Yea, not really. Dual AGP requires some hacking and it's not standard. It *can* be done, but it wasn't designed to be, and therefore requires special working to make it happen. It never became mainstream because it doesn't work very well.
AGP, by it's design, can only have one per machine.
It was an add-on specifically designed for the pattern of usage that video cards perform - lots of data out, and short requests in.
It was a patch to get us by until the "next PCI" came along - but AGP's great performance was also the reason it's taken so long to get PCI Express going; not a lot of demand for something we don't really need. Old PCI slots still provide ample bandwidth for most other types of expansion cards and on the server side you had 64-bit PCI/PCI-X.
Of course, we still needed PCIe, but it hasn't been a big push. Now, with the dual-video board thing happening, it's definitely helped push the bus into the mainstream.
As far as the changes in CPU slots, well, I agree to a point. While I believe that both Intel and AMD could have done more to keep slot changes to a minimum, a lot of times the chip-set changes along with the CPU requiring a new board anyways. So, why not upgrade the CPU slot to accommodate the new data patterns of the new architecture?
I do feel like I own hardware. Software, on the other hand..
$199 is a little high for internet service. Their lower speed 15Mbit is more resonable in pricing but still not in the same category as 100Mbit access.
The biggest problem with FIOS is that it's not available. They keep making a big deal about it, and I get information packets in my mailbox about it, but not one address in my town, or any of the neighboring towns can get it. And I live in a very densly populated area between Providence and Boston.
While I'm sure some people can get FIOS somewhere in my state, the number is so insignificant. You can't even get it in almost all of NYC.
You can't use the land-mass vs population arguement in the US because you can't get very high speed internet even in the most populated cities. It's simply not offered, unless you go for an $8,000/mo T3.
What wonderful things will happen at 10Mbit? Who knows. Until more people are on it, we've yet to see what new technologies would utilize it. Plus, who said 10Mbit was ultra-fast? These other countries are putting in 100Mbit. Quite a difference there.
Until there's even high speed (20+Mbit) Internet available in the big cities *at all*, for less then $5,000 a month, you can't say we're limited by land mass.
Right now, it doesn't matter where you live in the US. You can't get it. So until you can get these speeds in the highly populated areas you can't use the last mile arguement.
I take issue with it, too. 200Kbit isn't fast enough to move us into the next level of connectivity, whatever it might be. It doesn't allow you to do much (if anything) more then a dial-up account does. It doesn't enable live video, or video conferencing. It doesn't allow you to access your data anywhere, because you're severely limited to small files.
While it's better then dial-up, it's not even close to what the internet is capable of. 100Mbit connections could enable all sorts of things we can't even imagine yet.
As far as usage ratio - there's a difference between normal usage and restricting that usage. While I download probably 50x or more then what I upload, I still can't upload fast when I *do* want to upload. Even if it's only 1 out of every 50 megabytes.
Some countries are gearing up for 50+ MBit connections right now. That's more then 10x faster then a good cablemodem service. We're going to be left in the dust.
If you think the article was about Lasik, you didn't read it =) Not one mention of Lasik, at all. They grabbed some sperm with lasers, and they performed laser procedures on single cells.
However, about Lasik - there's been people that have had bad experiences with it. While I feel terrible for it, it's not the procedure that's the problem, it's the people doing it. More importantly, it's the diagnosis beforehand. Not everyone should do Lasik. Some eyes just won't do well with the procedure. Unfortunately, the doctors miss the signs of eye problems and go ahead with the procedure anyways. Maybe they need more research performed on what could cause a bad Lasik procedure, I don't know.
But I know quite a few people that have had it done with amazing results. No more contact lenses, no more glasses. Vision better then 20/20. So many Lasik procedures are done every day that the number of successful attempts *vastly* outweighs the number of failed. Enough to consider it a very safe procedure.
Again, I feel terrible for people that lose their vision before of a failed Lasik operation. But, there is a risk, and it's a known and proven risk. Before anything that affects something as important as my eyes, I would seek not a second, but a third and maybe forth opinion before doing anything.
