some books on cooking, and learn that, or find some other hobby that fancies you -- maybe remotely leveraging skills from your technical job, maybe not. Learn some new hobbies -- have fun; concentrate on gratitude. Happy people are more successful. Don't worry about competing with other people for "knowledge of the latest fad".
Try to figure out which worldly subject is important, but that you know the least about -- read a book or two on it.
To have depth of knowledge; reading a book isn't good enough, you need lots of experience to learn -- if you don't do a lot of programming in the language, you won't learn it very well.
On the other hand, you can expand breadth of knowledge into other subjects such as History or Art, by reading, and doing a little ---- the weaker you are in a subject, the easier it is to learn a meaningful amount
The fewer subjects you are that weak in.... well, the more global intelligence you will have:)
Re:Anybody use Knoppix today? Great stuff at one t
on
Knoppix 7.2 Released
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· Score: 1
it's frequently updated, and the version included in the UBCD tends to be outdated often.
Yeah... for system maintenance purposes; I would generally prefer to have 3 CDs
Knoppix!
A BartPE "Windows" ultimate boot CD -- for running windows-based maintenance tools
Hiren's boot CD -- contains many tools - handy for doing some things that Knoppix cannot do so easily, such as Removing Host Protected Area to fully utilize all the space available on a hard disk.
Re:Anybody use Knoppix today? Great stuff at one t
on
Knoppix 7.2 Released
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· Score: 1
I don't know, but it's not necessary to choose between them. You can start with Knoppix.
If Knoppix cannot recognize a required device; try a few of the others.
In my experience, if Knoppix doesn't have the driver -- none of the common rescue disks have the driver, though.
Last I checked what was sorely lacking was a PVSCSI driver and a VMXNET3 driver For rescuing virtual machines with Knoppix.
Oh, FFS! Everyone knows you do not, under any circumstances, google Google! Don't do it, the internet itself will collapse in a recursive that will never reach its stop condition. You have been warned! Don't do it!
That used to be the case, but I heard Google's MapReduce engine finally came up with an answer;
google for google, and the answer will be 42
If they wasted less time on specific niche problems and symbolic integration tricks: students could probably learn all the Calculus they really need in 1 semester. And then use the 2nd semester for better maths perspective; E.g. number theory or topology.
I am calling BS, requiring Calculus for Statistics is like saying you need to be a mechanic to understand how to drive a car.
The university education is not about learning to drive the car.
If you just want to drive the car, go take a 120 minute class on Excel; you don't need the 3 hours a week for 4 months class that covers the internals (and driving) then.
The study of statistics, is not to understand mechanical procedures -- it's to understand the mathmatics that gives rise to them, and how the procedures can be derived.
There are elements of foundational statistics that do not require calculus,
but Algebra, and set theory is definitely a requirement even at the foundational level,
to be able to understand probabilities involving sets, and application of useful structures such as Bayes theorem'.
Then, there are elements of statistics that do require calculus to understand how / why they work, and derive the formula.
Of course, anyone can memorize and use the formula without understanding the derivation -- that's not statistics; that's "Driving the car" as you put it.
LMOL no Calculus is not fundamental to understanding Statistics.
You can achieve a limited understanding of statistics without calculus.
Calculus is used to derive certain equations used in statistics.
Computer scientists need to fully understand what they are doing, to make sure they are applying valid procedures; not just grab random equations and plug in numbers.
Probability & Statistics is the most appropriate math coursework for a non-STEM major. An understanding of statistics helps you in day-to-day life.
I do agree. Actually, people are exposed to "Statistics" a lot.
People need to understand Statistics and Economics to function in a democratic society.
There absolutely should be at least one class in these two fields that all college students are required to take.
Politicians love to use statistics to trick people and spread lies.
The news media is also in love with statistics.... rarely do they provide the information a statistician would want to see, to understand the statistical validity of the implied arguments.
