Actually no, you're wrong. Netscape Navigator and Netscape Suite were always free for non-commercial use. If you wanted the version of Netscape for Win3.1 that included the TCP/IP stack and dialer, that cost money.
Netscape was the browser that nearly everyone used. It ran on nearly OS that was even slightly common. Most OS producers went through great trouble to bundle Netscape with the OS. This generated quite a bit of revenue for Netscape. The notable exception to that really was Microsoft, who refused to do this.
Instead, MS developed their own "free" browser that supported a subset of the HTML standards, added a *lot* of proprietary interfaces, and buried itself into the OS. They then tied many things into requiring the presence of that browser, including their own maintanance websites. Then they prohibited any third party reseller from removing it, or installing anything that competed with it.
Firefox might have had a chance as a non-free piece of software, had MS not already illegally forced out all the commercial competition with their "free" IE.
OK, then take what the GP said, and redact the missing parts instead of deleting them entirely. You get the same effect, and people simply are left wondering what the redacted bits are. It's isn't considered rewriting to redact parts of a document. However, it substantially alters the context, in much the way the GP deletions would do.
Perhaps you haven't seen the way some of these declassified documents are butchered.
Sounds like you're getting caught up in trees (terms) and missing the forest.
USENET is a way for articles to be propogated among coordinating servers, and then users would poll those distributed servers. RSS is a way for distributing articles with only one server, and the users query it directly. What this tech does is create a way for articles to be propogated among coordinating servers, but those servers are also the users. The users then query other users, who are acting as servers, and then become servers themselves.
So basically, this would do the same thing that USENET did, but without the network of static coordinating servers. It, instead, replaces the static servers with dynamic servers and a method of locating those dynamic servers. It's the USENET concept that has been more decentralized in the content distribution.
It isn't bad that it's basically a reinvention of USENET, but it is silly to argue that the concepts and goals aren't the same.
That's simple. Libertarians tend to want government staying out of where it doesn't belong. This particularly applies to the Federal government. There is nothing unconstitutional about a public school system... as long as the Federal has absolutely nothing to do with it. If the residents of an area vote to have such a thing, then fine, that's their democratic decision. I don't always like the idea of public schooling, because of the many conflicts and waste that are often involved, but I also can't say it would be right to force my neighboring town to not have one.
-An American Libertarian working for a municipal government.
Exactly, that's why I'm so strongly opposed to DRM encumbered formats. If you get an unencumbered music file, it is easy to move it between devices and create backups. You don't have to deal with any authorization for playback, or any annoying conversion steps. It just works.
By being willing to accept even a moderately encumbered format, such as AAC w/ Fairplay, you lose your Fair Use rights.
ITMS might be convenient in the short term, but the long term effects are opposed to customer rights and use, which I think negates the convenience.
Sounds like a 100% ripoff of Cisco's IP Phone technology. The Cisco stuff does all that with the phone set, soft-phone, emailed voicemails, and integration with Outlook.
How did you think that all worked... by MS deciding to start selling phones? That's been around for years now.
I agree that it's unlikely that the RIAA, and its members, will allow non-DRM digital downloads of music. That's part of the problem, though, since the music gets out there anyway. It's another step that does nothing to prevent copyright infringment. It's all about the studios being able to control what you do after you've purchased the music.
The ITMS burn to CD work around just isn't good enough. You pay for, and download, a low quality copy of a song. Then you burn that low quality song to CD. Now you've managed to pay a good bit more to have that song on CD than it would cost to buy the CD in the first place, and you don't get as good of a copy, either. The only thing you've managed to do better than buying it on CD is you were able to pick and choose the songs (which is, admittedly, of definite benefit). Now, you want to put that ITMS song that you've burned onto CD into a useful compressed format. You end up with something of even lower quality than the original low quality download.
The problem with you accepting the DRM infected downloads as "OK" is the nature of the story. RIAA, and members, like the idea of you paying to get nothing of cost to them, as in that it doesn't cost them anything for you to get that file. They also realized that they can control your use more with the DRM download than with the CD. Now they want to/get rid/ of that unencumbered CD, leaving you with no method of legally obtaining a good quality copy of the music, or one that is in a useful (non-DRM) format.
As I said, the only acceptable format is one without DRM. It is the only one in which you are able to retain full use of your purchase.
