Re:Not the VESA bus, the EISA bus!
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You kidding me? VLB was used in almost every single late-model 486, some 386's, and even some early Pentiums. VLB was around for quite awhile before widespread PCI adaptation.
Every single video board maker had VLB boards. I have a half a dozen of them in a drawer.
Whatever man, people have some really crappy PC's and they almost *all* have tons of spyware up the wazoo. You try to just do something simple like patch and scan for a virus, but things can easily turn into a nightmare. It often does.
7 techs checking ~100 PC's and cleaning 50 in 8 hours (including lunch) doesn't sound unresonable to me.
How many times have you sat at someone's PC when they are standing there - they try to get you to fix every little problem that have had. You can say no, but every time you do it's at least another minute or so off the clock.
I with the script kiddies would stop DOS'ing SCO. I want to read the stuff on their website to get a good laugh but I can't because it's almost always unavailable..
It seems to me that this special super-duper compiler wouldn't benefit any other CPU's since it's designed to make code that the processor executes the most effeciently.
Open sourcing a compiler for a CPU wouldn't automatically make the Xeon compiler any better. It would make gcc compile for that processor better.
Either way.. where's my super-duper Athlon and Athlon64 compilers!!
Every time a company (just like IBM) comes up with some new code to help out the Linux kernel, OSS, whatever - it helps their competition as well. So where's your fuzzy logic now?
The new world is open source, open ideas, and open specifications. Every single day it becomes more and more apparent. Get with the times.
Any generalizations are bad, no matter what you're talking about.
I hate to see all these linux fanboys. Get off it. I want Linux to survive and thrive and become the desktop everyone uses because I like it, I like the idea of it, and I like the fact that it can be made very complex and very simple. The more people that use it, the more cool software will be made. Not because I'm anti-MS, not because I'm an uber geek, and not because I consider Open Source a religion.
Sigh. I guess it comes with the territory. But really, there's some fairly intelligent people out there that act like blind fools when it comes to Windows, or flaws in Linux, or whatever.
Microsoft has two variations of their OS. Workstation and Server. Windows 9x was supposed to be the stepping stone from Windows 3.x to Windows NT, but it took a lot longer then expected to get everyone writing software that would be fully compatible with NT. In the meantime, the released Windows 98, Windows ME.
Windows XP is the last step in the migration of Windows 3.x to Windows NT.
Microsoft has a history of supporting old versions of their OS for a long time. Windows NT4 came out in 1996. They stopped officially supporting it in 2002 I believe. That's 6 years. I don't think that's too bad. Sure, they have released Windows 2000 and Windows XP/Server 2003, but they still supported NT4, and they continue to do so as emergencies appear (just no more Service Packs.)
Soon they will be supporting two OS's; Windows 2000 and Windows XP/2003. They are very very similar. All the variations of them are fluff. Not hard to support what is basically one product.
You can't count old versions of software as a "variation."
You must be kidding me when you mention the Linux thing. Forget the "for any single distro" loophole; Linux has hundreds of variations. Even redhat had several versions of their distribution. SuSE does too. But this is what we LIKE about Linux isn't it?
And your assumption would be correct. Not every business that tanks is because it did illegal and/or underhanded things. Commodore had internal problems and fell apart from within. It's a shame, too, because nearly every Commodore product was quality and ahead of it's time.
I'd have to say that this was one of the most poor performance comparisons I've ever seen.
Not only did they simply seem to download and install gentoo without even thinking about configuring it properly, they did a few little tests with very little explination about each test.
While I'm sure the scores are accurate for their tests, they obviously did not actually use Gentoo the way most people do: Optimized for their particular systems and their software.
Where Mandrake version whatever will always perform exactly the same and function exactly the same, Gentoo grants the ability to compile and configure software exactly how you want it.
Not to mention that the reason I choose Gentoo isn't because of performance - it's because of the extremely simple and easy interface to keeping your system updated and installing new software. Portage is the name.
I started working with Exchange when I supported it on the phone for Microsoft. No longer at that position or company, I have used my rather unique Exchange experience to set up and help maintain some pretty darned big Exchange orgs.
I can't even begin to guess as to why your particular Exchange server was black-holing messages. I've really never seen that odd behavior, except when the SMTP-screwing firewalls and relays would mangle messages. And as far as I am concerned, Exchange only loses 0% of messages per my own experience.