The common person has a lack of understanding of statistics, and it's used against them on a daily basis to manipulate them; manipulate them into supporting ideas they would not support otherwise,
OR manipulating them into making a financially poor decision they would not make if they were able to understand statistics, and understand the political/economic/financial background.
class about math that involves limited actual problem-solving by the student (you have to have some, but it's ok to keep problems simple for the purpose of understanding the concept rather than make a problem have double digit numbers where single digits would do),
Is this fair though? The humanities departments don't water down their classes for science majors.
You take a literature class; you will still have to write essays, and 5-page papers.
They essentially expect you to become an 'expert' in writing, in order to study literature.
I do agree about the 'not restricting students to a time allotted'
You're not expected to write the 5 page paper in class.
The math classes should have students solving complicated problems, but not expected to solve 5 to 10 hard ones in an hour.
Instead of asking students to solve problems on a test: ask them questions about the solution procedure. Ask them questions about the theorems.
Throw them simple problems with a sample solution proposed.
And on the test, ask the student to look over the solution, and explain why the solution works, or explain why it won't work / mark the error or fallacy, or invalid logic (E.g. which step was wrong).
In other words: throw hard math problems at the students, but let them solve the problems with the time and resources a professional would have available. In the professional world, you never get a complicated problem, and an expectation to solve it accurately in 10 minutes.
Solving hard problems requires lots of creativity, and testing creativity in 50 minutes is unfair.
Making them answer the questions about the takeaway lessons, that they should have learned in the process of going through the course: not a demonstration that they have become mechanized problem-solving machines.
OK, there's some ways you could design key mechanisms that would be worthy of a patent but merely changing the shape of a current implementation is not a valid use of the system.
Eh? Providing protection for customers that require a high-security access control system and desire to prevent unauthorized key duplication is a benefit to society.
It's a valid creative use of the patent system.
And very common.
Although they also like to patent key designs, even when they sell lower-security versions to the public without sales channel restrictions. In some cases, it's just used to charge $500+ per lock cylinder and $50 a key.
The patent on the keyway is the sole protection for higher security lock designs.
The government should provide these companies longer term protections, however, so the useful live of your $1000 high-security deadbolts aren't limited to 20 years.
As long as they meet some standard to prove that the restriction of the key blank is exclusively to protect their customers, and not to charge $50+ per key/key duplication or $10,000+ to locksmiths for the privilege of servicing their locks.
If there were in fact a legal concept of "cut-rate" internet service that nullified my arguments,
There doesn't have to be a legal concept. Google has a right to price products below the absolute highest possible cost to Google of users' usage, and use terms of use contract restrictions to prevent the usages that are physically possible, but likely to cause the usage to exceed Google's costs.
And this is likely to be effective, if the lower-cost usage is all that their target customer wants.
You don't need a special "legal recognition" for your product differentiation.
It's called capitalism.
It is true, that searching for other search engines is a favorite way your average end user utilizes to access other search engines.
So Google's SEO / ranking across other search engines is pretty important.
(Obviously; this is essential to their core business, and they won't leave this to an outside contracter )
Slashdot Mirror
Also, bitching because there's not an OSS platform that doesn't work with Windows proprietary solution doesn't mean that there's a problem with OSS.
No. I am just disappointed that there is no OSS platform that is suitable, because I really want there to be. I would love for all the code required to implement Enterprise services to be open source, and for them to be scalable, proven, robust, self-maintaining, and not requiring ad-hoc script work and daily attention from highly experienced unix engineers.
I'm not bitching that there's not a satisfactory OSS platform for Enterprise mail, and that the OSS hypervisor's available are not the most cost-effective choices: I am just explaining that is the world we live in, that we are to accept, that causes the decision, and the inherent characteristics of what is available right now, and what Enterprise users demand That make no OSS solution the right choice in some cases.
Because the OSS options are missing the last 20% of the characteristics Enterprises require, even though the other 80% is there.
Think of it this way: how much unused memory is going to waste in a server that only hosts one instance of something?
The answer is a whole lot, because application owners and novice sysadmins very frequently overestimate or intentionally overstate memory and CPU requirements, thinking more is always better.
So rightsizing, requiring justification for resource allocation, and time spent tuning and studying possible $/Compute improvements are important parts of capacity management.
But page sharing, overcommitment, ballooning, and swapping, as implemented are an extreme help.
