Great... except that the reflective qualities of the tablet screen means that you have to find just the right angle to stop seeing everything going on out in the sun behind you. That and the fact that you've got to sit in the shade in just such a position that you can somehow support the weight of the tablet held in both hands... and do that retarded skeuomorphic "swipe" to change to the next page... which really makes no sense on a tablet device or any electronic device.
I shall walk in the sun, and read in the sun like a human being. We've all got to die of something.
Exactly. The Kindle and Nook have both been on sale for several years; the have had a long time to gain the market penetration they have today. While I don't doubt that the tablets have impacted eReader sales, I think the fact is that as you said these are devices designed for a singular purpose and fulfill that singular purpose so well that there's no need to pitch and replace every year like people do with an iPad. Hell, I purchased my first Kindle at the same time as I got a first-gen iPad. While that original Kindle is still working great (though superseded by a newer model only because I dropped and broke the case on the original Kindle), that original iPad is now unsupported for upgrades, and its battery life is waning fast. That Kindle can still read the same books I read on my newer one and does it just as well... that old iPad can barely run some more recent apps, and even some older apps that I used to depend on have received updates that broke them on the iPad.
I have a newer iPad which truthfully is barely used except for checking my email and surfing the web when I'm eating breakfast at a hotel (more convenient than lugging my laptop downstairs). My Android phone in many ways is superior to the iPad... but the Kindle is still far superior to both of them when I'm on a plane or sitting on a beach in bright sunshine wanting to read a book.
That's very true... but as a general rule I'd say you're an exception. The vast majority of people who buy an eReader also use the store that it's tied to. Same with tablets; particularly with Android tablets it's relatively trivial to side-load free apps but the majority of people who buy them use the apps they can buy.
I have a lot of free content on my Kindle as well, but I also spend a decent amount at Amazon every month (including an Audible subscription) because sometimes I just get a hankering to read something specific while sitting at the gate at an airport.
Last year I had my Kindle with me when I spent two weeks in Bavaria. I completely forgot to bring the charger with me for my Kindle so I just turned off wireless unless I really needed it (like twice during the entire trip) and still had enough battery left to read "Freedom, tm" by Daniel Suarez during the flight home.
My counterpoint to this is simply the bulk; I love my Kindle Keyboard that I've had for about two years now because I travel a lot... both personally and business. Carrying books around in a carry-on is a pain and as my girlfriend discovered when we returned from Ireland two years ago having a large number of books really confuses TSA agents. I wish I were kidding!
Now having said that, there is an argument here that a tablet would be even better still since it can do so much and is really small. I would agree with that except that I have an iPad and have had a few Android tablets. Honestly; the form factor sucks for reading anything but magazine-style stuff. Actual books; the Kindle is FAR superior. The iPad I have to hold in both hands and because of its weight have to hold it with something supporting my arm to be comfortable. The Kindle is so light and compact that I can hold it in one hand and still turn pages back and forth with my thumb. It's also dead-easy to bookmark ("dog-ear") a page at any point and even sync those bookmarks and your current read page to the "cloud" so when (if) you do fire up the Kindle app on your phone, iPad or whatever you can continue where you left off, or open a specific bookmark.
The Nexus 7 and iPad Mini are better form factors for reading, but you still have the issue of weight. Also, you can't turn the page with one hand... you have to use the rather retarded "page swipe" or call up an onscreen menu and click a button. This puts you back in a two-handed mode which is rather uncomfortable for long periods of time.
This year my vacation for myself and my son was to a beach. Having the Kindle to kick back on the sand and read a book while my son had a blast in the sand and sea was a godsend. I did try the iPad briefly on the first day and hated trying to ignore reflections, peer at the relatively dimly lit screen etc.
Have tablets impacted sales of eReaders? Yes... and they will continue to do so. Will they supplant them? Of that I am far less sure; my Kindle is also incredibly handy for technical documentation and a friend of mine uses his for carrying around maintenance documents for some of the steel cutting and bending machinery as well as CNC machines he works on. He tried an Android tablet and in that manufacturing environment the screen was broken in about three days. The Kindle... OK he's on his third because of breakage but with a good case they last one hell of a lot longer than the tablet. That and the battery life; you use an iPad as an eReader and the battery life is not great... the Kindle he just throws it on a charger occasionally. For him it's a huge improvement on the old way of going to find the maintenance books (which are huge!) before working on one of them. Maybe eReaders are a bit of a niche product... but they always were. But I don't think it's a niche that's going away.
I for one will buy another similar Kindle if/when I kill or lose the one I have.
I went through almost the same process as you, and pretty much settled on the exact configuration you had up until a couple of months ago.
While I was at VMworld I played with Zimbra in their hands-on labs and decided I wanted to check it out. When I found out that there's a free version available I figured that I would stand up a virtual machine and play with it. You know what? I liked it. It's a bit heavy being a Java app, but it integrates a really nice web interface with the same backend components I was running before; Procmail, Spamassassin and so on... and the web interface is a lot more capable than Roundcube, integrating calendar and contact stuff quite nicely. Once I discovered that I could also use "Z-Push" to create an unsupported but perfectly functional ActiveSync compatible front end... well I was sold right then. Sure, the Z-Push took a lot of trial and error, but once I got it working it just is slick as all get out. I have an iPhone, iPad and my Android phone all hooked up to it, as well as my son's aging Windows Mobile phone.
