Take a look at the cost of new televisions that are HD capable. The prices are ridiculous right now. 35" HD TVs start at about $2000. There is absolutely noything about HD TV components or technology that justify the cost. The high cost is simply because they are new and are'nt strong sellers, yet. In a year or two the price will be down to that of a regular TV. Then you buy.
I think it's great that people are doing this. It is an important step in learning how to build much more complex systems, gaming or otherwise. But, it has already been done some 40 years ago. What's more, there weren't all these off the shelf chips that these guys used.
For those that are old enough to remember, I'm sure that you are already having fond memories of Pong. For those that are a bit younger, take a look at this.
Most all reviews are worthless because they simply lack any context. I've made this comment about the Slashdot book reviews too.
When Joe Blow say this product is great or that product is crap, it really means NOTHING, and putting any faith into these reviews is a major mistake. Unless the reviewer gives some background about themselves and their history with the product or category of products you have no way of knowing how they relate to you.
This is especially true of technical book reviews. Without having some idea about the persons knowlege and skill level and what experience they have, there is no real value in the review. For this reason, when I write book reviews I also include a brief resume listing things like years of experience in that field, certifications, other books that I have read on the subject, etc.
Even in large metropolitan areas there are usually only a few carriers. None of the carriers offer all of the technologies that are out there so, you need to first look at the technologies that are available from the carriers in your area.
The next step, after making a list of the available technologies, is to determine which one you need to use. This is determined by what you are trying to do. Are you setting up an ATM that only needs a 9600 baud connection or are you trying to do multi-site video conferencing that will require several megabits of bandwidth. This will limit your choices further, depending on what is available. Also, general cost of the technology may be factored here but, cost should not significantly affect your decision yet.
Hopefully at this point, you still have at least a couple of carriers to choose from. At this point you must look at reliability, responsiveness, whether the carrier will be around in a year or five years, SLAs and finally cost.Usually you're lucky to find two or more carriers to choose from in the end.
One last note, don't mistake carriers for service providers. There may be lots of service providers to choose from but, when you look closer, you'll likely find that they are all simply reselling the services of one or two carriers.
But, it looks really cool to me. I'd have to admit that MS has raised the bar with this OS. I wonder if the KDE team will show any interest in such things as the hand writing interface?
Well, there you have it. It's always been suspected that the Canadians were terrorists but, this proves it. Only last week was the US Justice Department talking about the criminality of open access points and now Canada does this.
Karma: Excellent -- Well, we'll just see about that!
Meridian systems use VXWorks from Wind River. As do Nortel's newer network gear. Their Bussiness Communication Manager, a small key system/PBX with IP telephony, proxy server, voice mail etc, uses NT 4.0 Embedded.
True, but you don't need a Windows 2000 server license and a Terminal Server license and Terminal Server CALs for every MACHINE that connects to the terminal server. These licenses cost a LOT more than the Office licenses that you'd have to buy as well.
The press release does not go into detail about the terminal server features of the new Cross-Over Server. Does it use it's own transport mechanism, or is it relying on X-11?
I suspect that it is using the X-11 approach and this will NOT impact the likes of Citrix. Citrix provides a great deal of functionality beyond simple terminal services. The management tools and the ability to publish applications are unrivaled and any administrator who has used them is not going to easily part with them. But, perhaps the biggest distinction is that Citrix uses a TINY amount of bandwidth when compared to X-11 or VNC. Whereas Citrix ICA protocol can work very nicely at 20Kbps VNC can easily use a couple of hundred Kbps and X-11 can go over 10Mbps for even basic applications.
Sure a Citrix implementation costs a fortune, mostly due to the fact that Microsoft requires three different licenses including a Windows license, a Terminal Server license and then Terminal Server CALs. It's damn expensive but, companies that really need that kind of functionality can easily afford it and once it's in, they won't part with it.
According to Google News?
on
New Mad Max Film
·
· Score: 5, Funny
You mean according to Google News by way of CNN, by way of Reuters, don't ya?
Seems to me that you should use the most modern solution out there. You want off-site storage and you want redundancy and you might like it to be distributed.
Sounds like P2P would be the ticket here. Just upload all your files onto Kazza and Gnutella and then let nature take its course, scattering them all over the internet.