I wouldn't exactly go on to say that Exchange is the *most* expensive intranet mail system. If you factor in all the stuff you actually get with Outlook and Exchange combined, you'd be hard pressed to find a commercial suite of applications to get the same stuff done for any significant cost benfit. Plus, you'd probably be giving up some functionality and depending on the situation this may not be acceptable.
As far as counting security and client side problems, I will ignore this until I see some examples. And I don't mean what's posted on secutiry bulletins. I want to know what security concerns you have..
Assuming that the workstations are Windows-based, what is the client you use? A little PoP3 client simply cannot offer the same amount of features that business people generally want. You'd probably end up using Outlook anyways, and each Exchange licence includes a copy of Outlook..
As far as overtime, you're assuming that everyone has problems with Exchange, 24 hours a day 7 days a week, which is not the case.
You take a last stab at exchange "being insecure" - how is it insecure? Do you think that you send out unencrypted broadcasts of your e-mail passwords when you login or something? I assure you this is not the case.
Without making any meaningless stabs at your preference in messaging systems, I will also have to agree to disagree.
> Yes, but when the MS-Exchange server was available it was still bouncing or altogether losing (external) mail, both incoming and outgoing.
What's "it" and why was it bouncing messages? If your ISP goes down, there's no "it" to bounce messages, and as far as I've ever seen on Exchange 2000 (where the SMTP service is more separated) it queues messages in it's queue until such time as the Exchange services are running. If it was not doing this, something else was amiss..
> Sounds like it's still part of an intranet.
Indeed, but I guess I'm just trying to figure out what you mean when you say Exchange is "functional death of external communication."
To me, "external communication" can be any number of things, but I am guessing that you mean SMTP based messaging. I have not found Exchange to be particularly lacking in SMTP messaging support, and it's very strict to standards when sending messages. It's also loose enough to allow any incoming SMTP based mail from systems that do not follow standards properly.
I've seen some Exchange systems (the US Army, GE, other large outfits) that handle many thousands of e-mails an hour, without a hitch. Okay, I can't say without ANY hitch, but it's certainly within the realm of performance and stability that you can find in the many Unix SMTP mail agents.
Obviously you wouldn't prefer Exchange over an SMTP mailer designed for high-volume mail relay. That's really not what the Exchange SMTP service is designed for. If you need your standard SMTP mailer for relaying large amounts of mail around, like and ISP, then you'd probably use Qmail, Sendmail, Postfix, etc.
When it comes to SMTP mail to and from your Exchange organization however, it does the job quite well. I've had very few compatibility issues; in fact most of the compatibility issues I've seen are from mailers that do not adhere to standards.
I'm not exactly what you mean by security when it pertains to SMTP messaging. There really isn't any. If you mean POP3/IMAP type protocols for accessing mailboxes, Exchange supports all the normal internet-type serurity methods.
I'm not a Microsoft advocate, and I'd prefer to run things Linux whenever possible.. but when it comes to e-mail systems, I have found nothing comparable to the Exchange and Outlook combination. Exchange itself is an excellent product, however I did like Exchange 5.5 a bit more then E2K. It used to be it's own entity, but now it's integrated into the OS. (Active Directory, etc.) E2K does have some cool stuff though, such as multiple stores and all that jazz.
I don't ever make generalizations about anything, especially software.
That includes Exchange. It's not "death" for everyone. I've never had one lost peice of mail in Exchange. One time I had to take a server down because the SCSI controller was corrupting the databases. I replaced the controller, rebuilt the databases, and imported the mail. Took a few hours, but out of the hundreds of Exchange servers I've had my hands on, I've never experienced "death" for Internet mail or otherwise.
Like I said, I didn't say Exchange was cheap.
As far as bouncing mail or losing mail, well, any properly designed system of some size will have multiple mail gateways to recieve mail. Not to mention that not once have I ever seen any mail server bounce a mail if none of the servers listed in MX were available. Mail is queued for a day, as a general rule.
Most ISP's offer free SMTP mail queueing in the event that none of your SMTP gateways are available as well.
I've connected Exchange sites together using the internet and SMTP, as well as X.400 connectors.