I will say as a caveat though that you do have to be a bit careful; make sure you're using a supported OS and don't jump ahead on patching unless you've taken a system snapshot first (I had it break on an early version with Ubuntu 10... once I moved to the latest Zimbra and 12.04 I have had no problems with other patches either, but I am still a bit more gun-shy than I was with my self-bakes email server). Zimbra does have a lot of dependencies and though most of them are baked into the package (MySQL, Postfix, Spamassassin etc) any one of the others does run the risk of breaking stuff. Still, that's what snapshots are for.
I must admit, I like the fact that I have this nice slick interface, my phone working and even database replication to a remote host thanks to using ZFS for my entire/opt filesystem and a script that replicates it nicely... plus I don't really have to do much to keep it running. I gave the box 2 cores and 4GB of ram, dialed down the swappiness and it just runs. With 10 average users it runs a load average of 0.25 or thereabouts most of the time... and as of right now has an uptime of 56 days. Oh, there's also a desktop client for Mac, Windows and Linux that basically works like an offline version of the web interface... it's not perfect but very usable for offline mail use.
And to feed into the original question; there's actually a very good local desktop app that works great. I know; I use it for my mail server. You can also with a bit of leg work get an unsupported but functional ActiveSync setup for your mobile devices that works awesome called z-push (I use version 2.0.2 because it just works pretty damned slick with both my Android and iPhone devices).
I will say though that I find the desktop client quite buggy when you add external accounts like GMail and the like. It never seems to finish sync until I've restarted it three or four times... so I just use Thunderbird for my GMail account with Zimbra for my own hosted account (which I'm trying to get people to use more).
For bonus points of course, it's all just Linux at the end of the day so you can get really creative with it. I installed it on Ubuntu 12.04 instead of using the appliance because I wanted to use ZFS as my data store and I have a script that replicates it to another server nightly in case of a server failure. On top of that for a time I had an IMAP client that ran on it connecting to GMail and then feeding all my mail back into a folder on the Zimbra server... but because I couldn't "reply as" it was useless... but is certainly doable if you want to just always reply from your Zimbra account.
Combine all this with a free StartCom certificate and you're golden... and despite being "heavy" (Java), it is a damned good mail system and the web interface is pretty damned slick.
Incorrect; Bumblebee allows you to boot into Intel and run Optimus stuff on the Nvidia with a simple command of "/usr/bin/optirun (application)". I use it all the time and it works great on a couple of different Optimus-equipped laptops I've tested it on. On my own Alienware M11xR2 I can get 4 and a half hours out the battery if I don't run 3D stuff... about 2 and a half when I do.
If you're into hardcore 3D gaming there's also the NVidia Optimus, which while I know is the solution that OP is complaining about is also supportable with Bumblebee (http://bumblebee-project.org/). It works fantastically well on my Alienware, and I've tested it on a Dell Latitude E6430 with great success (before I put Windows 8 on it for work). Power consumption is also great because I'm using Intel graphics most of the time for the desktop and only running the NVidia when I want to fire up Diaspora or FlightGear.
I came here to pretty much say this. I actually got an Alienware M11XR2 for free (it was purchased by my work for an executive who decided he hated it, and nobody else wanted such a small laptop so it was given to me as a play box). I stuck Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on it, installed Bumblebee after a bit of research and it works fantastically well. I play FlightGear and Diaspora on it frequently, and just got into the Steam for Linux beta. I haven't had any issues with it at all.
While I agree it's not an optimal solution (groan... oh the pun, the pun!) it works really well. I have just modified the launchers in my start menu to call/usr/bin/optirun when I have a 3D accelerated app installed. Just for the record I run Gnome-Shell instead of Unity because I seriously can't stand it, and editing the menu items is easier.
Interestingly, that extra step is really not that different to what I do on my Windows laptop which has a newer Optimus chipset (Dell E6430); more often than not I have to go and modify the launchers in the start menu to make sure they use the Optimus chipset to run instead of the Intel. Although I do also use the Nvidia control panel for that.
Hmm... maybe all that's missing is a control panel item for Bumblebee... I might have to break out my Python/GTK skills and throw one together:)
I just wanted to +1 this because I don't have mod points. Sociopaths very much do have no empathic response to others. My ex wife was diagnosed as a sociopath after our divorce... this wasn't exactly news to me but was a bitter pill to swallow. Since it came on late in life, it seems most likely that it was actually caused by physical damage in her case (which we can likely trace back to a car accident she had in 2003 where she did suffer minor brain damage). She literally feels no empathy toward others... in a sense I had to accept that for half a decade before the divorce she actually didn't really love me. There is also the chance that she never felt empathic... that she was always a sociopath.... but that's something we'll never know for sure.
She still lies, manipulates and cheats. She is also extremely good at pretending to be empathic and giving the outward appearance of normality... it's only when you are around her a lot that you start to see that her responses are manufactured. Quite often her responses seem almost too perfect and tend to echo similar emotional responses she has recently observed in movies and TV... which can make her seem quite emotionally volatile because her emotional responses change so much over time.
