I have to agree with you. I have to say thanks to the evolution project for having some working features but at the same time it seems to be so buggy from my experience that its more simple to use OWA directly.
I absolutely agree with you, Evolution although has a great intention is so buggy, features work in one version then not in the next (see Exchange filters not working in the current Ubuntu 7.10 launchpad bugs) it seems that there is no quality control. On the upside it has improved dramatically but its still not feature comparable to outlook in the remotest way. Their priority should be to get the full rpc over https feature set working (including GAL) then just do a huge bugfix exercise. Once evolution is stable it will allow many organisations to hasten their move to open source.
Linux is not really an enterprise operating system at this point in time. Yes its working in enterprise environments, yes its stable in most implementations and there are good patch management solutions etc but what is missing is some standardisation across hardware vendors. There is no standard way of monitoring RAID/Fans/Hardware failures etc. Each vendor has their own tools which makes having multi-vendor environments a pain, If we compare against windows with mom every vendor has a plugin which will allow you to monitor and manage the systems from a central point. If I look at some of the other "enterprise" operating systems like Solaris and AIX they have a standard set of tools for fibre channel controllers etc which work on all of the vendors. It may sound like a small issue but when your dealing with lots of systems having to know what controller is in a system to support it makes a big difference.
Personally If I write a document in openoffice I will save it in the default format if its for my use. If I however need to send it to someone I will save it as a PDF. If they need to edit the file and they are on windows I will send it in windows document format. Generally Word 95 to be easy.
I am all for open source going into new markets, I do feel that in the case of mozilla with firefox that they should really focus on resolving many of the bugs and really working on providing a rock solid, secure fast and stable "full scale" browser. Once they have finalised that work on a mobile browser.
There is nothing new in this product at all, IBM have had this type of server platform (3 socket supported) for some time in the form factor of the x3755.
Actually you can always use these images which include a backported kernel. They work well http://kmuto.jp/debian/d-i/ with opensource being opensource you can easily just make your own kernels and build it all up no problems.
In many ways it is in the producer of the operating systems best interest to have the underlying OS as complex as possible. That way they can be sure that they can sell people certifications which companies will feel comfortable in having and then they can ask for more money by becoming a specialist. The flipside of that is the more complex it becomes the easier it is to hide backdoors/trojans etc somewhere inside.
Over time there has been a large amount of conspiracy "theory" regarding the prohbition of drugs resulting in the CIA direclty benefiting from the huge profit margins. There has been evidence and drug trafficing on several different contintents that has been directly linked to the CIA. I know that there have been several movies that have been made regarding this exact topic some based on fact others based on annocdotal evidence. There has also been a large amount of evidence supporting the CIA traffic drugs through LA at the expense of community housing projects etc. There is more information about the links here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_America and http://www.narconews.com/ and http://www.fromthewilderness.com/ There are numerous links from American banks and the laundering of drug money. Especially through branches like banamex and Citi group. As long as drugs are illegal there will always be a government link to the incomes either directly via importing and dealing with the producers or simply by selling off goods that have been bought using 'dirty money' as long as those links remain there is no interest in the government in changing the drug policies even though many of the illegal drugs have no long term health benefits as is claimed in many government booklets/information pages. In fact many illegal drugs are being approved by the FDA for use in specialised treatment. One example of that is the use of MDMA to treat Post Traumatic stress disorder. As many people know different types of amphetamine have long been used for the treatment of common disorders like ADHD.
Having been testing servers based on the woodcrest processor from a leading tier 1 hardware vendor the overall power consumption is more than that of the Opteron based servers from the same vendor we compared them to. The real key on these particular servers is the extensive use of FBDIMM memory which increases the overall power usage of the server to make the woodcrest based boxes we tested equal to or more power hungry than the Opteron based servers using DDR.
From what I understand the AMD processors are still the only cores which have been totally designed from scratch for the 64bit computing, the Core 2 duo and extreme processors are still a Pentium M updated and tweaked for performance with EM64-T extensions added. To me having a processor designed from scratch with a sole purpose is what entices me into buying a new processor. I am now using my Turion X2 based desktops and love them.