Well, this is what happens when people are willing to accept a half-way system, like Apples ITMS. It isn't really a good method of online download, because it is infested with DRM. Now people are getting bitten by that, and they might not have a good option, all because they were so short-sighted.
This is to be expected. People said "iTunes is good" because they were Apple and they were offering the lesser of the evils. Somehow people thought that they were getting a deal by purchasing a lower quality, DRM infected, more expensive, version of their music from ITMS. Apple has consistently changed your "rights" by altering exactly what you can do with your music. They have their users locked down and could technically change your "rights" however they want.
So, yes, the RIAA is evil for both reasons. Killing online music is evil on both sides of the sale: for the selling side, it is a business with nearly no costs; for the purchasing side, you should be getting a discount and faster access to music. Realistically you pay the same or more, and the RIAA causes massive business operating costs. In the case of the CD, they're trying to take away the only (theoretically) unencumbered format that is left, and replace it with non-physical low-quality computer based copies.
Some of us refused to go along with the fanboi "Apple is the holy goodness" type attitude, because we could see further than our noses. The *only* acceptable solution is one with absolutely no DRM. That is why I only buy non-RIAA affiliated works on physical media in standard redbook audio (CDDA). It's why you should do same.
That's not a surprise, really. You get older and you start to value your time more; you want things to just work. If I were in a situation where I had a few people living in the same house, I'd probably be willing to invest the time to learn something like Asterisk for home. Learning it there means another skill that I can use on the job, and that makes me more valuable.
You're right though... setting up a full PBX just for myself would be silly. I'm also not exactly likely to use a > 5 person conference call at work, much less at home. It's a silly restriction to put in place, since it's obviously not a restriction of technology, but not one that will be a problem for most people. Those that it is a problem for could always just setup a paid conference call with someone like MCI, anyway.
I don't think I'll be comfortable with the technical setup that Skype uses for calling, just because they don't control the endpoints that they use to transmit calls. For my personal usage, that's generally ok, but I couldn't use that kind of setup for business. There are too many places for something to fail, or for information to be intercepted, and little to no way of knowing that it's occurred. That's largely me being paranoid, but there it is.;-)
I'm not sure about that with Skype... one of the reasons that they're popular is because they're free. Of course, they have ways which they could get revenue, such as Skype-out and Skype-in, but nothing that's earning much right now. Perhaps they will embrace an open standard, like SIP, which would make it easier for them to play with the bigger boys in the market. As they currently sit, they're only useful for point to point single user calls. Their conferences is the same idea... not good for an office, but fine for a group of individuals. They certainly *can* have a viable business model, though.
The big flaw that I see is that they depend on nodes that they don't own to place outgoing calls. I would never use a service that operates in that fashion for anything commercial, or anything that could be potentially confidential.
Businesses would be fools for using Skype for their calls, anyway. I don't know what the GP was thinking implying that Asterisk is a replacement for end user point to point calls.
Asterisk is only marginally more difficult than getting a regular PBX up and running. Those things can be beasts unless you're purchasing a software configurable product. Getting *those* will cost a lot of money. However, Asterisk would probably save you $40,000 in hardware, easily.
If you manage to buy the wrong cards for an Asterisk server, you're doing something wrong, as in you aren't doing it competently... It's not just for doing VoIP to the rest of the world... that would be foolish in most environments. You *can* use it that way, but you can also connect a bank of T-1s or T-3s to it and place calls out on a PRI or whatnot. That would enable you to be fully VoIP on the inside. You *could* connect to SIP networks, such as other sites over a VPN, though.
Google sells quite a few things, actually. They "give away" search, email, etc, but they sell search appliances, advertising, and Google Earth, off the top of my head. They are also likely soon to be selling corporate webmail hosting. They have Google Video, and the Enterprise Google Desktop product, too. They also have quite a few other projects that they could use to make money in the future, such as Transit, Compute, Froogle, and Local. They could also try making deals over Scholar, Books, News, and Catalogs.
Just because you don't see the obvious money making schemes that Google could try does not mean they aren't there. They do have products and services that they charge for, today, and there are many ways that they can leverage their other services to make a lot more money.
You can do the same thing with a camera and recorder, plus you get usable evidence about the person(s) entering the area. You can just use a keypad or card swipe and have the same security as with this asinine implant, plus you don't endanger the employees health as a direct result of your "security" requirement.
