I hope that, even if your buddy wasn't asked for his details, he at least got the name of the person who told him this, and noted the date and time of the call. It still might not have much effect, but at least it's something, y'know?
Nobody can submit claims until two months from now, at which time Alvarado is expected to approve the exact wording of the public notification of the settlement.
So there will be a fairly short window of opportunity.
But this, to me, is much more interesting.
Two-thirds of the unclaimed money will go to California public schools in a mix of donated Microsoft software and cash grants. Although the maximum value of the settlement is $1.1 billion, Microsoft could end up paying as little as $367 million in cash, which is what it would owe to California public schools if no vouchers are claimed. If all vouchers are claimed, Microsoft would be required to pay the maximum, but schools would then get nothing.
Now I wonder how this part of the negotiations worked out. The more that is claimed by Californians, the more they are effectively taking away from the public schools.
So (in a fit of pure speculation and knowing bugger all about how these things work in that great state), is there a chance that educational organizations might start running radio advertisements encouraging people to voluntarily give up their claims so that the money can automatically go to the schools? And, if that were to happen, and be successful in any quantity, might it then be possible for Microsoft to turn around and say, "see, people really didn't care that much after all"?
Now, my initial reaction is to think there's no way this could happen. But then I stop to consider just how little reimbursement would actually be involved for most people, and the fact that they have to go through the whole rigmarole of filling out the paperwork and submitting it and so on (unless they take up Lindows on their offer), and it just might work out that a fair quantity of people decide it's not worth it for them and they'd just as soon have it go to the schools.
Q: What benefits are available under the settlement?
A: You will receive vouchers redeemable for cash after the purchase of a wide variety of software and computer hardware products. The vouchers are worth: $16 for each Microsoft Windows or MS-DOS license claimed; $29 for each Microsoft Office license claimed; $5 for each Microsoft Word, Home Essentials or Works Suite license claimed; and $26 for each Microsoft Excel license claimed.
Correct. I really dislike getting on the whole political conspiracy thing, but, well, President Bush, his mate Cheney, etc., etc., in bed with big oil...you know.
The fact is the U.S. has had petrol prices held to an unreasonable and artificially low price for years and years. I'm guessing it has something to do with America's love affair with the car in general and enormous trucks in particular, and the power that is Ford/GM/etc. As you say, Americans feel entitled to low petrol prices, and can conveniently ignore that this only promotes expanded use of high-emission vehicles like the Ford F-150 trucks so beloved of anyone who needs to supplement their toughness factor.
Thanks for destroying the planet, y'all -- the rest of us really appreciate your selfish abuse of the place for the benefit of our children.
I will still be tooling around in the most practical vehicle I have ever owned... my motorcycle
Yeah, my motorcycles were the most practical vehicles I'd ever owned, too. Until I started having to cart around band gear. And my girlfriend didn't feel safe on a bike. And I needed to go shopping for enough groceries for a four-person flat for a week.
And then I got hit by someone who just didn't see me...drove her car straight into me, put me in the hospital with a leg broken in three places including a compound fracture.
By the way, have you ever seen the photos of motorcyclists who were lane-splitting and rode into a car door being opened by an oblivious car driver who was getting out of his car to see what was causing the jam? I have -- and it's really not pretty.
On the same line, please tell me you at least wear a full-face helmet (the best you can afford -- a Shoei or an Arai, say), full leathers, leather boots, and leather gloves -- at all times, all kinds of weather. I still can't stand to see motorcyclists here in PA riding in shorts and tee-shirts. Because I know what happened to me, and there wasn't a darned thing I could do to stop that lady from hitting me. (Way to go, governor Rendell, passing that repeal-mandatory-motorcycle-helmets law just as your buddy Mayor Street is gearing up for a re-election battle. I truly loathe corrupt Philadelphia politics.)
Point being, motorcycles are great fun, and, for me, they used to be worth the risk (when I didn't have a family to worry about). But they're in no way practical, and the mileage you quote is really rather comparable to that of a hybrid car.
Yes, but... The parent poster is correct; a survey came out a few months ago which showed the numbers of complaints per 100 cars for each manufacturer (typically around 80 to 120 or so, I think), which is always accompanied by fanfare from those manufacturers who have the lowest number of complaints.
But one of the more interesting bits highlighted in the report was that the number one complaint for all Hummer owners was the fuel economy. The average Hummer owner buys a tank and then is honestly surprised when they keep having to pull over to fill up the gas tank. Geniuses they are not.
