SpamAssassin (normally run on the smtp server) does something very similar. Unfortunately asking users to filter their mail based headers is like asking them to perform rocket surgery. Also, it turns out that OE cannot filter like this if it's being used with an IMAP server. I'm not sure if Thunderbird's built in spam filter makes use of the SpamAssassin headers or not but I wouldn't be surprised if it did.
Well, they may not have taken YOUR phone but they certainly do take phones they didn't sell. I have a Motorola V60c here that was origionally an Altel phone and I didn't have any trouble activating it on Verizon via their web site. I didn't change the firmware either.
I agree but I'd add that the problems you mention are really all just aspects of the same problem, or at least seem to go together. If someone knows they are paying you a high salary they are far more likely to take your advice seriously and far less likely to waste your time on things they could do for themselves.
So who are you going through now? For us hardware sales arn't a profit center, just a convienence to customers who are buying other services and frankly buying through Dell is a PITA. Unfortunately most of the other folks we've used have had inconsistant build quality.
What they don't mention in the glossies is that all of those users with thin clients are out of the water if the servers are down.
Definitely. And in my experience (we use a lot of Windows 2003 terminal servers), there are server problems fairly regularly.
Sure but these days even desktop users rely heavily on the network for things like shared storage etc. If your infrustructure isn't up to snuff you have problems no matter what. I havn't set up a Windows TC in a real production enviornment but uptimes for LTSP setups of a year or more are pretty common.
- A midrange server (~$10k) doesn't have *that* much more horsepower than a decent desktop. Maybe 3-4 times the CPU, 4 times the RAM, 4 times the disk space (more IO from SCSI RAID, of course). Yet people expect to be able to have 20-30 concurrent users with performance at least as good as that $500 desktop.
That's not unreasonable in many cases. Even with dozens of users cpu utilization tends to be nearly zero most of the time and memory is usually shared between copies of the same app so running 10X Mozilla does NOT take 10X the memory. The first person of the day to open an app may have to wait a few seconds but now that app is in cache and loads instantly for everyone else.
I thought Office was the #1 product because everyone knows how to use it and no one wants to use anything else (habit, addiction).
That's part of it but compatability is really the keystone. In my experience:
A. Most people (maybe 80 - 90%) don't know what they're doing in MS Office either. They get by but asking them to do something simple like saving a document in another format is like asking them to do brain surgery.
B. Consider an office of 100 workers. Even if 80% could be just as happy with OO they still have to buy MSO for everyone in order to stay comapatable with the 20% who actually need what MSO has to offer.
I do not know anyone who want to change his/her Office suite (except myself).
I say that every time a new version of MSO comes out and yet over time people do switch. Usually it's because customers with new versions of MSO that came with their shinny new Dell's send them documents they cannot open and they feel (sometimes rightly, sometimes not) that upgrading to the latest MSO themselves will help. I don't remember the last I heard of someone who upgraded to the latest MSO because they actually wanted one of it's new features. That's the power of incompatability + Monopoly.
I don't mean in the somewhat vauge utopian way that some (mis)associate with Stallman etc but in the feeling of being limited only by my own willingness to learn. If I want to try something new like learning a new programming language or booting a computer over a network or whatever I just do it rather than having to crack open my check book every time I want to explore. Also freedom from being treated like either a child or a criminal by the likes of MS and Sony with their product keys, activation schemes, rootkits etc. Freedom from unreasonable EULAs, the other day I noticed that the latest Flash Player Eula makes you agree to allow Adobe to "audit" your computer any time they want! I know they'll probably never actually demand an audit but why should I agree to let some joker into my house any time they want over some toy? The cost is nice too. I've got 6 computers around here at the moment and since my business is so closely tied to my hobby I probably couldn't legally use a lot of the "free for personal use" freeware that many use. The cost to outfit all of these with a modern Windows + AV + utilities and server software would run me into the thousands, and of course half of these machines wouldn't even run a modern Windows without serious upgrades.
Sorry for the rambling, but that's at least part of the appeal of Linux for me.
