Then again, I have never regarded email as a reliable method of communication. Everything truly important goes with a read receipt request and if I don't receive one then I phone or send snail mail. I continue to be amazed by the number of screwups I continue to hear about where someone says "I never got [such and such] email." As an admin, let me assure you that no (competent) email administrator has email randomly disappearing into the Magical Land of the Email Fairies.
I have had more people than I care to remember come to me complaining that "X says they sent me an email and I never received it, can you look into it?". Every single time I have been able to tell them exactly what happened. 8 times out of 10 the email's sat in their Inbox and they just have such a cluttered inbox that they can never find anything. (The other 2 times it's an internal mail that the sender sent to a number of people, but the complaining recipient isn't one of them).
As far as I am aware, there is no such thing as a 100% F/OSS solution that can claim this - at least, not unless you're prepared to use a plugin which is openly in early beta on the client side.
The solution, of course, is to ditch your client software and use a web client. This makes more sense anyway, because you no longer have to upgrade client PCs when the client is updated.
Is there really anyone out there who believes that corporate users would not practically all be better served with thin clients and lots of web-based services, with the remainder running on a server somewhere? Of course, Windows can't get thin clients right, and the world can't get getting rid of Windows right...
Please contact my manager and advise him that he will no longer be able to access email he's already downloaded while in a plane over the atlantic because a web-based client was judged to be "enough".
True Apple believers will stick their heads in the sand and ignore this long running trend of contempt for customers, but enterprises do notice, and remember bad behaviors from their suppliers. Until the corporate culture changes (and evidently this belief comes from the top) Apple does not belong in the enterprise. You mean like people have learnt from Microsoft?
Replying to myself here, but the Citadel Outlook connector appears to be a proprietary third-party application.
I accept that it's solved the half-baked sync solution issue, but it's certainly not "totally F/OSS end to end - at least until you hit Outlook".
Similarly, OpenGroupware.org states on their website:
In order to connect to your Opengroupware server with Outlook you need to buy the ZideLook plugin. You need to purchase one Zidelook license for each copy of Outlook that you intend to connect to the OGo server.
And regarding Zimbra's sync program, from Zimbra's website:
The Zimbra Connector for Outlook provides real time two-way synchronization of mail, contacts, tasks, and calendar between Outlook and the ZCS server
Note the keyword "real time" in there. Further perusal of the documentation states:
For more complete Outlook functionality, the ZCS includes the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Connector for Outlook (ZCO), a full MAPI provider that leverages the Microsoft-standard MAPI interface for contacts, calendar, and other functionality not supported by IMAP or POP.
So, in summary, all the products in discussion (Zimbra, OpenGroupware.org and Citadel) require at least one proprietary part to integrate with Outlook. AFAICT, the only significant difference with Citadel/OGo is that you can decide who gets the plugin - you don't have to buy some souped-up "enterprise" version to be able to use it. Which if anything makes things more complicated because now you've got to manage licensing for a separate product, rather than knowing "OK, I'm covered for 100 users on the mail server and it doesn't matter how they connect".
But I think there's a lot of weight to what I'm saying here. I'm sorry, but I disagree - certainly as far as groupware goes.
10 years ago you probably had a pretty good chance of getting a business to use Citadel (or any of the OSS groupware products that, er, didn't exist then...). Today, there's a very strong chance that the business doesn't want groupware. It wants Exchange. Mainly for the excellent Outlook integration and the shared calendars.
Most (all?) FOSS products that integrate with Outlook are fundamentally broken - they integrate by means of a periodic sync. Which immediately introduces an insurmountable race condition - person A sets up a meeting. Ten minutes later this meeting is sync'ed with the server. Person B invites person A to another meeting which clashes with the one person A has just set up - but B doesn't know this because their Outlook hasn't yet got the latest sync from the server.
Net result: B can't use the booking system without calling A up first to double-check that their calendar really is free. Which completely defeats the object of the shared calendars feature in the first place.
Zimbra (along with a couple of other "hybrids", such as Scalix) claims not to suffer from this problem - as long as you buy the commercial version. As far as I am aware, there is no such thing as a 100% F/OSS solution that can claim this - at least, not unless you're prepared to use a plugin which is openly in early beta on the client side.