So the report authors chatted with Hummer about this and were told that the company was considering ways to make this more obvious to consumers so they didn't get such an unpleasant shock after they bought the thing.
Riiight...because everyone had such a good understanding of what the effects of nuclear fallout would be back in 1957, a scant 12 years after the first bombs were dropped on Japan, when the book was first published.
I first read of the settlement this morning in my newspaper. I live in the Philadelphia region, which, to give some perspective to those outside the U.S., is the fifth largest city in the United States. For all intents and purposes, there is one morning newspaper in our area, the Philadelphia Inquirer.
This story was on the back page of the business section, bottom left, perhaps three column inches. Six short paragraphs. Or, to put it another way -- it was buried.
So, what do we have? A story about an extremely quick and low-key settlement on an issue that's potentially very embarrassing to the RIAA -- and it gets stuck in some out-of-the-way spot in the paper that hardly anyone will see.
But to really get the full import of this, you have to know what sort of paper the Inquirer is, and realize that the Inquirer generally would be all over this. Stories about poor little 12 year old girls being attacked by big business? I'd expect to see a front-page article continuing on to page 4 or page 6 with pictures of the girl and her mother.
No...when I found this article in the paper, my immediate thought was, "why would the Inquirer, given who they are, bury this? Who are they in bed with?"
Nice in theory, bit more difficult in practise. If you're going to host, you need to ensure you have not only the obvious requirement of bandwidth, but also a way to achieve a decent service level agreement (SLA). That means a high percentage uptime, and a quick turnaround if something blows up.
So, if you don't have a cluster of web servers for redundancy, you need to ensure you have a highly redundant and highly recoverable web server, monitoring, someone to answer the monitoring when it detects something's broken at 2 am, a maintenance window on your server(s)...get the picture? Just like everyone is saying "don't" on your original question*, they'd be saying "forget it" for exactly the same reasons if you asked about starting up a web-hosting business.
* Note I'm not joining the chorus of "don't" naysayers. You've already got a sufficient client list to make you consider this, so you must be doing something right, not only in your technical but in your business model. You don't say if you're considering doing this full-time, but you obviously want to ramp it up to the next level, so maybe one of you retains his/her day job while the other gives it a go full-time. Or, even better, see if one or both of you can go part-time on your existing jobs.
I moved to the U.S. four years ago, and that was the first time I'd ever even heard of this insurance. I have no idea how much it costs, but I know that the two consulting firms I've worked for in the past four years have both had insurance.
I believe the amount of insurance was one million dollars, but don't quote me on that. When I joined each company, my name was added to the insurance contract. These were both very small companies, by the way.
CSXT has confronted increasingly sophisticated computer viruses, like ones that have penetrated some of the most secure sites in the country in recent days.
Sorry, but they're obviously not "some of the most secure sites in the country". If they were, they wouldn't have been penetrated like this. How can I say this? Because my company didn't get penetrated.
I'm afraid of sounding like a broken record here, because if anyone looks at my past posting history they'll see I've said exactly the same thing. However, the fact is we have mission-critical 24/7/365 servers running Windows (as well as Linux) that simply can not be vulnerable. So we secure them, and we protect them, and put in safeguards, and work together as a team if there is a particularly nasty threat out there...and we keep running. Funny, that.
Sod it; plenty of other posters will argue the point about patching, firewalling, etc., and a myriad of rabid MS-bashers will refute and insult. Let my small voice add merely this to the fray -- it doesn't have to be this way, even if you use Windows. All that is required is people who know what they're doing.
Well, I'm in Philadelphia and I'm named Ian, but I'm from New Zealand.
However, my parents are originally from England, which means I have a distinct British tinge to my accent. Oh, and most of my family still lives over there...close enough?
(By the way, of course they're not all named Bruce -- that'll be the Australians.)
Linux was certified as providing only "low to moderate" security, compared with the same group's certification as "moderate to high" last year of the security of Microsoft's Windows 2000 software. Supporters said Linux software was under testing for better-security ratings.
In fact, I'd suggest people look at the story in the Inquirer linked above -- it gives a little more information as well as some light commentary.
Unfortunately you're going to get reamed over this, but you're right. I think you're quite correct in postulating people do this to justify "getting copies of music without paying for it". (Ahem.)
I will go further and state I think it's exacerbated by (i) sheer laziness, and (ii) snobbishness. It's simply easier to download a tune rather than go to the store (mingling with those dreadful teens who like -- ugh -- Britney and N'Sync), hunt through the racks, and shell out some cash. Forget the drama if it's not in stock; you'd have to interact with a store clerk and actually wait for the item to come in.