As a consumer the idea of my ISP blocking access to certain web sites or degrading third voip services in order to push their own bothers me but... As someone who manages several small business networks and runs a micro WISP I know that there ARE sometimes good reasons shape certain kinds of traffic and in some cases block it altogether.
Is legislation really likely to be so well written that it keeps Verizon from blocking competing VOIP solutions but still allows them to do responsible things like giving all VOIP traffic priority over bulk downloads? Also for some mediums, such as standard 802.11b/g large customer uploads absolutely kill performance for everyone else due to the "hidden node" problem. Unless you are going to use some sort of propriatary polling scheme you pretty much HAVE to shape bulk uploads if you want anything that requires low latency to work at all. Also, would spam/porn/add/popup blocking be allowed as long as they are optional?
When did techies decide that the GUI was the most important aspect of an OS? What keeps us from identifying the benefits of the 2.6.15-r6 kernel (such as SATA RAID support)?
Probably because anyone who knows what a kernel is can install whatever one they want on any distro. A really pollished (not just pretty but actually works right) GUI is a lot harder to graft on to a distro that doesn't already have it.
Frankley it seems self evident. If being gay is a choice then the opposite must be also but I just don't see how I could "choose" to be attracted to another man. Isn't it like that for you?
It's really short term thinking vs. long term thinking. Consider what happens when you have one gadget with binary drivers that only supports kernels through version X and another gadget with binary drivers that only support kernels from version X+1 on. What about different distributions? What if some day you want to try out one of the BSDs or maybe some other OS entirely? How about a different hardware platform?
The thing is that propriatary software has a habit of tying you to a whole host of other stuff that you may or may not want in the future.
From the article: In addition, customers aren't asking for open-source drivers, he said.
Your Response: There have been dozens of calls over the years for drivers to be open sourced!
But then you do a complete U-turn and say: Regardless so long as the drivers are proprietary, I will continue to load proprietary drivers into my kernel
And you're calling the FSF narrow minded? Pot, meet Kettle.
I couldn't agree more. The ability to do repairs in-house is the main reason I've been recomending Thinkpads to customers and buying them for my business. Shipping a dead laptop off takes longer and you never know what they are going to decide to do with the software/data. The last time I had a Gateway apart to repair a power plug it was something like 120+ screws to get to the motherboard and it took forever to get the thing back together. In contrast, I replaced the lcd inverter in a Thinkpad a while back and it took me an hour or less. I don't think I could have even gotten an inverter for most other brands. I'm not sure what I'll start using if Lenovo drops the ball.
I don't know how much space IPcop takes up but you can get cf -> ide adapters and cf cards pretty cheap these days. I just picked up a couple of extra 256MB CF cards from Newegg for $12 each and I think the CF -> IDE adapters were in the $20 range.
I've got several Debian Sarge boxes running OpenVPN with 2.4 series kernels and it works fine. In fact some of these were Woody boxes until fairly recently.
I'm not sure why you keep comparing OpenVPN VS. IPSEC. Openvpn is a product and IPsec is a protocol (actually a set of protocols) and in fact OpenVPN USES IPsec.
I've always liked IMP for email but last time I checked (about a year ago) the rest of Horde was either non-existant or alpha quality. Are the other features such as shared calendars, address books etc ready for production use now?
For now I've been using PhpGroupware instead which basically has the opposite problem. Overall it works great but the email module seems pretty clunky, especially for higher volume mail users.
they are NOT going to mess with PCs for fuck's sake! If someone has high security requirements that entity is not going to buy from a consumer level shop ANYWAY.
So you're saying that the sensitive departments of the US government custom builds their own desktops and laptops? Have a reference?
OK, now that we've had our magical holographic storage story for the year maybe it's time to move on to a story about a super parallel computer using FPGAS.
They don't have to backward compatible anymore. They are a frickin software company for one, #2, they own a fricking VM company (VirtualPC) that is responsible for Windows on the Mac.
Well, in fairness backword compatability is the main thing that their customers care about. Normal people don't buy a computer to run the OS, they buy it to run their apps. If a customer's existing software won't work on a new OS they might just as well start looking at a different OS or, more likely just stay with the old system for a while longer.