I've been an e-mail admin for years and I never look at e-mail unless there's a need to do so. I'm entrusted with the enture companies' store of e-mail and I would really have to be a dick to break that trust.
I've never done it at home on my own mail server (friends and family) and I've never done it at work. It would be unethical.
But, I do know of some people that don't give a shit and think it's funny to read everyone's mail. It just pisses me off.
I don't see Outlook as being much more complicated then past versions. Care to elaborate? If anything, Outlook 2003 has greatly enhanced the user experience with a much needed UI update. But there's really nothing new in any of the "2003" office components versus Office XP, or even Office 2000.
I would love to see an OSS replacement for Exchange. A *real* replacement, not a POP3/IMAP server with Squirrelmail and an NNTP server. I said in another post that I believe Evolution and KMail are very nice e-mail clients and with the right work on the server side, would be total Exchange/Outlook replacements. The client side is there, but there's simply no Exchange equal.
I'd love to see a Visio replacement, too. I was rather upset when Microsoft purchased Visio corp, because that meant absolutely zero chance for a non-windows version.
Well, I don't know what's going on at that place you worked at, but my previous contract had me and a Junior admin providing Exchange support for the company of 10,000 users. No sweat. And during the entire 12 month contract, we were down three times - on Sunday mornings for patches. Since we had cluster failovers, total down time was in the realm of two and a half minutes per down-time.
I don't know man. Exchange works great, but I guess if you have bad admins, shitty hardware, and an IT department that's heavily mis-managed, you'll have a lot of down time. As would be the case of anything else.
As far as your claim of a normal Exchange system being as much of a mish-mash as an OSS self-built system, you're dreaming.
A/V for exchnage Just Works. Scanmail for Exchange (trend) and Symantec for Exchange are two products that are simply set it and forget it. And they provide excellent server based virus scanning with Exchange's AVAPI.
As far as Spam filtering, there's several good spam filters you can install right on an Exchange server natively. Brightmail, for instance, integrates nicely with Exchnage's SMTP service. No need for Sendmail. Or, if you're a big enough company - you might go with an appliance like Ironmail or Ironport.
As far as having an MCSE - I'd have thought you would have figured out by now that it doesn't mean much. I don't have one. Yet I manage to run Exchange and AD systems just fine.
If you can't see past the hazy glass of 'I hate Microsoft' that you're looking though, I don't know what to tell you. Microsoft has some shitty software, and some buggy software, and IE sucks. But Exchange doesn't.
That's kinda a stretch. IBM is a corporation, not a government agency. If the government pays them, I'm sure it's to buy stuff or pay for specific tasks, not "here's some money. kk thx."
If you buy IBM products, it's no longer your money, it's theirs. Likewise, if I buy a used iPod from you, would you want me telling you how to spend that money?
Plus, what they're doing is proof of concept type stuff. Research. Not enough companies to this kind of stuff anymore. Xeorx, AT&T, DEC.. all gone. IBM does research on a lot more then this too - they're into a lot of shit. I say we encourage them to keep it up. Because it's not like Microsoft does any cool stuff like this.
Exchange 5.5 was a great product - I know a lot of people didn't like it but I loved it. And it was a lot more simple because it had it's own directory. Someone with basic Exchange knowledge could run a single server site without much ado. Now, with the AD stuff, it's definately more complicated.
It's not completely fair to say it's Exchange that needs a full time admin because a lot of the work is within the realm of AD.
Fortunately, if you've got decent quality hardware, once it's configured, it usually just works. If you're a small company, you could have a consultant that could come in once in awhile to do things AD and Exchange related (if someone is an Exchange expert, they should also be an AD expert.)
I worked for a company a couple years back that had hundreds of small business clients and we did they admin work. We put just about everyone on Exchange and many sites would just run, with minimal downtime due to patching and updates, for months and months - in some cases, years.