And, let's face it, isn't it nice to feel all superior to the Britney-loving masses? We're geeks, we are experts on our computers, and we don't need to interact with the technically feeble. We have cultivated an image of being somewhat enigmatic and mysterious geeks; we want to feel superior somehow, smug in our knowledge that we can do something our managers or clients can't. Or, if you prefer, it's the ability to stick it to the man that we crave; many of us demeaned for much of our lives by the athletes or whichever social group we missed out on, we now are able to turn the tables and engage in our own little world of anarchy.
Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? An over-the-top caricature, with little basis in reality. And yet...how much of it seems borne out by the typical rantings whenever the RIAA or MPAA is the topic of debate?
Since legally coipyright infringment damage can only me measured in economic terms of lost sales..
How can RIAA claim any loss in salse when the people sharing files do not have the dispoable income to purchase Cds in the first place?
So what you're saying is that if someone doesn't have much cash, then that individual should not feel obligated to live within his or her means. Hence, that nice Jaguar that I'd like to buy but can't afford should be mine for the taking. Yes, I'd be depriving the dealer of their commission and Jaguar of their cut, but we all know that the amount of money making its way into Jaguar's hands is such a tiny profit, compared to the inflated charges from the fascist middlemen, that it's really all irrelevant. Right?
I dislike the RIAA's heavy-handed tactics as much as anyone, but I'm not willing to condone illegal tactics simply because people are not prepared to live within their means. Please feel free to argue coherently against these tactics, but stop using tenuous logic to justify theft. (And despite what the semantic monkeys seem to trot out every time we debate this hoary old topic, it is theft.)
There's a popular tourist/holiday spot up north in NZ called the Bay of Islands. One of the most popular towns is Paihia. There's a small aquarium on the main strip, which contains only sea creatures that were found in the local region.
My wife and I went in there one day, and as we walked through the front door a very nice chap introduced himself, said he was the owner, and to feel free to ask him any questions we might have. We started walking around, and soon decided we wanted some more information about a particular fish, so asked him, and he obligingly answered our question. He then followed up by telling us, "By the way, that fish is also quite tasty to eat. You want to cook him up with just a splash of lemon juice, and he'll be beautiful". He then started pointing out other fish in that tank, telling us which were no good to eat and exactly how to cook the ones which were good to eat.
That guy very kindly gave us a full guided tour of the whole aquarium (it was a slow day) -- including his own personal cooking suggestions for every single tank in the place.
Personally, I hope they misunderestimate Linux right until it kills them....If MS loses the monopoly on Windows machines as game computers... at that point MS is dead. Let's just hope they don't know it yet.
So what you're saying, essentially, is you're looking for the day when Microsoft's monopoly gets replaced by a Linux monopoly. How is this better for freedom of choice, again?
Please...if it wasn't an anti-MS venomous rant it'd be marked as a troll or flamebait.
I've done Notes admin and Exchange admin, and I know which I prefer. But that's personal preferences to some extent, and familiarity with the product. And, by the way, God forbid that we should ever have to upgrade servers or infrastructure! Upgrade video cards to get the latest and greatest and wreak havoc with poorly or non-supported drivers -- sure. But not servers, no!!!
Mind you, given you seem to be under the mistaken impression that you are required to buy additional software to backup an Exchange repository, maybe the rest of the post makes sense. News flash -- NT Backup will backup an Exchange repository. Always has. As you say, it's a fairly basic function of real server software.
Want additional niceties? Sure, there are third-party solutions such as Backup Exec and ArcServe. But I've successfully used NT Backup for years to backup and, more importantly, successfully restore Exchange databases.
It's really not that hard, you know, if you take just a little time to learn how to properly work in an enterprise piece of software rather than simply charging in like a "manuals are for wimps!" hero.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeeeesss...
I hope that, even if your buddy wasn't asked for his details, he at least got the name of the person who told him this, and noted the date and time of the call. It still might not have much effect, but at least it's something, y'know?
Ahem. From page 1 of the article...
Heistad grilled them on their tech needs--really, all they wanted to do was send digital pictures of the kids to Grandma.
Short, succinct...ah, if only all requirements documents were so sweet.
Nobody can submit claims until two months from now, at which time Alvarado is expected to approve the exact wording of the public notification of the settlement.
So there will be a fairly short window of opportunity.
But this, to me, is much more interesting.
