As someone who knows someone who works at Salesforce.com as a product manager, I'm wondering which annoyances in Salesforce.com bug you the most. I can forward them to him.
ESPN's web site has a link that makes it easy for users to tell ISPs that they want ESPN360, but ISPs need to hear our point of view and know that they have plenty of customers who don't want their ISP to give into ESPN360's shenanigans. I posted the following onto my ISP's customer feedback page. Please feel free to clean up and use in any way that you see fit.
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I just wanted to give my feedback about ESPN360. I prefer that Speakeasy continues to operate as a neutral ISP regarding ESPN360 and does not pay ESPN360 to get their content for Speakeasy subscribers. I believe that individual end users who want to access ESPN360 content should pay ESPN360 directly and not through their ISP, especially as there are Speakeasy customers who do not use or have even heard of ESPN360. As an entertainment web site, ESPN360 is not offering a service that is of general public value that would warrant ISPs instead of individual end users to pay ESPN360 for access.
I enjoy my Speakeasy service as it exists today, and I hope that ESPN360's plan to get ISPs instead of end users to pay for their content fails. If ESPN360 succeeds, other web site operators may attempt the same strategy and lead to service fragmentation on the Internet, which raises the barrier to entry for new ISPs and also raises the operational costs of existing ISPs. It's an attempt to impose a cable company business model onto ISPs, which could additionally lead to ISP responsibility of delivered content.
Please keep Speakeasy as a neutral Internet connection by turning down any attempts from ESPN360 to get Speakeasy to pay for ESPN360 access.
I researched this for a small architecture firm earlier this year, and my recommendations for them were in the following order, with the first listings having the most preference for their particular business:
Google Apps probably would have been #1 if it had better feature parity at the time that I reviewed it, and it's possible that Google Apps would probably now be in the top three.
A really nice thing for the customer about the three recommendations above is that all feature full compatibility with Microsoft Outlook. I personally detest Outlook, but they like it, and all three are fully compatible with Outlook's groupware features.
To add myself to the set of Quicken alternative comments, I'd like to promote Mvelopes.com. It's an easy-to-use software as a service (SaaS) solution that runs as a full-page Flash application and uses a proactive budgeting approach rather than Quicken et al's reactive budgeting approach. With mobile browser access, it's possible to check the balance of each virtual envelope before making purchases, which helps make it proactive -- you can avoid spending money in the first place if the current balance of the relevant envelope isn't sufficient. In Quicken and other solutions, you enter in receipts after the fact and then get depressed about always spending more than you planned to in various categories.
I don't work for Mvelopes's company, but I am a very happy customer. I used Quicken from about 2002 to mid-2008, and I have to say that Mvelopes is far easier to use and keep up to date. It saves me at least two hours per week over my previous process, and I used to use Excel for budgeting because Quicken's budgeting modules suck, especially compared to Mvelopes's granular envelope spending and funding plan features. Mvelopes was designed with budgets at its core, which it calls envelopes, and envelopes are funded with each paycheck and other income sources as they come in.
Mvelopes isn't free, but it's competitive with the Quicken upgrade treadmill, and their online customer service is good enough. Bugs get fixed, and they are always adding features and improving usability further. It's reminds me a lot of the upgrade model of my employer, Salesforce.com. There's no software to install, besides Flash, and no action on your part needed to get updates. As a result of being a paid service, versus Mint.com, the data is private, and they don't load the UI with third party advertisements. Their privacy policy might not be as strong as the one at Salesforce.com, but it's good enough for me, for whatever that's worth:-).
Many will probably disagree with me on this, but I consider Windows to be a legacy operating system that I run on rare occasions within a VMware Server virtual machine. When run in VMware Server on a more modern desktop Linux operating system or even on a Mac, the risk likeliness of getting infected by viruses and malware is reduced by not using it often and limiting its use to specific applications that don't yet work on Linux or on a Mac. If its use is restricted to an internal accounting app, as an example, it would be difficult to get infected by an email virus or, if its firewall is enabled and VMware's NAT was in use, other standard Windows worms. As a result, it should be okay to use it past XP's end-of-life until it can run in Linux or Mac (or become web based).
When implementing the aforementioned scenario, it's possible to restrict IE browsing with IE URL Lock at https://www.moonlightdesign.org/urllock/ (shameless plug, though it's open-source) or, if your Windows apps don't use IE in any way (the reference pane in Office, as an example, uses IE to render reference info and search results), it's possible to use the proxy-is-localhost configuration approach or an upstream block to restrict browsing.
If you don't mind giving up dual-boot, an alternative is to use VMware Converter, which is free as in beer. After it is converted to a VMware virtual machine, the similarly free as in beer VMware Server can be used to run it. That is what I did with my pre-installed Vista, though I actually haven't used it in a long time..