Anybody see a problem with this? Seems like a "legal" use for P2P has finally shown up.
As alluded to in Thomas Gold's report from 1992, bacteria are very commonly found at extreme depths in the earth, by oil drilling operations. As has been the case for several years.
I think the most news worth portion of this article is the fact that this guy has acquired a multimillion dollar NASA grant, not that he has found anything new.
Lauder slammed his Replay box, 'it's too hot,' 'my wife doesn't know how to use it,' and he even tried to fry an egg on his PVR.
So, he doesn't like them. He thinks they are for copyright violation. He thinks cable companies should sue the PVR manufacturers. So, why does he own one and why is he pissed that his wife can't operate it.
Nortel - Passport Series Lucent - Cajun Series HP - Pro Curve Foundry Alcatel IBM etc....
Re:Solution from a problem that doesn't exist
on
VRRP
·
· Score: 2
Forget Dial-up. Think about the more critical commercial applications. Think something like Delta airlines resevation system or how about a hospitals record system or as the article alluded an enterprises phone system using IP telephony. These are situations where uptime is absolutely essential and in rare cases, a matter of life and death.
VRRP is very commonly used in the enterprise and it easily and simply saves downtime on a regular basis. Basically, if your enterprise runs two or more layer 3 switches you'd be stupid not to use t. Now think about those networks that use thousands of layer three switches, networks with tens of thousands of routers, virtual or otherwise. In these environments a failure could affect a very large portion of the network. With VRRP, the risk is greatly reduced, though not eliminated.
It's more like living in the past. Early refrigerators didn't use electrical compressors and such. Your Grandmother's refrigerator used a pilot flame to do its cooling. Sure, it wasn't able to cool and freeze quite as well modern refridgerators do but, it still kept food cold and made ice.
How cool is that, to use a flame for refrigeration? It's so cool that it is still used today in things like Recreational Vehicle refrigerators. See here.
But, it is configured "wrong", you said so yourself. since there's no cached copies of the headers stored If it was configured correctly the entire message would be cached locally.
When you first install Outlook it asks "Do you travel with this computer". If you choose YES it will configure Outlook to work in offline mode and cache the mailbox locally. If you choose NO then you get your present configuration which is unbarable over a slow link.
Also, note that if you have Terminal Services installed on your system, Outlook will not allow installation in Off-ine mode. See Q246052 about this issue.
My trip last week required dial-up from a hotel room. Max connection speed was 19200, man I hate that!
In any case, Outlook 2000 took only 2-3 seconds to start and new mail (the first few of 50+) was present within 5 seconds of Outlook startup. By the way, I hate to admit it but the mailbox contains 3000+ messages.
It sounds to me that you have Mozilla properly configured but, you do have an issue with your Outlook configuration.
After re-reading your post, I got to thinking that you don't specify what client the workstations are running. It Occurred to me that you may be running Windows 2000/NT on these laptops and that you may have implemented Roaming Profiles (for Windows).
This type of configuration can be an issue as users frequently store full files on their desktop which is part of the profile, rather than just short cuts to the files. This causes the profiles to grow very large, I've seen 60 Meg profiles, before people started complaining about performance when logging in.
If this is the problem that you are having, you should configure your environment to use the locally cached profile when slow links are detected. This will prevent trying to pull a 60 Meg desktop profile across a 56K link. This configuration is done at a domain level using Group Policy Objects.
But, like I said before, you don't really give enough information in your post.
The description of your environment and your problem are not exactly clear, as you list several different configurations. However, I think that there is definitely a problem.
The fact is that Microsoft has already addressed this very issue in the best possible way. Configuring the laptops with mobile Outlook profiles causes the Outlook to leave all mail in the users mailbox on the Exchange server but, at the same time it caches the the mail in a local file along with the global address book. this allows the user full mail functionality while disconnected from the Exchange server but then synchronizes any changes when the laptop is later connected. While the synchronization process is not entirely transparent, especially on slow connections, it is not unreasonably intrusive, either. The only time that I have found it to be an issue is when people have large attachments in the mail messages.
Contrary to the other recommendations, POP3 and IMAP alternatives will NOT be any faster than the native MAPI connection. Indeed, these alternative protocols will instead reduce functionality, as you have partially stated in your post.