If you know how to get the job done, it's not hard to build a really nice stable and easy to administer Exchange mail system.
Until such a system becomes available for Linux/Unix it will keep people on Microsoft, at least for mail.
I do believe that I mentioned that if it's a small installation, ISP hosted e-mail can work fine. I just don't like it, I like things done in-house and for e-mail, I use Exchange when possible. If not, I use Linux based POP/IMAP servers, and only for small systems. Webmin makes it easy for on-site staff to do general tasks as far as that's concerned.
Well, nobody said Outlook and Exchange were cheap. But..
> and poor interoperability with external mail.
Gosh, this couldn't be further from the truth. You can connect Exchange (and I have done so successfully many times: SMTP, MS Mail, CC:Mail, Lotus Domino, X.400, SNADS/PROFS, TP4/X.25 networks, NNTP Newsfeeds, POP3 Mailboxes, Novell Groupwise, Fax gateways, and other Exchange servers. You can access Exchange via Outlook MAPI, POP3, NNTP, IMAP, and the pretty darned good Web Interface.
Some people have used exchange simply to connect to foreign mail systems together (Like a Domino system to an MS Mail system) because it works so well.
On all the Exchange systems I've ever run, I've never lost one single peice of mail. The admins at your site must have been using some questionable practices and/or hardware..
Not to say you never have problems with Exchange, but hours of downtime every week? C'Mon, obviously Exchange isn't the problem there..
For SMTP mail relay, well, that's not the primary purpose of Exchange. It isn't bad however, and I have never had a problem with Exchange's SMTP service. The main purpost of course is to send and recieve Internet mail to and from Exchange.
As far as outsourcing the e-mail an ISP, well, for some people this may be a good idea I guess. For some of the installations I've been involved with it's simply not feasable. If your company has 10 offices, and some offices with over 500 people, internally run E-mail is a Good Thing. The internet connection goes down? You can still access your in-box and send messages to everyone else in your office. Any other messages will be queued nice and quietly until the connection comes back up.
So many of the problems associated with Exchange are probably due to the "NT Admin" syndrome. You get a dude with a year of IT experience running these machines since it's "the same as Windows on my desktop." Obviously this is only true for the Interface; you need to know how a system works to use it effectively.
I have not found a mail system as stable as Outlook with an Exchange server.
Outlook is a good program. Hell, all of office is pretty top-notch if you ask me. I'd buy it if they had a Linux version (Crossover Office is good but it's still not nearly as good as a native app..)
Outlook has a lot of nice features, the in-box rules are very easy to create and manage, and has more then a handful of other features that, in my opinion, set it apart from many other e-mail clients.
When coupled with an Exchange server, you get excellent seamless server-side storage of messages. IMAP can come close, but you still need local copies of your messages if you expect to do anything useful with them. Searches and such are all done on the server, eliminating network load. Many in-box rules will also run on the server-end, so even when Outlook isn't running, the rules still trigger and messages can be moved around your mailbox.
POP3 and IMAP definately have their place for internet-based e-mail services, but when it comes down to internal office e-mail, Outlook and Exchange just work better.
I'm not an advocate of Microsoft by any means, but I also don't ignore good software because of who makes it. MS Office is good, it's easy, and you can do a lot of stuff with it. OpenOffice is very good as well, no doubt about that, but MS Office is good too. And it comes with Outlook.
I'm waiting for the day when there's a Linux-Based e-mail system that's as good as the Outlook and Exchange combination. The other day there was a good discussion about Open Source alternatives to Exchange, and even with the ones that weren't free, nothing for Linux really impressed me. I think that if you need to use Linux on the backend, Lotus Domino is still the best choice.
If people refused to use new software because of known crash bugs, nobody would ever use any new software.
Not to mention that IE is a featureless dog that crashes more then Mozilla does.. for me anyways. Not like I do anything special either. IE has a tendency to ignore the "stop" button, it hangs up on dumb stuff, and the FTP client is terrible.
If it's not enforcable, how did the plaintiff win?
I guess they needed you in the courtroom to tell the jury it wasn't enforcable since you didn't sign something.
From this point on, I guess verbal contracts are completely out the door too. Tell that to the thousands of people convicted on conspiracy charges each year.
I don't see how you can really think that Y2K "upgrades" sparked the entire.com stuff and subsequently it being "done" popped the.com bubble.