Sadly, however, not every org has the resources to hire a firm to do their IT for them.
In my experience most businesses cannot afford NOT to have someone competent in charge of their IT. It doesn't need to be a full time job, a few hours per month is often plenty. The alternative is to have the "Office Guru", you know, they guy that has an X-Box at home and bought something on Ebay once, deal with it. The problem is that he/she probably has a real job they are supposed to be doing and will spend hours dealing with issues that would take a professional a few minutes to fix and will probably ignore any kind of preventitive maintence.
There's nothing wrong with a monopoly if it really is the best choice as there's no anti-competitive things going on to make it a trust.
Well, I don't see how you can ever know if there would have been a better choice in the absense of a monopoly. About all that can be said is that on average and over long periods of time competition will produce better products. There are clearly some markets, and I think the PC OS market is one of them, where just the existance of a monopoly or near monopoly tends to lock out competing products due mainly to compatability issues. I know plenty of people who would be as well or better served by Linux if only the hardware and software that they care about were available but the small market share of Linux prevents this software from being ported. Show me a single consumer grade scanner that not only works in Linux but actually comes with a nice poster describing exactly how to set it up in Linux. That isn't a reflection on the quality of Linux but just an artifact of low market share. This isn't just limited to operating systems either, I'm sure many of us here know of businesses who hate some software product or another that they use and would love to switch to a competing product but they don't because they have years of criticle data locked up in some propriatary format. Basically every software product is it's own monopoly and the result is often buggy products and crappy service. That situation just cannot possibly be effecient but it's pretty much guaranteed by our current copyright system.
I have no problem buying software if it's worth the cost of paying for it.
I see buying software from MS as like buying a stolen stereo from some guy on the street. Sure it's probably just as good as one from the store and at half the price or less it's a much better bargin but I also know that my money is going to fund additional theft and that will eventually come back to bite me or someone I know. Likewise I know that at least some of the money I pay MS is going towards preventing me from having a choice next time via both legal and illegal means. As a result, I'll buy their stuff if I feel I have to but if there is another choice that is even close I'll buy that instead.
Slashdot Mirror
SpamAssassin (normally run on the smtp server) does something very similar. Unfortunately asking users to filter their mail based headers is like asking them to perform rocket surgery. Also, it turns out that OE cannot filter like this if it's being used with an IMAP server. I'm not sure if Thunderbird's built in spam filter makes use of the SpamAssassin headers or not but I wouldn't be surprised if it did.
Verizon will not take phones they didn't sell.
Well, they may not have taken YOUR phone but they certainly do take phones they didn't sell. I have a Motorola V60c here that was origionally an Altel phone and I didn't have any trouble activating it on Verizon via their web site. I didn't change the firmware either.
I agree but I'd add that the problems you mention are really all just aspects of the same problem, or at least seem to go together. If someone knows they are paying you a high salary they are far more likely to take your advice seriously and far less likely to waste your time on things they could do for themselves.
So who are you going through now? For us hardware sales arn't a profit center, just a convienence to customers who are buying other services and frankly buying through Dell is a PITA. Unfortunately most of the other folks we've used have had inconsistant build quality.
Sure but these days even desktop users rely heavily on the network for things like shared storage etc. If your infrustructure isn't up to snuff you have problems no matter what. I havn't set up a Windows TC in a real production enviornment but uptimes for LTSP setups of a year or more are pretty common.
That's not unreasonable in many cases. Even with dozens of users cpu utilization tends to be nearly zero most of the time and memory is usually shared between copies of the same app so running 10X Mozilla does NOT take 10X the memory. The first person of the day to open an app may have to wait a few seconds but now that app is in cache and loads instantly for everyone else.
I thought Office was the #1 product because everyone knows how to use it and no one wants to use anything else (habit, addiction).
That's part of it but compatability is really the keystone. In my experience:
A. Most people (maybe 80 - 90%) don't know what they're doing in MS Office either. They get by but asking them to do something simple like saving a document in another format is like asking them to do brain surgery.