Its interesting that all benchmarks seem to include mp3 compression or mpeg video creation etc. How many slashdot users actually use their computers more than 1-5% of the time doing that type of stuff? Of course Its all those DiVX groups that need the performance so that they can encode and release an extra 20% more videos in a month;)
Overall the performance of the latest bunch of Intel processors is great, but when it comes down to it in a datacentre environment where spare stock etc is a costly exercise using Intel products is going to cost you more in the long run, while if we go with Opteron we can save on spares and still get great performance/power consumption.
Any company or government department that has any internet exposed servers that hold critical or sensitive information must be soo stupid they deserve to be broken into. What ever happened to having separated internet from internal servers etc..
Its interesting, I go over and read the list of banned payment services on the ebay web page and many of them are significantly cheaper than PayPal and Google. Understandably both the seller and the buyer would like to know that they can pay less fees when they are buying/selling or transfering funds around the world. It sounds very anti competitive, Although I am not sure about US laws but the Mastercard Worldcup issue sounds almost to familure.
Its true that the cost of music is cheap because they are not paying the royalties that the artists should get for the music that they create. AllOfMp3.com is in a fairly unique position in that it can sell the music at very low rates and has a very loyal customer base even if many of them KNOW that the music they are downloading is not legit in their country. Why do they do it, because many of them simply do not care, or perhapse they are sick of being ripped off by the Music industry. I know many people that use the service and are fanatical about how happy they are for the quality of the service when asked about the legalities they simply do not care. Its a similar thing with speeding in cars, people know its wrong but they will still do it and the law wont stop them if they choose to regardless. I am sure that AllofMp3.com could easily offer the songs for an extra 10cents or 20cents per song and still be well under the market rate, with that 20cents going 100% to the artists, the artists would probably be happier selling more music because it would simply become a commodity item. I am not sure how much they make from the record companies but I can just about bet its less than that for many artists. Knowing friends that have bands which are fairly good at what they play they have said they would be happy with 10cents per song if they could sell a few thousand songs a day. With the internet being such a great distribution method a few thousand songs a day is fairly easy to manage if you write/sing/play music that people like to listen to.
The allofmp3.com business model is one of the best that I have seen for Online music, Lets look at what the consumer gets - The choice of bitrate. - The choice of quality (vbr/etc) - A choice of albums which are simply not available on other sites like itunes. - Reliable service, friendly staff - Often has new albums well before other music stores have them. - VERY competitive pricing. - NO DRM.
Now taking into account that they apparently are not paying enough for the rights to the music or whatever it may well be, the business model works, even if I had to pay 20cents for each song or 40cents US for each song I would still go with Allofmp3.com because they offer a service to the consumer that works.I can download the music and play it where I want when I want. So here the recording companies are in a sticky spot, they know that the consumers want that model and they are trying to restrict it as much as possible. I believe in paying for music and I believe that the artists should get paid for the music but there comes a point in time when your getting ripped off, and that is how the record companies and recording industry has been for such a long time and now they are wondering why there has been such a revolt.... Here Warner is offering 2.5bn for EMI and visa versa yet will that REALLY benefit the musicians, the end user.. Hell no its only going to make share holders richer which is going to screw me, and you and whoever else listens to music.
I am interested to see viable alternatives to PayPal, their transaction rates are very expensive given the type and value of the transactions. I understand that every business has to make money but I am sure they would have more customers if the transaction cost where lower or had a better rate.
I wonder if a merger between AMD and ATI would cause adverse side effects with the AMD / nVidia relationship. many people claim that the nVidia boards are amoungst the best for the AMD chip (i have no experience using them personally except in the Sun x2100 server which has a _seriously_ crap second interface in it). However I am sure there could be some adverse side effects which would potentially hamper one of AMDs biggest alternative chipset providers.