"Dynamic memory" technologies such as that in Xen / Hyper-V to a much more limited degree.
since we're talking about VMs, when you have several instances running on your hardware, then yes, all those stray gigabytes do add up.
The Windows GUI is megabytes, not gigabytes, and these memory pages are transparently shared between VMs running on the same host, so the memory for GUI code in memory is deduplicated and "used once" for the benefit lots of VMs it's not that bad.
Most of the memory waste is due to the .NET framework, which leverages Garbage-collection based memory management for both server side and client side applications.
Java has a very similar issue with its Garbage-collected heap.
There is a GB or so of memory per server needed for filesystem cache, a small amount of memory required for server applications, for SQL servers SQL Engine cache memory, and then, for all kinds of clients and servers: many gigabytes for .NET or Java heaps.
Futhermore, the .NET or Java garbage collected heaps do not overcommit as well as "OS GUI memory" or resident Application code memory, because the Cache memory represents data that is specific to a workload, there are fewer memory pages in common.
The bulk of the memory usage is the result of inefficient application coding, or the use of inefficient Software development frameworks such as .NET, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, etc... instead of C++ or Objective C, Not an inefficient operating system.
So spamassassin uses a lot of CPU? Have you seen the resources an exchange DAG requires?
Yes. I have, and Spamassassin/Amavis is orders of magnitude more expensive CPU-wise. This is probably due to the very massive amount of spam being attempted, and the inability of RBLs and tools such as DCC and Vipul's razor to effectively divert them, before Spamassassin starts chugging away at massive concurrency.
All the more bothersome, when some domains want "wildcard forwarding rules", so brute-force spam attempts at a domain fire off hundreds of messages.
If by enterprise grade, you mean "good enough for an ISP to use", then open source does just fine with a bit of tweaking and fine tuning.
No. I mean good enough to satisfy Enterprise users, and managers of Enterprises, such that they are satisfied of the features, performance, capacity, availability guarantees, and user experience that they have no benefit to running their own mail server.
This by the way includes rapid failover capabilities of all mail-related operation, load balancing, spam filtering, and prevention of "misbehaving users or devices" from adversely effecting server operations -- (per user throttling).
There is Non-MS, Non-GUI technology that might provide many of the things. But at the end of the day What the users want matters more. If the end user is insistent on features that can only be provided by a GUI-based server solution, then that is probably what they will be getting.
Well for starters, ditch Sendmail, use Exim, and then implement DRBD with linux HA
Not happening. Well-justified hate relationship developed with Exim over the years, due to MTA induced failure after failure on large shared hosting deployments, poor logging, and general lack of simple configurability -- I think perhaps the only Linux mail server software to suck more than Exim is QMail; they are pretty much at the same level.
Postfix, on the other hand is great.
DRBD with linux HA
The problem with DRBD with Linux HA; other than the fact that only a unix guru can maintain it and safely execute a disaster recovery (which 98% of the engineering staff are not qualified to do, and the portion that think they are qualified but are not are the most dangerous), is that DRBD doesn't meet acceptable standards of robustness, and requires manual attention in the event of a failover, and for failback: it's active/passive, and failover can really only be leveraged safely in the event of a catastrophe.
In other words: DRBD in its current form is only really suitable to be used as disaster recovery type system, not a host failure response type system.
In testing DRBD has proven to be unreliable in various failure modes, we would wind up with damage to data caused by DRBD itself, or operator error trying to get the failback to work like it's supposed to after a split-brain incident. Also, anything reliant on fencing by "killing" another server externally is not acceptably sane -- robust clustering systems utilize self-fencing nodes and provide additional methods of making quorum.
. If you are doing anything serious (or even moreso if you aren't), you generally don't have the RAM to waste on a bloated operating system that has to start up and maintain a GUI whether you are using it or not.
So there is a bit of this RAM used to provide GUI functionality. It's worthwhile, because it means some maintenance tasks to junior staff whose skills for picking up CLIs are more limited; on the other hand, they can still be trained to manage the server, using remote management tools of course.
There is practically no reason an administrator should be logging into the server and starting up a graphical console, since all administration tools can be installed on their workstation and used remotely.