I think GP has never actually encountered a sociopath... I envy him.
I actually agree with GP... the Surface is a surprising development from Microsoft simply because it works so damned well. I've not played with one for long but I came away incredibly impressed. I have an iPad that's not seen a charge in 6 months, a smattering of Android tablets (and I think I've misplaced some of them) but to-date my computing world has been three laptops (one Windows, one Mac OSX and one Ubuntu), a server (running Ubuntu) and my Android phone. The Surface is the only tablet I could see myself actually using "in anger"; it's something I can whip out at a coffee shop to surf the web or actually get some real work done (assuming I have the keyboard/cover attached!) or something that's small, light and portable enough to throw into my backpack when I'm going for a long ride on my motorcycle for a couple of days... the only one of my laptops I consider small enough is my Ubuntu box which is an Alienware M11Xr2... even then the Surface is probably better.
It lacks apps at the moment... and the "classic" desktop feels a little like an appendix on the ARM-based tablet (no real apps for that environment)... but that will change and is changing rapidly.
I did a clean install of Windows 8 on my shiny new Dell Latitude E6430 on the day I received it... didn't even boot Windows 7. I figured the only way to learn something about this new OS was to jump in feet first and take a few licks. You know what? It's not bad.
Now, the caveat to that is that I put the final release candidate version on... not the boxed copy that wasn't yet released. Drivers were an issue for a bit... had great fun with Hulu Plus app and the fact that my 6430 has the Optimus video stuff going on (so it wouldn't play video) but that was fixed on Halloween when Dell/NVidia finally put out a new driver set. Of course, being on the bleeding edge sometimes means pain.
I will also set the caveat that I grew VERY weary of jumping back and forth between "Modern" and "Classic"... and I still don't really find benefit in "Modern" except for consumption; not creation. All I use it for is reading Reddit to Go and the news app while I eat my lunch or drink my coffee... other than that I work in "Classic". I also don't get the "Modern" apps... fullscreen single app... what is this; 1984 again? Seriously; WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 did this 30 years ago and I thought we have moved on from that idea. I for one *like* having multiple windows I can move around, scale and switch between. It makes my workflow a lot easier. This "single-app-per-screen" was what I thought Windows was supposed to save us from... now we're going back there?
I will admit it makes sense on a phone or a tablet... but it makes NO sense at all on a 24" 1920x1080 monitor three feet from your face unless it's a touchscreen and you have arms like an orang-utan. On the flip-side, I installed Classic Shell and have been quite happy ever since, only venturing into "Modern" when I have an actual need for one of the apps in there.
Java would actually be relevant to anything more than Enterprise and a tiny niche market of consumers.
I'm not sure I'd call Android either an Enterprise product or a tiny consumer niche even though a solid chunk of what you see in Android is written in Java, and all apps are written in it.
Though having said that the rest of your comments to have some merit. Slashdot does tend somewhat to be an echo chamber but that doesn't make the discussion irrelevant. I would say if you were to go back on the Slashdot comments about products that would fail you'll actually find more accurate predictions than the ones you trotted out; they are only obvious because they were probably the most glaring but there are plenty of other discussions about technology failures and successes.
You know, we've been doing this for four years where I work. And yes, I know everyone here is going to espouse Truecrypt as the one true solution, but the simple fact is NASA is run as a corporation... as such they'll probably go for a solution that's vendor supported. The fact that they're NASA will probably mean they'll get a pretty decent price on the software too.
Now, the downside of full-disk encryption (which many lazy corporations do instead of home directory only) is that it does increase the load on your system, slow it down and make recovery if/when it breaks a royal pain. Our helpdesk has an almost constant stream of laptops coming and going through their hands that they have to decrypt and re-encrypt because something got out of sync. Time consuming, and leads to downtime for the users. I've often suggested home folder only encryption... but the higher ups want it all encrypted... right up to the point that their laptop is down for two days because they've broken it.
By the way, another horrible side effect of whole disk encryption is that our experience says that it'll kill SSD's pretty rapidly. Our average SSD life is less than a year at this point because there doesn't seem to be a good full-disk encryption software that properly implements TRIM... so spinning disk or hybrid disk is the way to go.
I've used a fair smattering of virtual hosts and hypervisors both at work and personally. So here's what I think of them all (the free ones, anyway);
VMware: Probably one of the easiest to get set up and master. Dead simple point-and-click interface. Learning this is good if you want a career in virtualization because it is the yardstick by which all others are judged. There are a lot of features though that are disabled in the free version that are used in corporate environments... but you'll have the basics down.
Hyper-V: Also very simple to use and manage... but unlike VMware means you can run it as a side-piece on your existing Windows box rather than having a dedicated piece of hardware just for virtualization. Already built into most modern Windows variants, and used somewhat regularly in corporate environments. Again, paid adds features and support.
Citrix XenServer: Takes the basics of the open source Xen and adds a pretty damned nice GUI. Paid version adds support, but most of the major features are available and functional in the freebie. Trial versions of everything are available. Memory management out of the box is a bit of a pain (no overcommitment by default) but easy enough to modify. Use in corporate environments tends to follow people who have significant Citrix/XenDesktop infrastructure.
