You post a "why me" post and expect to get sympathy, when you've obviously failed at the most basic principles of running a business?
When you saw that digital downloads (not Internet piracy) were the way the music industry was going you didn't take the que and get out?
When you saw your profit going down you didn't see the red flag and say to yourself "I need to do something to change this, or shut it down"?
Take some responsibility for your situation and stop blaming others. You are the only one in control of your business and the only one that can make it better. If you don't have a product the consumers want, change your product to one they do. We don't want your "1984" big brother controls, we value our freedom to choose.
Blaming piracy is just an excuse for bad management.
This is the same feeling I've been getting lately, unfortunately when starting your business and trying to get start-up funds from a bank, they want to see some kind of educational background, i.e.: degree or certification, that proves to them you are capable of running the business. So that brings you right back to college again.
I was going to attempt to go back to school for a Electro-Mechanical engineering degree and try to switch careers, but the idea of four classes a week plus Saturdays was too daunting to go forward with.
I've settled on getting a CS degree through a respected online university that has higher standards than the usually crop of online schools. It will allow me to do 2 classes a week for 36 months to get my B.S. (18 for A.S.). If I keep going I can wrap up a Masters in 5 years.
I plan to concentrate on Java programming, which at least there is plenty of demand for, especially in partnership with Oracle or SAP applications skills which I already have.
Sounds to me like you were both being standoffish and need an attitude adjustment. Was she wrong to act like a snot, yes, but you made her do all of the troubleshooting work which is your job to do. If you lost the IT prima donna attitude and took the time to show your users how to do stuff and explain what is happening along the way, you'd probably meet a lot less resistance. I've had to work with many difficult users -Mac, Windows and *nix - along the way, and it all comes down to patience and hand-holding. Remember you're in a customer service position and you need to treat your clients with the respect that you would want in return.
I don't disagree that the Mid-west is not well served. However that being said, most of the population is in the areas currently served well and Apple is doing a good job balancing demand with brick and mortar stores and not over doing it like Gateway did which ultimately lead to their demise. Generally speaking as Macs go, if your not willing to drive the 2 hours, then you're not the clientel that they're trying to appeal to. Macs have always been targeted at well informed, technology buffs that know what they want and are willing to go out of their way to get it or spend a little more money to get better quality. Unfortunately for Apple, the greater margin of US consumers generally want cheaper, "good enough" quality merchandise which has lead to the profit and growth of companies like Dell and Microsoft. Though that is generally changing as consumers incomes increase and the overall disenfranchisement with poor quality merchandise, hence Walmart's attempts at acquiring higher quality merchandise lines for their stores.
Once again another poor premise and an article to take up space in the Times from someone who clearly knows nothing about the industry.
The whole premise of the article is that Apple is trying to compete for Microsoft's Windows business. Of course all of us in the know, know this is not the case and Steve Jobs himself has said that this is not Apple's goal. Apple has consistently said that they will pick their battles and work to create the best experience on a PC, not the most market share. Their iPod product line is the prime example of Apple picking the battles they can win.
For Apple to compete with Microsoft to win the most market share, Apple would have to completely change their whole way of doing business and then all they could do is compete on price which wouldn't work because Microsoft could slash their prices until Apple was driven out of business.
The author's claim of a lack of stores to try before you buy is FUD as well. Apple has all of the major metropolitan areas covered with Apple stores and their recent agreements with Best Buy, CompUSA and others only assure that their products are well exposed to the greater public. So I for one have no idea where he's coming from on this one. Plus Apple's whole marketing scheme is to get people interested in their computers through their iPod products which are pretty much available everywhere. Apple figures that if you like their iPod, you'll be apt to take a chance and try their computers. And it seems they're right given the recent sales numbers.
A more intelligent article would be one which compares how each of the companies have earned their market share and sales and discusses whether a true sales and consumer loyalty approach like Apple's will prove to be more sustainable than the monoply and forced upgrade sales approach that Microsoft has taken upon.