Note that with pre-installed Vista, you will most likely need to set SMBIOS.reflectHost = "TRUE" in your.vmx file so that Vista sees the real computer's BIOS keys instead of the emulated BIOS's keys. (I admit that "BIOS key" is a topic that I know very little about, and it's probably actually called something else).
Salesforce ensures via its processes throughout the company that no one except for you and anyone who you explicitly temporarily authorize, such as a support person in a service call, will see your data.
As new releases are created, Salesforce ensures that the APIs for previous versions do not regress, meaning that if you build an API integration on the latest version of the API and continue to use it as more Salesforce.com versions get released, your integration will work indefinitely until you decide to use the latest version of the API, and Salesforce.com hasn't dropped support for any of its obsolete API versions in years.
Depending on what you want to do with the platform, it's possible to sell your software to customers on the AppExchange. Customers, including those who already use Salesforce.com and those who do not, can install your AppExchange package and be up and running quickly. Customers who do not use Salesforce.com can use it via a platform license that you can sell directly to your customers, thus relegating Salesforce.com to be the underlying platform and giving you more complete control over your interactions with your customers. This is platform as a service (PaaS). I know, I know.. Buzzwords;-)
I use Unison, too, and love it! Not many backup solutions support backing up OS X resource forks and metadata to Linux servers. I use it in combination with a GFS-like shell script that performs a hard-link copy of the current backup state to another folder named after the current date and time, and backups older than a couple of months are deleted except for the last backup of each month. It's space efficient and longitudinal:-)
I wish the restore interface was as nice as Apple's Time Machine, but it's not that often that I need to restore, and it's not really that hard to create one-off Unison restoration config files.
Some (or many, or all?) distributions prompt for the root password on runlevel 1. To work around that, boot with an additional kernel argument: init=/bin/bash
openSUSE doesn't have an evaluation period. Thus, there is no need to be forced to install anything else other than, perhaps, the next version of openSUSE after your installed version is eventually end-of-lifed.
At the risk of being labeled a troll, I typically tell colleagues who ask about the Microsoft deal that Apple has numerous patent and other technology licensing agreements with Microsoft, and yet we don't see a groundswell of people on Slashdot calling Apple on the carpet for their Microsoft agreements.
In response, I've heard that the difference is that Apple doesn't pretend to be fully open-source whereas Novell does to an extent, though Apple does have an open-source kernel and other bits in addition to a proprietary system. Similarly, Novell's SuSE (not openSuSE) is a product that users typically need to pay for. From a high-level view, this looks like both companies offer a proprietary system as well as an open-source subset of that proprietary system.
As a result -- at least, from that simplification of the issue -- I think that anti-SuSE people on Slashdot are treating Novell unfairly versus Apple. I'm not a fan of the Microsoft deal, either, but I do like openSuSE on technical and, especially, usability grounds, and that is why I both advocate for and use it both at home and at work.
SuSE does offer YaST, which is a very easy-to-use system configuration tool. I need to learn more about Ubuntu, but as far as I know, YaST integrates system configuration bits in a more coherent and consistent manner than other distributions do. YaST was open-sourced at some point in the recent past, so other distros might possibly use it now or eventually, too.
For me, the only downside to SuSE is its slow and memory-inefficient package management system. It gets substantially better with each release, so it might be approaching the speed of apt-get on Ubuntu, but in 10.4, it wasn't quite there yet in performance. In features, however, it's definitely there:-).
It sounds like the Billion router's firmware had a really bad bug that happened to be poked by Windows XP SP3. Unless if this was in a third party library or some external code that they were using, I wouldn't be surprised if this was limited to just Billion routers.
XP SP3 didn't _cause_ the bug; it merely happened to recreate a condition that triggered a bug inside the router to crash itself.:-)
Back in the day, when CueCats were popular, I created a pluggable authentication module (PAM) that permits users to log in using scanned barcodes in the login process. I used this on my computer for a while, logging in using a grocery store loyalty card on my keychain. After a while, I found that it was faster to simply type my password, but this barcode solution might be worth considering for children.
Note that I haven't maintained the code, so it might need a little bit of TLC to compile and run with the latest versions of PAM. It relied on a really old CueCat patch for the kernel, though it should be straightforward to integrate the CueCat decoder into this PAM module and use a PAM text entry box for the input, I think..
Speakeasy might be an option for you. They do voice and data, and I've been using their OneLink service for about two years now. When combined with an HDTV antenna and either an HD TV or a computer HDTV receiver, you can be Comcast and AT&T-free:-).
I hear ya! My distro of choice is Novell openSUSE 10.2, which is very easy to set up and use, though I had to remove zmd to get efficient updates with opensuse-updater (the upcoming 10.3 doesn't install zmd by default). IMHO, Novell openSUSE 10.2 is an order of magnitude easier to set up and use than Ubuntu, though the/. community in general has taken an anti-Novell stance due to its patent cross licensing agreement with Microsoft (which is funny, considering how/. loves Apple despite Apple's numerous patent and technology cross licensing agreements with Microsoft, but I digress).