Xen (Open Source): By far the best to learn EVERYTHING about how virtualization actually works, but probably the worst for actually getting running VM's. There are GUI tools to simplify it, but since Xen is currently moving to a new toolset that is incompatible with most GUI interfaces, and the GUIs tend to be a smidge buggy on occasion it's usually easier just to learn the command line. Of course, then there are config files, XML files, bridged network interfaces. If you want to learn about the internals this is the way to go... but if you're only going to dedicate a day to trying each one then you might want to skip it... this one will take a couple of days at least even with the several well-written HOWTO's. Having said that, once everything is working it's really nice and you can turn around and say that you know how virtualization works, instead of just saying you know how a single product works!
VirtualBox: Like VMware is good for the beginner to learn the basics because it does have a nice GUI that guides you through everything. Update notifications are a constant irritant though; it seems that every week they're releasing an update for this bug or another... I turn that off and upgrade when I feel like it! However, use in corporate environments is almost non-existent. Good support for most OS's, and decent support for 3D graphics and the like but still pretty kludgy. I use it on my Mac for running my BootCamp partition while under OSX... mostly so I can access stuff on that installation and run updates and the like without having to reboot OSX.
I broke out the two main versions of Xen because they are significantly different. They are similar at the core (based on the same code) but Citrix has it own front-end tools that are incompatible with the tools you'll use under open source. However, the commands are the same and so learning open source Xen will have some bearing on using Citrix Xen.
Of course, there are plenty of other hypervisors out there. My personal recommendation if you just want to play would probably be Hyper-V or VirtualBox. VirtualBox has the advantage of being cross-platform; I don't know if you run Linux or Windows (or OSX) at home, and obviously Hyper-V is Windows only. If you really want to learn virtualization and how it works, then open source Xen is the way to go... I run it on my Ubuntu 12.04LTS box and love it... but it's not for the faint of heart! Setting up the networking alone can be "fun" and you should definitely familiarize yourself intimately with how to undo what you have done so you don't break anything! VMware like I said is used extensively in corporate environments... so if you want to pursue it as a career I'd recommend dedicating a box to an ESXi server and just play with it. It's free and easy... but really doesn't teach much in my opinion.
Of course; they're simulators. That's exactly what real flight is like. Of course, in the real thing the terror is a bit more palpable because you're ACTUALLY in danger...
Though there are aspects that are tricky to simulate; the taste of horrible coffee, the smell of a first officer with terminal flatulence, and the horrible shiver that goes down your spine when your finger happens to find a blob of some unidentifiable substance that has scraped off the fingers of the previous pilot onto the seat adjustment controls. The only advice I can give there is not to sniff it...
I am sure these things are also able to be simulated... sort of glad they're not.
Couldn't agree more. The reason Star Citizen has the traction it has, is that Chris Roberts started with demonstrable code and graphics. His presentation of the ideas is also fantastic.
Sorry, I am a bit jaded. Braben had his day but has promised Elite 4 for over a decade now and has never actually had anything solid to show for it. Even this Kickstarter project is just some hyperbole on a web page. So far his track record for promising the sky is secure, but actually delivering... yeah. And this is from one of the people who actively defended Frontier First Encounters because I saw the potential... but man the bugs were horrendous. If you think you've seen buggy code, you haven't seen a thing until you played the original FFE prior to the patch (which fixed only some of the bugs).
Maybe I'll be proven wrong... and in a sense I hope I am. I won't be backing him though: The world has moved beyond Elite. I play Eve Online and am deciding right now whether to back Star Citizen (*make that probably will before the end of the day). These deliver on the promises Braben made in the late 90's, and even deliver on the same promises that prompted Braben to whine that the technology wasn't there yet back in 2006. Ironically, Eve delivered many of the things he claimed were impossible right out of the gate back in 2003. Colour me unimpressed until I see something functional that we can see.
The concept was actually perfect timing; the problem was it was hobbled by horrendous execution. The Webtop environment was horribly limiting, basically allowing you to do nothing except run Firefox. The $499 price tag on launch day was also unbelievable when you could buy a functional laptop for less. Add on the AT&T options you had to add to your plan in order to own it ("Tethering plan + smartphone data plan") and it made the whole thing horribly cost-prohibitive.
I had an Atrix myself and liked it a lot. It was a great phone. My girlfriend purchased the lapdock (for $299 after a few months) and still uses it for her school (she's working on her MBA) so I got to play with it. To me it was effectively unusable without hacking it for a full Ubuntu install instead of the rather crap environment it had. Even then, it was still limited in storage until I hacked it some more to move it to the SD card... and then... and then. Yeah, it could have been a great tool and I loved the idea of everything being right there on my phone, but when I had to turn to XDA-Developers in order to make it functional, there's a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Great... except that the reflective qualities of the tablet screen means that you have to find just the right angle to stop seeing everything going on out in the sun behind you. That and the fact that you've got to sit in the shade in just such a position that you can somehow support the weight of the tablet held in both hands... and do that retarded skeuomorphic "swipe" to change to the next page... which really makes no sense on a tablet device or any electronic device.