I recently just did some research and testing on this very thing. I've been testing over the last month or so the Dell DataSafe web-based backup solution and found it to be reliable, easy to use and configure, and relatively inexpensive. Prices start at $9 a year for up to 3 GB of backup storage space to $39 a year for up to $30 GB of backup storage space. They have custom storage/pricing options as well if you need more space. They have a free 30 day trial with up to 3 GB of backup storage (which is what I tested). Backups are reasonably quick - 20 minutes for 2.75 GB of data over a T1 line. Because it is web-based, files can be accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection. I wouldn't call it a complete DR solution but for quick and dirty backups and restores it fills the need. Eventually when Dell has all the web-based features up and running it will be a truely awesome solution. Unfortunately at this time it is Windows only.
There already is a Linux company that has a Linux box without the Windows tax that has a great big box store nationwide distribution - Linspire. Say what you want about Linspire, but at least they support Open Source.
The whole Dell sucks because they won't sell Linux based PCs or no O/S PCs complaint is a farce.
The people complaining about this issue would never buy a Linux based computer, don't pay for software (whether it's free or not) and don't really care about Linux or Open Source in general. So no wonder why Dell has no interest in selling PCs with Linux or no O/S.
For those who do care, they either build their own PCs and put their flavor of Linux on them, get a new PC from their employer and dual-boot Linux (in which case its their employer paying the Windows tax), or they buy a Linux PC from one of the established Linux PC vendors, of which there are many.
The question shouldn't be why Dell should sell PCs with Linux, it should be: Why don't Linux users support Open Source by buying Linux based computers through Linux PC vendors? Linux users that are paying the Windows tax are just hurting their own cause and are supporting the enemy.
Regardless of whether M$ or Intel are the grantees of this bogus patent. VoIP and by extension a digital phone set via PC were invented by Danny Cohen in 1973 via an ARPA sponsored project involving the predecessor to VoIP - Network Voice Protocol (NVP). Read more on Wikipedia. In addition to this prior art, Cisco would probably have some disagreement with the validity of this patent as well with their Personal Communicator Application.
I wouldn't be surprised if another major online music supplier (say Apple) was supporting this counter-claim. Apple and others would definitely benefit from a ruling against the RIAA that would force the collective music corporations to provide music licensing on a market priced basis rather than the current "pay this much or you get nothing" price colluding practice. Of course OTOH Apple could be a victim of such a ruling because of their cooperation in colluding with the music corporations to keep the price of music to a fixed cost of $0.99 a song rather than a variable price structure based on the market value of the individual pieces of music. A decision either way wouldn't effect Apple's profit from music sales per se, rather it would just force them to change how they market their product and do business with the music corporations. Apple's main benefit from such a ruling would be to gain leverage in future licensing negotiations that could eventually extend to the MPAA as well and get them better deals on video licensing.
This will never happen for the same reason it hasn't been done up to now - If there was M$ Office available for Linux, why would anyone need to buy M$ Windows... - M$ knows this and won't enable a competing operating system to impeed their operating system market share. The only reason they make a version for the Mac is because of legal arrangements between the two companies, and that agreement is most likely to be ended within 5 years as Apple develops their new productivity applications to replace the current M$ Office applications that continue to stagnate on the Mac platform. ODF is a contributing factor, but it'll be awhile before that takes hold in corporate America and thus becomes the new defacto standard.
Oracle also has a multi-platform product - Oracle Calendar - that is part of their Collaboration Suite (which includes email, calendaring, PDA sync, etc...). It's not free, but Oracle has fairly generous licensing terms for schools. They also offer it in a hosted environment for low monthly fees. It'll do everything you want and more, and they are constantly working on providing enhanced support for applications that are part of the respective operating systems.
Chances are you're not going to be just turning off those Exchange servers, you're going to need to migrate the data. That being the case your going to want something with good migration tools that can handle that much migration in a relatively speaking short amount a time. I just completed an Exchange to Groupwise migration and there are some really great migration tools out there for it. Groupwise also meets all your requirements out of the box. Not to mention by buying Novell you're (at least indirectly) supporting open source. I'm not as sure about Lotus Notes, but regardless if your going to have that many users, you want big name vendor support.