From the description of your problem it is difficult to identify the specific problem. But, it sounds as though there is an issue which is causing excessive delays in connecting to Exchange via MAPI. This type of problem is less frequent with Exchange 2000 than it was with 5.5 but, it can still occur. Perhaps the most common problem for delays in connecting to Exchange remotely is a name resolution problem. You can test if this is the issue by starting a remote connection from one of these laptops (don't start Outlook) and see if you can ping the Exchange server by name. If ping does not resolve the name and start pinging immediately then there is a name resolution problem. If that is not the issue there is also a potential problem with name resolution in Outlook itself. I recommend having a look at this Knowledgebase article.
More information about your problem would certainly be helpful in finding the answer but, the only way to use Exchange faster than the above configuration is to use Outlook Web Access through a browser.
The only new aspect of this is that the Open Source projects will now be treated like the commercial vendors have been. They've always given the commercial guys lots of time but, there have been several occurrances where open source projects were given the shaft.
The first to come to mind was when Apache was given less than a days notice before they disclosed the vulnerability.
Under the new policy Apache will be given the same 30 days that Microsoft has gotten. Fair's fair.
I have this setup running in testing environment for about 5 months now, and would like to move it into production.
I can't find the words to ask this without sounding like an ass but, I really don't mean to be.
I have to ask though, what have you been testing for the past 5 months. When testing a server, web, mail, database, whatever, one of the early tests that I perform is load testing. Have you not done load testing to determine if Cocoon will handle your anticipated load and then some?
Why waste 5 months development time on a product that you don't know will support the load? Suppose it doesn't handle it (which I doubt), are you going to chuck 5 months work to move to BEA, WebSphere, IIS????? What have you been testing?
Slashdot Mirror
technological innovation is a big outward sign of a successful economy. Sometimes it appears like the U.S. is losing its edge in technology.
America lost it to the Japanese several years ago. America is actually showing signs of catching up again.
Take a look at the cost of new televisions that are HD capable. The prices are ridiculous right now. 35" HD TVs start at about $2000. There is absolutely noything about HD TV components or technology that justify the cost. The high cost is simply because they are new and are'nt strong sellers, yet. In a year or two the price will be down to that of a regular TV. Then you buy.
I think it's great that people are doing this. It is an important step in learning how to build much more complex systems, gaming or otherwise. But, it has already been done some 40 years ago. What's more, there weren't all these off the shelf chips that these guys used.
For those that are old enough to remember, I'm sure that you are already having fond memories of Pong. For those that are a bit younger, take a look at this.
Most all reviews are worthless because they simply lack any context. I've made this comment about the Slashdot book reviews too.
When Joe Blow say this product is great or that product is crap, it really means NOTHING, and putting any faith into these reviews is a major mistake. Unless the reviewer gives some background about themselves and their history with the product or category of products you have no way of knowing how they relate to you.
This is especially true of technical book reviews. Without having some idea about the persons knowlege and skill level and what experience they have, there is no real value in the review. For this reason, when I write book reviews I also include a brief resume listing things like years of experience in that field, certifications, other books that I have read on the subject, etc.
Even in large metropolitan areas there are usually only a few carriers. None of the carriers offer all of the technologies that are out there so, you need to first look at the technologies that are available from the carriers in your area.
The next step, after making a list of the available technologies, is to determine which one you need to use. This is determined by what you are trying to do. Are you setting up an ATM that only needs a 9600 baud connection or are you trying to do multi-site video conferencing that will require several megabits of bandwidth. This will limit your choices further, depending on what is available. Also, general cost of the technology may be factored here but, cost should not significantly affect your decision yet.
Hopefully at this point, you still have at least a couple of carriers to choose from. At this point you must look at reliability, responsiveness, whether the carrier will be around in a year or five years, SLAs and finally cost.Usually you're lucky to find two or more carriers to choose from in the end.
One last note, don't mistake carriers for service providers. There may be lots of service providers to choose from but, when you look closer, you'll likely find that they are all simply reselling the services of one or two carriers.
But, it looks really cool to me. I'd have to admit that MS has raised the bar with this OS. I wonder if the KDE team will show any interest in such things as the hand writing interface?
