This one implements a full store (i.e. the equivalent of what you get when you connect to Exchange).
Now that would be impressive. Most that I've seen synchronise at regular intervals (say, every 30 minutes) so it's really very easy to schedule clashing meetings, don't schedule address books and at least one doesn't synchronise free/busy information so you can't schedule meetings properly anyway.
I've looked at Citadel myself. I think it looks good, but I also think that when you say "shared calendars" to most middle and upper management, it gets interpreted as "Outlook + Exchange".
Without Outlook integration - and I mean real, half decent integration, must plugins are completely lousy for whatever reason - in my experience it is a much harder sell.
There are viable alternatives for the individual with a few hundred documents at most.
What they're talking about is viable alternatives for the government department with thousands of documents, dozens of databases and systems which interact with each other and the outside world which have been built up over the course of many years.
Yes, there are alternatives. But the sheer quantity of work involved in rolling them out is immense. I suspect many of these states want a drop-in alternative where they can have everything running almost exactly the same as it is now only without the Microsoft logo.
You'll probably get 100 people claiming "no you're wrong", so let me chime in with a little of my own opinion. I'm an armchair general here with no military background, so take it with as much salt as you think it needs.
Traditionally, armies are trained and wars fought on the assumption that you have a clear enemy, a reasonably clear battlefield and a clear goal which can be achieved by killing the right people.
You don't have any of these in a guerilla situation where what you're trying to do is keep the peace. And you don't win friends amongst civilians by wandering around pointing heavy weaponry at them.
Relatively few chicken plants, high schools and baseball stadiums operate in many parts of the world. Many of them can save energy in various ways like improving insualation, switching to low energy light bulbs.
Google can't do a great deal about the fact that thousands of PCs between them draw a lot of power.
It strikes me as remarkably inconvenient that there just happens to be a company which is US-based, Nigerian owned and happens to have a patent on something which so directly affects to OLPC project. How many companies can there be which fit this description?
Putting my tinfoil hat on for a moment, it's not possible that this company is a stooge for Intel or Microsoft, is it?
"$XXX per track mile" sounds remarkably simplistic - particularly when you consider that Japan is a much smaller area of land than the US, with a much denser population.
As a systems manager, in my experience any set of instructions which is longer than one page including screenshots is too complicated and liable to all sorts of breakage. If your process requires much more than that, it needs simplifying if you are to have a hope of it being followed properly.
There are a few exceptions to this, but most of them concern systems which do something of a specialist nature, and you're describing it to an audience which will understand what the system is trying to do. Neither of which really applies here.
But more than a few companies like to see how far they can push their luck - one of the current tactics seems to be "do NOT train shop floor staff in sales law, train them in company policy and make clear that a breach of policy is a serious offence". Company policy, of course, states "no refunds". They still put "this does not affect your statutory [legal] rights" on the till receipt because they're legally obliged to, but buggered if you can find someone in store who actually knows that you have a legal right to a refund.
With the upshot being that in some cases, you have to make a heck of a fuss to get a refund on anything.
(although I sense this'll fall foul of the Sales of Goods Act as "not fit for purpose" if they want to argue about it)
Very likely, but a number of retailers are reaching the conclusion that the Sale of Goods act only applies if it can be enforced - and few customers will get pissed off enough about a "no refunds unless the customer spends some time kicking up a stinking fuss" policy to notify Trading Standards.
You can't make an educated purchase decision - at least not on the high street where many people still prefer to shop - when the supply chain is being controlled by a small number of companies which are in bed together.
Particularly not when if you want music by a particular band, you have no choice but to buy the version of their album which is put out by the record label they're signed to because copyright law prevents anyone else putting out the same album.
The iPod is being bought by millions of people, not just the technically literate. And iTunes does support ripping music directly from CD to a compressed format (which can be AAC or MP3) - at least until DRM stops it. You buy a CD, you get it home, put it in the PC and iTunes complains that it can't be ripped - which for many will be the first hint that they've bought a DRM-infested CD - what are you going to do? It's pretty likely your first assumption will be "damn, they've sold me a faulty one".
any DRM CD CANNOT be advertised or sold as an audio compact disc.
No, but it's still sold in the same part of the store as all the audio compact discs, it's still distributed on a shiny round piece of plastic 12cm in diameter, it still comes in a box measuring about 14x12.5x1cm and it still (with some exceptions) plays in the same playback equipment.