I shall walk in the sun, and read in the sun like a human being. We've all got to die of something.
Exactly. The Kindle and Nook have both been on sale for several years; the have had a long time to gain the market penetration they have today. While I don't doubt that the tablets have impacted eReader sales, I think the fact is that as you said these are devices designed for a singular purpose and fulfill that singular purpose so well that there's no need to pitch and replace every year like people do with an iPad. Hell, I purchased my first Kindle at the same time as I got a first-gen iPad. While that original Kindle is still working great (though superseded by a newer model only because I dropped and broke the case on the original Kindle), that original iPad is now unsupported for upgrades, and its battery life is waning fast. That Kindle can still read the same books I read on my newer one and does it just as well... that old iPad can barely run some more recent apps, and even some older apps that I used to depend on have received updates that broke them on the iPad.
I have a newer iPad which truthfully is barely used except for checking my email and surfing the web when I'm eating breakfast at a hotel (more convenient than lugging my laptop downstairs). My Android phone in many ways is superior to the iPad... but the Kindle is still far superior to both of them when I'm on a plane or sitting on a beach in bright sunshine wanting to read a book.
Mmmhmm... Canon and Nikon are really hurting for people buying their newest cameras right now because of the OMGAWESOME camera in the iPhone 5...
That's very true... but as a general rule I'd say you're an exception. The vast majority of people who buy an eReader also use the store that it's tied to. Same with tablets; particularly with Android tablets it's relatively trivial to side-load free apps but the majority of people who buy them use the apps they can buy.
I have a lot of free content on my Kindle as well, but I also spend a decent amount at Amazon every month (including an Audible subscription) because sometimes I just get a hankering to read something specific while sitting at the gate at an airport.
+1
Last year I had my Kindle with me when I spent two weeks in Bavaria. I completely forgot to bring the charger with me for my Kindle so I just turned off wireless unless I really needed it (like twice during the entire trip) and still had enough battery left to read "Freedom, tm" by Daniel Suarez during the flight home.
My counterpoint to this is simply the bulk; I love my Kindle Keyboard that I've had for about two years now because I travel a lot... both personally and business. Carrying books around in a carry-on is a pain and as my girlfriend discovered when we returned from Ireland two years ago having a large number of books really confuses TSA agents. I wish I were kidding!
Now having said that, there is an argument here that a tablet would be even better still since it can do so much and is really small. I would agree with that except that I have an iPad and have had a few Android tablets. Honestly; the form factor sucks for reading anything but magazine-style stuff. Actual books; the Kindle is FAR superior. The iPad I have to hold in both hands and because of its weight have to hold it with something supporting my arm to be comfortable. The Kindle is so light and compact that I can hold it in one hand and still turn pages back and forth with my thumb. It's also dead-easy to bookmark ("dog-ear") a page at any point and even sync those bookmarks and your current read page to the "cloud" so when (if) you do fire up the Kindle app on your phone, iPad or whatever you can continue where you left off, or open a specific bookmark.
The Nexus 7 and iPad Mini are better form factors for reading, but you still have the issue of weight. Also, you can't turn the page with one hand... you have to use the rather retarded "page swipe" or call up an onscreen menu and click a button. This puts you back in a two-handed mode which is rather uncomfortable for long periods of time.
This year my vacation for myself and my son was to a beach. Having the Kindle to kick back on the sand and read a book while my son had a blast in the sand and sea was a godsend. I did try the iPad briefly on the first day and hated trying to ignore reflections, peer at the relatively dimly lit screen etc.
Have tablets impacted sales of eReaders? Yes... and they will continue to do so. Will they supplant them? Of that I am far less sure; my Kindle is also incredibly handy for technical documentation and a friend of mine uses his for carrying around maintenance documents for some of the steel cutting and bending machinery as well as CNC machines he works on. He tried an Android tablet and in that manufacturing environment the screen was broken in about three days. The Kindle... OK he's on his third because of breakage but with a good case they last one hell of a lot longer than the tablet. That and the battery life; you use an iPad as an eReader and the battery life is not great... the Kindle he just throws it on a charger occasionally. For him it's a huge improvement on the old way of going to find the maintenance books (which are huge!) before working on one of them. Maybe eReaders are a bit of a niche product... but they always were. But I don't think it's a niche that's going away.
I for one will buy another similar Kindle if/when I kill or lose the one I have.
I went through almost the same process as you, and pretty much settled on the exact configuration you had up until a couple of months ago.
/opt filesystem and a script that replicates it nicely... plus I don't really have to do much to keep it running. I gave the box 2 cores and 4GB of ram, dialed down the swappiness and it just runs. With 10 average users it runs a load average of 0.25 or thereabouts most of the time... and as of right now has an uptime of 56 days. Oh, there's also a desktop client for Mac, Windows and Linux that basically works like an offline version of the web interface... it's not perfect but very usable for offline mail use.