Two-thirds of the unclaimed money will go to California public schools in a mix of donated Microsoft software and cash grants. Although the maximum value of the settlement is $1.1 billion, Microsoft could end up paying as little as $367 million in cash, which is what it would owe to California public schools if no vouchers are claimed. If all vouchers are claimed, Microsoft would be required to pay the maximum, but schools would then get nothing.
Now I wonder how this part of the negotiations worked out. The more that is claimed by Californians, the more they are effectively taking away from the public schools.
So (in a fit of pure speculation and knowing bugger all about how these things work in that great state), is there a chance that educational organizations might start running radio advertisements encouraging people to voluntarily give up their claims so that the money can automatically go to the schools? And, if that were to happen, and be successful in any quantity, might it then be possible for Microsoft to turn around and say, "see, people really didn't care that much after all"?
Now, my initial reaction is to think there's no way this could happen. But then I stop to consider just how little reimbursement would actually be involved for most people, and the fact that they have to go through the whole rigmarole of filling out the paperwork and submitting it and so on (unless they take up Lindows on their offer), and it just might work out that a fair quantity of people decide it's not worth it for them and they'd just as soon have it go to the schools.
Q: What benefits are available under the settlement?
A: You will receive vouchers redeemable for cash after the purchase of a wide variety of software and computer hardware products. The vouchers are worth: $16 for each Microsoft Windows or MS-DOS license claimed; $29 for each Microsoft Office license claimed; $5 for each Microsoft Word, Home Essentials or Works Suite license claimed; and $26 for each Microsoft Excel license claimed.
{Emphasis added}
Correct. I really dislike getting on the whole political conspiracy thing, but, well, President Bush, his mate Cheney, etc., etc., in bed with big oil...you know.
The fact is the U.S. has had petrol prices held to an unreasonable and artificially low price for years and years. I'm guessing it has something to do with America's love affair with the car in general and enormous trucks in particular, and the power that is Ford/GM/etc. As you say, Americans feel entitled to low petrol prices, and can conveniently ignore that this only promotes expanded use of high-emission vehicles like the Ford F-150 trucks so beloved of anyone who needs to supplement their toughness factor.
Thanks for destroying the planet, y'all -- the rest of us really appreciate your selfish abuse of the place for the benefit of our children.
I will still be tooling around in the most practical vehicle I have ever owned...
my motorcycle
Yeah, my motorcycles were the most practical vehicles I'd ever owned, too. Until I started having to cart around band gear. And my girlfriend didn't feel safe on a bike. And I needed to go shopping for enough groceries for a four-person flat for a week.
And then I got hit by someone who just didn't see me...drove her car straight into me, put me in the hospital with a leg broken in three places including a compound fracture.
By the way, have you ever seen the photos of motorcyclists who were lane-splitting and rode into a car door being opened by an oblivious car driver who was getting out of his car to see what was causing the jam? I have -- and it's really not pretty.
On the same line, please tell me you at least wear a full-face helmet (the best you can afford -- a Shoei or an Arai, say), full leathers, leather boots, and leather gloves -- at all times, all kinds of weather. I still can't stand to see motorcyclists here in PA riding in shorts and tee-shirts. Because I know what happened to me, and there wasn't a darned thing I could do to stop that lady from hitting me. (Way to go, governor Rendell, passing that repeal-mandatory-motorcycle-helmets law just as your buddy Mayor Street is gearing up for a re-election battle. I truly loathe corrupt Philadelphia politics.)
Point being, motorcycles are great fun, and, for me, they used to be worth the risk (when I didn't have a family to worry about). But they're in no way practical, and the mileage you quote is really rather comparable to that of a hybrid car.
Yes, but... The parent poster is correct; a survey came out a few months ago which showed the numbers of complaints per 100 cars for each manufacturer (typically around 80 to 120 or so, I think), which is always accompanied by fanfare from those manufacturers who have the lowest number of complaints.
But one of the more interesting bits highlighted in the report was that the number one complaint for all Hummer owners was the fuel economy. The average Hummer owner buys a tank and then is honestly surprised when they keep having to pull over to fill up the gas tank. Geniuses they are not.
So the report authors chatted with Hummer about this and were told that the company was considering ways to make this more obvious to consumers so they didn't get such an unpleasant shock after they bought the thing.
Riiight...because everyone had such a good understanding of what the effects of nuclear fallout would be back in 1957, a scant 12 years after the first bombs were dropped on Japan, when the book was first published.