And besides, the record industry has never gone to great lengths to advertise "This is a vinyl LP", "This is a cassette" or "This is a CD" - it's fairly obvious from the packaging - so why would they have to stop advertising or selling it as a compact disc?
While the underlying RAID subsystem is fine, not all Linux distributions are particularly good at handling failure. The boot scripts in Ubuntu (Feisty) didn't complete booting if a disk was missing from a RAID - and they didn't even flash up a warning saying "oh dear, your raid is half-dead, better fix that" - though to be fair that may have been improved in 7.10.
Try and work out exactly what you're protecting against before you worry about solutions.
Do you want data to survive a hard disk failure? RAID. (Though I make no guarantee that any of these things have implemented RAID terribly well, particularly if a disk fails 2 years later and the replacement you plug in has totally different geometry).
Do you want data to survive your own mistakes? Then use the NAS as a backup for your own PC(s).
Do you want data to survive poor implementation in the firmware? For best results, you'll probably need two totally different devices and some means of keeping them synchronised. (Though a number of Buffallo's Linkstation products can support a separate external USB disk for backup of the NAS itself).
Do you want data to survive a house fire? If you've got immense quantities of data, you'll need a unit you can take offsite. If not, perhaps a subscription-based internet backup provider is the way to go.
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And they have no clue about technology.
Do you think it's reasonable that an average joe-user should expect that?
This one implements a full store (i.e. the equivalent of what you get when you connect to Exchange).
Now that would be impressive. Most that I've seen synchronise at regular intervals (say, every 30 minutes) so it's really very easy to schedule clashing meetings, don't schedule address books and at least one doesn't synchronise free/busy information so you can't schedule meetings properly anyway.
Is it going to be free (beer/speech)?
I've looked at Citadel myself. I think it looks good, but I also think that when you say "shared calendars" to most middle and upper management, it gets interpreted as "Outlook + Exchange".
Without Outlook integration - and I mean real, half decent integration, must plugins are completely lousy for whatever reason - in my experience it is a much harder sell.
Every modern console supports both NTSC and PAL.
The power supply difference is a bit more of an issue. Even if it's a universal power supply, you need the correct plug in the box...
Because there are lots of other shiny video games with realistic physics and lighting.
There are viable alternatives for the individual with a few hundred documents at most.
What they're talking about is viable alternatives for the government department with thousands of documents, dozens of databases and systems which interact with each other and the outside world which have been built up over the course of many years.
Yes, there are alternatives. But the sheer quantity of work involved in rolling them out is immense. I suspect many of these states want a drop-in alternative where they can have everything running almost exactly the same as it is now only without the Microsoft logo.
You'll probably get 100 people claiming "no you're wrong", so let me chime in with a little of my own opinion. I'm an armchair general here with no military background, so take it with as much salt as you think it needs.
Traditionally, armies are trained and wars fought on the assumption that you have a clear enemy, a reasonably clear battlefield and a clear goal which can be achieved by killing the right people.
You don't have any of these in a guerilla situation where what you're trying to do is keep the peace. And you don't win friends amongst civilians by wandering around pointing heavy weaponry at them.
Relatively few chicken plants, high schools and baseball stadiums operate in many parts of the world. Many of them can save energy in various ways like improving insualation, switching to low energy light bulbs.
Google can't do a great deal about the fact that thousands of PCs between them draw a lot of power.
I don't imagine it's a big deal - unless you want to eat HP skin patches.
They may be offered for free to students on an individual basis but there's no way they're offered for free to the college as a whole.
It strikes me as remarkably inconvenient that there just happens to be a company which is US-based, Nigerian owned and happens to have a patent on something which so directly affects to OLPC project. How many companies can there be which fit this description?
Putting my tinfoil hat on for a moment, it's not possible that this company is a stooge for Intel or Microsoft, is it?
Quite correct. Clearly the only thing that's denser is me.
"$XXX per track mile" sounds remarkably simplistic - particularly when you consider that Japan is a much smaller area of land than the US, with a much denser population.
I strongly disagree.
As a systems manager, in my experience any set of instructions which is longer than one page including screenshots is too complicated and liable to all sorts of breakage. If your process requires much more than that, it needs simplifying if you are to have a hope of it being followed properly.
