Hang on there, pardner. HMOs can be quite nice, and they can be a nightmare. It depends on the nature of the HMO and how you manage them. Tales of personal experience follow:
FIRST THERE WAS KAISER...
I was covered by Kaiser Permanente when living in CA, and they were an absolute dream. I walk in, They copy down my membership number, I wait a not-unreasonable period of time, they treat me, and I leave. When I got run over by my boss on my motorcycle (another story entirely), they took care of the whole mess. I had been carted off to a local chop-shop clinic by my employer, which sewed my missing digit back on, and Kaiser had to *undo* the surgery and sew it back on correctly.
I never saw any paperwork, I never had to pay anything other than my premium, and they even packed up a bag full of dressings & other medical accoutrements for me to take on my non-reschedulable road-trip 10 days later.
AND THEN THERE WAS GROUP HEALTH...
Having been blissed-out by my experience with Kaiser, I joined Group Health in Washington State. I quickly discovered that they are (imho) expensive, paperwork-intensive, mired in referral bullshit, and generally client-unfriendly. They insisted on assigning me to a GP, and then assigned me to a team of seven GP doctors so that I never saw the same GP twice. (Kind of defeats the purpose, no?)
It was impossible to see any specialist without seeing Dr. RandomGP(N), who would defer to Dr. RandomGP(N-1)'s experience, except that I couldn't never get in to see Dr. RandomGP(N-1) again because clients are only allowed to schedule appointments with Dr. RandomGP(ANY).
When I finally did get to see a specialist about the RSI injury to my wrist... well... I had a ~0.75" fluid bubble poking out of a rupture in the muscle wall. What does the GH doctor do? He had me look away and hit my wrist with a motherf*cking book to burst it! And because I didn't flinch when he thought I would, he hit me a lot harder than intended, and had to send me in for x-rays to make sure he didn't break my wrist. (On later visits he tried cortizone injections, then finally surgery as I had requested.)
And imho I got better treatment than the average Joe because my Group Health card was green rather than blue. What does green mean to them? Cash. I was a full-cash-paying customer. Blue-card clients (work-paid-insurance), from what I could see, got treated like shit and had to wait longer, too. Me, I got to go to the front of the line and get my poor service much faster.
IN THE END
The bottom line is that every individual's experience will be different. The kind of hands-off independence that Kaiser provided for me would be perceived as poor service by someone of my parents' generation, but I couldn't stand the way that GH did business. I'm sure that there are people out there who are happy with GH's service, I've just never me t any of them. But I wouldn't take that experience and condemn all HMOs. YMMV.
Point well taken; WINE performs very well for some, and not so well for others.
As for giving developers a wider market for their wares, I too hope that's the way the wind blows. I hope I see the day when my box of commercial software says "Certified to work with WINE" (with a nice little wine glass logo next to the wavy windows logo). Maybe Corel will be the first to put that on their packaging...
"Need" is subjective, but I'd still say a generalized 'yes.' VMware is a commercial software product that operates underneath the typical OS, and allows multiple OSs to run concurrently. You have to buy a MS-licensed copy of Windows to run on top of VMware. That's where the "VM" (virtual machine) comes from.
WINE, on the other hand is a mapping of win16 and win32 calls to 'nix calls. It's windows functions without the windows itself. It's not a VM, and therefore has a theoretical performance edge by reducing the number of application layers (although it'll be a while before WINE performance becomes acceptable).
Besides, WINE is open source, and will probably survive the next curve-ball that MS pitches. The way I see it, VMware is playing a dangerous game with MS by directly interfacing with their bread-and-butter products. Sort of like dating a guy whose previous 5 wives have all mysteriously disappeared after a long history of abuse. MS is likely to make a change to the EULA that specifies that you cannot run their OS on a VM, on a processor that wasn't purchased with the OS, etc etc. If this ever happens, VMware becomes the next Tektronix/WinDD or similar victim.
Dang! With a name like "Electrofuel" I figured that this had to be a fuel cell system. A former employer of mine was contemplating the use of a fuel cell design to power cellphones, so I'm sure it wouldn't be a stretch to power a laptop with them. Insurance and liability issues are probably the hold-up, though. Even if internal-battery model fuel cells are made only for laptop models with no battery cover (leaving an open, unencumbered exhaust vent), some fool out there would manage to block the vent, shove something in it, or otherwise blow the damn thing up in his or her lap, then file a I-dumped-McDonalds-coffee-in-my-lap lawsuit.
Oh, and I guess the market would be somewhat crimped if you were not permitted to carry the compressed gas cartridges required for a fuel cell aboard an airplane. Double-dang.
MS Office is irrelevant. For these that really desire the 100-pound godawful hodgepodge of features that MS has shoehorned into a 5-pound sack, there is StarOffice. It even recreates the Start-button interface, making even the most ardent Windows fanatic feel right at home.
However, for those that use Linux because its stability, speed, and configurability are orders of magnitude better than MS' offerings (and others' too, to be fair), the lack of MS Office on Linux is no burden. This is tantamount to claiming that Linux would be taken seriously as a server OS if MS were to port Exchange. (Pah!!) There are a multitude of offerings that serve all of the needs of most of the people. All that's necessary is a good set of file translators, which StarOffice, Applix, and Wordperfect all have.
