So, first the obvious stuff you know. It may have no value to you, but for doing live demos and development environments its sweet.
vmware workstation - for $$ you get an amazing desktop virtualization environment perfect for people who write drivers and core operating system software. Snapshots and things, complete control over memory, "frozen in state" debugging from outside the vm.
vmware server - free. On the desktop, it lets you run more than one pc at a time. Also can run on a server -- even headless. It can start with the operating system and automatically load the vm's at boot time. A conside side app lets you manage your headless server platform remotely.
Then you get into their Data Center environment.
Don't think 1 machine. Thinking 10 machines. You deploy your vm's across them, using your EMC storage arrays. You don't even have to know which hardware is running your vm. They can be moved around at will. Add a machine to the pack and you increase overall power. A machine goes down? So what? Migrate the vm. The VM's all run with the same "drivers" which are virtual.
Have you ever kept a server longer than you wanted because you didn't want to deal with reinstalling an entire operating system and all the software just to take advantage of the new hardware?
I could paper my walls with the number of stupid disclosure notices I've had to sign. One for each member of the family at each healthcare provider including eye doctories, pharmacists, alergists, etc., and another one for each school, camp, afterschool program, and employement situation.
All this, which in my case is well over 100 by this point, and they are useless?
GRRRRRRRR.
It makes me as angry as when I fill out forms for schools and camps for the kids and they have 4 or 5 forms for each kid that repeat the same questions! I'll bet I wrote my daughter's birthday 12 times just for one camp. I have three daughters, multiple camps and schools. GACK. All it does is lead to inaccuracy because when something changes all those different places will NEVER get updated.
1. The dig had to have a minimal environmental impact -- enough to satisfy Cambridge and the Cape.
2. The tunnel has to go through reclaimed swamp silt. For a significant part of it, they had to drill holes and fit pipes into the ground in an area, then pump a supercooled solution (not sure if they used saltwater or glycol) through the pipes and freeze the ground hard enough to dig through as they placed the tunnel.
3. The tunnel has to go through the center of a major city which is the economic engine for an entire region -- basically everything north of Hartford -- that has only 1 major central highway in and out, and a terrible lack of bridge and tunnel paths already.
4. The tunnel has to replace an elevated highway which is aptly named the "Central Artery" and is the single major traffic corridor through the city, but it has to do so without stopping traffic on that existing route.
Hell, the TEMPORARY bypasses are more complex and expensive to build than most highways.
When its done, however, what has always been the biggest blight on the city from an appearance, safety, and noise perspective will be gone.
What was an elevated 6 lane roadway will be green space. You will be able to walk from the Charles river all the way to South Station and Chinatown, stopping in the North End for an Italian dinner, at the Aquarium, at Fanuel Hall, at Rowe's Wharf, and at the Haymarket. Doing so now would be a noisy, dangerous, ugly nightmare of a walk. Doing it in a few years will be literally a walk in the park.
...for a good skeet tosser and a 12 guage shotgun. It is exceedingly difficult to get data off a drive that has been hit with buckshot at reasonably close range. Just make sure its not Dick Cheny doing the shotgun work.
They clearly don't have enough organized brainwaves to run the lawn mower.
Kidding aside, I understand that during adolescence the brain completely reorganizes higher functions -- often shifting the center or processing for many of them to entirely different places.
Its the mysterious blue smoke that runs all electronics. If they've let the mysterious blue smoke out, that's it for the servers. They'll never work again.
I knew someone would finally come up with this technological breakthrough that allows "The Mobile Web" to finally take off. Its not better screens, useable input devices, durable equipment with long battery life and low cost, cheap available bandwidth, or security end users can be confident in. No. None of these. The missing key has been the.mobi top level domain. Now, we can all get down to the business of using it and making money.
1. Invent the internet. 2. Create wireless Phones. 3. Convince end users that the internet is the web 4. Sell devices that can connect to the internet 5. Wait around for a dozen years. 6. Create a '.mobi' top level domain 7. Profit!