It's obviously not just about releasing a "Beta". At this point for M$ to create public interest in anything they sell or giveaway they have to market it. So in this case they anounce to everyone that will listen "Hey we're releasing a new version of our browser and it will be the next greatest thing on earth!". So really it's a marketing "Beta" to test the waters and see what public interest there is in their product.
Besides, why shouldn't M$ release a beta of their product at the 7th generation? Just because the Linux community has produced hundreds of point releases doesn't mean their community is going to stop producing betas to test and verify the new features and fixes. It just good software programming practice.
Which users would you be refering to? The Open Source zealots, normal Joe home users, everyday Joe business users? Sure the Open Source zealots will never use Microsoft products and granted right now they are the majority of Linux users. However, home and business users already use Microsoft products and are more apt to buy MS products then try to figure out how to download and use Open Source applications. All of the people who replied to this article assume Linux is going to be the desktop O/S, but where is the statistics to prove this? Right now Linux only has 3% (maybe 6% depending on the poll) market share, hardly a drop in the bucket for Microsoft to worry about. That leaves 97% of the market who is buying their products. So if Microsoft were to get in on the game now and help get WINE to the point where it can run all Windows based applications, when Linux's market share does start to make an impact Linux users will already be used to using Microsoft products under Linux and will continue to keep on buying. But Linux will never get to that point unless the zealots start to embrace and promote their operating system for what it is - stable, standards compliant, unbloated - and learn to work with others to make the perfect cross-system computing environment.
As the recent article from ecommercetimes.com mentioned on Slashdot states, Microsoft makes the majority of it's profits by selling Windows and MS Office. Even though it would slightly knock their O/S sales, I think it would be a worthwhile venture for Microsoft to contribute to WINE so that Linux users could run MS products under Linux. It would be a big boost to the WINE project and Microsoft would get product sales in return.
You forgot the golden rule, never buy Apple products within a month or so of an Apple Expo (unless your looking for a bargain on their existing products). Apple Expo Paris begins August 31st. Apple traditionally releases new products around their Expo event scheule.
The "under the hood" argument is the shortsightedness that keeps Linux off the desktop. These are the factors that make a product successful:
Brand Recognition
Visual Styling
Usefulness (ease of use also applies here)
Value
Right now Linux has little to no brand recognition. That's changing with IBM's advertisements and the SCO legal case, however if you still ask someone walking down the street what Linux is, 75% of the people won't be able to give you an answer.
Visually, Linux has a number of issues, however the most important in this case is there is nothing to visually distinguish itself from other Windows like interfaces. It's the beige box of the computer case world.
Usefulness is where Linux has had a lot of progress and is why it has the popularity in the IT world that it does. However most of the usefulness is on the server side of things - cheap quick way of setting up www, network security, and file sharing. The desktop productivity applications - key to getting Linux on the desktop - have a ways to go before they are comparable feature and ease of use wise to their Windows and Mac counterparts.
The concept of Free has yet to add any value to the Open-Source world, and beyond that the fact you can get Linux for free (no cost) leads to the point in this article makes that money conveys value. We can go back to your car example to make this point - What will the consumer think is better, the $9000 Kia or the $13,000 Toyota? At least here the Kia has some value, Linux with no cost, is the car on the side of the road with a B/O (best offer) sign in the window, who knows what your going to get?
Of course we have gotten off topic at this point, however the key to getting on track with Linux on the desktop, and the point of most of the comments, is to present a GUI that is innovative, easy to use, and that doesn't look like anything else. Doing this will bring brand recognition, and add value to Linux.
This whole idea of copying the Windows desktop is one of the reasons I get turned off Linux. If I want to use a Windows like interface why wouldn't I just use the real thing? People in the Open-Source community do a lot of talking about being innovative but I just ain't seeing it with projects like this. The post yesterday about ROX (even though it does copy an older RISC type OS) is at least a fresh idea in the Linux world and I give cudos to the author for trying something different. Sun also deserves cudos for their work on a 3D desktop as mentioned last week or so. It's innovative directions like these that Linux needs to go to differentiate itself from the Windows and Mac OSes that are already out there. How about working on a graphical and gesture interface like in Minority Report? Now that would be cool and would interest me in Linux. For now I'll just stick with my Mac.