The funny thing, IMHO, is that many of the major Linux distributions now include lots of apps at install, including office productivity and browser software. I'd like to see Microsoft attempt to sue Red Hat or SuSE to force them to give MS equal space on the preconfigured Gnome or KDE desktop (because the GPL cadre is a de facto monopoly?? God knows what MS lawyers will think up...).
Not that this should devolve into a "My macho hardware has longer uptime than yours" thing, but it's just plain dumb to issue a public challenge when you're clearly not prepared even to support the event, much less the actual responses to the challenge.
The lights were flickering all evening at my place (in Seattle proper), and my UPS' kicked in several times. But none of the systems even hiccupped. One of the modems needed the power cycled after lightning hit a pole 1 block away (nice fireworks when the City Light transformer blew up), but for the most part, everything was as it should be. It just boggles me that my basement is better prepared for such events than the MS production server staging network.
Or maybe She-Who-Hurtles-Lightning just wanted to twist Bill's undies into a wee bit tighter bunch than they already were. Heh.
Which is goofier: Lineo (easy to scrub) or Athlon (soothes your itchy feet)? These days with product names stooping to such lows as cars called the "Aspire" (to what?) and the "Charade" (it's not really a car...), a handheld operationg system called "Wince" ("You'll WinCE when you see the performance!!"), and AOL and Sun's new "iPlanet" (waaay too close to eIBM's enew ethinking), it's really hard to tell which marketing flub is worse.
Some MS people get it in their heads that MS should have a good showing in the S@H results. So they get approval from the company to set up a small server farm (so that they don't get a visit and an escort out of the building from corporate security, as is the custom for independent thinkers at MS).
They get a hold of a bunch of systems left over from the last major group upgrade. They are all the same speed & memory, all running NT with the same security hol...patch level. They started them all at the same time. So is it any surprise that they process blocks roughly in sync? Compound this with multiple clients per system, and periodic usage of the systems for other tasks, and you would have a wave-like effect as you've noticed. They turn in X000 blocks in a big hurry, then aren't heard from for a while.
As other posters have noted, large installations of Exchange usually mean very high maintenance, and as a result, very high cost. Running 1200 users on a single server is an entirely different animal than running 1200 users per server on a 25-server installation. The fact that your installation works well should be taken as a tribute to your planning, implementation, and maintenance skills. The average shows that it doesn't usually work that well.
My statements and projections are based on my experience, but I don't pretend to know everything. I worked on the Exchange team at Microsoft (a chapter in my life that I sometimes like to forget). I worked very closely with the system and component test teams, and with several customers trying to implement multi-thousand-seat installations. I wrote most of the Exchange Administrator's Guide, and a good chunk of the Concepts & Planning Guide. BUT my opinions are just that: opinions. You obviously planned your implementation well, and it works for you. In my experience/opinion, you are doing much better than average, and you should stick with Exchange.
On what kind of hardware? Are you actually suggesting 25,000 users on a single box? That would be almost two orders of magnitude beyond anything that I've seen in real production. More detail, please.
MS would like people to believe that Exchange is an enterprise-level communications tool, when it fact it is a buchered and bloated decendant of a mediocre 1992 X.400 email system from Data Connection Limited (check out http://www.datcon.co.uk/press/messserv.h tm) Don't believe the version number; Exchange is in its second major release (4.x really is 1.x, 5.x = 2.x, etc) and still has significant stability problems.
In my experience, Exchange can support 300 users per server happily on commonly acceptable x86 corporate server hardware (say, a 2 processor PII with 512mb ram). It seems that (in my limited experience, lest MS lawyers take this to be a declaration of fact, which it is not) once you've reached this level, doubling the ram and adding more cpu's has only a minimal effect, which means that you really have to add more servers to add capacity.
Let's do the math. 25,000 users at 500 users per server (to be quite generous) means that you're going to need a Windows NT server farm of about 50 systems just to do email. Again, being generous bargain hunters, let's say you can buy one of these servers for $10kUS. That means you're out $500,000 just for hardware. In my experience, you can support 500 POP users easily on a SPARC 2 or IPX, which can be had these days for about $500 decked out (including a 17" monitor). You could support the same (probably many more) on a $500 x86 box running any of the free *nixes. Assume you blow $500 on disk storage for these boxen just to level the starting line, bringing the total cost to $1000 per. That's still only $50,000.
One less zero usually gets the accountants' attention on an expenditure like this.
But let's talk about administrative support. IMHO you're going to need 1:1 admin per NT server at that usage level, given that remote admin of NT is difficult, and 500 users per server is going to prompt more than the occasional pretty blue interface. (Nevermind the security team you're going to need for a major NT installation.) Say a cheap NT admin costs $50kUS including benefits & overhead. You're looking at an HR budget of $2,500,000us. On the other hand, say you splurge and spend $150kUS per *nix admin. If they couldn't handle 10 little boxen apiece, I'll eat the electrons this was posted with. That's an HR budget of $750,000us.
That's 1/10th the hardware expense and 1/3 the maintenance expense of using Exchange. And that's (a) making some wild assumptions that benefit the Exchange argument, and (b) assumes that you're running *nix on shit hardware. Spend 5 times as much on hardware for new, supported stuff (say $250,000us, which would buy you a couple of well-outfitted Sparc 4500s, or 10 really gorgeous systems from VA Research). Your downtime will become next to nothing, you'll still have spent only half of what you would have for NT and Exchange, and your ongoing yearly administrative cost will be 1/3 of the other option. The *nix administrative savings alone will pay for the *nix hardware in a few months.