I'll ignore the troll 'over overprotective parent' tag. As a parent of three, I find the term redundant.
Yes, I know more about how the scary intraweb works than the average user. I've made a living on my own, solo, as a consultant and conference speaker on the subject for fifteen or so years without a big daddy corporation to look out for me.
You're the first in this chain to actually address the question. You say most people who don't know how computer networks work have a reasonable expectation of privacy. That's an answer, but limited. I'm asking why should they expect privacy when they're dealing with a business.
I'm not saying Google is required to turn it over, only that they're not required to NOT turn it over. Why would Google keep them private?
1. A legal reguirement? I see none, do you?
2. Altruism? Google seems honestly to make an attempt at doing business in a moral way, but that's a fairly thin line for an end user seeking privacy to count on.
3. Competition? Will end users really avoid Google if they feel these records are available to ? I doubt it. Some will, surely. I doubt market share would really drop though. Those who care most already know that there is no LEGAL requirement so they are not actually safe.
You tell me.
Oh, and for the record, I do not fear for my children's safety as a result of this or any other computer search -- it doesn't change the fact that I am disturbed by searches that have a reasonable chance of being what I consider disturbing.
Not being an idiot, I'm aware of not publishing things I want kept private. The point isn't the I published completely benign pictures. The point is in less than the space of an hour, at least two people walked into my "public storefront" and yelled out "Hey, I'm looking for something that's been determined by legal process to be against the law. Do you have that here?"
... as a society we make laws. Our decision through those laws has been that the right to watch what you want is outweighed by the potential and real dangers that our market driven society creates when you give monetary value to something that can be negative for the people who produce it -- who are not yet of majority age and not considered capable of providing their consent.
I'm not going to debate morals and laws. The two are only marginally connected. I found the searches offensive, personally. That's also not something for debate.
The question is, do you have a right to expect that what you request online in a search engine is private? If so, why?
I say using a search engine is no more private then walking into an open retail store and asking for a product or opinion. You have no right to expect or require the store not to tell anyone what you asked for. They are not bound by any legal or even moral code to do so. In fact, if you were to enter a gun shop and ask for the best sniper rifle and a book on assassination, they may have a legal (and I believe they have a moral) responsibility to do something about it. The retail clerk is not your clergy, priest, doctor, lawyer, or accountant.
So, what makes Google different from any other retail establishment in the eyes of the law?
"I believe they do" -- is not a basis for a legal or moral reasoning behind having an expectation of privacy in a transaction over a public network using a publically open network (which I would equate to a walk-in retail storefront).
The "If youre not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" argument doesn't fly here. I don't believe in it as a valid argument for or against anything. My statement is that "I have nothing to hide so I don't bother trying to hide anything, and if I did have something to hide I would expect to have to make the effort to hide it."
If we're talking a long term student taking a computer sci course, no ide. At most, ide agnostic. If you're teaching a community college class where students are taking a one-off course to get up to speed on a language or enhance their career, you're job is to give them the best tools and advice. Its about the students, not the teacher or the language.
IMO, a good IDE helps teach the language. I learned Java 100 times faster than I've learned any of the myriad other languages because Eclipse has a fabulous IDE for Java. I already knew programming constructs in general, and the Eclipse Java IDE led me through using those skills in a new language. Now I can dump the IDE and use joe or ultraedit or (FSM forbid, notepad or vi) and do fine.
VMWARE on Win32 will only be as stable as Win32 of course. So from that perspective, most people here would agree that Linux makes a better host.
On the other hand, if you're running a laptop or have some high end video or hard disk that requires drivers not available for linux, you may find your performance better under Windows (again, depending on many things, like how you configure vmware and its use of hardware).
There's no perfect answer to your question. My plans for new LAPTOPS will be to run the native drivers with Win32 as the host. Custom build desktops, however, I may well run the opposite way.
Should searches you type in be considered public records or somehow less protected? Google isn't your lawyer. I'm all for privacy laws, but there has to be a middle ground somewhere.