Furthermore... in 2008, core install was introduced, which no longer includes a GUI for servers, and this is supported with SQL 2012
In Windows Server 2013; with some exceptions, the desktop experience is not required on servers, and generally, there will be no GUI.
Anyways... the success of a hypervisor should not be judged based on the perceived quality of the applications it has virtualized. It is not a more meaningful feat to run MySQL in a hypervisor than it is to run MS SQL in a hypervisor.
If anything.. with MySQL there are fewer sizing hints, AND the operational metrics provided by the database engine are much sparser than the detailed instrumentation that MS SQL provides -- with MS SQL, you get a heck of a lot better information about the performance and sizing.
At least you didn't go so far as to try to defend MS SQL Server. Who mentioned OSS? I didn't.
MS SQL server is the only backend supported by some applications, and some developers.
Personally, I would favor Oracle, but getting anyone to agree to pay for it, is a problem.
The fact of the matter is SQL server provides robust hitless failover clustering functionality. Postgres and MySQL do not provide this; although they are getting closer. They are worlds apart in terms of features, so it's not really fair to pick one or the other as a dilemma play, now is it?
Some application owners will demand MS SQL, and some will demand PostgreSQL, and that's OKAY.
Despite what you're learned working with exchange, not all MTAs have be the same giant POS as your "mailbox."
It's not MTA functionality. It is LDA functionality.
Sendmail writes a flat file... this results in some limitations
(1) The 'inbox' (mail spool file) cannot exceed 2GB.
(2) Performance with monster sized mailboxes (very large number of mail messages) is extremely poor.
(3) In regards to open source mail clients and IMAP clients; nothing exists that scales satisfactorially. Definitely not Pine, not wu-pop3, Not Dovecot, not Cyrus, nothing.
Also, bitching because there's not an OSS platform that doesn't work with Windows proprietary solution doesn't mean that there's a problem with OSS.
The first rule is that it has to work.
Whatever the protocol is, it has to be compatible with mobile devices: it has to provide modern Push e-mail for quick message delivery None of this "Poll the server every 5 minutes" crap. And must provide some mechanism for enforcing security policy, however.
Neither POP3, nor IMAP, nor open source webmail applications are capable of the very bare essentials, sorry.
Sorry dude, this is slashdot. You lost your epeen contest with the op when you admitted your organisation uses exchange and sql server.
Would it be a good time to remind you that there aren't really any open source e-mail server products that are truly enterprise grade?
Sendmail doesn't work so well, when you are required to allow users to keep 20 Gigabytes in their mailbox, Share calendars / Tasks; access mail on their iPhone or Android device, Spamassassin's spam filtering sucks even with Bayesian filtering (due to the low kill rate and high false positive rate, and high CPU cost of Spamassassin),
and POP3/IMAP connectivity has security issues -- regarding possibility of corporate data being exfiltrated, and inability to remotely wipe mobile devices connecting with POP/IMAP, and ActiveSync is indeed up to the challenge?
Furthermore... i've yet to find an open source webmail platform that works with AD RMS -- Rights management services; or Windows IRM ( Digital Information Rights Management ), for encrypting sensitive corporate e-mail to ensure that it is not accidentally leaked outside the organization.
and it was the best choice we ever made.
I went the opposite direction. We had been using exclusively Xenserver.... then at some point VMware released a free edition of ESXi; this is huge, and we tested it and found many advantages.
Eventually, we ditched Xenserver. For the past few years we have been using VMware vSphere, and ditching Xenserver was one of the better choices we ever made.
3 years now. 20 Tb of files; 6 TB of Exchange mailboxes, 500 GB of SQL Server and MySQL data, >1000 transactions per second , 16 to 1 consolidation ratio, with CPU, Memory, and Storage heavily oversubscribed; 280 VMs on 3 hosts, and no issues..
See? Other people can do that too...
If it's dying; I am very heavily inclined to believe it's been mismanaged, sized improperly, misconfigured, or deployed incorrectly.