These areas already require bypasses in the event of an emergency. Fire and medical personnel need a way to get access. *They* wouldn't be foolish enough to let some nutjob implant them with something.
Mozilla Calendar, in all its incarnations, is barely alpha quality software. It only really works for personal calendars, with no collaboration. Lightning doesn't have a real release and Sunbird is 0.3alpha. As you admit to, if you don't need a calendar, then I suppose it's fine. When it's released, then it is an option; for now, it is not.
I've spent more time than I like trying to find a low cost solution to desktop calendaring with the features that Exchange/Outlook or GroupWise can offer. I would prefer to use OSS, but the problem is that nothing is currently usable that is OSS. If I was willing to go with a web interface, then I would be done, but that is not a realistically acceptable option.
Well, considering that Mozilla, Thunderbird, Eudora, Pegasus, The Bat, Outlook Express, GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and I'm sure quite a few others, do not do "just basic calendar" or directory services, the vast majority of clients are "mind numbingly brain dead".
Outlook is one of a very few collaboration clients that do shared calendars at all, for example. This might seem basic to someone that doesn't know what is involved, I suppose. As I said, *these are not basic things*.
Having a directory service is easy. Having one that is useful is not, since you need to have global contacts and personal contacts, and a way to share those personal contacts. You need a friendly way to update these contacts.
Having a calendar is easy. Having one that is useful is not, since you need to have global calendaring, personal calendaring, things like room and equipment reservations, personal calendars, and a mechanism to share them, the ability to invite a person to a meeting, having them accept, and have a the meeting roster updated, the ability to determine when your potential invitees are availabe, etc. You need a friendly way to manage these calendars.
That is before delegation gets added in. Most mid-size and larger businesses want to be able to delegate such things. Many smaller business and institutions want to delegate as well. You don't want to do this by sharing passwords.
Again, this stuff is *not easy*. There aren't a lot of options, in general, and the OSS options are rather useless; the client support is abyssmal. If you need these functions, and run Windows or MacOS, then you are going to spend money. A web page interface is not a usable option (which is to say that the usability, bluntly, sucks on them). Evolution, KMail, and Kontact don't run on Windows, and they are the OSS alternatives.
That's what the GP said, actually. Your house has an certain assessed value, and a certain tax rate, which accounts for the maximum taxable amount. Many places will only allow the collected property tax revenue to go up a certain amount over the previous year, regardless of new development or raising of assessments.
What could happen is to say that at your tax rate, the locality is able to collect $50 million, but only needs $30 million. They would have to adjust all of their taxes to only collect the $30 million, so nobody would pay the 100% rate based on their assessment. However, if they collected $30 million last year, but need $38 million this year, they may need to perform a special procedure to raise their tax revenue by the $8 million over the previous. In both cases, the maximum possible tax revenue would be $50 million, they levied a tax for that amount internally, and had to do a calculation to drop that to only the exact amount required.
So you see, you have a maximum possible tax, but would like not pay that full rate.
The entire state of MA does it this way, for example. I would be very surprised if most of the US didn't do it in a similar fashion.
No, this hosted gmail bit isn't a threat at all to things like Exchange. People *don't* want web apps for these things. You might think they are cool and wonderful, but those that have to use it day in and day out will want your head for making them use it. You also don't have control of your data and backup, and all of your information would be offsite.
You would need a ridiculous amount more control than "just throw in calendaring". You need delegation and free/busy tracking. You need desktop notification. You need a real client application (ie: NO WEB BROWSER).
It isn't what Outlook does by itself, it's what any rich client can do when connected to a proper server. You get contacts, shared contacts, calendars, shared calendars, delegation, appointment tracking, free/busy notification, shared/public message stores, to do lists, and - oh yeah - email tacked on to all that.
Outlook will connect to OpenGroupware, Exchange, Open-Xchange, Kolab, and a few others, and serve all of the groupware functions. There are a few other clients that will do similarly, such as GroupWise. Then you have things like Notes/Domino that do huge volumes more than the others.
That is a lot of things, and they are not trivial.
Of course it also means that I need Microsoft's permission to use something that I already paid for, and after the fact. I will not pay MS a single cent more than I can possibly avoid as a result of their vacant ethics and nonexistent desire to actually serve customers, not to mention the low quality of their products.
