On the upside, we gain a shot at lots of mobile bandwidth if the radio industry crumbles
No, you won't. These frequencies are also shared with all sorts of navigation equipment, that luckly enough radio stations contribute to. Pilots regularly use standard radio stations in place of VOR transmitters for navigation. This is one of the primary reasons that radio stations have to say their callsigns at required intervals, so pilots can identify the station should they have some sort of insturment failure which allows them to tune in, but not know what they are tuning into. Once you figure out what you're listening to, and which direction it is, you can use just a few more landmarks or another station to figure out where the hell you are.
Very useful if you're in a small craft at night with partial equipment failures, and doing so is a requirement for getting an instrument rating for private pilots.
Perhaps this kid sees consoles evolving into phone size device, like every other person who thinks the iPhone is the next video game arena to jump into.
Adaptec however, has been the way to go for the last 20 years if you want the safe route with relatively good performance for a reasonable price. Hate to sound like a fanboy, but unless I'm paying out the ass for racks of disks and controllers like something from EMC or the likes, Adaptec has always been the right choice.
3ware to me is: Wanna be RAID controller thats not really worth the effort. I realize this has changed somewhat since they first started selling controllers, and may but they still feel like you're cheaping out if you go the 3ware route.
Whats next, someone going to tell us Promise makes awesome RAID controllers?
And, I guarantee you, that if there were no Linux free IDEs, there would be no Visual Studio Express. I doubly guarantee you, that, if there was no gcc, there would be no standards compliant C++ in Visual Studio.
That depends on how you define standard exactly. If there is only one, isn't that sort of the standard?
chroot is not a jail, its a hack to make shitty software work in a specially constructed enviroment. It does not in any way prevent a malicious program from breaking out of the chroot, it just makes a poorly written one have the option of working in a special section of the filesystem where you can put specific versions of files without effecting the entire system.
FTP without a chroot is not really any different than ssh without a chroot. If you're just depending on the authors of your ftp daemon to protect you then your an idiot.
Let me say this one more time since no one ever gets it an every year we see a new slashdot article about it.
CHROOT IS NOT A FUCKING SECURITY FENCE, NOT INTENDED TO BE, DOESN'T ACT LIKE ONE, WILL NEVER BE ONE.
So every 4 months, taking a few seconds to learn a new password which you will then proceed to use every day for the next 4 months is too much effort for you eh?
Fortunately, many companies have policies to help people like you out. It generally involves working for some other company afterwords however.
I hear you, passwords are hard, giving a shit about what you do is hard.
You should probably find a new job that doesn't require you to have a memory better than a snail if you don't like the policy rather than just making your own rules because you can't be bothered to follow the ones that are in place.
Its good that you think you know better than the people in your company that are paid to make those decisions. Maybe you do, maybe you know better than everyone else. Of course you do. Thats why you're in charge and setting these sort of policies is your responsibility.
Stop being a lazy fuck and do what you're supposed to or find a new job.
Until I decided to post this my slashdot password WAS trustno1.
All of the 'strong' password crap also makes crackers ignore easy passwords. Every rule you add for making a 'secure password' limits the combinations available. Everytime you make a restriction you are in fact making it easier to brute the password.
Trustno1 has been a great password for years. I've had a honeypot setup for at least 8 years using that password for root and administrator and never has it been tried to authenticate with it, even with the hundreds of thousands of attempts that have been made.
Even the bad guys have been socially engineered into making some very well known passwords great for securing important things, such as slashdot, which used trustno1 for my account until about 30 seconds ago.
Vista is slower, and its so much slower that there are court cases and lawsuites over it.
Windows 7 on the other hand IS FASTER than the previous version of Windows. But only because the previous version of Windows was Vista. Its still not as fast as XP on the same hardware by any measurement. It is close enough to the same that on fresh installs I can switch between the OSes and not notice the speed difference without actually paying attention to a timer or something while doing things.
If you think Vista is faster, You'vey obviously never used... well... any operating system, MS or otherwise.