I think the Internet was the big.com hype catalyst, I don't know where you've been man. It was the Internet itself maturing and becoming available to the masses.
All of a sudden the Internet was realized as a viable place to make money, certain Internet technologies and websites were pulling in major cash, and everyone wanted a peice of that cash. Anyone with an idea was granted enourmous sums of cash to put it on the web, and most of them simply didn't make any money. A lot of people lost a lot of money, which was no big surprise. All the investors were hoping that they were funding the next "ebay" and get rich quick. Unfortunately too many of the investors invested in bombs like boo.com and lastminute.com..
Most of the.com bombs were new companies, funded by old ones and really rich people. They didn't have any Y2K problems from the very nature of their existance; they were new.
As far as IT people and programming people, well, since all these companies were paying big bucks for people to perform these jobs, a LOT of people that wouldn't have gotten into the field under "normal" market conditions took some classes and landed jobs paying a ton of money. Now that so many of the jobs are gone, these people aren't just going to say "/shrug. Oh well, back to being an accounts payable clerk." Instead, there's a flood of unemployed technical people that want the big money again. Many of whom aren't very good at it.
It's a lot harder to service and play around with the electronics on surface mount hardware. Surface mount stuff isn't better quality, it doesn't do anything different. It's less expensive to manufacture.
In many cases, integrated and surface mount equipment leads to lower quality.
Obviously where size and weight is an important factor, surface mounted chips and other electronic components have the definate advantage. I just don't think it's necessary everywhere (like on a sound card) and all it does is make the manufacturing process less expensive (and such savings are not necessarily passed onto the end-user.)
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You kidding me? VLB was used in almost every single late-model 486, some 386's, and even some early Pentiums. VLB was around for quite awhile before widespread PCI adaptation.
Every single video board maker had VLB boards. I have a half a dozen of them in a drawer.
Whatever man, people have some really crappy PC's and they almost *all* have tons of spyware up the wazoo. You try to just do something simple like patch and scan for a virus, but things can easily turn into a nightmare. It often does.
7 techs checking ~100 PC's and cleaning 50 in 8 hours (including lunch) doesn't sound unresonable to me.
How many times have you sat at someone's PC when they are standing there - they try to get you to fix every little problem that have had. You can say no, but every time you do it's at least another minute or so off the clock.
I've done upgrades of all the different Windows OS's and I've rarely had a problem upgrading that I wouldn't have had with a fresh install too. /shrug
I with the script kiddies would stop DOS'ing SCO. I want to read the stuff on their website to get a good laugh but I can't because it's almost always unavailable..
Actually, it's where you cut a peice of bread in half and call it two peices of bread.
It seems to me that this special super-duper compiler wouldn't benefit any other CPU's since it's designed to make code that the processor executes the most effeciently.
Open sourcing a compiler for a CPU wouldn't automatically make the Xeon compiler any better. It would make gcc compile for that processor better.
Either way.. where's my super-duper Athlon and Athlon64 compilers!!
Let me guess. You work for Microsoft.
Every time a company (just like IBM) comes up with some new code to help out the Linux kernel, OSS, whatever - it helps their competition as well. So where's your fuzzy logic now?
The new world is open source, open ideas, and open specifications. Every single day it becomes more and more apparent. Get with the times.
Indeed. Some are worse then others.
I agree.
Any generalizations are bad, no matter what you're talking about.
I hate to see all these linux fanboys. Get off it. I want Linux to survive and thrive and become the desktop everyone uses because I like it, I like the idea of it, and I like the fact that it can be made very complex and very simple. The more people that use it, the more cool software will be made. Not because I'm anti-MS, not because I'm an uber geek, and not because I consider Open Source a religion.
Sigh. I guess it comes with the territory. But really, there's some fairly intelligent people out there that act like blind fools when it comes to Windows, or flaws in Linux, or whatever.
Microsoft has two variations of their OS. Workstation and Server. Windows 9x was supposed to be the stepping stone from Windows 3.x to Windows NT, but it took a lot longer then expected to get everyone writing software that would be fully compatible with NT. In the meantime, the released Windows 98, Windows ME.
Windows XP is the last step in the migration of Windows 3.x to Windows NT.