While I was at VMworld I played with Zimbra in their hands-on labs and decided I wanted to check it out. When I found out that there's a free version available I figured that I would stand up a virtual machine and play with it. You know what? I liked it. It's a bit heavy being a Java app, but it integrates a really nice web interface with the same backend components I was running before; Procmail, Spamassassin and so on... and the web interface is a lot more capable than Roundcube, integrating calendar and contact stuff quite nicely. Once I discovered that I could also use "Z-Push" to create an unsupported but perfectly functional ActiveSync compatible front end... well I was sold right then. Sure, the Z-Push took a lot of trial and error, but once I got it working it just is slick as all get out. I have an iPhone, iPad and my Android phone all hooked up to it, as well as my son's aging Windows Mobile phone.
I will say as a caveat though that you do have to be a bit careful; make sure you're using a supported OS and don't jump ahead on patching unless you've taken a system snapshot first (I had it break on an early version with Ubuntu 10... once I moved to the latest Zimbra and 12.04 I have had no problems with other patches either, but I am still a bit more gun-shy than I was with my self-bakes email server). Zimbra does have a lot of dependencies and though most of them are baked into the package (MySQL, Postfix, Spamassassin etc) any one of the others does run the risk of breaking stuff. Still, that's what snapshots are for.
I must admit, I like the fact that I have this nice slick interface, my phone working and even database replication to a remote host thanks to using ZFS for my entire
And to feed into the original question; there's actually a very good local desktop app that works great. I know; I use it for my mail server. You can also with a bit of leg work get an unsupported but functional ActiveSync setup for your mobile devices that works awesome called z-push (I use version 2.0.2 because it just works pretty damned slick with both my Android and iPhone devices).
I will say though that I find the desktop client quite buggy when you add external accounts like GMail and the like. It never seems to finish sync until I've restarted it three or four times... so I just use Thunderbird for my GMail account with Zimbra for my own hosted account (which I'm trying to get people to use more).
For bonus points of course, it's all just Linux at the end of the day so you can get really creative with it. I installed it on Ubuntu 12.04 instead of using the appliance because I wanted to use ZFS as my data store and I have a script that replicates it to another server nightly in case of a server failure. On top of that for a time I had an IMAP client that ran on it connecting to GMail and then feeding all my mail back into a folder on the Zimbra server... but because I couldn't "reply as" it was useless... but is certainly doable if you want to just always reply from your Zimbra account.
Combine all this with a free StartCom certificate and you're golden... and despite being "heavy" (Java), it is a damned good mail system and the web interface is pretty damned slick.
Bumblebee. I use it, and it works.
Incorrect; Bumblebee allows you to boot into Intel and run Optimus stuff on the Nvidia with a simple command of "/usr/bin/optirun (application)". I use it all the time and it works great on a couple of different Optimus-equipped laptops I've tested it on. On my own Alienware M11xR2 I can get 4 and a half hours out the battery if I don't run 3D stuff... about 2 and a half when I do.
If you're into hardcore 3D gaming there's also the NVidia Optimus, which while I know is the solution that OP is complaining about is also supportable with Bumblebee (http://bumblebee-project.org/). It works fantastically well on my Alienware, and I've tested it on a Dell Latitude E6430 with great success (before I put Windows 8 on it for work). Power consumption is also great because I'm using Intel graphics most of the time for the desktop and only running the NVidia when I want to fire up Diaspora or FlightGear.
I came here to pretty much say this. I actually got an Alienware M11XR2 for free (it was purchased by my work for an executive who decided he hated it, and nobody else wanted such a small laptop so it was given to me as a play box). I stuck Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on it, installed Bumblebee after a bit of research and it works fantastically well. I play FlightGear and Diaspora on it frequently, and just got into the Steam for Linux beta. I haven't had any issues with it at all.
/usr/bin/optirun when I have a 3D accelerated app installed. Just for the record I run Gnome-Shell instead of Unity because I seriously can't stand it, and editing the menu items is easier.
:)
While I agree it's not an optimal solution (groan... oh the pun, the pun!) it works really well. I have just modified the launchers in my start menu to call
Interestingly, that extra step is really not that different to what I do on my Windows laptop which has a newer Optimus chipset (Dell E6430); more often than not I have to go and modify the launchers in the start menu to make sure they use the Optimus chipset to run instead of the Intel. Although I do also use the Nvidia control panel for that.
Hmm... maybe all that's missing is a control panel item for Bumblebee... I might have to break out my Python/GTK skills and throw one together
I just wanted to +1 this because I don't have mod points. Sociopaths very much do have no empathic response to others. My ex wife was diagnosed as a sociopath after our divorce... this wasn't exactly news to me but was a bitter pill to swallow. Since it came on late in life, it seems most likely that it was actually caused by physical damage in her case (which we can likely trace back to a car accident she had in 2003 where she did suffer minor brain damage). She literally feels no empathy toward others... in a sense I had to accept that for half a decade before the divorce she actually didn't really love me. There is also the chance that she never felt empathic... that she was always a sociopath.... but that's something we'll never know for sure.
She still lies, manipulates and cheats. She is also extremely good at pretending to be empathic and giving the outward appearance of normality... it's only when you are around her a lot that you start to see that her responses are manufactured. Quite often her responses seem almost too perfect and tend to echo similar emotional responses she has recently observed in movies and TV... which can make her seem quite emotionally volatile because her emotional responses change so much over time.