The biggest and reasonable complaint I've heard is that the system they are using is by Nextel who has poor coverage in Massachusetts. This combined with the fact that the contractors don't get paid if they can't be tracked (ie: if they go through a dead zone, which there are many) makes for a valid reason for complaint.
We use a highly modified version of the Liberum Helpdesk - www.liberum.org - it works out for us because we can modify it easily to keep up with organizational or process changes. I think this is definately something to keep in mind when choosing, some others are:
Availability of community or paid service support
Ease of use for your users (else they won't use it)
Ability to turn requests into FAQs or KBs
Reporting features to provide statistics to upper management (may help you to get that extra hand or better equipment, course it could get you fired too;-p )
Another thing to consider is how much time do you have to configure and get the application setup the way you want it. Something like this can take some considerable time especially if you go Open Source and have to do modifications. So make sure you can spend the time on it learning the application's ins and outs or else make sure you get an application where you can get consultation services. Most of this is common sense, but you'd be surprised how many people just jump into these things without carefully mapping out their needs and considering the options. A request tracking application is going to change the way you and team works so it is a big deal not to be taken lightly.
An XML based Webmail application could solve a lot of the issues brought up here. As I understand XML (through the various XML apps we use) Once a user hits the database for the requested data, that data is then stored on the client side in cached or in browser memory XML pages. With the data then stored locally, when a user manipulates that data it doesn't have to go back to the server, it just manipulates the local copy therefore it doesn't have to rely on a stable or fast internet connection, and then it just sends updates to the server afterwards in the background. Also through the transformable nature of XML it should be theoretically possible to click a button and have emails stored in some email message standard that various email readers could read or just as a text file.
Slashdot Mirror
You can just play it at their website http://www.scrabulous.com/
Big deal...
Innovate or die, it's the #1 rule of business.
You post a "why me" post and expect to get sympathy, when you've obviously failed at the most basic principles of running a business?
When you saw that digital downloads (not Internet piracy) were the way the music industry was going you didn't take the que and get out?
When you saw your profit going down you didn't see the red flag and say to yourself "I need to do something to change this, or shut it down"?
Take some responsibility for your situation and stop blaming others. You are the only one in control of your business and the only one that can make it better. If you don't have a product the consumers want, change your product to one they do. We don't want your "1984" big brother controls, we value our freedom to choose.
Blaming piracy is just an excuse for bad management.
This is the same feeling I've been getting lately, unfortunately when starting your business and trying to get start-up funds from a bank, they want to see some kind of educational background, i.e.: degree or certification, that proves to them you are capable of running the business. So that brings you right back to college again.
I was going to attempt to go back to school for a Electro-Mechanical engineering degree and try to switch careers, but the idea of four classes a week plus Saturdays was too daunting to go forward with.
I've settled on getting a CS degree through a respected online university that has higher standards than the usually crop of online schools. It will allow me to do 2 classes a week for 36 months to get my B.S. (18 for A.S.). If I keep going I can wrap up a Masters in 5 years.
I plan to concentrate on Java programming, which at least there is plenty of demand for, especially in partnership with Oracle or SAP applications skills which I already have.
Sounds to me like you were both being standoffish and need an attitude adjustment. Was she wrong to act like a snot, yes, but you made her do all of the troubleshooting work which is your job to do. If you lost the IT prima donna attitude and took the time to show your users how to do stuff and explain what is happening along the way, you'd probably meet a lot less resistance. I've had to work with many difficult users -Mac, Windows and *nix - along the way, and it all comes down to patience and hand-holding. Remember you're in a customer service position and you need to treat your clients with the respect that you would want in return.