Oh yeah. I forgot the expense of 50 copies of Windows NT, 50 copies of Exchange Server, and 25,000 client licenses... (*erk*!!)
Here's a real application for a cheaper version of this device: I want to wear a recording device that captures voice-quality audio and basic b/w video, all day, every day at work. I want every event and conversation I have to be recorded and transmitted offsite, say, to a recorder in my car. 8-10 hours of recording a day at relatively low quality ought to be do-able, resulting in a couple of CD's a week. A flat-panel microphone & ccd camera (periscoped to look like a pen), battery and transmitter ought to fit in my pocket just like a pack of smokes.
With the proliferation of monitoring technology being deployed throughout the corporate world, it only makes sense that the individual have a method of leveling the playing field. Imagine sitting in a project meeting when some inept program manager starts blamestorming you for something s/he screwed up. You say "Hold on a minute. Let's listen to what you told me 6 weeks ago at lunch about something else being a higher priority..." And just imagine the instant reduction or justified rise in sexual harassment claims -- load the mpeg file for that day, hit playback and watch the actual events.
Paranoid, yes. But I can think of half a dozen instances last year off the top of my head when I would have loved to be able to correct someone else's rather liberal interpretation of reality. In some cases, it might be the only thing that would save someone's job. My employer watches and records me (email, phone, video of the premises, etc); why can't I watch and record them?
Oh, fancy that. Corporate security's knocking on the window.
If your wrists hurt when you type, take it seriously! I didn't, and I have a nifty scar on the inside of my wrist from surgery that makes it look like I tried to off myself. And no, it wasn't CTS.
I developed a minor case of tendonitis during a particularly stressful contract (working 65-hour weeks on documentation for several months). The irritation caused internal swelling and fluid collection exactly where my wrist makes contact with the wristpad while typing. The pressure fron the fluid caused a rupture in the muscle wall below the skin, and the rupture in turn caused a fluid bubble about.75" dia to bulge out of my wrist. Uncool.
I ignored it (and kept working at breakneck pace) for a couple of months before seeing a doctor. By the time I went in, I had a lot of damage, and neither drainage+therapy or steroid injections into the muscle would repair it. Surgery (the serious knock-you-out, dig-around-with-a-scalpel-and-rasp, and sew-the-muscles-back-together kind) was the only option. If I had just paid attention to my body and eased off the work, I probably wouldn't have had to have any problem.
Ignore trendy names like CTS or RSI. Don't seek labels because they facilitate easy misdiagnosis. Pay attention to your body, and make sure that your doctor pays attention to your symptoms rather than matching you to a diagnostic profile. If something hurts, stop! If it affects your work and you can't stop, at least vary your techniques. Remember that no job is worth permanently damaging your hands or any other part of your body.
With all the creativity out there, surely it would be possible to release these movies in serial style: shorter, better, and cheaper. Shorter movie production times imply shorter release cycles (noone here is familiar with that notion, are they?). More use of CGI technology implies cheaper initial costs (esp using cots hardware and free/oss tools). More movies would probably lead to more competition between movie production companies and movie houses (and bigger opportunities for indies), which hopefully would lower prices. Great big expensive epic sagas would be the exception rather than the accepted rule for movie success.
Everyone wins, even the geeks who are enticed into getting off their collectives asses and going to a movie house once a week. Imagine a screen with no keyboard... Phht. Wishful thinking. I'm nostalgic for an era before my time; how is that possible?
The roar of SDMI's death emanates directly from the pipes of loud-ass motorcycles all across the US.
Today I picked up a copy of Cycle World magazine, and on page 84, I read a full-page article on how the Rio is an excellent solution to (a) magnetic tank bags damaging cassette tapes, and (b) cd players skipping from the vibration of the bike. (Disclaimer: Although I did once stuff some earbuds into the lining of my helmet just like a zillion other people, I don't advocate anyone else doing it.)
Discussion of MP3 piracy controversy? Not a word. Suggestions about SDMI? Nope. Any hint that there's anything in the world that would dethrone MP3? Nah. The worst thing they could say about the product was that it doesn't come with software for the Mac. Given that MP3 already has this kind of fully-immersed mainstream exposure, SDMI has as much chance of displacing MP3 as I do of fighting off a cruise missle with a stick.
My first suggestion would be one way of getting such stage-shy acts some income. While I'm sure someone brighter than I will come along with a more profitable solution, the idea that you can trust the consumer and still make some money is very appealing to me.
Direct mail, when it works well, entices people to voluntarily respond 3-5% of the time, and supports a multi-billion dollar industry even with the expenses of paper printing, snail mail, and physical promo products. When used for evil, the knowledge of this industry results in spam. It just seems to me that when used for good, free distribution of real product over a much lower-overhead medium can generate income for artists.
The problem is simply how to connect the consumer to the artist. Usage-based systems (like DIVX and SDMI)? Ugh. Encrypted music through greedy pig recording company middlemen? Double-ugh. As ugly as it seems, voluntary direct micropayment seems the least distasteful option. Until someone embeds an URL to their "Pay me a buck for this song" e-commerce site in their MP3-ID, I'll gladly paste some stamps on a beer and mail it to a POB.