You're assuming that users in Cuba will see the same thing when they try hitting Windows Update as users in the US or Europe, viz. "Your copy of Windows must be Genuine to update".
But IP address filtering is a wonderful thing, if properly applied.
The biggest problem, as I see it, is Microsoft software's entrenchment. It's partly that the customers are hooked on it (the devil you know?), but it's also the expected difficulties in switching. People said the same thing about IBM 20 or 30 years ago.
Granted, computers are far more pervasive now than they were then. But so are IT professionals.
The main problem I see is that they are using mostly unlicensed copy of windows, since Windows licenses can't be acquired in Cuba. How's that a problem? Cuba's a classic example of the kind of place where Microsoft would far rather people pirate Windows than use Ubuntu legitimately - get 'em hooked then tighten the anti-piracy screws later.
Over here in Europe it's pretty common having to pay your country's VAT (plus customs fees) for imported goods. The same would work for offshore retailers sending goods to the US. Except the US has a very different tax system to most of Europe. The closest they have is something called "Sales Tax", and that varies from state to state. (As I understand it, it's also only levied on goods sold within the state, not goods brought in from another state or, for that matter, another country).
Secondly, litigation costs money. If the residents of NY that are impacted convince the state government to change the law, Amazon will not have to pay a penny. Except through lost sales and developer time because they'd have to update their systems to say "Oh, you're based in NY? Sorry, can't affiliate with you."
Speak for your own OS. Linux (along with the various GNU utilities) has been moving towards using SI definitions when it does the translation for some time now.
For an example of the confusion, download the latest Knoppix (it hasn't been updated in a while). ls -lh uses binary units, df -h uses SI units.
If they only started out while our planet was cooling, they should have found us by now, known that this planet was going to be Earth-like and setup shop back when they could go hunting Dinosaurs.
So, where the hell are they? They arrived a few million years ago in a ship called the "B Ark", and consisted mainly of hairdressers and telephone sanitizers.
SNMPv3 has security built in, and if you're only using it as a monitoring system it's not too bad. Saves messing around with shell scripts which need to re-invent most of the intelligence in net-snmp in order to reliably look at every partition and promptly break in the next major OS upgrade because the way the kernel makes these things visible has changed.
I wouldn't fancy using it for writing values, though.
Shuttleworth has never pretended Ubuntu was purely about being nice to the community - he always planned that one day it would bring some money in.
It follows that Canonincal has to offer something that they charge for. And seeing as they've pledged that the distribution itself remains free, it makes sense that the things they charge for are the kind of things a business might need and might be prepared to pay for - support and bells and whistles that aren't in the free version and frankly aren't terribly relevant to the individual with one or two systems.
Not strictly true, as another poster has pointed out.
We do -very occasionally- sentence someone to a whole life tariff - generally mass murderers.
What does contradict human rights law is a politician imposing such a tariff. For many years Home Secretaries (senior UK politician with ultimate responsibility for law and order) would occasionally impose a whole life tariff on someone long after they'd already been sentenced by a judge.
I suspect the main reason this is unlawful is because a politician might be imposing these sentences for political rather than judicial reasons.
By the way, one of the interesting things about this case: it will NOT be a jury trial. Mr. Howell never demanded a jury trial. Judge Wake, not a jury, will be the trier of the facts. I can't remember the exact case right now, but wasn't there one recently where someone did demand a jury trial and lost rather heavily?
With that in mind, I think I'd be more interested in speaking to a judge than a jury.
What will make a difference is that the managers who make decision in data centers Stop right there.
Unless we're talking at cross purposes, I would imagine data centres to mean server farms. Not desktop PC's.
Linux support on servers is by and large pretty damn good. Server vendors tend to be fairly conservative in the hardware they choose, SCSI/SAS RAID cards have excellent support in Linux as do most wired ethernet cards - far and away the most important things.
Desktops, OTOH - oh hell. Dell's current Optiplex 755 is quite nice for Linux support - it's entirely Intel. But AFAICT Dell don't specifically mention this on their website, and I doubt they'll warrant it. So the Optiplex 760 (or whatever they wind up calling it) could be based on anything.
If the answer to that is: Nothing, then the next question is: Why not just use Windows? I suspect you're playing Devil's (or maybe Microsoft's) advocate, but I'll give you a reason anyway.