I think GP has never actually encountered a sociopath... I envy him.
I actually agree with GP... the Surface is a surprising development from Microsoft simply because it works so damned well. I've not played with one for long but I came away incredibly impressed. I have an iPad that's not seen a charge in 6 months, a smattering of Android tablets (and I think I've misplaced some of them) but to-date my computing world has been three laptops (one Windows, one Mac OSX and one Ubuntu), a server (running Ubuntu) and my Android phone. The Surface is the only tablet I could see myself actually using "in anger"; it's something I can whip out at a coffee shop to surf the web or actually get some real work done (assuming I have the keyboard/cover attached!) or something that's small, light and portable enough to throw into my backpack when I'm going for a long ride on my motorcycle for a couple of days... the only one of my laptops I consider small enough is my Ubuntu box which is an Alienware M11Xr2... even then the Surface is probably better.
It lacks apps at the moment... and the "classic" desktop feels a little like an appendix on the ARM-based tablet (no real apps for that environment)... but that will change and is changing rapidly.
+1 to this.
I did a clean install of Windows 8 on my shiny new Dell Latitude E6430 on the day I received it... didn't even boot Windows 7. I figured the only way to learn something about this new OS was to jump in feet first and take a few licks. You know what? It's not bad.
Now, the caveat to that is that I put the final release candidate version on... not the boxed copy that wasn't yet released. Drivers were an issue for a bit... had great fun with Hulu Plus app and the fact that my 6430 has the Optimus video stuff going on (so it wouldn't play video) but that was fixed on Halloween when Dell/NVidia finally put out a new driver set. Of course, being on the bleeding edge sometimes means pain.
I will also set the caveat that I grew VERY weary of jumping back and forth between "Modern" and "Classic"... and I still don't really find benefit in "Modern" except for consumption; not creation. All I use it for is reading Reddit to Go and the news app while I eat my lunch or drink my coffee... other than that I work in "Classic". I also don't get the "Modern" apps... fullscreen single app... what is this; 1984 again? Seriously; WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 did this 30 years ago and I thought we have moved on from that idea. I for one *like* having multiple windows I can move around, scale and switch between. It makes my workflow a lot easier. This "single-app-per-screen" was what I thought Windows was supposed to save us from... now we're going back there?
I will admit it makes sense on a phone or a tablet... but it makes NO sense at all on a 24" 1920x1080 monitor three feet from your face unless it's a touchscreen and you have arms like an orang-utan. On the flip-side, I installed Classic Shell and have been quite happy ever since, only venturing into "Modern" when I have an actual need for one of the apps in there.
Java would actually be relevant to anything more than Enterprise and a tiny niche market of consumers.
I'm not sure I'd call Android either an Enterprise product or a tiny consumer niche even though a solid chunk of what you see in Android is written in Java, and all apps are written in it.
Though having said that the rest of your comments to have some merit. Slashdot does tend somewhat to be an echo chamber but that doesn't make the discussion irrelevant. I would say if you were to go back on the Slashdot comments about products that would fail you'll actually find more accurate predictions than the ones you trotted out; they are only obvious because they were probably the most glaring but there are plenty of other discussions about technology failures and successes.
You know, we've been doing this for four years where I work. And yes, I know everyone here is going to espouse Truecrypt as the one true solution, but the simple fact is NASA is run as a corporation... as such they'll probably go for a solution that's vendor supported. The fact that they're NASA will probably mean they'll get a pretty decent price on the software too.
Now, the downside of full-disk encryption (which many lazy corporations do instead of home directory only) is that it does increase the load on your system, slow it down and make recovery if/when it breaks a royal pain. Our helpdesk has an almost constant stream of laptops coming and going through their hands that they have to decrypt and re-encrypt because something got out of sync. Time consuming, and leads to downtime for the users. I've often suggested home folder only encryption... but the higher ups want it all encrypted... right up to the point that their laptop is down for two days because they've broken it.
By the way, another horrible side effect of whole disk encryption is that our experience says that it'll kill SSD's pretty rapidly. Our average SSD life is less than a year at this point because there doesn't seem to be a good full-disk encryption software that properly implements TRIM... so spinning disk or hybrid disk is the way to go.
I've used a fair smattering of virtual hosts and hypervisors both at work and personally. So here's what I think of them all (the free ones, anyway);
VMware: Probably one of the easiest to get set up and master. Dead simple point-and-click interface. Learning this is good if you want a career in virtualization because it is the yardstick by which all others are judged. There are a lot of features though that are disabled in the free version that are used in corporate environments... but you'll have the basics down.
Hyper-V: Also very simple to use and manage... but unlike VMware means you can run it as a side-piece on your existing Windows box rather than having a dedicated piece of hardware just for virtualization. Already built into most modern Windows variants, and used somewhat regularly in corporate environments. Again, paid adds features and support.
Citrix XenServer: Takes the basics of the open source Xen and adds a pretty damned nice GUI. Paid version adds support, but most of the major features are available and functional in the freebie. Trial versions of everything are available. Memory management out of the box is a bit of a pain (no overcommitment by default) but easy enough to modify. Use in corporate environments tends to follow people who have significant Citrix/XenDesktop infrastructure.