However, if you think about what would be involved in maintaining a "close to exchange" system based on OSS that a lot of these people around here keep pushing, I'd dare you to not have an expert on site to handle the OpenLDAP, Apache, Squirrelmail, INN, IMAPd and Sendmail mish-mash.
It's not just a big deal, it's a HUGE deal. At my last contract, I had sometimes five meetings a day for two weeks straight. Yea, it sucked, but it would have sucked a lot more without Outlook and Exchange there to help organize my schedule, collaborate with the others via updates to meetings and e-mails to explain.
There's other scheduling systems out there, but none of them integrate with e-mail like Exchange/Outlook does.
You're right about the FOSS community not getting the point of Exchange. I always see "well, I can run a sendmail/procmail system for free." But it's not the same! Sure, that will get your e-mail. But we want more then just plain e-mail - we want e-mail that works with other users like Exchange/Outlook does.
There's a lot there in the OSS community - great e-mail clients rivaling Outlook and lots of server based e-mail stuff. If I were a good programmer, maybe I'd try to bring it all together. But I'm not =) I hope someone does.. Exchange/Outlook is really great, but it doesn't do anything that I see would be amazingly hard to duplicate with the right talent behind the keyboard.
You can easily see the standard SMTP headers on every single message right in Outlook (View > Options, Anyone?)
As far as NDR's - there IS NO STANDARD NDR. Every mail server has it's own. If a message is accepted by a remote mail server, and then generates an NDR and sends it back, Exchange/Outlook will display the message as it was received. If the message was REJECTED by the remote mail server, Exchange actually present very GOOD NDR messages. Have you actually LOOKED at one? Right at the end, you'll see something like this:
------------------
The following recipient(s) could not be reached:
user@domain.net on 8/4/2005 9:10 PM
The e-mail account does not exist at the organization this message was sent to. Check the e-mail address, or contact the recipient directly to find out the correct address.
( eastrmmtao06.cox.net #5.1.1 smtp; 550 (user@domain.net)... User not known)
------------------ See the end? That's the part where Exchange is telling you EXACTLY what happened: The remote server, eastrmmtao06.cox.net gave an SMTP error 550, with the data User not known.
Sorry man, but you really don't know what you're talking about.
I really like Exchange. I try not to be a poster boy for it, but even after 7 years of working with Exchange on a primary basis, I still like it.
I've had my eye out for a real alternative to Exchange for years. Some come very close - Groupwise 4 vs Exchange 5.5 was a pretty good match although Exchange still had more going for it. I've particularly looked for a good OSS solution but I just haven't found anything.
You could spend some time getting an OpenLDAP/IMAP/INN/Apache/Etc system all running in tandem and bring it kinda close - but the user experience just won't match what you can get with Exchange and Outlook. You'd end up with a somewhat disjointed set of tools for users to use.
Calendering/Scheduling is *huge* with most companies. You can do it with a lot of mail clients, but none of them do it like Outlook does it when using Exchange. While I do believe that you don't really need Calendaring and e-mail together so tightly, it does work out pretty well when you need to respond to invitations personally and/or have that automatically update meetings and tasks.
I think a client like Evolution or even KMail could bring a lot to the table if they could bring together server-based e-mail and collaboration in a unified way like Outlook does with Exchange. Both of these clients are just as nice as Outlook, but they're just as bad as Outlook when Outlook is in POP3 or IMAP mode.
Maybe he's an awesome IT guy, but I've deployed Exchange servers - even Exchange 5.5 servers several years back - that process millions of SMTP messages a day.
It's possible that he just doesn't have the experience necessary to run a busy Exchange system. I've had years of experience with Exchange and I still learn new little things all the time. You can install it and go, and it works pretty good. But you can really do a lot of customization and performance tuning with an Exchange server.
This is another example on how monetary fines are a joke. It's not just Austrailia - it happens everywhere.