"On the Beach" by Nevil Shute. A stark portrayal of a small town in Australia which is one of the last to die horribly after a nuclear war.
I first read of the settlement this morning in my newspaper. I live in the Philadelphia region, which, to give some perspective to those outside the U.S., is the fifth largest city in the United States. For all intents and purposes, there is one morning newspaper in our area, the Philadelphia Inquirer.
This story was on the back page of the business section, bottom left, perhaps three column inches. Six short paragraphs. Or, to put it another way -- it was buried.
So, what do we have? A story about an extremely quick and low-key settlement on an issue that's potentially very embarrassing to the RIAA -- and it gets stuck in some out-of-the-way spot in the paper that hardly anyone will see.
But to really get the full import of this, you have to know what sort of paper the Inquirer is, and realize that the Inquirer generally would be all over this. Stories about poor little 12 year old girls being attacked by big business? I'd expect to see a front-page article continuing on to page 4 or page 6 with pictures of the girl and her mother.
No...when I found this article in the paper, my immediate thought was, "why would the Inquirer, given who they are, bury this? Who are they in bed with?"
Nice in theory, bit more difficult in practise. If you're going to host, you need to ensure you have not only the obvious requirement of bandwidth, but also a way to achieve a decent service level agreement (SLA). That means a high percentage uptime, and a quick turnaround if something blows up.
So, if you don't have a cluster of web servers for redundancy, you need to ensure you have a highly redundant and highly recoverable web server, monitoring, someone to answer the monitoring when it detects something's broken at 2 am, a maintenance window on your server(s)...get the picture? Just like everyone is saying "don't" on your original question*, they'd be saying "forget it" for exactly the same reasons if you asked about starting up a web-hosting business.
* Note I'm not joining the chorus of "don't" naysayers. You've already got a sufficient client list to make you consider this, so you must be doing something right, not only in your technical but in your business model. You don't say if you're considering doing this full-time, but you obviously want to ramp it up to the next level, so maybe one of you retains his/her day job while the other gives it a go full-time. Or, even better, see if one or both of you can go part-time on your existing jobs.
I moved to the U.S. four years ago, and that was the first time I'd ever even heard of this insurance. I have no idea how much it costs, but I know that the two consulting firms I've worked for in the past four years have both had insurance.
I believe the amount of insurance was one million dollars, but don't quote me on that. When I joined each company, my name was added to the insurance contract. These were both very small companies, by the way.
Perhaps the silliest quote from the article:
CSXT has confronted increasingly sophisticated computer viruses, like ones that have penetrated some of the most secure sites in the country in recent days.
Sorry, but they're obviously not "some of the most secure sites in the country". If they were, they wouldn't have been penetrated like this. How can I say this? Because my company didn't get penetrated.
I'm afraid of sounding like a broken record here, because if anyone looks at my past posting history they'll see I've said exactly the same thing. However, the fact is we have mission-critical 24/7/365 servers running Windows (as well as Linux) that simply can not be vulnerable. So we secure them, and we protect them, and put in safeguards, and work together as a team if there is a particularly nasty threat out there...and we keep running. Funny, that.
Sod it; plenty of other posters will argue the point about patching, firewalling, etc., and a myriad of rabid MS-bashers will refute and insult. Let my small voice add merely this to the fray -- it doesn't have to be this way, even if you use Windows. All that is required is people who know what they're doing.
Or what about a graduate physics student who's writing a dissertation centered around the half life associated with a radioactive element?
Well, I'm in Philadelphia and I'm named Ian, but I'm from New Zealand.
However, my parents are originally from England, which means I have a distinct British tinge to my accent. Oh, and most of my family still lives over there...close enough?
(By the way, of course they're not all named Bruce -- that'll be the Australians.)
But I won't give my credit card number to a thousand different sites...
Until there's a standard for centralized payments
Happy to oblige... here's your answer.
Their press release.
From that release...
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 has achieved Common Criteria Security running on IBM eServer xSeries.
IBM has gotten Linux certified
Correction -- they got SuSE Linux certified. This only applies to SuSE. Incidentally, it cost them $500,000.
Linux got the highest rating possible
No it didn't. FUD. According to this story...
Linux was certified as providing only "low to moderate" security, compared with the same group's certification as "moderate to high" last year of the security of Microsoft's Windows 2000 software. Supporters said Linux software was under testing for better-security ratings.
In fact, I'd suggest people look at the story in the Inquirer linked above -- it gives a little more information as well as some light commentary.