I've been able to "convert" two people at work from Windows XP to openSUSE 10.2 based on its merits and ease of use. Ubuntu will hopefully get to a similar position from a technical perspective, but IMHO at this time, Novell openSUSE 10.2 is already there, and Novell has committed themselves to making SUSE Linux a world-class desktop operating system.
From your post, here is what openSUSE 10.2 and likely other distros can offer:
- Browser: Firefox, Konqueror, Mozilla Seamonkey, Opera, and IEs4Linux (I use IEs4Linux to access Outlook Web Access's calendar at work, since I use Thunderbird for my email. I'm looking forward to an Exchange plug-in for Mozilla Lighning)
- Email: Thunderbird (yay! I'm also writing a Salesforce.com extension for it called Thunderforce), Evolution (I actually despise it, though I also don't like Outlook's interface. To each, their own.. Don't bother with the Exchange connector; it's slow and crashes often), KMail, and others
- Quicken 2008 might be tricky. Quicken 2007 appears to work to an extent, but it might have issues, which is probably not good for an accounting package
- GnuCash is a possible replacement for Quicken, though it's more like QuickBooks than Quicken. For a personal finance look and feel, KMyMoney might be the better way to go, though some time might need to be invested in the conversion process. Converting from Quicken Mac 2004 to KMyMoney was not seamless for me, but I haven't gone back and fixed the errors in the import configuration that I used and tried again. If you do the GnuCash approach, then you can use my GnuCashToQIF program to export back to Quicken in case if you want to go back to it or if you need to export your data to an accountant, either as QIF or IIF. I have an old Mac at home that I'm moving away from, though I'm still using Quicken and iTunes on it
- Novell's version of OpenOffice includes extensive support for Excel macros, so it's worth trying out. It might address all of your Excel needs. As a nice bonus, OpenOffice uses a single-document interface (SDI) instead of a multiple-document interface (MDI), permitting you to have two or more separate top-level spreadsheet windows side-by-side or on different monitors. Excel is MDI, though it does create a top-level start menu button for each open document, essentially faking SDI, but it's really MDI. You could enlarge Excel to span multiple monitors and have your MDI windows not maximized, but that breaks down if you have one monitor portrait and the other one landscape. If you really, really need Excel, then it appears to be well supported by CrossOver Office
- Visual Studio 2005 is a tough one because MonoDevelop might not include all the features that you may be accustomed to. It does implement a lot, but it's probably not a drop-in replacement yet.
True, but it depends on how much you trust those 3rd party repositories. I presently don't trust PackMan and the others, but I do trust Novell, KDE, and the authors of Kaffeine. I don't have any specific reason to not trust the 3rd party repositories, but I also don't have any reason or relationship in place to trust them. It's mostly about how much trust and risk each person is willing to have.
Well, you're in luck, because Kaffeine can do exactly that. When combined with w32codecs, you can play just about anything. It's very nifty, and I'm very satisfied with it.
I'm using openSUSE 10.2, and I had to recompile Kaffeine and install DeCSS to watch encrypted DVDs. Unfortunately, Novell compiles Kaffeine and libxine with encrypted DVD support disabled by default, but it's straightforward to recompile it using rpmbuild to include DVD support. 3rd party repositories out there, such as PackMan, also have precompiled Kaffeine packages available if you don't want to recompile Kaffeine and libxine.
An online CRM provider in San Francisco? Sounds familiar:-)
As an IT manager, a good first thing to do in the morning is check email in a LIFO fashion with an eye for high-priority email messages. In IT, at least in my past experience at a non-profit, every day is typically about putting out fires with little time available for interesting projects. Knowing what's hot and what's only warm is key, and, with luck, time will eventually exist to tackle the medium-priority emergencies. Forget about ever tackling the non-emergencies; they only take up space on the to-do list and will never get done anyway.
This is a large part of why I got out of IT and into software development:-). I could have just experienced an exceptionally resource-constrained IT environment, but I'd imagine that IT resources are severely limited at almost any organization -- non-profit and for-profit. IT is typically seen as a cost center and not an area of new development. I tried to reason that away, but I eventually gave up and now actively create new products as a software engineer:-).
Yes, but if you read Microsoft's EULA, you'll quickly see that they disclaim all liability for its use or misuse, the product is licensed AS-IS, the product is not fit for any particular purpose, and they grant no warranties of any kind, explicit or implied. In other words, you can try to sue Microsoft, but it will be dismissed so fast you won't know what hit you.
Say someone at Microsoft embeds a cute virus or tracking cookie or something (according to many, they already have in the form of Alexa cookies, but I digress). People may screem and shout Holy Murder all they want, but because they licensed the software and agreed to pay Microsoft for a product that has no warranties and no assumption of wrongdoing on the part of Microsoft, other than, perhaps, defective media on boxed products, then it's tough cookies.