This means that for things that I can't avoid Windows for, I can either deal with the registration key, the activation protection racket, genuine disadvantage, and whatever other obnoxious and useless thing they come up with next, or I can use a key generator to make a volume key, integrate it with the install to avoid ever entering it again, never have to activate, and use one of the various ways to get rid of genuine disadvantage (ie: install activex plugin, then disable it). It took one blank CD, one reg key, and a 15 second work around to defeat all of their ridiculous, intrusive, and anti-customer annoyance that came with XP.
Now at work, I can't do this. I will still not have anything to do with paying MS for volume licensing, and their activation BS has meant that Windows has been restricted from server installation if a functional alternative exists. They lost many hundreds of users from Windows Server licensing, Exchange licensing, and Office licensing, just because MS lacks ethics and good, secure products at a *reasonable* price.
So, my desktops run Windows 2000, NT4 is still on a few servers, and it will stay that way, until I can get the NT machines onto a more managable platform.
What you're looking for is the same as a whole lot of other people are.
There are a few open source kits out there that are decent, but none of them are really done. Kolab and OpenGroupware look nice, but they have extremely limited client support. Kolab doesn't even have a fully functional web interface, instead relying on KDE's Kontact. They will both play well with Outlook on Windows through a for-money connector. Citadel has many of the features, but lacks *any* real client. I would love if the OSS kits worked, but people are much more interested in adding toys than finishing the project in good stages.
Sometimes the right answer is to spend money. Exchange, Notes/Domino, and GroupWise will do very close to what you want. There are a number of similar kits, like Kerio's mail server, Scalix (commerical OpenGroupware), OpenExchange, and whatever OpenMail became called.
As much as people think web apps are so wonderful, they really need to understand that they are not a panacea. Working in a web app for major use is quite a total pain; they just don't work as nicely as a native application. The interfaces are slow and there is no capability for offline operation. If the only fully-functional interface to something like this is a web app, then you have to largely discount it as an option. Users will hate you for forcing them to it.
If Evolution ran on Windows, you would be fairly done with the search. The devs haven't gotten around to making this a reality, so you are stuck in an annoying place. If you are looking for only yourself, then any of these solutions is probably sufficient. If you are looking for a product normal users will have to deal with, then look to spend money on software.
Funny, but exactly the reason why speed cameras, and everything of the ilk, should be banned. They screw up constantly, and nobody is checking on them. This is *exactly* as predicted from when they started putting those horrid things up. At least the Aussies had some guts and were breaking the damned things.
Sounds like exactly what EA did with C&C Generals. I never bought another EA game after that pathetic attempt at release software. You couldn't even reliably *play* a network game, so it was pretty difficult to worry about cheating. Every patch broke some other aspect of the game, and every other introduced some new and more annoying DRM infection. The next patch would remove the DRM so that people could play the game.
The other biggie, Ubisoft, is just as bad. I had to actually block all traffic to Ubisoft's servers so that I could play Raven Shield. It would attempt to communicate with their servers to "authorize" the network game, but if my Internet link was down it would just stop the game every 10 seconds or so while the attempt timed out.
After those two little brushes with the stupidity of EA and Ubisoft, both of them guaranteed that I won't be purchasing from them.
I'll tell you what, though. If the IE7 upgrade requires me validating all my machines to get it to install, then it's not being installed. It would require a visit to each of my machines, across seven buildings, and weeks of time. I would have to log in as Administrator to each of them, download this ridiculous validation plugin, run it, then let IE install.
Or... much more likely, since I've already bought Windows, entered a serial number, and, in some cases, activated the copy, I'll just use one of the well known workarounds to avoid the latest MS attempt to make my life harder. Throw the plugin at IE6, automatically disable the plugin, enter the appropriate registry settings. *That* can be scripted remotely.
Following the terms, and bending over for MS to screw you again and again are different. Sure, their terms say they can do this, but that they decided to is obnoxious and unnecessary. I'm certainly not going to defend them by saying I'm "happy" to comply. I'm not; it pisses me off, and I don't want to deal with it. Way to go MS, another anti-copying scheme that just irritates paying customers, but doesn't bother copyright-infringers in the least.
(And BTW, just because MS marketing is outright lying about "innovation" doesn't mean that it's ok.)
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Actually no, you're wrong. Netscape Navigator and Netscape Suite were always free for non-commercial use. If you wanted the version of Netscape for Win3.1 that included the TCP/IP stack and dialer, that cost money.