I've often thought that a good use of the ID tag fields at the end of an MP3 file would be to have something like the following attached to the music: "If you like this or other songs by this artist, send $1US or 1 beer to POB 88, Sometown USA 98765-1234." Sorta like shareware for music; voluntary, friendly, and likely to generate a small but steady income.
Then again, I like the idea of GPL music, with the artist making money on promotions, live performances, and personal association. If Mozart were alive today, I'd pay $$ to see him conduct, rather than listen to a free/pirated rip of the Obscuranian National Orchestra performing his tunes off some LaserLight brand cd.
Obviously MW screwed up. More specifically, the sales droids screwed up because they didn't understand what it means to have BeOS with ported GNU tools from or similar to those from Linux. To them, that means it's a BeOS head and heart with Linux fingers and toes. So the droids say "hybrid" and the techs roll their eyes. It's not a stretch to see where they're coming from.
I'm just not sure why you're all worked up about it. I quote loosely: "Call me whatever you want, just make sure you spell my name right." At this point, any vendor uttering "Linux" because they think it will help sell product (and any news org blindly repeating it) is extremely good news.
Just a quick note on the new name for the K7 processor -- Ugh! One of the many things I liked about AMD was the focus on giving better performance at less cost. Part of this was the avoidance of silly marketing techniques such as the use of a semi-random conglomeration of masculine phonemes as a product name. By choosing "Athlon" you have clearly identified your product as a Pentium-Merced-Celeron knockoff. (Besides, why would you want a name that has connotations of scrawny marathon runners?) The notion that it's easier to differentiate the "Athlon" processor generation from the "K6" as opposed to "K7" from "K6" is pure goofiness. I hope that you continue to use "K7" (at least as a subtitle) in your marketing and sales, and I look forward to the K8.
I'll buy one (esp at those great prices!), but I don't think I'll be putting an "Athlon Inside" sticker on my case anytime soon...
What marketing Braniac thought "Athlon" would be a good name? Makes me think of athlete's foot (not a good thing) or an anorexic-looking marathon runner (not quite a good association for something you want to be speedy). The phonemes are all wrong for this.
What AMD should shoot for are phonemes that connote strength and speed. Vehicle manufacturers are all over this -- witness "Altima" (connotations of extreme height, or peak of achievement), "Lexus" (height of snobbishness; more money than thou), "Volvo" (Latin for 'I go' -- very forceful), and even the new Suzuki "Hiyabusa" (they say it means "Falcon" but I say it has more to do with easy sex or goosing someone...:)
I propose something radical: a consistent name. K7 was fine by me. It's got a sexy consonant (just like M, Q, R, V, X, Z -- also great for car nomenclature), and a single digit that tells me the generation of the product. What could be better?
jon [with way too much time on my hands...]
heterogeneous multiprocessing, anyone?
on
1GHz Alphas
·
· Score: 3
Well, that answered half of a longstanding question: The Alpha will be interchangable with the K7 on SlotB motherboards.
But what about heterogeneous multiprocessing on 2+ processor systems? Can I have a K7 AND an Alpha on one dual-slot board? Obviously one would have to enjoy kernel hacking (and probably BIOS hacking), but this has been a fixation of mine ever since I played with Rainbow 100 (z-80 + 8088 in the same box) and Apple II (6502 with a z-80 card). I even upgraded my Kaypro II with a 8088 daughterboard when I was in school.
Imagine the performance gains when you can predictively send ops to a processor with an architecture best suited for the operation. Sick and twisted, I know.
When you see "PCS", think higher-frequency. It's a marketing term that the cellular carriers would like you to associate with higher technology. In fact it is a combination of existing features with higher frequency. For example, the latest ATT PCS operates at 1.9GHz using standard TDMA compression. The new technology you're buying is mostly in the vocoder chip, phone software, and improved batteries & power management.
Some GSM carriers' PCS offerings also run at 1.9GHz. Most CDMA carriers still operate at 800MHz (I think). However, looking further up the frequency scale, ATT owns licenses to 2.1GHz frequencies for cellular phone usage. They talked publicly about also using 2.1GHz for fixed wireless service about a year ago, but I dunno if it's in use yet.
What scares me the most is that until 3 months ago, I was an employee of a cellular phone company. My usage averaged between 15-30 airtime hours per month (.5-1 hour per day), with the phone powered-on and clipped to my belt anytime I was dressed. I would stop using the phone when it got too hot. Or maybe it was my head getting warm...
[We had the "option" of using a free cellphone + free hours, but in reality it was a requirement. Upon employment, noone *asked* if I wanted the phone, they just gave me the forms to sign and a submission deadline. I'm a sucker for free stuff, so I used it all the time. I suppose I shouldn't have drunk the free Kool-Aid either...]
Does this mean that we'll get Palm devices with more OEM memory? I think it's a great idea to make the pilot able to run portable apps & interoperate with more of the computing world. But when the rubber hits the road, 2 megs is a piddly little amount of memory even for a system designed to run fairly compact & elegant java apps.
Show me a PalmV with 16 or 32mb out of the box, and then I'll be convinced.