To expand on your analogy:-), using Microsoft and most other general-purpose commercial software programs is just like letting your friend store his lawnmower in your shed for $5 or even $500 but under a contract that explicitly states that anything stored in that shed is the renter's full responsibility and that if anything happens to that shed and, consequently, the renter's property in that shed, then the renter has no recourse at all, other than whining on Slashdot or consumer product boards about how bad the shed owner is. (of course, for the sake of argument, this was a contract that had the renter sign and/or initial every paragraph and write out that he/she fully understands that he/she has absolutely no legal recourse and waives all rights to civil and criminal proceedings other than those explicitly granted by law, but I digress again. Perhaps it could even be worded that storing property in the shed constitutes full legal abandonment of said property). So how is that different from open-source software that a company paid no money for?
However, not all is lost for the lawnmower owner. Both open-source and commercial vendors typically offer support and warranty services for an extra, typically annual or per-incident, fee. The Mozilla Foundation offers telephone support and probably other options as does Microsoft. If a company is so inclined, it can purchase these support options from the Mozilla Foundation and others. Companies don't have to, but it's there for those who want or need it. And bam, there's the legal obligation to make it all work:-).
Mozilla developers have their collective and individual reputations to keep their software in check. If a process breakdown or malicious intent resulted in an official release of Firefox containing malware and viruses, that would probably spell significant doom for Firefox, especially if it was malicious intent. Same thing with Microsoft, though with Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation invites everyone to see the "man behind the curtain" in the form of source code, minutes, and the like while Microsoft keeps that under lock and key, requiring the Mozilla foundation to be especially careful in what it puts in and keeps out of Firefox.
As a minor nitpick, Firefox does have an organization behind it -- the Mozilla Foundation. And that foundation has interests and a reputation to protect and defend. So, for those who believe that they can sue software creators, one could sue the Mozilla Foundation just as easily as they can sue Microsoft (though, in both cases, the suit would highly likely be thrown out).
Just my $0.02:-).
As another way of looking at it, couldn't an IT Manager that ignores Firefox and insists on using Microsoft Internet Explorer as their organization's desktop web browser be reprimanded for knowingly deploying a product throughout the organization that is known to have significant security holes and an active exploit community, thus knowingly putting their company in harm's way when a known safer, (mostly) compatible, and open-source alternative with the backing of top-tier software companies exists? When combined with organizations th
Although this isn't a complete answer to what you suggest for configuration management in Linux, YaST seems to strike a good balance between different programs requiring their separate configuration files and the desire to permit the user to centrally (and graphically) manage the overall and, in some cases, detailed configuration of the system with the configuration management system synchronizing and collaborating the configuration changes to and between the many underlying programs and systems.
If you haven't tried YaST, try it!:-). With a fair shake, I think you'll be impressed:-).
I don't have a good answer for the multiple desktop toolkit API dilemma other than to toss Swing and SWT into the ring;-). Though, other platforms have similar situations, too, but I admit that at least they have clearer future directions and preferred toolkits. On the Mac, you have Carbon, Cocoa, Swing, and SWT, though Cocoa is the preferred toolkit. On Windows, things might not be as clear, but at least two are very strong: Win32 GDI+User32 and Windows Forms in.NET. Just about all are basically wrappers for GDI+User32 except for Swing. Finally, on Linux, raw X and Motif are generally considered the toolkits of yesterday with GTK+ and KDE being the preferred desktop toolkits. It's really a matter of choosing between the two, though I've noticed that most commercial vendors that I deal with use GTK+ in their Linux front-ends.
GTK+ can be made to look like KDE with the proper theme. You system might be using one of GNOME's default themes rather than a KDE+GNOME unified theme such as RedHat's BlueCurve or the one that SuSE uses. GTK+ can certainly be quite ugly, but the same GTK+ program can look very pleasant and polished with a well-designed theme:-)! (just like KDE apps)
Slashdot Mirror
The Emery Go-Round? http://www.emerygoround.com/
Or, my favorite, a planet where it's raining men ;-) (with apologies to the Weather Girls)
As someone who knows someone who works at Salesforce.com as a product manager, I'm wondering which annoyances in Salesforce.com bug you the most. I can forward them to him.
ESPN's web site has a link that makes it easy for users to tell ISPs that they want ESPN360, but ISPs need to hear our point of view and know that they have plenty of customers who don't want their ISP to give into ESPN360's shenanigans. I posted the following onto my ISP's customer feedback page. Please feel free to clean up and use in any way that you see fit.
