Yup, sounds like a PITA. I guess you gotta look at the bottom line. I can't imagine that bandwidth would EVER be more expensive than a dedicated IT staff in-house to babysit it, but I guess that I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Could you please let me know where you work? Since privacy isn't important to you, I want to avoid ever doing business with you. You might not care, but your customers do.
Oh yeah... I forgot to mention... my attorney has his office set up the same way. Sorry, but I'm going to listen to my attorney over a tin-foil hat wearing Slashdot freak.
So you need more bandwidth when your data is stored outside your company.
If you don't need as much, you don't buy as much, and you don't pay as much. Saving money is good.
Again: Eh. We have a DSL line. It works fine for all of our Net needs, including Exhchange. I don't have any employees downloading porn or full DVD movies.
And you trust them? Companies have died over less. I'll pass, thanks.
Companies have died over running out of hard drive space? Which ones? I've never heard of that, before!
Could you please let me know where you work? Since privacy isn't important to you, I want to avoid ever doing business with you. You might not care, but your customers do.
I said invoices and the occasional customer question. What does that have to do with anybody's privacy? Did you forget your meds today?
Or maybe I should ask, what kind of sensitive stuff are YOU sending via email? Are you emailing credit card and social security numbers, or something like that? Hasn't anybody even mentioned to you that that might not be the smartest idea...?
1. An email to anyone internal to the company has to traverse your network link twice.
Eh, so what?
2. It makes document retention more difficult. If you are subject to sarbanes-oxley or are involved in pending federal litigation you must retain all incoming email for something like two years.
Actually, it's easier. If we need more disk space, the Exchange service provider just gives us more space. I don't have to deal with adding hard drives, servers, etc. Hell, I don't even have to notify anybody, they just handle it, and send us the bill.
3. Who's reading your email?
Who cares? It's just business stuff. If our ASP wants to look at our exciting invoices, or customer questions, I really don't care. We don't have anything super-secret, but if we did, it probably wouldn't be sent via email, anyway.
I dunno. I own a 10 person company, and it's just fine for us. We have just a regular ol' 3 Mbps DSL connection. My buddy has a 6 person attorney's office that relies on Exchange for much more stuff than I do, and he doesn't have any problems. I dunno. Sounds like some kind of mis-configuration on the server end. I'd call them up and let them fix it. It works pretty easily for my and my friends' business, and we both just have plain ol' business DSL.
As far as the company data, well, I told him it was more likely that a hacker could get it off their servers than get it off the ASP's servers.
Exactly. The ASP's or ISP's deal with security for a living. They're going to be as good if not better than most regular IT people because they deal with it all day, every day.
And of course, you're right... it is a bit more expensive from an initial dollar standpoint (ie: we're paying $xxx/month for this hosting and $xx/month for that), but yeah, less time spent on it, and more reliable. It most definately saves money in the long run.
Everything else is divided up into specialties (ie: if a window gets broken, we don't go make our own glass), so why not IT?
i don't want my company data on someone else's servers.
I used to think that, too. Then, I found out I could let somebody else deal with the headaches and liability, so I outsourced it. Just in the past 6 months, I've outsourced both our web hosting, and I switched out our dumb POP mail server for an Exchange Server hosted elsewhere. Now that we don't have to deal with worrying about the server, we can spend more time and energy on the parts of our business that actually makes us money.
Data, schmata. They do backups, they've got all of the redundancy, blah, blah, blah. It's better than we could do in house, and it's cheaper.
Their solution certainly said that we aren't to open any MS Word documents.
No it doesn't. Here's the text. Read it carefully. It's very complicated:
Do not open or save Word files [the part you conveniently left out]that you receive from un-trusted or that are received unexpected from trusted sources.
Got it? I hope so. This suggestion is ALWAYS true, regardless of whatever known bugs there may be in existence at the time.