I don't disagree that the Mid-west is not well served. However that being said, most of the population is in the areas currently served well and Apple is doing a good job balancing demand with brick and mortar stores and not over doing it like Gateway did which ultimately lead to their demise. Generally speaking as Macs go, if your not willing to drive the 2 hours, then you're not the clientel that they're trying to appeal to. Macs have always been targeted at well informed, technology buffs that know what they want and are willing to go out of their way to get it or spend a little more money to get better quality. Unfortunately for Apple, the greater margin of US consumers generally want cheaper, "good enough" quality merchandise which has lead to the profit and growth of companies like Dell and Microsoft. Though that is generally changing as consumers incomes increase and the overall disenfranchisement with poor quality merchandise, hence Walmart's attempts at acquiring higher quality merchandise lines for their stores.
Once again another poor premise and an article to take up space in the Times from someone who clearly knows nothing about the industry.
The whole premise of the article is that Apple is trying to compete for Microsoft's Windows business. Of course all of us in the know, know this is not the case and Steve Jobs himself has said that this is not Apple's goal. Apple has consistently said that they will pick their battles and work to create the best experience on a PC, not the most market share. Their iPod product line is the prime example of Apple picking the battles they can win.
For Apple to compete with Microsoft to win the most market share, Apple would have to completely change their whole way of doing business and then all they could do is compete on price which wouldn't work because Microsoft could slash their prices until Apple was driven out of business.
The author's claim of a lack of stores to try before you buy is FUD as well. Apple has all of the major metropolitan areas covered with Apple stores and their recent agreements with Best Buy, CompUSA and others only assure that their products are well exposed to the greater public. So I for one have no idea where he's coming from on this one. Plus Apple's whole marketing scheme is to get people interested in their computers through their iPod products which are pretty much available everywhere. Apple figures that if you like their iPod, you'll be apt to take a chance and try their computers. And it seems they're right given the recent sales numbers.
A more intelligent article would be one which compares how each of the companies have earned their market share and sales and discusses whether a true sales and consumer loyalty approach like Apple's will prove to be more sustainable than the monoply and forced upgrade sales approach that Microsoft has taken upon.
I recently just did some research and testing on this very thing. I've been testing over the last month or so the Dell DataSafe web-based backup solution and found it to be reliable, easy to use and configure, and relatively inexpensive. Prices start at $9 a year for up to 3 GB of backup storage space to $39 a year for up to $30 GB of backup storage space. They have custom storage/pricing options as well if you need more space. They have a free 30 day trial with up to 3 GB of backup storage (which is what I tested). Backups are reasonably quick - 20 minutes for 2.75 GB of data over a T1 line. Because it is web-based, files can be accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection. I wouldn't call it a complete DR solution but for quick and dirty backups and restores it fills the need. Eventually when Dell has all the web-based features up and running it will be a truely awesome solution. Unfortunately at this time it is Windows only.
...I haven't started my new business yet... Linux is coming to a new notebook vendor real soon now More details coming soon...
There already is a Linux company that has a Linux box without the Windows tax that has a great big box store nationwide distribution - Linspire. Say what you want about Linspire, but at least they support Open Source.
The whole Dell sucks because they won't sell Linux based PCs or no O/S PCs complaint is a farce.
The people complaining about this issue would never buy a Linux based computer, don't pay for software (whether it's free or not) and don't really care about Linux or Open Source in general. So no wonder why Dell has no interest in selling PCs with Linux or no O/S.
For those who do care, they either build their own PCs and put their flavor of Linux on them, get a new PC from their employer and dual-boot Linux (in which case its their employer paying the Windows tax), or they buy a Linux PC from one of the established Linux PC vendors, of which there are many.
The question shouldn't be why Dell should sell PCs with Linux, it should be: Why don't Linux users support Open Source by buying Linux based computers through Linux PC vendors? Linux users that are paying the Windows tax are just hurting their own cause and are supporting the enemy.
Regardless of whether M$ or Intel are the grantees of this bogus patent. VoIP and by extension a digital phone set via PC were invented by Danny Cohen in 1973 via an ARPA sponsored project involving the predecessor to VoIP - Network Voice Protocol (NVP). Read more on Wikipedia. In addition to this prior art, Cisco would probably have some disagreement with the validity of this patent as well with their Personal Communicator Application.