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I just wanted to give my feedback about ESPN360. I prefer that Speakeasy continues to operate as a neutral ISP regarding ESPN360 and does not pay ESPN360 to get their content for Speakeasy subscribers. I believe that individual end users who want to access ESPN360 content should pay ESPN360 directly and not through their ISP, especially as there are Speakeasy customers who do not use or have even heard of ESPN360. As an entertainment web site, ESPN360 is not offering a service that is of general public value that would warrant ISPs instead of individual end users to pay ESPN360 for access.
I enjoy my Speakeasy service as it exists today, and I hope that ESPN360's plan to get ISPs instead of end users to pay for their content fails. If ESPN360 succeeds, other web site operators may attempt the same strategy and lead to service fragmentation on the Internet, which raises the barrier to entry for new ISPs and also raises the operational costs of existing ISPs. It's an attempt to impose a cable company business model onto ISPs, which could additionally lead to ISP responsibility of delivered content.
Please keep Speakeasy as a neutral Internet connection by turning down any attempts from ESPN360 to get Speakeasy to pay for ESPN360 access.
Thank you for your attention.
I researched this for a small architecture firm earlier this year, and my recommendations for them were in the following order, with the first listings having the most preference for their particular business:
1. Rackspace.com hosted Exchange
2. Scalix
3. Yahoo! Zimbra
Google Apps probably would have been #1 if it had better feature parity at the time that I reviewed it, and it's possible that Google Apps would probably now be in the top three.
A really nice thing for the customer about the three recommendations above is that all feature full compatibility with Microsoft Outlook. I personally detest Outlook, but they like it, and all three are fully compatible with Outlook's groupware features.
To add myself to the set of Quicken alternative comments, I'd like to promote Mvelopes.com. It's an easy-to-use software as a service (SaaS) solution that runs as a full-page Flash application and uses a proactive budgeting approach rather than Quicken et al's reactive budgeting approach. With mobile browser access, it's possible to check the balance of each virtual envelope before making purchases, which helps make it proactive -- you can avoid spending money in the first place if the current balance of the relevant envelope isn't sufficient. In Quicken and other solutions, you enter in receipts after the fact and then get depressed about always spending more than you planned to in various categories.
I don't work for Mvelopes's company, but I am a very happy customer. I used Quicken from about 2002 to mid-2008, and I have to say that Mvelopes is far easier to use and keep up to date. It saves me at least two hours per week over my previous process, and I used to use Excel for budgeting because Quicken's budgeting modules suck, especially compared to Mvelopes's granular envelope spending and funding plan features. Mvelopes was designed with budgets at its core, which it calls envelopes, and envelopes are funded with each paycheck and other income sources as they come in.
Mvelopes isn't free, but it's competitive with the Quicken upgrade treadmill, and their online customer service is good enough. Bugs get fixed, and they are always adding features and improving usability further. It's reminds me a lot of the upgrade model of my employer, Salesforce.com. There's no software to install, besides Flash, and no action on your part needed to get updates. As a result of being a paid service, versus Mint.com, the data is private, and they don't load the UI with third party advertisements. Their privacy policy might not be as strong as the one at Salesforce.com, but it's good enough for me, for whatever that's worth :-).
Hopefully, this helps..
Many will probably disagree with me on this, but I consider Windows to be a legacy operating system that I run on rare occasions within a VMware Server virtual machine. When run in VMware Server on a more modern desktop Linux operating system or even on a Mac, the risk likeliness of getting infected by viruses and malware is reduced by not using it often and limiting its use to specific applications that don't yet work on Linux or on a Mac. If its use is restricted to an internal accounting app, as an example, it would be difficult to get infected by an email virus or, if its firewall is enabled and VMware's NAT was in use, other standard Windows worms. As a result, it should be okay to use it past XP's end-of-life until it can run in Linux or Mac (or become web based).
When implementing the aforementioned scenario, it's possible to restrict IE browsing with IE URL Lock at https://www.moonlightdesign.org/urllock/ (shameless plug, though it's open-source) or, if your Windows apps don't use IE in any way (the reference pane in Office, as an example, uses IE to render reference info and search results), it's possible to use the proxy-is-localhost configuration approach or an upstream block to restrict browsing.
If you don't mind giving up dual-boot, an alternative is to use VMware Converter, which is free as in beer. After it is converted to a VMware virtual machine, the similarly free as in beer VMware Server can be used to run it. That is what I did with my pre-installed Vista, though I actually haven't used it in a long time..
Note that with pre-installed Vista, you will most likely need to set SMBIOS.reflectHost = "TRUE" in your .vmx file so that Vista sees the real computer's BIOS keys instead of the emulated BIOS's keys. (I admit that "BIOS key" is a topic that I know very little about, and it's probably actually called something else).
Hopefully, this helps.
Disclaimer: I work as a software engineer at Salesforce.com.
Depending on your needs and budget, Force.com might be a viable option. It's all proprietary, but they do provide enterprise-class service level agreements and have delivered enterprise-grade levels of uptime to companies big and small ( http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ ). Its Apex programming language is Java-like ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/apex-programming-language/ ), and it's possible to write arbitrary user interfaces on it using its Java server faces extending VisualForce page layout markup language ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/visualforce/ ).