* You might be able to burn ISOs, but you still can't mount them. Loopback device anyone? Do I really need to pay $XX, or install some spyware-infested freeware crap, just to mount ISOs?
Just for reference, Microsoft offers the Virtual CD Control Panel which will let you mount ISOs. I started using it sometime in late 2k5, not sure when it actually came out, and appearently it can be made to work in Vista at least.
I did some quick Googling and could find the main link to the MS product page for it. Prolly should have used bing, but I refuse to use a search engine that has changed names to get market share.
Anyway, if you actually use the MS Virtual CD control panel you'll quickly understand why they didn't include it. The management interface is some basic windows app that would have been accepted during the win95 internal builds, before the betas, not any time after that. But it does indeed work, after you figure out the sequence of button clicks required to get you going since it doesn't do anything other than what the button says, such as loading the driver automatically rather than requiring you to go to a different dialog first to enable the drive than come back and add a drive. Its just not end-user friendly. Geeks will figure it out quick enough though.
Interestingly enough, my Ubuntu install doesn't just let me double click on an ISO to mount it out of the box. Do any distros work this way? I'll fully accept it may be due to my futzing. I'm a FreeBSD user mostly, just play with Ubuntu so I have a general idea whats going on in the Linux desktop arena, and I've done some weird crap to it so it wouldn't surprise me if I pissed off some automounter gods or something.
I seem to recall it being more than a single mount command to do it in FBSD although I know it can be done with just a couple.
Its funny how that when you take statisitics out of context or only looking at a small subset of the factors involved in a statistical analysis that you can prove just about anything.
Sadly you like to ignore the fact that a lot more people use Windows than Linux, so naturally Windows stories are going to be more popular.
Its not anti-Linux. Its pro-howTheWorldActuallyWorksIfYouAren'tWearingYourFanboyBlinders.
Why do you think Apple gets more press for its OS than Linux, but less than MS does for Windows?
Why do you think anything iPod outranks any other music player these days?
It must be beautiful to be able to ignore all the other evidence screaming at you in order to keep your inner fanboy happy.
IMHO, FreeBSD is a far more useful OS than Linux. Must be a conspiracy from slashdot since Linux stories get a lot of news here but FreeBSD doesn't.
Of course its more likely that most everyone here prefers Linux, but I'm going to ignore that and scream about your evil anti-FreeBSD conspiracy !@$!@%!@%!@%!@
Yes, and I know people who by eXtenze and Bottled Water. There are always going to be idiots in the world, you have to throw them out of the equation unless you are in the business of taking advantage of those idiots.
IT people have a harder time 'getting comfortable' because they generally know the products better than the average user. IT people generally have to know everything about the product because each one of their users will actually use different parts. IT people also generally take pride in knowing how to do stuff, so they are much more into how the software works.
Joe the Secretary just needs to know how to use his company press release templates in Word. Gina the marketing drone needs to know how to do mail merge. The accounting group needs to know how to get the new version of excel to pull in some data from the old version of access until it gets converted, Dave the IT guy has to know it all so he can explain it to Joe, Gina and the accounting group when asked. Sadly, a two day training course doesn't teach you everything, it just hits the high points in a hurry.
I'm not sure I've seen anyone who needed 'training' for an Office upgrade. Office upgrades are basically skinning changes, and have been since Office 95. Office 2k7 was a rather drastic change, but its still basically a skin change.
Vista was a bad one. I, a rather technical person could not get used to it and won't use it. I however love Win7 compared to Vista. It is an acceptable upgrade. Of course, I prefer XP over Win2k so I'm part of that group of people who like 'pretty and cute' in their OS, not 'ugly and as efficient as possible'. Either one is acceptable, not knocking the people who like the Win2k style interface, it just doesn't do it for me anymore, looks old and out dated.
I don't see anyone needing training for Win7 upgrades except for IT personal who have to deal with bugs, and maybe a few minutes explaining the task bar differences, but there really won't be much training there either.
Why do you think it will require a bunch of retraining? Do you need retraining every time you change your KDE or GTK skin? I can understand if you do, some of them are outright horrible.