Slashdot Mirror
Hang on there, pardner. HMOs can be quite nice, and they can be a nightmare. It depends on the nature of the HMO and how you manage them. Tales of personal experience follow:
FIRST THERE WAS KAISER...
I was covered by Kaiser Permanente when living in CA, and they were an absolute dream. I walk in, They copy down my membership number, I wait a not-unreasonable period of time, they treat me, and I leave. When I got run over by my boss on my motorcycle (another story entirely), they took care of the whole mess. I had been carted off to a local chop-shop clinic by my employer, which sewed my missing digit back on, and Kaiser had to *undo* the surgery and sew it back on correctly.
I never saw any paperwork, I never had to pay anything other than my premium, and they even packed up a bag full of dressings & other medical accoutrements for me to take on my non-reschedulable road-trip 10 days later.
AND THEN THERE WAS GROUP HEALTH...
Having been blissed-out by my experience with Kaiser, I joined Group Health in Washington State. I quickly discovered that they are (imho) expensive, paperwork-intensive, mired in referral bullshit, and generally client-unfriendly. They insisted on assigning me to a GP, and then assigned me to a team of seven GP doctors so that I never saw the same GP twice. (Kind of defeats the purpose, no?)
It was impossible to see any specialist without seeing Dr. RandomGP(N), who would defer to Dr. RandomGP(N-1)'s experience, except that I couldn't never get in to see Dr. RandomGP(N-1) again because clients are only allowed to schedule appointments with Dr. RandomGP(ANY).
When I finally did get to see a specialist about the RSI injury to my wrist... well... I had a ~0.75" fluid bubble poking out of a rupture in the muscle wall. What does the GH doctor do? He had me look away and hit my wrist with a motherf*cking book to burst it! And because I didn't flinch when he thought I would, he hit me a lot harder than intended, and had to send me in for x-rays to make sure he didn't break my wrist. (On later visits he tried cortizone injections, then finally surgery as I had requested.)
And imho I got better treatment than the average Joe because my Group Health card was green rather than blue. What does green mean to them? Cash. I was a full-cash-paying customer. Blue-card clients (work-paid-insurance), from what I could see, got treated like shit and had to wait longer, too. Me, I got to go to the front of the line and get my poor service much faster.
IN THE END
The bottom line is that every individual's experience will be different. The kind of hands-off independence that Kaiser provided for me would be perceived as poor service by someone of my parents' generation, but I couldn't stand the way that GH did business. I'm sure that there are people out there who are happy with GH's service, I've just never me t any of them. But I wouldn't take that experience and condemn all HMOs. YMMV.
Point well taken; WINE performs very well for some, and not so well for others.
As for giving developers a wider market for their wares, I too hope that's the way the wind blows. I hope I see the day when my box of commercial software says "Certified to work with WINE" (with a nice little wine glass logo next to the wavy windows logo). Maybe Corel will be the first to put that on their packaging...
"Need" is subjective, but I'd still say a generalized 'yes.' VMware is a commercial software product that operates underneath the typical OS, and allows multiple OSs to run concurrently. You have to buy a MS-licensed copy of Windows to run on top of VMware. That's where the "VM" (virtual machine) comes from.
WINE, on the other hand is a mapping of win16 and win32 calls to 'nix calls. It's windows functions without the windows itself. It's not a VM, and therefore has a theoretical performance edge by reducing the number of application layers (although it'll be a while before WINE performance becomes acceptable).
Besides, WINE is open source, and will probably survive the next curve-ball that MS pitches. The way I see it, VMware is playing a dangerous game with MS by directly interfacing with their bread-and-butter products. Sort of like dating a guy whose previous 5 wives have all mysteriously disappeared after a long history of abuse. MS is likely to make a change to the EULA that specifies that you cannot run their OS on a VM, on a processor that wasn't purchased with the OS, etc etc. If this ever happens, VMware becomes the next Tektronix/WinDD or similar victim.
Dang! With a name like "Electrofuel" I figured that this had to be a fuel cell system. A former employer of mine was contemplating the use of a fuel cell design to power cellphones, so I'm sure it wouldn't be a stretch to power a laptop with them. Insurance and liability issues are probably the hold-up, though. Even if internal-battery model fuel cells are made only for laptop models with no battery cover (leaving an open, unencumbered exhaust vent), some fool out there would manage to block the vent, shove something in it, or otherwise blow the damn thing up in his or her lap, then file a I-dumped-McDonalds-coffee-in-my-lap lawsuit.
Oh, and I guess the market would be somewhat crimped if you were not permitted to carry the compressed gas cartridges required for a fuel cell aboard an airplane. Double-dang.
MS Office is irrelevant. For these that really desire the 100-pound godawful hodgepodge of features that MS has shoehorned into a 5-pound sack, there is StarOffice. It even recreates the Start-button interface, making even the most ardent Windows fanatic feel right at home.
However, for those that use Linux because its stability, speed, and configurability are orders of magnitude better than MS' offerings (and others' too, to be fair), the lack of MS Office on Linux is no burden. This is tantamount to claiming that Linux would be taken seriously as a server OS if MS were to port Exchange. (Pah!!) There are a multitude of offerings that serve all of the needs of most of the people. All that's necessary is a good set of file translators, which StarOffice, Applix, and Wordperfect all have.