Unfortunately you're going to get reamed over this, but you're right. I think you're quite correct in postulating people do this to justify "getting copies of music without paying for it". (Ahem.)
I will go further and state I think it's exacerbated by (i) sheer laziness, and (ii) snobbishness. It's simply easier to download a tune rather than go to the store (mingling with those dreadful teens who like -- ugh -- Britney and N'Sync), hunt through the racks, and shell out some cash. Forget the drama if it's not in stock; you'd have to interact with a store clerk and actually wait for the item to come in.
And, let's face it, isn't it nice to feel all superior to the Britney-loving masses? We're geeks, we are experts on our computers, and we don't need to interact with the technically feeble. We have cultivated an image of being somewhat enigmatic and mysterious geeks; we want to feel superior somehow, smug in our knowledge that we can do something our managers or clients can't. Or, if you prefer, it's the ability to stick it to the man that we crave; many of us demeaned for much of our lives by the athletes or whichever social group we missed out on, we now are able to turn the tables and engage in our own little world of anarchy.
Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? An over-the-top caricature, with little basis in reality. And yet...how much of it seems borne out by the typical rantings whenever the RIAA or MPAA is the topic of debate?
Since legally coipyright infringment damage can only me measured in economic terms of lost sales..
How can RIAA claim any loss in salse when the people sharing files do not have the dispoable income to purchase Cds in the first place?
So what you're saying is that if someone doesn't have much cash, then that individual should not feel obligated to live within his or her means. Hence, that nice Jaguar that I'd like to buy but can't afford should be mine for the taking. Yes, I'd be depriving the dealer of their commission and Jaguar of their cut, but we all know that the amount of money making its way into Jaguar's hands is such a tiny profit, compared to the inflated charges from the fascist middlemen, that it's really all irrelevant. Right?
I dislike the RIAA's heavy-handed tactics as much as anyone, but I'm not willing to condone illegal tactics simply because people are not prepared to live within their means. Please feel free to argue coherently against these tactics, but stop using tenuous logic to justify theft. (And despite what the semantic monkeys seem to trot out every time we debate this hoary old topic, it is theft.)
Beaut. I notice the banner on the home page calls this an "introductory offer". How much does it increase later?
And, out of curiosity, how long have they been in business?
There's a popular tourist/holiday spot up north in NZ called the Bay of Islands. One of the most popular towns is Paihia. There's a small aquarium on the main strip, which contains only sea creatures that were found in the local region.
My wife and I went in there one day, and as we walked through the front door a very nice chap introduced himself, said he was the owner, and to feel free to ask him any questions we might have. We started walking around, and soon decided we wanted some more information about a particular fish, so asked him, and he obligingly answered our question. He then followed up by telling us, "By the way, that fish is also quite tasty to eat. You want to cook him up with just a splash of lemon juice, and he'll be beautiful". He then started pointing out other fish in that tank, telling us which were no good to eat and exactly how to cook the ones which were good to eat.
That guy very kindly gave us a full guided tour of the whole aquarium (it was a slow day) -- including his own personal cooking suggestions for every single tank in the place.
Personally, I hope they misunderestimate Linux right until it kills them....If MS loses the monopoly on Windows machines as game computers... at that point MS is dead. Let's just hope they don't know it yet.
So what you're saying, essentially, is you're looking for the day when Microsoft's monopoly gets replaced by a Linux monopoly. How is this better for freedom of choice, again?
Please...if it wasn't an anti-MS venomous rant it'd be marked as a troll or flamebait.
I've done Notes admin and Exchange admin, and I know which I prefer. But that's personal preferences to some extent, and familiarity with the product. And, by the way, God forbid that we should ever have to upgrade servers or infrastructure! Upgrade video cards to get the latest and greatest and wreak havoc with poorly or non-supported drivers -- sure. But not servers, no!!!
Mind you, given you seem to be under the mistaken impression that you are required to buy additional software to backup an Exchange repository, maybe the rest of the post makes sense. News flash -- NT Backup will backup an Exchange repository. Always has. As you say, it's a fairly basic function of real server software.
Want additional niceties? Sure, there are third-party solutions such as Backup Exec and ArcServe. But I've successfully used NT Backup for years to backup and, more importantly, successfully restore Exchange databases.
It's really not that hard, you know, if you take just a little time to learn how to properly work in an enterprise piece of software rather than simply charging in like a "manuals are for wimps!" hero.
Excellent, you'll be well prepared for a life as a prolific poster on Slashdot, then.