Microsoft has a history of supporting old versions of their OS for a long time. Windows NT4 came out in 1996. They stopped officially supporting it in 2002 I believe. That's 6 years. I don't think that's too bad. Sure, they have released Windows 2000 and Windows XP/Server 2003, but they still supported NT4, and they continue to do so as emergencies appear (just no more Service Packs.)
Soon they will be supporting two OS's; Windows 2000 and Windows XP/2003. They are very very similar. All the variations of them are fluff. Not hard to support what is basically one product.
You can't count old versions of software as a "variation."
You must be kidding me when you mention the Linux thing. Forget the "for any single distro" loophole; Linux has hundreds of variations. Even redhat had several versions of their distribution. SuSE does too. But this is what we LIKE about Linux isn't it?
And your assumption would be correct. Not every business that tanks is because it did illegal and/or underhanded things. Commodore had internal problems and fell apart from within. It's a shame, too, because nearly every Commodore product was quality and ahead of it's time.
I'd have to say that this was one of the most poor performance comparisons I've ever seen.
Not only did they simply seem to download and install gentoo without even thinking about configuring it properly, they did a few little tests with very little explination about each test.
While I'm sure the scores are accurate for their tests, they obviously did not actually use Gentoo the way most people do: Optimized for their particular systems and their software.
Where Mandrake version whatever will always perform exactly the same and function exactly the same, Gentoo grants the ability to compile and configure software exactly how you want it.
Not to mention that the reason I choose Gentoo isn't because of performance - it's because of the extremely simple and easy interface to keeping your system updated and installing new software. Portage is the name.
I just love ignoring ignorant blanket statements, which your entire reply is.
Indeed.
I started working with Exchange when I supported it on the phone for Microsoft. No longer at that position or company, I have used my rather unique Exchange experience to set up and help maintain some pretty darned big Exchange orgs.
I can't even begin to guess as to why your particular Exchange server was black-holing messages. I've really never seen that odd behavior, except when the SMTP-screwing firewalls and relays would mangle messages. And as far as I am concerned, Exchange only loses 0% of messages per my own experience.
I wouldn't exactly go on to say that Exchange is the *most* expensive intranet mail system. If you factor in all the stuff you actually get with Outlook and Exchange combined, you'd be hard pressed to find a commercial suite of applications to get the same stuff done for any significant cost benfit. Plus, you'd probably be giving up some functionality and depending on the situation this may not be acceptable.
As far as counting security and client side problems, I will ignore this until I see some examples. And I don't mean what's posted on secutiry bulletins. I want to know what security concerns you have..
Assuming that the workstations are Windows-based, what is the client you use? A little PoP3 client simply cannot offer the same amount of features that business people generally want. You'd probably end up using Outlook anyways, and each Exchange licence includes a copy of Outlook..
As far as overtime, you're assuming that everyone has problems with Exchange, 24 hours a day 7 days a week, which is not the case.
You take a last stab at exchange "being insecure" - how is it insecure? Do you think that you send out unencrypted broadcasts of your e-mail passwords when you login or something? I assure you this is not the case.
Without making any meaningless stabs at your preference in messaging systems, I will also have to agree to disagree.
> Yes, but when the MS-Exchange server was available it was still bouncing or altogether losing (external) mail, both incoming and outgoing.
What's "it" and why was it bouncing messages? If your ISP goes down, there's no "it" to bounce messages, and as far as I've ever seen on Exchange 2000 (where the SMTP service is more separated) it queues messages in it's queue until such time as the Exchange services are running. If it was not doing this, something else was amiss..
> Sounds like it's still part of an intranet.
Indeed, but I guess I'm just trying to figure out what you mean when you say Exchange is "functional death of external communication."
To me, "external communication" can be any number of things, but I am guessing that you mean SMTP based messaging. I have not found Exchange to be particularly lacking in SMTP messaging support, and it's very strict to standards when sending messages. It's also loose enough to allow any incoming SMTP based mail from systems that do not follow standards properly.
I've seen some Exchange systems (the US Army, GE, other large outfits) that handle many thousands of e-mails an hour, without a hitch. Okay, I can't say without ANY hitch, but it's certainly within the realm of performance and stability that you can find in the many Unix SMTP mail agents.