The funny thing, IMHO, is that many of the major Linux distributions now include lots of apps at install, including office productivity and browser software. I'd like to see Microsoft attempt to sue Red Hat or SuSE to force them to give MS equal space on the preconfigured Gnome or KDE desktop (because the GPL cadre is a de facto monopoly?? God knows what MS lawyers will think up...).
Not that this should devolve into a "My macho hardware has longer uptime than yours" thing, but it's just plain dumb to issue a public challenge when you're clearly not prepared even to support the event, much less the actual responses to the challenge.
The lights were flickering all evening at my place (in Seattle proper), and my UPS' kicked in several times. But none of the systems even hiccupped. One of the modems needed the power cycled after lightning hit a pole 1 block away (nice fireworks when the City Light transformer blew up), but for the most part, everything was as it should be. It just boggles me that my basement is better prepared for such events than the MS production server staging network.
Or maybe She-Who-Hurtles-Lightning just wanted to twist Bill's undies into a wee bit tighter bunch than they already were. Heh.
Which is goofier: Lineo (easy to scrub) or Athlon (soothes your itchy feet)? These days with product names stooping to such lows as cars called the "Aspire" (to what?) and the "Charade" (it's not really a car...), a handheld operationg system called "Wince" ("You'll WinCE when you see the performance!!"), and AOL and Sun's new "iPlanet" (waaay too close to eIBM's enew ethinking), it's really hard to tell which marketing flub is worse.
My semi-random thought:
Some MS people get it in their heads that MS should have a good showing in the S@H results. So they get approval from the company to set up a small server farm (so that they don't get a visit and an escort out of the building from corporate security, as is the custom for independent thinkers at MS).
They get a hold of a bunch of systems left over from the last major group upgrade. They are all the same speed & memory, all running NT with the same security hol...patch level. They started them all at the same time. So is it any surprise that they process blocks roughly in sync? Compound this with multiple clients per system, and periodic usage of the systems for other tasks, and you would have a wave-like effect as you've noticed. They turn in X000 blocks in a big hurry, then aren't heard from for a while.
That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it.
As other posters have noted, large installations of Exchange usually mean very high maintenance, and as a result, very high cost. Running 1200 users on a single server is an entirely different animal than running 1200 users per server on a 25-server installation. The fact that your installation works well should be taken as a tribute to your planning, implementation, and maintenance skills. The average shows that it doesn't usually work that well.
My statements and projections are based on my experience, but I don't pretend to know everything. I worked on the Exchange team at Microsoft (a chapter in my life that I sometimes like to forget). I worked very closely with the system and component test teams, and with several customers trying to implement multi-thousand-seat installations. I wrote most of the Exchange Administrator's Guide, and a good chunk of the Concepts & Planning Guide. BUT my opinions are just that: opinions. You obviously planned your implementation well, and it works for you. In my experience/opinion, you are doing much better than average, and you should stick with Exchange.
On what kind of hardware? Are you actually suggesting 25,000 users on a single box? That would be almost two orders of magnitude beyond anything that I've seen in real production. More detail, please.
I say with relative authority: Puh-leez!
MS would like people to believe that Exchange is an enterprise-level communications tool, when it fact it is a buchered and bloated decendant of a mediocre 1992 X.400 email system from Data Connection Limited (check out http://www.datcon.co.uk/press/messserv.h tm) Don't believe the version number; Exchange is in its second major release (4.x really is 1.x, 5.x = 2.x, etc) and still has significant stability problems.
In my experience, Exchange can support 300 users per server happily on commonly acceptable x86 corporate server hardware (say, a 2 processor PII with 512mb ram). It seems that (in my limited experience, lest MS lawyers take this to be a declaration of fact, which it is not) once you've reached this level, doubling the ram and adding more cpu's has only a minimal effect, which means that you really have to add more servers to add capacity.
Let's do the math. 25,000 users at 500 users per server (to be quite generous) means that you're going to need a Windows NT server farm of about 50 systems just to do email. Again, being generous bargain hunters, let's say you can buy one of these servers for $10kUS. That means you're out $500,000 just for hardware. In my experience, you can support 500 POP users easily on a SPARC 2 or IPX, which can be had these days for about $500 decked out (including a 17" monitor). You could support the same (probably many more) on a $500 x86 box running any of the free *nixes. Assume you blow $500 on disk storage for these boxen just to level the starting line, bringing the total cost to $1000 per. That's still only $50,000.
One less zero usually gets the accountants' attention on an expenditure like this.
But let's talk about administrative support. IMHO you're going to need 1:1 admin per NT server at that usage level, given that remote admin of NT is difficult, and 500 users per server is going to prompt more than the occasional pretty blue interface. (Nevermind the security team you're going to need for a major NT installation.) Say a cheap NT admin costs $50kUS including benefits & overhead. You're looking at an HR budget of $2,500,000us. On the other hand, say you splurge and spend $150kUS per *nix admin. If they couldn't handle 10 little boxen apiece, I'll eat the electrons this was posted with. That's an HR budget of $750,000us.
That's 1/10th the hardware expense and 1/3 the maintenance expense of using Exchange. And that's (a) making some wild assumptions that benefit the Exchange argument, and (b) assumes that you're running *nix on shit hardware. Spend 5 times as much on hardware for new, supported stuff (say $250,000us, which would buy you a couple of well-outfitted Sparc 4500s, or 10 really gorgeous systems from VA Research). Your downtime will become next to nothing, you'll still have spent only half of what you would have for NT and Exchange, and your ongoing yearly administrative cost will be 1/3 of the other option. The *nix administrative savings alone will pay for the *nix hardware in a few months.