If you're Joe Shmoe in Austrailia and you have a banner ad for an online casino on your personal blog web site, you can get fined for almost $200,000 a day. That's a LOT more then most of the population earns per YEAR. Yet, if you're a corporation, it's $850,000 - which is a lot more but most corporations could afford to pay out at least a day's worth of fines (and if not, you bankrupt the company and go home) whereas the 200k would put any individual out on the street - no car, house, nothing.
What kind of users? You realize that Exchange users are a little more demanding on a system then a pop client right? There's a shit load more functionality then sendmail, and the user experience is a lot better - more real-time information handed out to users. Not to mention, ohh, you know. Sharing information. Centralized address books. Public folders..
Plus, I didn't say the machines were taxed. We could have slapped on another 15,000 - 25,000 users without many issues besides more space on the SAN.
Plus, quad proc machines these days just don't cost what they used to. Might as well have a high ceiling?
And for the small ones. Exchange is very easy to use, but if you don't know how it works you can dig yourself pretty deep.
For the large corporation, you can support an unlimited amount of users with Exchange server. Yes, unlimited. All sharing the same address books, calendars, folders, tasks, etc. And it Just Works. With the right planning and deployment, maintaining an Exchange system can be a very easy thing to do.
I'm sorry, but anyone that says Exchange Server sucks is ignorant. The same people that are zealots about (insert OS/Software/Hardware here.) And usually, it's the same people that have never worked as an administrator/engineer for a large (6,000+ users) company.
Exchange is good software. It Just Works. And it performs exceptionally well. I've been working with it for years.
I consulted at a Univerisity with two Active/Passive Exchange clusters servicing over 12,000 users. Some used Outlook, some used POP/IMAP, some used OWA. It was Exchange 2000, later 2003. It's not like these were powerhouse big-iron type machines, either - quad processor boxes with 4GB RAM attached to a Clariion, I think they were 2.4Ghz Xeons. Of course, those were the mailbox servers - we had other machines for connectors and OWA front-end. But that's just normal best practices with a busy Exchange environment.
Another placed I worked at had dual-processor Compaq DL380's running the show, with over 2500 users per node. No sweat.
Usually, poor performance on Exchange is due to mis-configurations and not enough disk I/O. You can throw as many processors you want at Exchange, but it's really all about IO.
This guy also doesn't know the first thing about database servers if he's bitching about the memory usage on Store.exe. Store.exe is (as we know) the information store database service. It will use as much memory as it needs, and as is available. Usually the big memory usage is just cached data. Store.exe will give up all it's cached paged as soon as another app requires it. A lot of these kids now a days still think every app needs to run in 200k memory or it's "bloat." What's the point in having 4GB RAM if your applications don't use it?
They've obviously never administered a large database server. A big MS-SQL database server will cache the whole database, if it can. 1GB on store.exe? Try 4GB on mssql.exe.
I agree that there's issues with Exchange when it comes to administration (Public Folders can get unmanagable if you don't pay very close attention to user activity, although since Exchange 2000 I've never had any issues with PF Replication.) Overall, there's no other system that's as capable as Exchange for your basic groupware needs. It's VERY stable.
"I'm used to playing 1600x1200 on my pc at 60FPS."
Newb. Everyone knows you should be running on a 16:10 screen now - 1920x1200 is more appropriate for todays games.
"I'm playing on a 105" (not a typo) screen with a native resolution of 1366x768"
1366x768 sucks. Well, it doesn't suck, but you can visibly see pixelization on a 42" screen. Already, you can't do 1080i/p, which is where all the media will end up soon enough. That's why I chose the Sharp 45" LCD (1920x1080) over any of the 50" plasmas (1366x768.) I'm guessing your 105" screen is just a projector hanging on your ceiling or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea, not really. Dual AGP requires some hacking and it's not standard. It *can* be done, but it wasn't designed to be, and therefore requires special working to make it happen. It never became mainstream because it doesn't work very well.
AGP, by it's design, can only have one per machine.