Some of us realize that when you really start using things for more than email and web browsing, that you're going to have 'these problems' with every OS.
If you (or anyone else) thinks that Linux doesn't have these same issues then you don't actually use it for anything serious. Nor is it just Linux, its *BSD, Solaris, AIX, Windows, Linux, EVERY OS HAS ISSUES. Stop pretending Linux is special because you don't see thousands and thousands of blog posts, mailing list posts ects about Linux issues. For every pissed off Windows user posting to a forum there are several happy ones. There are more Windows posts because there are more users.
This idea that Linux is 'better and less prone to problems' is silly. Computers (here it comes) are like cars. Everyone make and model is different in some way, but in general they ALL have the same issues, pretending that your teams OS doesn't is just silly and ignorant. Its a sign you don't have a grasp on reality or your teams place in the world.
I could equally ask - why the Hell do so few PDAs and smartphones support IMAP NOTIFY? It gives you push email using a perfectly good standard that works quite happily with any half-decent IMAP server. Concept-wise, it's not drastically different to ActiveSync (client establishes a TCP/IP connection with the server, says "let me know when something new comes in" and keeps the connection open).
I can tell you why. If phone properly supported NOTIFY then I wouldn't have to sign up for a MobileMe account to get notifications. RIM couldn't sell their rediculously priced systems to the various people who want push on their blackberry's.
The excuse used is that battery life suffers because the radio has to stay active to monitor the server for notify responses. Of course there are about a billion ways this could be resolved, but going back to the original reason, they make more money this way.
The fact that we aren't using IMAP for all email services at this point blows my mind. The shitty support for IMAP is all just to facilitate supporting vendor specific protocols such as Exchange.
Exchange IMAP support: sucks ass, might as well use outlook and the exchange protocol. GMail IMAP support: lame and a mess, makes you really just want to use the web interface, yay more ads! Outlook 2007 actually finally supports IMAP NOTIFY, no previous version did. Too bad they fucked it up with a shitty rendering engine for HTML.
As I've said in another post. 'Superior product' is not a synonym for 'lock-in'. GMail lacks features that Outlook has. That doesn't make you 'Locked In' to Outlook. All the data is easily exportable, you can move it very easy, there is no lockin.
There just simply isn't a product that has the features that Outlook does.
I'm sorry you don't like Outlook. I don't either, but there is no Lock In, there just isn't any competition, regardless of all the shitty little jokes that try to call themselves replacements such as Zimbra or OpenExchange or whatever that happens to be called this week.
Tech support isn't using Outlook for the support system, but the tech support people can get an email to them personally, instead of to the proper support address, click a button and it goes into the support system.
I'm sorry you don't understand how useful integration between products can be, but it is. Integration doesn't imply using that Outlook is being used for the support system, but it does make using the support system far easier. Our support system is actually Eventum, now part of the MySQL family, and we have a nice plugin that makes it so when a sales person or anyone in our company gets an email thats REALLY a support issue, with the click of a button and filling out a form it gets thrown into Eventum, all the appropriate contacts are added to the ticket, priorities set, ect ect ect.
Do that with GMail. The best you can get is moving it to another shared folder, such as the standard inbound support email folder.
You won't get iPhone push support from google without MobileMe accounts, thats the way iPhone push works. Use MobileMe and you already have iPhone push email.
Google uses ActiveSync to sync with Outlook, nothing else.
Again, 'Superior Product' is not another word for 'Lock In', regardless of how much we all hate the company with the superior product.
Lock-in is when you have a bunch of data and prevent people from taking it to some thing different.
You can't call it lock-in when you basically say 'I like product A better than product B because product A has (insert feature list) and product B doesn't, or product B is a loosely connected amalgamation of simple tools trying to pretend to be A.
The only thing GMail has over Outlook/Exchange is reliability. So far, GMail appears more reliable than an Exchange server generally is, however thats probably because GMail just has far more servers to throw at it. Long term, GMail isn't even really cheaper than Outlook/Exchange unless you're doing the freebe apps for your domain or standard gmail, in which case you've just basically given up every single feature of Outlook/Exchange in order to go back to email the way it was in 1996, with a pretty web interface.