Xen (Open Source): By far the best to learn EVERYTHING about how virtualization actually works, but probably the worst for actually getting running VM's. There are GUI tools to simplify it, but since Xen is currently moving to a new toolset that is incompatible with most GUI interfaces, and the GUIs tend to be a smidge buggy on occasion it's usually easier just to learn the command line. Of course, then there are config files, XML files, bridged network interfaces. If you want to learn about the internals this is the way to go... but if you're only going to dedicate a day to trying each one then you might want to skip it... this one will take a couple of days at least even with the several well-written HOWTO's. Having said that, once everything is working it's really nice and you can turn around and say that you know how virtualization works, instead of just saying you know how a single product works!
VirtualBox: Like VMware is good for the beginner to learn the basics because it does have a nice GUI that guides you through everything. Update notifications are a constant irritant though; it seems that every week they're releasing an update for this bug or another... I turn that off and upgrade when I feel like it! However, use in corporate environments is almost non-existent. Good support for most OS's, and decent support for 3D graphics and the like but still pretty kludgy. I use it on my Mac for running my BootCamp partition while under OSX... mostly so I can access stuff on that installation and run updates and the like without having to reboot OSX.
I broke out the two main versions of Xen because they are significantly different. They are similar at the core (based on the same code) but Citrix has it own front-end tools that are incompatible with the tools you'll use under open source. However, the commands are the same and so learning open source Xen will have some bearing on using Citrix Xen.
Of course, there are plenty of other hypervisors out there. My personal recommendation if you just want to play would probably be Hyper-V or VirtualBox. VirtualBox has the advantage of being cross-platform; I don't know if you run Linux or Windows (or OSX) at home, and obviously Hyper-V is Windows only. If you really want to learn virtualization and how it works, then open source Xen is the way to go... I run it on my Ubuntu 12.04LTS box and love it... but it's not for the faint of heart! Setting up the networking alone can be "fun" and you should definitely familiarize yourself intimately with how to undo what you have done so you don't break anything! VMware like I said is used extensively in corporate environments... so if you want to pursue it as a career I'd recommend dedicating a box to an ESXi server and just play with it. It's free and easy... but really doesn't teach much in my opinion.
tl;dr: People suck.
Of course; they're simulators. That's exactly what real flight is like. Of course, in the real thing the terror is a bit more palpable because you're ACTUALLY in danger...
:)
Though there are aspects that are tricky to simulate; the taste of horrible coffee, the smell of a first officer with terminal flatulence, and the horrible shiver that goes down your spine when your finger happens to find a blob of some unidentifiable substance that has scraped off the fingers of the previous pilot onto the seat adjustment controls. The only advice I can give there is not to sniff it...
I am sure these things are also able to be simulated... sort of glad they're not.
Why yes, I am a pilot; how did you know?
I paid for FFE... and given the buggy piece of shit it turned out to be I think he owes me money.
Couldn't agree more. The reason Star Citizen has the traction it has, is that Chris Roberts started with demonstrable code and graphics. His presentation of the ideas is also fantastic.
Sorry, I am a bit jaded. Braben had his day but has promised Elite 4 for over a decade now and has never actually had anything solid to show for it. Even this Kickstarter project is just some hyperbole on a web page. So far his track record for promising the sky is secure, but actually delivering... yeah. And this is from one of the people who actively defended Frontier First Encounters because I saw the potential... but man the bugs were horrendous. If you think you've seen buggy code, you haven't seen a thing until you played the original FFE prior to the patch (which fixed only some of the bugs).
Maybe I'll be proven wrong... and in a sense I hope I am. I won't be backing him though: The world has moved beyond Elite. I play Eve Online and am deciding right now whether to back Star Citizen (*make that probably will before the end of the day). These deliver on the promises Braben made in the late 90's, and even deliver on the same promises that prompted Braben to whine that the technology wasn't there yet back in 2006. Ironically, Eve delivered many of the things he claimed were impossible right out of the gate back in 2003. Colour me unimpressed until I see something functional that we can see.
So Minneapolis now has two selling points? High speed phone data and the Mall of America. Whoo... I really should move. /sarcasm :)
... the new trilogy complemented the old one,
I do not think that word means what you think it means...
The concept was actually perfect timing; the problem was it was hobbled by horrendous execution. The Webtop environment was horribly limiting, basically allowing you to do nothing except run Firefox. The $499 price tag on launch day was also unbelievable when you could buy a functional laptop for less. Add on the AT&T options you had to add to your plan in order to own it ("Tethering plan + smartphone data plan") and it made the whole thing horribly cost-prohibitive.
I had an Atrix myself and liked it a lot. It was a great phone. My girlfriend purchased the lapdock (for $299 after a few months) and still uses it for her school (she's working on her MBA) so I got to play with it. To me it was effectively unusable without hacking it for a full Ubuntu install instead of the rather crap environment it had. Even then, it was still limited in storage until I hacked it some more to move it to the SD card... and then... and then. Yeah, it could have been a great tool and I loved the idea of everything being right there on my phone, but when I had to turn to XDA-Developers in order to make it functional, there's a problem.