The cost of building out datacentres has been soaring for several reasons, the first real issue is being able to provide enough power for todays power hungry servers to run at any sort of density required to actually churn the data. We see datacentres only able to offer very low amount of power per square meter in the UK, which is very low and can often only provide you with upto 4 quad processor XEON servers per rack. When you can only have that density the cost is much greater. The other aspect is how do you cool it, the traditional airconditioning raised floor method really does not work as its almost impossible to actually cool where you have to cool and there will always be hot spots even if your doing warm row cold row designs etc. Its important to seal the cool air in and funnel it to where its needed. APC have recently been working heavily in this area and claim to be able to cool MASSIVE amounts of density. The other issue is the management aspects of these datacentres. In the past you could design a datacentre to be good for 5-10 years now its hard to design something which will be good for the same length of time becaues the power requirements, cooling and power grid is something that is often over utilised (as per in the UK datacentre market).
It is well established that the United States completely screwed the russian economy during the 90s. Therer are several well documented US commisions that outlined just such issues as a means to help halt Russia selling OIL in Rubles or Euros (not sure which one off the top of my head). There have been several high profile reports regarding the issues raised and many of them have been simply swept under the carpet by mainstream press.
As a systems administrator working on a few large scale mail servers the 'investment' required to cut spam and virus emails is very low if the system has been designed properly. I use open source tools on a system with in excess of 150,000 active users and it costs nothing in licenses and its on four servers and a central NetAPP filer for the mailstore. Realistically if we distribute the total cost over the user count and support issues are very low. its simple design the system. Our email service uses the following -Qmail, vpopmail, simscan, spamassassin and clamav. On a userbase with the amount of users we have its very easy to distribute, its easy to scale and the performance is great.
Having been on the user and dev end of both prods
on
Lotus vs. SharePoint
·
· Score: 1
I have used and built systems on both software sets, Here is what i found
- Lotus notes was more difficult to build an application but once we had built that application it did exactly what we wanted it to do and we could introduce our own work flows etc. That was something that sharepoint never gave us the ability to use/do.
- Sharepoint provides another great way for Microsoft to lock users into their software suites, We had disabled the use of IE across all servers within our company and installed and manage firefox, That leads us to massive problems with users ability to run with Sharepoint.
- Lotus notes is cross platform and does not have nearly as much lock-in to any particular vendor. There are so many additional third party products that integrate into Notes that you can have something so powerful that your entire business world can run from it with minimal development and maintenance.
- Sharepoint is something that was easy for us to deploy, but scaling it and keeping the whole system running seemed to take much more support time from the help desk which instantly made the software more costly over time than the Notes solution even after taking the development time for Notes into account.
- If you want to use Sharepoint from a system that is NOT on the domain its an absolute nightmare. When you want to add an article its time to start authenticating several times just to post, then it will often report that you do not have permissions even though you have authenticated to access the server. If you join the domain then it makes it all much easier.. but how about working from home and remote users? Its not an issue for Notes.
From our extensive testing of the Sun T2000 in datacentre environments we see that as a system pushing LAMP applications it will come out much faster than any other servers in its category. Another real selling point for the system in Datacentre environments in the UK is that its fairly powerful for the power it draws and the heat that it produces, We can get away with fewer systems doing the same amount of work. Having Sun endorse Ubuntu's SPARC port will be a massive improvement to the overall product, one of the biggest issues we have is since moving away from Solaris to XEON And Opteron based Linux servers over the last three years we are in a stitch having to deploy Solaris on these servers to support the ~40-50k users we have connected to our web farm at any one time means we have multiple operating systems to support. as we use Debian on all our other servers and the debian SPARC port is not stable on the T1 yet.. so at the end of the day for the purpose that the server has been built for (web farm/content delivery) its a brilliant system. And as for SSL its not an issue, many big web farms do not do SSL on the servers in that farm anyway rather on 'ssl accelorators' etc.
Your experiences are very similar to ones that I have been having recently. All of our internal systems are web based which makes the end platform completely irrelevent with many people using Linux, MacOS X and windows in a small percentage.