I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but its NOT a troll. Its a serious question and a real world situation. I've already put on my virtual gnomex bunker gear and SCOTT pack (it matches my real gnomex bunker gear and SCOTT pack) and am "fully encapsulated" so don't bother with the flame throwers.
Here's a valid concern --
I'm looking through my web logs tonight, and in particular I'm browsing the search engine queries that bring people to my site. I'm curious about such things. Anyway, two of the queries really bugged me. These are just today over the course of a few hours. One was "12 year old girl pics" and the other was "preteen 9 - 12 girl pics".
I had posted a blog entry with pics of my 12 year old kicking butt on the soccer field. There's nothing about these that would invite tampering or whatever, they snapshots from a distance and I'm sure both these "people" will be dissapointed. The fact is this blog entry generated two disturbing hits within just the few hours that I was looking at. Ugh.
So, what's a DAD to do with information like that? Don't answer, its not your decision -- It was a rhetorical question.
The important question is, what should Google do with information like that? Does someone using a search engine like that have an expectation of privacy? If so, why?
On what basis can using a search engine come with an expectation of privacy? When search on the net, I have the assumption that there is no privacy. Were I to really want privacy I suppose I could use an anonymizer, but I don't so I don't (if you see what mean).
Ok, so if I read TFA correctly, what we're really talking about here amounts to a battery with a different type of chemistry and slightly more complex internal structure. I don't see a promise of easy home re-use and re-charge necessarily in the TFA. In fact, it indicates the potential market for "...as many as 80 million fuel-cell cartridges" by 2012.
Seems to me, that "fuel-cell cartridges" == batteries for all intents and purposes. Given that, the issues that will need to be raised are the same as those of batteries now. Will they be made in standard sizes, or will we have to pay a premium for the model used by each manufacturer? Compare this to ink-jet printer cartridges. They all pretty much do the same thing. We are forced to buy a unique one for each manufacturer and printer. They purposely make them different from each other even within the same vendor, so that small competitors cannot have the manufacturing capability to produce a full product line without huge startup costs. The result is that we pay a huge premium for the name brand or one of the few aftermarket versions, or go through hell refilling them.
Be careful here. Calling it a fuel cell doesn't mean you can carry around a bottle of ethyl alcohol and refill it yourself. It also doesn't mean you can go to the local convenience store and buy a stockpile of size AAA from one of a dozen competing companies. The business model that makes HP and Epson so much money now was copied from Gillette. Don't think for a second these guys won't try to go the same way.
They rate it 8.7 out of 10 --- very high. Of course, they actually go to the trouble of comparing recent versions of the product with other things on the net, not just some badly done apps in an oversized I.T. department from a guy paid to deal with problems.
You have 27,000 employees who live and breath Notes. Do you have any idea what it would take to put that many employees on Exchange, and if you did, what what happens when a single file became corrupted? What if you had to upgrade versions?
The biggest problem with Notes is that it's easy to design a bad app. Designer is so easy on the surface, that any moron can make something that looks like its a Notes app. Of course, it won't scale because they didn't know what they were doing when they wrote it. The UI will suck, again, because they didn't know what they were doing when they wrote it. Nonetheless, these quick temporary solutions quickly become permenant and critical, and then someone who knows something has to be paid a lot of money to do it right.
Notes will continue to "suck" for people like you for years, but then again, you don't have an alternative because there is nothing to migrate to. Other products do some of the things Notes does. Many do Mail and Calendaring -- some better, surely. None do the kinds of rapid, inexpensive, but secure and portable applications and integration.
I do a lot of work with Asterisk and have investigated pricing on inbound and outbound rates to such an extent that it would be considered obsessive.
With most VoIP, inbound call phone numbers are at least as expensive to get as outbound when you get to any kind of volume. I'm not talking about 1 line for a few bucks, or a few test lines at fixed cost, but the ability to just recieve a bunch of calls at once on a phone number. It comes down to about $18 (US) for the ability to recieve each concurrent inbound call. You can get unlimited at a penny or two per minute per call, but that ends up being more expensive if you do good pooling with a fixed number of lines. Outbound can be as little as half that.