It was an add-on specifically designed for the pattern of usage that video cards perform - lots of data out, and short requests in.
It was a patch to get us by until the "next PCI" came along - but AGP's great performance was also the reason it's taken so long to get PCI Express going; not a lot of demand for something we don't really need. Old PCI slots still provide ample bandwidth for most other types of expansion cards and on the server side you had 64-bit PCI/PCI-X.
Of course, we still needed PCIe, but it hasn't been a big push. Now, with the dual-video board thing happening, it's definitely helped push the bus into the mainstream.
As far as the changes in CPU slots, well, I agree to a point. While I believe that both Intel and AMD could have done more to keep slot changes to a minimum, a lot of times the chip-set changes along with the CPU requiring a new board anyways. So, why not upgrade the CPU slot to accommodate the new data patterns of the new architecture?
I do feel like I own hardware. Software, on the other hand..
$199 is a little high for internet service. Their lower speed 15Mbit is more resonable in pricing but still not in the same category as 100Mbit access.
The biggest problem with FIOS is that it's not available. They keep making a big deal about it, and I get information packets in my mailbox about it, but not one address in my town, or any of the neighboring towns can get it. And I live in a very densly populated area between Providence and Boston.
While I'm sure some people can get FIOS somewhere in my state, the number is so insignificant. You can't even get it in almost all of NYC.
You can't use the land-mass vs population arguement in the US because you can't get very high speed internet even in the most populated cities. It's simply not offered, unless you go for an $8,000/mo T3.
What wonderful things will happen at 10Mbit? Who knows. Until more people are on it, we've yet to see what new technologies would utilize it. Plus, who said 10Mbit was ultra-fast? These other countries are putting in 100Mbit. Quite a difference there.
Until there's even high speed (20+Mbit) Internet available in the big cities *at all*, for less then $5,000 a month, you can't say we're limited by land mass.
Right now, it doesn't matter where you live in the US. You can't get it. So until you can get these speeds in the highly populated areas you can't use the last mile arguement.
I take issue with it, too. 200Kbit isn't fast enough to move us into the next level of connectivity, whatever it might be. It doesn't allow you to do much (if anything) more then a dial-up account does. It doesn't enable live video, or video conferencing. It doesn't allow you to access your data anywhere, because you're severely limited to small files.
While it's better then dial-up, it's not even close to what the internet is capable of. 100Mbit connections could enable all sorts of things we can't even imagine yet.
As far as usage ratio - there's a difference between normal usage and restricting that usage. While I download probably 50x or more then what I upload, I still can't upload fast when I *do* want to upload. Even if it's only 1 out of every 50 megabytes.
Some countries are gearing up for 50+ MBit connections right now. That's more then 10x faster then a good cablemodem service. We're going to be left in the dust.
If you think the article was about Lasik, you didn't read it =) Not one mention of Lasik, at all. They grabbed some sperm with lasers, and they performed laser procedures on single cells.
However, about Lasik - there's been people that have had bad experiences with it. While I feel terrible for it, it's not the procedure that's the problem, it's the people doing it. More importantly, it's the diagnosis beforehand. Not everyone should do Lasik. Some eyes just won't do well with the procedure. Unfortunately, the doctors miss the signs of eye problems and go ahead with the procedure anyways. Maybe they need more research performed on what could cause a bad Lasik procedure, I don't know.
But I know quite a few people that have had it done with amazing results. No more contact lenses, no more glasses. Vision better then 20/20. So many Lasik procedures are done every day that the number of successful attempts *vastly* outweighs the number of failed. Enough to consider it a very safe procedure.
Again, I feel terrible for people that lose their vision before of a failed Lasik operation. But, there is a risk, and it's a known and proven risk. Before anything that affects something as important as my eyes, I would seek not a second, but a third and maybe forth opinion before doing anything.
I've been an e-mail admin for years and I never look at e-mail unless there's a need to do so. I'm entrusted with the enture companies' store of e-mail and I would really have to be a dick to break that trust.