If Google wants to compete, they have to produce a superior product. GMail and Apps for your Domain in their current forms aren't superior products.
There is no lock-in because there is no competing product with a comparable feature set, and its pretty easy to export your data from all the products you mentioned so that it can be moved.
So they are catching up to what MS offered almost 7 years ago... Maybe it'll catch on with Google, they're good at seeing the future. To me however, wave is nothing but a bunch of Hot air and an indication that Google is starting to get too arrogant and MS like for my tastes.
Only idiots want to run Exchange, and they want to run exchange when the company is tiny, when running Exchange is easy and relatively hassle free.
Exchange is actually not so bad in a tiny company, it sucks ass when you are a large company.
However, users want integrated calendars, scheduling/free/busy notification, global contacts, personal contacts, shared contacts, global shared folders, user controllable shared folders, they want it on all their PCs and they want it available from the web when they've got a dead battery and only a Internet Cafe to check in from. They want it to keep their blackberry in sync and they want it to coordinate the 150 other things that Outlook/Exchange do well on a small scale that allow Outlook users to, I know this is hard to believe, be productive.
Users love Outlook/Exchange. The admins hate it with a passion, but thanks for showing us how little grasp you have on the IT world.
Zimbra is a steaming pile of shit. Sorry, I hate exchange, I hate Outlook, but Zimbra doesn't even come close to comparing to the Outlook/Exchange combination.
Integrating with Outlook doesn't mean shit. GMail 'integrates' with Outlook. SEAMLESS integration is what users expect. Zimbra simply works differently, and differently enough that its freaking annoying.
While I realize MS produces bloated crap code, when you state 'You can put 2x the users on Zimbra' then you need to stop and think for a second why... Why? Because its not providing the same feature list.
I too want an Outlook/Exchange replacement combo that doesn't suck ass, but Zimbra isn't it.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you won't. These frequencies are also shared with all sorts of navigation equipment, that luckly enough radio stations contribute to. Pilots regularly use standard radio stations in place of VOR transmitters for navigation. This is one of the primary reasons that radio stations have to say their callsigns at required intervals, so pilots can identify the station should they have some sort of insturment failure which allows them to tune in, but not know what they are tuning into. Once you figure out what you're listening to, and which direction it is, you can use just a few more landmarks or another station to figure out where the hell you are.
Very useful if you're in a small craft at night with partial equipment failures, and doing so is a requirement for getting an instrument rating for private pilots.
Perhaps this kid sees consoles evolving into phone size device, like every other person who thinks the iPhone is the next video game arena to jump into.
Yes, but thanks the Linux's retarded licensing, ZFS sucks ass on Linux.
Do you sha hash your md5sums to make sure they are always correct too?
Perhaps to the kids, you are right.
Adaptec however, has been the way to go for the last 20 years if you want the safe route with relatively good performance for a reasonable price. Hate to sound like a fanboy, but unless I'm paying out the ass for racks of disks and controllers like something from EMC or the likes, Adaptec has always been the right choice.
3ware to me is: Wanna be RAID controller thats not really worth the effort. I realize this has changed somewhat since they first started selling controllers, and may but they still feel like you're cheaping out if you go the 3ware route.
Whats next, someone going to tell us Promise makes awesome RAID controllers?
That depends on how you define standard exactly. If there is only one, isn't that sort of the standard?
Why is it that slashdot seems to think open standards support from Microsoft would kill them, but its great for everyone else?
So many reasons why this post is silly:
chroot is not a jail, its a hack to make shitty software work in a specially constructed enviroment. It does not in any way prevent a malicious program from breaking out of the chroot, it just makes a poorly written one have the option of working in a special section of the filesystem where you can put specific versions of files without effecting the entire system.
FTP without a chroot is not really any different than ssh without a chroot. If you're just depending on the authors of your ftp daemon to protect you then your an idiot.