As someoone that has previously been heavily involved with Remedy. Last time I checked there are now web agents that you can deploy and have no problems with. It may not have an agent for your products in use but it will be a matter of time for the most part.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree with you. I have to say thanks to the evolution project for having some working features but at the same time it seems to be so buggy from my experience that its more simple to use OWA directly.
I absolutely agree with you, Evolution although has a great intention is so buggy, features work in one version then not in the next (see Exchange filters not working in the current Ubuntu 7.10 launchpad bugs) it seems that there is no quality control. On the upside it has improved dramatically but its still not feature comparable to outlook in the remotest way. Their priority should be to get the full rpc over https feature set working (including GAL) then just do a huge bugfix exercise. Once evolution is stable it will allow many organisations to hasten their move to open source.
Linux is not really an enterprise operating system at this point in time. Yes its working in enterprise environments, yes its stable in most implementations and there are good patch management solutions etc but what is missing is some standardisation across hardware vendors. There is no standard way of monitoring RAID/Fans/Hardware failures etc. Each vendor has their own tools which makes having multi-vendor environments a pain, If we compare against windows with mom every vendor has a plugin which will allow you to monitor and manage the systems from a central point. If I look at some of the other "enterprise" operating systems like Solaris and AIX they have a standard set of tools for fibre channel controllers etc which work on all of the vendors. It may sound like a small issue but when your dealing with lots of systems having to know what controller is in a system to support it makes a big difference.
Personally If I write a document in openoffice I will save it in the default format if its for my use. If I however need to send it to someone I will save it as a PDF. If they need to edit the file and they are on windows I will send it in windows document format. Generally Word 95 to be easy.
I am all for open source going into new markets, I do feel that in the case of mozilla with firefox that they should really focus on resolving many of the bugs and really working on providing a rock solid, secure fast and stable "full scale" browser. Once they have finalised that work on a mobile browser.
There is nothing new in this product at all, IBM have had this type of server platform (3 socket supported) for some time in the form factor of the x3755.
Actually you can always use these images which include a backported kernel. They work well http://kmuto.jp/debian/d-i/ with opensource being opensource you can easily just make your own kernels and build it all up no problems.
In many ways it is in the producer of the operating systems best interest to have the underlying OS as complex as possible. That way they can be sure that they can sell people certifications which companies will feel comfortable in having and then they can ask for more money by becoming a specialist. The flipside of that is the more complex it becomes the easier it is to hide backdoors/trojans etc somewhere inside.
Over time there has been a large amount of conspiracy "theory" regarding the prohbition of drugs resulting in the CIA direclty benefiting from the huge profit margins. There has been evidence and drug trafficing on several different contintents that has been directly linked to the CIA. I know that there have been several movies that have been made regarding this exact topic some based on fact others based on annocdotal evidence. There has also been a large amount of evidence supporting the CIA traffic drugs through LA at the expense of community housing projects etc. There is more information about the links here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_America and http://www.narconews.com/ and http://www.fromthewilderness.com/ There are numerous links from American banks and the laundering of drug money. Especially through branches like banamex and Citi group. As long as drugs are illegal there will always be a government link to the incomes either directly via importing and dealing with the producers or simply by selling off goods that have been bought using 'dirty money' as long as those links remain there is no interest in the government in changing the drug policies even though many of the illegal drugs have no long term health benefits as is claimed in many government booklets/information pages. In fact many illegal drugs are being approved by the FDA for use in specialised treatment. One example of that is the use of MDMA to treat Post Traumatic stress disorder. As many people know different types of amphetamine have long been used for the treatment of common disorders like ADHD.
Having been testing servers based on the woodcrest processor from a leading tier 1 hardware vendor the overall power consumption is more than that of the Opteron based servers from the same vendor we compared them to. The real key on these particular servers is the extensive use of FBDIMM memory which increases the overall power usage of the server to make the woodcrest based boxes we tested equal to or more power hungry than the Opteron based servers using DDR.
From what I understand the AMD processors are still the only cores which have been totally designed from scratch for the 64bit computing, the Core 2 duo and extreme processors are still a Pentium M updated and tweaked for performance with EM64-T extensions added. To me having a processor designed from scratch with a sole purpose is what entices me into buying a new processor. I am now using my Turion X2 based desktops and love them.