I've never done it at home on my own mail server (friends and family) and I've never done it at work. It would be unethical.
But, I do know of some people that don't give a shit and think it's funny to read everyone's mail. It just pisses me off.
I don't see Outlook as being much more complicated then past versions. Care to elaborate? If anything, Outlook 2003 has greatly enhanced the user experience with a much needed UI update. But there's really nothing new in any of the "2003" office components versus Office XP, or even Office 2000.
I would love to see an OSS replacement for Exchange. A *real* replacement, not a POP3/IMAP server with Squirrelmail and an NNTP server. I said in another post that I believe Evolution and KMail are very nice e-mail clients and with the right work on the server side, would be total Exchange/Outlook replacements. The client side is there, but there's simply no Exchange equal.
I'd love to see a Visio replacement, too. I was rather upset when Microsoft purchased Visio corp, because that meant absolutely zero chance for a non-windows version.
First of all, they aren't all that Sexy. Reports have shown that these simple processors don't pack as much punch as they would have liked.
Second of all, it's pointless to buy the machine for it's hardware becuase you can't do anything with it besides play games.
Well, I don't know what's going on at that place you worked at, but my previous contract had me and a Junior admin providing Exchange support for the company of 10,000 users. No sweat. And during the entire 12 month contract, we were down three times - on Sunday mornings for patches. Since we had cluster failovers, total down time was in the realm of two and a half minutes per down-time.
I don't know man. Exchange works great, but I guess if you have bad admins, shitty hardware, and an IT department that's heavily mis-managed, you'll have a lot of down time. As would be the case of anything else.
As far as your claim of a normal Exchange system being as much of a mish-mash as an OSS self-built system, you're dreaming.
A/V for exchnage Just Works. Scanmail for Exchange (trend) and Symantec for Exchange are two products that are simply set it and forget it. And they provide excellent server based virus scanning with Exchange's AVAPI.
As far as Spam filtering, there's several good spam filters you can install right on an Exchange server natively. Brightmail, for instance, integrates nicely with Exchnage's SMTP service. No need for Sendmail. Or, if you're a big enough company - you might go with an appliance like Ironmail or Ironport.
As far as having an MCSE - I'd have thought you would have figured out by now that it doesn't mean much. I don't have one. Yet I manage to run Exchange and AD systems just fine.
If you can't see past the hazy glass of 'I hate Microsoft' that you're looking though, I don't know what to tell you. Microsoft has some shitty software, and some buggy software, and IE sucks. But Exchange doesn't.
That's kinda a stretch. IBM is a corporation, not a government agency. If the government pays them, I'm sure it's to buy stuff or pay for specific tasks, not "here's some money. kk thx."
If you buy IBM products, it's no longer your money, it's theirs. Likewise, if I buy a used iPod from you, would you want me telling you how to spend that money?
Plus, what they're doing is proof of concept type stuff. Research. Not enough companies to this kind of stuff anymore. Xeorx, AT&T, DEC.. all gone. IBM does research on a lot more then this too - they're into a lot of shit. I say we encourage them to keep it up. Because it's not like Microsoft does any cool stuff like this.
It depends.
Exchange 5.5 was a great product - I know a lot of people didn't like it but I loved it. And it was a lot more simple because it had it's own directory. Someone with basic Exchange knowledge could run a single server site without much ado. Now, with the AD stuff, it's definately more complicated.
It's not completely fair to say it's Exchange that needs a full time admin because a lot of the work is within the realm of AD.
Fortunately, if you've got decent quality hardware, once it's configured, it usually just works. If you're a small company, you could have a consultant that could come in once in awhile to do things AD and Exchange related (if someone is an Exchange expert, they should also be an AD expert.)
I worked for a company a couple years back that had hundreds of small business clients and we did they admin work. We put just about everyone on Exchange and many sites would just run, with minimal downtime due to patching and updates, for months and months - in some cases, years.