Because my employer already has an extensive Linux infrastructure, complete with a mail spool alone which would preclude any version of Exchange short of the full enterprise edition with support for very large mailstores. Last time I added the prices up I came to something like £80,000 setup and a further £40,000 per annum in licensing alone. My entire budget for 1 year including hardware, consultancy and licensing but excluding salaries is about £30,000.
Of course, if your employer is coming at it from the other direction - already has an extensive Windows infrastructure - then things may be rather different.
UK judges can set recommended minimum tariffs - eg. "Life, recommend at least 15 years". But "Life with no possibility of parole" isn't something I've heard of.
Having said that, I have heard of judges setting minimum tariffs based on "X years per victim - you killed N victims so it's N * X" (and if that means a 400 year prison sentence, tough. Should have thought of that before you killed all those people). And the judge at Rosemary West's trial said "If attention is paid to what I think, you will never be released.".
But a "guaranteed you're leaving in a box whether you like it or not" sentence handed down by a judge is very rare.
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Every single one of the problems you discuss can be boiled down to incompetent systems administration.
In my experience, incompetent systems administration can make anything work only "most of the time", regardless of how reliable it was designed to be.
I have had more people than I care to remember come to me complaining that "X says they sent me an email and I never received it, can you look into it?". Every single time I have been able to tell them exactly what happened. 8 times out of 10 the email's sat in their Inbox and they just have such a cluttered inbox that they can never find anything. (The other 2 times it's an internal mail that the sender sent to a number of people, but the complaining recipient isn't one of them).
The solution, of course, is to ditch your client software and use a web client. This makes more sense anyway, because you no longer have to upgrade client PCs when the client is updated.
Is there really anyone out there who believes that corporate users would not practically all be better served with thin clients and lots of web-based services, with the remainder running on a server somewhere? Of course, Windows can't get thin clients right, and the world can't get getting rid of Windows right...
Please contact my manager and advise him that he will no longer be able to access email he's already downloaded while in a plane over the atlantic because a web-based client was judged to be "enough".At current PC prices, you'd be nuts not to have at least one or two (more if you're a large business).
Replying to myself here, but the Citadel Outlook connector appears to be a proprietary third-party application.
I accept that it's solved the half-baked sync solution issue, but it's certainly not "totally F/OSS end to end - at least until you hit Outlook".
Similarly, OpenGroupware.org states on their website:
In order to connect to your Opengroupware server with Outlook you need to buy the ZideLook plugin. You need to purchase one Zidelook license for each copy of Outlook that you intend to connect to the OGo server.
And regarding Zimbra's sync program, from Zimbra's website:
The Zimbra Connector for Outlook provides real time two-way synchronization of mail, contacts, tasks, and calendar between Outlook and the ZCS server
Note the keyword "real time" in there. Further perusal of the documentation states:
For more complete Outlook functionality, the ZCS includes the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Connector for Outlook (ZCO), a full MAPI provider that leverages the Microsoft-standard MAPI interface for contacts, calendar, and other functionality not supported by IMAP or POP.
So, in summary, all the products in discussion (Zimbra, OpenGroupware.org and Citadel) require at least one proprietary part to integrate with Outlook. AFAICT, the only significant difference with Citadel/OGo is that you can decide who gets the plugin - you don't have to buy some souped-up "enterprise" version to be able to use it. Which if anything makes things more complicated because now you've got to manage licensing for a separate product, rather than knowing "OK, I'm covered for 100 users on the mail server and it doesn't matter how they connect".
Is that so? Looks like I've got some further research to do then.
Unless the nature of the question was "Are you going to shut up or do I have to shoot you?", then the nature of it doesn't enter into the matter.
I have to say, now that the MicroHoo deal isn't going ahead, I do find Zimbra tempting.
How easy would it be to migrate an existing IMAP server (mail stored as Unix maildirs) to Zimbra?
10 years ago you probably had a pretty good chance of getting a business to use Citadel (or any of the OSS groupware products that, er, didn't exist then...). Today, there's a very strong chance that the business doesn't want groupware. It wants Exchange. Mainly for the excellent Outlook integration and the shared calendars.