Netscape was the browser that nearly everyone used. It ran on nearly OS that was even slightly common. Most OS producers went through great trouble to bundle Netscape with the OS. This generated quite a bit of revenue for Netscape. The notable exception to that really was Microsoft, who refused to do this.
Instead, MS developed their own "free" browser that supported a subset of the HTML standards, added a *lot* of proprietary interfaces, and buried itself into the OS. They then tied many things into requiring the presence of that browser, including their own maintanance websites. Then they prohibited any third party reseller from removing it, or installing anything that competed with it.
Firefox might have had a chance as a non-free piece of software, had MS not already illegally forced out all the commercial competition with their "free" IE.
OK, then take what the GP said, and redact the missing parts instead of deleting them entirely. You get the same effect, and people simply are left wondering what the redacted bits are. It's isn't considered rewriting to redact parts of a document. However, it substantially alters the context, in much the way the GP deletions would do.
Perhaps you haven't seen the way some of these declassified documents are butchered.
Sounds like you're getting caught up in trees (terms) and missing the forest.
USENET is a way for articles to be propogated among coordinating servers, and then users would poll those distributed servers. RSS is a way for distributing articles with only one server, and the users query it directly. What this tech does is create a way for articles to be propogated among coordinating servers, but those servers are also the users. The users then query other users, who are acting as servers, and then become servers themselves.
So basically, this would do the same thing that USENET did, but without the network of static coordinating servers. It, instead, replaces the static servers with dynamic servers and a method of locating those dynamic servers. It's the USENET concept that has been more decentralized in the content distribution.
It isn't bad that it's basically a reinvention of USENET, but it is silly to argue that the concepts and goals aren't the same.
That's simple. Libertarians tend to want government staying out of where it doesn't belong. This particularly applies to the Federal government. There is nothing unconstitutional about a public school system... as long as the Federal has absolutely nothing to do with it. If the residents of an area vote to have such a thing, then fine, that's their democratic decision. I don't always like the idea of public schooling, because of the many conflicts and waste that are often involved, but I also can't say it would be right to force my neighboring town to not have one.
-An American Libertarian working for a municipal government.
Exactly, that's why I'm so strongly opposed to DRM encumbered formats. If you get an unencumbered music file, it is easy to move it between devices and create backups. You don't have to deal with any authorization for playback, or any annoying conversion steps. It just works.
By being willing to accept even a moderately encumbered format, such as AAC w/ Fairplay, you lose your Fair Use rights.
ITMS might be convenient in the short term, but the long term effects are opposed to customer rights and use, which I think negates the convenience.
Sounds like a 100% ripoff of Cisco's IP Phone technology. The Cisco stuff does all that with the phone set, soft-phone, emailed voicemails, and integration with Outlook.
How did you think that all worked... by MS deciding to start selling phones? That's been around for years now.
I agree that it's unlikely that the RIAA, and its members, will allow non-DRM digital downloads of music. That's part of the problem, though, since the music gets out there anyway. It's another step that does nothing to prevent copyright infringment. It's all about the studios being able to control what you do after you've purchased the music.
/get rid/ of that unencumbered CD, leaving you with no method of legally obtaining a good quality copy of the music, or one that is in a useful (non-DRM) format.
The ITMS burn to CD work around just isn't good enough. You pay for, and download, a low quality copy of a song. Then you burn that low quality song to CD. Now you've managed to pay a good bit more to have that song on CD than it would cost to buy the CD in the first place, and you don't get as good of a copy, either. The only thing you've managed to do better than buying it on CD is you were able to pick and choose the songs (which is, admittedly, of definite benefit). Now, you want to put that ITMS song that you've burned onto CD into a useful compressed format. You end up with something of even lower quality than the original low quality download.
The problem with you accepting the DRM infected downloads as "OK" is the nature of the story. RIAA, and members, like the idea of you paying to get nothing of cost to them, as in that it doesn't cost them anything for you to get that file. They also realized that they can control your use more with the DRM download than with the CD. Now they want to
As I said, the only acceptable format is one without DRM. It is the only one in which you are able to retain full use of your purchase.
Well, this is what happens when people are willing to accept a half-way system, like Apples ITMS. It isn't really a good method of online download, because it is infested with DRM. Now people are getting bitten by that, and they might not have a good option, all because they were so short-sighted.