However, if you think about what would be involved in maintaining a "close to exchange" system based on OSS that a lot of these people around here keep pushing, I'd dare you to not have an expert on site to handle the OpenLDAP, Apache, Squirrelmail, INN, IMAPd and Sendmail mish-mash.
It's not just a big deal, it's a HUGE deal. At my last contract, I had sometimes five meetings a day for two weeks straight. Yea, it sucked, but it would have sucked a lot more without Outlook and Exchange there to help organize my schedule, collaborate with the others via updates to meetings and e-mails to explain.
There's other scheduling systems out there, but none of them integrate with e-mail like Exchange/Outlook does.
You're right about the FOSS community not getting the point of Exchange. I always see "well, I can run a sendmail/procmail system for free." But it's not the same! Sure, that will get your e-mail. But we want more then just plain e-mail - we want e-mail that works with other users like Exchange/Outlook does.
There's a lot there in the OSS community - great e-mail clients rivaling Outlook and lots of server based e-mail stuff. If I were a good programmer, maybe I'd try to bring it all together. But I'm not =) I hope someone does.. Exchange/Outlook is really great, but it doesn't do anything that I see would be amazingly hard to duplicate with the right talent behind the keyboard.
You can easily see the standard SMTP headers on every single message right in Outlook (View > Options, Anyone?)
As far as NDR's - there IS NO STANDARD NDR. Every mail server has it's own. If a message is accepted by a remote mail server, and then generates an NDR and sends it back, Exchange/Outlook will display the message as it was received. If the message was REJECTED by the remote mail server, Exchange actually present very GOOD NDR messages. Have you actually LOOKED at one? Right at the end, you'll see something like this:
------------------
The following recipient(s) could not be reached:
user@domain.net on 8/4/2005 9:10 PM
The e-mail account does not exist at the organization this message was sent to. Check the e-mail address, or contact the recipient directly to find out the correct address.
( eastrmmtao06.cox.net #5.1.1 smtp; 550 (user@domain.net)... User not known)
------------------
See the end? That's the part where Exchange is telling you EXACTLY what happened: The remote server, eastrmmtao06.cox.net gave an SMTP error 550, with the data User not known.
Sorry man, but you really don't know what you're talking about.
I really like Exchange. I try not to be a poster boy for it, but even after 7 years of working with Exchange on a primary basis, I still like it.
I've had my eye out for a real alternative to Exchange for years. Some come very close - Groupwise 4 vs Exchange 5.5 was a pretty good match although Exchange still had more going for it. I've particularly looked for a good OSS solution but I just haven't found anything.
You could spend some time getting an OpenLDAP/IMAP/INN/Apache/Etc system all running in tandem and bring it kinda close - but the user experience just won't match what you can get with Exchange and Outlook. You'd end up with a somewhat disjointed set of tools for users to use.
Calendering/Scheduling is *huge* with most companies. You can do it with a lot of mail clients, but none of them do it like Outlook does it when using Exchange. While I do believe that you don't really need Calendaring and e-mail together so tightly, it does work out pretty well when you need to respond to invitations personally and/or have that automatically update meetings and tasks.
I think a client like Evolution or even KMail could bring a lot to the table if they could bring together server-based e-mail and collaboration in a unified way like Outlook does with Exchange. Both of these clients are just as nice as Outlook, but they're just as bad as Outlook when Outlook is in POP3 or IMAP mode.
Maybe he's an awesome IT guy, but I've deployed Exchange servers - even Exchange 5.5 servers several years back - that process millions of SMTP messages a day.
It's possible that he just doesn't have the experience necessary to run a busy Exchange system. I've had years of experience with Exchange and I still learn new little things all the time. You can install it and go, and it works pretty good. But you can really do a lot of customization and performance tuning with an Exchange server.
This is another example on how monetary fines are a joke. It's not just Austrailia - it happens everywhere.