UCS is rock solid. If you have issues with it, get some consultants out to audit and verify the configuration and design of the infrastructure piece by piece for adherence to best practices; and attempt to fault isolate to where the issue is.
It's been a few years since Citrix started giving it away, free as in beer.
They gave away what used to be called XenServer Enterprise functionality for free.
What they don't include for free is:
might be sensible to put them in cold climates rather than hot
People outside cold climates need servers geographically near too.... a datacenter that is far away will have high latency: so far noone's found a way around the speed of light limitation.
How about burying datacenters though... under the ground, where the temperature is more uniform, and, where you can also bury huge copper arrays, and put your servers in thermal contact with the thermally conductivearrays, to conduct the heat away....... using the earth itself as a heat sink?
Excel is considered a skill? EXCEL??!
I think maybe you need to learn more about it. Clever use of Excel can eliminate the need for a lot of expensive data processing computer software, and business software in particular, for many use cases. I realize that the perceived coolness of Spreadsheets from a technology perspective is pretty low, because it's old stuff, and it is not very shiny.
If you can avoid 10 hours of programming by taking a couple hours to put together a spreadsheet that solves the problem without building a program, then you can be that much valuable to the business....
And kQuery instead of jQuery
Folks who just knew jQuery, would do well to learn and add Node.JS, Prototype, MooTools, and Dojo to their skill set
jQuery is very limited, and has its inconsistencies. There are some much better frameworks out there. :)
Those are not skills for this summer, those are skills for several summers ago.
Agreed...
Learn yourself some HTML6, haXe, Zimbu, Opa, F#, Rails 4.0 (released a few days ago), CoffeeScript, Google Dart, Ceylon, , Django 1.5, MS Excel, 'R', Dao,Hadoop, MongoDB, C# 4.0, Python 3,
Not. More seriously: go buy some books on cooking, and learn that, or find some other hobby that fancies you -- maybe remotely leveraging skills from your technical job, maybe not. Learn some new hobbies -- have fun; concentrate on gratitude. Happy people are more successful. Don't worry about competing with other people for "knowledge of the latest fad".
Try to figure out which worldly subject is important, but that you know the least about -- read a book or two on it. To have depth of knowledge; reading a book isn't good enough, you need lots of experience to learn -- if you don't do a lot of programming in the language, you won't learn it very well.
On the other hand, you can expand breadth of knowledge into other subjects such as History or Art, by reading, and doing a little ---- the weaker you are in a subject, the easier it is to learn a meaningful amount
The fewer subjects you are that weak in.... well, the more global intelligence you will have :)
it's frequently updated, and the version included in the UBCD tends to be outdated often.
Yeah... for system maintenance purposes; I would generally prefer to have 3 CDs
I don't know, but it's not necessary to choose between them. You can start with Knoppix. If Knoppix cannot recognize a required device; try a few of the others.
In my experience, if Knoppix doesn't have the driver -- none of the common rescue disks have the driver, though.
Last I checked what was sorely lacking was a PVSCSI driver and a VMXNET3 driver For rescuing virtual machines with Knoppix.
Oh, FFS! Everyone knows you do not, under any circumstances, google Google! Don't do it, the internet itself will collapse in a recursive that will never reach its stop condition. You have been warned! Don't do it!
That used to be the case, but I heard Google's MapReduce engine finally came up with an answer; google for google, and the answer will be 42
Or rather, "Search instead for googol"
Oh, hell no! I was thinking 2 semesters ;-)
If they wasted less time on specific niche problems and symbolic integration tricks: students could probably learn all the Calculus they really need in 1 semester. And then use the 2nd semester for better maths perspective; E.g. number theory or topology.
I am calling BS, requiring Calculus for Statistics is like saying you need to be a mechanic to understand how to drive a car.
The university education is not about learning to drive the car. If you just want to drive the car, go take a 120 minute class on Excel; you don't need the 3 hours a week for 4 months class that covers the internals (and driving) then.
The study of statistics, is not to understand mechanical procedures -- it's to understand the mathmatics that gives rise to them, and how the procedures can be derived.
There are elements of foundational statistics that do not require calculus, but Algebra, and set theory is definitely a requirement even at the foundational level, to be able to understand probabilities involving sets, and application of useful structures such as Bayes theorem'.