This is to be expected. People said "iTunes is good" because they were Apple and they were offering the lesser of the evils. Somehow people thought that they were getting a deal by purchasing a lower quality, DRM infected, more expensive, version of their music from ITMS. Apple has consistently changed your "rights" by altering exactly what you can do with your music. They have their users locked down and could technically change your "rights" however they want.
So, yes, the RIAA is evil for both reasons. Killing online music is evil on both sides of the sale: for the selling side, it is a business with nearly no costs; for the purchasing side, you should be getting a discount and faster access to music. Realistically you pay the same or more, and the RIAA causes massive business operating costs. In the case of the CD, they're trying to take away the only (theoretically) unencumbered format that is left, and replace it with non-physical low-quality computer based copies.
Some of us refused to go along with the fanboi "Apple is the holy goodness" type attitude, because we could see further than our noses. The *only* acceptable solution is one with absolutely no DRM. That is why I only buy non-RIAA affiliated works on physical media in standard redbook audio (CDDA). It's why you should do same.
That's not a surprise, really. You get older and you start to value your time more; you want things to just work. If I were in a situation where I had a few people living in the same house, I'd probably be willing to invest the time to learn something like Asterisk for home. Learning it there means another skill that I can use on the job, and that makes me more valuable.
;-)
You're right though... setting up a full PBX just for myself would be silly. I'm also not exactly likely to use a > 5 person conference call at work, much less at home. It's a silly restriction to put in place, since it's obviously not a restriction of technology, but not one that will be a problem for most people. Those that it is a problem for could always just setup a paid conference call with someone like MCI, anyway.
I don't think I'll be comfortable with the technical setup that Skype uses for calling, just because they don't control the endpoints that they use to transmit calls. For my personal usage, that's generally ok, but I couldn't use that kind of setup for business. There are too many places for something to fail, or for information to be intercepted, and little to no way of knowing that it's occurred. That's largely me being paranoid, but there it is.
Ah, that makes more sense. :)
I'm not sure about that with Skype... one of the reasons that they're popular is because they're free. Of course, they have ways which they could get revenue, such as Skype-out and Skype-in, but nothing that's earning much right now. Perhaps they will embrace an open standard, like SIP, which would make it easier for them to play with the bigger boys in the market. As they currently sit, they're only useful for point to point single user calls. Their conferences is the same idea... not good for an office, but fine for a group of individuals. They certainly *can* have a viable business model, though.
The big flaw that I see is that they depend on nodes that they don't own to place outgoing calls. I would never use a service that operates in that fashion for anything commercial, or anything that could be potentially confidential.
Businesses would be fools for using Skype for their calls, anyway. I don't know what the GP was thinking implying that Asterisk is a replacement for end user point to point calls.
Asterisk is only marginally more difficult than getting a regular PBX up and running. Those things can be beasts unless you're purchasing a software configurable product. Getting *those* will cost a lot of money. However, Asterisk would probably save you $40,000 in hardware, easily.
If you manage to buy the wrong cards for an Asterisk server, you're doing something wrong, as in you aren't doing it competently... It's not just for doing VoIP to the rest of the world... that would be foolish in most environments. You *can* use it that way, but you can also connect a bank of T-1s or T-3s to it and place calls out on a PRI or whatnot. That would enable you to be fully VoIP on the inside. You *could* connect to SIP networks, such as other sites over a VPN, though.
Google sells quite a few things, actually. They "give away" search, email, etc, but they sell search appliances, advertising, and Google Earth, off the top of my head. They are also likely soon to be selling corporate webmail hosting. They have Google Video, and the Enterprise Google Desktop product, too. They also have quite a few other projects that they could use to make money in the future, such as Transit, Compute, Froogle, and Local. They could also try making deals over Scholar, Books, News, and Catalogs.
Just because you don't see the obvious money making schemes that Google could try does not mean they aren't there. They do have products and services that they charge for, today, and there are many ways that they can leverage their other services to make a lot more money.
You can do the same thing with a camera and recorder, plus you get usable evidence about the person(s) entering the area. You can just use a keypad or card swipe and have the same security as with this asinine implant, plus you don't endanger the employees health as a direct result of your "security" requirement.
These areas already require bypasses in the event of an emergency. Fire and medical personnel need a way to get access. *They* wouldn't be foolish enough to let some nutjob implant them with something.