If you're Joe Shmoe in Austrailia and you have a banner ad for an online casino on your personal blog web site, you can get fined for almost $200,000 a day. That's a LOT more then most of the population earns per YEAR. Yet, if you're a corporation, it's $850,000 - which is a lot more but most corporations could afford to pay out at least a day's worth of fines (and if not, you bankrupt the company and go home) whereas the 200k would put any individual out on the street - no car, house, nothing.
What kind of users? You realize that Exchange users are a little more demanding on a system then a pop client right? There's a shit load more functionality then sendmail, and the user experience is a lot better - more real-time information handed out to users. Not to mention, ohh, you know. Sharing information. Centralized address books. Public folders..
Plus, I didn't say the machines were taxed. We could have slapped on another 15,000 - 25,000 users without many issues besides more space on the SAN.
Plus, quad proc machines these days just don't cost what they used to. Might as well have a high ceiling?
Give me a break.
If I do a query for "Linux Problem" I get millions of results. That must mean Linux is unstable and shitty too, huh?
And for the small ones. Exchange is very easy to use, but if you don't know how it works you can dig yourself pretty deep.
For the large corporation, you can support an unlimited amount of users with Exchange server. Yes, unlimited. All sharing the same address books, calendars, folders, tasks, etc. And it Just Works. With the right planning and deployment, maintaining an Exchange system can be a very easy thing to do.
I'm sorry, but anyone that says Exchange Server sucks is ignorant. The same people that are zealots about (insert OS/Software/Hardware here.) And usually, it's the same people that have never worked as an administrator/engineer for a large (6,000+ users) company.
You'll get shitty admins and/or insufficient funds to support a stable environment no matter what software you use.
He is obviously on an Anti-MS kick.
Exchange is good software. It Just Works. And it performs exceptionally well. I've been working with it for years.
I consulted at a Univerisity with two Active/Passive Exchange clusters servicing over 12,000 users. Some used Outlook, some used POP/IMAP, some used OWA. It was Exchange 2000, later 2003. It's not like these were powerhouse big-iron type machines, either - quad processor boxes with 4GB RAM attached to a Clariion, I think they were 2.4Ghz Xeons. Of course, those were the mailbox servers - we had other machines for connectors and OWA front-end. But that's just normal best practices with a busy Exchange environment.
Another placed I worked at had dual-processor Compaq DL380's running the show, with over 2500 users per node. No sweat.
Usually, poor performance on Exchange is due to mis-configurations and not enough disk I/O. You can throw as many processors you want at Exchange, but it's really all about IO.
This guy also doesn't know the first thing about database servers if he's bitching about the memory usage on Store.exe. Store.exe is (as we know) the information store database service. It will use as much memory as it needs, and as is available. Usually the big memory usage is just cached data. Store.exe will give up all it's cached paged as soon as another app requires it. A lot of these kids now a days still think every app needs to run in 200k memory or it's "bloat." What's the point in having 4GB RAM if your applications don't use it?
They've obviously never administered a large database server. A big MS-SQL database server will cache the whole database, if it can. 1GB on store.exe? Try 4GB on mssql.exe.
I agree that there's issues with Exchange when it comes to administration (Public Folders can get unmanagable if you don't pay very close attention to user activity, although since Exchange 2000 I've never had any issues with PF Replication.) Overall, there's no other system that's as capable as Exchange for your basic groupware needs. It's VERY stable.
"I'm used to playing 1600x1200 on my pc at 60FPS."
Newb. Everyone knows you should be running on a 16:10 screen now - 1920x1200 is more appropriate for todays games.
"I'm playing on a 105" (not a typo) screen with a native resolution of 1366x768"
1366x768 sucks. Well, it doesn't suck, but you can visibly see pixelization on a 42" screen. Already, you can't do 1080i/p, which is where all the media will end up soon enough. That's why I chose the Sharp 45" LCD (1920x1080) over any of the 50" plasmas (1366x768.) I'm guessing your 105" screen is just a projector hanging on your ceiling or something.