Actually, when I read this, I couldn't help but laugh at all of the dumb companies that thought that they could save money by investing in what is still, essentially, a third world country. They should've realized that a few McDonald's and a rudimentary grasp of English doesn't make a country a first world country, (a good place to do business). I hope the backwater Indian government continues to tax "outsiders" in their own provincial way so that these stupid companies will learn their lessons. I think that India has a LONG way to go before it should be considered as any kind of technological powerhouse, and I think that this is a strong sign that that is true.
The whole thing... Everything works together. I'm using Windows 2K, Exchange Server, Outlook, Office, Visual Studio, and very soon, RMS. It's all an integrated, easy to use package. Like I said, nobody else is really anywhere close to that. It's not a nasty patchwork like Linux, where all you have to do is sneeze at the computer, and it's irreparably broken (unless you're a Unix admin). It's also complete on the back end (Exchange Server, IIS, SQL Server, etc) for just about anything you need in most generic small to medium sized businesses (unlike Apple).
Exactly the opposite of the way Microsoft and Sony are doing it.
What do you mean, exactly? My PS2 is the center of my entertainment now (games, movies, and music). The PS3 will do the same thing for me. What else is there?
Like what? Can you name even one thing that they've incorporated which would require a giant research department?
How about putting the whole damn platform together in a useable package? Apple has done it to a very limited extent (missing lots of server pieces), but nobody else has done it.
Wow... so let me get this straight... this is a phone that requires OSX, which requires and Apple PC. Wow. I think that Apple has successfully earned the dubious title of "King of Lock-In". What's next? An iToilet that requires an Apple PC, OSX, an iPod, and iToilet Paper? Will it require iPlumbing to be installed in an iHouse? I think it's ridiculous, but obviously, there are gullible people out there buying this stuff...
I'd go one step further and say that Halo 2 flat out sucks. My GF just got an XBox to keep me at her place more, so I picked up Halo 2 figuring millions of players can't be wrong. Well, millions of Halo 2 players ARE wrong. I really was surprised. The sound was absolutely horrible. The graphics weren't much better than Doom, but what graphics there were were so dark and pixellated, that I really have a hard time telling what I'm shooting at. The story is a joke. The movement is sloppy, at best. I LOVE first person shooters, and I've played almost all of them since Wolfenstein 3-D first came out, and I was shocked to find out that Halo 2 was one of the worst I've ever played.
Now, I don't play games online, so maybe online play is more entertaining, but the gameplay itself was terrible, so I can't imagine that Halo 2 is much better, whether you're playing a computer or a person.
Yea numbnuts, you have to make sure the software is compatible with your computer. Meanwhile the rest of us learn to read the box or in the case of us Penguin nuts we check online for supported options before buying anything.
The only thing is, the rest of us quit doing that back in, oh I dunno, in the late 80's, early 90's. Whenever I've bought software in the past decade or so, it's just worked for me. No need to upgrade every few months as you say. I'm able to just buy any old box at the local thrift store for $20, and anything (other than games) works just fine on all of them (I have about a dozen assorted computers here at work).
Welcome to 2006. Unless you're a masochist (and apparently you are), you don't have to do that any more. But I guess, if you've got nothing better to do...
It appears that most of the/. community doesn't really remember desktop computing before, say about Windows95?
Things like network configurations and why you need them, what is HAL anyway? What are all those programs in the 'running processes' list? Why do I need to block ports?
Why is it important that everybody learn these things? What's the point?
I own a ten person company, and it's exactly how you described it, with us. I'll leave whatever is working for as long as it works, but when it's time to buy a new machine, it's whatever Dell (or whoever) has for cheapest, and I'll take whatever Windows OS it comes with. Right now, if I need a new machine in the next 6 months or so, I *might* try a bit harder to get one with XP, but it's not a big deal. As long as it's Windows, I don't really care what it is. We *never* upgrade OS's, because the oldest we have in here right now is W2K, and that works just fine.
If you call making the product more useful to more people an "embrace and extend" trick, then hopefully, they can "embrace and extend" more OSS projects. This is going to be a good thing for users. It really doesn't say all that much for the OSS community that it took getting MS involved for something like this to happen.