Obviously you wouldn't prefer Exchange over an SMTP mailer designed for high-volume mail relay. That's really not what the Exchange SMTP service is designed for. If you need your standard SMTP mailer for relaying large amounts of mail around, like and ISP, then you'd probably use Qmail, Sendmail, Postfix, etc.
When it comes to SMTP mail to and from your Exchange organization however, it does the job quite well. I've had very few compatibility issues; in fact most of the compatibility issues I've seen are from mailers that do not adhere to standards.
I'm not exactly what you mean by security when it pertains to SMTP messaging. There really isn't any. If you mean POP3/IMAP type protocols for accessing mailboxes, Exchange supports all the normal internet-type serurity methods.
I'm not a Microsoft advocate, and I'd prefer to run things Linux whenever possible.. but when it comes to e-mail systems, I have found nothing comparable to the Exchange and Outlook combination. Exchange itself is an excellent product, however I did like Exchange 5.5 a bit more then E2K. It used to be it's own entity, but now it's integrated into the OS. (Active Directory, etc.) E2K does have some cool stuff though, such as multiple stores and all that jazz.
I don't ever make generalizations about anything, especially software.
That includes Exchange. It's not "death" for everyone. I've never had one lost peice of mail in Exchange. One time I had to take a server down because the SCSI controller was corrupting the databases. I replaced the controller, rebuilt the databases, and imported the mail. Took a few hours, but out of the hundreds of Exchange servers I've had my hands on, I've never experienced "death" for Internet mail or otherwise.
Like I said, I didn't say Exchange was cheap.
As far as bouncing mail or losing mail, well, any properly designed system of some size will have multiple mail gateways to recieve mail. Not to mention that not once have I ever seen any mail server bounce a mail if none of the servers listed in MX were available. Mail is queued for a day, as a general rule.
Most ISP's offer free SMTP mail queueing in the event that none of your SMTP gateways are available as well.
I've connected Exchange sites together using the internet and SMTP, as well as X.400 connectors.
If you know how to get the job done, it's not hard to build a really nice stable and easy to administer Exchange mail system.
Until such a system becomes available for Linux/Unix it will keep people on Microsoft, at least for mail.
I do believe that I mentioned that if it's a small installation, ISP hosted e-mail can work fine. I just don't like it, I like things done in-house and for e-mail, I use Exchange when possible. If not, I use Linux based POP/IMAP servers, and only for small systems. Webmin makes it easy for on-site staff to do general tasks as far as that's concerned.
Gosh, read the article man..
The slashdot blurb was somewhat incorrect, but..
This shows how many people act like experts on matters they have no idea about.
Well, nobody said Outlook and Exchange were cheap. But..
> and poor interoperability with external mail.
Gosh, this couldn't be further from the truth. You can connect Exchange (and I have done so successfully many times: SMTP, MS Mail, CC:Mail, Lotus Domino, X.400, SNADS/PROFS, TP4/X.25 networks, NNTP Newsfeeds, POP3 Mailboxes, Novell Groupwise, Fax gateways, and other Exchange servers. You can access Exchange via Outlook MAPI, POP3, NNTP, IMAP, and the pretty darned good Web Interface.
Some people have used exchange simply to connect to foreign mail systems together (Like a Domino system to an MS Mail system) because it works so well.
On all the Exchange systems I've ever run, I've never lost one single peice of mail. The admins at your site must have been using some questionable practices and/or hardware..
Not to say you never have problems with Exchange, but hours of downtime every week? C'Mon, obviously Exchange isn't the problem there..
For SMTP mail relay, well, that's not the primary purpose of Exchange. It isn't bad however, and I have never had a problem with Exchange's SMTP service. The main purpost of course is to send and recieve Internet mail to and from Exchange.
As far as outsourcing the e-mail an ISP, well, for some people this may be a good idea I guess. For some of the installations I've been involved with it's simply not feasable. If your company has 10 offices, and some offices with over 500 people, internally run E-mail is a Good Thing. The internet connection goes down? You can still access your in-box and send messages to everyone else in your office. Any other messages will be queued nice and quietly until the connection comes back up.
So many of the problems associated with Exchange are probably due to the "NT Admin" syndrome. You get a dude with a year of IT experience running these machines since it's "the same as Windows on my desktop." Obviously this is only true for the Interface; you need to know how a system works to use it effectively.