Where is the cost in all this? The cost is the connection to the copper based system. At some point, somewhere, someone has to get paid for a link to that big addressing system.
The sick part is, most of the big telcos are doing voip any way, and their ability to hold onto that master address space is the key last item for them to hold the power to charge what they do. ENID (including free systems) are functional -- and can work just like DNS -- but the providers wont use it.
There's a system (ENID based, I believe) that would allow any number you dial from your regular phone or cell phone to be checked against a registry, and if a voip address is listed for it, the telco could bypass the entire infrastructure and route the call directly to the person you called over voip. So if I registered a voip address to my phone number (which I have done) and you called me from say, Verizon Wireless, they could route the call to me without going over a single bit of big telco as anything other than VoIP. No telco switching involved. It would bypass my per-minute inbound costs entirely other than my internet connection.
It works if you call from a voip phone that knows about the registry (Asterisk based systems, for example can do this). The telcos and cell companies don't do it. Why not? As a whole, they make their money by controlling that master address -- the phone number.
B1. Ponies! B2. Desktop Cold Fusion, the energy of the Future! B3. Gray Goo. B4. Profit! B5. AI Based dust collecting overloards. B6. A working automobile metaphore. B7. An actual first post. B8. An editor who actually reads the articles before posting them.
Someone at D-Link should simply have realized the mistake and paid for a few very fast servers to sit at a hosting facillity and respond to the requests -- and all the requests already using that service -- for as long as the Danes were willing to point the DNS entry for that server to them.
In the scheme of things, and from a marketing perspective, anything else is stupid and a waste of good will.
Slashdot Mirror
So, first the obvious stuff you know. It may have no value to you, but for doing live demos and development environments its sweet.
vmware workstation - for $$ you get an amazing desktop virtualization environment perfect for people who write drivers and core operating system software. Snapshots and things, complete control over memory, "frozen in state" debugging from outside the vm.
vmware server - free. On the desktop, it lets you run more than one pc at a time. Also can run on a server -- even headless. It can start with the operating system and automatically load the vm's at boot time. A conside side app lets you manage your headless server platform remotely.
Then you get into their Data Center environment.
Don't think 1 machine. Thinking 10 machines. You deploy your vm's across them, using your EMC storage arrays. You don't even have to know which hardware is running your vm. They can be moved around at will. Add a machine to the pack and you increase overall power. A machine goes down? So what? Migrate the vm. The VM's all run with the same "drivers" which are virtual.
Have you ever kept a server longer than you wanted because you didn't want to deal with reinstalling an entire operating system and all the software just to take advantage of the new hardware?
...at causing a pain in my A5S!
I could paper my walls with the number of stupid disclosure notices I've had to sign. One for each member of the family at each healthcare provider including eye doctories, pharmacists, alergists, etc., and another one for each school, camp, afterschool program, and employement situation.
All this, which in my case is well over 100 by this point, and they are useless?
GRRRRRRRR.
It makes me as angry as when I fill out forms for schools and camps for the kids and they have 4 or 5 forms for each kid that repeat the same questions! I'll bet I wrote my daughter's birthday 12 times just for one camp. I have three daughters, multiple camps and schools. GACK. All it does is lead to inaccuracy because when something changes all those different places will NEVER get updated.
1. The dig had to have a minimal environmental impact -- enough to satisfy Cambridge and the Cape.
2. The tunnel has to go through reclaimed swamp silt. For a significant part of it, they had to drill holes and fit pipes into the ground in an area, then pump a supercooled solution (not sure if they used saltwater or glycol) through the pipes and freeze the ground hard enough to dig through as they placed the tunnel.
3. The tunnel has to go through the center of a major city which is the economic engine for an entire region -- basically everything north of Hartford -- that has only 1 major central highway in and out, and a terrible lack of bridge and tunnel paths already.
4. The tunnel has to replace an elevated highway which is aptly named the "Central Artery" and is the single major traffic corridor through the city, but it has to do so without stopping traffic on that existing route.
Hell, the TEMPORARY bypasses are more complex and expensive to build than most highways.