Mozilla Calendar, in all its incarnations, is barely alpha quality software. It only really works for personal calendars, with no collaboration. Lightning doesn't have a real release and Sunbird is 0.3alpha. As you admit to, if you don't need a calendar, then I suppose it's fine. When it's released, then it is an option; for now, it is not.
I've spent more time than I like trying to find a low cost solution to desktop calendaring with the features that Exchange/Outlook or GroupWise can offer. I would prefer to use OSS, but the problem is that nothing is currently usable that is OSS. If I was willing to go with a web interface, then I would be done, but that is not a realistically acceptable option.
Well, considering that Mozilla, Thunderbird, Eudora, Pegasus, The Bat, Outlook Express, GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and I'm sure quite a few others, do not do "just basic calendar" or directory services, the vast majority of clients are "mind numbingly brain dead".
Outlook is one of a very few collaboration clients that do shared calendars at all, for example. This might seem basic to someone that doesn't know what is involved, I suppose. As I said, *these are not basic things*.
Having a directory service is easy. Having one that is useful is not, since you need to have global contacts and personal contacts, and a way to share those personal contacts. You need a friendly way to update these contacts.
Having a calendar is easy. Having one that is useful is not, since you need to have global calendaring, personal calendaring, things like room and equipment reservations, personal calendars, and a mechanism to share them, the ability to invite a person to a meeting, having them accept, and have a the meeting roster updated, the ability to determine when your potential invitees are availabe, etc. You need a friendly way to manage these calendars.
That is before delegation gets added in. Most mid-size and larger businesses want to be able to delegate such things. Many smaller business and institutions want to delegate as well. You don't want to do this by sharing passwords.
Again, this stuff is *not easy*. There aren't a lot of options, in general, and the OSS options are rather useless; the client support is abyssmal. If you need these functions, and run Windows or MacOS, then you are going to spend money. A web page interface is not a usable option (which is to say that the usability, bluntly, sucks on them). Evolution, KMail, and Kontact don't run on Windows, and they are the OSS alternatives.
That's what the GP said, actually. Your house has an certain assessed value, and a certain tax rate, which accounts for the maximum taxable amount. Many places will only allow the collected property tax revenue to go up a certain amount over the previous year, regardless of new development or raising of assessments.
What could happen is to say that at your tax rate, the locality is able to collect $50 million, but only needs $30 million. They would have to adjust all of their taxes to only collect the $30 million, so nobody would pay the 100% rate based on their assessment. However, if they collected $30 million last year, but need $38 million this year, they may need to perform a special procedure to raise their tax revenue by the $8 million over the previous. In both cases, the maximum possible tax revenue would be $50 million, they levied a tax for that amount internally, and had to do a calculation to drop that to only the exact amount required.
So you see, you have a maximum possible tax, but would like not pay that full rate.
The entire state of MA does it this way, for example. I would be very surprised if most of the US didn't do it in a similar fashion.
No, this hosted gmail bit isn't a threat at all to things like Exchange. People *don't* want web apps for these things. You might think they are cool and wonderful, but those that have to use it day in and day out will want your head for making them use it. You also don't have control of your data and backup, and all of your information would be offsite.
You would need a ridiculous amount more control than "just throw in calendaring". You need delegation and free/busy tracking. You need desktop notification. You need a real client application (ie: NO WEB BROWSER).
It isn't what Outlook does by itself, it's what any rich client can do when connected to a proper server. You get contacts, shared contacts, calendars, shared calendars, delegation, appointment tracking, free/busy notification, shared/public message stores, to do lists, and - oh yeah - email tacked on to all that.
Outlook will connect to OpenGroupware, Exchange, Open-Xchange, Kolab, and a few others, and serve all of the groupware functions. There are a few other clients that will do similarly, such as GroupWise. Then you have things like Notes/Domino that do huge volumes more than the others.
That is a lot of things, and they are not trivial.
Of course it also means that I need Microsoft's permission to use something that I already paid for, and after the fact. I will not pay MS a single cent more than I can possibly avoid as a result of their vacant ethics and nonexistent desire to actually serve customers, not to mention the low quality of their products.