B. Consider an office of 100 workers. Even if 80% could be just as happy with OO they still have to buy MSO for everyone in order to stay comapatable with the 20% who actually need what MSO has to offer.
I do not know anyone who want to change his/her Office suite (except myself).
I say that every time a new version of MSO comes out and yet over time people do switch. Usually it's because customers with new versions of MSO that came with their shinny new Dell's send them documents they cannot open and they feel (sometimes rightly, sometimes not) that upgrading to the latest MSO themselves will help. I don't remember the last I heard of someone who upgraded to the latest MSO because they actually wanted one of it's new features. That's the power of incompatability + Monopoly.
What's wrong with bookmarks as html? I've always liked being able to set my home page to point at my bookmarks.htm.
Short answer: Freedom.
I don't mean in the somewhat vauge utopian way that some (mis)associate with Stallman etc but in the feeling of being limited only by my own willingness to learn. If I want to try something new like learning a new programming language or booting a computer over a network or whatever I just do it rather than having to crack open my check book every time I want to explore. Also freedom from being treated like either a child or a criminal by the likes of MS and Sony with their product keys, activation schemes, rootkits etc. Freedom from unreasonable EULAs, the other day I noticed that the latest Flash Player Eula makes you agree to allow Adobe to "audit" your computer any time they want! I know they'll probably never actually demand an audit but why should I agree to let some joker into my house any time they want over some toy? The cost is nice too. I've got 6 computers around here at the moment and since my business is so closely tied to my hobby I probably couldn't legally use a lot of the "free for personal use" freeware that many use. The cost to outfit all of these with a modern Windows + AV + utilities and server software would run me into the thousands, and of course half of these machines wouldn't even run a modern Windows without serious upgrades.
Sorry for the rambling, but that's at least part of the appeal of Linux for me.
As a consumer the idea of my ISP blocking access to certain web sites or degrading third voip services in order to push their own bothers me but... As someone who manages several small business networks and runs a micro WISP I know that there ARE sometimes good reasons shape certain kinds of traffic and in some cases block it altogether.
Is legislation really likely to be so well written that it keeps Verizon from blocking competing VOIP solutions but still allows them to do responsible things like giving all VOIP traffic priority over bulk downloads? Also for some mediums, such as standard 802.11b/g large customer uploads absolutely kill performance for everyone else due to the "hidden node" problem. Unless you are going to use some sort of propriatary polling scheme you pretty much HAVE to shape bulk uploads if you want anything that requires low latency to work at all. Also, would spam/porn/add/popup blocking be allowed as long as they are optional?
When did techies decide that the GUI was the most important aspect of an OS? What keeps us from identifying the benefits of the 2.6.15-r6 kernel (such as SATA RAID support)?
Probably because anyone who knows what a kernel is can install whatever one they want on any distro. A really pollished (not just pretty but actually works right) GUI is a lot harder to graft on to a distro that doesn't already have it.
Frankley it seems self evident. If being gay is a choice then the opposite must be also but I just don't see how I could "choose" to be attracted to another man. Isn't it like that for you?
Useability beats ideology
It's really short term thinking vs. long term thinking. Consider what happens when you have one gadget with binary drivers that only supports kernels through version X and another gadget with binary drivers that only support kernels from version X+1 on. What about different distributions? What if some day you want to try out one of the BSDs or maybe some other OS entirely? How about a different hardware platform?
The thing is that propriatary software has a habit of tying you to a whole host of other stuff that you may or may not want in the future.
From the article:
In addition, customers aren't asking for open-source drivers, he said.
Your Response:
There have been dozens of calls over the years for drivers to be open sourced!
But then you do a complete U-turn and say:
Regardless so long as the drivers are proprietary, I will continue to load proprietary drivers into my kernel
And you're calling the FSF narrow minded? Pot, meet Kettle.
i-series...
I couldn't agree more. The ability to do repairs in-house is the main reason I've been recomending Thinkpads to customers and buying them for my business. Shipping a dead laptop off takes longer and you never know what they are going to decide to do with the software/data. The last time I had a Gateway apart to repair a power plug it was something like 120+ screws to get to the motherboard and it took forever to get the thing back together. In contrast, I replaced the lcd inverter in a Thinkpad a while back and it took me an hour or less. I don't think I could have even gotten an inverter for most other brands. I'm not sure what I'll start using if Lenovo drops the ball.