Salesforce ensures via its processes throughout the company that no one except for you and anyone who you explicitly temporarily authorize, such as a support person in a service call, will see your data.
As new releases are created, Salesforce ensures that the APIs for previous versions do not regress, meaning that if you build an API integration on the latest version of the API and continue to use it as more Salesforce.com versions get released, your integration will work indefinitely until you decide to use the latest version of the API, and Salesforce.com hasn't dropped support for any of its obsolete API versions in years.
Depending on what you want to do with the platform, it's possible to sell your software to customers on the AppExchange. Customers, including those who already use Salesforce.com and those who do not, can install your AppExchange package and be up and running quickly. Customers who do not use Salesforce.com can use it via a platform license that you can sell directly to your customers, thus relegating Salesforce.com to be the underlying platform and giving you more complete control over your interactions with your customers. This is platform as a service (PaaS). I know, I know.. Buzzwords ;-)
Relevant URLs:
Force.com: http://www.force.com/
Salesforce.com's cloud status: http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/
Apex programming language: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/apex-programming-language/
VisualForce: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/application-development/visualforce/
AppExchange: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/appexchange/
API and integrations: http://www.salesforce.com/platform/integration/
Hopefully, this helps. Please don't mod me as troll ;-). I'm trying to be helpful and informative to the original poster.
I use Unison, too, and love it! Not many backup solutions support backing up OS X resource forks and metadata to Linux servers. I use it in combination with a GFS-like shell script that performs a hard-link copy of the current backup state to another folder named after the current date and time, and backups older than a couple of months are deleted except for the last backup of each month. It's space efficient and longitudinal :-)
I wish the restore interface was as nice as Apple's Time Machine, but it's not that often that I need to restore, and it's not really that hard to create one-off Unison restoration config files.
Some (or many, or all?) distributions prompt for the root password on runlevel 1. To work around that, boot with an additional kernel argument: init=/bin/bash
If it's NT/2000/XP, there's always the NT password disk (one of my favorite Windows utilities): http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.html
openSUSE doesn't have an evaluation period. Thus, there is no need to be forced to install anything else other than, perhaps, the next version of openSUSE after your installed version is eventually end-of-lifed.
At the risk of being labeled a troll, I typically tell colleagues who ask about the Microsoft deal that Apple has numerous patent and other technology licensing agreements with Microsoft, and yet we don't see a groundswell of people on Slashdot calling Apple on the carpet for their Microsoft agreements.
:-)
:-(. Please be nice!)
In response, I've heard that the difference is that Apple doesn't pretend to be fully open-source whereas Novell does to an extent, though Apple does have an open-source kernel and other bits in addition to a proprietary system. Similarly, Novell's SuSE (not openSuSE) is a product that users typically need to pay for. From a high-level view, this looks like both companies offer a proprietary system as well as an open-source subset of that proprietary system.
As a result -- at least, from that simplification of the issue -- I think that anti-SuSE people on Slashdot are treating Novell unfairly versus Apple. I'm not a fan of the Microsoft deal, either, but I do like openSuSE on technical and, especially, usability grounds, and that is why I both advocate for and use it both at home and at work.
Now I'm off to download the latest version
(there goes my karma, though
SuSE does offer YaST, which is a very easy-to-use system configuration tool. I need to learn more about Ubuntu, but as far as I know, YaST integrates system configuration bits in a more coherent and consistent manner than other distributions do. YaST was open-sourced at some point in the recent past, so other distros might possibly use it now or eventually, too.
:-).
For me, the only downside to SuSE is its slow and memory-inefficient package management system. It gets substantially better with each release, so it might be approaching the speed of apt-get on Ubuntu, but in 10.4, it wasn't quite there yet in performance. In features, however, it's definitely there
It sounds like the Billion router's firmware had a really bad bug that happened to be poked by Windows XP SP3. Unless if this was in a third party library or some external code that they were using, I wouldn't be surprised if this was limited to just Billion routers.
:-)
XP SP3 didn't _cause_ the bug; it merely happened to recreate a condition that triggered a bug inside the router to crash itself.
Back in the day, when CueCats were popular, I created a pluggable authentication module (PAM) that permits users to log in using scanned barcodes in the login process. I used this on my computer for a while, logging in using a grocery store loyalty card on my keychain. After a while, I found that it was faster to simply type my password, but this barcode solution might be worth considering for children.
http://pam-cuecat.sourceforge.net/
Note that I haven't maintained the code, so it might need a little bit of TLC to compile and run with the latest versions of PAM. It relied on a really old CueCat patch for the kernel, though it should be straightforward to integrate the CueCat decoder into this PAM module and use a PAM text entry box for the input, I think..