This means that for things that I can't avoid Windows for, I can either deal with the registration key, the activation protection racket, genuine disadvantage, and whatever other obnoxious and useless thing they come up with next, or I can use a key generator to make a volume key, integrate it with the install to avoid ever entering it again, never have to activate, and use one of the various ways to get rid of genuine disadvantage (ie: install activex plugin, then disable it). It took one blank CD, one reg key, and a 15 second work around to defeat all of their ridiculous, intrusive, and anti-customer annoyance that came with XP.
Now at work, I can't do this. I will still not have anything to do with paying MS for volume licensing, and their activation BS has meant that Windows has been restricted from server installation if a functional alternative exists. They lost many hundreds of users from Windows Server licensing, Exchange licensing, and Office licensing, just because MS lacks ethics and good, secure products at a *reasonable* price.
So, my desktops run Windows 2000, NT4 is still on a few servers, and it will stay that way, until I can get the NT machines onto a more managable platform.
What you're looking for is the same as a whole lot of other people are.
There are a few open source kits out there that are decent, but none of them are really done. Kolab and OpenGroupware look nice, but they have extremely limited client support. Kolab doesn't even have a fully functional web interface, instead relying on KDE's Kontact. They will both play well with Outlook on Windows through a for-money connector. Citadel has many of the features, but lacks *any* real client. I would love if the OSS kits worked, but people are much more interested in adding toys than finishing the project in good stages.
Sometimes the right answer is to spend money. Exchange, Notes/Domino, and GroupWise will do very close to what you want. There are a number of similar kits, like Kerio's mail server, Scalix (commerical OpenGroupware), OpenExchange, and whatever OpenMail became called.
As much as people think web apps are so wonderful, they really need to understand that they are not a panacea. Working in a web app for major use is quite a total pain; they just don't work as nicely as a native application. The interfaces are slow and there is no capability for offline operation. If the only fully-functional interface to something like this is a web app, then you have to largely discount it as an option. Users will hate you for forcing them to it.
If Evolution ran on Windows, you would be fairly done with the search. The devs haven't gotten around to making this a reality, so you are stuck in an annoying place. If you are looking for only yourself, then any of these solutions is probably sufficient. If you are looking for a product normal users will have to deal with, then look to spend money on software.
They do the same things in Australia, but it's a lot like a game. Add more levels of difficulty and it becomes more fun to get around it.
More important... it should tell the government that the citizens don't want these cameras and are willing to risk themselves to get rid of them.
Funny, but exactly the reason why speed cameras, and everything of the ilk, should be banned. They screw up constantly, and nobody is checking on them. This is *exactly* as predicted from when they started putting those horrid things up. At least the Aussies had some guts and were breaking the damned things.
Sounds like exactly what EA did with C&C Generals. I never bought another EA game after that pathetic attempt at release software. You couldn't even reliably *play* a network game, so it was pretty difficult to worry about cheating. Every patch broke some other aspect of the game, and every other introduced some new and more annoying DRM infection. The next patch would remove the DRM so that people could play the game.
The other biggie, Ubisoft, is just as bad. I had to actually block all traffic to Ubisoft's servers so that I could play Raven Shield. It would attempt to communicate with their servers to "authorize" the network game, but if my Internet link was down it would just stop the game every 10 seconds or so while the attempt timed out.
After those two little brushes with the stupidity of EA and Ubisoft, both of them guaranteed that I won't be purchasing from them.
I'll tell you what, though. If the IE7 upgrade requires me validating all my machines to get it to install, then it's not being installed. It would require a visit to each of my machines, across seven buildings, and weeks of time. I would have to log in as Administrator to each of them, download this ridiculous validation plugin, run it, then let IE install.
Or... much more likely, since I've already bought Windows, entered a serial number, and, in some cases, activated the copy, I'll just use one of the well known workarounds to avoid the latest MS attempt to make my life harder. Throw the plugin at IE6, automatically disable the plugin, enter the appropriate registry settings. *That* can be scripted remotely.
Following the terms, and bending over for MS to screw you again and again are different. Sure, their terms say they can do this, but that they decided to is obnoxious and unnecessary. I'm certainly not going to defend them by saying I'm "happy" to comply. I'm not; it pisses me off, and I don't want to deal with it. Way to go MS, another anti-copying scheme that just irritates paying customers, but doesn't bother copyright-infringers in the least.
(And BTW, just because MS marketing is outright lying about "innovation" doesn't mean that it's ok.)
Well, northern Africa did get a bit of a turn for a while, specifically Ethiopia. We're talking biblical times, though.... so thousands of years ago.