Do you have a link to more info on your POS solutions? Also, do you have solutions for other markets or just restaurants?
Feel free to email me if you prefer. ray AT sonictech DOT net
I don't know how much space IPcop takes up but you can get cf -> ide adapters and cf cards pretty cheap these days. I just picked up a couple of extra 256MB CF cards from Newegg for $12 each and I think the CF -> IDE adapters were in the $20 range.
I've got several Debian Sarge boxes running OpenVPN with 2.4 series kernels and it works fine. In fact some of these were Woody boxes until fairly recently.
I'm not sure why you keep comparing OpenVPN VS. IPSEC. Openvpn is a product and IPsec is a protocol (actually a set of protocols) and in fact OpenVPN USES IPsec.
I've always liked IMP for email but last time I checked (about a year ago) the rest of Horde was either non-existant or alpha quality. Are the other features such as shared calendars, address books etc ready for production use now?
For now I've been using PhpGroupware instead which basically has the opposite problem. Overall it works great but the email module seems pretty clunky, especially for higher volume mail users.
they are NOT going to mess with PCs for fuck's sake! If someone has high security requirements that entity is not going to buy from a consumer level shop ANYWAY.
So you're saying that the sensitive departments of the US government custom builds their own desktops and laptops? Have a reference?
OK, now that we've had our magical holographic storage story for the year maybe it's time to move on to a story about a super parallel computer using FPGAS.
They don't have to backward compatible anymore. They are a frickin software company for one, #2, they own a fricking VM company (VirtualPC) that is responsible for Windows on the Mac.
Well, in fairness backword compatability is the main thing that their customers care about. Normal people don't buy a computer to run the OS, they buy it to run their apps. If a customer's existing software won't work on a new OS they might just as well start looking at a different OS or, more likely just stay with the old system for a while longer.
Sadly, however, not every org has the resources to hire a firm to do their IT for them.
In my experience most businesses cannot afford NOT to have someone competent in charge of their IT. It doesn't need to be a full time job, a few hours per month is often plenty. The alternative is to have the "Office Guru", you know, they guy that has an X-Box at home and bought something on Ebay once, deal with it. The problem is that he/she probably has a real job they are supposed to be doing and will spend hours dealing with issues that would take a professional a few minutes to fix and will probably ignore any kind of preventitive maintence.
There's nothing wrong with a monopoly if it really is the best choice as there's no anti-competitive things going on to make it a trust.
Well, I don't see how you can ever know if there would have been a better choice in the absense of a monopoly. About all that can be said is that on average and over long periods of time competition will produce better products. There are clearly some markets, and I think the PC OS market is one of them, where just the existance of a monopoly or near monopoly tends to lock out competing products due mainly to compatability issues. I know plenty of people who would be as well or better served by Linux if only the hardware and software that they care about were available but the small market share of Linux prevents this software from being ported. Show me a single consumer grade scanner that not only works in Linux but actually comes with a nice poster describing exactly how to set it up in Linux. That isn't a reflection on the quality of Linux but just an artifact of low market share. This isn't just limited to operating systems either, I'm sure many of us here know of businesses who hate some software product or another that they use and would love to switch to a competing product but they don't because they have years of criticle data locked up in some propriatary format. Basically every software product is it's own monopoly and the result is often buggy products and crappy service. That situation just cannot possibly be effecient but it's pretty much guaranteed by our current copyright system.
I have no problem buying software if it's worth the cost of paying for it.
I see buying software from MS as like buying a stolen stereo from some guy on the street. Sure it's probably just as good as one from the store and at half the price or less it's a much better bargin but I also know that my money is going to fund additional theft and that will eventually come back to bite me or someone I know. Likewise I know that at least some of the money I pay MS is going towards preventing me from having a choice next time via both legal and illegal means. As a result, I'll buy their stuff if I feel I have to but if there is another choice that is even close I'll buy that instead.