Let me say this one more time since no one ever gets it an every year we see a new slashdot article about it.
CHROOT IS NOT A FUCKING SECURITY FENCE, NOT INTENDED TO BE, DOESN'T ACT LIKE ONE, WILL NEVER BE ONE.
So every 4 months, taking a few seconds to learn a new password which you will then proceed to use every day for the next 4 months is too much effort for you eh?
Fortunately, many companies have policies to help people like you out. It generally involves working for some other company afterwords however.
I hear you, passwords are hard, giving a shit about what you do is hard.
You should probably find a new job that doesn't require you to have a memory better than a snail if you don't like the policy rather than just making your own rules because you can't be bothered to follow the ones that are in place.
Its good that you think you know better than the people in your company that are paid to make those decisions. Maybe you do, maybe you know better than everyone else. Of course you do. Thats why you're in charge and setting these sort of policies is your responsibility.
Stop being a lazy fuck and do what you're supposed to or find a new job.
Until I decided to post this my slashdot password WAS trustno1.
All of the 'strong' password crap also makes crackers ignore easy passwords. Every rule you add for making a 'secure password' limits the combinations available. Everytime you make a restriction you are in fact making it easier to brute the password.
Trustno1 has been a great password for years. I've had a honeypot setup for at least 8 years using that password for root and administrator and never has it been tried to authenticate with it, even with the hundreds of thousands of attempts that have been made.
Even the bad guys have been socially engineered into making some very well known passwords great for securing important things, such as slashdot, which used trustno1 for my account until about 30 seconds ago.
I'm sorry, what was your old trolling account, so I can associate you with the right one.
Bullshit.
Vista is slower, and its so much slower that there are court cases and lawsuites over it.
Windows 7 on the other hand IS FASTER than the previous version of Windows. But only because the previous version of Windows was Vista. Its still not as fast as XP on the same hardware by any measurement. It is close enough to the same that on fresh installs I can switch between the OSes and not notice the speed difference without actually paying attention to a timer or something while doing things.
If you think Vista is faster, You'vey obviously never used ... well ... any operating system, MS or otherwise.
Just for reference, Microsoft offers the Virtual CD Control Panel which will let you mount ISOs. I started using it sometime in late 2k5, not sure when it actually came out, and appearently it can be made to work in Vista at least.
http://blogs.msdn.com/charles_sterling/archive/2007/05/14/virtual-cd-rom-control-panel-on-vista.aspx
I did some quick Googling and could find the main link to the MS product page for it. Prolly should have used bing, but I refuse to use a search engine that has changed names to get market share.
Anyway, if you actually use the MS Virtual CD control panel you'll quickly understand why they didn't include it. The management interface is some basic windows app that would have been accepted during the win95 internal builds, before the betas, not any time after that. But it does indeed work, after you figure out the sequence of button clicks required to get you going since it doesn't do anything other than what the button says, such as loading the driver automatically rather than requiring you to go to a different dialog first to enable the drive than come back and add a drive. Its just not end-user friendly. Geeks will figure it out quick enough though.
Interestingly enough, my Ubuntu install doesn't just let me double click on an ISO to mount it out of the box. Do any distros work this way? I'll fully accept it may be due to my futzing. I'm a FreeBSD user mostly, just play with Ubuntu so I have a general idea whats going on in the Linux desktop arena, and I've done some weird crap to it so it wouldn't surprise me if I pissed off some automounter gods or something.
I seem to recall it being more than a single mount command to do it in FBSD although I know it can be done with just a couple.
Its funny how that when you take statisitics out of context or only looking at a small subset of the factors involved in a statistical analysis that you can prove just about anything.
Sadly you like to ignore the fact that a lot more people use Windows than Linux, so naturally Windows stories are going to be more popular.
Its not anti-Linux. Its pro-howTheWorldActuallyWorksIfYouAren'tWearingYourFanboyBlinders.
Why do you think Apple gets more press for its OS than Linux, but less than MS does for Windows?
Why do you think anything iPod outranks any other music player these days?
It must be beautiful to be able to ignore all the other evidence screaming at you in order to keep your inner fanboy happy.
