OpenNMS offers excellent training and support. My company flew Tarus down to Autralia for a week where he implemented OpenNMS across our four sites in the first day, then spent four days with myself and a colleague training us on its features.
The price, including business class flight from America (it's a lonnnng flight and we wanted him semi-conscious on arrival) was absolutely trivial when compared against just the licensing costs of a comparable proprietary product such as HP OpenView. Highly recommended.
Australia was first with mandatory helmet laws for cyclists. Now Australia's experience with that is cited as good reason not to introduce the same in other countries.
So, it may be good for the rest of the world. Probably not.
I do believe usenet is about to "grow up" the way the web did. Except newsgroups are useless to businesses for anything except support forums, so how this is going to affect things in the future remains to be seen.
One of the biggest problems in business is the use of email. People get brought on board a project where all the communication has been done by email.
If the project members used a collaborative medium such as Usenet to communicate, new parties to the project have full access to the history of what's gone before.
In fact, it would only make it worse - Opensource it and you will have serious issues with version control and compatibility.
Perl, Python, Ruby...they're all open source aren't they? How many versions of those languages are flying around?
Re:casual desktop users may want to try Knoppix
on
Debian 3.0r2 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Granted you're saying it's for casual desktop users, but Knoppix is not a good choice for an installable OS.
If you install Knoppix to the HD you're opening up a rare can of worms when you try to update it or add software that's not included on the Knoppix CD. I believe this is becuase it's a custom mix of testing and unstable; not something your casual user should be messing with (a category I fall in to).
Don't get me wrong, I love Knoppix, it allowed me to still use my laptop while I was building Gentoo which took the best part of three days. Two weeks ago my work machine went south and I used it to recover all my data before handing it to the IT department (with IT's blessing I might add.)
Assming that what you're after is hooking in to a remote machine graphically. Runs on top of Windows or *nix so pretty portable
Also has the advantage of being stateless on the client, i.e. disconnect from the server, reconnect and you're back where you you were.
http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/
Don't get me wrong, I think urpmi is what the rpm format has been crying for, and it does deserve more recognition. It's a shame that the true power of it is hidden from most users by rpmDrake.I only found out about urpmi because I've this habit of opening everything from an X term, at least for the first few goes.)
Bad thing though is that when I did a security update for the kernel, it broke my Masquerading. After poking in to the kernel, I found that that version of the kernel didn't have NAT compiled in which kind of upset me.
That's what nudged me to Debian which so far I've had no problems with; howevere I'm using stock Woody which is just a tad out of date. Maybe I'd find the same issues that put me off Mandrake in unstable?
Having it run on your Mom's machine is great for those of us that want to learn Solaris but can't afford a SPARC. Way I see it, this can only increase Solaris mindshare which has to be a good thing surely?
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OpenNMS offers excellent training and support. My company flew Tarus down to Autralia for a week where he implemented OpenNMS across our four sites in the first day, then spent four days with myself and a colleague training us on its features. The price, including business class flight from America (it's a lonnnng flight and we wanted him semi-conscious on arrival) was absolutely trivial when compared against just the licensing costs of a comparable proprietary product such as HP OpenView. Highly recommended.
Australia was first with mandatory helmet laws for cyclists. Now Australia's experience with that is cited as good reason not to introduce the same in other countries. So, it may be good for the rest of the world. Probably not.
Granted you're saying it's for casual desktop users, but Knoppix is not a good choice for an installable OS.
If you install Knoppix to the HD you're opening up a rare can of worms when you try to update it or add software that's not included on the Knoppix CD. I believe this is becuase it's a custom mix of testing and unstable; not something your casual user should be messing with (a category I fall in to).
Don't get me wrong, I love Knoppix, it allowed me to still use my laptop while I was building Gentoo which took the best part of three days. Two weeks ago my work machine went south and I used it to recover all my data before handing it to the IT department (with IT's blessing I might add.)
Also has the advantage of being stateless on the client, i.e. disconnect from the server, reconnect and you're back where you you were. http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/
Don't get me wrong, I think urpmi is what the rpm format has been crying for, and it does deserve more recognition. It's a shame that the true power of it is hidden from most users by rpmDrake.I only found out about urpmi because I've this habit of opening everything from an X term, at least for the first few goes.) Bad thing though is that when I did a security update for the kernel, it broke my Masquerading. After poking in to the kernel, I found that that version of the kernel didn't have NAT compiled in which kind of upset me. That's what nudged me to Debian which so far I've had no problems with; howevere I'm using stock Woody which is just a tad out of date. Maybe I'd find the same issues that put me off Mandrake in unstable?
Having it run on your Mom's machine is great for those of us that want to learn Solaris but can't afford a SPARC. Way I see it, this can only increase Solaris mindshare which has to be a good thing surely?