Most (all?) FOSS products that integrate with Outlook are fundamentally broken - they integrate by means of a periodic sync. Which immediately introduces an insurmountable race condition - person A sets up a meeting. Ten minutes later this meeting is sync'ed with the server. Person B invites person A to another meeting which clashes with the one person A has just set up - but B doesn't know this because their Outlook hasn't yet got the latest sync from the server.
Net result: B can't use the booking system without calling A up first to double-check that their calendar really is free. Which completely defeats the object of the shared calendars feature in the first place.
Zimbra (along with a couple of other "hybrids", such as Scalix) claims not to suffer from this problem - as long as you buy the commercial version. As far as I am aware, there is no such thing as a 100% F/OSS solution that can claim this - at least, not unless you're prepared to use a plugin which is openly in early beta on the client side.
You're assuming that users in Cuba will see the same thing when they try hitting Windows Update as users in the US or Europe, viz. "Your copy of Windows must be Genuine to update".
But IP address filtering is a wonderful thing, if properly applied.
Granted, computers are far more pervasive now than they were then. But so are IT professionals.
Speak for your own OS. Linux (along with the various GNU utilities) has been moving towards using SI definitions when it does the translation for some time now.
For an example of the confusion, download the latest Knoppix (it hasn't been updated in a while). ls -lh uses binary units, df -h uses SI units.
So, where the hell are they? They arrived a few million years ago in a ship called the "B Ark", and consisted mainly of hairdressers and telephone sanitizers.
Next question?
SNMPv3 has security built in, and if you're only using it as a monitoring system it's not too bad. Saves messing around with shell scripts which need to re-invent most of the intelligence in net-snmp in order to reliably look at every partition and promptly break in the next major OS upgrade because the way the kernel makes these things visible has changed.
I wouldn't fancy using it for writing values, though.
Shuttleworth has never pretended Ubuntu was purely about being nice to the community - he always planned that one day it would bring some money in.
It follows that Canonincal has to offer something that they charge for. And seeing as they've pledged that the distribution itself remains free, it makes sense that the things they charge for are the kind of things a business might need and might be prepared to pay for - support and bells and whistles that aren't in the free version and frankly aren't terribly relevant to the individual with one or two systems.
Not strictly true, as another poster has pointed out.
We do -very occasionally- sentence someone to a whole life tariff - generally mass murderers.
What does contradict human rights law is a politician imposing such a tariff. For many years Home Secretaries (senior UK politician with ultimate responsibility for law and order) would occasionally impose a whole life tariff on someone long after they'd already been sentenced by a judge.
I suspect the main reason this is unlawful is because a politician might be imposing these sentences for political rather than judicial reasons.
With that in mind, I think I'd be more interested in speaking to a judge than a jury.
Unless we're talking at cross purposes, I would imagine data centres to mean server farms. Not desktop PC's.
Linux support on servers is by and large pretty damn good. Server vendors tend to be fairly conservative in the hardware they choose, SCSI/SAS RAID cards have excellent support in Linux as do most wired ethernet cards - far and away the most important things.
Desktops, OTOH - oh hell. Dell's current Optiplex 755 is quite nice for Linux support - it's entirely Intel. But AFAICT Dell don't specifically mention this on their website, and I doubt they'll warrant it. So the Optiplex 760 (or whatever they wind up calling it) could be based on anything.
Ah, so they've reinvented the SNMP management console.
Nice to see such extensive innovation.
Because my employer already has an extensive Linux infrastructure, complete with a mail spool alone which would preclude any version of Exchange short of the full enterprise edition with support for very large mailstores. Last time I added the prices up I came to something like £80,000 setup and a further £40,000 per annum in licensing alone. My entire budget for 1 year including hardware, consultancy and licensing but excluding salaries is about £30,000.
Of course, if your employer is coming at it from the other direction - already has an extensive Windows infrastructure - then things may be rather different.
Now that's another difference
UK judges can set recommended minimum tariffs - eg. "Life, recommend at least 15 years". But "Life with no possibility of parole" isn't something I've heard of.
Having said that, I have heard of judges setting minimum tariffs based on "X years per victim - you killed N victims so it's N * X" (and if that means a 400 year prison sentence, tough. Should have thought of that before you killed all those people). And the judge at Rosemary West's trial said "If attention is paid to what I think, you will never be released.".
But a "guaranteed you're leaving in a box whether you like it or not" sentence handed down by a judge is very rare.