I wouldn't be surprised if another major online music supplier (say Apple) was supporting this counter-claim. Apple and others would definitely benefit from a ruling against the RIAA that would force the collective music corporations to provide music licensing on a market priced basis rather than the current "pay this much or you get nothing" price colluding practice. Of course OTOH Apple could be a victim of such a ruling because of their cooperation in colluding with the music corporations to keep the price of music to a fixed cost of $0.99 a song rather than a variable price structure based on the market value of the individual pieces of music. A decision either way wouldn't effect Apple's profit from music sales per se, rather it would just force them to change how they market their product and do business with the music corporations. Apple's main benefit from such a ruling would be to gain leverage in future licensing negotiations that could eventually extend to the MPAA as well and get them better deals on video licensing.
This will never happen for the same reason it hasn't been done up to now - If there was M$ Office available for Linux, why would anyone need to buy M$ Windows... - M$ knows this and won't enable a competing operating system to impeed their operating system market share. The only reason they make a version for the Mac is because of legal arrangements between the two companies, and that agreement is most likely to be ended within 5 years as Apple develops their new productivity applications to replace the current M$ Office applications that continue to stagnate on the Mac platform. ODF is a contributing factor, but it'll be awhile before that takes hold in corporate America and thus becomes the new defacto standard.
Oracle also has a multi-platform product - Oracle Calendar - that is part of their Collaboration Suite (which includes email, calendaring, PDA sync, etc...). It's not free, but Oracle has fairly generous licensing terms for schools. They also offer it in a hosted environment for low monthly fees. It'll do everything you want and more, and they are constantly working on providing enhanced support for applications that are part of the respective operating systems.
Chances are you're not going to be just turning off those Exchange servers, you're going to need to migrate the data. That being the case your going to want something with good migration tools that can handle that much migration in a relatively speaking short amount a time. I just completed an Exchange to Groupwise migration and there are some really great migration tools out there for it. Groupwise also meets all your requirements out of the box. Not to mention by buying Novell you're (at least indirectly) supporting open source. I'm not as sure about Lotus Notes, but regardless if your going to have that many users, you want big name vendor support.
Yeah well my site gets 100% Firefox users.
Sub BrowserDetect()
If Browser != "Firefox";
RedirectBrowser("www.getfirefox.com");
End If
End Sub
It's obviously not just about releasing a "Beta". At this point for M$ to create public interest in anything they sell or giveaway they have to market it. So in this case they anounce to everyone that will listen "Hey we're releasing a new version of our browser and it will be the next greatest thing on earth!". So really it's a marketing "Beta" to test the waters and see what public interest there is in their product. Besides, why shouldn't M$ release a beta of their product at the 7th generation? Just because the Linux community has produced hundreds of point releases doesn't mean their community is going to stop producing betas to test and verify the new features and fixes. It just good software programming practice.
Which users would you be refering to? The Open Source zealots, normal Joe home users, everyday Joe business users? Sure the Open Source zealots will never use Microsoft products and granted right now they are the majority of Linux users. However, home and business users already use Microsoft products and are more apt to buy MS products then try to figure out how to download and use Open Source applications. All of the people who replied to this article assume Linux is going to be the desktop O/S, but where is the statistics to prove this? Right now Linux only has 3% (maybe 6% depending on the poll) market share, hardly a drop in the bucket for Microsoft to worry about. That leaves 97% of the market who is buying their products. So if Microsoft were to get in on the game now and help get WINE to the point where it can run all Windows based applications, when Linux's market share does start to make an impact Linux users will already be used to using Microsoft products under Linux and will continue to keep on buying. But Linux will never get to that point unless the zealots start to embrace and promote their operating system for what it is - stable, standards compliant, unbloated - and learn to work with others to make the perfect cross-system computing environment.
As the recent article from ecommercetimes.com mentioned on Slashdot states, Microsoft makes the majority of it's profits by selling Windows and MS Office. Even though it would slightly knock their O/S sales, I think it would be a worthwhile venture for Microsoft to contribute to WINE so that Linux users could run MS products under Linux. It would be a big boost to the WINE project and Microsoft would get product sales in return.