Its interesting that all benchmarks seem to include mp3 compression or mpeg video creation etc. How many slashdot users actually use their computers more than 1-5% of the time doing that type of stuff? Of course Its all those DiVX groups that need the performance so that they can encode and release an extra 20% more videos in a month ;)
Overall the performance of the latest bunch of Intel processors is great, but when it comes down to it in a datacentre environment where spare stock etc is a costly exercise using Intel products is going to cost you more in the long run, while if we go with Opteron we can save on spares and still get great performance/power consumption.
Any company or government department that has any internet exposed servers that hold critical or sensitive information must be soo stupid they deserve to be broken into. What ever happened to having separated internet from internal servers etc..
Its interesting, I go over and read the list of banned payment services on the ebay web page and many of them are significantly cheaper than PayPal and Google. Understandably both the seller and the buyer would like to know that they can pay less fees when they are buying/selling or transfering funds around the world. It sounds very anti competitive, Although I am not sure about US laws but the Mastercard Worldcup issue sounds almost to familure.
Its true that the cost of music is cheap because they are not paying the royalties that the artists should get for the music that they create. AllOfMp3.com is in a fairly unique position in that it can sell the music at very low rates and has a very loyal customer base even if many of them KNOW that the music they are downloading is not legit in their country. Why do they do it, because many of them simply do not care, or perhapse they are sick of being ripped off by the Music industry. I know many people that use the service and are fanatical about how happy they are for the quality of the service when asked about the legalities they simply do not care. Its a similar thing with speeding in cars, people know its wrong but they will still do it and the law wont stop them if they choose to regardless. I am sure that AllofMp3.com could easily offer the songs for an extra 10cents or 20cents per song and still be well under the market rate, with that 20cents going 100% to the artists, the artists would probably be happier selling more music because it would simply become a commodity item. I am not sure how much they make from the record companies but I can just about bet its less than that for many artists. Knowing friends that have bands which are fairly good at what they play they have said they would be happy with 10cents per song if they could sell a few thousand songs a day. With the internet being such a great distribution method a few thousand songs a day is fairly easy to manage if you write/sing/play music that people like to listen to.
The allofmp3.com business model is one of the best that I have seen for Online music, Lets look at what the consumer gets
- The choice of bitrate.
- The choice of quality (vbr/etc)
- A choice of albums which are simply not available on other sites like itunes.
- Reliable service, friendly staff
- Often has new albums well before other music stores have them.
- VERY competitive pricing.
- NO DRM.
Now taking into account that they apparently are not paying enough for the rights to the music or whatever it may well be, the business model works, even if I had to pay 20cents for each song or 40cents US for each song I would still go with Allofmp3.com because they offer a service to the consumer that works.I can download the music and play it where I want when I want. So here the recording companies are in a sticky spot, they know that the consumers want that model and they are trying to restrict it as much as possible. I believe in paying for music and I believe that the artists should get paid for the music but there comes a point in time when your getting ripped off, and that is how the record companies and recording industry has been for such a long time and now they are wondering why there has been such a revolt.... Here Warner is offering 2.5bn for EMI and visa versa yet will that REALLY benefit the musicians, the end user.. Hell no its only going to make share holders richer which is going to screw me, and you and whoever else listens to music.
I am interested to see viable alternatives to PayPal, their transaction rates are very expensive given the type and value of the transactions. I understand that every business has to make money but I am sure they would have more customers if the transaction cost where lower or had a better rate.
I wonder if a merger between AMD and ATI would cause adverse side effects with the AMD / nVidia relationship. many people claim that the nVidia boards are amoungst the best for the AMD chip (i have no experience using them personally except in the Sun x2100 server which has a _seriously_ crap second interface in it). However I am sure there could be some adverse side effects which would potentially hamper one of AMDs biggest alternative chipset providers.