Oh yeah. I forgot the expense of 50 copies of Windows NT, 50 copies of Exchange Server, and 25,000 client licenses... (*erk*!!)
Here's a real application for a cheaper version of this device: I want to wear a recording device that captures voice-quality audio and basic b/w video, all day, every day at work. I want every event and conversation I have to be recorded and transmitted offsite, say, to a recorder in my car. 8-10 hours of recording a day at relatively low quality ought to be do-able, resulting in a couple of CD's a week. A flat-panel microphone & ccd camera (periscoped to look like a pen), battery and transmitter ought to fit in my pocket just like a pack of smokes.
With the proliferation of monitoring technology being deployed throughout the corporate world, it only makes sense that the individual have a method of leveling the playing field. Imagine sitting in a project meeting when some inept program manager starts blamestorming you for something s/he screwed up. You say "Hold on a minute. Let's listen to what you told me 6 weeks ago at lunch about something else being a higher priority..." And just imagine the instant reduction or justified rise in sexual harassment claims -- load the mpeg file for that day, hit playback and watch the actual events.
Paranoid, yes. But I can think of half a dozen instances last year off the top of my head when I would have loved to be able to correct someone else's rather liberal interpretation of reality. In some cases, it might be the only thing that would save someone's job. My employer watches and records me (email, phone, video of the premises, etc); why can't I watch and record them?
Oh, fancy that. Corporate security's knocking on the window.
If your wrists hurt when you type, take it seriously! I didn't, and I have a nifty scar on the inside of my wrist from surgery that makes it look like I tried to off myself. And no, it wasn't CTS.
.75" dia to bulge out of my wrist. Uncool.
I developed a minor case of tendonitis during a particularly stressful contract (working 65-hour weeks on documentation for several months). The irritation caused internal swelling and fluid collection exactly where my wrist makes contact with the wristpad while typing. The pressure fron the fluid caused a rupture in the muscle wall below the skin, and the rupture in turn caused a fluid bubble about
I ignored it (and kept working at breakneck pace) for a couple of months before seeing a doctor. By the time I went in, I had a lot of damage, and neither drainage+therapy or steroid injections into the muscle would repair it. Surgery (the serious knock-you-out, dig-around-with-a-scalpel-and-rasp, and sew-the-muscles-back-together kind) was the only option. If I had just paid attention to my body and eased off the work, I probably wouldn't have had to have any problem.
Ignore trendy names like CTS or RSI. Don't seek labels because they facilitate easy misdiagnosis. Pay attention to your body, and make sure that your doctor pays attention to your symptoms rather than matching you to a diagnostic profile. If something hurts, stop! If it affects your work and you can't stop, at least vary your techniques. Remember that no job is worth permanently damaging your hands or any other part of your body.
With all the creativity out there, surely it would be possible to release these movies in serial style: shorter, better, and cheaper. Shorter movie production times imply shorter release cycles (noone here is familiar with that notion, are they?). More use of CGI technology implies cheaper initial costs (esp using cots hardware and free/oss tools). More movies would probably lead to more competition between movie production companies and movie houses (and bigger opportunities for indies), which hopefully would lower prices. Great big expensive epic sagas would be the exception rather than the accepted rule for movie success.
Everyone wins, even the geeks who are enticed into getting off their collectives asses and going to a movie house once a week. Imagine a screen with no keyboard... Phht. Wishful thinking. I'm nostalgic for an era before my time; how is that possible?
The roar of SDMI's death emanates directly from the pipes of loud-ass motorcycles all across the US.
Today I picked up a copy of Cycle World magazine, and on page 84, I read a full-page article on how the Rio is an excellent solution to (a) magnetic tank bags damaging cassette tapes, and (b) cd players skipping from the vibration of the bike. (Disclaimer: Although I did once stuff some earbuds into the lining of my helmet just like a zillion other people, I don't advocate anyone else doing it.)
Discussion of MP3 piracy controversy? Not a word. Suggestions about SDMI? Nope. Any hint that there's anything in the world that would dethrone MP3? Nah. The worst thing they could say about the product was that it doesn't come with software for the Mac. Given that MP3 already has this kind of fully-immersed mainstream exposure, SDMI has as much chance of displacing MP3 as I do of fighting off a cruise missle with a stick.
My first suggestion would be one way of getting such stage-shy acts some income. While I'm sure someone brighter than I will come along with a more profitable solution, the idea that you can trust the consumer and still make some money is very appealing to me.
Direct mail, when it works well, entices people to voluntarily respond 3-5% of the time, and supports a multi-billion dollar industry even with the expenses of paper printing, snail mail, and physical promo products. When used for evil, the knowledge of this industry results in spam. It just seems to me that when used for good, free distribution of real product over a much lower-overhead medium can generate income for artists.
The problem is simply how to connect the consumer to the artist. Usage-based systems (like DIVX and SDMI)? Ugh. Encrypted music through greedy pig recording company middlemen? Double-ugh. As ugly as it seems, voluntary direct micropayment seems the least distasteful option. Until someone embeds an URL to their "Pay me a buck for this song" e-commerce site in their MP3-ID, I'll gladly paste some stamps on a beer and mail it to a POB.