When its done, however, what has always been the biggest blight on the city from an appearance, safety, and noise perspective will be gone.
What was an elevated 6 lane roadway will be green space. You will be able to walk from the Charles river all the way to South Station and Chinatown, stopping in the North End for an Italian dinner, at the Aquarium, at Fanuel Hall, at Rowe's Wharf, and at the Haymarket. Doing so now would be a noisy, dangerous, ugly nightmare of a walk. Doing it in a few years will be literally a walk in the park.
...for a good skeet tosser and a 12 guage shotgun. It is exceedingly difficult to get data off a drive that has been hit with buckshot at reasonably close range. Just make sure its not Dick Cheny doing the shotgun work.
Its a little box running Windows CE on low power. In most respects then, its more like a PDA or cell phone than a PC.
Now, if it ran embedded linux in a way that let you update the firmware, it might be the basis for a really interesting brick computer.
They clearly don't have enough organized brainwaves to run the lawn mower.
Kidding aside, I understand that during adolescence the brain completely reorganizes higher functions -- often shifting the center or processing for many of them to entirely different places.
Exactly how would this ASIMO++ handle that?
Oh, and what about blondes?
Maybe, but I couldn't understand them either way, so what's the point?
Its the mysterious blue smoke that runs all electronics. If they've let the mysterious blue smoke out, that's it for the servers. They'll never work again.
I knew someone would finally come up with this technological breakthrough that allows "The Mobile Web" to finally take off. Its not better screens, useable input devices, durable equipment with long battery life and low cost, cheap available bandwidth, or security end users can be confident in. No. None of these. The missing key has been the .mobi top level domain. Now, we can all get down to the business of using it and making money.
1. Invent the internet.
2. Create wireless Phones.
3. Convince end users that the internet is the web
4. Sell devices that can connect to the internet
5. Wait around for a dozen years.
6. Create a '.mobi' top level domain
7. Profit!
I'll ignore the troll 'over overprotective parent' tag. As a parent of three, I find the term redundant.
Yes, I know more about how the scary intraweb works than the average user. I've made a living on my own, solo, as a consultant and conference speaker on the subject for fifteen or so years without a big daddy corporation to look out for me.
You're the first in this chain to actually address the question. You say most people who don't know how computer networks work have a reasonable expectation of privacy. That's an answer, but limited. I'm asking why should they expect privacy when they're dealing with a business.
I'm not saying Google is required to turn it over, only that they're not required to NOT turn it over. Why would Google keep them private?
1. A legal reguirement? I see none, do you?
2. Altruism? Google seems honestly to make an attempt at doing business in a moral way, but that's a fairly thin line for an end user seeking privacy to count on.
3. Competition? Will end users really avoid Google if they feel these records are available to ? I doubt it. Some will, surely. I doubt market share would really drop though. Those who care most already know that there is no LEGAL requirement so they are not actually safe.
You tell me.
Oh, and for the record, I do not fear for my children's safety as a result of this or any other computer search -- it doesn't change the fact that I am disturbed by searches that have a reasonable chance of being what I consider disturbing.
-- the syntax is as you describe. Nonetheless, the point of the question remains valid. Care to answer it?
Not being an idiot, I'm aware of not publishing things I want kept private. The point isn't the I published completely benign pictures. The point is in less than the space of an hour, at least two people walked into my "public storefront" and yelled out "Hey, I'm looking for something that's been determined by legal process to be against the law. Do you have that here?"
Is that statement, unasked for, private?
... as a society we make laws. Our decision through those laws has been that the right to watch what you want is outweighed by the potential and real dangers that our market driven society creates when you give monetary value to something that can be negative for the people who produce it -- who are not yet of majority age and not considered capable of providing their consent.
I'm not going to debate morals and laws. The two are only marginally connected. I found the searches offensive, personally. That's also not something for debate.
The question is, do you have a right to expect that what you request online in a search engine is private? If so, why?