OSDL is shrinking (again) by 33%. VA Software (The owner of Slashdot) is still bleeding. Linspire has largely flopped. Novell is only making money because MS just gave them a big cash infusion. Red Hat is the only OSS company out there making any money, from what I can tell, and even Red Hat is in trouble from the big boys (lots of other people agree... lots of short selling of their stock.
There simply are not many OSS companies out there that are really financially healthy.
Well, I guess I meant that you can't use it as a tax loophole to take money out of the company without paying taxes on it. The "owners" or "directors" of a non-profit can only get paid via salaries, vs. a traditional company, where anything left at the end of the year belongs to the owner(s).
True, but an open source project doesn't take much to run - just a server and some bandwidth, and the bandwidth needs can be minimized via judicious mirroring.
Uuuh, ok. That's like saying that all you need to run a successful business is a cash register. If these projects are run like hobbies, and you don't expect any kind of widespread useage or support, then yeah, slap it up on a web server, and be done with it. If you want it to be successful, than it needs to be run the same as any other successful business.
I'd like to take this opportunity, after countless Slashdot posts about "Everybody should know how computers work", that perhaps what would be more useful if everybody instead learned a bit about how business works. I think that the OSS community has pooh-poohed the importance of basic business knowledge long enough, as is obvious from the overwhelming non-success of OSS companies.
At the end of the financial year, there is no profit to be paid out to the owners. It all goes back into the company. Realistically, in this case, you're right... a lot of it goes to salaries. Although, you can't claim to be a "non-profit" company, and pay the CEO a kajillion dollars. Once you're a non-profit, then the IRS watches closely to make sure that people are paid reasonable amounts. You can't use it as a tax loophole (otherwise, every company on the planet would be a "non-profit") company. But, you're right, you still have to cover your expenses like any other company, or you have to close the doors and sell the Aeron chairs.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, sounds like a PITA. I guess you gotta look at the bottom line. I can't imagine that bandwidth would EVER be more expensive than a dedicated IT staff in-house to babysit it, but I guess that I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Could you please let me know where you work? Since privacy isn't important to you, I want to avoid ever doing business with you. You might not care, but your customers do.
Oh yeah... I forgot to mention... my attorney has his office set up the same way. Sorry, but I'm going to listen to my attorney over a tin-foil hat wearing Slashdot freak.
So you need more bandwidth when your data is stored outside your company.
If you don't need as much, you don't buy as much, and you don't pay as much. Saving money is good.
Again: Eh. We have a DSL line. It works fine for all of our Net needs, including Exhchange. I don't have any employees downloading porn or full DVD movies.
And you trust them? Companies have died over less. I'll pass, thanks.
Companies have died over running out of hard drive space? Which ones? I've never heard of that, before!
Could you please let me know where you work? Since privacy isn't important to you, I want to avoid ever doing business with you. You might not care, but your customers do.
I said invoices and the occasional customer question. What does that have to do with anybody's privacy? Did you forget your meds today?
Or maybe I should ask, what kind of sensitive stuff are YOU sending via email? Are you emailing credit card and social security numbers, or something like that? Hasn't anybody even mentioned to you that that might not be the smartest idea...?
1. An email to anyone internal to the company has to traverse your network link twice.
Eh, so what?
2. It makes document retention more difficult. If you are subject to sarbanes-oxley or are involved in pending federal litigation you must retain all incoming email for something like two years.
Actually, it's easier. If we need more disk space, the Exchange service provider just gives us more space. I don't have to deal with adding hard drives, servers, etc. Hell, I don't even have to notify anybody, they just handle it, and send us the bill.
3. Who's reading your email?
Who cares? It's just business stuff. If our ASP wants to look at our exciting invoices, or customer questions, I really don't care. We don't have anything super-secret, but if we did, it probably wouldn't be sent via email, anyway.