You forgot the golden rule, never buy Apple products within a month or so of an Apple Expo (unless your looking for a bargain on their existing products). Apple Expo Paris begins August 31st. Apple traditionally releases new products around their Expo event scheule.
The "under the hood" argument is the shortsightedness that keeps Linux off the desktop. These are the factors that make a product successful:
Right now Linux has little to no brand recognition. That's changing with IBM's advertisements and the SCO legal case, however if you still ask someone walking down the street what Linux is, 75% of the people won't be able to give you an answer.
Visually, Linux has a number of issues, however the most important in this case is there is nothing to visually distinguish itself from other Windows like interfaces. It's the beige box of the computer case world.
Usefulness is where Linux has had a lot of progress and is why it has the popularity in the IT world that it does. However most of the usefulness is on the server side of things - cheap quick way of setting up www, network security, and file sharing. The desktop productivity applications - key to getting Linux on the desktop - have a ways to go before they are comparable feature and ease of use wise to their Windows and Mac counterparts.
The concept of Free has yet to add any value to the Open-Source world, and beyond that the fact you can get Linux for free (no cost) leads to the point in this article makes that money conveys value. We can go back to your car example to make this point - What will the consumer think is better, the $9000 Kia or the $13,000 Toyota? At least here the Kia has some value, Linux with no cost, is the car on the side of the road with a B/O (best offer) sign in the window, who knows what your going to get?
Of course we have gotten off topic at this point, however the key to getting on track with Linux on the desktop, and the point of most of the comments, is to present a GUI that is innovative, easy to use, and that doesn't look like anything else. Doing this will bring brand recognition, and add value to Linux.
This whole idea of copying the Windows desktop is one of the reasons I get turned off Linux. If I want to use a Windows like interface why wouldn't I just use the real thing? People in the Open-Source community do a lot of talking about being innovative but I just ain't seeing it with projects like this. The post yesterday about ROX (even though it does copy an older RISC type OS) is at least a fresh idea in the Linux world and I give cudos to the author for trying something different. Sun also deserves cudos for their work on a 3D desktop as mentioned last week or so. It's innovative directions like these that Linux needs to go to differentiate itself from the Windows and Mac OSes that are already out there. How about working on a graphical and gesture interface like in Minority Report? Now that would be cool and would interest me in Linux. For now I'll just stick with my Mac.
The biggest and reasonable complaint I've heard is that the system they are using is by Nextel who has poor coverage in Massachusetts. This combined with the fact that the contractors don't get paid if they can't be tracked (ie: if they go through a dead zone, which there are many) makes for a valid reason for complaint.
Here is a link to the files referenced in the book: http://web.mit.edu/ktools/
Regards,
Timothy Boyden
Systems Administrator
MIT Department of Facilities
We use a highly modified version of the Liberum Helpdesk - www.liberum.org - it works out for us because we can modify it easily to keep up with organizational or process changes. I think this is definately something to keep in mind when choosing, some others are: Availability of community or paid service support Ease of use for your users (else they won't use it) Ability to turn requests into FAQs or KBs Reporting features to provide statistics to upper management (may help you to get that extra hand or better equipment, course it could get you fired too ;-p )
Another thing to consider is how much time do you have to configure and get the application setup the way you want it. Something like this can take some considerable time especially if you go Open Source and have to do modifications. So make sure you can spend the time on it learning the application's ins and outs or else make sure you get an application where you can get consultation services. Most of this is common sense, but you'd be surprised how many people just jump into these things without carefully mapping out their needs and considering the options. A request tracking application is going to change the way you and team works so it is a big deal not to be taken lightly.
An XML based Webmail application could solve a lot of the issues brought up here. As I understand XML (through the various XML apps we use) Once a user hits the database for the requested data, that data is then stored on the client side in cached or in browser memory XML pages. With the data then stored locally, when a user manipulates that data it doesn't have to go back to the server, it just manipulates the local copy therefore it doesn't have to rely on a stable or fast internet connection, and then it just sends updates to the server afterwards in the background. Also through the transformable nature of XML it should be theoretically possible to click a button and have emails stored in some email message standard that various email readers could read or just as a text file.