I say using a search engine is no more private then walking into an open retail store and asking for a product or opinion. You have no right to expect or require the store not to tell anyone what you asked for. They are not bound by any legal or even moral code to do so. In fact, if you were to enter a gun shop and ask for the best sniper rifle and a book on assassination, they may have a legal (and I believe they have a moral) responsibility to do something about it. The retail clerk is not your clergy, priest, doctor, lawyer, or accountant.
So, what makes Google different from any other retail establishment in the eyes of the law?
"I believe they do" -- is not a basis for a legal or moral reasoning behind having an expectation of privacy in a transaction over a public network using a publically open network (which I would equate to a walk-in retail storefront).
The "If youre not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" argument doesn't fly here. I don't believe in it as a valid argument for or against anything. My statement is that "I have nothing to hide so I don't bother trying to hide anything, and if I did have something to hide I would expect to have to make the effort to hide it."
If we're talking a long term student taking a computer sci course, no ide. At most, ide agnostic. If you're teaching a community college class where students are taking a one-off course to get up to speed on a language or enhance their career, you're job is to give them the best tools and advice. Its about the students, not the teacher or the language.
IMO, a good IDE helps teach the language. I learned Java 100 times faster than I've learned any of the myriad other languages because Eclipse has a fabulous IDE for Java. I already knew programming constructs in general, and the Eclipse Java IDE led me through using those skills in a new language. Now I can dump the IDE and use joe or ultraedit or (FSM forbid, notepad or vi) and do fine.
VMWARE on Win32 will only be as stable as Win32 of course. So from that perspective, most people here would agree that Linux makes a better host.
On the other hand, if you're running a laptop or have some high end video or hard disk that requires drivers not available for linux, you may find your performance better under Windows (again, depending on many things, like how you configure vmware and its use of hardware).
There's no perfect answer to your question. My plans for new LAPTOPS will be to run the native drivers with Win32 as the host. Custom build desktops, however, I may well run the opposite way.
Should searches you type in be considered public records or somehow less protected? Google isn't your lawyer. I'm all for privacy laws, but there has to be a middle ground somewhere.
I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but its NOT a troll. Its a serious question and a real world situation. I've already put on my virtual gnomex bunker gear and SCOTT pack (it matches my real gnomex bunker gear and SCOTT pack) and am "fully encapsulated" so don't bother with the flame throwers.
Here's a valid concern --
I'm looking through my web logs tonight, and in particular I'm browsing the search engine queries that bring people to my site. I'm curious about such things. Anyway, two of the queries really bugged me. These are just today over the course of a few hours. One was "12 year old girl pics" and the other was "preteen 9 - 12 girl pics".
I had posted a blog entry with pics of my 12 year old kicking butt on the soccer field. There's nothing about these that would invite tampering or whatever, they snapshots from a distance and I'm sure both these "people" will be dissapointed. The fact is this blog entry generated two disturbing hits within just the few hours that I was looking at. Ugh.
So, what's a DAD to do with information like that? Don't answer, its not your decision -- It was a rhetorical question.
The important question is, what should Google do with information like that? Does someone using a search engine like that have an expectation of privacy? If so, why?
On what basis can using a search engine come with an expectation of privacy? When search on the net, I have the assumption that there is no privacy. Were I to really want privacy I suppose I could use an anonymizer, but I don't so I don't (if you see what mean).
Don't forget:
"Hell, I can do that!"
and...
"Son, hold my beer."
Ok, so if I read TFA correctly, what we're really talking about here amounts to a battery with a different type of chemistry and slightly more complex internal structure. I don't see a promise of easy home re-use and re-charge necessarily in the TFA. In fact, it indicates the potential market for "...as many as 80 million fuel-cell cartridges" by 2012.
Seems to me, that "fuel-cell cartridges" == batteries for all intents and purposes. Given that, the issues that will need to be raised are the same as those of batteries now. Will they be made in standard sizes, or will we have to pay a premium for the model used by each manufacturer? Compare this to ink-jet printer cartridges. They all pretty much do the same thing. We are forced to buy a unique one for each manufacturer and printer. They purposely make them different from each other even within the same vendor, so that small competitors cannot have the manufacturing capability to produce a full product line without huge startup costs. The result is that we pay a huge premium for the name brand or one of the few aftermarket versions, or go through hell refilling them.