I've often thought that a good use of the ID tag fields at the end of an MP3 file would be to have something like the following attached to the music: "If you like this or other songs by this artist, send $1US or 1 beer to POB 88, Sometown USA 98765-1234." Sorta like shareware for music; voluntary, friendly, and likely to generate a small but steady income.
Then again, I like the idea of GPL music, with the artist making money on promotions, live performances, and personal association. If Mozart were alive today, I'd pay $$ to see him conduct, rather than listen to a free/pirated rip of the Obscuranian National Orchestra performing his tunes off some LaserLight brand cd.
Obviously MW screwed up. More specifically, the sales droids screwed up because they didn't understand what it means to have BeOS with ported GNU tools from or similar to those from Linux. To them, that means it's a BeOS head and heart with Linux fingers and toes. So the droids say "hybrid" and the techs roll their eyes. It's not a stretch to see where they're coming from.
I'm just not sure why you're all worked up about it. I quote loosely: "Call me whatever you want, just make sure you spell my name right." At this point, any vendor uttering "Linux" because they think it will help sell product (and any news org blindly repeating it) is extremely good news.
J
What would the Intel 4004 be?
Old.
(not sure about the middle of that sequence w/the 88 'n 086, tho.)
From my mail to AMD:
Just a quick note on the new name for the K7 processor -- Ugh! One of the many things I liked about AMD was the focus on giving better performance at less cost. Part of this was the avoidance of silly marketing techniques such as the use of a semi-random conglomeration of masculine phonemes as a product name. By choosing "Athlon" you have clearly identified your product as a Pentium-Merced-Celeron knockoff. (Besides, why would you want a name that has connotations of scrawny marathon runners?) The notion that it's easier to differentiate the "Athlon" processor generation from the "K6" as opposed to "K7" from "K6" is pure goofiness. I hope that you continue to use "K7" (at least as a subtitle) in your marketing and sales, and I look forward to the K8.
I'll buy one (esp at those great prices!), but I don't think I'll be putting an "Athlon Inside" sticker on my case anytime soon...
What marketing Braniac thought "Athlon" would be a good name? Makes me think of athlete's foot (not a good thing) or an anorexic-looking marathon runner (not quite a good association for something you want to be speedy). The phonemes are all wrong for this.
:)
What AMD should shoot for are phonemes that connote strength and speed. Vehicle manufacturers are all over this -- witness "Altima" (connotations of extreme height, or peak of achievement), "Lexus" (height of snobbishness; more money than thou), "Volvo" (Latin for 'I go' -- very forceful), and even the new Suzuki "Hiyabusa" (they say it means "Falcon" but I say it has more to do with easy sex or goosing someone...
I propose something radical: a consistent name. K7 was fine by me. It's got a sexy consonant (just like M, Q, R, V, X, Z -- also great for car nomenclature), and a single digit that tells me the generation of the product. What could be better?
jon
[with way too much time on my hands...]
Well, that answered half of a longstanding question: The Alpha will be interchangable with the K7 on SlotB motherboards.
But what about heterogeneous multiprocessing on 2+ processor systems? Can I have a K7 AND an Alpha on one dual-slot board? Obviously one would have to enjoy kernel hacking (and probably BIOS hacking), but this has been a fixation of mine ever since I played with Rainbow 100 (z-80 + 8088 in the same box) and Apple II (6502 with a z-80 card). I even upgraded my Kaypro II with a 8088 daughterboard when I was in school.
Imagine the performance gains when you can predictively send ops to a processor with an architecture best suited for the operation. Sick and twisted, I know.
When you see "PCS", think higher-frequency. It's a marketing term that the cellular carriers would like you to associate with higher technology. In fact it is a combination of existing features with higher frequency. For example, the latest ATT PCS operates at 1.9GHz using standard TDMA compression. The new technology you're buying is mostly in the vocoder chip, phone software, and improved batteries & power management.
Some GSM carriers' PCS offerings also run at 1.9GHz. Most CDMA carriers still operate at 800MHz (I think). However, looking further up the frequency scale, ATT owns licenses to 2.1GHz frequencies for cellular phone usage. They talked publicly about also using 2.1GHz for fixed wireless service about a year ago, but I dunno if it's in use yet.
What scares me the most is that until 3 months ago, I was an employee of a cellular phone company. My usage averaged between 15-30 airtime hours per month (.5-1 hour per day), with the phone powered-on and clipped to my belt anytime I was dressed. I would stop using the phone when it got too hot. Or maybe it was my head getting warm...
[We had the "option" of using a free cellphone + free hours, but in reality it was a requirement. Upon employment, noone *asked* if I wanted the phone, they just gave me the forms to sign and a submission deadline. I'm a sucker for free stuff, so I used it all the time. I suppose I shouldn't have drunk the free Kool-Aid either...]
Does this mean that we'll get Palm devices with more OEM memory? I think it's a great idea to make the pilot able to run portable apps & interoperate with more of the computing world. But when the rubber hits the road, 2 megs is a piddly little amount of memory even for a system designed to run fairly compact & elegant java apps.
Show me a PalmV with 16 or 32mb out of the box, and then I'll be convinced.