I dunno. I own a 10 person company, and it's just fine for us. We have just a regular ol' 3 Mbps DSL connection. My buddy has a 6 person attorney's office that relies on Exchange for much more stuff than I do, and he doesn't have any problems. I dunno. Sounds like some kind of mis-configuration on the server end. I'd call them up and let them fix it. It works pretty easily for my and my friends' business, and we both just have plain ol' business DSL.
As far as the company data, well, I told him it was more likely that a hacker could get it off their servers than get it off the ASP's servers.
Exactly. The ASP's or ISP's deal with security for a living. They're going to be as good if not better than most regular IT people because they deal with it all day, every day.
And of course, you're right... it is a bit more expensive from an initial dollar standpoint (ie: we're paying $xxx/month for this hosting and $xx/month for that), but yeah, less time spent on it, and more reliable. It most definately saves money in the long run.
Everything else is divided up into specialties (ie: if a window gets broken, we don't go make our own glass), so why not IT?
i don't want my company data on someone else's servers.
I used to think that, too. Then, I found out I could let somebody else deal with the headaches and liability, so I outsourced it. Just in the past 6 months, I've outsourced both our web hosting, and I switched out our dumb POP mail server for an Exchange Server hosted elsewhere. Now that we don't have to deal with worrying about the server, we can spend more time and energy on the parts of our business that actually makes us money.
Data, schmata. They do backups, they've got all of the redundancy, blah, blah, blah. It's better than we could do in house, and it's cheaper.
Their solution certainly said that we aren't to open any MS Word documents.
No it doesn't. Here's the text. Read it carefully. It's very complicated:
Do not open or save Word files [the part you conveniently left out]that you receive from un-trusted or that are received unexpected from trusted sources.
Got it? I hope so. This suggestion is ALWAYS true, regardless of whatever known bugs there may be in existence at the time.
Actually, when I read this, I couldn't help but laugh at all of the dumb companies that thought that they could save money by investing in what is still, essentially, a third world country. They should've realized that a few McDonald's and a rudimentary grasp of English doesn't make a country a first world country, (a good place to do business). I hope the backwater Indian government continues to tax "outsiders" in their own provincial way so that these stupid companies will learn their lessons. I think that India has a LONG way to go before it should be considered as any kind of technological powerhouse, and I think that this is a strong sign that that is true.
The whole thing... Everything works together. I'm using Windows 2K, Exchange Server, Outlook, Office, Visual Studio, and very soon, RMS. It's all an integrated, easy to use package. Like I said, nobody else is really anywhere close to that. It's not a nasty patchwork like Linux, where all you have to do is sneeze at the computer, and it's irreparably broken (unless you're a Unix admin). It's also complete on the back end (Exchange Server, IIS, SQL Server, etc) for just about anything you need in most generic small to medium sized businesses (unlike Apple).
Exactly the opposite of the way Microsoft and Sony are doing it.
What do you mean, exactly? My PS2 is the center of my entertainment now (games, movies, and music). The PS3 will do the same thing for me. What else is there?
Like what? Can you name even one thing that they've incorporated which would require a giant research department?
How about putting the whole damn platform together in a useable package? Apple has done it to a very limited extent (missing lots of server pieces), but nobody else has done it.
IT would be neat if it used the same connection as the iPod
Let me get this straight... you want more vendor lock-in?
Wow... so let me get this straight... this is a phone that requires OSX, which requires and Apple PC. Wow. I think that Apple has successfully earned the dubious title of "King of Lock-In". What's next? An iToilet that requires an Apple PC, OSX, an iPod, and iToilet Paper? Will it require iPlumbing to be installed in an iHouse? I think it's ridiculous, but obviously, there are gullible people out there buying this stuff...
I'd go one step further and say that Halo 2 flat out sucks. My GF just got an XBox to keep me at her place more, so I picked up Halo 2 figuring millions of players can't be wrong. Well, millions of Halo 2 players ARE wrong. I really was surprised. The sound was absolutely horrible. The graphics weren't much better than Doom, but what graphics there were were so dark and pixellated, that I really have a hard time telling what I'm shooting at. The story is a joke. The movement is sloppy, at best. I LOVE first person shooters, and I've played almost all of them since Wolfenstein 3-D first came out, and I was shocked to find out that Halo 2 was one of the worst I've ever played.