The cost of building out datacentres has been soaring for several reasons, the first real issue is being able to provide enough power for todays power hungry servers to run at any sort of density required to actually churn the data. We see datacentres only able to offer very low amount of power per square meter in the UK, which is very low and can often only provide you with upto 4 quad processor XEON servers per rack. When you can only have that density the cost is much greater. The other aspect is how do you cool it, the traditional airconditioning raised floor method really does not work as its almost impossible to actually cool where you have to cool and there will always be hot spots even if your doing warm row cold row designs etc. Its important to seal the cool air in and funnel it to where its needed. APC have recently been working heavily in this area and claim to be able to cool MASSIVE amounts of density. The other issue is the management aspects of these datacentres. In the past you could design a datacentre to be good for 5-10 years now its hard to design something which will be good for the same length of time becaues the power requirements, cooling and power grid is something that is often over utilised (as per in the UK datacentre market).
It is well established that the United States completely screwed the russian economy during the 90s. Therer are several well documented US commisions that outlined just such issues as a means to help halt Russia selling OIL in Rubles or Euros (not sure which one off the top of my head). There have been several high profile reports regarding the issues raised and many of them have been simply swept under the carpet by mainstream press.
As a systems administrator working on a few large scale mail servers the 'investment' required to cut spam and virus emails is very low if the system has been designed properly. I use open source tools on a system with in excess of 150,000 active users and it costs nothing in licenses and its on four servers and a central NetAPP filer for the mailstore. Realistically if we distribute the total cost over the user count and support issues are very low. its simple design the system. Our email service uses the following
-Qmail, vpopmail, simscan, spamassassin and clamav. On a userbase with the amount of users we have its very easy to distribute, its easy to scale and the performance is great.
I have used and built systems on both software sets, Here is what i found
- Lotus notes was more difficult to build an application but once we had built that application it did exactly what we wanted it to do and we could introduce our own work flows etc. That was something that sharepoint never gave us the ability to use/do.
- Sharepoint provides another great way for Microsoft to lock users into their software suites, We had disabled the use of IE across all servers within our company and installed and manage firefox, That leads us to massive problems with users ability to run with Sharepoint.
- Lotus notes is cross platform and does not have nearly as much lock-in to any particular vendor. There are so many additional third party products that integrate into Notes that you can have something so powerful that your entire business world can run from it with minimal development and maintenance.
- Sharepoint is something that was easy for us to deploy, but scaling it and keeping the whole system running seemed to take much more support time from the help desk which instantly made the software more costly over time than the Notes solution even after taking the development time for Notes into account.
- If you want to use Sharepoint from a system that is NOT on the domain its an absolute nightmare. When you want to add an article its time to start authenticating several times just to post, then it will often report that you do not have permissions even though you have authenticated to access the server. If you join the domain then it makes it all much easier.. but how about working from home and remote users? Its not an issue for Notes.
From our extensive testing of the Sun T2000 in datacentre environments we see that as a system pushing LAMP applications it will come out much faster than any other servers in its category. Another real selling point for the system in Datacentre environments in the UK is that its fairly powerful for the power it draws and the heat that it produces, We can get away with fewer systems doing the same amount of work. Having Sun endorse Ubuntu's SPARC port will be a massive improvement to the overall product, one of the biggest issues we have is since moving away from Solaris to XEON And Opteron based Linux servers over the last three years we are in a stitch having to deploy Solaris on these servers to support the ~40-50k users we have connected to our web farm at any one time means we have multiple operating systems to support. as we use Debian on all our other servers and the debian SPARC port is not stable on the T1 yet.. so at the end of the day for the purpose that the server has been built for (web farm/content delivery) its a brilliant system. And as for SSL its not an issue, many big web farms do not do SSL on the servers in that farm anyway rather on 'ssl accelorators' etc.
Your experiences are very similar to ones that I have been having recently. All of our internal systems are web based which makes the end platform completely irrelevent with many people using Linux, MacOS X and windows in a small percentage.
As someoone that has previously been heavily involved with Remedy. Last time I checked there are now web agents that you can deploy and have no problems with. It may not have an agent for your products in use but it will be a matter of time for the most part.