IMHO, FreeBSD is a far more useful OS than Linux. Must be a conspiracy from slashdot since Linux stories get a lot of news here but FreeBSD doesn't.
Of course its more likely that most everyone here prefers Linux, but I'm going to ignore that and scream about your evil anti-FreeBSD conspiracy
!@$!@%!@%!@%!@
We see it a lot in government organizations. The federal EPA for instance uses Domino/Notes.
Sad, but true.
Yes, and I know people who by eXtenze and Bottled Water. There are always going to be idiots in the world, you have to throw them out of the equation unless you are in the business of taking advantage of those idiots.
IT people have a harder time 'getting comfortable' because they generally know the products better than the average user. IT people generally have to know everything about the product because each one of their users will actually use different parts. IT people also generally take pride in knowing how to do stuff, so they are much more into how the software works.
Joe the Secretary just needs to know how to use his company press release templates in Word. Gina the marketing drone needs to know how to do mail merge. The accounting group needs to know how to get the new version of excel to pull in some data from the old version of access until it gets converted, Dave the IT guy has to know it all so he can explain it to Joe, Gina and the accounting group when asked. Sadly, a two day training course doesn't teach you everything, it just hits the high points in a hurry.
I'm not sure I've seen anyone who needed 'training' for an Office upgrade. Office upgrades are basically skinning changes, and have been since Office 95. Office 2k7 was a rather drastic change, but its still basically a skin change.
Vista was a bad one. I, a rather technical person could not get used to it and won't use it. I however love Win7 compared to Vista. It is an acceptable upgrade. Of course, I prefer XP over Win2k so I'm part of that group of people who like 'pretty and cute' in their OS, not 'ugly and as efficient as possible'. Either one is acceptable, not knocking the people who like the Win2k style interface, it just doesn't do it for me anymore, looks old and out dated.
I don't see anyone needing training for Win7 upgrades except for IT personal who have to deal with bugs, and maybe a few minutes explaining the task bar differences, but there really won't be much training there either.
Why do you think it will require a bunch of retraining? Do you need retraining every time you change your KDE or GTK skin? I can understand if you do, some of them are outright horrible.
Some of us realize that when you really start using things for more than email and web browsing, that you're going to have 'these problems' with every OS.
If you (or anyone else) thinks that Linux doesn't have these same issues then you don't actually use it for anything serious. Nor is it just Linux, its *BSD, Solaris, AIX, Windows, Linux, EVERY OS HAS ISSUES. Stop pretending Linux is special because you don't see thousands and thousands of blog posts, mailing list posts ects about Linux issues. For every pissed off Windows user posting to a forum there are several happy ones. There are more Windows posts because there are more users.
This idea that Linux is 'better and less prone to problems' is silly. Computers (here it comes) are like cars. Everyone make and model is different in some way, but in general they ALL have the same issues, pretending that your teams OS doesn't is just silly and ignorant. Its a sign you don't have a grasp on reality or your teams place in the world.
I can tell you why. If phone properly supported NOTIFY then I wouldn't have to sign up for a MobileMe account to get notifications. RIM couldn't sell their rediculously priced systems to the various people who want push on their blackberry's.
The excuse used is that battery life suffers because the radio has to stay active to monitor the server for notify responses. Of course there are about a billion ways this could be resolved, but going back to the original reason, they make more money this way.
The fact that we aren't using IMAP for all email services at this point blows my mind. The shitty support for IMAP is all just to facilitate supporting vendor specific protocols such as Exchange.
Exchange IMAP support: sucks ass, might as well use outlook and the exchange protocol.
GMail IMAP support: lame and a mess, makes you really just want to use the web interface, yay more ads!
Outlook 2007 actually finally supports IMAP NOTIFY, no previous version did. Too bad they fucked it up with a shitty rendering engine for HTML.
As I've said in another post. 'Superior product' is not a synonym for 'lock-in'. GMail lacks features that Outlook has. That doesn't make you 'Locked In' to Outlook. All the data is easily exportable, you can move it very easy, there is no lockin.