Speakeasy might be an option for you. They do voice and data, and I've been using their OneLink service for about two years now. When combined with an HDTV antenna and either an HD TV or a computer HDTV receiver, you can be Comcast and AT&T-free :-).
I hear ya! My distro of choice is Novell openSUSE 10.2, which is very easy to set up and use, though I had to remove zmd to get efficient updates with opensuse-updater (the upcoming 10.3 doesn't install zmd by default). IMHO, Novell openSUSE 10.2 is an order of magnitude easier to set up and use than Ubuntu, though the /. community in general has taken an anti-Novell stance due to its patent cross licensing agreement with Microsoft (which is funny, considering how /. loves Apple despite Apple's numerous patent and technology cross licensing agreements with Microsoft, but I digress).
I've been able to "convert" two people at work from Windows XP to openSUSE 10.2 based on its merits and ease of use. Ubuntu will hopefully get to a similar position from a technical perspective, but IMHO at this time, Novell openSUSE 10.2 is already there, and Novell has committed themselves to making SUSE Linux a world-class desktop operating system.
From your post, here is what openSUSE 10.2 and likely other distros can offer:
- Browser: Firefox, Konqueror, Mozilla Seamonkey, Opera, and IEs4Linux (I use IEs4Linux to access Outlook Web Access's calendar at work, since I use Thunderbird for my email. I'm looking forward to an Exchange plug-in for Mozilla Lighning)
- Email: Thunderbird (yay! I'm also writing a Salesforce.com extension for it called Thunderforce), Evolution (I actually despise it, though I also don't like Outlook's interface. To each, their own.. Don't bother with the Exchange connector; it's slow and crashes often), KMail, and others
- Quicken 2008 might be tricky. Quicken 2007 appears to work to an extent, but it might have issues, which is probably not good for an accounting package
- GnuCash is a possible replacement for Quicken, though it's more like QuickBooks than Quicken. For a personal finance look and feel, KMyMoney might be the better way to go, though some time might need to be invested in the conversion process. Converting from Quicken Mac 2004 to KMyMoney was not seamless for me, but I haven't gone back and fixed the errors in the import configuration that I used and tried again. If you do the GnuCash approach, then you can use my GnuCashToQIF program to export back to Quicken in case if you want to go back to it or if you need to export your data to an accountant, either as QIF or IIF. I have an old Mac at home that I'm moving away from, though I'm still using Quicken and iTunes on it
- Novell's version of OpenOffice includes extensive support for Excel macros, so it's worth trying out. It might address all of your Excel needs. As a nice bonus, OpenOffice uses a single-document interface (SDI) instead of a multiple-document interface (MDI), permitting you to have two or more separate top-level spreadsheet windows side-by-side or on different monitors. Excel is MDI, though it does create a top-level start menu button for each open document, essentially faking SDI, but it's really MDI. You could enlarge Excel to span multiple monitors and have your MDI windows not maximized, but that breaks down if you have one monitor portrait and the other one landscape. If you really, really need Excel, then it appears to be well supported by CrossOver Office
- Visual Studio 2005 is a tough one because MonoDevelop might not include all the features that you may be accustomed to. It does implement a lot, but it's probably not a drop-in replacement yet.
True, but it depends on how much you trust those 3rd party repositories. I presently don't trust PackMan and the others, but I do trust Novell, KDE, and the authors of Kaffeine. I don't have any specific reason to not trust the 3rd party repositories, but I also don't have any reason or relationship in place to trust them. It's mostly about how much trust and risk each person is willing to have.
Well, you're in luck, because Kaffeine can do exactly that. When combined with w32codecs, you can play just about anything. It's very nifty, and I'm very satisfied with it.
I'm using openSUSE 10.2, and I had to recompile Kaffeine and install DeCSS to watch encrypted DVDs. Unfortunately, Novell compiles Kaffeine and libxine with encrypted DVD support disabled by default, but it's straightforward to recompile it using rpmbuild to include DVD support. 3rd party repositories out there, such as PackMan, also have precompiled Kaffeine packages available if you don't want to recompile Kaffeine and libxine.
Or you can use `openssl s_client -host www.somesite.com -port 443` for HTTPS sites :-)
An online CRM provider in San Francisco? Sounds familiar :-)
:-). I could have just experienced an exceptionally resource-constrained IT environment, but I'd imagine that IT resources are severely limited at almost any organization -- non-profit and for-profit. IT is typically seen as a cost center and not an area of new development. I tried to reason that away, but I eventually gave up and now actively create new products as a software engineer :-).
As an IT manager, a good first thing to do in the morning is check email in a LIFO fashion with an eye for high-priority email messages. In IT, at least in my past experience at a non-profit, every day is typically about putting out fires with little time available for interesting projects. Knowing what's hot and what's only warm is key, and, with luck, time will eventually exist to tackle the medium-priority emergencies. Forget about ever tackling the non-emergencies; they only take up space on the to-do list and will never get done anyway.