Be careful here. Calling it a fuel cell doesn't mean you can carry around a bottle of ethyl alcohol and refill it yourself. It also doesn't mean you can go to the local convenience store and buy a stockpile of size AAA from one of a dozen competing companies. The business model that makes HP and Epson so much money now was copied from Gillette. Don't think for a second these guys won't try to go the same way.
They rate it 8.7 out of 10 --- very high. Of course, they actually go to the trouble of comparing recent versions of the product with other things on the net, not just some badly done apps in an oversized I.T. department from a guy paid to deal with problems.
0 TCnotes_1.html
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/05/11/78099_2
FSM save us from yet another rich client war.
You have 27,000 employees who live and breath Notes. Do you have any idea what it would take to put that many employees on Exchange, and if you did, what what happens when a single file became corrupted? What if you had to upgrade versions?
The biggest problem with Notes is that it's easy to design a bad app. Designer is so easy on the surface, that any moron can make something that looks like its a Notes app. Of course, it won't scale because they didn't know what they were doing when they wrote it. The UI will suck, again, because they didn't know what they were doing when they wrote it. Nonetheless, these quick temporary solutions quickly become permenant and critical, and then someone who knows something has to be paid a lot of money to do it right.
Notes will continue to "suck" for people like you for years, but then again, you don't have an alternative because there is nothing to migrate to. Other products do some of the things Notes does. Many do Mail and Calendaring -- some better, surely. None do the kinds of rapid, inexpensive, but secure and portable applications and integration.
Forgive me limited memory at the hour I wrote the post.
I do a lot of work with Asterisk and have investigated pricing on inbound and outbound rates to such an extent that it would be considered obsessive.
With most VoIP, inbound call phone numbers are at least as expensive to get as outbound when you get to any kind of volume. I'm not talking about 1 line for a few bucks, or a few test lines at fixed cost, but the ability to just recieve a bunch of calls at once on a phone number. It comes down to about $18 (US) for the ability to recieve each concurrent inbound call. You can get unlimited at a penny or two per minute per call, but that ends up being more expensive if you do good pooling with a fixed number of lines. Outbound can be as little as half that.
Where is the cost in all this? The cost is the connection to the copper based system. At some point, somewhere, someone has to get paid for a link to that big addressing system.
The sick part is, most of the big telcos are doing voip any way, and their ability to hold onto that master address space is the key last item for them to hold the power to charge what they do. ENID (including free systems) are functional -- and can work just like DNS -- but the providers wont use it.
There's a system (ENID based, I believe) that would allow any number you dial from your regular phone or cell phone to be checked against a registry, and if a voip address is listed for it, the telco could bypass the entire infrastructure and route the call directly to the person you called over voip. So if I registered a voip address to my phone number (which I have done) and you called me from say, Verizon Wireless, they could route the call to me without going over a single bit of big telco as anything other than VoIP. No telco switching involved. It would bypass my per-minute inbound costs entirely other than my internet connection.
It works if you call from a voip phone that knows about the registry (Asterisk based systems, for example can do this). The telcos and cell companies don't do it. Why not? As a whole, they make their money by controlling that master address -- the phone number.
Cmon, we can do better than that...
B1. Ponies!
B2. Desktop Cold Fusion, the energy of the Future!
B3. Gray Goo.
B4. Profit!
B5. AI Based dust collecting overloards.
B6. A working automobile metaphore.
B7. An actual first post.
B8. An editor who actually reads the articles before posting them.
This bit of information was useful to know, and didn't make the /. summary.
Someone at D-Link should simply have realized the mistake and paid for a few very fast servers to sit at a hosting facillity and respond to the requests -- and all the requests already using that service -- for as long as the Danes were willing to point the DNS entry for that server to them.
In the scheme of things, and from a marketing perspective, anything else is stupid and a waste of good will.