I have not found a mail system as stable as Outlook with an Exchange server.
Outlook is a good program. Hell, all of office is pretty top-notch if you ask me. I'd buy it if they had a Linux version (Crossover Office is good but it's still not nearly as good as a native app..)
Outlook has a lot of nice features, the in-box rules are very easy to create and manage, and has more then a handful of other features that, in my opinion, set it apart from many other e-mail clients.
When coupled with an Exchange server, you get excellent seamless server-side storage of messages. IMAP can come close, but you still need local copies of your messages if you expect to do anything useful with them. Searches and such are all done on the server, eliminating network load. Many in-box rules will also run on the server-end, so even when Outlook isn't running, the rules still trigger and messages can be moved around your mailbox.
POP3 and IMAP definately have their place for internet-based e-mail services, but when it comes down to internal office e-mail, Outlook and Exchange just work better.
I'm not an advocate of Microsoft by any means, but I also don't ignore good software because of who makes it. MS Office is good, it's easy, and you can do a lot of stuff with it. OpenOffice is very good as well, no doubt about that, but MS Office is good too. And it comes with Outlook.
I'm waiting for the day when there's a Linux-Based e-mail system that's as good as the Outlook and Exchange combination. The other day there was a good discussion about Open Source alternatives to Exchange, and even with the ones that weren't free, nothing for Linux really impressed me. I think that if you need to use Linux on the backend, Lotus Domino is still the best choice.
That's not true man..
If people refused to use new software because of known crash bugs, nobody would ever use any new software.
Not to mention that IE is a featureless dog that crashes more then Mozilla does.. for me anyways. Not like I do anything special either. IE has a tendency to ignore the "stop" button, it hangs up on dumb stuff, and the FTP client is terrible.
Hmm. Well, what are they used for, besides Active Directory stuff?
In my DNS domains, "www" a records serve fine as a server record..
> This case is about EULA violation.
If it's not enforcable, how did the plaintiff win?
I guess they needed you in the courtroom to tell the jury it wasn't enforcable since you didn't sign something.
From this point on, I guess verbal contracts are completely out the door too. Tell that to the thousands of people convicted on conspiracy charges each year.
I mean, reverse-engineering is legal, right?
Unless someone says "ohh, don't do that!"?
I don't see how it's legal to forbid something that is legal just because it's under the blanked of the "EULA."
What's next? I think the bigger problem should be addressing what is acceptable for EULA terms.
I couldn't disagree with you more.
.com stuff and subsequently it being "done" popped the .com bubble.
.com hype catalyst, I don't know where you've been man. It was the Internet itself maturing and becoming available to the masses.
.com bombs were new companies, funded by old ones and really rich people. They didn't have any Y2K problems from the very nature of their existance; they were new.
I don't see how you can really think that Y2K "upgrades" sparked the entire
I think the Internet was the big
All of a sudden the Internet was realized as a viable place to make money, certain Internet technologies and websites were pulling in major cash, and everyone wanted a peice of that cash. Anyone with an idea was granted enourmous sums of cash to put it on the web, and most of them simply didn't make any money. A lot of people lost a lot of money, which was no big surprise. All the investors were hoping that they were funding the next "ebay" and get rich quick. Unfortunately too many of the investors invested in bombs like boo.com and lastminute.com..
Most of the
As far as IT people and programming people, well, since all these companies were paying big bucks for people to perform these jobs, a LOT of people that wouldn't have gotten into the field under "normal" market conditions took some classes and landed jobs paying a ton of money. Now that so many of the jobs are gone, these people aren't just going to say "/shrug. Oh well, back to being an accounts payable clerk." Instead, there's a flood of unemployed technical people that want the big money again. Many of whom aren't very good at it.
So I dunno where you're coming from..
It's a lot harder to service and play around with the electronics on surface mount hardware. Surface mount stuff isn't better quality, it doesn't do anything different. It's less expensive to manufacture.
In many cases, integrated and surface mount equipment leads to lower quality.
Obviously where size and weight is an important factor, surface mounted chips and other electronic components have the definate advantage. I just don't think it's necessary everywhere (like on a sound card) and all it does is make the manufacturing process less expensive (and such savings are not necessarily passed onto the end-user.)