Well, there you have it. It's always been suspected that the Canadians were terrorists but, this proves it. Only last week was the US Justice Department talking about the criminality of open access points and now Canada does this.
Karma: Excellent -- Well, we'll just see about that!
Meridian systems use VXWorks from Wind River. As do Nortel's newer network gear. Their Bussiness Communication Manager, a small key system/PBX with IP telephony, proxy server, voice mail etc, uses NT 4.0 Embedded.
For a Citrix server you need the following licenses:
Windows 2000 Server License
Windows 2000 File & Print Client Access License (per client)
Windows 2000 Terminal Server License
Terminal Server Client Access License (per client machine, non-concurrent)
Citrix Server Client Access License (per concurrent user)
Application License (per concurrent terminal session)
True, but you don't need a Windows 2000 server license and a Terminal Server license and Terminal Server CALs for every MACHINE that connects to the terminal server. These licenses cost a LOT more than the Office licenses that you'd have to buy as well.
The press release does not go into detail about the terminal server features of the new Cross-Over Server. Does it use it's own transport mechanism, or is it relying on X-11?
I suspect that it is using the X-11 approach and this will NOT impact the likes of Citrix. Citrix provides a great deal of functionality beyond simple terminal services. The management tools and the ability to publish applications are unrivaled and any administrator who has used them is not going to easily part with them. But, perhaps the biggest distinction is that Citrix uses a TINY amount of bandwidth when compared to X-11 or VNC. Whereas Citrix ICA protocol can work very nicely at 20Kbps VNC can easily use a couple of hundred Kbps and X-11 can go over 10Mbps for even basic applications.
Sure a Citrix implementation costs a fortune, mostly due to the fact that Microsoft requires three different licenses including a Windows license, a Terminal Server license and then Terminal Server CALs. It's damn expensive but, companies that really need that kind of functionality can easily afford it and once it's in, they won't part with it.
You mean according to Google News by way of CNN, by way of Reuters, don't ya?
Seems to me that you should use the most modern solution out there. You want off-site storage and you want redundancy and you might like it to be distributed.
Sounds like P2P would be the ticket here. Just upload all your files onto Kazza and Gnutella and then let nature take its course, scattering them all over the internet.
Anybody see a problem with this? Seems like a "legal" use for P2P has finally shown up.
As alluded to in Thomas Gold's report from 1992, bacteria are very commonly found at extreme depths in the earth, by oil drilling operations. As has been the case for several years.
I think the most news worth portion of this article is the fact that this guy has acquired a multimillion dollar NASA grant, not that he has found anything new.
Lauder slammed his Replay box, 'it's too hot,' 'my wife doesn't know how to use it,' and he even tried to fry an egg on his PVR.
So, he doesn't like them. He thinks they are for copyright violation. He thinks cable companies should sue the PVR manufacturers. So, why does he own one and why is he pissed that his wife can't operate it.
Hey Gary, can she set the clock on your old VCR?
Nortel - Passport Series
Lucent - Cajun Series
HP - Pro Curve
Foundry
Alcatel
IBM
etc....
Forget Dial-up. Think about the more critical commercial applications. Think something like Delta airlines resevation system or how about a hospitals record system or as the article alluded an enterprises phone system using IP telephony. These are situations where uptime is absolutely essential and in rare cases, a matter of life and death.
VRRP is very commonly used in the enterprise and it easily and simply saves downtime on a regular basis. Basically, if your enterprise runs two or more layer 3 switches you'd be stupid not to use t. Now think about those networks that use thousands of layer three switches, networks with tens of thousands of routers, virtual or otherwise. In these environments a failure could affect a very large portion of the network. With VRRP, the risk is greatly reduced, though not eliminated.
So, could you tell me where I might be able to get the supplies for a "working nuclear reactor", an fairly easy task if you know how.
Seems to me that the level of difficulty is about the same.
It's more like living in the past. Early refrigerators didn't use electrical compressors and such. Your Grandmother's refrigerator used a pilot flame to do its cooling. Sure, it wasn't able to cool and freeze quite as well modern refridgerators do but, it still kept food cold and made ice.
