... I found it very entertaining and occasionally informative. My mine gripe is I could have done without the constant, relentless footnotes, which interrupt the text and rarely say anything more than "I [the author] was at that meeting, and I tried to talk xxx [the "stupid" company] out of blah blah blah [the "stupid" decision], but they didn't listen". They serves no purpose other than to annoy the reader and make the author sound just a little smug, in a "ner ner ner I told you so" sense.
I bought the book directly from the author, and mostly enjoyed it, but it really could do with a good subedit. The author's hero-worship of Chuck Peddle is barely disguised, and the rampant Apple-bashing does wear a little thin after the first few times of telling us how crappy Woz and the Apple ][ were and how Chuck and the PET were much better.
Also, I was a little disappointed the book jumps right into the Commodore story in the 70's: the first couple of decades of Commodore's typewriters-and-calculators business is deal with in a few pages. The Amiga story seems pegged on as an afterthought; less than a 3rd of the book deals with the Amiga and Commodore's demise, surely subjects worthy of entire books in their own right.
Overall though, it was worth the purchase, and hopefully there'll be a 2nd edition addressing these flaws.
Couldn't agree more. We're about to replace 400 desktops with Wyse 1200LE's after a test rollout of 50. We use Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 to push JUST the apps our callcentre users NEED, not the ones they'd like to play around with. The 1200LE's have just enough intelligence to get themselves on the network and run an ICA published app. There's no desktop for the users to fanny around with, no local devices to worry about, the Wyse terminals cost a quarter of a PC and will last for 4 times as long. They boot up in 5 seconds and if one should go down, we can have a new one in place in 2 minutes. We don't even worry about keeping all of our blade-based Citrix farm under hardware maintenance - if one of the blades goes down due to a hardware fault, there's plenty of others to take over. DR is a breeze as we've a redundant farm at another size. Trusted users can work from home seamlessly using the Metaframe Web Interface.
I could go on and on, but what it boils down to is: In the corporate world, 99% of users don't need a 250W power supply, an 80Gb drive and a 256Mb graphics card. They need a line-of-business app, an e-mail client and a web browser onto the corporate Intranet. And you don't need a BFO PC for that.
Before Novell starts trying to convince others to port their apps to Linux, they really need to sort out their own applications. The GroupWise Linux client is a mess; slow, clunky and missing several major features that have been around in the Win32 code for years. The back-end server runs lovely on Linux, but then again it ran lovely on OS/2 10 years ago.
As part of Yet Another Self-Study course years ago (I think it was for the CCNA exam), I remember reading something about the term Broadband as opposed to Baseband.
Baseband (as in 10Base-T, 100Base-T etc) was defined as for connection to a single device, where as broadband was for carrying data to multiple devices. Therefore, an old-fashioned coax link to a desktop would be referred to as 10Base-T, whereas a gigabit copper backbone would be 1000Broad-T.
I've never seen this repeated anywhere, and it certainly doesn't fit into the common definition of broadband, so maybe I imagined the whole thing:)
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... I found it very entertaining and occasionally informative. My mine gripe is I could have done without the constant, relentless footnotes, which interrupt the text and rarely say anything more than "I [the author] was at that meeting, and I tried to talk xxx [the "stupid" company] out of blah blah blah [the "stupid" decision], but they didn't listen". They serves no purpose other than to annoy the reader and make the author sound just a little smug, in a "ner ner ner I told you so" sense.
I bought the book directly from the author, and mostly enjoyed it, but it really could do with a good subedit. The author's hero-worship of Chuck Peddle is barely disguised, and the rampant Apple-bashing does wear a little thin after the first few times of telling us how crappy Woz and the Apple ][ were and how Chuck and the PET were much better.
Also, I was a little disappointed the book jumps right into the Commodore story in the 70's: the first couple of decades of Commodore's typewriters-and-calculators business is deal with in a few pages. The Amiga story seems pegged on as an afterthought; less than a 3rd of the book deals with the Amiga and Commodore's demise, surely subjects worthy of entire books in their own right.
Overall though, it was worth the purchase, and hopefully there'll be a 2nd edition addressing these flaws.
Couldn't agree more. We're about to replace 400 desktops with Wyse 1200LE's after a test rollout of 50. We use Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 to push JUST the apps our callcentre users NEED, not the ones they'd like to play around with. The 1200LE's have just enough intelligence to get themselves on the network and run an ICA published app. There's no desktop for the users to fanny around with, no local devices to worry about, the Wyse terminals cost a quarter of a PC and will last for 4 times as long. They boot up in 5 seconds and if one should go down, we can have a new one in place in 2 minutes. We don't even worry about keeping all of our blade-based Citrix farm under hardware maintenance - if one of the blades goes down due to a hardware fault, there's plenty of others to take over. DR is a breeze as we've a redundant farm at another size. Trusted users can work from home seamlessly using the Metaframe Web Interface. I could go on and on, but what it boils down to is: In the corporate world, 99% of users don't need a 250W power supply, an 80Gb drive and a 256Mb graphics card. They need a line-of-business app, an e-mail client and a web browser onto the corporate Intranet. And you don't need a BFO PC for that.
Before Novell starts trying to convince others to port their apps to Linux, they really need to sort out their own applications. The GroupWise Linux client is a mess; slow, clunky and missing several major features that have been around in the Win32 code for years. The back-end server runs lovely on Linux, but then again it ran lovely on OS/2 10 years ago.
As part of Yet Another Self-Study course years ago (I think it was for the CCNA exam), I remember reading something about the term Broadband as opposed to Baseband.
:)
Baseband (as in 10Base-T, 100Base-T etc) was defined as for connection to a single device, where as broadband was for carrying data to multiple devices. Therefore, an old-fashioned coax link to a desktop would be referred to as 10Base-T, whereas a gigabit copper backbone would be 1000Broad-T.
I've never seen this repeated anywhere, and it certainly doesn't fit into the common definition of broadband, so maybe I imagined the whole thing