Now, I don't play games online, so maybe online play is more entertaining, but the gameplay itself was terrible, so I can't imagine that Halo 2 is much better, whether you're playing a computer or a person.
Yea numbnuts, you have to make sure the software is compatible with your computer.
Meanwhile the rest of us learn to read the box or in the case of us Penguin nuts we check online for supported options before buying anything.
The only thing is, the rest of us quit doing that back in, oh I dunno, in the late 80's, early 90's. Whenever I've bought software in the past decade or so, it's just worked for me. No need to upgrade every few months as you say. I'm able to just buy any old box at the local thrift store for $20, and anything (other than games) works just fine on all of them (I have about a dozen assorted computers here at work).
Welcome to 2006. Unless you're a masochist (and apparently you are), you don't have to do that any more. But I guess, if you've got nothing better to do...
It appears that most of the /. community doesn't really remember desktop computing before, say about Windows95?
Things like network configurations and why you need them, what
is HAL anyway? What are all those programs in the 'running processes' list? Why do I need to block ports?
Why is it important that everybody learn these things? What's the point?
I own a ten person company, and it's exactly how you described it, with us. I'll leave whatever is working for as long as it works, but when it's time to buy a new machine, it's whatever Dell (or whoever) has for cheapest, and I'll take whatever Windows OS it comes with. Right now, if I need a new machine in the next 6 months or so, I *might* try a bit harder to get one with XP, but it's not a big deal. As long as it's Windows, I don't really care what it is. We *never* upgrade OS's, because the oldest we have in here right now is W2K, and that works just fine.
If you call making the product more useful to more people an "embrace and extend" trick, then hopefully, they can "embrace and extend" more OSS projects. This is going to be a good thing for users. It really doesn't say all that much for the OSS community that it took getting MS involved for something like this to happen.
OSDL is shrinking (again) by 33%. VA Software (The owner of Slashdot) is still bleeding. Linspire has largely flopped. Novell is only making money because MS just gave them a big cash infusion. Red Hat is the only OSS company out there making any money, from what I can tell, and even Red Hat is in trouble from the big boys (lots of other people agree... lots of short selling of their stock.
There simply are not many OSS companies out there that are really financially healthy.
Well, I guess I meant that you can't use it as a tax loophole to take money out of the company without paying taxes on it. The "owners" or "directors" of a non-profit can only get paid via salaries, vs. a traditional company, where anything left at the end of the year belongs to the owner(s).
True, but an open source project doesn't take much to run - just a server and some bandwidth, and the bandwidth needs can be minimized via judicious mirroring.
Uuuh, ok. That's like saying that all you need to run a successful business is a cash register. If these projects are run like hobbies, and you don't expect any kind of widespread useage or support, then yeah, slap it up on a web server, and be done with it. If you want it to be successful, than it needs to be run the same as any other successful business.
I'd like to take this opportunity, after countless Slashdot posts about "Everybody should know how computers work", that perhaps what would be more useful if everybody instead learned a bit about how business works. I think that the OSS community has pooh-poohed the importance of basic business knowledge long enough, as is obvious from the overwhelming non-success of OSS companies.
I've never understood how this is non-profit.
At the end of the financial year, there is no profit to be paid out to the owners. It all goes back into the company. Realistically, in this case, you're right... a lot of it goes to salaries. Although, you can't claim to be a "non-profit" company, and pay the CEO a kajillion dollars. Once you're a non-profit, then the IRS watches closely to make sure that people are paid reasonable amounts. You can't use it as a tax loophole (otherwise, every company on the planet would be a "non-profit") company. But, you're right, you still have to cover your expenses like any other company, or you have to close the doors and sell the Aeron chairs.
Uh, everybody has parts of their job that they don't like. That doesn't make you a hero. It makes you an employee. Get over yourself.