There just simply isn't a product that has the features that Outlook does.
I'm sorry you don't like Outlook. I don't either, but there is no Lock In, there just isn't any competition, regardless of all the shitty little jokes that try to call themselves replacements such as Zimbra or OpenExchange or whatever that happens to be called this week.
Tech support isn't using Outlook for the support system, but the tech support people can get an email to them personally, instead of to the proper support address, click a button and it goes into the support system.
I'm sorry you don't understand how useful integration between products can be, but it is. Integration doesn't imply using that Outlook is being used for the support system, but it does make using the support system far easier. Our support system is actually Eventum, now part of the MySQL family, and we have a nice plugin that makes it so when a sales person or anyone in our company gets an email thats REALLY a support issue, with the click of a button and filling out a form it gets thrown into Eventum, all the appropriate contacts are added to the ticket, priorities set, ect ect ect.
Do that with GMail. The best you can get is moving it to another shared folder, such as the standard inbound support email folder.
You won't get iPhone push support from google without MobileMe accounts, thats the way iPhone push works. Use MobileMe and you already have iPhone push email.
Google uses ActiveSync to sync with Outlook, nothing else.
Again, 'Superior Product' is not another word for 'Lock In', regardless of how much we all hate the company with the superior product.
I hate to say this in defense of MS but...
Having a superior product isn't 'Lock-In'.
Lock-in is when you have a bunch of data and prevent people from taking it to some thing different.
You can't call it lock-in when you basically say 'I like product A better than product B because product A has (insert feature list) and product B doesn't, or product B is a loosely connected amalgamation of simple tools trying to pretend to be A.
The only thing GMail has over Outlook/Exchange is reliability. So far, GMail appears more reliable than an Exchange server generally is, however thats probably because GMail just has far more servers to throw at it. Long term, GMail isn't even really cheaper than Outlook/Exchange unless you're doing the freebe apps for your domain or standard gmail, in which case you've just basically given up every single feature of Outlook/Exchange in order to go back to email the way it was in 1996, with a pretty web interface.
If Google wants to compete, they have to produce a superior product. GMail and Apps for your Domain in their current forms aren't superior products.
There is no lock-in because there is no competing product with a comparable feature set, and its pretty easy to export your data from all the products you mentioned so that it can be moved.
So they are catching up to what MS offered almost 7 years ago ... Maybe it'll catch on with Google, they're good at seeing the future. To me however, wave is nothing but a bunch of Hot air and an indication that Google is starting to get too arrogant and MS like for my tastes.
No, its the users.
Only idiots want to run Exchange, and they want to run exchange when the company is tiny, when running Exchange is easy and relatively hassle free.
Exchange is actually not so bad in a tiny company, it sucks ass when you are a large company.
However, users want integrated calendars, scheduling/free/busy notification, global contacts, personal contacts, shared contacts, global shared folders, user controllable shared folders, they want it on all their PCs and they want it available from the web when they've got a dead battery and only a Internet Cafe to check in from. They want it to keep their blackberry in sync and they want it to coordinate the 150 other things that Outlook/Exchange do well on a small scale that allow Outlook users to, I know this is hard to believe, be productive.
Users love Outlook/Exchange. The admins hate it with a passion, but thanks for showing us how little grasp you have on the IT world.
Yes. Learn more about Google Apps integration with AD and other SSO systems, but it most certainly does.
No.
Zimbra is a steaming pile of shit. Sorry, I hate exchange, I hate Outlook, but Zimbra doesn't even come close to comparing to the Outlook/Exchange combination.
Integrating with Outlook doesn't mean shit. GMail 'integrates' with Outlook. SEAMLESS integration is what users expect. Zimbra simply works differently, and differently enough that its freaking annoying.
While I realize MS produces bloated crap code, when you state 'You can put 2x the users on Zimbra' then you need to stop and think for a second why ... Why? Because its not providing the same feature list.
I too want an Outlook/Exchange replacement combo that doesn't suck ass, but Zimbra isn't it.