Then, there are elements of statistics that do require calculus to understand how / why they work, and derive the formula.
Of course, anyone can memorize and use the formula without understanding the derivation -- that's not statistics; that's "Driving the car" as you put it.
LMOL no Calculus is not fundamental to understanding Statistics.
You can achieve a limited understanding of statistics without calculus.
Calculus is used to derive certain equations used in statistics.
Computer scientists need to fully understand what they are doing, to make sure they are applying valid procedures; not just grab random equations and plug in numbers.
Probability & Statistics is the most appropriate math coursework for a non-STEM major. An understanding of statistics helps you in day-to-day life.
I do agree. Actually, people are exposed to "Statistics" a lot.
People need to understand Statistics and Economics to function in a democratic society. There absolutely should be at least one class in these two fields that all college students are required to take.
Politicians love to use statistics to trick people and spread lies.
The news media is also in love with statistics.... rarely do they provide the information a statistician would want to see, to understand the statistical validity of the implied arguments.
The common person has a lack of understanding of statistics, and it's used against them on a daily basis to manipulate them; manipulate them into supporting ideas they would not support otherwise, OR manipulating them into making a financially poor decision they would not make if they were able to understand statistics, and understand the political/economic/financial background.
class about math that involves limited actual problem-solving by the student (you have to have some, but it's ok to keep problems simple for the purpose of understanding the concept rather than make a problem have double digit numbers where single digits would do),
Is this fair though? The humanities departments don't water down their classes for science majors.
You take a literature class; you will still have to write essays, and 5-page papers.
They essentially expect you to become an 'expert' in writing, in order to study literature.
I do agree about the 'not restricting students to a time allotted'
You're not expected to write the 5 page paper in class.
The math classes should have students solving complicated problems, but not expected to solve 5 to 10 hard ones in an hour.
Instead of asking students to solve problems on a test: ask them questions about the solution procedure. Ask them questions about the theorems.
Throw them simple problems with a sample solution proposed. And on the test, ask the student to look over the solution, and explain why the solution works, or explain why it won't work / mark the error or fallacy, or invalid logic (E.g. which step was wrong).
In other words: throw hard math problems at the students, but let them solve the problems with the time and resources a professional would have available. In the professional world, you never get a complicated problem, and an expectation to solve it accurately in 10 minutes.
Solving hard problems requires lots of creativity, and testing creativity in 50 minutes is unfair.
Making them answer the questions about the takeaway lessons, that they should have learned in the process of going through the course: not a demonstration that they have become mechanized problem-solving machines.
OK, there's some ways you could design key mechanisms that would be worthy of a patent but merely changing the shape of a current implementation is not a valid use of the system.
Eh? Providing protection for customers that require a high-security access control system and desire to prevent unauthorized key duplication is a benefit to society.
It's a valid creative use of the patent system. And very common. Although they also like to patent key designs, even when they sell lower-security versions to the public without sales channel restrictions. In some cases, it's just used to charge $500+ per lock cylinder and $50 a key. The patent on the keyway is the sole protection for higher security lock designs.
The government should provide these companies longer term protections, however, so the useful live of your $1000 high-security deadbolts aren't limited to 20 years. As long as they meet some standard to prove that the restriction of the key blank is exclusively to protect their customers, and not to charge $50+ per key/key duplication or $10,000+ to locksmiths for the privilege of servicing their locks.
If there were in fact a legal concept of "cut-rate" internet service that nullified my arguments,
There doesn't have to be a legal concept. Google has a right to price products below the absolute highest possible cost to Google of users' usage, and use terms of use contract restrictions to prevent the usages that are physically possible, but likely to cause the usage to exceed Google's costs.
And this is likely to be effective, if the lower-cost usage is all that their target customer wants.
You don't need a special "legal recognition" for your product differentiation. It's called capitalism.
It is true, that searching for other search engines is a favorite way your average end user utilizes to access other search engines. So Google's SEO / ranking across other search engines is pretty important.
(Obviously; this is essential to their core business, and they won't leave this to an outside contracter )