This is a large part of why I got out of IT and into software development
The US-Mexico border isn't a truck that you can just dump people into. It's a series of tubes! http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/26/trickedout_se cret_tu.html
Yes, but if you read Microsoft's EULA, you'll quickly see that they disclaim all liability for its use or misuse, the product is licensed AS-IS, the product is not fit for any particular purpose, and they grant no warranties of any kind, explicit or implied. In other words, you can try to sue Microsoft, but it will be dismissed so fast you won't know what hit you.
:-), using Microsoft and most other general-purpose commercial software programs is just like letting your friend store his lawnmower in your shed for $5 or even $500 but under a contract that explicitly states that anything stored in that shed is the renter's full responsibility and that if anything happens to that shed and, consequently, the renter's property in that shed, then the renter has no recourse at all, other than whining on Slashdot or consumer product boards about how bad the shed owner is. (of course, for the sake of argument, this was a contract that had the renter sign and/or initial every paragraph and write out that he/she fully understands that he/she has absolutely no legal recourse and waives all rights to civil and criminal proceedings other than those explicitly granted by law, but I digress again. Perhaps it could even be worded that storing property in the shed constitutes full legal abandonment of said property). So how is that different from open-source software that a company paid no money for?
:-).
:-).
Say someone at Microsoft embeds a cute virus or tracking cookie or something (according to many, they already have in the form of Alexa cookies, but I digress). People may screem and shout Holy Murder all they want, but because they licensed the software and agreed to pay Microsoft for a product that has no warranties and no assumption of wrongdoing on the part of Microsoft, other than, perhaps, defective media on boxed products, then it's tough cookies.
To expand on your analogy
However, not all is lost for the lawnmower owner. Both open-source and commercial vendors typically offer support and warranty services for an extra, typically annual or per-incident, fee. The Mozilla Foundation offers telephone support and probably other options as does Microsoft. If a company is so inclined, it can purchase these support options from the Mozilla Foundation and others. Companies don't have to, but it's there for those who want or need it. And bam, there's the legal obligation to make it all work
Mozilla developers have their collective and individual reputations to keep their software in check. If a process breakdown or malicious intent resulted in an official release of Firefox containing malware and viruses, that would probably spell significant doom for Firefox, especially if it was malicious intent. Same thing with Microsoft, though with Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation invites everyone to see the "man behind the curtain" in the form of source code, minutes, and the like while Microsoft keeps that under lock and key, requiring the Mozilla foundation to be especially careful in what it puts in and keeps out of Firefox.
As a minor nitpick, Firefox does have an organization behind it -- the Mozilla Foundation. And that foundation has interests and a reputation to protect and defend. So, for those who believe that they can sue software creators, one could sue the Mozilla Foundation just as easily as they can sue Microsoft (though, in both cases, the suit would highly likely be thrown out).
Just my $0.02
As another way of looking at it, couldn't an IT Manager that ignores Firefox and insists on using Microsoft Internet Explorer as their organization's desktop web browser be reprimanded for knowingly deploying a product throughout the organization that is known to have significant security holes and an active exploit community, thus knowingly putting their company in harm's way when a known safer, (mostly) compatible, and open-source alternative with the backing of top-tier software companies exists? When combined with organizations th
Although this isn't a complete answer to what you suggest for configuration management in Linux, YaST seems to strike a good balance between different programs requiring their separate configuration files and the desire to permit the user to centrally (and graphically) manage the overall and, in some cases, detailed configuration of the system with the configuration management system synchronizing and collaborating the configuration changes to and between the many underlying programs and systems.
:-). With a fair shake, I think you'll be impressed :-).
;-). Though, other platforms have similar situations, too, but I admit that at least they have clearer future directions and preferred toolkits. On the Mac, you have Carbon, Cocoa, Swing, and SWT, though Cocoa is the preferred toolkit. On Windows, things might not be as clear, but at least two are very strong: Win32 GDI+User32 and Windows Forms in .NET. Just about all are basically wrappers for GDI+User32 except for Swing. Finally, on Linux, raw X and Motif are generally considered the toolkits of yesterday with GTK+ and KDE being the preferred desktop toolkits. It's really a matter of choosing between the two, though I've noticed that most commercial vendors that I deal with use GTK+ in their Linux front-ends.
:-)! (just like KDE apps)
If you haven't tried YaST, try it!
I don't have a good answer for the multiple desktop toolkit API dilemma other than to toss Swing and SWT into the ring
GTK+ can be made to look like KDE with the proper theme. You system might be using one of GNOME's default themes rather than a KDE+GNOME unified theme such as RedHat's BlueCurve or the one that SuSE uses. GTK+ can certainly be quite ugly, but the same GTK+ program can look very pleasant and polished with a well-designed theme