There are a few exceptions to this, but most of them concern systems which do something of a specialist nature, and you're describing it to an audience which will understand what the system is trying to do. Neither of which really applies here.
This procedure is 12 pages long.
Yes I know.
But more than a few companies like to see how far they can push their luck - one of the current tactics seems to be "do NOT train shop floor staff in sales law, train them in company policy and make clear that a breach of policy is a serious offence". Company policy, of course, states "no refunds". They still put "this does not affect your statutory [legal] rights" on the till receipt because they're legally obliged to, but buggered if you can find someone in store who actually knows that you have a legal right to a refund.
With the upshot being that in some cases, you have to make a heck of a fuss to get a refund on anything.
(although I sense this'll fall foul of the Sales of Goods Act as "not fit for purpose" if they want to argue about it)
Very likely, but a number of retailers are reaching the conclusion that the Sale of Goods act only applies if it can be enforced - and few customers will get pissed off enough about a "no refunds unless the customer spends some time kicking up a stinking fuss" policy to notify Trading Standards.
You can't make an educated purchase decision - at least not on the high street where many people still prefer to shop - when the supply chain is being controlled by a small number of companies which are in bed together.
Particularly not when if you want music by a particular band, you have no choice but to buy the version of their album which is put out by the record label they're signed to because copyright law prevents anyone else putting out the same album.
I disagree with you there.
The iPod is being bought by millions of people, not just the technically literate. And iTunes does support ripping music directly from CD to a compressed format (which can be AAC or MP3) - at least until DRM stops it. You buy a CD, you get it home, put it in the PC and iTunes complains that it can't be ripped - which for many will be the first hint that they've bought a DRM-infested CD - what are you going to do? It's pretty likely your first assumption will be "damn, they've sold me a faulty one".
any DRM CD CANNOT be advertised or sold as an audio compact disc.
No, but it's still sold in the same part of the store as all the audio compact discs, it's still distributed on a shiny round piece of plastic 12cm in diameter, it still comes in a box measuring about 14x12.5x1cm and it still (with some exceptions) plays in the same playback equipment.
And besides, the record industry has never gone to great lengths to advertise "This is a vinyl LP", "This is a cassette" or "This is a CD" - it's fairly obvious from the packaging - so why would they have to stop advertising or selling it as a compact disc?
No, that's Guy Fawkes Night, where we remember a chap called Guy Fawkes who was involved in a failed plot to blow up our seat of government.
Whether we remember it because we wish he had succeeded or we are glad he failed is, however, open to some debate.
Absolutely correct.
After all, there's nothing like a distribution which occasionally breaks itself to teach you all about troubleshooting Linux.
Oh.
That's interesting, because I bought the Buffalo linkstation with the USB port with a view to doing exactly that.
On the plus side, they run Linux under the hood so it should be easy enough to rebuild it with a different distribution which does what it's meant to.
With any luck the code which is causing the system to hang is actually a dodgy bit of shell script or perl and can be edited.
And one thing I forgot - test your restore methodology.
In fact, that's so important I'll put it on a line by itself in bold type.
Test your restore methodology
That's better. Nothing worse than carefully spending months on devising a backup system then discovering you can't restore from it.
Maybe.
While the underlying RAID subsystem is fine, not all Linux distributions are particularly good at handling failure. The boot scripts in Ubuntu (Feisty) didn't complete booting if a disk was missing from a RAID - and they didn't even flash up a warning saying "oh dear, your raid is half-dead, better fix that" - though to be fair that may have been improved in 7.10.
Try and work out exactly what you're protecting against before you worry about solutions.
Do you want data to survive a hard disk failure? RAID. (Though I make no guarantee that any of these things have implemented RAID terribly well, particularly if a disk fails 2 years later and the replacement you plug in has totally different geometry).
Do you want data to survive your own mistakes? Then use the NAS as a backup for your own PC(s).
Do you want data to survive poor implementation in the firmware? For best results, you'll probably need two totally different devices and some means of keeping them synchronised. (Though a number of Buffallo's Linkstation products can support a separate external USB disk for backup of the NAS itself).
Do you want data to survive a house fire? If you've got immense quantities of data, you'll need a unit you can take offsite. If not, perhaps a subscription-based internet backup provider is the way to go.