How cool is that, to use a flame for refrigeration? It's so cool that it is still used today in things like Recreational Vehicle refrigerators. See here.
But, it is configured "wrong", you said so yourself. since there's no cached copies of the headers stored If it was configured correctly the entire message would be cached locally.
When you first install Outlook it asks "Do you travel with this computer". If you choose YES it will configure Outlook to work in offline mode and cache the mailbox locally. If you choose NO then you get your present configuration which is unbarable over a slow link.
Also, note that if you have Terminal Services installed on your system, Outlook will not allow installation in Off-ine mode. See Q246052 about this issue.
My trip last week required dial-up from a hotel room. Max connection speed was 19200, man I hate that!
;)
In any case, Outlook 2000 took only 2-3 seconds to start and new mail (the first few of 50+) was present within 5 seconds of Outlook startup. By the way, I hate to admit it but the mailbox contains 3000+ messages.
It sounds to me that you have Mozilla properly configured but, you do have an issue with your Outlook configuration.
Excuse me, I have to go clean out my mailbox.
After re-reading your post, I got to thinking that you don't specify what client the workstations are running. It Occurred to me that you may be running Windows 2000/NT on these laptops and that you may have implemented Roaming Profiles (for Windows).
This type of configuration can be an issue as users frequently store full files on their desktop which is part of the profile, rather than just short cuts to the files. This causes the profiles to grow very large, I've seen 60 Meg profiles, before people started complaining about performance when logging in.
If this is the problem that you are having, you should configure your environment to use the locally cached profile when slow links are detected. This will prevent trying to pull a 60 Meg desktop profile across a 56K link. This configuration is done at a domain level using Group Policy Objects.
But, like I said before, you don't really give enough information in your post.
The description of your environment and your problem are not exactly clear, as you list several different configurations. However, I think that there is definitely a problem.
The fact is that Microsoft has already addressed this very issue in the best possible way. Configuring the laptops with mobile Outlook profiles causes the Outlook to leave all mail in the users mailbox on the Exchange server but, at the same time it caches the the mail in a local file along with the global address book. this allows the user full mail functionality while disconnected from the Exchange server but then synchronizes any changes when the laptop is later connected. While the synchronization process is not entirely transparent, especially on slow connections, it is not unreasonably intrusive, either. The only time that I have found it to be an issue is when people have large attachments in the mail messages.
Contrary to the other recommendations, POP3 and IMAP alternatives will NOT be any faster than the native MAPI connection. Indeed, these alternative protocols will instead reduce functionality, as you have partially stated in your post.
From the description of your problem it is difficult to identify the specific problem. But, it sounds as though there is an issue which is causing excessive delays in connecting to Exchange via MAPI. This type of problem is less frequent with Exchange 2000 than it was with 5.5 but, it can still occur. Perhaps the most common problem for delays in connecting to Exchange remotely is a name resolution problem. You can test if this is the issue by starting a remote connection from one of these laptops (don't start Outlook) and see if you can ping the Exchange server by name. If ping does not resolve the name and start pinging immediately then there is a name resolution problem. If that is not the issue there is also a potential problem with name resolution in Outlook itself. I recommend having a look at this Knowledgebase article.
More information about your problem would certainly be helpful in finding the answer but, the only way to use Exchange faster than the above configuration is to use Outlook Web Access through a browser.
The only new aspect of this is that the Open Source projects will now be treated like the commercial vendors have been. They've always given the commercial guys lots of time but, there have been several occurrances where open source projects were given the shaft.
The first to come to mind was when Apache was given less than a days notice before they disclosed the vulnerability.
Under the new policy Apache will be given the same 30 days that Microsoft has gotten. Fair's fair.
I have this setup running in testing environment for about 5 months now, and would like to move it into production.
I can't find the words to ask this without sounding like an ass but, I really don't mean to be.
I have to ask though, what have you been testing for the past 5 months. When testing a server, web, mail, database, whatever, one of the early tests that I perform is load testing. Have you not done load testing to determine if Cocoon will handle your anticipated load and then some?
Why waste 5 months development time on a product that you don't know will support the load? Suppose it doesn't handle it (which I doubt), are you going to chuck 5 months work to move to BEA, WebSphere, IIS????? What have you been testing?